Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Getting Lucky (1990)

Directed by Michael Paul Girard
Starring Steven Cooke, Lezley Z McCraw, Rick McDowell
Rated R
USA

"Some stupid nerd threw puke water on me and Tony. This is Tony, by the way."

One of the more amateurish bits of teensploitation flotsam out there, Getting Lucky is a very low-level Troma pick-up about a nerdy high school kid named Bill (Steven Cooke), who is in love with a terminally depressed cheerleader named Krissi (Lezley Z McCraw), and is constantly menaced by a possibly gay bully/rapist/big man on campus named Tony (Rick McDowell). Like all nerds, Bill's always thinking ahead, so he looks for a part-time job to help pay for his college tuition, and that's where the trouble/story/wonderfulness starts.

Bill snags a job as the football team's towel boy, a job no one's held for more than a week. Bill finds out why pretty quickly. In a scene that is looking more and more like a gay gang rape, Tony drops his towel and demands that Bill pick it up - with his teeth.
"I think my hand would be more effective," he stammers.
"Yeah well, I bet I've got something your hand would be pretty effective on," Tony says, grabbing his crotch.
Where the fuck are we going with this, Mr. Girard?
Tony takes a thermos full of spoiled milk he found in his locker and pours it on the floor. That's got to be some sort of semen reference. Anyway, he makes Bill clean it up while the other dudes crowd around him screaming "Towel boy!" like it's some sort of slur. I fully expected Tony to pull out his angry penis next and hit Bill in the eye with it, but instead, he manages to pull himself away from the man-on-towel-boy hijinks long enough to meet Krissi at the back of the school. She's got the hots for him, for some reason. Masochistic tendencies, maybe. Or brain damage.
"I thought you were going to stand me up," pouts Krissi.
"Hey, it would take a real dildo-brain to stand up a babe as hot looking as you," Tony says, planting a wet one on her.
"Oh Tony, you know how to say just the right things," says Krissi.

The two start rolling around on the grass. Tony manages to get Krissi's panties off. She tells him she's a virgin and isn't sure she wants to go through with it - perhaps getting fucked on the ground by the school asshole wasn't exactly how she envisioned her first time - but Tony keeps up a steady stream of bullshit ("It'll be like the greatest wave you've ever felt crashing down on you"), so she decides to just let 'em at it. But before he can penetrate this ripe young beauty, Bill comes bounding out of the locker room and accidentally douses the two lovers with his bucketful of bad milk. And so ends his career as a towel boy.

Later on, Bill's wandering around picking up trash (it's his thing, recycling) when he finds a leprechaun, Lepkey (Garry Kluger), in a beer bottle. I know, who hasn't, right? So, as they are wont to do, the tiny man in the bottle (that's actually a genie, but whatever) grants him three wishes. By the way, if you're envisioning a Warwick Davis-type Leprechaun, sadly, that's not the case here. Our magical midget is just a regular dude in a costume-shop Robin Hood outfit. Bill first asks for world peace, but Lepkey admits he's not a very good leprechaun, so that's probably thinking too big. His next wish is a date with Krissi. Lepkey thinks he can handle that one. Or can he? At that exact moment, Tony and Krissi are scheming on the phone about how to hook up away from the prying eyes of Krissi's overprotective mom. The plan is for Krissi to ask nerd-boy Bill out, and then bail on him to fuck Tony. And so, just when Lepkey claims to have granted Bill's wish, the phone rings.

Dopey Bill accepts the date, of course. He takes Krissi to the drive-in. They're showing Princess Warrior, which looks way more interesting than this. She asks Bill to get her some popcorn, and then sneaks away to Tony's car. After fumbling around with condoms forever, he settles on a handjob, but is rudely interrupted by Bill, who taps on the glass and tells his date that it's time to go home. They drive home in silence.

You may be wondering, at this point, where the laughs are. Well, me too. If Getting Lucky is actually some sort of existential horror film, then it's doing a bang-up job, because this is one of the most depressing, soul-sucking movies I think I've ever seen. If it's supposed to be a comedy, holy smokes, things are going badly.

Having failed at the date, Lepkey grants Bill a wish for a car (he asks for a Ferrari, but gets a Pinto), and when he's getting bullied by Tony, the leprechaun causes the asshole to beat himself with his own tennis racket, and then to shove it up his own ass. He gets carried away by paramedics, the racket tucked firmly but safely between his thighs.

A word, if I may, about Lezlie Z McCraw. You get used to bad, amateurish acting in these kinds of movies, but our girl Lezlie goes way beyond bad into this somnambulant non-acting fugue state. Her delivery is so distant, so eerily not-there-at-all that you start to wonder just what drugs she's on. My guess is a Nyquil/Valium cocktail. Also, in three-quarters of her scenes, she's being mauled by Tony. He almost always has his fingers jammed deep into her crotch. And yet, she never shows any signs of discomfort, even when the scene calls for it. Almost as if she's used to such brutish behavior. She's just fuckin' bizarre, man. Just what is your game, Lezlie Z? Please let me know, because you are freaking me out.

Anyway, Krissi has a change of heart and starts dating Bill. He takes her out for a round of miniature golf, and things go pretty swell. Afterward, however, he starts to wonder if she's really over Tony. Lepkey turns him into a cat, so he can spy on her. So, there he is, in cat form, getting stroked by Krissi, when Tony barges in.
"When I was in the hospital this afternoon and they were pulling the tennis racket out, all I could think of was you."
He actually says that. She rebuffs him and he tries to rape her while Bill-the-cat watches. Does any of this sound funny yet? Well, just wait until you hear what's next.

The next day, after the attempted rape hubbub dies down, Bill and Krissi are going to ride their bicycles to school together. Bill wants to adjust her brakes or something first, and his wrench is the wrong size. He asks Lepkey to change it for him, and the drunken little moron screws it up and shrinks Bill down to microscopic size. So he's stuck on Krissi's bike seat. She thinks he bailed on her, so she jumps on her bike and heads to school, while tiny Bill holds on for dear life inside her underwear. This effect is achieved by what looks like two sheets slung from the ceiling and some dyed rope to represent her vagina hair. The fake Supertramp song on the soundtrack during all of this goes "We can't get much closer, we can't get much closer..." Krissi goes to class, and in his attempts to climb his way out of her panties, Bill stimulates Krissi with such fervor that she has a screamy orgasm right at her desk.

After class, Krissi has cheerleader practice, and then she hits the showers. So there's a shower scene, at least. At some point, Bill falls out of her vagina and lands on the shower floor. Then he rolls around in bubbles for awhile. Lepkey finally figures out how to get Bill back to normal size, but he realizes he left his glasses and wrench in Krissi's vagina. This could prove fatal, but luckily, the offending objects just materialize in her underwear.

I don't know how/why this happens, but in the next scene, Bill's getting paddled by the principal. It's shot like man-on-manPOV porn. Halfway through, Lepkey gives the principal a heart attack. And then we move on.

Etc.

I'll give Getting Lucky this much: the last half-hour is so loony, there's just no way you could predict any of it. It's incredibly random. Horse fights? Shish Kebab duels? It's pretty nuts. It's also pretty tedious. Clearly, Girard tried his damnedest to bash out an entertaining film on a shoestring, but there are so many things wrong with this film that it's just a lost cause, really. Still, the film has developed a fervent cult of badfilm enthusiasts who will gush with Troll 2-esque passion about the panty debacle or Bill's playin'-the-sax-while-skateboardin' buddy, or the barbarian (spoiler alert!), but the whole mess just gave me a headache.

That being said, I'm still going to dig up some of Girard's post-Lucky films. Bikini Med School has got to be awesome. Right?

PS: If you never want to see any of these actors again, then your wish - wink, wink - is granted. Most of them never acted again.

Availability: Getting Lucky is available on DVD.

- Ken McIntyre

Fatty Girl Goes to New York (1982)

AKA Cicciabomba
Directed by Umberto Lenzi
Starring Donatella Rettore, Gena Gas, Adriana Russo, Anita Ekberg
Unrated
Italy

"Die, priest!"

There are two very difficult hurdles to get through before you can really enjoy the sorta-charming and quite sweet Fatty Girl Goes to New York. First, it was directed by Umberto Lenzi, the same crazy fucker that made Make Them Die Slowly. It is therefore quite difficult to watch this without flashing back to the scene with the live turtle getting hacked to ribbons, or any of the other bits of defenseless animal cruelty in that dumb movie. Who says he's not gonna hang a monkey or throw a kangaroo out the window in this one? Also, Fatty Girl is clearly not fat. She's a skinny girl with magic-marker freckles, cotton balls stuffed in her cheeks, and a series of clown-like fat suits. It's incredibly distracting, and almost Ed Wood-esque in its ineptitude.

But hey, besides the ridiculous looking protagonist and the constant threat of animal mutilation, things are pretty smooth sailing.

Mirsi (Donatella Rettore) is the 'Fatty Girl' of the title, a gregarious life-gulper whose self-esteem is sky-high, despite her weight and tragic wardrobe. Miri lives in a tiny Italian village called Happy, and works at Catholic Venetian Radio, where she hosts a popular call-in show, Magic Phone, the only program on the station that plays pop music and doesn't hold to a strict Catholic dogma. She's just as contrary at school, spending most of her time sticking up for her best friend Pinocchia (Adriana Russo, wearing a weird long-nose appliance) and plotting the downfall of cavalier cocksman Mirko (Dario Caporaso).

As the story begins, Mirko bribes Miri into writing a paper for his Greek class in exchange for a date, and then stands her up. Knowing this was his plan all along, Miri actually writes a paper detailing Mirko's plans to bone the principal's wife, thusly ending his career at that school.

Fuming, the freshly-expelled Mirko runs into Deborah (Gena Gas), Miri's vindictive beauty-queen sister, while she's being crowned Miss something-or-other. He quickly charms her and whisks her away in his car, sash and all. After hearing Miri on the radio and declaring his hate for her, he finds out that he just picked up his arch-enemy's sister, and together, they plot her downfall. Mirko invents an alter-ego, "Angelo". Angelo sends Miris flowers and calls in to her radio show, telling her how much he needs her. The vulnerable Miris falls in love with her phantom admirer, and so, when he leaves a note to meet him at the park one evening, she rushes to him - dressed exactly like the Hamburgler, in a striped shirt, giant floppy hat, and a cape - only to find a smirky Mirko and his douchebag friends. They spray her with hoses and call her "Fatty girl" until she cries.

The next day, someone brings in a tape of Miris declaring her love for "Angelo" and plays it over the intercom at school. And then she gets fired from the radio station. They replace her with a nun. Miris can take no more abuse, and decides to commit suicide. But before she puts her head in the oven, she decides to eat her last box of chocolates. Inside the box, she finds a golden envelope. She opens it to find that she's won a prize: a free trip to New York City.
"I'll kill myself another day," she says. "I won first prize!"

Miris makes it to New York and while she's riding the escalator in the airport, she's spotted by Baroness Von Kemp (a very past-her-prime Anita Ekberg).
"There she is," the Baroness shouts at her assistant. "I've found my creature!"

Seems the Baroness has inherited some sort of diet-powder company from her dead husband, and she wants to use Miris as her test subject. Since the gunk is made from swordfish bones, she dresses Miris up in a fish costume for the "before" picture in a proposed magazine ad. Miris is not quite sure why this is happening - she tells the Baroness repeatedly that she's happy being fat - but what the hell. Crazy shit happens in New York.

So, Miris spends her days eating fishbone soup and running around Times Square in a bright orange jumpsuit. Eventually, she loses the weight and gets a makeover, which is awesome, because watching her walk around in the clown suits for 40 minutes was pretty tiresome. Unfortunately, this being 1982 - and an Italian 1982, at that - her new look involves giant shoulder pads and a blonde Duran Duran pompadour. So I'm not sure it was much of an improvement. Anyway, she goes on a television show and performs a song (Rettore was actually an Italian pop star at the time) that goes, in part, "My head exploded/with these thin legs, I'd like a sandwich."

Soon, everybody wants their own bowl of fishbone soup. To show how much of a star Miris has become, Lenzi has her do the 'My Head Exploded' song over and over, in different outfits. Occasionally he even flashes a hilariously unconvincing cut-and-pasted magazine cover with Miris' face on it.


Miris spends some time in soaking up the limelight, but eventually decides to go home and rub everybody's face in her fame and good looks. She runs into her friend Pinnocchia, who had plastic surgery to snip off her long, pointy nose. The two hotsy-totsies head over to Miris' house, where they find Deborah on the roof, threatening to jump.

Turns out Mirko, that cad, promised to marry her and then changed his mind, telling her he's marrying the mayor's daughter, Simona (adorable Paola Rinaldi), instead. Naturally, Miris concocts a plan to fuck up Mirko's life again.

I'll leave you to find out how she does it. It involves a chicken and a transvestite.

The very height of frivolous - and surprisingly coy, especially from a guy who directs cannibal movies - Fatty Girl Goes to New York is nevertheless pretty fuckin' delightful. This was Rettore's first film, and despite the ridiculous half-hour she spent in a fat suit, she did fine job playing the ever-plucky Miris. During the second half of the movie she pretends to be an FBI agent from New York City, and does a squeaky American accent (in Italian) that's quite funny. Its been mentioned that you don't actually need to know Italian to watch and enjoy this movie, and it's true. The half-assed subtitles help, of course, but if they weren't there, Rettore's animated performance and faux-American squeals tell the story perfectly. There are also some very funny regional flourishes: the grumpy priest, Miris' chief rival at the radio station, opens his morning-drive show with "It's 7 AM...more or less."
That seems hilariously Italian to me. There's lots of treacly 80's Italian pop to sample on the soundtrack, hideous fashions to scoff at, and some very striking women to ogle, including the gorgeous Gena Gas who, like Rettore, was a pop singer dabbling in acting. Hardcore sleaze beasts or celebrity skin enthusiasts will probably want to stay away from this lighter-than-air concoction, but if you're in the mood for some wispy, goofy fun, Fatty Girl Goes to New York is well worth a look. It does not let Lenzi off the hook for Make Them Die Slowly, but it at least shows he was capable of more than penis chopping and animal abuse.

Availability
: Fatty Girl Goes to New York is available on DVD.

Clip: Listen to Gena Gas's 1982 hit SOS Ti Amo!



Clip: Rettore as Miris in Fatty Girl:



Clip: Rettore perfoming Kamikaze Rock N' Roll Suicide on some loony Italian TV show, 1982:


- Ken McIntyre

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