Cyber Monday: Project Shadowchaser Trilogy

Frank Zagarino dies hard!

Cinemasochism: Black Mangue (2008)

Braindead zombies from Brazil!

The Gweilo Dojo: Furious (1984)

Simon Rhee's bizarre kung fu epic!

Adrenaline Shot: Fire, Ice and Dynamite (1990)

Willy Bogner and Roger Moore stuntfest!

Sci-Fried Theater: Dead Mountaineer's Hotel (1979)

Surreal Russian neo-noir detective epic!

Friday, May 23, 2014

Cinemasochism: DEATH KICK (1998)

There is nothing we love more than a good ol’ vanity project.  Film itself is a self-centered medium, so there is something doubly alluring/repulsive in a person taking the time and money to publically pat themselves on the back while riding on their own shoulders.  From Steve Seagal’s ON DEADLY GROUND (1994) to John De Hart’s GETEVEN (1993), the vanity project runs the gamut big bucks to “here’s a quarter” budgets.  No doubt falling in the range of the latter is DEATH KICK, a low budget action flick from the Show Me State of Missouri. Damn, I wish you hadn’t shown me.

Although the DVD box and IMDb listing have this as DEATH KICK, the actual onscreen title is the super redundant KICK TO DEATH – DEATH KICK.  That is the cinematic equivalent of a “Danger! Rough Road Ahead” sign that you see while driving.  The film wastes no time getting down to business as five folks of dissimilar backgrounds meet in a tile warehouse.  They are there at the behest of leader Robert Tolcou (Jesse Bean) and despite their diversity they all have one thing in common. They all got screwed by divorce lawyer Adrian Lane (Michael Hartig).  Tolcou’s plan is simple – he and his partner, Andrew Teal (Earnest Hart, Jr.), will kidnap Mr. Lane and bring him back to the warehouse.  Each aggrieved person will then get to spend quality time with the Legal Eagle of their nightmares.  And by quality time I mean they get to have a fighter of their own choosing beat the crap out of him.  Each wronged party must give $50,000 to buy into the game and whoever kills Lane will get $250,000 (to be split 50/50 with their fighting avatar). Teal, a former cop, assures them that it will all be kosher because this warehouse was once a Fed safe house and the cops won’t bother them.

Our ambulance chaser is snatched at his home with barely any resistance and soon brought back to the warehouse and tied up.  What happens next is basically a series of the same scene over and over as Lane is confronted by his disgruntled ex-clients one-by-one and they air their grievances in the court of death kicks. All rise! Up first is Alexandria Dunavich (K.C. Carr), who is pissed that Lane cost her custody of her son during her trial.  She shows this by getting topless, mounting him, and then introducing her fighters, two black girls.  Hey, why does she get two? What she (and the audience) didn’t know is Lane, who looks like a wimpier John Astin, can kick some ass and he disposes of her two fighters. Next up is Tolcou, who is pissed that Lane exposed him as a wife beater and pedophile.  Lane tells him off by saying, “You need a ladder to get to the level of shit.” Ooooooooooooh, burn!  Tolcou’s fighter is a big black dude (Terry Cramer) who wields a mighty stick.  Lane gets him to abandon his weapon and, of course, whoops his ass. Client no. 3 is Tracy White (Corinne Malcolm), a sexy socialite whose entrance is followed by an “ohhhh yeah” on the soundtrack (really!). She is pissed that Lane’s divorce has caused her to become a social pariah in her affluent circle of friends.  Not only that, but she is still upset he “spurned my interest” and gets back at him by having a private fashion show where she drapes her naked body over him while saying how much she checked out his ass during the trial. Quick question: can you figure out whose vanity project this is yet?  Below is a video of the fight between her fighter and Lane.


Take that slow motion punch to the balls as a metaphor for me watching this film. Revenge-minded client no. 4 is Melinda “Matty” Kempt (Deborah Loveless), who says “you killed my mother and father.” Seems when she was sixteen Lane worked on a messy divorce that ended up with Matty’s abusive dad killing her mother and then committing suicide. But wait, there’s more!  Somehow after that she entered into a relationship with Lane (!?!) and she still loves him.  You see, she wants to help him out of this situation…and this somehow involves mounting him topless.  Tolcou speeds up the process and brings in her fighter (Michael Stocker) against her wishes. This results in my favorite bit as Stocker makes sure to turn his back to the camera to show off the martial arts school logo on his jacket, but it is unreadable.  Amazingly, this fight is the first time Lane opts to try to buy off a fighter, but his adversary is having none of that.  Until, that is, he tastes some of Lane’s Average White Guy Fists of Fury.  Beaten down, the fighter pleads for the deal again, but Lane says, “You opened this door, now come on in” before knocking him out with a knee to the head.  Does this guy’s lawyer card say “Adrian Lane, Attorney-at-Law and F’n Bad Ass” on it? Finally, we get Teal. He is upset that Lane uncovered some hidden assets of his during divorce proceedings and wiped him out.  Teal chose to go last because he knew Lane would persevere (“You’re like a cat, always landing on your feet.”) and Teal’s reward is not only the money, but the chance to beat up all the other fighters.  Uh, what?  Yeah, for some reason he takes on all the previous combatants and whoops them all (naturally, they all attack one at a time).  Pshaw, the real test of his martial arts mettle is Lane.  Care to guess who wins?

Your honor, request for a mistrial?  Full disclosure – I have no idea how I got DEATH KICK in my collection.  I mean, I have the DVD and inside is a receipt showing I ordered it online in mid-April for a hefty sum of four dollars, but I have zero recollection of how or why I ordered this.  I don’t even know how I heard about it! Maybe I had a THE LOST WEEKEND (1945) type moment and I was stocking up on ‘90s cheapo action flicks while drunk?  Here’s the problem with that theory – I don’t drink.  So this is a film so brutal that my mind actually tried to make me forgot just what led me to this decision to get this film.  Even worse, it took me two weeks to trudge through this.  With 95% of the action taking place in a dreary cinderblock warehouse, the film was a mental endurance test of the highest order with scene after scene of bad fights set to numbing guitar on the soundtrack.  Honestly, I’ve had cavity fillings that were more fun.  Did I finally meet my match?  A film so bad that it would make me tap out? Nah, I’m tough.  Tough and dumb.

If you haven’t already figured it out, DEATH KICK is a vanity project for Michael Hartig.  A former St. Louis police officer, Hartig is not only the lead here but also wrote and produced the film.  Even without the Hartig-centric opening credits, any astute viewer would know something was up during the first attorney/client showdown.  Not only is Adrian Lane presented as a super successful attorney, but he is shown to have a quick wit, is a badass fighter, and irresistible hunk.  This might work if say the litigious lead was Harrison Ford or Gregory Peck, but Hartig’s Lane is no Atticus Finch.  Hell, in terms of legal Lotharios, he’s not even Vinny Gambini! Sporting a terrible toupee, Hartig looks kind of like Bruno Kirby or ‘80s Sonny Bono and is about as attractive as the former and as dangerous as the latter.  So the idea that this man can not only kick ass, but literally get women to drop their panties (yes, that happens!) is ridiculous.  No joke, there are three central female characters in this film and at some point in the film all three press their naked bodies up against Hartig while cooing about how sexy he is.  The film is basically a live-action capturing of Hartig’s fantasies.


Speaking of which, I started to wonder if we weren’t seeing something on a more subconscious level.  Initially I thought Hartig must have gone through a messy divorce, but he has the bloodsucking lawyer the hero here.  Not only that, the film features scene-after-scene of Hartig being tied up.  Now I get that it works in the mechanics of the story, but I couldn’t help but wonder if Hartig is working out some serious mental kinks (emphasis on the “kink”) while making this.  To his credit, Hartig does do his own stunt work and I swear is slammed into the same warehouse door at least a thousand times.  But you just have to wonder how the hell did this get made?  Did no one have the heart to tell Hartig how silly this all looked? Regardless, I have some strange admiration for guys like this who throw it all out there, world be damned. The only thing GETEVEN’s lawyer-cum-leading-man De Hart has up on him is that he sang two songs on the soundtrack.  True story: I got very excited when a song was warbled over the DEATH KICK end credits, but, alas, it was not sung by Hartig.    I was initially sad to see on the IMDb that Hartig had passed away in 2004, but it appears to be an error as his Linkedin page shows he is still around and running his production company.  His main occupation, however, is still law enforcement. Somewhere a collection of ropes and B-movie actresses willing to do nudity breathed a sigh of relief.

Wednesday, May 21, 2014

The Spy Who Flubbed Me: LE MAGNIFIQUE (1973)

Jean-Paul Belmondo has made a lot of movies, of which many, or most, have been huge box office hits in Europe. They have also been very popular in Asia and have influenced many Hong Kong films, including the early works of Jackie Chan. While Chan never completely plagiarized Belmondo's work that I know of, many of his early action set-pieces and lack of stunt double are more than a little similar.

Admittedly I’ve seen only a handful of Belmondo's films. The ones that I have seen, such as COP OR HOOD (1979) and THE PROFESSIONAL (1981), have been entertaining but, as far as I could see, nothing to set the world on fire. Certainly nothing to warrant the world-wide fame and celebrity status that Belmondo would no doubt himself be proud to bask in… Until now.

(Mild spoilers forthcoming) The movie opens with an incredibly bizarre, stylized scene of a US secret agent in Acapulco being whisked away in a phone booth by a helicopter, only to be dumped into the ocean where divers attach a shark cage to the phone booth allowing the agent to be attacked by said shark with blood billowing through the water. If that sequence doesn't blow your mind and hook you in, this is just not your kind of movie. Of course there is only one thing for the agency to do now! Get top agent Bob Saint-Clair (Belmondo) on the job! Super-suave, sharp-dressed and with teeth so white they almost sparkle, Saint-Clair is so flamboyant that Simon Templar would feel like a wall-flower next to him. They said he was an "agent". They didn't say anything about "secret".


Saint-Clair, bent for revenge (in an extremely Colgate ad kind of way) is hot on the heels of Karpov (Vittorio Caprioli), a megalomaniacal arch-villain with an army of black leather clad troopers who is looking to take over the world with his organization of evil. Actually, Saint-Clair spends less time chasing after Karpov than he does chasing after the ravishing Tatiana (Jacqueline Bisset), and who can blame him? Karpov is actually the one doing the chasing, desperately trying to liquidate Saint-Clair by any means necessary. Those means usually are sending hordes of his foot-soldiers after Saint-Clair only to be casually shot down by the super-agent in mid-tryst. And this is only the beginning of the film!

This completely over-the-top, occasionally surreal spoof of James Bond films works amazingly well. It is hugely imaginative, incredibly bloody (in a cartoon way) and often hilarious. Better still, (big spoiler) it has another layer. We discover that Bob Saint-Clair is actually a work of fiction, a character written in a series of novels by the scruffy, chain-smoking writer François Merlin (Belmondo, again). Merlin uses the people he sees in everyday life as characters in his novels including his sleazy, egotistical boss (Caprioli) and the lovely, book-worm college student (Bisset) down the hall.

In all of the Belmondo films that I have seen, he typically plays a hard-boiled cop with a flair for the dramatic. In COP OR HOOD (1979), he shows a bit of comic flair, but it is completely misplaced in an otherwise serious action outing. Here he is allowed to unleash his rather baroque comic talents with everything from clever wit to the campy pratfalls that the French love so much. Belmondo has professed his enthusiasm for the work of Steve McQueen, even occasionally referencing it in his films, such as the '67 Mustang chase sequence in THE OUTSIDER (1983), which was reportedly done as a tribute to McQueen who had succumbed to cancer three years earlier. Perhaps this is why Bisset, who starred opposite McQueen in BULLIT (1968), was cast. Regardless of the reason, she is perfect fit, playing the introverted nebbish and the ravishing Bond girl archetype with aplomb and is an equal partner in making this film work.

Directed by Philippe de Broca, this is considered to be a Belmondo classic and it’s easy to see why. The movie moves at a brisk pace and doesn’t come to a screeching halt, as you would expect, when the filmmakers delve into Merlin’s life of bleak drudgery. The use of atmosphere to contrast the two “lives” is perfectly executed with bright-colors and sunlight for Saint-Clair’s world and drab grays and rain for Merlin’s. Surprisingly, celebrated screenwriter Francis Veber (who has written more films that have been remade in the US than probably anyone else in history) had his name removed from the credits after Broca and Caprioli did some rewrites. Perhaps he wasn't pleased with the level of excessive violence, such as a scene in which Saint-Clair literally shoots out a man's brains, which neatly fall in a plate on a bistro table. It may not have been exactly what Veber wanted it to be, but it is a great movie that completely changed my American perception of Belmondo movies. I hope Veber can find solace in that.

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

The Gweilo Dojo: The Films of Jun Chong


Our (not entirely) complete guide to the films of professional martial arts master Jun Chong!


NINJA TURF (1985)
















Saturday, May 17, 2014

Sci-Fried Theater: BLOOD GLACIER (2013)

Some films are so iconic that other filmmakers can’t help but ermm… pay “homage” to them. Some have made entire careers out of regurgitating other people’s work and spoon-feeding it to the masses whose eyes roll wildly in their heads while they foam at the mouth and scream about “Oscars” (Sally Strothers should have a late night commercial about these pitiable fools). Other filmmakers make references to the work of those that have come before with the subtle use of thematic elements, characters or shot composition. Use all three and you are back in the first category.

Then there are those who fall in the middle. They draw heavy inspiration from a film and add their own twist to it. Such is the case with the Austrian film BLOOD CRACKER. I mean, GLACIER. BLOOD GLACIER.

At a research station in the Austrian Alps, a small group of scientists studying the effects of global warming discover a glacier that is rapidly melting. The glacier is a rusty red color and trapped in the ice is a cell-structure of unknown origin. While investigating this glacier, the dog of the station’s lifer and obligatory rummy Janek (Gerhard Liebmann), discovers a dead fox in the glacier’s cave (I guess they melt faster on the inside). Something is moving under the fox’s skin and suddenly the dog has a wound. Assuming that his dog was attacked by a rabid fox, Janek returns to the station where the current biologist Birte (Hille Beseler) takes one look at the samples from the glacier and flips out claiming to have never seen cells like this before. Unfortunately the cells are rapidly deteriorating, so she needs another fresh sample – right now! This is, of course, impossible due to inclement weather and the alleged rabid fox. Cue strangely familiar argument about going back to the site under dangerous conditions.



Complicating things is the imminent arrival of the Prime Minister (Brigitte Kren) who is accompanied by Janek’s former lover Tanja (Edita Malovcic). Complicating things even further is the fact that Janek, who has been living in a bottle since Tanja left, is now drunk and on morphine for a head injury when he is suddenly almost attacked by a creature that looks like a cross between a fox and a spider. Of course nobody believes him until Berte finds a mutant bug while obtaining more samples. Once in possession of said samples (and after a gooey autopsy), Berte has it all figured out in a matter of minutes and uses a whiteboard to draw stick figures to explain it to the audience – err, I mean to the other scientists, who would have no clue what she was talking about if she used big words. You see the creature is a hybrid of a fox and an isopod that was created when the fox ate the isopod (as foxes are known to do) and the cells from the glacier took DNA from both species and created a hybrid that gestated in the fox. Well of course it is. Happens all the time. You know, just like (this is actually what she says) the mermaids of old and the Egyptian god Anubis.

Meanwhile the PM and her posse are hiking over the Alps to the station because apparently the station was conveniently built in an area that has no vehicle access of any kind (at least until the end of the movie). While hiking the photographer is bitten by a weird bug and a completely random girl in shorts and a t-shirt runs screaming from out of nowhere while being chased by a black hawk-like thing. Where did this girl come from and why is she dressed for a day at the beach in the middle of the friggin' Alps? That's not important, what is important is that the thing that was chasing her has just killed the only guy with a firearm. Ain't that a bitch?

If it sounds like I’m being incredibly vague, it’s because the film is incredibly vague on this subject. Unlike the usual SyFy or Hollywood CGI monster fodder, here the producers use a real effects team to make some really amazing practical creatures. Well, at least I think they are amazing. I don’t really know because the young director Marvin Kren seems to think he is some sort of cinéma vérité maestro who not only has to shoot every single scene with a hand-held camera, but clearly believes that he is making a “classy” horror film, which in his mind means that the audience should never be allowed to see any of the horror elements. If the camera isn’t whip-panning and jiggling during the monster attacks, Kren rapidly edits extreme close-ups, many of which are out of focus, so that at best you get a glimpse of what appears to be some really elaborate creature effects. During the first real attack scene (a full hour into the movie), the station is assaulted by something that appears to be a mutant ram. Of course you never get a good look at it, and when it is killed by the member of the cast you would least expect to use a large electric drill (ie the obvious choice), the creature is cropped completely out of frame. The drill could be penetrating anything. A mutant ram-head, a block of wood, Michelangelo’s David, you don’t know. Seriously, I bet the effects guys were fucking pissed. Like Alec Gillis kind of pissed.

On the one hand you have a fairly competent cast for this sort of affair. The performances are lacking in subtlety and nuance as has become de rigueur for modern genre movies (I can see the stage direction being “pretend like you are on a TV show!”), but at least it’s not an ethnically diverse, trendy cast of 20-somethings with fashionable haircuts. On the other hand, for the first hour of the movie all they really do is yell at each other in a small room. Even after getting into the rehashing of the old NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD scenario where the group of people are trapped by the menace that is outside, we still don’t get a whole lot to get excited about. Even worse, the 90 minutes of build up with Janek’s dog finally pays off in the last minute of the film with one of the stupidest endings I have ever seen. Lameness on a scale heretofore unknown to man. Even having Janek wake up and having it all be a drunken fever dream would have been better than the absurdly sentimental claptrap offered here. If you want to keep the film spoiler –free, skip the next paragraph.

You see, Janek and Tanja were lovers at the station some years back, and in the final moments of the film Tanja tells Janek that she was pregnant when she left, but the baby never came to term. Cue Niagara Falls. Moments later Janek hears some strange squealing sounds coming from where his dog is lying and fears that his dog has finally succumbed to the mutation. When he grabs his rifle, Tanja pleads with him to stop and then shows him why… the dog has given birth to a hybrid mutation of Janek and the dog and Tanja is cradling it in her arms like the infant she was denied. The end. Seriously, I couldn’t make that shit up.

J.J. Abrams was here.
In spite of the myriad of ideas pilfered from THE THING (1982), such as the fact that the station’s anti-social drunk lives in a shack connected to the station via a hanging power-line, director Kren and screenwriter Benjamin Hessler seemed to have missed the finer points of the original film. The clever dialogue, dynamic characters, nuanced acting and spectacular effects all seemed to have gone over their heads. Granted for a small, indy production, I don’t expect all of those things and for the most part it is reasonably well done for what it is. If Kren had removed his cranium from his gluteus and had some confidence in his cast and crew, we would have ended up with a piece of entertaining, if derivative, monster horror. Instead, his lack of confidence and experience compels him to try to force the film to be more scary and exciting by over editing a mess of jiggling hand-held shots… and then there is that ending. It’s too bad because there is a good film in here somewhere.

Saturday, May 10, 2014

Writer-director Paul Golding on giving PULSE (1988) life

“I heard a man on TV one time say that paranoia is just another word for heightened awareness.” – Old Man (Charles Tyner)

Hollywood is rife with horror stories regarding the struggles of first time filmmakers.  We’ve heard of neophytes being skipped over, frozen out, and physically removed from their pet projects.  But would you believe me if I told you the account of a first time filmmaker who managed to direct his own script free of struggle, impress his bosses and the studio still managed to screw it up?  Such is case with PULSE (1988), a science fiction thriller written and directed by Paul Golding.

Growing up, I was familiar with PULSE due to the eye catching VHS cover.  Oddly, I never saw it as a kid and only caught up with the film this year. Telling the story of a young boy (Joey Lawrence) who must fight a seemingly evil electrical current in his father’s California home, PULSE took me by surprise and shocked me.  It was an incredible well made science fiction film that was as scary as it was intelligent.  Not only that, but it worked as an impressive allegory of man succumbing to technology, a sentiment that is even more relevant today.  Emerging in a decade fondly remembered for its sci-fi masterpieces, this was no easy feat.  Surprisingly, there was very little info on both the film and Golding online.  Hoping to correct this, I contacted Mr. Golding and expressed interest in the history of PULSE.  Thankfully, the genial Golding was more than happy to discuss his lone feature film.

In order to trace the pathway to PULSE, we have to go all the way across the country.  A native of Troy, New York, Golding grew up with a love for science fiction and the desire to become a theoretical physicist.  He would express his creativity as a kid by recording reel-to-reel comedy tapes with friends and this eventually led to an interest in filmmaking.  “One of my friends suggested we get a camera and film this weird stuff that we were laying out on audio,” he explains.  “So I got my mother to get me an 8mm camera.  I started shooting stuff and it was weird stuff.  I’ve always loved movies, but to me movies were always Grace Kelly and Jimmy Stewart.  What I was doing was like ‘The Waste Land’ by T.S. Eliot on 8mm set to a piece of music.”

It was a confluence of three disparate things that eventually sent Golding on his path to being a filmmaker – the launch of Sputnik, the experimental film QUEEN OF SHEBA MEETS THE ATOM MAN (1963), and an article on film schools in the New York Herald Tribune.  The Russians’ space success made him realize that the United States only wanted hands on workers rather than theoretical ones in the Space Race.  With that out of the way, he was again drawn to film.  “I went down to Cooper Union and they screened Ron Rice’s QUEEN OF SHEBA MEETS THE ATOM MAN,” Golding reveals.  “And I realized, ‘Holy crap, I’m an underground filmmaker’ and knowing I had some place in the universe was really quite helpful.  And then I read an article in the Herald Tribune that said there were schools that actually taught filmmaking.  They said there were only two schools, there were actually three.  They only mentioned in the article USC and UCLA.  If they had mentioned NYU, I would have gone there and my life would have been completely different.”

Golding eventually ended up at USC’s historic cinema department and he soon found himself among some soon-to-be-historic classmates including John Milius, Basil Poledouris, Walter Murch, and a gentleman by the name of George Lucas. Golding was fascinated by Lucas’ early short LOOK AT LIFE (1965), which incorporated a technique using still photographs by animation teacher Herb Kosower.  Golding made his own attempt at this technique with the short WIPEOUT. Golding and Lucas soon found themselves in the same film aesthetics class instructed by Woody Omens, who had the students work in groups of two. “So George and I paired up,” he says. “Since I was in charge of the stockroom, I was able to get us the Arriflex because we only had one.  We went down to Figueroa and the first thing we saw were these reflections on these highly polished chrome parts of this Volkswagen.  So we shot 100 feet of film on that; we took turns finding shots and then taking them.  And when we showed it the next week, everybody went crazy.  So Woody said why don’t I give you another 100 feet of film and you can make a movie.  So we went back to Figueroa.  The Volkswagen wasn’t there, but another car was.  I edited it to a piece of music from a Miles Davis album that Herbie Hancock was a piano soloist on.”  The resulting experimental film was the three minute short HERBIE (1966) and it highlighted Golding’s mastery of editing. This talent proved beneficial after school when he worked as an editor on Haskell Wexler’s MEDIUM COOL (1969).

After briefly relocating to San Francisco, Golding returned to Los Angeles to get into the film industry.  He met Zalman King in the early 1970s and the duo struck up a creative partnership when King asked Golding to rewrite his screenplay, BAKERSFIELD BLUES.  The resulting script was titled POWER and revolved around carnival worker running a machine that was literally the thing of nightmares.  “The Dream Machine was this visual thing,” he explains, “a way of terrifying people, making them believe something was happening.”  The script was optioned by RSO (Robert Stigwood Organization) in 1975.  Although it attracted several high profile directors including Michael Apted and Bob Rafelson, the project never got made.  In fact, the highly prolific Golding/King collaboration saw several screenplays developed – SWAGGER at 20th Century Fox and GODSHEAD at Mutual Pictures – but none ever found their way before the cameras.

Instead, Golding found his first feature writing credit come via the small screen, although it wasn’t intended that way. Along with co-writer David Irving, he wrote a screenplay about a young boy who encounters a little Bigfoot while lost in the woods. Appropriately, it was called LITTLEFOOT.  After several producers told them it would be a perfect film for Disney, the two writers took it to the Home of the Mouse. The enthusiasm for the project went quickly up the chain of command until Ron Miller – president of Walt Disney Productions in addition to being Disney’s son-in-law – offered a truly bizarre alteration.  “He said, ‘It’s a sweet little story and would make a great film, but the Disney organization is not going to subscribe to the Bigfoot myth,’” Golding relays. “In one of the best turnarounds I’ve ever pulled off in an actual meeting, I said, ‘What if it wasn’t Bigfoot, but the last Indian of a tribe?’”

It was a move that could surely earn Golding the Indian sobriquet of “Quick on his Feet” as it worked.  The revised project was soon given the green light and shot under the title of THE SECRET OF LOST VALLEY under the directorial eye of actor Vic Morrow.  It debuted in two parts on WALT DISNEY’S WONDERFUL WORLD OF DISNEY in April and May 1980.  While Golding was not satisfied with the final product, he did earn a Writer’s Guild award for the script as the Guild judged nominated screenplays based solely on the writing and not the film itself.  The experience would also steel him for dealing with executives who might want to change his PULSE script.


It was during this productive period in the ‘70s that Golding also started writing what would eventually become PULSE.  Copyrighted under various names including CURRENTS, HOUSE, and TRACT, the story’s genesis began with an innocuous comment by one of Golding’s friends. “I was living in a house in Eagle Rock, which is next to Glendale, California,” Golding explains, “basically a tract house.  After I had just gotten divorced, I got a number of friends in from USC to come share the house with me so I wouldn’t be lonely.  One of them was Caleb Deschanel, who is one of the best cinematographers ever.  I remember one morning at breakfast he came in and said, ‘You know, it’s so weird.  Last night I was just listening to the little sounds the house makes – the furnace turning on and off and the flexing of the pipes – it was like the house was alive and it was taking care of me.’ He wasn’t used to central heating. That idea kind of stuck with me for a while and I started thinking about the dark side of the house taking care of you and it kind of grew out of that.”

Helping expand that seed of an idea was the story another friend told Golding about a computer he built for the telephone company that eventually reprogrammed itself to avoid the very problem it was built to detect.  Those ideas combined with Golding’s desire to tell a tale about our increasing dependence on technology resulted in the story of a married couple trapped in a house by an evil current.  “The film did evolve,” he says of his script.  “It wasn’t until the later stages that I solved the ultimate problem in the film.  The ultimate problem in any ‘haunted house’ film is why they just don’t get out.  To hell with the mortgage, you’re going to die if you stay.  The solution to that was making the main character a kid because he simply just couldn’t get out.  That solved my problem and the last couple of drafts were with the boy as the main character in it.”

One of the screenplay’s best (and most admirable) elements is that Golding refuses to explain just what exactly the evil electricity is.  It just appears in the grid after a lightning bolt hits a power station.  We don’t know if the current is of alien origin, man-made or even a ghost in electrical form.  Naturally, such ambiguity is frowned upon by movie executives. When asked if he was told to change his script to explain it more, Golding replies, “Endlessly. They always wanted to know more. Take a film like POLTERGEIST (1982), which I really enjoyed up until the end.  It is very well made and a very good story.  I hated that there was this burial ground explanation. Whenever you see the monster, it is always a letdown.”

The ominous lightning bolt in the opening of PULSE:


Regardless of the ambiguity, the script drew immediate interest.  “I really don’t know what the actual number is,” he states, “but I’ve been telling people that I sold it nine times.  Maybe it was eight or it was ten.  I sold options on it basically.  I sold a first look on it before I wrote it to some people.”  Golding even once sold the script outright as a TV movie, a move that thankfully never panned out.

By the time the 1980s rolled around, Golding reasserted the idea of getting PULSE off the ground.  A kink emerged early on when POLTERGEIST opened and several people deemed PULSE as too similar.  Golding had also worked with friends Andrew Davis and David Gilbert on writing the hip-hop film BEAT STREET (1984).  It was seeing Davis, who was the film’s original director, fired that steeled his trepidation of directing his own script.  “I sat with him at the bar that night after he had been fired and I saw the pain,” he discloses. “I thought to myself afterward, ‘Well, that is about as bad as it gets and he’s alive.’ So I thought I can’t do any less and that kind of stiffened me.”

Golding had support from his friend and manager William McEuen, who eventually set PULSE up under his Aspen Film Society company with Columbia lined up as distributor.  Columbia was in a period of transition in 1986/87 as parent company Coca-Cola (yes, they were owned by the soda manufacturer) sold off Embassy Pictures, Embassy Home Entertainment and The Walter Reade Organization. British film producer David Puttnam and David Picker were installed as Columbia’s CEO/Chairman and President, respectively.  Known for producing less Hollywood and more dramatic fare, the Two Davids added PULSE to their schedule with a budget of $6 million dollars.  In addition to being given a healthy budget, Golding was also allowed to pick his own producer and selected Patricia Stallone for the job.

Golding set out to cast the film and a number of familiar faces including Tommy Lee Jones auditioned for the role of the father, Bill.  Golding relays an amusing anecdote with regards to one casting session.  “Our casting agents had done ST. ELSEWHERE,” he explains, “so we got a number of people through them for various parts.  And one of them was David Morse.  It was amazing.  He did a scene and after he left we all looked at each other and were like, ‘Wow, he’s it. That’s fantastic.’  He killed it.  There was a power in that room that came from him and that was just awesome.  And then we looked at the tape and [the great performance] wasn’t there.  It was the strangest thing I’d ever encountered.”

Thankfully, casting the film’s main character was much easier.  In a town known for terrible tykes, Golding was fortunate to land 11-year-old Joey Lawrence as his lead. Already a showbiz veteran with 77 episodes of GIMME A BREAK under his belt, Lawrence came in and immediately wowed the filmmakers.  “Joey was pretty much automatic,” Golding reveals. “His parents walked in with him and it was, ‘Okay, he can do it.’  He’s got the experience, the look and he is the right age.  I don’t think we interviewed maybe one other person before we decided he’s it.”

The acquisition of Lawrence also proved to be a bit of a package deal as his younger brother Matthew also snagged the role of friendly neighbor Stevie.  “When Joey’s parents came in, they said, ‘We also have Matty here.’  Matty couldn’t read [but] had memorized that whole long speech that he does on the curbside with Joey and he just knocked it out of the ballpark.”

Filming began in May 1987 in California with a bulk of the exteriors taking place in a four house cul-de-sac.  The great W.C. Fields once opined that a filmmaker should never work with animals or children, but Golding had very few problems with Lawrence. “The biggest problem I had with Joey was the TV thing,” he says. “TV acting and movie acting are very different.  TV acting is a small screen and you’ve got to put a lot into it to come across; in movies it is a very big screen and you need to be a lot more subtle.  There was the scene where Joey has his experience with Charles Tyner and he is totally upset.  When we did the first look at that scene, Joey was television.  He was waving his arms.  I said, ‘Okay, look, you’ve got to tone it down.  You’ve got to keep the same intensity but you can’t do the thing with your hands, okay?’  So he did it again and they kept sneaking out.  So I said, “Okay, sit on your hands literally.”  Instead of doing the wide shot first, we did his close up first and he literally had to sit on his hands.  If they started to move out from underneath his legs, I’d say cut and we’d do it again.”

Editing ran concurrent to shooting and, despite his background as an editor, Golding put full trust in his cutter, Gib Jaffe.  Fans of the film will be interested to know that the original cut ran 2 hours and several scenes found their way onto the cutting room floor. “There is a scene,” he divulges, “that was alluded to where Joey says, ‘Yeah, [Ellen] took me riding.’ That was a scene up in the hills with these big electric transmission lines and she tells the story of when she was a little girl and they put these power lines in and then these tract houses happened after that and she somehow thought that there were signals that caused that to happen. It adds to his thought process.  It just wasn’t a good enough scene and we decided the film moved better without it. That was the most important [cut].  We also had some scenes that we shot in Colorado of him with his mother before he comes.  We just see suitcases in the hallway and him playing with other kids. At that point early in the film we just felt it was going on too long.”

When film wrapped, Golding had come in one day early on principal photography and one million dollars under budget. While most would consider this a feat to be lauded, Golding found out that in Hollywood it wasn’t considered desirable.  “I was informed by someone who knew these things that that was not good,” he says.  “I thought it was great!  We made the film and I got everything I wanted and it is a million dollars less.  But they said when the studio sees you’ve come in a million dollars under budget they’re going to feel cheated.  They know that that script ought to cost six million dollars and if you only spent five, you must have cheated them somehow.  So we found ways to spend the other million dollars. I understood what they were saying, it made insane sense.”

Various PULSE video boxes (click to enlarge):


Golding eventually used this money to secure what is perhaps one of the film’s best technical features, Macro photography.  While they did discuss the effects with his pal Lucas’ ILM (Industrial Light and Magic) studio, Golding eventually went with a more unconventional choice.  “The people from Oxford Scientific Films came to us when we were looking for people to do it and they had a wonderful reel of material.  They had designed this rig over in England that could do extraordinary close up, macro photography.  They definitely wanted to bring their equipment over to Hollywood and get it done here, but that was at the point in time when we really needed to add money to the budget, so I said, ‘No, we’ll all come over there.’  It was all done at their studio at Oxfordshire.

“They are all extreme, extreme close ups.  We didn’t build any models to photograph.  We used real microcircuit and regular circuits.  The only trickery we did is in the scene inside the television set where the electronic pathways are reconfiguring themselves.  That was photographed and then played backwards.”

Several examples of the Macro-photography, 
creating an almost alien-like landscape:





With the film completed in the fall of 1987, Golding screened the final product for friends and Columbia executives.  The reaction proved far beyond anything Golding could have anticipated.  “David Picker, the President of Columbia the time, was sitting a couple of seats over,” he reveals.  “At the end of the film David came up to me and said, ‘Feel my hands.’ It was the weirdest thing anyone had ever said to me. He said, ‘Feel my hands, my palms are sweating.’ He said, ‘I love this film, this is a great film.  We’re going to do this and that.  We’re going to do a 70 mm blowup.  We’ll release it separately in New York and L.A. to get word of mouth [going] and this will be our big film this summer.’”

Unfortunately, this excitement was short lived.  In late September 1987, Putnam and Picker were removed from their posts at Columbia.  Former Paramount executive Dawn Steel was announced as the incoming President on October 28, 1987 and this essentially gave PULSE a flat line.  Rather than judge a film solely by its own merit, Steel adopted the Hollywood mindset of “I can’t support what my predecessor produced” and dumped an entire slate of releases between January and March 1988.  Of all the pictures (including Spike Lee’s SCHOOL DAZE, Richard Benjamin’s LITTLE NIKITA, and Terry Gilliam’s THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN, which would sit on the shelf an additional year), PULSE received the roughest treatment as it was given a limited two market opening in Oklahoma and Texas on March 4, 1988.  Golding had gone from the perfect situation – directing his own script with zero studio interference and support from the highest executives – to a frustrating nightmare of studio politics. “Until the dream got popped by Dawn Steel, it was a dream scenario,” he laments.


Columbia's early 1988 release schedule 
(notice the number of February & March dates):


The unceremonious dumping of PULSE obviously bothered the filmmakers.  So much so that a lead article in Variety on March 8, 1988 appeared under the title “PULSE Makers Charge Columbia Is Dumping Film.”  It was doubly disappointing as the film received excellent reviews from The Houston Post and Variety.  Golding, however, had little time to mourn as he was soon onto his next project, co-writing and directing a film adaptation of BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS.  “At that point, I had been on a new journey of discovery with Kurt Vonnegut,” he details of his time post-PULSE release.  “He had been my hero forever, so the idea of working on a Vonnegut novel as a film was very cool and it kind of put behind me what had just happened.”

The project was set up at Handmade Films and the company even went so far as to announce a specific shooting start date (June 19, 1989) in Variety.  “They had a budget of $7 million dollars and I had gone over it with their production person,” he reveals, “I had gone through to do the board and overall budget.  We agreed that as long as the above the line [talent] didn’t get out of hand that the film could be made from the script that Peter Bergman and I have written.”  Golding’s ideal scenario would have seen Robin Williams as Dwayne Hoover and Gene Hackman as Kilgore Trout.  Unfortunately, the film never made it before the cameras.  While declining to offer specifics, Golding does mention it was an honor to work with one of his heroes and says Vonnegut was pleased with their script, which made several huge alterations to the source novel, changes that the author admired (more on that can be read on Golding’s website here).    

Golding continued to write with the screenplay EUDAEMONIC PIE (“a bunch of brilliant young scientists who go off to take on Las Vegas with a computer in the sole of their shoes” he says of the plot).  Soon, however, he found himself like a character in PULSE and at the mercy of modern technology.  “My wife and I ended up taking the advice of her son,” he explains of his post-Hollywood work, “and opening a store because she had a business background.”

Together they opened an internet store right as it was taking off and ended up literally catching a “wave” at the right place at the right time. “We sold a little of this and a little of that,” he says. “Then we put a product called the Leatherman Wave on there.  Leatherman didn’t have very good distribution, but it had an enormous reputation; when we put that online, we literally started receiving orders faster than we could print them.  We got a faster printer.”

Golding relocated to New York in the new millennium and he and his wife restored a farm house they bought together.  Although it would appear his filmmaking years are behind him, Golding had a surprising answer when asked if he ever thought of doing a sequel or remake to PULSE. “I wrote a screenplay right after PULSE,” he reveals, “a film that I never sold. [It’s] a detective story that, in a sense, is almost a sequel. Right now we’re all trying to get together and figure out how to get it made. Originally it was called AAMES, but right now it is recently re-titled MACROCHIP.  It is certainly not the same characters.  It has the same kind of thematic content of this thing that’s bigger [than the characters] and in this case is almost, but not quite, explained.”  He is currently developing it with local filmmaker Jon Cring and it will allow Golding to work with his son Nick, who is also a film editor.

Twenty six years after PULSE’s inauspicious release, it is a testament to the film and Golding’s filmmaking skills that people are still talking about the film.  Golding has even screened it twice in Schenectady to appreciative audiences.  “It is nice that other people have seen it.  It is nice that people say good things about it to me,” he says.

As for his own thoughts on the film, Golding is modest in his assessment.  “I thought it was pretty good,” he says.  “I’d give it a B+.”