Camp

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Symphony for a Sinner (1979) was a long, lavishly photographed color film generally considered the magnum opus of the class productions. New York critic and coauthor of Midnight Movies J. Hoberman would rank it as one of the ten best films of the year, while Stan Brakhage would call it “the ultimate class picture.” John Waters, who now visited George regularly whenever he passed through San Francisco, envied the lurid color photography and wanted George to shoot his next picture (which would have been Polyester and didn’t happen). Symphony, Waters said, had the look he craved for Desperate Living (1977).Read More »

directed by Curt McDowell (THUNDERCRACK); starring Velvet Busch and Mark Ellinger; a busy prostitute during businessmen’s lunch break.Read More »

This film is a sequel in name only to Valley of the Dolls (1967). An all-girl rock band goes to Hollywood to make it big. There they find success, but luckily for us, they sink into a cesspool of decadence. This film has a sleeping woman performing on a gun which is in her mouth. It has women posing as men. It has lesbian sex scenes. It is also written by Roger Ebert, who had become friends with Russ Meyer after writing favorable reviews of several of his films.

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It’s deadpan-droll throughout (with at least as many highly quotable lines as Rocky Horror), cod-moralistic, carefully balanced between satire and melodrama, gratuitously focused on women with outsize breasts, and shot and edited with astonishing mastery. Much of Meyer’s film language, as Ebert points out, is redolent of ‘pure’ silent cinema: to-the-point storytelling and earnestly expressive performances, plus montage sequences worthy of Slavko Vorkapich.

— Tony Ryans, Sight & SoundRead More »

From imdb: I believe Hanoch Levin is Israel’s only great playwright. He’s best known for stark, stylized black humor about petty people who are unaware of their own pettiness. It’s a little as if Samuel Beckett were writing about Ralph Kramden. I’ve never seen a good translation of his work. The best representation on film is _Floch_. While not exactly sugar-coated, it’s a mite more pleasant than many of his stage plays. Read More »

Sexy Barbarella roams 41st-century space with her blind guardian angel, Pygar. Directed by Roger Vadim; actors Jane Fonda, John Law, Anita Pallenberg, Milo O’Shea, David Hemmings, Marcel Marceau, Claude Dauphin

In this notorious film version of the popular French comic strip by Jean-Claude Forest, Jane Fonda plays a sexy yet innocent space-age heroine in the year 40,000 A.D. who never gets herself into a situation that requires too much clothing. BARBARELLA opens with the titular heroine stripping down to nothing in zero gravity among strategically placed credits. From there Barbarella embarks on a mission to find a peace-threatening young scientist named Duran Duran (Milo O’Shea) by order of the president of Earth. En route, she’s attacked by killer dolls, is strapped into a contraption known as the Excessive Machine, and falls in love with a blind angel.Read More »

Review
This 1980 attempt to cut in on the “midnight movie” market created by The Rocky Horror Picture Show has become a camp classic for all the wrong reasons. The Apple is fascinating because it takes a conceptual wrong turn at every angle: the ‘futuristic’ production design looks garish and cheap instead of sleek, the tone constantly veers back and forth between comedy and melodrama and the script is a mind-boggling muddle of religious overtones, heavy-handed “showbiz” satire and silly attempts at an anti-totalitarian message. The Apple’s serious intentions are further crippled by weak performances: George Gilmour makes a stone-faced, emotionally inert hero and Catherine Mary Stewart is too bland a romantic lead to inspire any interest in the film’s romantic subplot. The only actor who escapes unscathed is Vladek Sheybal, who applies a light comedic touch to the villainous Mr. Boogalow that escapes the rest of the cast. Despite these seemingly insurmountable flaws, The Apple remains surprisingly watchable if one has a taste for schlock: director Menahem Golan keeps up a speedy pace that delivers the film’s bizarre melange of mismatched elements at a breezy clip and the outrageous musical score delivers an unintentionally funny but always catchy musical number every few minutes. The finished product seldom makes sense but delivers so much sheer oddness at such a high speed that it is virtually impossible to be bored by this film. As a result, The Apple will probably baffle most viewers but trash devotees will find it to be a ‘schlock musical’ classic worthy of Can’t Stop The Music or Grease 2. ~ Donald Guarisco, All Movie GuideRead More »

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During her Italian vacation, a young and beautiful American tourist finds herself as a guest in a coastal villa inhabited by a bunch of odd people.Read More »

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Guy Hands, chief executive of U.K. buyout firm Terra Firma, lost nearly $34 million as a result of investments in films including the bizarre tale of a seven-foot boxing shrimp.

Hands is one of 75 investors who were encouraged to invest in a number of films through a company called Little Wing Films, claim tax relief and make an almost immediate profit. Hands said he had to repay more than £15 million in disallowed relief to the Inland Revenue, plus £2.3 million in interest, after the investment failed to achieve the intended tax benefits. Hands invested in three projects in 2001 and 2002, including a comedy called “Crust” featuring a seven-foot mutant shrimp washed up on a British beach and taught to box by a drunken pub landlord.Read More »

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“Cry-Baby is a 1990 American teen musical film written and directed by John Waters. It stars Johnny Depp as 1950s teen rebel “Cry-Baby” Wade Walker, and also features a large ensemble cast that includes Amy Locane, Iggy Pop, Traci Lords, Ricki Lake, Kim McGuire, David Nelson, Susan Tyrrell, and Patty Hearst. The film did not achieve high audience numbers in its initial release, but has subsequently become a cult classic and spawned a Broadway musical of the same name which was nominated for four Tony Awards.

The film is a parody of teen musicals (particularly Grease) and centers on a group of delinquents that refer to themselves as “drapes” and their interaction with the rest of the town and its other subculture, the “squares”, in 1950s Baltimore, Maryland. “Cry-Baby” Walker, a drape, and Allison, a square, create upheaval and turmoil in their little town of Baltimore by breaking the subculture taboos and falling in love. The film shows what the young couple has to overcome to be together and how their actions affect the rest of the town.Read More »