F.C. Schaefer's Blog, page 8

Truly Needful Things indeed!

NEEDFUL THINGS is one Stephen King book that sat on my shelf far too long before I got around to reading it. It uses one of his basic tropes, that of the small community beset by an outside evil, one that worms its way into the heart of said community, and then wrecks havoc. In SALEM’S LOT, the title town met the evil that was Mr. Barlow, the vampire; in IT, the town is Derry and the villain is Pennywise the Dancing Clown, in THE TOMMYKNOCKERS, it’s the little town of Haven overrun by an alien presence let loose from a long buried spacecraft. In this book, the town in question is Castle Rock, Maine, the setting of a number of King’s previous works, and the evil, which sets up shop on Main Street, is Leland Gaunt, the proprietor of a new knickknack store called Needful Things. Those who enter Gaunt’s establishment find an item that is their heart’s desire, be it a Sandy Koufax baseball card, a pair of sunglasses worn by Elvis himself, a Bazun fishing rod, or a charm that miraculously cures arthritis. Once the unsuspecting lay eyes on the item they secretly lust after, they will do anything to have it, and it is their lucky day, for Mr. Gaunt doesn’t ask for payment in currency, instead asking his ensnared customers to perform a “harmless” prank on another member of the community. These pranks are anything but benign; instead they push the buttons of their victims, hitting them right in their fears, hates, and resentments. Soon, a chain reaction of escalating violence is rippling through the town of Castle Rock, building toward a bloodbath while Mr. Gaunt patiently waits inside his store for it all go down.


I liked this book a lot, it’s not THE STAND or THE SHINING, but for a plot that is a basic potboiler, King gets everything out of it that he possibly could. Maybe a more subtle writer might have done more with the story, it certainly has possibilities, but subtlety is not why I read Stephen King. My paperback copy comes in at 700+ pages, so there is space to set the table and introduce the varied citizens of Castle Rock, recognizable to any Constant Reader as his usual crew of narrow minded, covetous, foul tempered and foul mouthed small town Maine residents. One particular rotten apple has a first name of Danforth, which surely was a swipe at J. Danforth Quayle, who was Vice President at the time the book was written, and who was considered to be rather feckless by his critics. There are references to VCRs, fax machines, Princess Phones, the movie YOUNG GUNS, that does date the book to the early ‘90s, but once I was immersed in the story, I didn’t really notice. The pace in the middle section does sag a bit – Ace Merrill’s trip to Boston goes on too long – but once the story really gets going at the end of the second act, it becomes a real page turner. Alan Pangborn and Polly Chambers, the novel’s main characters, are the kind of flawed protagonists King writes well, and Leland Gaunt is the kind of antagonist familiar to King’s books, an evil that is never quite truly explained, and that’s just fine. Like the malevolent force behind the doors at the Overlook Hotel, Gaunt appears to be an entity who feeds upon human weakness, and in Castle Rock, he finds a buffet. There’s a creepy spider, and plenty of gore, but one of the more horrific aspects of the story was how well King gets into the tyranny of constant pain, as with Polly’s arthritis of the hands. There are references to earlier King books set in and around Castle Rock – CUJO, THE BODY, THE DEAD ZONE, THE SUN DOG, THE DARK HALF – that are a real treat for us Constant Readers. This being a Stephen King book, there are some heavy handed knocks at organized religion, and having one prominent town resident being a closeted homosexual comes off as a tired cliché now. In the end, if NEEDFUL THINGS (an apt description of Gaunt’s unwary victims) doesn’t quite measure up to King’s best books, it is because we have seen its premise, themes, and tropes in earlier books. Still, there’s nothing wrong with using familiar chords to play a different tune.

After this book, King washed his hands of Castle Rock, but reading this novel now, and looking back at the passage of time, I wish King in the latter part of his career might reconsider, and give us a story that tells us what happened to that town in the years since. If not, at least King should think about bringing back Leland Gaunt for another appearance in a different book, he’s a great villain. And looking back, maybe we shouldn’t have had so much fun at Dan Quayle’s expense, we’ve seen much worse than him come and go in the years since.

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Farewell Black Widow, and hello little sister: a review.

It has been awhile since the fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe have had a feature length film to enjoy, but after being delayed for over a year due to the pandemic, the public finally got to see BLACK WIDOW, the stand alone movie built around Scarlet Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff, a former assassin turned SHIELD agent and then a member of the Avengers. Natasha made her debut in IRON MAN 2, and had been a mainstay of MCU films since. Though some fans have had problems with how her character was handled from one film to the other, Johansson’s interpretation of the character created back in 1964 by Stan Lee, Don Rico, and Don Heck, developed a huge following, and of course, a demand that she get a solo film of her own same as Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, and Thor. When The Widow met her final fate in AVENGERS: ENDGAME, it was a gut punch of a twist, and seemed to forestall the possibility of a standalone movie, but Disney/Marvel found a way to give the fans what they wanted by making a film a set right after the events of CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR, where the Avengers were disbanded, and Natasha was a fugitive from the American government, and hiding in Europe for violating the Sokovia Accords.


I made a point to see BLACK WIDOW cold, purposely avoiding any reviews, and most importantly, any spoilers. This aided my enjoyment of the movie tremendously. The film opens with a flashback to a happy family living in suburban Ohio in 1995, a father, a mother, and two young girls, but they are soon revealed to be deep cover Russian operatives; with their mission completed, and their cover blown, they flee America for Cuba in the first of THE BLACK WIDOW’s many impressive action scenes. The older of the two sisters is Natasha, who, once in Cuba, is given over to The Red Room, a criminal organization that takes control of the minds of the girls it recruits, and trains both her, and her sister, to be assassins. Now, years later, the fugitive Natasha is back to reconnect with her former “family,” and take down The Red Room, and its leader, General Dreykov. Along the way, there are a number of well staged chase sequences, hand to hand combat, a breakout from an arctic Russian prison, a couple of plot twists and turns, and some genuine character development.


BLACK WIDOW has scenes and plot threads which are clearly similar to THE AMERICANS, KILLING EVE, and a finale that echoed the end of WINTER SOLDIER. None of this I minded, as BLACK WIDOW takes those similarities and truly makes them its own. And like many other Marvel films, it has got the art of three act storytelling down pat. For all the great action scenes in the film, the story is truly anchored to the dinner table sequence at the end of the second act, when Natasha and her Russian “family” are finally all together, and they sit and talk about their mutual past, what was real, what was not, and what it meant, along with the enduring pain it caused. Its proof that even in an action heavy super hero film, it is necessary to build character, and get the audience invested in them. It also helps the cast great actors like Rachel Weisz as Natasha’s “mother,” and David Harbour, as her “father,” the former Soviet super soldier known as The Red Tornado; Harbour’s performance is a great balancing act of the dramatic and comedic, creating a past his prime super hero who refuses to quit. The breakout star of the film is Florence Pugh, as Natasha’s little “sister,” a good assassin in her own right; Pugh was awesome in the horror film MIDSOMMAR, and she nearly eclipses Johansson here. When you cast Ray Winstone, who plays Derykov, as your main villain, than half the work is done. Some might be disappointed that Chris Evans, Robert Downey Jr. Samuel Jackson, or Mark Ruffalo didn’t make cameos in their own iconic MCU roles, but the decision was made to keep the spotlight on Johansson, who more than earned her right to a solo star turn. William Hurt does appear as Thunderbolt Ross though, a way of connecting it all back to all those other film’s continuity. I must give high praise to director Cate Shortland, and screenwriter, Eric Pearson; together they have given us a movie that is par beside the three Captain America films, which are the best of the MCU in my opinion.


Of course there is a post credits scene, one that suggests we definitely have not seen the last of Florence Pugh’s Belova. And please put Cate Shortland behind the camera of some other Marvel projects, she knows how to do it right. As for Scarlet Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff, she will be sorely missed, but we’ve got a great film to remember her by.

I am an indie author and my latest novel is ALL THE WAY WITH JFK: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF 1964. It is available at the following:
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A Quiet Place II: my review.

After a year’s wait, A QUIET PLACE II has arrived, the sequel to the unexpected 2018 hit about an alien invasion of Earth, and the desperate struggle of a family to survive in its aftermath. One reason why the original succeeded was the spin director, writer, and star, John Krasinski, put on this long standing WAR OF THE WORLDS story trope: the invaders are fearsome killing machines without eyes, finding their human prey on sound alone. This wrinkle allowed the movie to build enormous suspense and tension as the humans survivors by necessity had to move about making virtually no noise whatsoever. To up the ante, Krasinski had the lead female character, played by Emily Blount, pregnant and about to deliver her child, a situation fraught with incredible danger. The first film succeeded so well because Krasinski built his story solidly, and exploited his premise to the maximum for a solid payoff for the audience. But sequels are a different matter, and usually are judged on how well they manage the degree of diminishing returns, as they often are nothing more than a rehash of the original.


I’m glad to say that as sequels go, A QUIET PLACE II is one of those rare ones that builds on the first film, and actually feels like an organic continuation of the story of the Abbot family, as they must continue without the father, Lee, played by Krasinski, and care for their newborn. One thing that right away won me over was an opening sequence that flashed back to Day One of the invasion, where the Abbott family is attending a ball game in the small town where they live just as everything descends in chaos. It’s a great way to bring everyone up to speed on just how deadly these creatures really are, along with satisfying fans’ curiosity as to just how things went down at the beginning, something we were left to wonder about after seeing a few newspaper headlines (another scifi apocalypse trope) in the first film. The movie then picks up right where the first one left off with Blount and her children, including deaf daughter, Regan (well played by Millicent Simmonds), and son Marcus (played by Noah Jupe), leaving their farm with their newborn in tow looking for fellow survivors. A near disastrous mishap in an old steel mill leads to an encounter with a man named Emmett (played by Cillian Murphy), a family friend from the before the invasion, but now a traumatized survivor who offers them little. The story then divides into three arcs, as Regan sneaks off to follow a radio signal that may hint at a larger community of survivors with Emmett not far behind her, intending to bring her back, while mother Evelyn must search out medical supplies for Marcus, who had the misfortune to step in a bear trap, leaving the boy to protect the baby, retreating to an air tight furnace if necessary. All of these story lines are journeys for the characters, especially the children, who must face great dangers if they are to emerge as the kind of people who will not only survive in this world, but triumph in it. Emmett too, must learn that there is strength in numbers, that there is more than just hiding and hunkering down.


In many ways, I might like this sequel more than the first, as Krasinski really goes all in to make this a monster and horror film in scifi clothes. He understands the conventions of the genre, and how to build suspense and then pay it off despite a couple of unfortunate jump scares (the last resort of the lazy). And despite opening the story up with its exploration of the wider world, he continually finds ways to get his characters into enclosed locations (an airtight blast furnace, the interior of a radio station) to give the audience a sense of claustrophobia and menace. This is a film that also uses the small details well, such as when the camera pans along a line of empty shoes on a train station platform, leaving it up to us to imagine the grisly fate of their owners. The creatures are CGI used well, and whose appearances are sparing enough that they don’t become less intimidating. Krasinski gets great work out of his actors, especially Simmonds, who is a real find; Murphy, who knows something about apocalypses after being in 28 DAYS LATER, is an excellent choice to step into the surrogate father role, and Dijimon Hounsou is a welcome sight in any film.


My fondness for the film does not blind me to the presence of logic holes in the plot, as the premise, like in many scifi horror films, might not stand up under rigorous examination – just how does the alien acute sense of hearing work, and what is its range, and why does some ambient noise easily shield human voices, while in other situations, it does not? Both films are made for those “Everything wrong with (insert title) in 15 minutes” videos on Youtube. But whatever the problems with the premise, Krasinski does manage to make me buy into it while watching, and that’s enough. Will there be a third film? The ending leaves that possibility open, though I do think the Abbott family saga might all be told. That said, any future film(s) could be set anywhere and explore different facets of this apocalyptic world. And they might expand on just who these, so far, one note killing machines from outer space really are; my theory is that they are simply the first wave shock troops, or just plain exterminators, sent in the clean out the dominant species on this planet, before the real invasion can begin. It’s a thought.

I am an indie author and my latest novel is ALL THE WAY WITH JFK: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF 1964. It is available at the following:
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Teen Dystopia fans rejoice, there's a fourth Quarantine book.

As I have said in my previous reviews for the first three books in the QUARANTINE series, I am more than a few years past the target audience for this YA series, but I am a fan of a good story, especially a good riff on LORD OF THE FLIES. The earlier books centered around plague ravaged McKinley High in Colorado, where an escapee from a government facility unleashed a virus that infected teenagers while causing anyone post puberty to puke up their lungs and die an awful death. With all the teachers dead, and the school quarantined from the rest of the world, the kids are on their own, and if you’ve read the other books, then you know how bad that went. Those volumes centered around brothers David and Will, and Lucy, the girl to whom both are attracted. The third book in the series, THE BURNOUTS, wrapped up their story; the fourth book, THE GIANT, takes a minor character from earlier in the series, and tells his story.


That title character being Gonzalo, a hulking giant of kid who helped David and Will in a tight spot in a confrontation with a rival gang, but who later “graduated” from McKinley to the outside world. This book tells his story in two parallel time lines, one set in the post McKinley present, the other in the past, which begins with Gonzalo as a very small for his age sixteen year old on his own after the virus is unleashed. He falls in with a gang called the Mice, who travel about the school in the overhead air vents, stealing what they can from other gangs. Here Gonzalo meets Sasha, the girl he falls in love with, and Baxter, the runty little creep who leads the Mice. Baxter is jealous of the attention Sasha is giving Gonzalo, and separates him from the gang just as Gonzalo experiences a sudden growth spurt, making it impossible for him to go back into the vents in search of the girl he loves. The upside is that his new size makes him a object of fear, and forcing the other gangs leave him alone. The present day sections of the book chronicle Gonzalo’s search through plague ravaged, and quarantined off, Colorado for Sasha, who, along with the rest of the infected student body, has fled McKinley, and is now in hiding from roving adults, determined to hunt down and shoot on sight the virus carrying teens.


The authors, a duo who goes by the pen name Lex Thomas, do have their particular teen dystopia formula down pat, especially when it comes to creating characters worth getting invested with. I empathized with Gonzalo from the start, and understood his immediate attraction to Sasha, who seems like a great girlfriend, but they leave us with enough doubt that her feelings for Gonzalo might not be as deep as his for her. This creates more than a little tension as we follow him on his odyssey across Colorado searching for her. And the authors’ penchant for ending each chapter on a cliff hanger is in full use here, which helped draw me more into the story. There’s not as much gore as in the earlier books, which I thought excessive at times, but enough to satisfy the fans, and I thought THE GIANT had much less of a sexual content than those earlier books as well. Still, there is plenty of profanity, and what I call the “ick” factor, where the authors go for the gross out. Also, as everyone who has read the first three books know, the writers are not wedded to happy endings, even to characters we have come to love. This too, helps create tension as Gonzalo gets closer to finding his lost love. The themes of cruelty and sheer meanness that have run through the entire series also on display in the fourth book, as one generation attempts to destroy another, while gangs and cliques made up of different members of the social hierarchy turn upon one another as well. The entire QUARANTINE series has turned on the notion that when it all hits the fan, the utter worst in people will come out.


By putting out a fourth book, I feared that Lex Thomas might be going to the well one time too many, as there has been a glut of YA fiction teen dystopias in the past decade, and frankly, after THE BURNOUTS, I thought the story had all been told. What I liked best about THE GIANT was that I cared about the Gonzalo and Sasha, and wanted to see what the finale of their story would be, and it was enough to carry me to the final page. Moving most of the tale’s action outside of the walls of McKinley dilutes some of the built in suspense inherent in the earlier book, and the writing gets annoyingly repetitive at times; why do we constantly need to be reminded that Baxter has a “handsome” face? At the present there seems to be no more books in THE QUARANTINE series to read, and I don’t know if Lex Thomas have any plans to continue with it, but it is worth noting that they leave things at a point where there are many more survivors’ stories to be told, and many more sequels could be written.

I am an indie author and my latest novel is ALL THE WAY WITH JFK: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF 1964. It is available at the following:
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Hollywood and World War II: a great history book.

I am a huge fan of Mark Harris’s SCENES FROM A REVOLUTION: THE BIRTH OF THE NEW HOLLYWOOD, which tells the stories of the making of the five films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar in 1967, a great history of the American movie industry at a critical turning point. His follow up FIVE CAME BACK: A STORY OF HOLLYWOOD AND THE SECOND WORLD WAR combines two of my favorite subjects, movies and history, and is just as compelling and fascinating. It is the story of five film directors, John Ford, Frank Capra, William Wyler, John Huston, and George Stevens, who walked away from very successful careers in Hollywood to join different branches of the military during World War II, despite the fact that all of them were past draft age. In the service, each one put their talents to use making what were essentially propaganda films for the American war effort that would be shown in movie theaters, which in that pre television era, was the only means by which Americans saw any “real” footage of the war. I put in those quote marks because the military was not above recreating battlefield events that hadn’t been recorded on camera, though often not for want of trying. But because these men were awesomely talented masters of visual storytelling, the work they did was far more than just “propaganda.”

The names of Ford, Capra, Wyler, Huston, and Stevens are well known to film buffs like me, and their work in Hollywood, both before and after the war has been endlessly analyzed, and has legions of fans. Harris’ book fills in the gaps between in their careers, telling the story of how the war affected them personally, both emotionally and physically, and how the experience affected their work in the years and decades after the war, when they made some of their greatest films. Harris did a lot of research and it shows in his writing, which vividly gives us a feel for each man’s personality. The crusty and often cantankerous Ford saw the war coming, and enlisted in the Navel Reserve a year before the war, fulfilling a lifelong ambition to serve his country even though he was closer to 50 than 40. Capra had won three Best Director Oscars, and had made classics like IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT and MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON, and possessed the kind of confidence necessary to go toe to toe with studio heads. Wyler, an immigrant from Europe, who made the Academy Award winning MRS. MINIVER just before joining the Air Force, was considered the master of the prestige film, a man who could get the best work out of event the most difficult stars like Bette Davis. Huston was from a family of acting royalty who had just established himself as a major director with THE MALTESE FALCON; he was a hard drinker and a womanizer who knew a good story when he saw one. Stevens had made his reputation as the director of sophisticated musicals and comedies staring Astaire and Rogers, Tracy and Hepburn, not to mention Cary Grant. Except for Capra, who stayed in Washington for the duration, these men would see and experience the war up front, and have crucial moments under fire, notably Ford at the battle of Midway; Wyler in the skies over Germany; Huston in the Aleutians and the small villages of Italy; Stevens in a journey with the infantry across Europe that ended at Dachau. For me the most compelling parts of the book are Wyler’s battle with severe hearing loss due to exposure to loud airplane engines during a bombing mission; Huston’s futile battle to get a documentary on the mental problems of veterans before the public; and especially Stevens’ reaction when confronted with the atrocities of Dachau, an event that, understandably, effected him for the rest of his life. It is good reading, and Harris tells their stories well, including pointing out where some of these men embellished their recollections of events after the war.

The book also serves to bring back some forgotten history, such as how the Jewish studio heads deliberately did not confront the growing threat of Nazism and Fascism in the years before the war in order to preserve the lucrative German market, not to mention risking the ire of powerful isolationist and anti-Semitic politicians who were determined to keep America out of another European war. Though all of these directors reputations are now firmly secure, all of them were keenly aware that walking away from Hollywood for the years it would take to defeat Germany and Japan might very well end their lucrative careers, and some of them, specifically Wyler and Stevens, had difficulty getting comfortable in the director’s chair once the hostilities ended, and were more than a little resentful that the film business had gotten along fine without them during their years in uniform. It is well known that Ford never let John Wayne forget that he didn’t serve – the Duke took advantage of a draft deferment because he was the father of four children, but that wouldn’t have prevented Wayne from enlisting. I found the parts of the book concerning Frank Capra’s politics to be quite interesting, and will come as news to the many who think the man who gave us MR. DEEDS and MR. SMITH was a liberal Democrat. Capra’s experience in Washington, far from the battlefronts, though no less of a contribution than those of his fellow directors, may have led him to seriously misread American audiences after the war. Harris gives an excellent accounting of the making of both IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE and THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES, Capra and Wyler’s first post war films, projects that became personal statements for both men, and their inevitable clash at the Academy Awards for 1946. Harris’ research is faultless, backed up with pages of notes in the back of the book. The author also manages to work in some interesting cameos to his narrative: Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss), animator Chuck Jones, future screenwriter Paddy Chafesky, playwright Robert Sherwood, and even Walter Mondale. Then there is Joseph Breen, the enforcer of the Production Code in Hollywood, a man, who in the midst of a world war for national survival, thought it his duty to protect the American public from mild profanity in movies, and the fact that married couples slept in the same bed. And hopefully a younger generation will read this book and learn of Harold Russell.

Words cannot adequately capture the work done by these directors during the war, but Ford’s THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY, Capra’s KNOW YOUR ENEMY series, Wyler’s MEMPHIS BELLE, Huston’s The BATTLE OF SAN PIETRO and LET THERE BE LIGHT, along with the footage Stevens shot of the Nazi atrocities that was used at Nuremburg are readily available online. Even check out the PRIVATE SNAFU cartoons that were made to be shown only to enlisted men. Mark Harris’s well written book honors these men and their legacy, and I think it should be a must read for any serious film buff or history student. I can’t recommend this book enough.

My book, BIG CRIMSON 1: THERE'S A NEW VAMPIRE IN TOWN, can be found on Amazon at: https://amzn.to/3GsBh2E
and on Smashwords at: https://bit.ly/3kIfrAb

My alternate history novel ALL THE WAY WITH JFK: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF 1964 can be found on Amazon at: http://amzn.to/2jVkW9m
and on Smashwords at: http://bit.ly/2kAoiAH

Visit my Goodreads author's page at:
http://bit.ly/2nxmg

Visit my Amazon author's page at: https://amzn.to/3nK6Yxv

Why I grudgingly admire Jordan Belfort; a review of The Wolf of Wall Street.

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET is a perfect companion to GOODFELLAS, Martin Scorsese’s other masterpiece, as both films are based on memoirs of morally dubious men who fell in love with a criminal culture, and lived the lifestyle to the fullest while they could before the inevitable reckoning, one that included ratting out their compatriots in crime. While Henry Hill’s story concerned life in the small time Mafia, Jordan Belfort, the protagonist of WOLF, was determined to be a high rolling stockbroker on Wall Street, where he could enjoy all the vices too much money could buy. While few have rated WOLF on the level of GOODFELLAS, I think it is one of Scorsese’s most entertaining films, one with a tremendous rewatch factor. Some chided Scorsese for using his tried and true (and by implication, over used) bag of tricks to tell the story, from showy tracking shots, a soundtrack full of oldies (Laura Branigan’s “Gloria” in Italian), to having Jordan break the fourth wall and directly address the audience at pertinent moments. I think the director’s signature moves were perfect for this story, especially when it came to the fourth wall, as it allowed for some exposition concerning the hows and wheres of stock manipulation that the audience needs to understand in order to make sense of Jordan’s actions.

At a three hour running time, WOLF tells the story of Jordan Belfort from his early days as a junior stock broker just before the Crash of ’87, an event that nearly ended his career before it had gotten started proper, to his landing on his feet hawking penny stocks in a Long Island boiler room, a position from which he rose to build Stratton Oakmont, a seemingly respectable brokerage firm, that was in reality just a pump and dump operation, which fraudulently over valued cheap stocks to the firm’s benefit. It was all a scam built on Jordan’s undeniable talent at the “hard sell.” While clients were fleeced, Jordan and his associates made hundreds of millions, which of course they didn’t report and pay taxes on. Ultimately, this house of cards collapsed under the scrutiny of an FBI and an SEC investigation, but Jordan and his friends lived it up while they could in a haze of women, booze, and drugs. What our Woke betters might call “toxic masculinity.” Some viewers were put off by scene after scene of bad boys living it up in one debauched bacchanal after another, but I think that was the point Scorsese and screenwriter, Terrence Winter, were trying to make: the wages of sin can look pretty attractive, that’s why so many buy in.

There is much to take away from WOLF depending on your point of view, and one of the things I got out of Scorsese’s film is that Jordan Belfort, masterfully played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is the poster boy for much of what has gone wrong in America in the last four decades, as we have become a country that no longer produces things so much as make deals that profit some at the expense of others. Where there are always winners and losers, where the only success that matters is material success, specifically material success in excess; where the winners are entitled to more…and more…and more. Jordan is like so many who came to believe that the rules were for losers, and that he was clever enough to get away with it where so many others got caught.

Yet, while many consider Jordan Belfort trash, I found qualities in him, at least as he is presented in the film, that I grudgingly admired, specifically in the way he landed on his feet after losing his high paying Wall Street job by going to work in a strip mall boiler room. The scene where DiCaprio walks in and shows the other poor fools there how to cold call a client and get his money is one of my favorites. The way he was loyal to his shlubby crew – Donny, Chester, Rugrat – a group of doughy mediocrities that are as about as far from the Cool Kids and Golden Boys as one could get, all of whom he took with him to the top, never cheating them, making them part of his success. In the end, he would give up their names to the FBI only because the Bureau had his back to the wall and he was looking at many years in prison. I was struck by the scene where, at real risk to himself, Jordan warns Donny he is wearing a wire: that is something Henry Hill would never have done. Though he is not in any way husband material, I do think Jordan genuinely cared for both of his wives.

And as far as I’m concerned, THE WOLF OF WALL STREET is one of the funniest films of the 2010s. I laughed harder at it than almost any “official” comedy of the past ten years. The sequence of Jordan and Donny under the influence of the Lemon 714 Quaaludes is a masterpiece of physical comedy, hilarious and horrifying at the same time, and played to perfection by DiCaprio and Jonah Hill. The entire cast is pitch perfect, including the aforementioned Hill, but also Rob Reiner (though in no universe do I believe he is the father of Leonardo DiCaprio), Kyle Chandler, Jon Bernthal, Ethan Suplee, Joanna Lumley, Kenneth Choi, Shea Whigham, and Jon Favreau. Matthew McConaughey has a mic drop of a cameo early in the film as Jordan’s mentor, and then walks out of the film. For me, this is the movie that put Margot Robbie on my radar; she is the epitome of drop dead gorgeous as Naomi, Jordan’s second wife. Scorsese makes better use of Jean Dujardin than THE ARTIST did, casting him as a shady Swiss banker, happy to take Jordan’s money, not so pleased to return it. That is Bo Dietl as himself; he’s become part of Scorsese’s stock company. And this is the movie that I will always believe DiCaprio should have won the Best Actor Oscar for. It is an utterly fearless performance from beginning to end, and I’m not just talking about his dance moves at Jordan’s wedding reception. Too bad he had to go up against McConaughey’s work in THE DALLAS BUYERS CLUB.

I think the final scene, where the real life Jordan Belfort introduces DiCaprio to a packed room at a sales seminar, resonates more now than it did when the movie was released. This is where Scorsese turns the camera around and it glides over the seminar’s participants sitting in rows, their rapt attention focused on DiCaprio, who after prison is reinventing himself as a motivational speaker. I think it is Scorsese’s way of saying that some of the problem, and responsibility, here rests with the audience. That guys like Jordan would never have gotten away with so much if there had not been for people who confused conniving and deviousness with smarts. Who fell for glib hucksters who had no moral qualms about telling people exactly what they wanted to hear. Looking back today, we should have paid better attention.

My book, BIG CRIMSON 1: THERE'S A NEW VAMPIRE IN TOWN, can be found on Amazon at: https://amzn.to/3GsBh2E
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Why I liked Season 4 of Fargo.

It was a long wait for Season 4 of FX’s FARGO, one of the most exceptional drama anthologies on current TV. And with so many productions held up because of the pandemic, it was a real treat when this show made it back on the air. The first three seasons did the impossible, they managed to equal, if not surpass, the Coen Brothers classic Mid Western noir from 1996, with stories of lawmen, and women, organized criminals, and crooked businessmen interacting in the heartland. The writing and acting were on another level, giving us riveting television. Season 4 promised to be their most ambitious yet, with a story built around organized crime families in early 1950s Kansas City, with a large cast of characters, and some offbeat casting

Yet when Season 4 arrived, many fans expressed disappointment, complaining that the story was too sprawling, with too many characters to follow, with plots and subplots that lost focus; there often seemed to be no one to root for consistently, while the themes of the show, which had something to do with history and identity and assimilation, were not clearly delineated.

The season opened with a quick history of organized crime in Kansas City, as the Irish and the Jews warred for control of the city despite uneasy truces. Ultimately, the Irish were victorious, only to have to contend with the up and coming Italians from the old country. By 1950 the triumphant Italians now had to face the challenge of Black Americans, who have come north from the Deep South seeking a better way of life, even if it’s outside the law. The various clans have a tradition of exchanging sons as hostages to make sure both sides stay in line. The large cast of characters that caused so many complaints were introduced in the opening episode, “Welcome to the Alternate Economy:” the heads of the Fadda and Cannon families, the former being the established Mafia concern in the city, while the latter, headed by Loy Cannon, are the Black American upstarts, ready to cut out their piece of the illegal pie: the Smutney family, an interracial couple who operate a funeral home, and their precocious teenage daughter, Ethelrida; Oraetta Mayfair, a nurse with a Fargo accent so thick you could cut it with a knife, and high mortality rate among her patients; Odis Weff, a crooked cop with a raging case of OCD; Rabbi Milligan, a Fadda soldier with an interesting history; Josto Fadda, a second generation Mafia son who is everything Michael Corleone was not. Subsequent episodes enlarged this group to include: Gaetano Fadda, Josto’s quick tempered and violent brother; Dick Wickware, a United States Marshall and devout Morman; Zelmare and Swanee, violent prison escapees and lovers being perused by Wickware; Satchel, Loy’s son traded to the Faddas and kept under the watchful eye of Rabbi Milligan; Doctor Senator and Ebal Violante, the consiglieres to the Cannons and Faddas respectively. Add to that various ambitious and faithful soldiers in both crime families and it did prove to be a big cast for any TV show. Except for the Smutney family, most of these people would charitably be called “not nice” at best, and in the cases of Oraetta and Gaetano, downright evil. Even Loy, the Black man trying to take care of his own in a very hostile society, is shown to have no problem with murder, intimidation, and extortion. The villainous characters have always been one of FARGO’s big draws, at least for me, and I think for other viewers as well. But this year there did seem to be an absence of virtue, a truly sympathetic character with whom to become invested. Ethelrida, whose high school history report bookends the season, is presented as this person early on, but then she all but disappears in many episodes, seemingly pushed aside for the more colorful characters before returning in the last two episodes where she becomes the catalyst that brings the various plot threads to together at the climax of the Fadda/Cannon gang war.

I didn’t find the sprawling cast a problem, to me, each episode played out like chapters of a Great American Novel, where character is plot, and the story takes its time getting where it’s going. It’s a question of journey not so much as destination. It was also a season that clearly wanted to take on some big themes, like class and race in America, the only problem with that is that so much else in popular culture is doing the same thing. I thought series writer and creator, Noah Hawley, was a little too heavy handed at times; too eager to let the viewer know exactly where he was coming from especially when he had street guys from the ‘50s mouthing sentiments that would more nearly come from a 21st Century Berkeley California Starbucks barista. There was definitely some on the nose dialogue. The pacing was a problem as well, but this might have more to do with the pandemic forcing a production shutdown before the last episodes were completed; this clearly necessitated some script editing, leaving some characters and potential sub plots on the cutting room floor. The season finale, “Storia Americana,” had a run time of only 39 minutes, though it did wrap things up nicely. The shutdown did necessitate a time jump for the last two episodes, as the story speeded up to the summer of ’51 with its green trees and lawns, while the previous episodes had been set in the dead of a mid western winter, a staple of previous seasons. I would note that the cinematography was feature film level excellent, making Kansas City and the countryside surrounding it especially striking.

One thing Season 4 had was plenty of ironic humor and violence, the latter often coming right out of nowhere, as when one villain trips, falls and blows his brains out. In “Nadir,” there is a shootout in a train station between Zelmare and Swanee and Wickware and the police that is a great homage to the sequence De Palma shot for THE UNTOUCHABLES. There was a pie laced with a laxative by Oraetta (who is a true force of chaos) that sat on a table for a long time and caused a lot tension before it was consumed by one unwary character. This leads to a robbery scene like no other. Though the cast was large, so was the body count by the end of the final episode. And like in other seasons, the acting is off the hook; for me, the standouts were newcomers Giancarlo Esposito and Jessie Buckley as Gaetano and Oraetta respectively, both of them murderous monsters in very different ways. Old veteran Glynn Turman has tremendous presence as the Doctor, while Chris Rock might not register strongly at first as Loy, but he really comes into the character in the last episodes, and goes out strong in the finale. The episode “East/West” is also a homage of sorts to THE WIZARD OF OZ with its B/W Kansas countryside, but it is a showcase for Ben Whishaw as Rabbi Milligan who goes on the lam to keep Satchel safe. Jason Schwartzman, Timothy Olyphant, Jack Huston, Emryi Crutchfield, Karen Aldridge, Kelsey Asbille, Anji White, and Francesco Acquaroli are all equally great giving performances that kept me coming back to see what happened with their characters each week.

I will concede to the critics that of the four seasons of FARGO, this one is weakest, but that is only because the first three set the bar so high. Whatever the shortcomings, it was never unwatchable, and week end and week out it was the most interesting thing on TV. To me, it portrayed one of the essential dynamic truths of American history: that those pushed aside and disdained by whatever considers itself the mainstream always find a way to get their foot in the door, even if they have to shove somebody else on the margin out of the way. That those on the bottom always manage to get out from under any oppressive status quo if they scratch and claw hard enough. It’s not pretty, and it’s not fair, and it might not be what Noah Hawley intended, but I think that theme resonates.

The mid credits scene at the end of “Storica Americana,” we are given a cameo that circles back to Season Two, giving me hope that Season Five, whenever we get it, will build on this great shared universe.

I am an indie author and my latest novel is ALL THE WAY WITH JFK: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF 1964. It is available at the following:
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Great book about a not very nice guy.

If anyone wants to understand how America got where it is today at the end of the Trump era, then Gabriel Sherman’s THE LOUDEST VOICE IN THE ROOM, a biography of Roger Ailes, is required reading. Originally published in 2014, when Ailes was at the height of his power at the head of FOX News, my copy contains an afterward which details his fall from power in July 2016 amidst a sexual harassment scandal. Ailes did not cooperate with the writing of this book, but Sherman talked to a lot of people who worked with the man from his earliest days in Warren, Ohio, to his glory days at FNC, when he was arguably one of the most consequential Americans of the 21st Century. Most of what they had to say was not flattering, but that is only fair, for Ailes had a sharp tongue himself, and he knew how to use it against those who got on his bad side.

Because Ailes did not sit down with Sherman, there is more than a little extrapolating when it comes to trying to find out what made him tick. Attention is paid to a childhood with a cruel father, and a strained marriage to Ailes’s mother, a woman who sued for divorce as soon as Roger left for college in 1958, selling his childhood home before remarrying and moving to California, in the process, throwing away all of his “stuff.” Did this ultimately make Ailes one of those conservatives who in middle age longed for that mythic Eisenhower era America, and thought that the country’s salvation rested upon the return to the status quo of a bygone time? Nevertheless, the young Roger found work in radio, and then television. A job with the Mike Douglas Show led to fortuitous meeting in 1967 with then Presidential candidate Richard Nixon, where Ailes talked himself into a job as a media advisor on Nixon’s campaign. He did such a good job in presenting the very untelegenic candidate to the American public that he was able to get work on other Republican campaigns in the years ahead, while still keeping one foot in the door of television and entertainment. The high point (or low point, depending on which side you fall on) was in 1988 when Ailes helped turn George H. W. Bush from Reagan’s wimpy Vice President into a clone of Clint Eastwood. This entailed the infamous Willie Horton ad which implied that Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis was an accessory to rape and murder. Ailes may not have been solely responsible for a political ad that forever changed American politics for the worse, but his finger prints were on it despite vociferous denials later when the Bush campaign’s scorched earth tactics came in for heavy condemnation. Ailes moved on to a new frontier, cable television news; establishing himself at MSNBC before Rupert Murdoch came calling with an offer to head up a fledgling “fair and balanced” news network that would be a counterweight to the all powerful “liberal media.”

I am no admirer of Ailes’s politics and the way he practiced them, but I found myself grudgingly impressed with the young Ailes, who clearly possessed great self confidence, was a very quick study, and capable of creating opportunities for himself (the meeting with Nixon), plus he was very good at office politics; whatever the game was, he knew how to play it. Though Sherman never quite comes out and states it, the picture the book presents is of a driven man in whom success did not bring out the best. As a boss, Ailes was overbearing in the extreme, demanding absolute loyalty with a thin skin when it came to any form of criticism. He had an eye for talent, and could be very supportive, which was often returned in the form of genuine loyalty from those he hired, but like many powerful and successful men, Ailes obviously came to consider himself entitled, ultimately to things for which he had no right to ask.

Many on the left wrote Roger Ailes off as a huckster, out to exploit gullible right wingers by giving them a TV network with propaganda 24 hours a day affirming their racist, xenophobic, anti-intellectual world view. That he did, but Sherman more than makes the case that the man was a true believer in his own right, that his abilities as a salesman were put firmly behind a product in which he truly believed; FOX News succeeded because the man calling the shots behind the scenes was one of the audience he was trying to reach. He tapped into an underserved constituency that tuned in each and every day wanting more…and more. Most of all, he understood that conflict sells, that it is us against them, the true hard working Americans and patriots versus liberal elitists who sneered at them, and wanted to confiscate their hard earned dollars, while forcing sexually deviancy to be taught in every classroom. To get this message out, he hired sneering blowhards like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck. Along the way, anyone who questioned the policies of the second Bush administration after 9/11 was denounced as traitors, while the invasion of Iraq on flimsy grounds was rammed down the throats of anyone who objected. The Tea Party, Birtherism, and the evils of Bill and Hilary and Barack and Michelle became synonymous with the FOX News brand. And the on air female talent had to be sure and show some leg. Ailes’s creation became the most powerful entity inside the Republican Party, with its power to make or break Presidential candidates. Those whom Ailes favored got special treatment on FOX, thus giving him the kind of power once reserved for the bosses of political machines. How sad and ironic it must have been for him to have been forced out of his job the very week that Donald Trump, a personal friend and a man beloved by the FOX News audience, accepted the Republican Presidential nomination at its convention in July of 2016. One wonders what might have been if Ailes had remained in command during the Trump years, when, no doubt, he would have talked with the President daily. But it was not to be.

In the end, I think Roger Ailes gloried in the power, but he had no conception of responsibility, the kind that even the lowliest of public office holders come to respect. Common ground and compromise held no value, not the least because they generated no ratings and no revenue.

Gabriel Sherman’s book is a superb work of investigative journalism, but I doubt it will be the definitive work on the subject. I’m not taking anything away from Sherman, but I think we are still too close to the time and place to truly understand events, that Roger Ailes’s final place in history is yet to be determined, but until that time comes, THE LOUDEST VOICE IN THE ROOM will do.

My book, BIG CRIMSON 1: THERE'S A NEW VAMPIRE IN TOWN, can be found on Amazon at: https://amzn.to/3GsBh2E
and on Smashwords at: https://bit.ly/3kIfrAb

My alternate history novel ALL THE WAY WITH JFK: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF 1964 can be found on Amazon at: http://amzn.to/2jVkW9m
and on Smashwords at: http://bit.ly/2kAoiAH

Visit my Goodreads author's page at:
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GONE returns, sort of, with some great monsters.

Sequels are the price we pay for loving a story and its characters. Even though I was most definitely not in the demographic for Michael Grant’s YA dystopia series, GONE, I really enjoyed those books, which were a modern day variation of LORD OF THE FLIES. The plot concerned the ocean side town of Perdido Beach, California, where, in the middle of the day, a dome descends over the town and the immediate surroundings, and everyone over the age of 15 vanishes, leaving the remaining children to fend for themselves. More than that, some of the kids develop super powers, and become aware that there is an evil entity inside the dome with them. A war of survival, fought on many fronts, ensues.

The final book in the series, LIGHT, appeared to wrap it all up well, but in 2017, Grant put out a new series that picks up the story a few years later. It seems that there are more meteorites filled with a mutagenic virus on the way to earth just like the one which caused all the problems back in Perdido Beach. Only this time, they are landing all over the earth, and causing a new rash of mutations, affecting people both good and evil. This completely separates the two series, the former being a classic teen dystopian horror story with scifi overtones, while the sequel is most definitely a super hero universe origin story. If fans pick up the first book of this new series, MONSTER, expecting the old magic, they may be in for a disappointment.

First of all, MONSTER contains few of the characters from GONE; Dekka Talent being an exception, and for reasons not quite satisfactorily explained, uber villain Drake Merwin (whom we saw disintegrate in the finale of LIGHT) also makes a return. Drake was a big fan favorite, so I understand why Grant might tweak things to make his appearance possible. Which brings up the second thing: the new characters, some of whom lack the instant likability of the original cast; right off the bat, we are introduced to Shade Darby, a young woman who though not a member of the FAYZE, has a definite and tragic connection to the events at Perdido Beach. The problem with Shade is that she is something of a YA fiction trope: the headstrong, smart and determined young woman who goes and gets what she wants. Try as he might, Grant never quite makes her that compelling. The opening chapter, where we meet Shade and her trans Latino new friend, Cruz, involves a lot of unpacking, and explaining, as though everything was written carefully as so not to offend. It does not get the book off to nearly as fast a start as the original series. Grant is much more successful when introducing other characters such as Armo, a spoiled kid of Hollywood who has a bad case of ODD and who becomes part of a government experiment, and his villains who begin as Justin DeVeere, Tom Peaks, and Vincent Vu, messed up humans who become very big and bad and very nasty monsters. It does feel that Grant is going all in on diversity box checking with his characters, and some will find that his treatment of minorities leaves something to be desired. It is worth noting that nearly all of his antagonists suffer some kind of mental and/or emotional illness, or personality disorder, which I think Grant uses as character defining shortcuts. It is also worth noting that it is all but impossible to write about race, gender, or any form of disability, be it mental or physical, in fiction today and not rub someone the wrong way.

Which brings us to the third thing: a superhero origin story has to have a great moment of transformation, where the human becomes superhuman or man becomes monster. I’m thinking of AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON; or Bruce Banner being doused with Gamma rays and bursting through his cloths to become The Hulk; not long ago, I read Stephen King’s DESPERATION, which had a demon possess humans and physically swell their bodies to gigantic size. Such scenes can make a book or movie, and to be honest, I felt Grant’s metamorphosis’s were lacking somewhat. Grant describes his transformations, which almost all of his characters undergo, as “morphing,” and writes them in a way that makes one think of a CGI effect. Bodies that grow and change, sprouting tentacles and claws in the process, should not sound quite so mundane. And certain details should be consistent: a character who has just transformed back into a human after going on a rampage in the form of a giant starfish monster would be stark naked in the middle of the street, yet he is waved aside by the arriving police as though nothing is unusual. Furthermore, Shade, Bekka, Cruz, Justin, and the others appear to master their new abilities and bodies almost instantly; even Peter Parker had a learning curve.

Another noticeable change from the first series: the kids are older here by several years. Maybe Grant wanted to make sure the junior high boys and girls who fell in love with GONE back in the early 2010s would relate to these new books now that they were about to enter college.

But despite all my criticisms, I was satisfied with MONSTERS when I finished the last chapter. As a GONE fan, it was still a kick to go back into that world, and the book has more going for it than just nostalgia. After the slow beginning, the action kicks in, and Grant’s skills at writing a compelling narrative take over the story, delivering a couple of great action scenes, including a battle on the Golden Gate Bridge with the transformed Justin that plays out like something James Cameron would direct. The finale, where all the heroes and villains come together at last to take part in a battle featuring a couple of Godzilla sized creatures laying waste to the port of Los Angeles, is Michael Grant at his best. And Grant does not forget his flair for inserting large amounts of gore into his books. The parts dealing with a secret government agency determined to get possession of the meteorites and create an army of monsters of their own is a trope right out of the X-Files, but Grant makes it work, especially in a chapter where Bekka and Armo escape an underground facility filled with horrifying creatures.

As a the first book in a new series, MONSTER ends with the stage set for the next installment, with plenty of plot threads dangling. That is how it should be, and I am looking forward to VILLAIN to see where Michael Grant takes his characters next. And fans of the old series that might not be sold on this new one, keep reading to the last page, you will be rewarded.

I am an indie author and my latest novel is ALL THE WAY WITH JFK: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF 1964. It is available at the following:
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My review of the most "inappropriate" film of all time.

Most films reflect the popular culture are of their time, and while the really great stuff turns out to be transcendent, such as REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, much of it starts to show its age, and very soon. That’s the case with PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW, the Roger Vadim directed, and Gene Roddenberry produced, dark sex comedy from 1971. A box office disappointment at the time for MGM, it nevertheless made quite an impression on those who did seek it out back in the day, its reputation growing with the years, even becoming a favorite of Quentin Tarantino. And of course, the reason why it made such as impression is the truly salacious content of PRETTY MAIDS, something every reviewer of the film makes plain. This is movie with a fine eye for the female form, and it showed it off every chance it got, which was a lot. But more than the skin, it’s the attitude of the film, which seems to express the world view of Hugh Hefner and Playboy magazine, circa 1969. In short, PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW just might be the most “inappropriate” movie of all time. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The story centers around affluent Oceanside High in Southern California, which has a problem: members of its nubile young cheerleader squad keep getting strangled to death. One unlucky young lady is discovered in a toilet stall in the film’s opening. But this serial killer business is reduced to a subplot, as much of the movie centers around multiple sexual relationships between teachers and students. The uber popular football coach, Tiger McDrew, is regularly getting it on with young ladies in his office, which is decked out like a swinging bachelor pad. Tiger takes more than a paternal interest in his student assistant, oddly named Ponce de Leon Harper, who discovered the murder victim in the bathroom. Poor Ponce has no game with women. Worse, this plight has left him in a state of near constant arousal. Taking Ponce under his wing, Tiger arranges for him to be tutored by Miss Smith, a substitute teacher, in more subjects than one. Meanwhile the State Police have their hands full as the bodies pile up, and eventually, Ponce catches on that his benefactor may have more to hide than a bunch of illicit relationships with dead girls.

Roger Vadim was the French director who made Brigitte Bardot a household name, and later married Jane Fonda; together they made BARBERELLA, the kinky scifi classic. This film was his first American directing job, and he really nails the early ‘70s with its mini-skirts, denim jeans, and Afros. He also got great work out of a cast of pros, which remains one of the films strongest points. Rock Hudson brought all of his charm and screen presence to the part of Tiger, and used it effectively to disguise a character who is not who he appears to be. Angie Dickenson is one of the most gorgeous women to ever grace a movie screen, and she manages to be believable as Miss Smith, a character who otherwise might have been nothing more than a male fantasy. Everyone points out that Telly Savalas seems to be auditioning for Kojak; he plays the state police investigator who is no dumb cop. Keenan Wynn trots out his irascible old coot routine as a dimwitted Sheriff’s deputy, while Roddy McDowall is the picture of befuddlement as the school principle, who even has the standard glasses wearing secretary. James Doohan, Scotty from STAR TREK, plays one of Savalas’s investigators, and it is strange to hear him speak without an accent. I think the best performance is by young John David Carson (previously the voice of Dino Boy on Saturday morning cartoons) as Ponce, whose character arc goes from wide eyed and frustrated to Lothario, something he pulls off with ease. Amy Eccles, Brenda Sykes, and Joy Bang play some of the young ladies who are crazy for Tiger.

A lot of fans have asserted that Vadim and Roddenberry (who also wrote the screenplay) were just dirty old men indulging themselves by making a film where nubile teenage girls are panting after a middle aged man, a film where there we see a lot of female anatomy, but male nudity (Hudson and Carson) is implied or barely glimpsed. I think it is simple: they did it for the money. Vadim wanted to make a hit film in America, and Roddenberry wanted to establish himself in the film business after STAR TREK, and on paper, PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN ROW looked like a sure fire hit. By the late ‘60s, the Hayes Office was history, censorship was gone, and Americans were flocking to see films with sex and violence, the more gratuitous the better. MGM had fallen on hard times financially, and put some big bucks into the production; Rock Hudson had fallen off the Top Ten Box Office star list some years earlier and surely figured this was the kind of change of pace role that would put him back up there. But while sex sells, the public’s appetite for prurience has its limits, and the film did not find an audience. Bad timing might have had something to do with it, I think if PRETTY MAIDS had come out in 1968, it would have fared better at the box office, as titillating sex comedies had reached saturation levels by 1971. Younger film goers had little interest in going to see an R rated film starring an actor their mother’s found dreamy back in the Eisenhower Era. A bad marketing campaign didn’t help, as dark comedy has always been a tough sell to American audiences. In the years after its release, the film all but disappeared, showing up infrequently on TV as it was hard to edit for network standards in the ‘70s and ‘80s. There was a VHS and then a DVD release, but they could be hard to find. Only recently has a remastered DVD been available.

So what to make of a film that flaunted the changing morality of the Sexual Revolution of the late ‘60s in the 21st Century? It seems that PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW is still a problem, for what was subversive against the Ozzie and Harriet America that preceded the upheaval of the ‘60s, is still subversive today, just for different reasons. It’s still a film where female sexuality exists only to gratify the desires of men and boys; where multiple sexual relationships between students and teachers are winked at, if not encouraged. The scene where Tiger “stimulates” Miss Smith is a felony pure and simple, but it’s treated like a joke here; many would accuse the tone of the film as being downright misogynistic. There is so much that is utterly and completely wrong in this movie that it would make the usual suspects – the ones who thrive daily on online outrage culture – heads explode in unison. Today, PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW subverts an entirely different morality, one, at its worst, can be just as puritanical as the one of more than half century ago now. It’s worth noting that Oceanside High, with its randy teachers and students, was not only part of Nixon’s America, but Ronald Reagan’s California, and is a perfect example of the kind of “permissiveness” the Gipper furiously attacked throughout his political career.

I think PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW is part of a very special subgenre: the black high school comedy. It would make a good triple bill with MASSACRE AT CENTRAL HIGH and HEATHERS. It’s also worth noting that three of the film’s stars, Hudson, Dickinson, and Savalas, landed on their feet, and went on the star in hit TV detective shows in the ‘70s. And I bet The Osmonds’ agent didn’t read the script before inking the deal where one of their songs would be sung over the opening and closing credits.

My book, BIG CRIMSON 1: THERE'S A NEW VAMPIRE IN TOWN, can be found on Amazon at: https://amzn.to/3GsBh2E
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My alternate history novel ALL THE WAY WITH JFK: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF 1964 can be found on Amazon at: http://amzn.to/2jVkW9m
and on Smashwords at: http://bit.ly/2kAoiAH

Visit my Goodreads author's page at:
https://bit.ly/47dOR5N

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