Brief Film Reviews (4/24/14)

After the jump three pans: Cockfighter, Knights of Badassdom, and If You Don't Stop It, You'll Go Blind:

Cockfighter (1974) - Setting aside the animal abuse and misogyny, Monte Hellman's follow-up to Two-Lane Blacktop has its moments, but it never comes together into a cohesive, truly interesting whole. Warren Oates plays a trainer of gamecocks that goes years without drinking or talking in an effort to swear off the two things that have kept him from reaching the height of his profession. He plots his path to the championships while trying to get the woman he loves to understand why cockfighting is so important to him. Hellman forces the pose of cool, macho distance here. It results in the lead character trying to get us to understand him (he does speak in narration) even though the film doesn't give us enough to understand him. There's also nothing in the film, despite the lead character's insistence on the mystique of cockfighting, that suggests anything but the pointless idiocy of the "sport" of cockfighting. Oates puts forth some effort, but there just is not enough here. Screened on Amazon Prime Instant via an awful transfer that appears to have been taken from a faded old videotape.

Knights of Badassdom (2013) - Steve Zahn, Peter Dinklage, and Summer Glau star as live-action role players that inadvertently summon a succubus. The succubus graphically murders game players until our lead characters finally summon the courage to confront the monster. The film is neither fish nor fowl. It's fairly gory but in no way scary so it doesn't work as horror (and certainly isn't committed to being a horror). It isn't funny, and seems more preoccupied with cutting heads off, so it doesn't work as comedy. The film relies too heavily on mockery of the same characters we're supposed to cheer for, bringing hostility to a world that renders it ineffective as fantasy. The actors mostly phone it in; maybe they realized pretty quickly that this wasn't going to work. It's also very rushed, giving it the feel of a film that was shot in a hurry. There's little to no visual inventiveness and the filmmakers make little use of the milieu of the LARPers other than to mock them for their nerdy dedication to their fantasy world. Just not fun at all. Screened on VOD.

If You Don't Stop It, You'll Go Blind (1975) - A series of skits in which the players act out bad dirty jokes. As you might expect, misogyny (rape jokes!) and anti-gay material is rampant. But even the people that might be inclined to forgive all of that have to confront the movie's greatest problem: it isn't funny. At all. It's basically the worst parts of the Playboy joke section circa 1965. The most important aspect of this film is that it demonstrates how starved people must have been for access to bawdy humor before video and pay TV. This actually did well enough to generate a sequel. Screened on Amazon Prime Instant, and I don't know why.