Holiday in Confusion - PUNK VACATION

Tonal shifts in movies can be risky business.  A perfectly timed hairpin turn is exciting; startling the audience and deepening their engagement.  Perfect is hard to pull off, though.  An awkward shift breaks the flow, pulling the watcher out of the story.  The filmmakers need to know exactly what they are doing or it could be disaster.  If you can't nail it, don't even try.  Alternatively, go in all the way.  Throw in so many tonal shifts, redirections, and crazy tangents that the watcher is left punch drunk, staggering through the movie in stunned fascination.  Guess which approach Stanley Lewis took for 1990’s PUNK VACATION?

The Capsule:

In a quiet Californian desert town, Deputy Steve Reed (Stephen Fiachi) fills his days with unsuccessful target practice in an empty field, responding to false alarms, and getting yelled at by his paranoid, commie hating boss, Sheriff Virgil (Louis Waldon).  The monotony ends on the night an eclectic gang of bike punks ride into town.  An altercation over a Dr. Pepper vending machine outside a diner leaves the owner dead, his young daughter catatonic, and one punk in the hospital.  While Reed and the other cops bumble around, his girlfriend, Lisa (Sandra Bogan), vows vengeance for her father and sister.  She hunts down the gang on her own, but finds herself on a head-on collision with its equally strong willed--and frighteningly psychotic--leader, Ramrod (Roxanne Rogers).  Lisa's fate, and that of the entire town, will wind up in Deputy Reed's hands, and no one is happy about that.

This direct to video cheapie was released in 1990, but is a product of the '80s all the way.  Early '80s, at that, Billy Idol "White Wedding" period.  The anachronistic aesthetic is just the first sign of this movie's serious case of multiple personality disorder.  In the beginning, our punk vacationers seem like they have rolled straight out of DEATH WISH.  They come just short of Jeff Goldblum’s vile band of caricatures as they torment and ultimately murder Mrs. Kemper.  The DEATH WISH comparison is so pronounced they even use the same catatonic daughter cliché, though thankfully the sexual assault is implied rather than shown (at least I think its implied, there is zero exposition explaining what is wrong with her).  The trajectory is set for a full-on revenge flick, swapping a despondent father for a pissed off sister.  Straight forward, right?

Except, a weird thing happens.  The longer the movie spends with the punks, the less they seem like vicious animals and more like a quirky collection of misfits, each with their own unique look and personality.  There’s the French chick who looks like Siouxsie Sioux from Siouxsie and the Banshees.  The bandana wearing emo guy who plays a sad harmonica.  The bald Goth punk who carries nunchucks but doesn’t know how to use them.  The skinny white dude who dresses like Prince.  Two valley girl punks discuss future career opportunities while on guard duty (one wants to be an electrical engineer).   

They are an odd crew, and none odder than Feggy (Billy Palmieri), who clearly did not read the entire job description when he answered the Punks Wanted ad.  He’s a bit of a hippy peacenik, always whining when Ramrod wants to play it tough.  He usually falls in line, until eventually making a stand and declaring he doesn’t want to be involved in "senseless violence or car theft."  Not exactly the poster boy for the renegade punk lifestyle, yet everyone in the gang not only puts up with him, but genuinely cares for him.  The family that stabs diner owners together stays together, I guess.

Incidentally, true to the title, this is literally a punk vacation.  The gang aren’t on a drug run, or on the lamb, they are just taking a road trip, getting out of the hustle and bustle of L.A. for a few days.  When they are holed up in a barn after the unplanned murder, Feggy even complains that he thought they were just going fishing.  I think he is actually carrying traveler’s checks.  

Whether this was the intent or not, I started to like these lunkheads.  Every once in a while, there will be another radical tone change and they will become threatening again, but for only so long.  For instance, pistol packing Lisa confronts Ramrod at their barn hideout, but the punks get the jump on her.  The next scene has her tied to a tree in her underwear, which doesn’t bode well.  It turns out she was only stripped because Ramrod needed her clothes to sneak into town disguised as a normal, non-punk girl (pretty clever, really).  The punks guarding Lisa have their minds more on stick sword fighting rather than anything sordid.  At one point, Lisa is tied to the ground with rat cages at her hands, but no one lets the rats out, and Lisa doesn’t seem overly concerned.  It’s like the Spanish Inquisition staged by elementary schoolers.

Ramrod is the only legitimate badass in the bunch and stays on point the entire time.  It’s an interesting group dynamic.  She is so intense that no one dares question or challenge her, but she has a fierce, almost maternal attachment to her band of freaks.  She keeps things democratic, like asking for a vote on what they want to eat. Her administrative skills are solid.  She gets seriously fucking scary at times, like when she faces down Reed, ignoring his gun and makes her gang vote if they should rape the deputy before killing him.  I think she’s just trying to intimidate Reed (it works), but since she was the one getting aggressive with the daughter, who knows?  During a Viking funeral for some of her fallen punkmates (they just toss the bodies on the fire rather than making a fancy pyre), she advocates rampaging through the town and killing all the cops.  So, yeah, she’s a firecracker.  The dodgy kind, that might blow up in your hand as soon as you light the fuse.

Whether this was an intentional feminist nod or not, I like that the story is advanced by two assertive and (comparatively) competent women.  Lisa, while not as badass, is fearless in her personal pursuit of justice (not just revenge).  She certainly runs rings around the fantastically inept, all male police force.  Maybe if Lisa was the sheriff instead of the clueless, commie obsessed doofus, Virgel (“Did Patton call for the State Troopers when he invaded Iwo Jima?”), they wouldn’t be so useless.

This includes her boyfriend, Deputy Reed.  I’ve never seen a main character this bad at his job outside of a (intentional) comedy.  He  takes out one of the punks fleeing the scene of Mr. Kemper’s murder completely by accident.  He hits him with his car while pulling into the parking lot, knocking himself out in the process.  His investigative skills aren’t exactly razor sharp, either (“If they haven’t left the area, they might still be around.”).  At one point, he goes into the hospital carrying some girl we’ve never seen before.  When the nurse inquiries about what happened, he just says “Don’t ask.”  Both the girl and the nurse react like this isn’t unusual for Reed, and we never hear about it again.  My guess is that he accidentally shot her while trying to get her balloon out of a tree.  Again.

After Lisa is kidnapped, the movie switches tracks once more as Reed teams up with fellow cop Don (Don Martin) to come to the rescue.  Kind of a LETHAL WEAPON vibe, but with morons.  So, more like SAMURAI COP.  They make the smart call of not telling Sheriff Virgil what they are up to, because that lunatic would have gotten everyone, killed.  Instead they break into an unspecified house, steal some guns, and handle it themselves.  Astonishingly, not only do they get Lisa out unharmed, the take out a couple of punks along the way.  Also, Reed shoves a cucumber on to the barrel of his shotgun before shooting someone.  I…don’t know why that happened.

The climax brings another whiplash, putting us in the punk's camp when they face off against Virgil’s posse of drunken redneck hunters (including a Vietnam vet wearing a pith helmet, as Vietnam vets are known to do). The punks are automatically more sympathetic because ‘80s movie law always has drunken rednecks higher on the asshole scale.  Only Nazis rate worse.  The punks initially have the advantage because of Ramrod’s decisive planning.  Then they split up, and without her direct motivation, everyone’s bloodlust tanks, even the dude who was Special Forces in ‘Nam (or maybe just ROTC, they weren’t super clear on that).  The traps they set for the hunters make Kevin from HOME ALONE look like Jigsaw.  Rednecks get knocked off a pipe into a four-foot ditch, tripped down a slight hill slope, and caught in a net.  Luckily, the boozed-up gun nuts are too dumb to just lift the net over their head, so that buys some time for our heroes/villains.  

Everything boils down to the final confrontation between Lisa and Ramrod, the movie's emotional core.  And yes, there is an emotional core, and character arcs, though they resemble a Richter scale measurement more than a graceful arc.  Bullets are exchanged, justice is served.  Maybe?  I might have mentioned early that this movie can be a tad confusing.  

So many questions are left unanswered, such as what the hell did I just watch? Was this a gritty revenge story or a screwball comedy?  Will Feggy ever go fishing?  Director Stanley Lewis followed this up by not making movies anymore, as did most of the cast, so we may never know.  PUNK VACATION is a mess, but for reasons I can't explain, I still dig it.  Sometimes we should just follow Deputy Reed's advice and don't ask.

C. Chaka

Future Imperfect - AEON FLUX

I like movies that are puzzles.  Not just in Mysteries, but across all genres.  Movies that explicitly spell out every twist and development can come off as patronizing.  Part of the fun for me is trying to fill in the details and make the connections, right or wrong, myself.  Having to figure it out can make for a more challenging and engaging experience.  The 2005 Sci-fi acid trip AEON FLUX tests the limits of this argument. 

The Capsule:

After 99% of the planet’s population dies of a virus in 2011 (dodged a bullet there, I only had a sinus infection that year), the survivors are herded into a giant city called Bregna.  For the last 400 years, Bregna has been ruled by the Goodchild Dynasty, founded by the guy who cured the virus (because scientists always get all glory).  Things are pretty good in Bregna, except Gestapo-like police sometimes kidnap/kill people for no apparent reason. A rebel faction called the Monican are sick of this shit, so they send their top assassin, Aeon Flux (Charlize Theron) to kill the current chairman, Trevor Goodchild (Marton Csokas).  Before she can take him out, she is shocked to discover she shares a mysterious connection to the man somewhere in her forgotten past.  The jumble of memories and emotions leaves her, and the audience, confused.  To unravel the truth, she will have to team up with the man she was sent to kill.  Standing in the way of the answers are hundreds of machinegun toting goons, lethal plant based security systems, and her one time partner, Sithandra (Sophie Okonedo), who has hands for feet.  Believe me, I haven’t even scratched the surface of how weird this movie really is. 

I pride myself at being able to piece together—or just completely fabricate—some semblance of logic to the most convoluted sci-fi head scratchers.  This movie is so bugnuts insane, though, even I can’t make heads or tails or hand/feet out of parts of it.  This is partially because director Karyn Kusama ambitiously sought to make a truly fantastic and unique future world.  Mostly, though, it´s because the studio fired  Kusama after she finished the movie and chopped it up to the point of utter incomprehension.  Kusama was brought back in to edit it once their version did not play well for test audiences, but she wasn’t allowed to return the film to her vision.  The result was a complete mess that appealed to no one.  Except me.

You know you are in trouble when the movie begins with a few screens of exposition, followed immediately by voiceover of more exposition.  I was thinking “Well, at least they didn’t throw in a flashback,” when I realized the first ten minutes was a flashback.  Even with all that explanation, much of the plot is still mystifying.  There is an intriguing, if ludicrous, sci-fi premise at its core, but it gets lost in all the muddled motivations, sudden betrayals, and allegiance switches. 

One of the biggest unsolved questions is why the government are such authoritarian assholes.  It’s a counterproductive stance to have.  The society of Bregna isn’t a grimy, worn out dystopia like in BLADE RUNNER.  Everything is clean and shiny.  The citizens seem to be free of class divisions, poverty, and crime.  In fact, the number one occupation in Bregna is apparently just milling about aimlessly.  The Goodchild regime and the police seem to be the only ones with an official function.  Why do you need to have a strangle hold on your population if everyone is so chill?  The only real strife in the city is completely manufactured by the government.  People just disappear sometimes, or get killed by the cops.  There is a secret reason behind it, but the ruling party doesn't even bother trying to cover things up.  No one in the city has a clue what exists outside of Bregna’s walls.  It wouldn’t be hard to explain why people are missing.  “Oh Ted?  Yeah, he moved to literally anywhere else on Earth.  He said he’d send you a postcard.”  Problem solved.

The price for the regime being so heavy handed comes in the form of a secret resistance movement.  They are called the Monicans, presumably after Monica Geller from Friends, judging by Charlize Theron’s haircut.  They have a complex covert operation involving spies, operatives, and assassins, all getting their orders from the Handler (Frances McDormand, looking unsure of what she is doing there).  But just like the government they fight against, the Monicans are very vaguely defined.  Their only goal seems to be to kill Trevor Goodchild, and then later Aeon because she goes rogue.  The government paints them as the major, and possibly only, threat against their rule, but we never see why.  It’s all very elliptical.  The government goes after the Monicans because they fight back, and the Monicans fight back because the government goes after them.

No matter how much of a mess the plot is, there are few things that tickle my crazy sci-fi heart.  One is the gusto with which the filmmakers embrace the absurd future technology.  This is not like ALIEN or even BLADE RUNNER, where the technology is basically identifiable.  Okay, that’s a scanner, that’s a flamethrower, that’s a flying car, got it.  AEON FLUX is like Alice in Futureland.  Things don’t have contemporary correlations.  Government buildings are protected by gardens with hanging papayas that shoot poison darts and blades of grass are actual blades.  The Monicans communicate by using something like a telepathy pill that links their minds together in a virtual meeting hall.  Sort of a mental Skype call.  

Most stuff made sense in function, if not form.  Aeon leaves around a bunch of explosive ball bearings that come rushing to her like trained mice when she whistles.  She can peel off bits of her skin and use them like Band-Aids to close other people’s wounds.  Data is stored in liquid.  Some shit I have no clue about.  She finds this, um, wearable robotic squid in Trevor’s study that either teleported her to a lab or changed the study into a lab, or used a dimensional overlay to… I have no idea.  It made the fight scene more dynamic, so I’ll just go along with it.

Oh, and there’s a part where the Handler gives Aeon a map transferred through pollen coming out of a flower she produces from her mouth.  Because what else is she going to do, give her a piece of paper?  This is the future, damn it.

I’m kind of disappointed they didn’t go all out with it.  There are still basic things you can recognize, like tables and stairs and umbrellas.  Give me chairs growing out of the backs of large turtles, or thermostats that you control by licking.  

The movie does highlight the future of fashion, though.  Aeon is introduced in stylish Business Dominatrix chic, complete with a sheer head stocking.

She also has a negligee made from strings of beads, which seems like it would be difficult to sleep in.   

The best outfit goes to Pete Postlethwaite, who plays a ghost dressed like a cannoli with arms.  He lives in a giant jellyfish blimp. 

The design team put a lot of work into this movie.  Or a lot of drugs.

Compared to all the crazy shit constantly parading across the screen, the actual actors can seem a bit lost.  Theron puts forth a solid effort.  Aeon is no Furiosa by any stretch, but Theron gives her a similarly steely determination and supreme confidence.  Her combination of elegance and physicality makes her a believable super assassin.  The fights are what you would expect for the mid 2000’s, lots of quick cuts and close ups.  The emphasis is more on acrobatics, much like in the original MTV cartoon the movie is based on.  Aeon is constantly diving, swinging, or flipping over something.  She never just walks into a room when she can do a flying leap into one.  

Kusama creates a very female focused world without being overt about it.  Bregna has outgrown sexism the way it outgrew many of the old social ills (except fascism).  No one underestimates or patronizes Aeon because she is a woman.  While the majority of the government council is male, including Trevor’s brother Oren (Jonny Lee Miller, who we immediately identify as the real villain because he says nefarious things like “we can’t give them the luxury of hope”), the movie is filled with women in positions of power.  Most of the Monicans are women, as is Trevor’s formidable head of security, Freya (Caroline Chikezie).  The longest, most elaborate fight sequences are Aeon against Freya and then Sithandra.  The faceless male troopers can't last more than a few seconds against her.  Don't even start with the aristocratic fops on the council.  Women are the more formidable force in this town.

I would love to see Kusama’s original cut.  I have the feeling it would make much more sense while retaining the crazy bits.  I’d even like to see the studio’s version to see how they stuffed all this into 70 minutes (the theatrical version felt rushed at 93).  As it stands, the current cut is a fascinating vision of unbound ambition hamstrung by studio interference.  Unsurprisingly, the compromised product did not do well at the box office, and we did not get an AEON FLUX 2.  That didn't stop Kusama, who continues to direct diverse and intriguing work, such as the exquisite THE INVITATION, and an incredibly creepy segment of the all female directed horror anthology, XX.   As for AEON FLUX, it can be appreciated for its wild concepts and gorgeous visuals.  No matter what you think of the movie, it has a woman with hands for feet.  Where else are you going to get that?

C Chaka