WHY I HATE HOLLYWOOD, PART ONE: Fatal Attraction. Directed by Adrian Lyne (1987)

Have you checked out any of those worst film lists that are all over the net lately? These lists never include the real crapola, tedium on a par with watching paint dry like "Apocalypse Now". So I thought I'd get the ball rolling on talking about really bad movies by going back to "Fatal Attraction". The laboured plot concerns a married lawyer played by Michael Douglas who has a one night stand, but his sauce on the side (Glenn Close) turns out to be several raisins short of a fruit cake. When Douglas tries to leave her after their brief tryst, Close slashes her wrists rather than slashing at the lawyer with a knife; this turns out to be the first of the flick's many major disappointments. According to the film-makers, Douglas is supposed to represent everyman but when was the last time you had everyman down as some obnoxious Yuppie lawyer with money falling out of his asshole? Within about a minute of Douglas appearing onscreen I just wanted his character killed off, since aside from being a complete twat, he also has the worst haircut in the movie (and that is saying something because Glenn Close has a seriously atrocious barnet too). Yeah, I know the eighties was full of bad haircuts but the Douglas barnet in "Fatal Attraction" is the sort of thing that makes you regret the demise of Sweeny Todd. In a decent movie (say an Italian thriller of the seventies or early eighties), when Glenn Close has her hands behind her back unhappily saying goodbye to Douglas, she'd have had a knife hidden there and would have offed the pig. Unfortunately this is Hollywood darling, so she's slashed her own wrists instead.

Close initially seduces Douglas by stating she is discrete and asking if he is discrete too; so you are supposed to feel lots of sympathy for him and none for her when she starts stalking the asshole. The problem with this film is that when Close stops laying the lead she doesn't start the slaying every guy she picks up (she just follows Douglas around instead of going for a body count to rival the current atrocities in Iraq, which is what any indie horror director would have done); this is basically a slasher film without any killings – so stuff of no consequence like plot and characterisation are even more in the way of the action here than is usually the case with Hollywood films - like these bozos are totally hung up on outmoded literary models and appear unable to get it into their thick skulls that film is a visual medium. The way the syrup of sympathy is ladled on for Bad Hair Day Douglas means that "Fatal Attraction" ends up making flicks like "The New York Ripper" (1982 directed by Lucio Fulci) or even "Dressed To Kill" (1980 directed by Brian De Palma) look like essays in feminist practice. So "Fatal Attraction" just goes on and on, very slowly, with Close making threatening phone calls and indulging in other tedium (turning up at the lawyer's office, damaging his car, etc.), until she works up a big enough head of steam to boil a bunny rabbit belonging to the lawyer's six year old daughter. The set up for this is completely botched, we know it is coming and yet the rabbit is still unconvincingly placed up over one edge of the pan so that even slow viewers are clear about what it is when the lid is lifted; in any half decent film Close would have made the rabbit into a stew and fed it to the family before they discovered what was going on (shades of Lamberto Bava's 1980 movie "Macabre" I know, but better than what goes down here).

The wrongly placed boiled bunny is the first indication that this film has gone completely off beam even judged on its own pathetic standards (the standards of Hollywood realism aren't something I dig myself). So basically this is a horror movie with all the supernatural elements stripped out, Glenn Close is a monster used to reinforce the reactionary WASP messages endlessly feed to us in Hollywood fare such as 'sex is dangerous' and 'only conservative values can save us from this mad world' (while simultaneously buttressing the warped social relations from which this madness stems). The film was originally shot with Michael Douglas telling his screen wife Anne Archer about his one night stand so that she can warn Close off, the monster then commits suicide. However, test screenings showed US west coast audiences did not like this, since they were no doubt hip to the fact the they were watching a toned down stalk and slash flick ("Friday The 13th Part 13: Alex Powders Her Nose" anybody?). Therefore in the standard released version (apart from Japan which kept the 'original' ending) a knife wielding Glenn Close confronts Anne Archer (the lawyer's meek wife and another case of a bad haircut) in the bathroom, Archer screams for Douglas who attempts to drown the monster in the tub. Shots of an apparently dead Close in a bath full of water appear framed to bring to mind John Everett Millais's horribly mawkish painting "Ophelia" (1852). But there is an inappropriate slippage since the large knife Close wields simultaneously made me think of Jacques-Louis David's picture "The Death of Marat" (1793).

In "Isle of The Dead" (1945 directed by Mark Robson) a number of the shots are successfully framed in imitation of old master paintings (most obviously pictures by Vermeer), but "Fatal Attraction" director Adrian Lyne completely botches the conceit. "Ophelia" was never going to work in this context anyway, even without the intrusion of "Marat", since its model Elizabeth Siddall famously became ill lying in a bath of cold water posing for the picture and its painter Millais was forced to pay her medical bills, ten years later Siddall overdosed on laudanum (an addiction some believed she'd developed because of her subsequent marriage to Dante Gabriel Rosetti and his infidelities), all of which cuts against the thread of "Fatal Attraction's" weak plot for anyone with even a passing knowledge of nineteenth-century English culture. So having conjured up a heap of inappropriate associations by lying apparently dead in the bath, Close then rises from the water just as one would expect from the monster she portrays throughout the film; and Close is no 'Lady of the Lake', another unfortunate but inevitable association here given the similarities between this movie and the infinitely superior "Friday The 13th" franchise (which are set around a lake). Archer who had disappeared from the bathroom, now suddenly and most unfortunately reappears with a gun and has transmogrified without rhyme or reason from timid wife into a "Dirty Harry" type character. Archer shoots Close to death before this 'monster' can hack her horribly hubby to pieces. So the film, which has been a sustained piece of disappointment, ends in more disappointment. Douglas never faces retribution for one of the worst haircuts ever seen on celluloid. "Fatal Attraction" would have been a lot better if all the major characters had died, and preferably within the first five minutes of screen time. Alongside "The Godfather" this is one of the most boring movies I have ever seen; it is truly post modern in its total lack of imagination and while that ought to be a redeeming feature, for some reason it isn't. Hollywood should be closed down so that everyone can get on with the business of enjoying 'reel' movies like "Dolemite" and "Raspberry Reich"

Part Two in right hand column

Why I Hate Hollywood Part Three: Factory Girl directed by George Hickenlooper (2006)

I was curious to see "Factory Girl" because I found Hickenlooper's Rodney Bingenheimer documentary "Mayor of Sunset Strip" intriguing. Unfortunately "Factory Girl" is a complete turkey that takes famous names of the sixties like Edie Sedgwick (the Paris Hilton of 40 years ago), Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan and shamelessly fictionalises them. Sedgwick was always one dimensional (but looked great in Warhol's movies) but the rest of those who are trashed in this film were more complex characters. Another former Factory habitué Lou Reed summed up this movie rather well when he told the New York Daily News, "I read that script. It's one of the most disgusting, foul things I've seen — by any illiterate retard — in a long time. There's no limit to how low some people will go to write something to make money... They're all a bunch of whores."

Alongside the plot banalities there is the restaging of Factory films like "Vinyl", and while the original Warhol movie is under lit and the murkiness adds to its interest, the version here is properly lit Hollywood schlock. Sienna Miller actually cops Edie Sedgwick's moves in "Vinyl" surprisingly well, but the real star of this production was Gerard Malanga and Jack Huston's attempts to emulate him and his dance moves are a major embarrassment. "Vinyl" is available as a commercial DVD from Italy and no where else precisely because music copyright laws have traditionally been laxer there than almost anywhere else in the overdeveloped world... Anyone who wants "Vinyl" can buy it via the internet (although obviously they'd need a PAL TV system to view it, which rules out most Americans).

The budget for "Factory Girl" (reported to be seven million dollars) allowed Hickenlooper to license "Nowhere To Run" by Martha Reeves & The Vandellas, but didn't stretch to bringing in songs by The Rolling Stones or The Kinks (which are used alongside Martha Reeves without permission on the soundtrack to "Vinyl"). Instead Hickenlooper has substituted "Don't Bring Me Down" by The Pretty Things for the Stones and "I'm The Face" by the High Numbers (the first single by The Who issued under their 'original' name) for The Kinks. While both The Pretty Things and The Who are great bands in their own right, they don't work here because anyone with any interest in Warhol will know exactly why they're being used (to save money and possibly because the producers own the rights). Then we have The Birds doing "Leaving Here" (that's the British Birds which featured future Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood). I like The Birds but the Eddie Holland original is both infinitely superior and the version of "Leaving Here" that would have been played in The Factory (however given Holland's star producer status at Tamla Motown it would have cost a lot more to licence than a track by band who never had a hit...).

The soundtrack gets even more incoherent than I've already indicated. Clearly no effort was made to find appropriate music and instead Hickenlooper appears to have acquired a copy of the 1974 compilation of 60s garage rock "Nuggets" and used it as inspiration for finding music he could licence for next to nothing. There are plenty of tunes on this soundtrack I've been spinning for years (I bought a copy of "Nuggets" while still a schoolboy in the 1970s), but they just don't work here. "(Just like) Romeo and Juliet" by The Reflections, "Night Time" and "I Want Candy" by The Strangeloves, and "Psychotic Reaction" by The Count Five, are all great pop rockers but take me away from The Factory and conjure up completely unrelated aspects of the sixties.

Likewise, other than to save money I can't see any reason to favour The McCoys' version of "Fever" over all others. That said, I love The McCoys' hit "Hang On Sloopy", even if that tune was first recorded by The Downliners Sect (who considered the song an album filler). And come on, if you're gonna use "Shakin' All Over" on a sixties themed soundtrack then you gotta go with the Johnny Kidd and The Pirates original, but what you get here is The Guess Who doing it... Oh and Hickenlooper hasn't licensed any tracks by Factory house band The Velvet Underground either, instead he's had someone make what isn't even a passable imitation of them.

"Factory Girl" is completely pointless since so much original film footage of those it is about is both readily available and so much better than Hickenlooper's crock of shit. Like all Hollywood schlock the only reason this flick exists is to make money. Avoid!

The films of Manchester exploitation legend Cliff Twemlow

Sleaze Cinema

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