And hopefully me. Who knows?
I’ve started this post a hundred times or more in my head. Here’s hoping that actually sitting down and typing achieves something. Making that particular set of things occur have been difficult of late.
Cast your mind back to 2020 and the week that the COVID Lockdown officially happened – now consider all the plans you’d made for that week. That is what happened to Crapfest. We had one planned, we were ready, and then this science fiction plague shut everything down, including us. A state of affairs that continued for the next three years.
Now, COVID is not over, no matter what the capitalism-fueled media would like you to believe, but if you’re careful, you can pretend it is. So we all decided to be careful, and have a Crapfest, dammit.
And there were times it was obvious it had been three years. Mistakes were made, mostly mine (having received my Medicare card in the interim, 
I had a good excuse). Mainly, I got the timing wrong, resulting in a shortened event. Rick had joined the Choir Celestial, so I took over his queso and dip duties. Erik wanted to make the event special, and made a chili with smoked beef brisket, and although as a lifelong Texan I had never encountered that (armadillo and rattlesnake, yes), it was, as you might guess, delicious. Also as a lifelong Texan, I was able to ignore Erik’s fretting that he had used too many jalapenos. *snorts in Texan*
SPOILER ALERT: It was the perfect amount of jalapenos.
Also in attendance: Alan and Paul. There, all the niceties have been niced.
And there I stopped typing and now it’s almost four days later. Real life can stop being so damn interesting any time now.
Dave started things off with Hangman, a 1985 safety short from the UK. In it, an Australian-inflected fellow in a budget-conscious costume suggesting an executioner (black tank top and domino mask), offers to play his namesake game using accidents from unsafe building sites instead of words with missing letters. This made sense in some producer’s mind.
So we have scenes of unsafe construction practices, usually resulting in somebody falling from a great height. We saw the money shots in these scenes in a montage at the beginning, but now we get to experience their thrilling backstories. The worksites keep getting more cartoonishly unsafe, until there is one that no sane person would enter, much less carrying large, awkward objects all by themself. The stunt work, it must be said, is actually quite good.
Oh, yeah, Crocodile No-Fundee gets clobbered at the end because he wasn’t wearing a hard hat. EAT IRONY, JACKO.
My opening shot was a section of a video I had stumbled across on the Web called Lupinranger VS Patranger VS Kyuranger. As you might suspect, this is about three Super Sentai teams (or, to use the American parlance, Power Rangers) who find themselves at odds but must team up in the face of this week’s ultimate evil (who, it must be admitted, is pretty cool-looking).
So Patrangers are cop power rangers, Lupinrangers are (misunderstood) thief power rangers, and Kyurangers are space power rangers, who have apparently been off in space for a while or some thing. English subtitles were not available, which really made it all a bit better for us. For the record, that is 19 power rangers in all, and everyone of them gets their own anime-style intro in a sequence that takes a minute and a half. Skullhead seems a bit bored when they finally get back around to him.
“Are you finished yet?”
(Okay, this is from Ryusoulger VS Lupinranger VS Patranger, but you’ll get the idea. Ryusoulgers are Dinosaur Knight power rangers and oh jesus don’t get me started)
The ensuing fight scene is actually darn good – everybody gets to show off their totally toyetic gizmos (available at a store near you), and finally kick Kaiju Skull with a SuperMegaUltraPlatinumStar Zord.
“This is some retro nostalgia stuff, right?” asked Dave. I didn’t have the heart to tell him how recent these super sentai series were, as in 2019 (that Ryusoulger clip is from 2020). If you want to dip your toe in this madness, I found The RangerWiki invaluable in providing something more than a slippery grip on the subject.
We bid a fond farewell to the seemingly endless array of power rangers to start on feature-length exploitation, starting with Dave’s entry, the 1984 Alley Cat, supposedly chosen to secure Paul’s attendance.
Karen Mani is Billy, your typical 1984 martial artist protagonist who kicks the crap out of some thugs trying to steal her car. The lead thug (whose catchphrase is “Drive, asshole!) leads a retaliatory strike, during which Billie’s grandmother is fatally stabbed. When she discovers just how corrupt and ineffective the System turns out to be (by way of a judge throwing her in jail for being too mouthy, resulting in prison shower scenes and lesbian come-ons), well enough is enough and SHE GONE KICK THEY ASS.
As far as such low-budget actioners go, this is actually pretty good. Mani handles herself well and should have had a better career – she eventually moved into production, then seemingly left the business altogether. I’m amazed that it took three directors to deliver a vehicle combining Death Wish, Vigilante, and boobies. That probably points to some difficulties in the production – it’s surprising that it hangs together as well as it does.
My own entry was 1983’s Get Crazy, chosen because of the extremely good buzz from a recent B-Fest. Ed Begley Jr. plays a ruthless capitalist who wants to shut down Allen Garfield’s Saturn Theatre (a sort of smaller-scale Fillmore West – intentionally) so a too-tall condominium tower can be built there. When Garfield refuses to sell, a bomb is planted to go off during the New Year’s Eve concert.
Get Crazy also features Daniel Stern as the stage manager and Malcolm McDowell as rock superstar Reggie Wanker. It also has a murderer’s row of other notables in small roles, like Paul Bartel, Mary Woronov (sadly rather wasted here), Robert Picardo as a zealous fire marshal, and Michelle Bauer and Linnea Quigley as a couple of Reggie’s groupies (I spotted Linnea but not Michelle, which I regard as a personal failure). I can only surmise that Dick Miller was busy that week. And, oh yeah, the actual Lou Reed.
It’s an Allen Arkush film, which means plenty of cartoonish humor and an anarchic bent to the proceedings. I mean, I haven’t even gotten to Electric Larry, the mysterious cyborg drug dealer who shows up with a Star Wars briefcase full of whatever is needed at the moment (to the strains of Adrien Bellew’s “Big Electric Cat”, no less). Or the late Blue Blaze Irregular Bill Henderson tearing up the stage as King Blues, who keeps leaving the party in the green room because no matter who’s on stage, he can say, “They’re playing one of my songs!” or…
We could be here all day. Why had I never heard of this movie? Apparently some capitalists had seen The Producers and thought, “That’s a good idea, let’s apply it to a movie!” and thus didn’t care if the movie even got released, much less promoted.
That’s a fan-made trailer, incidentally. The actual trailer kind of explained why it tanked so hard.
Speaking of box office disasters when it was released and promptly vanished from sight, we came to Erik’s offering.
Look, it’s going to be impossible to try to assess Leonard Part 6 in any sort of objective way due to Producer/Writer/Star Cosby’s antics, so we are fortunate that it was already lambasted contemporaneously by everybody under the sun, mainly for its naked Coca-Cola product placement and just being not very good in general.
For our part, at least we kept the rape jokes to a minimum.
Okay, deep breath. The Leonard of the title is a retired master spy and troubleshooter who is called back into action because a supervillain named Medusa Johnson (Gail Foster) has devised a way to control animals. The opening scene featuring a murderous rainbow trout is one of the few entertaining moments in its 85 minutes.
Joe Don Baker tells Leonard he’s needed back into the fold by sending someone to kill him at his restaurant, as Joe Don Baker does. That sequence should have been a killer slapstick opening – instead it’s just sort of there, which is going to be a continuing problem throughout. Everybody is doing their job (the cinematographer is Jan de Bont, for God’s sake), but they just… can’t… seem to haul the flick out of its oppressive mediocrity. Maybe if Arkush had directed…
No! Not the Coke Freezer!
Possibly the most egregious part for us was the casting of Tom Courtenay as Leonard’s manservant and aide-de-camp Frayn, who is also in charge of delivering a rousing speech to the agent as he prepares for his mission. Alan opined in the dark, “This movie doesn’t deserve Tom Courtenay” to which I replied, “And vice-versa.”
Could have added “Neither do we,” but that certainly went without saying.
And that was that. Really going to try to have another one soon, maybe after only a couple of years this time.
Honestly. Leonard Part 6 leaves a mark. And I’ve seen Things.
3 Comments
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
drfreex.com 
I guess I was unclear, I should have said *meta* retro nostalgia
Great to read you again! Who’s the cowboy?
Some guy I picked up on the Internet. Who knows, he might not even be real.