| | | The holy grail of cult weirdo cinema. Looking disarmingly like a real movie, this tale of a reformed prostitute falling for a man with a secret that makes her's look trivial is a delirious blend of Hollywood soap opera and fist-in-the-gut exploitation. Fuller, aptly dubbed a true American primitive by Andrew Saris, combined violence and sentimentality with a naive vigor that out post-modern era will never see the like of again. The man could use handicapped children to represent vulnerability without irony. how naive is that? But Fuller's cloying touches are overwhelmed at every turn by the corrosive tone of violence and nihilistic despair. As startling a pre-credits sequence as any film. NAKED KISS was one of a number of early 1960s American films that obviously could NOT have been released, but were-Seconds, Doctor Strangelove, The Loved One, Fail Safe, Lady in a Cage and the original Something Wild all come to mind. Buy this DVD for cheap, and if it blows you away, upgrade to the Criterion edition. Starring Constance Towers, Anthony Eisley. Run Time: 93 minutes . Region 1 encoding . Black & White |
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| | | The holy grail of cult weirdo cinema. THE NAKED KISS is incompetently written and grotesquely sentimental, yet it's one of the great American films. Looking disarmingly like a real movie, this tale of a reformed prostitute falling for a man with a secret that makes her's look trivial is a delirious blend of Hollywood soap opera and fist-in-the-gut exploitation. Quintessential maverick director Sam Fuller's one great gift was unfiltered immediacy. He genuinely believed his bizarre hysterical style was just the most straightforward way to tell a story. Most artists have some concept of taste or sophistication-a nagging inner voice that tells them when they've gone too far off the reservation. But Sam Fuller was vulgar. He didn't affect vulgarity, he breathed it. Has anyone ever been so fully described by a single word? From the Latin vulgaris meaning of the mob. of or relating to the common people. Lacking in cultivation, perception, or taste. Common, coarse, excessive in expenditure or display, pretentious, offensive in language, earthy, lewdly or profanely indecent. Fuller was all of those things. He was also a sincere moralist. He combined violence and sentimentality with a naive vigor that out post-modern era will never see the like of again. The man could use handicapped children to represent vulnerability without irony. how naive is that? THE NAKED KISS starts with as startling a pre-credits sequence as any film. This was one of a number of early 1960s American films that obviously could NOT have been released, but were. Starring Constance Towers, Anthony Eisley. B&W . Widescreen letterbox - 1.66:1 . Audio: English (Dolby Digital 1.0) |
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| | | Stellar little cult film. Peter Bogdanovich's directorial debut based on a story by Hollywood madman Sam Fuller. The message still rings true thirty-five years on. Tim O'Kelly plays Bobby Thompson, a seemingly mild-mannered husband and son. But Bobby has a penchant for collecting firearms and thinking murderous thoughts, which translate into action when he becomes a deadly sniper, picking off drivers on the L.A. freeway from high above an oil tank. Meanwhile, Byron Orlok (Boris Karloff), an aging horror film star, plans his retirement, feeling the atrocities wrought by daily human global existence have numbed the public to the movie monsters he plays. As fate and movies will have it, Thompson and Orlok's worlds collide at the Reseda Drive-In where Orlok is making his final public appearance. Writer-director Bogdanovich, helming his debut feature, also appears as young Hollywood director Sammy Michaels. |
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| | | Directed by John McNaughton. Written by Samuel Fuller & Christa Lang. Starring Ione Skye and Anne Heche. Campy remake of 1956 exploitation classic; one of several 1990s SHOWTIME remakes of Samuel Z. Arkoff 1950s exploitation films. Notable for the overwrought screenplay by all-time maverick director Fuller which was then directed against the grain in colorful, cartoony fashion. Fuller was such a nut that it's hard to tell if the script was serious or parody, but the director probably felt is was a satire. It's a fine line. the "women in prison" genre is difficult to parody, since a key trait of the genre is that everything's exaggerated. "Framed for the murder of a record company president in 1952 Hollywood, young, aspiring singer Aggie O'Hanlon is sentenced to life in prison and tries to adjust to her life behind bars in a hellish women's prison where she is befriended by other "lifer" inmates who help her out when Aggie finds herself marked for murder by an unknown source who thinks she knows more about the murder than she does." |
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