Grindhouse Classics : “The Stuff”

"The Stuff" Movie Poster

B-movie veteran Larry Cohen (God Tole Me To, It’s Alive) could always pull a project together, it seems. The guy was just plain never out of work for long — and still isn’t, although he seems confined primarily to scriptwriting duties these days with projects such as Phone Booth and Captivity. In 1985 he was still a genuine low-budget auteur, though, writing as well as directing projects for the smallest-scale indie distributors, mid-size outfits like New World (who handled the financing for the subject of our — ahem! — “analysis” today), and occasionally even the big Hollywood studios. Working primarily out of New York, Cohen was usually able to put together a pretty decent cast to handle his uniformly well-written and well-executed, if a bit “old-school” horror in terms of their occasional less-than-complete originality, flicks.

Simply put, you generally knew what you’d be getting from a Larry Cohen film — nothing groundbreakingly awesome, but always better-done-than-it-felt-like-they-probably-should-be, some decent budget effects work, a fe laughs, and generally a pretty solid little story. And so it is with The Stuff, in many ways probably the quintessential Cohen flick.

It’s probably a bit ironic that ol’ Larry became best known for his horror (more precisely his horror-comedy hybrid) work, given that he got his start with blaxploitationers like Bone and the truly classic Black Caesar, but if there’s one thing Cohen has proven over the years it’s that he’s a movie industry survivor — when times and tastes change, he’s smart enough to change with them and go with the new flow enough to keep getting work. When blaxploitation started to slow down, it’s only natural that a guy with his keen survival instincts would gravitate toward horror, but one thing he didn’t lose along the way was his nose for making his stories stick with an audience by injecting just enough contemporary social commentary to give his films relevance. It’s never an overpowering element of his M.O., so to speak, but it’s always in there somewhere. Sometimes that makes his projects feel pretty dated, as the issues he’s addressing are no longer of front-burner importance in today’s world. At other times, though, it makes him look downright prescient, as the issues he’s tackling actually grow in importance from the time of the movie’s initial release.

That’s certainly the case with The Stuff, a movie about gelatinous goo oozing out of the center of the Earth and packaged as an ice cream-type dessert that eventually takes over and expels itself from the “host bodies” who are consuming it.

Just can't get enough of The Stuff!

Okay, so the parallels to the horror classic The Blob are pretty painfully obvious here, but like I said, sparkling originality has never been a Larry Cohen signature. What’s remarkable is that the issues he’s tackling in this story — fake foodstuffs, slick marketing (the fake TV commercials for the The Stuff, with their scarily-catchy “Just can’t get enough of The Stuff” jingle are one of this movie’s highlights), and environmental disaster oozing from the ground are more pressing than ever in in 2010, when our grocery store shelves are full of genetically-modified “frankenfoods,” our airwaves (and the internet) are bombarded with with ever-more-aggressive ad campaigns for shit we don’t need, and oil is spilling out of an underwater hole into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate of 200,oo0 barrels (or something) a day with no end in sight.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a true Larry Cohen film without a plethora of fairly-well-realized characters. Our main protagonist is a corporate espionage specialist named David “Mo” Rutherford (Michael Moriarty) , who;s been hired by a consortium of ice cream manufacturers to find out the secret of The Stuff and why it’s eating up their market share (and, quite literally, their customers). In his quest to find out what The Stuff is, where it comes from, and why people just can’t resist its appeal, he teams up with a wide variety of crackpots, independent sleuths, and various hangers-on, including PR-exec-turned-gal Friday (and sorta-love interest) Nicole (Andrea Marcovicci), down-on-his-luck cookie magnate (and obvious Famous Amos stand-in) “Chocolate Chip” Charlie (SNL alum Garrett Morris, who meets and awesomely spectacular stuff-induced demise that you have to see to believe), and right-wing militia commander Colonel Malcolm Grommett Spears (Paul Sorvino), who basically functions as a cross between Rush Limbaugh and Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay (needless to say, he’s convinced The Stuff is a commie plot to destroy America and he’s determined to wipe every trace of it from the face of our fair land).

If all this sounds like a weird amalgamation of The Blob, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and Soylent Green, well — that’s because it is. But goddamn if it doesn’t all work.

Here comes The Stuff!

The effects, as mentioned, are terrific fun. The huge masses of stop-motion Stuff are well-realized and frankly look a hell of a lot better than most of today’s CGI garbage, and for smaller-quantity servings, they just used gobs of yogurt and soft-serve ice cream. Again, damned if it doesn’t work just fine. There are several impressive death-by-Stuff scenes, the just-mentioned one with Morris being the best, but truth be told they all look good, and I’ve watched plenty of flicks with ten, a hundred, or even a thousand times the budget of this one not pull off their supposedly “shocking” death sequences with anywhere near this much effectiveness and aplomb. All told, it’s a genuine visual delight.

And finally, on the trivia front, be on the lookout for appearances from Danny Aiello, the Brothers Bloom, Eric Bogosian, and a very young Mira Sorvino.

"The Stuff" DVD from Anchor Bay

The Stuff is available on DVD from Anchor Bay. It features a 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer that’s been digitally remastered and looks great, the sound likewise has been remastered and is presented in a crisp, clear 5.1 mix, and as far as the extras go, while the overall selection is pretty light, there’s a feature-length commentary track from Larry Cohen himself that’s flat-out awesome to listen to.

Is The Stuff a classic? Nah. But it’s plenty good, about 50 times better than your first impression of it would lead you to believe, and a downright professional piece of work. It’s fun, it’s funny, it’s incisive, it’s smart, and it’s well-acted, well-directed, and amazingly well-realized visually. It’s one of those movies that, if you own it, you find yourself watching it again three or four times a year just because — well, it’s so damn solidly done.

And with that, I’m off to the Dairy Queen for a heaping pile of soft-serve Stu —- errr, ice cream.

“Survival Of The Dead” : George Romero Still Shows The Young’uns How It’s Done

"Survival Of The Dead" Movie Poster

I guess I’m an old-school horror fan (or maybe I’m just old), but to this reviewer the theatrical opening of a new George Romero “Dead” movie is still a big deal. Always has been, always will be. And that’s why, even though his latest, George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead has been available for purchase online and on demand on cable for a couple of weeks now (it also opened theatrically in Europe about a month before it did here in the US) and I’ve been chomping at the bit to see it, I’ve resisted. I wanted to see it on the big screen, with an audience (an audience, it should be noted, that’s probably been pretty effectively boiled down to nothing but Romero die-hards like myself after the — shall we say — less than enthusiastic reception for Diary of the Dead) — because damnit, even though this opening wasn’t an “event,” per se, it still counts as one in my book. I guess I’m just stubborn like that.

So the question now is — was it worth the wait? Obviously the theatrical release, limited as it is, can only be described as formality on the part of Magnolia Pictures and their Magnet imprint — they know this thing isn’t gonna recoup its costs in theaters, and it’ll probably be gone in a week. Like so much indie horror, they’re counting on alternative “viewing platforms” providing nearly all of the audience for this film. And so it goes. 42 years (think about that for just a second — 42 fucking years! This guy has been making zombie films for nearly half a century!) after Night of the Living Dead, the creator of the modern zombie genre is well and truly back to his independent roots, albeit for completely different reasons than those that prevailed in 1968.

Back then, Romero was just a young guy who made local TV commercials in the Pittsburgh area and there was no reason for Hollywood to take a chance on him. He had to go it alone and find independent distribution for his film because that was the only choice had had. Today,  he has to go the independent route because there’s a sense that the times have passed old George by, and that he just doesn’t “have it” anymore.

As is my wont to do with conventional “wisdom,” your humble host is here to piss all over that notion.

Romero's zombies : still hungry after all these years

Survival of the Dead picks up immediately after the events in 2007’s Diary of the Dead, so rather than viewing this as Romero’s sixth “Dead” film (even though it is), it’s probably best to think of it as the second film in his second “zombie cycle,” since Diary took us back to the beginning. Our focal point here character-wise is the ragtag renegade National Guard unit-turned-highwaymen we met briefly in Diary when they held up the fleeing students’ RV.  Thanks to the wonder of internet cell phone connections, they’ve learned about a place called Plum Island, off the coast of Delaware, that’s supposedly a zombie-free paradise.

When our ragtag band of Uncle Sam’s formerly-finest led by Sergeant “Nicotine” Crockett (Alan Van Sprang) arrives at the ferry crossing to the island, though, they find they’ve been set up by the crusty old Irish sailor who sent out the internet greeting to the world, one Patrick O’Flynn (Kenneth Welsh), who intends to trade safe passage to the island for — well — everything they’ve got, which in this case happens to include a million bucks’ cash.

Needless to say, the Sarge and his boys (and one girl, a lesbian solider nicknamed, drearily enough, “Tomboy” and played by Athena Karkanis) aren’t going for this and a battle ensues between O’Flynn and his cohorts, the renegade military unit, and whatever zombies happen to be mulling about on the ferry.

After “Tomboy” saves O’Flynn’s life, they all make sorta-nice and head for Plum Island together — there’s just one problem. O’Flynn’s become persona non grata there since he and the patriarch of the other large island clan, a hard-ass named Seamus Muldoon (Richard Fitzpatrick) don’t exactly see eye to eye on how best to deal with the undead menace. O’Flynn’s  a shoot-’em-all-in-the-head sort of guy, while Muldoon wants to train them to eat something other than human flesh if possible and keep ’em around for — well, I dunno, domestication, I guess, although he’s big into family, as well, and probably just doesn’t like the idea of pumping lead into the skulls of his loved ones if he doesn’t have to, even if they are, you know, dead. The fact that the two families have a generations-long blood feud going on between them (think of them as the Irish version of the Hatfields and the McCoys) doesn’t help matters, either.

The families have shared the island uneasily over the years, with the O’Flynns making their living as fishermen while the Muldoons have earned their livelihood as ranchers (I didn’t know ranching was a big thing in Delaware, but there you have it). So anyway, the premise has some holes in it (and the amount of inbreeding on the island must be crazy).

It’s also, dare I say it, repetitious — essentially what we’ve got going on here is the exact same set-up as Romero’s earlier Day of the Dead, although this time the roles are reversed. In Day, the people who wanted to attempt to domesticate the walking corpses were the smart (if still crazy) ones — the “heroes” of the story, if you will. This time around, they’re the unscrupulous assholes. And while this time Romero’s got a whole island to play around with rather than Day‘s underground military research bunker, it doesn’t change the fact that premise-wise, we’re pretty much in firmly familiar territory here.

Patrick O'Flynn don't take no shit from no zombies

Other problems persist : while most of the acting is certainly competent (something that couldn’t be said for Diary), the OTT stereotypical Irish accents do start to grate after awhile, and make O’Flynn and Muldoon feel more like caricatures than fully-fleshed-out characters. The time frame is problematic as well : this supposedly takes place just six days after the dead started walking, yet Muldoon has hatched his plan to try to coexist (or maybe that should be enslave) the zombie hordes pretty damn quickly. Also, the zombies exhibit the type of familiar-to-their-real-lives actions (think Bub from Day “Big Daddy” from Land of the Dead) that, in previous Romero lore, it took them years to come around to (there’s a hysterical scene with a chained-up living dead mailman delivering the same letters to the same box over and over again).

Still, there’s an awful lot here Romero gets right.  The zombies themselves have an unknown quality to them that’s been missing for some time, and there’s a sense that the standard “Romero rules” may not necessarily apply across the board. the effects work, apart from a couple of crap CGI sequences, are generally good, and the blood-n’-guts are handles with the level of aplomb we’ve come to expect. the interactions beween the characters are handled in a pleasingly naturalistic manner, giving us real insight into how real people deal with the by-now-done-to-death scenario of a “zombie apocalypse.” And of course, the question of who’s actually worse, them or us — a staple of Romero’s flicks from the beginning — is brought to chillingly effective life through the demented actions of Seamus Muldoon and his clan.

The family blood feud adds an interesting wrinkle, as well, and gives us a look at a heretofore unexplored facet of life in world overrun by the dead — how the tensions of a new and altogether deadly situation can either serve to transcend age-old tensions (think of Yugoslavia — everyone was pretty much united in their hatred of the Soviet interlopers, yet the minute the dreaded commies were gone all the age-old ethnic tensions came bubbling back to the surface resulting in — well, you know) or, in this case, exacerbate them even further.

As with Diary, given the proximity of events here to the beginning of the shambling-corpse onslaught, the zombies themselves aren’t as “far gone” in appearance as they were in movies like Day and Land. they’re more at the level of physical putrefaction we saw in Dawn on the Dead, although there’s more overall goriness to their look than the simply greyish-blue facepaint many of them sported in that classic film.

As for the conclusion, well, that’s right outta Day as well, with the zombies kept as “research subjects” by Muldoon turned loose to wreak havoc on the island, with the added wrinkle here being that against this backdrop the blood feud between his kinfolk and the O’Flynn’s is finally settled once and for all (or is it? I don’t want to give too much away, but the film’s final scene does show that age-old enmity carries on even after death. I’ll say no more and have probably said too much already). As for the survivors (such as there are) from our now-freelance National Guard crew, well, that’s where we get another interesting wrinkle on Day‘s premise — rather than escaping to an island at the end, these folks decide to get the hell off the island. One major problem with the ending that I won’t divulge too many details about — Romero’s trademark social commentary, which had been pleasingly relegated to a more figure-it-out-for-yourself status (as opposed to the pounding-you-over-the-head-with it he did in Diary) really does take over and get pretty damn preachy for the last minute or two. It’s not enough to dimish your overall enjoyment of what is, aforementioned niggles aside, still a well-done zombie flick, but why George can’t just trust his audiences enough to figure out what he’s saying anymore (it’s never too far in the background, after all) is beyond me. He  achieves the classic balance between horror and sociopolitical allegory throughout this film, then breaks his old sledgehammer from Diary back out for the conclusion.

What you see this movie for --- zombies on the loose!

And speaking of Romero as social commentator, while it does get admittedly heavy at the tail end, it’s still, on the whole, pleasing to see that he hasn’t abandoned this angle to his cinematic storytelling. You go into a George Romero “Dead” film expecting sociopolitical allegory, after all, whether it be Night of the Living Dead‘s none-too-subtle parallels with race relations at the time and its firm stance in support of black civil rights, Dawn of the Dead‘s absolutely blistering (yet, perhaps paradoxically, quite understated) critique of consumerism, Day of the Dead‘s exploration of Reagan-era militarism and the Cold War “bunker mentality,” Land of the Dead‘s savaging of Bush-era “War on Terrorism” bullshit and the outright evil that is gated “communities” (an oxymoron if ever there was one), or Diary of the Dead‘s annoyingly-overstated-yet-nonetheless-spot-on take on both the voyeurism and, ironically enough I suppose, narcissism at the heart of today’s YouTube-style “culture” of “emerging media.”

While Survival of the Dead doesn’t exactly tackle any new symptoms of our overall cultural malaise, mining instead, as mentioned (or at least implied) the same thematic ground as Day, taking that exploration of “bunker mentality”-style tribalism and nativism out of a Cold War setting and transposing it into today’s world of racist Arizona immigration laws,  ugly nationalism and xenophobia expressed in the form of right-wing “Tea Party” pseudo-populism, and anti-Muslim hysteria, isn’t necessarily indicative of any creative bankruptcy on Romero’s part, it just shows that he understands that while circumstances may have changed, the essential dangers inherent in any sort of “us-vs.-them” mentality persist.

As you’ve probably been able to gather by now, Survival of the Dead is shy, by several orders of magnitude, of being the absolute spot-on classic that Romero’s first three “Dead” films were. But enough of what makes those movies so movies so undeniably compelling, even after all these years, is still here — the characterization, the sociopolitical analysis, the technical expertise in terms of editing and pacing, the humor, the heart, and, yes, the splatter — to make it well worth your time.  Modern zombie flicks, be they comedies like Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland,  action-thrillers like the Resident Evil films, or contemporary thoughtful meditations on the human condition in the face of  apocalypse like the 28 Days and Weeks Later all have bits and parts of the George Romero legacy in there somewhere, but to date no one has been able to combine each of those various elements to achieve all the possibilities inherent in the zombie film in the way that the man himself has done — and continues to do. Survival of the Dead isn’t on the same level as his best work, but it’s still miles ahead of what anyone else has been able to accomplish within the genre he created.

“Quiet Nights Of Blood And Pain” Updates A Classic Grindhouse Premise For The 21st Century

"Quiet Nights Of Blood And Pain" DVD Cover

The “psycho vet” story is an old staple in grindhouse and exploitation filmmaking, and we’ve covered a few of the classics in this genre on this page very blog in the year-and-change we (okay, I)’ve been at it — The Executioner Part II, Combat Shock and Deathdream spring immediately to mind.

Of course, these films and literally dozens of others were about disturbed Viet Nam vets, but given that we’re now involved in not one, but two no-end-in-sight-and-no-way-to-really-win conflicts, and have been mired down in them for a hell of a long time, it’s a wonder that more enterprising young filmmakers haven’t returned to “psycho vet” territory since it seems like it would be pretty fertile ground for them. The “theater” of war may have changed, but the basic premise really hasn’t, sadly, all that much — we’re still fighting for dubious (at best) reasons, our “volunteer” force is composed mostly of people with little or no other economic opportunity, our definition of “victory” seems to be constantly changing, the local populace wants us to get the hell out and had become the primary “enemy” we’re fighting, and the government seems to want to put the whole thing on the backburner and just have all of us out here in medialand forget about it while they keep shoveling more of our tax dollars into the bottomless pit these wars have become.

Oh, and a lot of the men and women who are fortunate enough to get out of the war(s) alive come back severely, and quite understandably, traumatized, if not outright psychologically (and sometimes even physically) broken.

Yes, friends, the United States never fucking learns, and something tells me that in 5 or 10 years’ time we’ll be having this same conversation, only then  the unlucky “winner” of our imperialistic —- uhhmmmm — “attentions” will be Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, or some combination thereof. The future’s so bright I gotta wear shades and all that.

Now, we’ve had our fair share of Afghanistan and Iraq war documentaries, to be sure, and a bunch of dramas, from the exceptional (Brian DePalma’s criminally underrated and nearly-unseen Redacted) to the drearily preachy (In The Valley Of Elah) to the insanely- fetishized -yet-disgustingly-apolitical (The Hurt Locker — wouldn’t you know it won Best Picture). But to date, we haven’t had an Iraq or Afghanistan-themed exploitation picture.

Enter Ohio-based microbudget veteran writer-director Andrew Copp, who’s given us some truly groundbreaking ultra-independent horror flicks like 1998’s The Mutilation Man and 2005’s The Atrocity Circle, to fill this glaring void.

While Copp’s earlier work has been at times almost dizzingly experimental, with Quiet Night of Blood and Pain he (apart from a couple of scenes that diverge into crazed video psychedelia) he pursues a pretty straightforward narrative — William (Loren S. Goins) is a recently-returned Iraq war vet with a severe case of PTSD due to the atrocities he’s committed (while Abu Ghraib isn’t mentioned specifically, it’s hard not to draw the conclusion that he was either there or at a similar facility due to his predilection for the kind of zip-tie “handcuffs” we’ve seen in so many of the photos from that testament to the war’s ultimate, and repulsively inhuman, folly), and now that he’s home, he’s continuing his “mission” by taking out the “traitors” and “enemies” in his hometown — anti-war activists, hippies, and other peaceniks of various stripes. He’s egged on in his crusade by his psycho brother (played by Copp himself), a veteran of the first Gulf War (you know, the one we were told “went well”).

Across town, fellow veteran Adrienne (Amanda DeLotelle, the film’s co-producer) is struggling with her own readjustment to civilian life and finds support from Viet Nam vet Ray (played by Ray Freeland) and his Veterans for Peace-type group. One night after a meeting of this support group, Adrienne is set upon by two assailants in an alley, and William, who’s “monitoring” the meeting place of the “subversive” group fends off the attackers before fleeing off into the night himself. He begins to stalk Adrienne and her friends, though, as part of his “bring the war home” pseudo-mission.

William's treatment of John Kerry voters

They’re not the only folks to get his attention, though — one evening he breaks into the home of some people who have a John Kerry bumpersticker on their car and gives ’em the kind of “special treatment” he became so skilled at administering to “enemy combatants” in Iraq, and dispatches a couple of guys selling antiwar titles at their bookstore, as well.   But the more he  keeps tabs on Adrienne and her group, the more he becomes obsessed with wiping out this supposed “fifth column” that’s right in his midst. Needless to say, what follows ain’t gonna be pretty.

If you’re new to microbudget moviemaking, Quiet Nights of Blood and Pain may not, in all honesty, be the best place to begin your education. The acting is a mixed bag — Goins is generally superb as William and elicits a sense of controlled-but-seething menace throughout, while Freeland’s characterization of Ray is pretty much rote script-reading. Somewhere in between the two polarities is  DeLotelle’s portrayal of Amanda — she has such an unaffected and minimalist approach to her “acting” (I’m guessing more due to sheer inexperience than any conscious decision-making on her part, but I suppose I could be wrong) that it’s hard to tell whether to call her performance completely unprofessional or amazingly naturalistic. Whatever the reason and whatever the cause, though, it works, so whether that’s by choice or by dint of sheer accident really doesn’t matter much in the end.

Okay, here's some blood --- but there's quiet nights and pain, too

Copp is a skilled director who’s worked with 8mm, 16mm, and video before (this is SOV using a Panasonic DV-30 with a 1.33:1 aspect ratio, so it’s presented full-frame), and knows both how to compose shots and stage some pretty sold gore effects. In addition, since he wrote the script himself, he has a keen understanding of its pacing, and he does a pretty damn masterful job of alternating scenes of profoundly alienated evenings at home doing nothing with good old fashioned splatterfest-style ultraviolence — and the makeup and effects work is quite good. Not up to Hollywood standards, of course, but  part of the fun of watching this type of movie comes from seeing what the filmmakers are able to do with severely limited resources.

Needless to say, Quiet Nights of Blood and Pain never played theaters, nor was it ever going to, but it’s available on DVD either directly from coppfilms.com or at most major retailers like Amazon. It’s distributed under the auspices the good folks at Tempe Video and picture and sound quality are both pretty much perfect (again, given the inherent limitations of the flick’s production values).  For extras, there’s a look at a gallery showing of some of Copp’s artwork, and a well-made and highly informative “making-of” featurette.

Copp has stated that his goal was to make a film with a grindhouse-style sensibility updated to apply to the modern sociopolitical landscape. In that he’s succeeded quite admirably. Sure, it’s show on video instead of low-grade film stock, but the spirit of the exploitation independents is definitely alive and well here — and while it’s a bit of a tightrope act he’s set for himself in combining a “message movie” with a psycho slasher flick, he pulls it off pretty well. At times it feels a bit preachy, but as it’s antiwar message is one this reviewer agrees with, I never found the political content to be grating, nor to detract from the character-driven story that lies at the movie’s core.

Like its tagline (“He’s Back From The War,  But He Can’t Stop Killing!”), Quiet Nights of Blood and Pain is anything but flashy or terribly original, but certainly direct and earnest enough to be worthy of respect. It’s a labor of love with its birth pains in full view for all to see, and what it lacks in polish it more than makes up for in heart and integrity.

Catch A Ride With Gomez Addams In His “Wacky Taxi”

"Wacy Taxi" Movie Poster Under Its Alternate Title, "Pepper And His Wacky Taxi"

In the early 1970s, lots of washed-up former sitcom stars were given “comeback vehicles”  (that should probably read “potential comeback vehicles”) at the top of the bill in cheap family films.  The most notorious example is probably Disney tapping Bob Crane to play the title role in “Superdad,” which probably isn’t actually the worst bit of casting when you consider how many kids he probably had running around out there.

Not to be outdone by the big studios, legendary (as far as these things go) exploitation house Avco Embassy got ahold of a script called Wacky Taxi in 1972 and figured it would be perfect for the patriarch of the Addams Family himself, the one and only John Astin.

I won’t mice words here, I absolutely love this guy. How can you not? Every time he popped up as a guest star on risible 80s sitcoms like “Night Court,” he had that same batshit-insane gleam in his eye that he trademarked as Gomez and invariably livened up the otherwise dreary proceedings just by his very presence.  And for that reason alone I really — and I mean really — wanted to like Wacky Taxi (also released, as you can see from the poster, under the title Pepper and his Wacky Taxi).

Unfortunately, everything about this movie sucks, including Astin’s performance. The guy looks like he’s literally sleepwalking through the film — not that I blame him, I’d probably do exactly the same thing if confronted with a story this agonizingly dull.

I hate to burst your expectations (actually, I’d hate for you to even have any expectations  about this movie), but there’s very little actual “wackiness” here at all. In fact, it’s a pretty somber and morose little flick, with a tedious and dreary “pick yourself up by your bootstraps and everything will turn out fine” moral shoehorned into it to make the proceedings not only boring,  but annoying, as well. Really. Save that kind of message for those “Legless Girl Runs Marathon On Her Hands” stories stuffed in the back pages of the National Enquirer and other right-wing tabloids to promulgate their mean-spirited “see? the unfortunates of society don’t really need any help from us, they can do amazing things on their own” worldview.

Anyhow, to the plot, such as it is — Astin plays Pepe “Pepper”  Morales, a big-dreaming Mexican-American (an atrocious bit of casting since even though he did play a guy named Gomez on TV, Astin doesn’t actually look particularly Hispanic) who lives with his wife, Maria (woodenly played — not that  the script requires anything more — by Maria Pohji) and their four kids in sunny San Diego, California.  With another mouth to feed on the way (here’s an idea for an actual, realistic message for the film — don’t have more kids than you can afford!) Pepper decides the time is now to quite his decent-paying but soul-destroying job at an aluminum can factory, raid the family “savings account” kept in a coffee can in the kitchen,  buy a piece of shit, dilapidated 1959 Cadillac, paint the word “Taxi” on its sides and top, and hit the streets looking for fares without actually, you know, getting a cab license, insurance, or any of that other pesky legal crap. Smart guy.

At this point, you’d figure that if his wife had any sense at all she’d dump the guy, but then that wouldn’t be in keeping with the “family values”-type themes on display here, so instead she dutifully sticks by him as he goes about this shit-for-brains scheme.

Cruising around town in his illegal cab, Pepper decides the best way to drum up business is to pull up to people not only trying to hail cabs but waiting for buses, as well, and not only undercut standard taxi prices, but undercut the going bus fares, as well! He hauls carloads of  naval servicemen to the base for 60 cents apiece (probably not a decent chunk of change even in 1972), and takes a female enlistee to Tijuana for reasons unspecified (actually, he won’t cross the border — but she pays him 20 bucks to wait for her on the US side for two hours, whereupon she returns, crying — now let’s see here, what would she have to go to Tijuana for two hours for that would have her coming back teary-eyed? Two years before Roe v. Wade? Keep in mind this flick was pitched to family audiences — good luck explaining that little plot twist to your six-year-old!). He takes a fast-talking, fast-eating blowhard (played by Allan Sherman, the guy who sang “Camp Grenada”) to the airport and gets hassled by the cops for not having either a standard taxi license or an airport sticker. He hauls an arguing family home from said airport. And then his cab gets stolen when he leaves it running with the door open while he carts their luggage in.

Maybe it’s for the best, though, because along the way there are, actually, some voices of sanity trying to tell him to quit this crazy scheme. His brother-in-law,  a fly-by-night lawyer (portrayed by Ralph James), is the first to clue Pepper into the fact that he needs a cab operator’s license, a fare box, and insurance (he hadn’t thought of any of that stuff), and his buddies from the factory tell him that “big business” will be out to destroy him (setting up in the viewer’s mind, if only for a moment, a “Pepper-vs.-The Man” theme that would make sense, and make for at least a semi-involving plot, but which nonetheless never materializes).

Pepper isn’t hearing any of it, though. He’s determined to get his supposedly “wacky” taxi back and pursue his dream of building an empire to rival Yellow, Checker, or any of the other big-time cab outfits.  He gets arrested trying to bust into a storage locker where he thinks he sees the car. He escpaes from police custody (by asking if he can get a drink of water and then making a run out the door of the station) and proceeds to walk around aimlessly, sit around aimlessly, lie around aimlessly — you get the picture, He’s a broken man.

To relieve the monotony of doing nothing all day long, he goes on a bender and , while walking home form the bar, he thinks he spots the guy who stole all his hopes and dreams (well, okay, his ’59 Caddy). He follows the “culprit” home, rings his doorbell, the guy (ladies and gentlemen, Frank Sinatra Jr.! — yes, really!) answers, and Pepper proceeds to attempt to strangle him after asking nicely to get his “cab” back and being met with a “what the fuck are you talking about, buddy?” response (again, good luck explaining this one to your kids — “Daddy, why is Pepper choking an innocent man?”).  The other people in the house, whoever the hell they are, knock Pepper out, and next thing you know —

He’s back at home having his bruises and scars attended to by his ever-faithful wife. How and why he didn’t end up back in the slammer is anyone’s guess, maybe he just apologized nicely after regaining consciousness and Frank Sinatra Jr., stand-up guy that he is, decided not to file charges.

Cue more doing nothing. Until Pepper’s teenage son (by the way, we never learn the names of any of his offspring, and Pepper himself just refers to them as “ninos”) tires of his old man’s lethargy and gets a huge groups of probably 50 or so neighborhood kids together to scour the city until they find the (again, supposedly “wacky”) taxi.

Which they do. In a junkyard. At which point Pepper races over there on foot like a man possessed and, I guess, gets it out, either by finance or force. Not that we ever see him do this, since at this point we “treated” to a series of flashbacks to all the good times Pepper had earlier in the movie in his self-declared “cab.”

And then, the epilogue — dear God, the epilogue. Pepper’s brother-in-law loans him the money to buy a taxi operator’s license and a fare box, and loans him some more when it’s time to expand his operation. In no time at all, “Pepper, Inc.” (where’d he ever come up with that name?) is the most successful taxi operation in town, and he keeps his original “wacky” taxi on display in the parking lot as a nostalgic reminder of how his empire began. The. Fucking. End.

"Wacky Taxi"/ "Superargo" DVD From Code Red's "Exploitation Cinema" Series

Wacky Taxi is now available on DVD, double-billed with Italian low-budget wrestler-turned-superhero “classic” Superargo Vs. The Faceless Giants as part of Code Red’s Exploitation Cinema series. Again, as seems to frequently be the case with these releases, the Code Red label itself is nowhere to be found and instead it’s been put out under the until-very-recently defunct Saturn Productions label for whatever reason. The picture is presented in a 16:9 anamorphic transfer that’s got the occasional emulsion line and the more-than-occasional grain and speckle, but on the whole it looks cleaner than you’d probably expect it to and frankly a whole hell of a lot better than it probably deserves to.  The sound is standard mono, nothing special, but gets the job done just fine, especially considering the seriously lame nature of the cloying “life is sunny and great”-type songs penned by jazz semi-legend Willie Ruff.

On a final note, while the credits for the film list TV veteran Alex Grasshoff as the director, IMDB actually has  Astin himself down as co-director. All I can say is that I really, sincerely hope it’s not true. I’d hate to lose any more estimation for him than I already have.

This is bad stuff, to be sure — horrendous, even — but at least we’ll always have reruns of The Addams Family on somewhere to remind us of how great  John Astin was. Most of the time.