trippycheez

I felt so trashy while watching Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madame, yet it was so engrossing I just couldn't help continuing on. It's an expose of a woman who ran a high class prostitution ring in LA in the early 90s. Nick Broomfield interviews his subjects (call girls, the director of Starsky & Hutch, an elderly madame who looks and acts exactly like the Egg Lady in Pink Flamginos, a gruff voice on the phone belonging to "Cookie" the bodyguard, and eventually Heidi herself) again and again, eventually trapping them all in a web of lies. It's impossible to figure out who is telling the truth, if the people involved are just having a chuckle at Broomfield's expense, or if they're all so wigged out on coke that they legitimately have no idea what is going on.

In exchange for interviews, Broomfield actually hands his subjects huge wads of cash on camera, so at first he seems like the sucker (or, oddly, like he's applying the prostitute/john relationship to the structure of his documentary), but really he's buying a career move while they're just making themselves look silly. Overall I think Broomfield had the last laugh by exposing how absolutely ludicrous some of these Hollywood types are.

Broomfield is a shameless sensationalist, but he certainly knows how to bring out the hilarity and surreal nature of otherwise serious subjects.

NETHERWORLD, a Full Moon picture set in the Louisiana swamps, successfully delivers a Gothic atmosphere filled with lush vegetation, isolated manor homes, and brothels operated by voodoo sorceresses. However, thanks to a hopelessly cheesy script, the film never transcends its early-90s low-budget roots.

The plot concerns a Corey Thornton, a dashing young man who has just inherited a vast estate from the father he never knew in life. While combing through the deceased's papers, he discovers that his father's last wish was to be brought back from the dead. Corey becomes obsessed with this task and seeks help from those around him: Bijou (the slobbering neighborhood idiot-savant), Diane (Southern-fried "jailbait" who actually looks to be about 25 years old), his father's lawyer (who has mysteriously deformed hands), and of course Delores (a prostitute with big hair and mystical powers).

The action alternates between Corey's manor house and Tonk's, the brothel-next-door, where all the girls are named after dead celebrities...or have Marilyn Monroe and Mary Magdalene really been resurrected?! The band plays smooth jazz as passions rise and Delores casts sultry glances at everyone. Then things get weird. A hand flies out of the wall and starts killing people, whose souls become trapped inside the bodies of birds. A bird which is clearly a hand puppet screams "NEVERRRRRR!" We finally descend to the Netherworld, where the forces of evil fight for control of Corey's mind in a scene that will leave you wondering, "Oh...that was the climax?" All in all, Netherworld is a good bit of entertainment which never gets boring; however, one can't shake the feeling that if slightly more money and effort had been put into it, it could have been good instead of just adequate.

Perhaps if I had not watched von Sternberg's SCARLET EMPRESS the day before I watched IVAN THE TERRIBLE, I would have appreciated Eisenstein's film more.

SCARLET EMPRESS is von Sternberg's own historical Russian epic: Catherine the Great (played by Marlene Deitrich) rises to power despite conspiracies against her--conspiracies much like the ones that face Ivan in Eisenstein's film. The films are remarkably similar, and Eisenstein's influence on von Sternberg's lighting and montage sequences could not be more apparent.

Unfortunately, IVAN THE TERRIBLE is light years behind SCARLET EMPRESS in terms of the integration of sound with image, humanistic characterizations, and nuanced (as opposed to exaggeratedly theatrical) acting styles. If I had to guess, I'd say IVAN THE TERRIBLE was made ten years before SCARLET EMPRESS. In fact, it was made ten years after.

I'm a big fan of Eisenstein's BATTLESHIP POTEMPKIN, and as a student of Russian history and culture, I expected IVAN THE TERRIBLE to be a thoroughly engaging film. Instead it seemed a primitive effort: a move backward for a man who excelled at silent storytelling but couldn't evolve along with cinema. Of course, this IS Eisenstein, and IVAN is a very intelligent and well-crafted film, but viewed alongside its contemporaries, its shortcomings become all too apparent.