Stream-Of-Consciousness Review: The First Turn-On

Title?: The First Turn-On  (1983, dir. Michael Herz)

First or second viewing?: First

Preconceptions:

I generally distrust Troma movies to deliver what I want in exploitation; I always get the feeling they’re trying either too hard or not at all.  Maybe I’m a bit of a snob, but I believe there’s genuine art to the genre.

Program Start:

Summer camp! Embarrasing pre-celeb appearance by Vincent D’Onofrio as an idiot with a chainsaw! Boobs at the 2-minute-29 mark! I’m fully on board so far.

Even for a teen sex comedy from the ’80s, the humor is pandering and caricatured. Like an episode of Hee-Haw.” Everybody emotes like they’re in a junior high play.

A group of campers led by a nature expert go on a nature hike, get trapped in  a cave-in. Tell each other stories to pass the time until they get rescued. It’s like an Amicus horror anthology, in sex-comedy form! Had this been done before? Has it since?

They’re trapped in mother nature’s vagina, taking turns telling about their first times:

The first teller–a guy named Stud–tells a tale of a coerced handjob, leading to public humiliation. She says, “I hope this doesn’t get me pregnant;” fine example of the piss-poor sex education we had in the ’80s.

Stud then hitches a ride with a hooker in a van with a plush, fuzzy blue interior, symbolic of her…blue womb? She offers to do him for free, but he’s so nervous he brings a male friend with more supposed experience, to warm her up, I guess? Hm. The guy, of course, has no idea what he’s doing either, and the hooker rejects him for Stud. He admits he’s a virgin; she teaches him how to surrender to instinct.

A commercial for a dating service that manages to lump homosexuals into the same punchline as pedophiles and bestial relationships. Faux pas, Troma. Unless it’s a comment on rigid commercial society’s view of homosexuality. But if it is, it’s more subtle than I’d ever give Troma credit for.

The next storyteller-a fat loser-tells of inadvertently saving a woman from being jumped by a gang of gay black men–while wearing a Klan outfit, I’d be remiss not to mention. She takes him home and indulges his food fetish before showing him her gratitude. Dialogue hints that they may be cousins, but this is never explored further. She has cute little boobies.

The next narrator is a girl who claims to have been forced her first time; the flashback shows otherwise. Barnyard sex! More rape-y humor!

Meanwhile, back at the camp, a camper tries an experiment in attracting the girl of his dreams: jizzing in her food without her consent. The theory proves successful (!), but on the fat girl instead of the hottie. Commenting on the un-PC-ness of this gag seems ridiculous; it’s no worse than the racial and homophobic humor. Nonetheless, it’s a gag as fascinating as it is disgusting; teenagers learning to trust in the attractive power of their own pheremones instead of colognes and perfumes. Trusting in primal nature, and getting over one’s squeamishness about it, gets one laid.

The next story involves yet another weird pairing of guys who think they’ll do better with chicks “as a team.” This time, they’re brothers. Big brother kicks little brother out of the room at the zero hour; little brother hooks up with a Penthouse pet, who happens to be in the next room. Big brother turns out to be a disappointment, so his girlfriend-for-the-evening joins little brother in a threesome. The tale, of course, reads like a Penthouse Forum story.

Nature Girl tells her tale of being rejected by her first boyfriend–the most unattractive male who ever had a wet-n-messy fetish–only to find solace in identical twin Chippendale dancers. Another incestuous threesome.

Meanwhile, back at yadda yadda: a camper is tricked into jerking off in public, under the pretense of an innocent circle jerk.

The trapped nature hikers begin to panic as their oxygen runs out: birth trauma, smothering anxiety. In the heat of the moment, scared they’re about to die, they admit to actually being virgins. Nature Girl gives a speech that pretty much stands as the credo for all the films in this genre: “If you live fully in the moment, and live by the laws of nature, then if death comes to take you before your time, you’ll be a part of nature.” They all decide they’re not going to die virgins, and melt into a hippie pagan cave orgy.

The group orgasm brings the rockpile down; the nature lovers are reborn into the world as adults. Even the repressed elders find each other and get laid.

Afterthoughts:

This might be as close to the quality level of the better Corman/AIP movies as Troma ever got! Holy shit! There’s a solid, satisfying philosophy behind this one, as batshit retarded as the movie undeniably is.

Stream-Of-Consciousness Review: Piranha 2: The Spawning

Title?: Piranha 2: The Spawning

First or second viewing?: First

Preconceptions:

James Cameron’s first film. I am not a Cameron fan. Terminator was fun, sure, but in my (admittedly minority) opinion, Aliens was as much a step down from Scott’s original as Rick Rosenthal’s Halloween II was from Carpenter’s original. Having said that, I’m dying to see how he tackles the subject of amphibious, winged piranhas.

Program Start:

An homage to the opening of Jaws 2. With boobies! Well played, Cameron. Carnivorous coitus interruptus. Underwater no one can hear you scream.

Opening credits: camera crawls over the wreck of a sunken ship. Precursor, of course, to Titanic. And that IMAX movie.

Lance Henrickson’s in this!

Looks like someone really overdid the soft focus; looks like it was shot through a cheesecloth.

Resort hotel in the Caribbean. A mother and son live out a vaguely Oedipal dynamic within; she works there as a diving instructor.

It’s an Italian production; I recognize all the voice actors from every other Italian exploitation film.

In the hotel bar: Jewish stereotypes–Italian style!

Hypersexual older lady hitting on all the younger men. She reminds me of the infected old woman in Cronenberg’s Shivers.

Young Oedipus goes out an a crewing excursion with a rich asshole. Alexandre Aja took a few plot points from this one for his remake, I see. The asshole seems to be an American ivy league stereotype, but he’s got a hot Italian daughter.

There is so far no indication of even a younger, rawer Cameron in this film. The comic relief scenes feel like they were directed by Stephen King.

Expositional dialogue about the spawning of the grunion–and humans’ intrusion on their ritual–provides ironic foreshadowing: humans have come upstream to “spawn,” only to be consumed by fish. It’s not unclever, I’ll give it that.

More boobies!

Lance Henrickson is a crotchety cop, who happens to be the diving instructor’s estranged husband (precursor to the leads’ relationship in The Abyss), and Oedipus’s father. Be careful, Lance.

Mom is hit on by one of her students. You be careful too, dude.

Victim’s facial flesh eaten away, except for what’s behind the scuba mask. Great idea, fun effect.

Okay, so some scenes are a little better than others. Maybe the second unit director sucked. Maybe somebody got fired and replaced. Have to investigate later.

Some pretty strong female characters: another Cameron trait (his most positive, in my opinion).

The first time we see a piranha fly, it emerges from a victim’s torso cavity in a manner more than slightly reminiscent of a certain film he would later helm the sequel to.

The mom succumbs to her suitor’s advances; ominous music carries us out of this scene into one where naked bimbos get viciously eaten. As if her having sex with this guy brought it on somehow. The fish are a manifestation of Young Oedipus’ latent jealousy, I’m telling you. Aliens is also fraught with mother issues. Was Cameron raised by a single mom, like Tarantino?

The hotel manager is the Mayor Vaughn stand-in, refusing to close the beaches.

The mom’s suitor is playing her! He’s a mole for the bio-weapon firm that made the piranhas; precursor to the Burke character in Aliens. 

Every time the piranhas attack, it hits me all over again: this is a movie about flying piranhas.

Interesting score. Sounds like Michael Nyman sometimes.

A guy staggers out of the water, half eaten, and is dragged back in by the fish. Pretty strong scene.

Tourists gather at the spawning ground to participate in a silly ritual intended to summon the grunions. Their mockery of nature is dutifully punished.

Oh yeah–this movie’s about flying piranhas!

The mom and the bio-weapons guy rig the piranhas’ nest with dynamite. Funny: I just attended a 35mm screening of Alligator last night–another Jaws ripoff featuring dynamite in the climax. I choose to recognize this as Jungian synchronicity.

The fish eat the bioweapons guy. Was it Nature’s vengeance, or the latent jealousy of Young Oedipus?

Mom grabs the anchor of Henrickson’s speeding boat to escape the explosion. Pretty nifty trick, actually. She gets to be an action hero in the end.

Afterthoughts:

Found out that indeed, there were at least two directors who worked on the film, and Cameron had very little control. He was not, however, the child of a single mom.

I initially wanted to write that, due to my incredibly low expectations, Piranha 2 turned out to be not half bad. But in fact, the opposite is true: It’s exactly half bad.