Fade to Black. Dennis Christopher, Eve Brent, Linda Kerridge. Dir. Vernon Zimmerman, Compass International, 1980
Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets. Dir. Bill & Ross Turner, Vinegar Syndrome/Utopia, 2020
I subscribe to one Youtube channel, Just The Discs, hosted by Brian Saur, a movie blogger/podcaster. Brian's work tends to focus on older movies he feels people should know about, though on JTD he confines himself to Bluray and 4k UHD releases. When Brian gets a shipment in from one of the boutique reissue labels such as Vinegar Syndrome, Shout!Factory/Scream!Factory, or UK-based Arrow Video, he does an episode of JTD previewing and talking up each title.
Our Man in the Valley, Marc Edward Heuck, recently sent me four films from Vinegar Syndrome following one of their sales. Two are Golden Age Porn, and I've decided not to write up porn titles, so I decided to lump the other two together and write about them, though they are very different films. I would say if this doesn't work blame Brian, except for two things: his podcasts, blog, and Youtube iterations are invaluable resources people ought to avail themselves of, and Brian is a genuinely kind man who deserves better. So blame me.
Though film historians Amanda Reyes and Bill Ackerman identify Fade to Black as a slasher in their commentary track, both writer/director Vernon Zimmerman and star Dennis Christopher rejected that label altogether, Zimmerman going so far as to say he did not view Fade to Black as even being a horror movie. It's not an easily pigeonholed picture, combining elements of traditional horror, slasher, psychological thriller, and comedy.
Christopher plays Eric Binford, a movie-nerd in his 20s who lives in LA with his cruel Aunt Stella and works as a delivery boy for a film distributor. Obsessed with Golden Age Hollywood, Binford lives mostly in a dreamworld, lost in his love of film classics and their iconic stars, to the detriment of his relationships with family and co-workers. Stood up for a date with a Marilyn Monroe-lookalike named Marilyn O'Connor and humiliated by a prostitute the same evening, belittled by Aunt Stella and a bullying co-worker (Mickey Rourke in his 3rd feature), Binford finally experiences a psychotic break after accidentally causing Stella's death while lost in a waking dream of the film noir Kiss of Death, then chasing the prostitute while dressed as Bela Lugosi's Dracula, during which she trips and impales herself on a picket fence.
His grasp of reality shattered, Binford begins murdering his tormentors one by one, each time dressed as a character from one of his favorite movies. These include the Mummy, Hopalong Cassidy, and especially James Cagney's Cody Jarrett from White Heat, his personal idol. Meanwhile a social worker consulting with the LAPD, played by actor/comedian Tim Thomerson (a contemporary of Richard Pryor) and a female uniformed officer, played by Gwynne Gilford (mother of the rebooted Star Trek's Chris Pine) begin closing in on Binford's identity, resulting in a race to stop Binford before he kills again.
Not everything in Fade to Black works, but as one of the first self-referencing horror films it presages slasher spoofs like Student Bodies and Pandemonium and especially the Scream series with imagination, style, and an empathy for both prey and predator sadly lacking in the Scream franchise. Movie lovers will enjoy not only Binford's cosplay but the picture's use of classic film clips to illustrate his thoughts, an idea Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid would exploit two years later, and which formed the basis for HBO's Dream On, but the movie's frequent use of movie theatre marquees, movie posters and stills, and the movie trivia Binford knows as well as his own phone number. I got a kick out of seeing marquees for Coal Miner's Daughter, Kramer vs. Kramer, Little Miss Marker, and Serial, a meta-reference since Thomerson also starred in it.
If I were to highlight a single problem with Fade to Black, it's the picture's exploration of the consequences of TV and movie violence. An idea many other features have also explored, it premises on a belief in "magic bullets," the idea that we can find a direct causal link between watching onscreen violence and committing it in real time. A popular idea even today, the magic bullets theory has virtually no scientific evidence to back it, making the picture's focus on the idea silly, to me.
Still, most of Fade to Black succeeds, particularly sympathetic leads Christopher as Eric, an inadvertent monster, and Linda Kerridge's Marilyn, who genuinely cares about Eric and likes him, belying the film's early going when she appears to be yet another of Binford's persecutors. Very much a cult film, I won't be re-watching Fade to Black often (though I've seen it three times as of this post), but it's worth at least one viewing and possibly many more depending on a viewer's immersion in fandoms and cosplay. A solid three-star effort.
Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets appears to be a documentary detailing the last day of operations for a Las Vegas dive bar called The Roaring 20s, that day being the day after Trump's election in 2016. A series of conversations and vignettes centered on the bar's regulars, a motely crew including failed actors, Vietnam veterans, professional alcoholics, and even a drag queen, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets celebrates what its directors see as a vanishing breed, the kind of bar where people gather to talk and be together regardless of political or other ideologies.
Certain elements throughout the film tip the directors' hands that all is not as it seems, particularly the movies running on TCM on the bar's TV, most of which involve tragic fates and death (a clip from the original version of Titanic struck me as particularly suspect.) Upon its release at Sundance, critics wondered how much of the film is straight documentary and how much qualifies as some form of fiction.
The bonus features on the Bluray give us the answer. All of it is fictive. Though the Ross Brothers use non- or unknown actors, there was no Roaring 20s bar about to close forever. The entire film functions as an elegy for what one of the brothers calls "vanishing bar-spaces," seeing the dawn of Trump as the death knell for bipartisan civility and individualism. At first, knowing that cheapened the experience for me, but as I realized these characters, many of whom appear to be all but homeless and completely alone outside the bar, do have places to go and families who love them, that cheapening quality vanished. I've been homeless six times and my family is close to nonexistent. You'll never hear me complain that the lonely and dispossessed in a picture actually have homes and families. Besides, the Ross Brothers create a convincing and compelling illusion of the friendly neighborhood tavern where even the lonely and broken-down find solace and sanctuary.
Fade to Black's composer, Craig Safran, wrote the music for the Cheers theme song, "Where Ev'rybody Knows Your Name." Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, whether absolute truth or quasi-fiction, shows us one such place, and by film's end we all feel its loss. A remarkable, warm, human film for a cold, sad time. Strongly recommended.
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