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Cousins (1983)
WILLIAM HIGGINS (RIP)... HE DELIVERS
Armed with a 35mm movie camera and the ability to sweet-talk a dizzying parade of smooth-chested California boys with feathered hair and Dolphin shorts into hardcore action, Higgins launched a porno empire called Laguna Pacific/Catalina Video. From 1981-86 he produced an unequaled number of XXX classics that are even sexier today.
His movies have much to recommend them, including brilliant c*ck-worshipping cinematography shot in a variety of locations (many of them outdoors), multiple orgasms per actor, and truly innovative synth scores by someone hiding behind the goofy alias "Costello Presley". But what sets them above and apart from virtually everything made since is the overwhelming sense of sexual tension Higgins achieves. He takes his time establishing the characters, settings -- and yes, chemistry.
Higgins is the opposite of director Matt Sterling, whose work from the. Same period (with the notable exception. Of the shot-on-film THE BIGGER THE BETTER) were icy, stagey tableaux. Legions of Sterling's fans have been happy to put up with unimaginative scenarios and mechanical sex since he was always able to score the prettiest plastic Adonises ever seen in gay porn.
But for viewers willing to keep their fingers off the fast-forward button and let Higgins draw them into his laidback California cream-dreams, the wait is worth it. By the time Higgins's guys get to the action, the audience is squirming and sweating as much as the cast members. And what members! Though Higgins has been criticized for focusing exclusively on hairless beach boys, there's actually quite an array of young 80s dudes on display in his films... dudes who were gorgeous, cute, homely, sophisticated, dorky, hickish, shy and insatiable (true, it's too bad they were all Caucasian).
That most of them lack the traditional porn-star quality is a major plus. The dead-eyed, blowdried, overpumped tanning-bed look that was being cultivated by Higgins' competitors is refreshingly absent. These guys, even mega-babes like Bill Henson, Chris Lance and Kip Noll seem REAL, like they have jobs and friends and lives somewhere. Their sexy, amplified ordinariness made their enthusiasm for on-camera oral and anal action a f*ck of a lot hotter, if you ask me.
Let's take a look at one of Higgins's biggest smashes, COUSINS. In it is everything that makes his work superior. When viewing his movies today, one's porn-aesthetic expectations are immediately thrown by the fact that they're shot on film. And they don't look that much cheaper than other 80s B-flicks from Roger Corman and Golan-Globus. If you can handle the production values of something like SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE 2, you can. Happily watch a Higgins.
But unlike his mainstream counterparts, Higgins' approach to his chosen genre was always unpredictable. How many other porn films have you seen that begin with a Wisconsin family on vacation, driving what looks like a Ford Pinto station wagon? That's how COUSINS starts. The family consists of Billy Gant, 18 and blonde, and his frumpy 40-something parents.
That these parents are even shown on-camera is a risk for Higgins. Their presence could destroy the fantasy, but their purpose is clear: They're an obstacle to get around, just like every other gay teen's parents. Ultimately they help create sexual tension.
The family pulls up to a house in the Hollywood Hills. It belongs to Billy's aunt and uncle who, being from Los Angeles, are a fraction more hip-looking (the uncle has long hair and a mustache). They have a very attractive 20-year-old son named Matt, who sports dark, big 80s-style hair. As Matt helps Billy unpack the Pinto, the family gabs for a few minutes, then adjourns to the backyard pool for a barbecue supper.
At this point the only clue that you're watching a gay porno is one shot of the grill, which is covered with more plump, juicy weiners than six people could possibly eat. But we know we're watching one -- that's what we rented/bought/illegally downloaded -- and this is Higgins's genius. Throughout the banal chitchat about the weather and the next day's visit to Santa Ana, we know that Billy and Matt are going to go at it sometime soon (we're already seven minutes in now), and the sexual tension starts mounting without Higgins having to do a thing -- no furtive glances, no leering closeups of Matt's firm pecs. Nothing! The mere presence of the middle-aged parents makes us uncomfortable, and imbues Billy and Matt's anticipated encounter with a thrilling sense of realism and forbidden danger.
Higgins continues to toy with us. Everyone turns in for the night, and Matt and Billy end up in their tighty-whiteys sharing Matt's double bed. OK, now? No. Matt tells Billy he has a surprise for him out by the pool. They head outside in their jockeys. Now? No. Matt produces a joint, which they smoke, and then proceeds to ask Billy about the girls in Wisconsin. Matt tells Billy that L. A. is full of "quirky ladies".
Dissolve to Matt's room, later. Both guys are in bed. Matt's asleep. Billy isn't. Finally at the nine-minute mark, we're in familiar territory. Or are we? In a tortuously sexy real-time tease, with two sets of parents down the hall, Billy starts to explore, pulling the sheet off his sleeping cousin, then slipping off Matt's briefs, then running his hands over Matt's luscious bod, then playing with Matt's d*ck until it gets bigger. And since Matt is played by Matt Ramsey -- who went on to make over 1000 hetero pornos as Peter North -- it gets REALLY big. (Incredibly, North spent years denying he made those 10 or so gay flicks. But we always knew the tasty, bisexy truth.)
For around three minutes, Billy sucks Matt, until Matt awakens and tells Billy that no matter what Billy's heard about California boys, he's not into it. Then Matt grabs the sheet and, boner akimbo, bunks down on the bedroom floor. Hey, wait a minute! But Higgins is merciful -- a few seconds later we hear Matt thinking to himself that it didn't feel too bad and, pricelessly, "He IS my cousin... I shouldn't let him down." So he hops back into bed, shoves himself back into Billy's mouth, and screws the hell out of him (Matt: Come on, you tight-assed sonofabitch!") in a feverish, wildly hot scene that ends quickly, with Matt spurting one of his trademark geysers, leaving us gasping for more.
After an excellent poolside scene in which Matt seduces the barely legal pizza guy, the very loose narrative shifts to a flashback about Pizza Guy's friends in Berkeley (which looks suspiciously like the suburban San Fernando Valley), and the film takes a new turn. The deadpan improvised feel of the earlier scenes is replaced with what seems like a campy spoof of the artificiality of most porn setups: Cory Adams plays a bitchy blonde preppy with winged bangs who wickedly steals five C-notes from his unseen sugar-daddy's wallet and then tries to take a nap. He's interrupted by the arrival of two cute, mall-salesclerk-types who've shown up to clean the house. The resulting dialogue and acting is so John-Waters-bit-player it demands to be quoted in its entirety:
CORY (to himself): Those f*ckin' punks! How am I supposed to sleep? (HE STRUTS INTO THE LIVING ROOM TO CONFRONT THE MALE MAIDS) Can't you be more quiet?! Daddy didn't move me in here to take this sh*t!
MAID #1: Listen, f*ggot... one day you'll be down here cleaning with us.
CORY: Don't bank on it, honey.
MAID #2: At least we don't suck d*ck.
CORY: I don't suck Daddy's d*ck. (THEN, BARRELING ON) Daddy sucks my d*ck cuz it's hot wanna taste?
(The best porn line of all time, really)
MAID #1: Never.
MAID #2: No. No.
CORY: Maybe you could be persuaded. (BRANDISHING C-NOTES) One or two of these should take care of that.
MAID #2: Make it three.
And that $300 pays for an energetic, versatile three-way.
The next sequence introduces us to new characters: blonde Chris Allen and his straight bud Lee Landis, who drops by Chris's cabin to have a couple beers and spend the night. With the same matter-of-fact, non-cheesy directorial style employed in the opening scenes, Higgins creates a hold-your-breath-sexy PENTHOUSE FORUM tease as Chris casually hauls out some hardcore hetero stroke-mags and tosses one to Lee. Oblivious to Chris, Lee starts beating off to the magazine, resulting in a believably nervous but horny-as-hell Chris spanking it to his own mag, while sneaking glances at his pouty-lipped pal.
The heat cranks higher when Chris pulls out a jar of lube, then hesitantly offers some to Lee. Higgins confounds expectations again by having Lee grunt "Yes", but when Chris reaches over with a glob of it on his fingers, hoping to smear it onto his pal's big one, Lee scoops the lube off of Chris's fingers with a slightly contemptuous "I can take it from here" that endows the dual masturbation action with insanely agonizing str8-guy. Denial. Hot!
This carries over to the next scene, which features Chris and Lee off-roading in a jeep. What's ingenious about the jeep scene is we have no idea what will happen. Maybe Lee Landis the actor is straight, and all he'll do is j*ck off again. Maybe not even that. It wouldn't be out of character for Higgins to have Chris make another pass at Lee, and have Lee get pissed, jump out of the jeep and hitch a ride with a chick. Thank God that's not the way it goes...
After they park the jeep in an isolated area, Chris retrieves more erotica and succeeds in getting juicy, hunky Lee to start whacking it again. But this time Chris just can't help himself: "I bet my mouth would feel better than your hand." Lee takes him up on it, and the sun-and-sperm-soaked explosion is all the more torrid since Chris (and the viewer) practically had to beg for it. And still the film isn't over! We get the delectable bonus of Matt Ramsey/Peter North solo action in the wilderness, sending COUSINS off with a foamy 40 oz bang. That's entertainment!
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987)
A comment on the comment commenting on Harleymac's comment
Hanleymac"s comment
john-brouhard7 June 2008
There is not much I can add to Hanleymac"s comments except I hope Richard Carpenter can find a way to completely stop this mess from ever being seen ANYWHERE!!! GET, IF YOU CAN, "THE KAREN CARPENTER STORY, 1989. I think you'll find it much more informative, and that it deals with Karen's suffering more than "Superstar". It, as I recall, helped make all of us aware of the problems associated with Anorexia and other eating disorders. "The Karen Carpenter Story" doesn't free the Carpenter family from some responsibility for what happened to Karen, but it doesn't bash them either. The attempt on the part of Harold and Agnes was simply to try and protect them (Karen and Richard) from the problems of the entertainment world. If my wife, Terrie and I had been their parents, we might possibly have done things the same way. As for "Superstar, The Karen Carpenter Story", it should be sent as far away as the East is from the West.
MY COMMENT ON THE ABOVE, TO ITS AUTHOR: Just 3 things, really. Because I can't restrain myself. 1) It was obvious by 2008 that SUPERSTAR would never be fully suppressed in our lifetime. Despite his obvious genetic & creative superiority to almost anyone I can think of, not even Richard Carpenter can subjugate the internet. We all know he's tried. and clearly failed, since the illicit outlaw Mattel-mockery SUPERSTAR continues to survive.
2) If the commentator above had fathered Richard & Karen Carpenter (I'm leaving his wife Terrie out of this, in fairness to the woman) the siblings' DNA would have contained no talent of any kind, and so The Carpenters as we know them would never have existed. So the reviewer could never have "possibly done things the same way as" Harold and Agnes Carpenter, with regard to Richard & Karen, who would have been entirely different children and adults than the celebrities we're all so familiar with today. Specifically, the way one manipulates, emotionally and psychosexually poisons, and takes financial advantage of gifted platinum-selling international recording superstars would be worlds away from parenting long-term minimum-wage retail, food service and/or janitorial "cast members" at Downey-adjacent Disneyland. However, elementary deductive reasoning establishes beyond a statistical doubt that in the hypothetical parallel world in which the initial comment-poster is father to Richard & Karen, ironically both siblings would have perished many years ago, either through severely compromised congenital physical and/or mental disabilities, or suicide, either separately or in some type of macabre brother/sister pact.
3). As anyone who's ever owned, used or seen a globe should realize, the East and West actually border each other, so the commentor's wish for where copies of Todd Haynes's SUPERSTAR should be "sent" actually expresses a desire for the film's position (be it in Haynes' manager's safety deposit-box, a website for downloading bootleg content, or in the blackest, most brainless chamber of loathing in. the reviewer's heart) to remain completely unchanged.
Thank you.
Midnight Return: The Story of Billy Hayes and Turkey (2016)
Fans of MIDNIGHT EXPRESS & riveting documentaries are in for major treat
In a perfect world, Sally Sussman and Anthony Morina, the creative team behind this often-astonishing non-fiction festival hit, would be under contract to HBO, Netflix, Amazon Video, or another cool cable channel or streaming movie service, and allowed to choose any well-known film based on real people and events in modern history as their launchpad for a series of documentaries like this one. I'd eagerly gobble up every single one.
As a huge fan of MIDNIGHT EXPRESS, the 1978 Alan Parker blockbuster about a young American, Billy Hayes, notoriously tossed into a hellish Turkish prison when he's caught with hashish while trying to board a flight home, I've seen the movie many times since its initial release -- when my dad rocked my 11-year-old world by driving us to Waterville, Maine, on a school-night, to see it on the big screen. Yet until a few days ago, when a friend's lucky invitation to MIDNIGHT RETURN's premiere theatrical run at Beverly Hills' Music Hall (it's next playing on the big screen in Palm Springs, which is obviously the better way to catch it), I had no clue that Parker's brutal, electrifying, nerve-shredding suspense classic was just the opening act of an outrageous and controversial saga that stretched over 40 years.
I don't want to give away any of the surprises Sussman and Morina weave into the doc, and the tale of what happened to Hayes before, during and after Parker's adaptation of his memoir is so fascinating and expertly structured, it's not until after viewing MIDNIGHT RETURN does one realize what a feat of storytelling Sussman and Morina have pulled off, juxtaposing vintage news clips, scenes from MIDNIGHT EXPRESS and a slew of jaw-droppingly candid original new interviews with Hayes, Parker, producer David Puttnam, Oliver Stone (who won an Oscar for his EXPRESS screenplay and is a priceless part of the story) -- and a well-chosen sample representing the apparent millions of Turks (and Turkish-Americans) for whom Hayes has been a living Satan and MIDNIGHT EXPRESS is apparently the greatest scourge ever committed against Turkey! This bizarrely fervent controversy began with Parker and Hayes bringing the film to Cannes for a sneak-premiere in 1978 and continues to this day because of its "overwhelmingly negative" portrait of Turkey and Turks, in other words the country which sentenced Hayes to an appallingly severe incarceration, and the people at the prisons who abused him to the brink of madness and death. Did anyone expect a different portrayal? Oh, just you wait...
Without relying on the tempting crutch of spoken narration, Sussman and Morina spin out this epic story, spanning five decades and many personal and sociopolitical viewpoints, with total clarity, sophisticated wit and a driving pace that manages to match the legendary nail-biter that inspired it. It's one of the most compelling movies of any genre that I've seen in the last ten years.
Trash Humpers (2009)
The Emperor Has No Clothes... or Talent
Comparing this worthless, punishing swill to even the worst of John Waters or David Lynch gives it way too much credit. So Harmony Korine (a great name for a gangster's moll) was able to replicate the look of a crappy 8th generation VHS videotape? That's some feat. So he got a bunch of irritating exhibitionists to unconvincingly disguise themselves as old people and then set them loose to hump trashcans and break old TV sets? Bravo. The only true accomplishment here is getting intelligent people to A) masochistically sit through this non-movie and then B) actually try to critique and interpret it like it's something more than the pathetic indulgence of someone who has so much contempt for his audience that he makes Marguerite Duras look like Nora Ephron.
Queen Kong (1976)
A Steaming Pile of Apeshit
As a tot in 1976, I remember seeing blurbs and photos from this in "Famous Monsters of Filmland" and "The Monster Times", and then hearing it had been suppressed by Dino DeLaurentiis. I grew up imagining a cheeky, raunchy, hip spoof and now, finally, over 32 years later, I feel compelled to report QUEEN KONG is the worst movie I've ever endured, and that includes MYRA BRECKINRIDGE (and JUNO). Smug, ghastly cheap (what the hell did they spend the 632K budget on, exactly?!), laugh-free, irritating to the point of nausea, its 84 minutes feel like hours. There's not enough material here to sustain a two-minute sketch in the worst KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE knock-off you could ever imagine, and I would like to personally test anyone who finds this entertaining for developmental disabilities. It makes Dino's KONG look like the 1933 original and should be avoided at any price. I would rather sit through two semesters of trigonometry, go without sex for six months, and endure a jalapeno enema than have to view this again. It's really that bad.
Footballers Wive$: Extra Time (2005)
Delicious, Ballsy & Instantly Addictive
This spin-off manages the tough task of being just as entertaining as its glamorous mother show "Footballers Wive$"-- in some ways it's even better, since its compact episode lengths (22m for Series One and 33m for Series Two) allow for a faster pace. "Extra Time" really deserves to be judged on its own. It carves out a unique identity, grittier, raunchier, less suburban, yet absolutely in keeping with FBW's high standard of unpretentiously heightened drama.
Among the many pleasures of "Extra Time"'s all-too-brief two seasons: expertly crafted plot lines involving Anika Beevor, Tanya Turner's ruthless baby sister, and her whorifying simultaneous relationships with Earls Park owner/pervy ex-pop star Gary Ryan and his hot son Oliver, and the murderous love triangle between Bruno Milligan's housing estate love child Yasmin, doomed footballer Seb Webb and fascinating roughneck sociopath Cash Brown; and the return of sick bitch-nurse Jeanette Dunkley, whose antics with Darius are so wrong they're right.
Add to this the best cast since FBW Series One. Sarah Matravers has the gutsy, commanding quality of Rachel Griffiths-- Joly Salter, her hard-luck mum abandoned by Bruno years before anchors the show with real family heart much the way Jackie is the moral center of FBW. Marc Bannerman is the manliest slab of FBW beef since Jason Turner-- helping spike the hunk quotient are the enormously appealing Marc Hendrey as Rees, Jack Pierce's psycho-sexy Cash, and Travis Oliver, who provides the best nudity in FBW history as Anika's troubled toy-boy. His and hers scene-stealing top honors go to Ross Finbow as Cash's put-upon, affecting accomplice Woody, and the outrageously charismatic Dominique Moore. Playing Yaz and Rees's trashette pal Chanel, she's hilarious, shameless and bubbling over with entitlement. In short, she's what FBW has always been all about.
Sod off, naysayers. Now I want to watch every episode of EXTRA TIME again.