“High Water” Does Not Float My Boat

We aren’t in Poland anymore, Toto! Nice moment from trailer.

The thing that got me interested in watching High Water, a Polish TV series about a flood in Warsaw, was a single scene from the trailer. It showed a woman walking out onto a balcony or something like that which gives a partial view of a city street. She looks bewildered as several zebras run down the street.

I thought that was brilliant. Such a simple powerful and economical way of telling viewers that something weird is definitely going on. I thought a filmmaker who came up with such a scene for their trailer might know what he’s up to.

And mostly I was right. The main characters are Jasmina Tremer, a hydrologist, and Jakub Marczak, the head of the governmental agency that’s responsible for dealing with floods. The early going had a nice sense of foreboding to it. People went about their business but there was a sense of something ominous approaching. (Such as a flood!)

*Marczak (played by Tomasz Schuchardt) and Tremer (played by Agnieszka Zulewska). In many scenes Schuchardt looks unnervingly like Nick Offerman, who played Ron Swanson in “Parks & Recs.”*

Early on I wasn’t sure exactly how much information the scientists and engineers and bureaucrats had about the oncoming flood. A lot of them were maintaining that Warsaw would be unaffected by the flood. The streets would just be a little damper than usual. I found this puzzling. In my experience floods are well anticipated thanks to our modern communications structure and general knowledge about how flooding works. But you got no sense of any such knowledge among the bureaucrats in Warsaw.

Our heroine of course sees the danger almost immediately when she’s called in to help with the flood control effort by Marczak, who coincidentally is also her ex-husband. She launches into intense research on the city’s hydrology and flood history. Soon she is berating the Warsaw bureaucrats for their lack of concerned about the flood and for their general incompetence. I suspect that berating Warsaw bureaucrats for incompetence and indifference prior to the flood was an important agenda for the series.

Still I thought the moviemakers were doing an excellent job of building up dramatic tension for scenes of lots of water being in places it definitely should not be. I even like the hydrology research scenes. They developed Tremer’s expertise as a hydrologist and they helped viewers get a sense of the potential scale of the disaster.

Unfortunately we learned something about Tremer that kind of ruined it for me. Yes she is Marczak’s ex-wife and they have had a bitter custody dispute over their daughter. Which Marczak has won and not just because he’s an important bureaucrat. He won the custody dispute because ex-wife Tremer is also an ex-heroin addict.

Here’s the thing. I could buy a brilliant hydrologist who is also an ex junkie (and who is still on methadone by the way). What I couldn’t buy is an ex-junkie hydrologist who yells at other hydrologists and scientists and engineers and bureaucrats and generally throws her weight around.

Being an ex-junkie, socially she has no weight. She is an ex junkie. I have trouble believing a junkie would throw her weight around like that. Surely a junkie of all people would know that human beings are generally irrational. Surely an ex junkie would know that yelling at people rarely influences them. Junkies generally have had plenty of experience being yelled at about their drug habit and have generally noticed that the yelling has done little or nothing to stop them. And ex-junkies would undoubtedly know that in any dispute, people would use their former addict status against them.

But Tremer thinks that yelling at middle-aged men who are not junkies and who are clearly full of themselves, as experts are wont to be, will somehow make her opinions win out.

In short, I found myself totally unable to buy the main character as written. She was obnoxious, annoying and made no sense. Her supposed brilliance as a hydrologist just couldn’t make up for a character that was mostly flaws. So I gave up on the series.

It’s a shame. In so many other respects the storytelling was really good. And the trailer also made it clear that I missed a lot of exciting scenes of large amounts of water being in places where they definitely shouldn’t be. But I just couldn’t get past how badly conceived and written Tremer’s character was. And frankly anyone who writes the main character that badly is probably going to screw up in other respects somewhere on down the line. So after 1 ½ episodes, I gave the series a pass. I may have made a mistake, but I really don’t think so.

“October Faction” Loses To Bad Writing

I was initially interested in the Netflix series October Faction because it had a fairly interesting premise. It’s about a mixed race couple (Fred and Delores Allen) who work for a shadowy agency that fights supernatural evils. He’s white and from old money she’s black and from the middle class (the fictional movie middle class that includes everyone who’s not a multimillionaire or from the hood, or both). They have two high school age children whom they’ve been protecting from their highly dangerous supernatural fighting activities. It sounded like there could be a lot of fun derived from a situation like this. I mean, Tim Powers-level fun.

Also, the son is gay, so the mixed-race marriage is just part of ticking all the boxes (I was hoping it was about working with class differences, but nope). Now generally when you encounter writing that ticks all the diversity boxes and you have a major older white male cishet character, he’s got to be evil, bigoted or an asshole or some combination of those traits, with little or nothing in the way of redeeming traits. But to the creators’ credit they portray Mr. Allen as a fun and interesting person.

Unfortunately the writing skill that led the creators to develop this interesting premise apparently vanished when they started writing the actual scripts. The first episode was what killed it for me and for my wife when we gave the series a shot. We only got glimpses of the supernatural fighting and of the shadowy government agency. Most of the series’ first episode was bogged down in family drama. Teen family drama, the absolute worst kind of family drama. Teen family drama seemed pretty boring to me when I was a teen. As an adult it’s excruciatingly boring.

What was delivered.

But the clincher that totally killed both of our interests in watching the show beyond the first episode was a scene between the Allens after they had just fought a couple of supernatural entities. They’re sitting in a car and Delores wants to talk about important family issues and Fred doesn’t. Both the dialogue and the acting were horribly flat and off. The scene was like nails on a chalkboard. It just completely threw both of us out of the storyline. You can’t focus on the story when the writing is that bad. The lines were like something that would show up as parody dialogue in something like the “I Know What You Did” series. Only it wasn’t supposed to be funny, it was supposed to be dramatic. And it was just horrible.

I don’t want to leave the impression that the actors who play the mom and the dad are bad actors. They are not bad actors. When given a chance to do or say something interesting they do a fine job. They just weren’t able to bring the wretched scene to life. I don’t think that Gary Oldman and Meryl Streep working at their best could have done a hell of a lot with that scene.

The writing may be bad because the TV series is based on a graphic novel of the same name. Generally (but not always) graphic novel and comic book writing are inferior to real writing. Sorry, comic book fans, that’s just the truth. The “Savage Sword of Conan” comic series, which originally were based directly on Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories and had incredibly good pen and inkwork eventually ran out of Howard stories and substituted original stories by comic book writers. Let’s just say the difference was notable, I mean, REALLY notable. It wasn’t just a matter of mediocre writing looking bad next to great writing. It was “what IS this brain-damaged swill doing in something with Robert E. Howard’s name on it?”

Now I don’t know if that’s the problem with the writing in the October Faction TV series, I just know that if I were a comic-book character, whenever I see “based on the comic book” or “based on the graphic novel” question marks would appear above my head.

The series may improve as the season goes along but I’m absolutely not interested in subjecting myself to any more horrifically bad writing in order to find out. I have better things to do with my life such as watching paint dry.

(There won’t be a second season, Netflix canceled the series after the first season. Good call for once, Netflix.)

“Yup” to “Nope”

I’m going to give a great big “yes” to Jordan Peele’s film Nope. I nearly made the same mistake with Nope that I made with Ridley Scott’s Alien when it first came out. I did not watch Alien until it had been out for years because I thought it was just a horror movie.

I thought the science fiction background was just that, a simple background for some monster running around killing people. I was very wrong. Alien was in a very well conceived science fiction universe. Although there were lots of horrific deaths in Alien that wasn’t the main point of the movie. The main point of the movie was to frighten viewers with the notion of how hostile and unforgiving the universe might be, that there might be animals out there that are more deadly than any predators we have ever encountered on Earth, and which can prey on us quite successfully.

And while I don’t want to give away any spoilers about Nope it is a movie very much in the same vein of Alien. The monster is wonderfully well thought out, much better thought out than Alien’s monster. It is a real out of context problem of a monster. The humans who encounter it often die not just because of the monsters capabilities as a predator, but because the humans can’t understand the nature of the problem they are facing.

The main characters are well crafted as well. You find them appealing and you want them to survive. (Many movies do not manage this.) The main characters’ abilities and personalities also work very well with the plot. You understand how they are able to do what they do and also why they fail at times.

Although I am not a fan of horror movies I would say that Nope gets full marks for being an excellent horror movie. In addition to the simple horror of human beings being maimed and killed, it also conveys the much more difficult but much more rewarding Lovecraftian horror. You will get your full share of chills and thrills and unearthly horror from Nope.

Nope is one of the best movies I have seen in quite a while. I am very glad that I saw it relatively quickly and did not mistake it for a simple horror film for years as I did with Alien.

Watch this movie if you get a chance. It will be worth it.

9000 Words on “White Oleander” The Book and the Movie: Spoilers Abound

White Oleander, the book cover. I have NO idea why the woman on the cover is a brunette.

Warning: this essay is going to compare the book “White Oleander” with the movie “White Oleander” and will spoil the living shit out of both. If you have not watched the movie/read the book, stop reading this essay right now and watch the movie/read the book. I would recommend the book over the movie, but the movie is fine as well.

As wonderful as this essay may be, it’s not nearly as good as reading ”White Oleander” or watching the movie. Don’t cheat yourself.

This essay is also 8800 words long. You have been warned.

“White Oleander” is about Astrid Magnussen, a young girl (she is 12 when the book opens) whose mother Ingrid kills her lover and is caught and sentenced to prison for it, leavin Astrid to languish in the California foster care system for most of her teenage years.

If this sounds like a Lifetime Channel tearjerker movie to you, I don’t blame you for thinking so. It definitely has the form of a Lifetime tearjerker, but it’s very different in its focus and intent, and it ignores the conventions of the genre completely.

White Oleander is more of a coming-of-age story, but it’s a very unconventional coming-of-age story. Astrid must deal with the various foster families she lives with while in the foster care system, and the events that occur as she does so. And most of all, she must deal with her mother Ingrid, who is a domineering bitch. Many reviewers have called Ingrid a narcissist and a sociopath, some even going so far as to say she is a narcissistic sociopath, and certainly she’s a narcissist, though I don’t believe she’s a total sociopath. Certainly, she’s close enough for hand grenades and horseshoes. But there’s an alternate interpretation of Ingrid that I think is more interesting than just labeling her a sociopath.

When we first meet Ingrid and Astrid, they are living in Los Angeles. Ingrid is earning her living as a paste-up artist for a movie mag called ”Cinema Scene,” making $8 an hour, a near-minimum wage even in the late 1980s (my, how things don’t change). Barry Kolker, one of the movie movers and shakers who shows up in the pages of “Cinema Scene,” is dating one of the editors at the magazine, and he spots Ingrid.

Very shortly thereafter Kolker has dumped the editor and is pursuing Ingrid. That’s because Ingrid is ravishingly beautiful. “Every girl thinks her mother is the most beautiful woman she has ever seen, but my mother was the most beautiful woman anyone I knew had ever seen,” Astrid says in the book. Michelle Pfeiffer was cast as Ingrid Magnussen, and she is a dead perfect in the role.

Ingrid and Astrid’s beauty is an important plot point, actually. They are beautiful, and they are very aware they are beautiful. In fact, Ingrid is snobbish about her beauty. She does not like people who are not as attractive as her and criticizes them for their looks very freely.

Astrid is not yet the beauty her mother is, but she’s well on her way, and in the same cool Scandanavian blond way. And she is very conscious of how she looks to other people, and uses her looks to her advantage at times.

Ingrid works as a paste-up artist but in her free time she is a poet and artist, creating poems and art projects. She gets her poems published by the sort of publishers that publish poems, and her art projects show up in the sort of galleries that show art projects. She’s fairly successful but it’s definitely a niche market and there’s no money at all in it … hence her $8 an hour paste-up job.

Ingrid is a raging narcissist, and she has nothing but contempt for people who are powerful but do not measure up to her scale of beauty and artistry.

Barry Kolker doesn’t measure up on either count. He’s older, overweight, and a bit of a pig. But he pursues Ingrid while Ingrid mocks him thoroughly to Astrid. She eventually dates Kolker, and falls for him despite his total unsuitability from her aesthetic point of view.

A cynical man might suspect that she allows herself to fall for Kolker because he’s wealthy and shows her the good life, something that her past lovers have done, though those lovers were handsome and aesthetically pleasing to Ingrid.

Countering that notion we have the fact that Ingrid is not at all interested in things like fine meals, except perhaps for their aesthetic elements. Astrid recalls that Ingrid could eat nothing but peanut butter for days on end without even appearing to notice it. (Astrid does not give us her feelings on the matter of eating nothing but peanut butter for days on end, but given that it’s a childhood memory, I bet it stuck with her for a reason.)

Ingrid is entirely focused on the aesthetics of her life, and she feels that the hardships she encounters as an $8 an hour pasteup artist and single mother are the attempts of the world to break her and her daughter’s spirit. She often reminds Astrid of their Viking heritage, that they came from people who slew their gods and hung their body parts from trees.

That’s how Ingrid sees herself and her daughter, as beautiful, heroic Vikings struggling to maintain their standards in a world that has no appreciation of them, except perhaps for their beauty, which is unattainable by most.

Kolker starts ghosting a bit on Ingrid, and she suspects something is up, so she drives out to meet up with him at his apartment, leaving Ingrid in the car.

The meeting goes fabulously at first. Ingrid and Kolker make love. But then Kolker throws Ingrid out, saying she has to leave because he has a date arriving soon.

Now that is cold.

But there’s a risk to being cold, Kolker learns. Ingrid conceives a deep and aesthetic hatred for Kolker. Ingrid’s hatred leads her to stalk Kolker and harass him, breaking into his house and erasing all the data on his 1980s PC, finally culminating in murdering Kolker with the juice of the white oleander. The white oleander is a plant that has significance to Ingrid because it is a hardy desert plant that can thrive where other plants can’t, but still puts out beautiful, waxy white blossoms … and of course, it’s deadly poisonous. It’s a very aesthetically pleasing murder, you can see how Ingrid couldn’t resist it.

And that’s why the simple sociopath label is a mistake. it makes it too easy to gloss over all the character development that led Ingrid to murder Kolker. I think a large portion of Ingrid’s motivation for murdering Kolker was wounded pride from being rejected by Kolker after relaxing her standards so much for him.

And possibly I’m reading too much into it, but perhaps one of the reasons Ingrid relaxed her standards for Kolker was that she was interested in settling down with him. She knew very well that she was beautiful, and that she was capable of attracting almost any man she wanted to, in fact, she frequently attracted men she was not particularly interested in attracting – like Kolker, initially. And when Kolker dumps her, it’s an even more powerful denial for her.

Well what with all the stalking and break-ins, it doesn’t take the cops long to figure out who killed Kolker, and Astrid wakes up one morning to see Ingrid being hauled away by the cops in handcuffs. Ingrid yells to Astrid that they can’t keep her and she’ll be back in a few hours.

Astrid can’t believe what’s happened. She knew her mother had murdered Kolker, but she never dreamed she be jailed for it … that was the sort of thing that only happened to less refined, less attractive people. Making it worse is that Astrid absolutely adores her mother. Like the child she is (she is 12 or 13 when the murder is committed) she has uncritically accepted her mother’s view of herself and the world.

But Ingrid does not return, instead, after a day or two, Child Protective Services finally comes to the apartment, where Astrid has been keeping vigil for Ingrid. She’s told she has 15 minutes to pack all her things, then it’s off to the CPS processing center.

Astrid gets placed in a foster home presided over by the mother, Starr, an ex-stripper who still dresses to reveal her ripe body. There are also two boys in the home, and a girl slightly older than Astrid, Coralee, who is Starr’s natural daughter. There’s also Ray, a carpenter who is married to a woman he hasn’t seen in five years and is Starr’s boyfriend.

Starr is an ex-alcoholic thanks to some recently acquired devout Christianity. She buys clothes for Astrid and pretty soon has her baptized, which does not exactly make Astrid a devout Christian. But as she tells Peter, the older of the two boys whom she has taken a liking to, it’s good to have something to believe in. One gets the sense that Astrid has adopted Christianity as a fall-back position, a bit of safety given that her mother’s philosophy does not seem to have worked out.

This is a recurring theme of the book, the way Astrid learns from and adapts to the various families she lives among.

Starr’s family is mostly nice people, and Astrid finds them comfortable people to live among. Uncle Ray, as Starr’s boyfriend is called, takes a friendly interest in Astrid, and teaches her to play chess, which she really enjoys — it’s an echo of the aesthetic life with her mother.

Eventually Astrid finds Ray very attractive sexually, and she knows Ray finds her attractive, too, having inherited her mother’s ability to use her beauty and to be aware of its effect on other people.

Meanwhile, Astrid gets a letter from her mother, who has been sentenced to 35 years to life in prison for murdering Kolker. Throughout her time in foster homes, Ingrid and Astrid correspond, maintaining their bond though Astrid become less and less happy about her mother over time, and with good reason.

Ingrid is amused by Astrid’s new clothing but she is incensed when she learns that Astrid has been baptized and gone Christian, as she feels it is a repudiation of her violent Viking beliefs. This tension between Astrid and her mother over the new ideas and lifestyles Astrid encounters is a running theme in the book that eventually leads to tragedy. (Well, more tragedy.)

Astrid and the other kids are allowed to visit the library, and in the library she finds a book that really fires her mind up: a survival guide. You know, one of those books that recount how shipwrecked sailors on rafts survived for weeks and months on end by drinking the dew from the masts of their boats, that sort of thing. When Astrid encounters adversity, and she’ll encounter a lot of it, she goes back to this book, thinking of the privations people has endured to encourage herself to endure her own privations.

This is the key to understanding Astrid, I think. Her life prior to Kolker’s murder was wasn’t your typical middle class life, but her mother whom she idolized was (almost) always there, caring for her. That life was wiped away in an instant, when the cops came for her mother. Astrid sees Starr’s family as a raft she is on after her old life foundered, and she must do whatever she can to survive.

But even in survival mode, Astrid wants a little goodness from life. The particular bit of goodness she wants is Ray. She knows Ray is attracted to her, and she is attracted to him, mostly for his goodness and kindness and maleness. He is far from attractive: slightly overweight, three fingers missing, he’s very much a regular guy, but a nice regular guy. I pictured him as a buffer, tanner version of Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski, maybe a little younger, too.

Ingrid divines from Astrid’s letters that she is attracted to Ray and is, of course, incensed. “Never lay down for the father!” she declares. She doesn’t tell Astrid she’s to young at 14 to have sex, no she just tells Astrid not to have sex with Dad. Which is good advice. Which Astrid does not take. Astrid is not at all swayed by her mother’s command, she is more concerned with the fact that sleeping with Ray is counter to traditional morality. Ray is Starr’s man, the woman who has taken her in, and it’s wrong to steal him. Astrid knows that. But still, she wants Ray, and it’s Ingrid’s Nietzschean “Do what thou wilt” that Astrid finally goes with. She manages to be alone with Ray in one of the houses he is building and makes her move. With her mother’s beauty and sexuality, even young as she is, Ray doesn’t resist her when she makes her move, and soon they are sexually “breaking in” rooms in unfinished houses all over Los Angeles.

Starr gets wind of the attraction between Astrid and Ray and threatens to call Child Protective Services, but Astrid dissuades her by pointing out that it might make Ray angry if he thinks she has thrown Astrid out, and by swearing she is not attracted to Ray — straight-up lying.

Starr starts drinking shortly thereafter, and not too long after gets into a drunken rage and grabs Ray’s 38 caliber pistol and perforates Astrid with a bullet. Ray drags Starr off and the older son calls 911 and patches Astrid up, saving her life, but leaving the family destroyed.

Astrid of course is overwhelmed with guilt, feeling that she has inherited her mother’s poisonous sexuality. Like a kid, she thinks everything is all about her. She’s guilty of taking Starr’s man, true, but she never even considers that Ray should have been enough of an adult to refuse to have sex with her. Or that Starr should not have taken up drinking. Or that Starr should not have shot her. No, it’s all Astrid’s fault, in her mind … she’s still 14. It’s all about her dangerous sexuality, you see.

The one consolation Astrid gets is letters from Ingrid in which she expresses her grief and fear when she learns that Astrid has been shot and might not make it out of the hospital, and then her relief and joy when she learns that Astrid will live.

When Astrid gets out of the hospital, her next foster home is Marvel Turlock’s. Astrid describes them as “my first real family” and by that she means thoroughly middle class, with the father a nebbishy sort, and the mother, Marvel, is a Mary Kay cosmetics saleswoman. Marvel, a dour and domineering woman, mainly wants Astrid to function as a maid and domestic assistant, roles which Astrid adapts to readily, still in survival mode. Meanwhile, there is school, where she does well, her mother having done a really good job of educating her in everything except math.

While surviving in Marvel’s home, Astrid becomes curious about Marvel’s next door neighbor, Olivia Johnstone, a beautiful black woman who is gone much of the time. She hears Marvel describe Olivia as a “nigger who thinks she is better than us with her nice cars, but we all know how she makes her money — flat on her back.”

This of course pique’s Astrid’s interest big time, and shortly thereafter she has finagled her way into Olivia’s life and they become friends. Olivia it turns out is a high-class courtesan sort of prostitute, a well-educated former professional with lots of wealthy clients who pay her very well to be their arm candy and mistress as occasion demands. Soon she is taking Astrid on trips to Rodeo Drive to go shopping with her, and introducing her to a very different lifestyle than she has experienced with Ingrid, Starr or Marvel.

Astrid of course wants to try out this prostitution thing, and she has also been wanting to smoke some pot (Ray smoked pot, and shared his pipe with Astrid during their special times together. Ray was a nice guy, but careless in many respects, which may be why he lost his first family, not to mention his fingers.)

She knows some of the bad boys at school smoke pot, as she walks past them on her way home, and stops by and makes a deal with the dealer of the bunch, sucking his cock in exchange for a baggie of pot. She found it not at all exciting to suck the boy’s cock, nor did she find it particularly horrible or disgusting, but she liked having the pot. (Granted, Astrid’s experiences up to that point had given her very high standards for horrible and disgusting.)

And speaking of horrible and disgusting experiences, when Astrid is out jogging one evening, she’s severely mauled by a group of neighborhood dogs, sending her to the hospital once again. This is probably the most blatantly bad plotting in the book … it drops into the story out of nowhere, and goes nowhere. I’m just mentioning it because it’s a major event in Astrid’s stay with the Turlocks. I think Fitch might have stuck it in there just to have something physically horrible happen to Ingrid during her stay with the Turlocks. She got shot by Starr and mauled by dogs while with the Turlocks, who knows what adventures await her?

When Astrid tells Olivia about her little foray into prostitution, Olivia says, “That’s not what I meant,” which I think means that she doesn’t think that sucking boy’s cocks for pot is the way to become a high-priced courtesan. But Astrid likes the pot so she keeps at it, having no other way to get pot.

Ingrid is pissed when she learns that Astrid has made friends with a prostitute, and advises her to run from away from the woman because she is a tool of the Powers That Be and that Astrid will learn nothing from her but how to be used by the Powers That Be. Astrid is unpersuaded … perhaps because at this point her mother, having destroyed her own family with her sexuality and gotten herself a 35 years to life prison sentence to boot, has very little credibility with Astrid on the topic of handling sexuality or anything else.

Eventually, and it’s very eventually, Marvel gets wind of Astrid’s hanging out with a prostitute, pot smoking and such, and calls the cops down on Olivia and then calls Child Protective Services. So it’s off to a new home for Astrid.

Astrid is pretty sick about it. Life at the Turlocks was dull but stable, other than the occasional mauling by dogs.

Astrid’s new foster mother is Amelia Ramos and life under Amelia’s care is very stable, too, except for one thing. Ramos has about half a dozen young charges, and she was making good money from CPS for fostering them, so to maximize the money, she starved them. Not to death, just enough to keep them able to move and function. But undernourished enough that it affects Astrid’s academic performance in school, in the sense that the numbers and letters on the page kind of swim in front of her eyes and she can’t concentrate.

Astrid also scrounges through the school garbage for food and she still has vivid red scars on her face from the dog attack, so she’s considered a freak by her schoolmates.

Astrid is surprisingly cool with this. She says, “The scars on my inside should show on my outside.”

She is 14 or 15 at this point, and this is just the sort of thing you would expect a 15 year old to say. Very teen angsty, though Astrid has come by her angst honestly.

Astrid complains to Child Protective Services about not being fed, repeatedly, but the caseworker in charge of her is in awe of Ramos and doesn’t buy it. Fortunately, after several months of starvation Astrid’s caseworker leaves the job and a new caseworker comes in and takes Astrid’s complaints seriously and gets her moved to another home.

This doesn’t help the half a dozen or so other girls being starved at Ramos’ place, but none of them dares to complain because they fear that if they do, they will be taken to MAC, the MacConnell Children’s Center where children go when they can’t get placed at a foster home. The kids at Ramos’ place are terrified of it, trading the devil they know for the devil they don’t know.

The new caseworker places Astrid in a home that works out far better than any of the others she has been in. The husband, Mark Richards, is a successful reality show producer of a series that specializes in woo … haunted houses, that sort of thing. The wife, Claire Richards, is an actress who is not nearly so successful. Mark’s job keeps him on the road much of the time, and Claire is left alone in the house, and it’s clear that Astrid is there to keep her company.

But Claire does something that none of her other foster parents did: she gives Astrid unconditional love. This is something Astrid has never encountered before, because of course narcissist Ingrid considers Astrid to be a flawed extension of herself, when she notices Astrid at all.

Astrid of course returns Claire’s love. She has been starved for love all her life, and she opens right up to Claire. She finally understands what it’s like to be loved for who you are, without any caveats, and she loves it.

Astrid tells Claire all about herself and of course Claire is fascinated by Ingrid, the doomed poetess done wrong by her man.

Ingrid senses Astrid’s affection for Claire from her letters and hates Claire, which is a Very Bad Thing because Claire is a gentle soul who is prone to depression, suspecting that Mark’s frequent absences involve infidelity. In fact, Mark and Claire’s real motivation for fostering Astrid was so that she could kind of watch Claire and not let her kill herself in a fit of depression.

Claire and Ingrid correspond. There is nothing Astrid can do to stop them from corresponding. She tries to tell Claire how dangerous and evil her mom can be, but Claire does not take Astrid seriously, she is blinded by Ingrid’s brilliance as an artist. Eventually Claire wants to meet Ingrid, and Astrid finds herself forced to come along, filled with dread, knowing her mother is going to do something terrible to Claire. And of course, Ingrid does just that, very deliberately. She even advises Astrid to “Keep your bags packed” before the visit is over.

Over the Christmas holidays, one of the few times when Mark is sure to be home, he gets called away to chase some woo happening somewhere for his show, and it really cranks up Claire’s fear of abandonment and infidelity, which of course are EXACTLY the feelings Ingrid worked on when she spoke alone with Claire during their visit.

So after Mark’s tumultuous departure for the land of woo, Astrid hides because she can’t handle the turmoil in the one place she’d found that she felt loved at. Later she goes and comforts Claire, and sleeps with her, not in the sexy way, even though Claire gives Astrid a kiss full on the lips. Astrid says she would have let Claire do anything to her sexually at that point, she loved Claire so much (but also not in a specifically sexual way, just general love for her as a person). But it’s not a sexy kiss, it’s a goodbye kiss, because when Astrid wakes up the next morning she finds Claire is dead, with a spilled bottle of sleeping pills next to her.

This understandably freaks Claire out, and she spends half a day wandering around mindlessly in the house, then calls Mark.

With her foster mother dead, Astrid winds up at the MacConnell Children’s Center, the MAC that all the starvelings at Ramos’ home feared so much. It is a rough place: Astrid cuts her long blond hair short because the boyfriend of another girl at MAC comments that he thinks Astrid is pretty and the girl and her friends jump Astrid and rough her up.

But other than that, MAC turns out to be a pretty nice place. Its institutional predictability is comforting to Astrid after so much trauma in the families she has been placed with. Nobody there loves her, but nobody there shoots her or kills themselves, and she can handle a little beating … on the scale of things she has been through, it’s minor.

Also, while she’s there, she meets a boy, Paul Trout, who is an artist like Astrid. Well, not like Astrid, he draws comics instead of doing watercolors like Astrid. But she sees genuine artistry in his comics, and although she doesn’t become his girlfriend, exactly, they do become friends through their shared interest in art and in being outsiders (white kids are relatively rare in the foster child system generally and especially MAC, which the book does acknowledge in places. It’s part of the White Oleander theme of the book: rare, poisonous plants with beautiful white blossoms, you see.)

Both Paul and Astrid are eventually placed with new homes, but Paul has an arrangement with a local comics store that’s happy to function as a mail drop for him while he’s with a home (Paul runs away from his foster homes a lot) and also setting up a drop for Astrid, so they can communicate.

Astrid gets a chance to go home with a very nice suburban couple but turns it down because she does not feel there is anything she can learn from them.

This actually marks a major change in Astrid, the first time she’s actually made a choice about where she will be living. Throughout the book Astrid has been struggling with her mother’s attempt to control her, but never really making any choices for herself in her own life, other than continuing to draw and paint.

Instead of going with the suburban couple, Astrid goes home with Rena Grushenka. Rena is a Russian who makes a living by scavenging, and Astrid is one of several girls she has scavenged from the foster care system. But with the girls, Rena’s scavenging is benevolent in nature. The girls help Rena scavenge, and help her fix up or decorate scavenged items to increase their value. That’s really all that’s required of them (she’s fostering them for the money, like the evil Mrs. Ramos, but unlike Mrs. Ramos, they get plenty to eat and a place to sleep. Who they sleep with is not a great interest of Rena’s, nor are their social lives and activities, so long as they attend school as required).

Most of the girls in Rena’s house at the time are in their teens, in a neighborhood full of boys who are either in bands, starting a band or thinking about starting one, so boyfriends and bands with loud music blaring 24/7 and plenty of soft drugs to enjoy are the norm.

Astrid is not a fan of the 24/7 party music, but as always, she adapts. And she does learn to like the scavenging lifestyle. She learns how to bargain and how to stick up for what she wants as part of the bargaining process.

She also befriends Yvonne, one of the girls at Rena’s who is pregnant, and winds up going with her to her birthing classes, and even ends up attending at her child’s birth, taking the place of the boyfriend who has ghosted.

Astrid stays with Rena for several years, graduating from high school and finishing out her time as a foster child, too.

Meanwhile, Ingrid has been having a lot of success as the woman poet imprisoned for murder, kinda wrongfully if you squint your eyes real hard and don’t focus them, which a lot of people are willing to do for a beautiful imprisoned woman poet. She gets publicity, and her case attracts a big time feminist women’s attorney, Susan Valeris, and soon there is a new trial in the offing on some legal grounds or other.

Valeris wants Astrid to testify on behalf of her mother, to explain that her mother never planned to kill Kolker, and that she did not poison him. And Astrid is fully willing to lie in court for her mom. But her time with Rena has sharpened Astrid. She realizes that there is something Ingrid needs from her, and that means she has power over Ingrid. So she meets with Ingrid and tells her she will testify for her, anything she likes, but in return, Ingrid needs to tell her the truth about a few things.

Ingrid of course says she has always told Astrid the truth, and that’s when Astrid asks Ingrid who Annie was. “Annie” is a person whom Astrid has had vague snatches of memories of all her life. Very vague snatches, like memories of the phrase “Make tinkle for Annie.” Not “make tinkle for mommy.” And she occasionally draws a round-faced woman from memory whom she does not remember.

“How can you remember that?” Ingrid asks. And then proceeds to confess that when Astrid was a toddler, Ingrid got fed up with motherhood and abandoned Astrid for a year or so, dumping her on Annie, a neighbor who took in children and babysat. She left Astrid with her for an afternoon, then one thing led to another, and bob’s yer uncle, Astrid remained with Annie for a year before Ingrid dropped by to pick her up.

For some reason, this pisses Astrid off, as she realizes that is the reason she has been so strongly attached to Ingrid. Ingrid had already abandoned her once. Astrid had spent her whole life anxious that her mother would abandon her again, and of course, when Ingrid killed Kolker, that was a form of abandonment, too. Ingrid had certainly never taken the effect this would have on Astrid into account, and if she had, she would have dismissed it with some Nietzchean bullshit along the lines of “Whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.”

“You should have been sterilized!” Astrid says, pissed as hell.

Ingrid is upset by the coldness she finds in Astrid, and the ground shifts as Ingrid bargains to get back in Astrid’s good graces. Astrid is still a hard bargainer, and of course, what Ingrid has done is something that requires more than an apology. She tell Ingrid that the only way she will believe that Ingrid actually loves her is if she were to tell her lawyer to stop pestering Astrid to testify on Ingrid’s behalf. If she really loves Astrid, she’ll give up the testimony that offers her strongest hope of being acquitted, and risk spending the rest of her life behind bars.

This is remarkably cold of Astrid. As a test of love, it’s as extreme as it gets, and it’s not just Ingrid who’s taking a risk here. Imagine the guilt Astrid might feel if her mother’s retrial resulted in a guilty verdict and she spent the rest of her life behind bars because Astrid didn’t testify on her behalf. It’s a risk Astrid is willing to take, which makes me think more than a little bit of Mom now resides in Astrid’s soul.

Granted, Astrid doesn’t have a love/hate relationship with her mother. It’s more like love/hate/hate/hate/hate, and let’s have a little more hate just to be on the safe side. Astrid has come a long way from the little girl who stood in awed worship of her mother’s beauty and artistic dedication.

Ingrid accepts the deal, she wants to be in Astrid’s good graces just that badly. Perhaps it is because for all the years behind bars, Astrid has been the one true human connection that Ingrid has had on the outside world. Or maybe the risk to Ingrid is not so great as it might seem: she is a dedicated aesthete. She is still able to write poetry while sitting in her jail cell, and that might just be enough, for Ingrid.

Freed of any obligation to her mother, Astrid hooks up with Paul through the comic bookstore mail drop, and the two of them move to Berlin. Why Berlin? I have no fucking clue. Maybe because in Germany college is free to anyone who wants to attend, and Paul and Astrid enroll as kibitzers in some advanced art classes.

In Berlin Astrid stops drawing and starts creating art projects. She buys suitcases and decorates her interior with found art from flea markets and such.

Wait, I said “her interior” instead of “their interiors.” That was not a mistake. The suitcases all relate to memories and events in her life. For example, there is a “Claire” suitcase that incorporates 27 different words for “sorrow” and sleeping pills and swatches of nice fabric. These suitcases represent Astrid incorporating her life into some kind of structure, something she can get a handle on rather than a random series of Dickensian tragedies as they might seem to a disinterested observer.

Throughout the book Astrid has expressed fears that she would wind up alone, abandoned and eventually dead, like the rusted out hulks of cars that litter then dry basin of the Los Angeles River. It’s not just a fear of death, it’s a fear of nothingness, a fear of never having been. The suitcases represent Astrid building herself into a person, of creating a life for herself, something she is also doing as she lives with Paul in Berlin. Their life is one of extreme poverty, as neither really has a job or any skills … basically, they are orphans with high school degrees (at least in Astrid’s case, I’m not sure about Paul’s). They live in an abandoned building with just a single space heater that smells like singed hair when it’s working, sleeping together in a sleeping bag fully clothed because it’s just that fucking cold in Berlin.

But they do have a life, however precarious economically. And Astrid’s suitcase art (and Astrid herself) catches the eye of an art professor in Berlin who wants to buy them. But Astrid can’t sell them, despite their grinding poverty, because they represent her life, though she does create a suitcase for the professor as a gift. (Astrid is fully aware that the professor would like to sleep with her, and she would have no qualms with doing so, except for her relationship with Paul. She is totally willing to lay down for the father.)

And yes, by interpreting her life in terms of the suitcases, Astrid is going down the same path her mother did. She is casting her life in aesthetic terms. But you never get the sense that Astrid will ever care more about her life than the people who are important to her. She’s not THAT kind of aesthete. Then again, she put her mother on the hook for a life in prison just to test how much she loved Astrid. There are definitely some not-warm-and-cuddly aspects to Astrid’s personality.

Ingrid wins her retrial even without Astrid’s testimony (there were many irregularities during the trial, it turns out). With Ingrid out of prison, and Astrid knowing that she means so much to Ingrid that she will risk life in prison, returning to California for a life of relative ease as the celebrity poet/jailbird’s daughter is attractive. As bad as Ingrid was, she was also enthralling, and she did give Astrid a childhood where she felt safe and protected, so long as Ingrid was around, anyway. But Astrid chooses instead to stay in chilly Berlin with Paul to build her own life.

That’s how the book ends, with Astrid choosing to remain with Paul but realizing that at some level she will always love Ingrid, the mother that gave her a childhood that enchanted her, even though she can’t really have that mother any more.

Now, let’s talk about the movie. I have saved some of my thoughts on the book for the movie review, because there are some things the book did much better than the movie, and some things the movie did better than the book, and mostly it’s a matter of how the two media differ, though I do think Fitch is a better writer than Mary Agnes Donohue, the woman who adapted the book to movie form. Then again, I think Fitch is one of the finest writers we have, so I’m not throwing shade on Donohue here.

First of all, in any movie adaptation of a book, the big issue is what are you going to include, and what are you going to drop? Donohue did a great job, though I think the episodic nature of the book made things easy for her. She discarded the whole Marvel Turlock episode, a sound decision I think. Its only purpose, really, is to have Astrid consider and reject the life of prostitution through her friendship with Olivia Johnstone. When Johnstone ghosts Astrid after Turlock calls the cops on her, Astrid realizes that the problem with prostitution is that you trade the possibility of emotionally satisfying sexual relationships for money … you get the goods, but that’s all you get. No love, the stuff Astrid has been starved of and craves.

It’s a valid insight I suppose (I don’t know enough about the lives of prostitutes to speak knowledgeably on its validity) but it is really a sidelight in relation to the main theme, Astrid’s relationship with her mother.

And frankly, to a certain extent, this episode reads as if Fitch had decided to “do” the prostitution issue as part of the story. It’s a realistic issue for a really beautiful young woman in the foster care system to face, but not central to the story. Good call.

The dog mauling was also dropped. I don’t think it had any place in the novel, it seemed to just come out of nowhere and go nowhere.

Likewise, the Ramos episode was dropped. I agree with this even more … it was by far the weakest episode. It’s credible that some foster children would be starved for the sake of money by their foster parents, but it’s a real sideline. It did nothing to advance Astrid’s character.

The casting was for the most part spot on. But there was one notable departure, and that was Ray, Astrid’s lover at Starr’s home. I expected a buffer Big Lebowski Jeff Bridges, what we got in the movie was a young, buff Cole Hauser, very handsome, nice six pack abs rather than the slightly pudgy waistline and three missing fingers described in the book. The movie Ray is very much a romantic movie leading man, very handsome, which works hard against the theme of Astrid being attracted to Ray primarily because of the kindness he shows her. You can see almost any adolescent girl finding movie Ray attractive enough to stalk him in a deserted house and jump him like a desperate cougar, as Astrid does.

This brings up another difference between the movie and the book. The sexual relationship between Astrid and Ray is so severely downplayed that it does not really exist. We know Astrid likes Ray, but that’s about all we know. The hot and heavy sexual affair between 14-year-old Astrid and middle-aged Ray that was clearly described in the book vanishes in the movie.

This was not a good decision, I thought it really set the movie back, because it made the character of Astrid considerably less deep and complex. She wanted Ray, and you could sense her mother’s headstrong “I want what I want and will have it” inside her as she went after him. Astrid had learned from Ingrid that men were easily available, all you had to do was lure them in and they were yours, and although Astrid was a lot less subtle than her mother with regard to Ray, she got what she was after.

In the movie Astrid is this hurt little innocent who never does anyone any harm who toughens up due to all her misfortunes, becoming a hard-bargaining street punk artist kind of woman. But in the book there was always the sense of Ingrid’s influence over Astrid, or maybe just Astrid being like her mother by inheritance.

Imagine how much depth it would have added to the movie to have a scene where Ingrid has picked out one of her young poet admirers for her next affair, a shot of her looking at him when he is unaware, a smile that combines lust and anticipation but also has a cool, predatory element to it. Then imagine a shot later on of Astrid looking at Ray in exactly the same way, without consciously knowing she is doing so. It would have added so much to the characterization.

Although I disagree with deep-sixing the Ray/Astrid affair, I think I know why they did it. They did it because they feared they would not be able to get any decent rating from the MPAA if they included it. Underage sex, especially with middle aged men, is a sensitive topic in America. I know, I write erotica and sell it on Amazon, and there are several topics that will get your book banned on Amazon, and sexual relationships involving underage characters in any way, however carefully done, is right up there at the top. If you ignore a book ban and keep submitting books with sex in them involving underage characters, you will find your account banned on Amazon, a huge financial blow to anyone who is trying to make money as a writer. (I don’t deal in this topic in my writings, but I have had several books banned for other reasons, so I have learned to pay careful attention to where the lines are drawn.)

I think it’s a shame that the Ray/Astrid affair was left out of the movie, but I understand the motives of the filmmakers, and I don’t think it was an unreasonable decision on their part, even if it did damage the story. They may have been in serious jeopardy of being rated out of having an audience had they not done so.

There is also the matter of Ingrid. On the one hand, the casting was spot on, as it was in almost every case in the movie. (It’s no surprise, the book was full of juicy roles for women and juicy roles for women in Hollywood are rare. I bet if the showrunners had insisted on auditions that involved wrestling oiled and naked while reciting lines from the movie, they would still have had an assortment of heavy hitters lined up, naked, oiled and ready to wrestle.) Michelle Pfeiffer is achingly beautiful and has the sharp features and intensity that the role of Ingrid demands. She knocked her scenes out of the park every time … you could sense the almost fanatical aesthete lurking behind her beauty and her exquisite manners.

But I noticed that most reviewers of the movie simply described Ingrid as a narcissist and sociopath. None of them really got very far in describing the aesthete element of Ingrid, her commitment to art and poetry and the seriousness with which she takes them, and herself. I don’t think it was because the reviewers were unperceptive. I think the movie didn’t have the time to work those elements in properly. Fitch had the luxury of building a complex, layered portrait of both Ingrid and Astrid throughout the course of the novel, and without that layered portrait, reviewers could not see that Ingrid’s problem was not that she was unable to feel normal emotions and empathy, but that she had filtered all her feelings through her art, that Ingrid the person might be someone more like her daughter Astrid. The thing that really makes White Oleander successful is the depth and complexity of Ingrid and Astrid … Ingrid isn’t just a filler for the label “sociopath,” she’s a very complex person, just as Astrid is more than a wounded dove who matures.

You can easily miss that in the movie, and that’s a shame, though I don’t feel it’s the moviemaker’s fault, so much as part of the movie medium.

The one cure for this issue I can think of would be to turn “White Oleandar” into a miniseries, which would give the filmmakers much more opportunity to flesh out Ingrid and Astrid’s characters. (Though I don’t know of any visual media that would run such a series that would allow the showrunners to deal honestly with the theme of Astrid’s sexuality, especially her relationship with Ray.)

The place where the movie really shines, I think, is in the way it brings breath and life into the characters. Allison Lohman does a great job with Astrid, starting out as the wounded dove she is and toughening up gradually as she is hardened by her experiences in foster care, and as she slowly realizes how little she meant to Ingrid in the grand scheme of things.

Rene Zellweger also brings Claire to life. Most reviewers describe this as a brilliant bit of acting, but I don’t quite agree. The role seemed to me to be right in Zellweger’s wheelhouse, and she just did the kind of acting she normally does, and knocked it out of the park. It was a brilliant bit of casting, I’ll grant you that.

Robin Wright Penn (aka Robin Wright) did a fine job as Starr, but it wasn’t really a demanding role. She brought out as much to Starr’s character as there was, but it wasn’t a role that called for depth of subtlety, moving from a reformed alcoholic True Believer to an enraged alcoholic with a gun wasn’t a tough character arc in the movie.

Similarly, Svetlana Efremova did a fine job playing Rena Gruschenka, but I didn’t see it as a difficult role. The sparsity of roles for female actors that don’t involve being “The Girl” or “The Mother” or “The Kickass Action Chick” means that almost any decently cast role is going to be filled by an actress who is WAAAY overqualified for the material.

Speaking of “The Girl” I thought Patrick Fugit did a fine job as “The Boy” aka Paul Trout. Now, that is a bit unfair … There are layers to Trout’s character in the book that create all kinds of opportunities for acting: he is the child of junkie parents whom he does not respect (see: junkies) and he has a bad skin and he’s a real artist in his own right, with a lot of insight into Alison and genuine feeling for her, and not just because she’s as beautiful as he is unbeautiful. He feels drawn to her because of their shared status as outsider artists who have the deck stacked against them because of their foster child status.

But the same time compression issues that made so many reviewers see Ingrid Magnussen as simply “The Sociopath Mom” work to make Trout into just “The Boy.” Fugit does a fine job of playing Trout, capturing his combination of diffidence as an unattached orphan and confidence in his art, but there’s just not enough screen time devoted to him to fully flesh out his character — another problem that a miniseries could solve.

Barry Kolker is even more severely cropped by the movie. His appearances are confined to a few flashbacks showing the lead-up to his murder. The movie gives us no idea that Kolker chased — stalked, almost — Ingrid for a long time before she lowered her standards and let him become her lover. It gives us no idea who Kolker is, other than that he is a wealthy, successsful pig who chases beauties like Ingrid relentlessly and then dumps them in the most cruel and thoughtless manner once he’s had his fill of them.

To be honest, that’s all the role requires, basically, but it did leave out the insight into Ingrid’s taste and character that made Kolker’s pursuit of her ultimately successful.

These problems with the movie underscore some of the problems with the book, however. There were a few unanswered questions I would have liked answered after reading the book. The largest one was: Ingrid … how in the world did she become such a fucked-up person? What drove her to become such a total aesthete? What made her so absolutely independent of her family? Was she an orphan? We know nothing about Ingrid’s family, other than a notion that she was vaguely related to Danish royalty.

These gaps in our knowledge are mostly explained by the fact that the entire book is written from Astrid’s point of view. And Ingrid is just the sort of person who would not tell Astrid about her family because Ingrid deemed that to be unimportant. In fact, in the book it’s revealed that when Astrid was eight, Astrid’s father, who divorced Ingrid when Astrid was a toddler, had wanted to see Astrid, but Ingrid refused him permission, without taking Astrid’s interests or needs into account at all, indeed, without informing Astrid of the incident at all until the meeting where Astrid forced Ingrid to tell her the truth about her life in exchange for her testimony.

The cost of telling the story totally from Astrid’s viewpoint is that we don’t understand what made Ingrid who she is, any more than Astrid does, and as she’s one of the central characters in the story that’s damned annoying.

Frankly, I wish Astrid had asked Ingrid quite a few more questions about Ingrid’s family and early life while she had Ingrid tied over the barrel in their negotiations about her testimony.

Another place where I thought the book was weak was in dealing with issues of money and class. It’s established early on that Ingrid is dirt poor, making eight bucks an hour, little more than minimum wage even in the late 80s, early 90s, as a paste-up artist at a third rate celebrity magazine. This is undoubtedly how a beautiful white woman got a 35-to-life sentence for murder, because for people with lawyers, especially beautiful people with decent lawyers, that just doesn’t happen. And lawyers cost money.

But the problem with poverty and the law isn’t really central to the book and it’s not where it’s a problem. It’s a problem with Ingrid being an aesthete and dirt poor. Frankly, it’s much more common to find hard-core aesthetes among the wealthy than the poor, because for the poor, keeping yourself fed, clothed and housed demands a certain amount of time, attention and energy that detracts considerably from being an aesthete. When brutal necessity and aestheticism collide, what you generally get is a greasy spot where the asestheticism used to be.

We are given hints and clues about how Ingrid deals with this: her wealthier boyfriends show her the good life during their dalliances with her. And as Astrid notes, Ingrid can eat nothing but peanut butter for days without being the least bit bothered by it.

It’s even conceivable that Ingrid’s extreme aestheticism is at least in part a defense against the poverty she finds herself mired in. She rejects her poverty through her aestheticism. Her job is just something she has to do to support her poetry. It’s not an uncommon response to poverty among the aesthetically inclined, in fact, it’s a cliché, but the aestheticism is generally not taken nearly as far as Ingrid takes hers.

Of course, Ingrid could probably get out of her poverty if she were willing to trade on her beauty and her artistic success as a poet and marry or become the mistress of a wealthy man. But that would be breaking one of her rules, and Ingrid doesn’t break any of her rules until she falls for Kolker, which turns out to have been a very bad idea. Ingrid’s rules are part of the reason she takes herself so seriously, they are MUCH more important to her than any of the laws of God and man, So when Ingrid breaks one of her rules to take Kolker as a lover, and he then spurns her in the crudest possible way, why that little man-rule about not killing others means NOTHING to Ingrid.

I think having the story be at least in part about a fine, noble (by her own terms) struggling artist being slowly ground down by poverty until circumstances and her own refusal to let herself be treated like a poor, slutty wench (which is what Kolker does to her) would have added a nice element of reality to the story … showing Ingrid struggling to be Ingrid in a world that only sees her as the third paste up artist to the left in some cubicle farm is something that would add an element of universal appeal, done correctly. And Fitch could have done it correctly, I have every confidence in her. She’s a hell of a writer.

Which is a fine place to end my reviews of the movie and the book. Any comments I have made about the novel’s shortcomings are mere quibbles, and the movie is a fine film that showcase the story as well as the medium and the censorship it’s subject to would permit. Fact is, Frist has created some fascinating characters and a fine story that you and I can profitably think about and learn from.

And what I’ve done in writing this incredibly lengthy review is stretch out my enjoyment of them both by thinking about them more and in great detail. I also suspect that this exercise will inform my own writing as well. If you have read the whole damned thing, then I hope you will find that it has extended your enjoyment of “White Oleander” as well. Because otherwise, you have to be feeling really screwed right about now.

Vicious Circles

The director of “Vicious Circles” took every opportunity to let the camera drink in Carolyn Lowery’s beauty and sensuality, to which we say, “Thank you very much, Mr. Whitelaw, sir.”

You just know that any movie in which the heroine is as beautiful as Carolyn Lowery, AND she has to wear a bondage sex harness with inflatable straps that push her breasts together to improve her cleavage, has got to be a GREAT guy movie. And Vicious Circles is definitely that.

But Vicious Circles is more than a great guy movie. Like Desert Passion, it’s one of those movies whose central plot element clearly comes from the same place Internet bondage fantasies come from, but which for the most part fails to fully realize the fantasy (though it DOES have an actual bondage scene, which puts it one up on the bondage-free Desert Passion).

Ruthless billionaire March, played by Ben Gazzarra, has created himself a little fantasy world called The Circle, in which he and a few wealthy friends have at their beck and call beautiful young women who are in essence their sex slaves. They aren’t REALLY slaves — the thing that keeps the beautiful young women interested in playing master and slavegirl with the billionaire and his buddies is money ($2000 a day), not force, and when they’re not “in harness” so to speak they’re free to wander the city and have fun as they please.

Ruthless billionaire March is so rich that he can afford to take naps while feeling up his slavegirls. At $2000 a day, they’ll sit there all day for him.

The protagonist, Andrea Hunt, is played by a radiantly beautiful Lowery. Andrea is a woman who’s living and sleeping in Paris with her half-brother (very sophisticated when it’s done in Paris, France, as opposed to, say, Tennessee). Her brother is in training to be a chef, but is having trouble making tuition money, so he gets involved in smuggling drugs, and gets set up, busted and sent to prison.

Andrea wants her brother/lover out of prison forthwith, which is going to be a problem, since the drug he was smuggling is considered a particular problem by France’s wine industry, and they want him IN — for a long, long time. Which means she’ll need a very good lawyer, which means she’ll need money, which she has none of. Which is what initially motivates her to become one of the Circle’s sex slaves for hire.

Meanwhile one of the Circle’s sex slaves for hire shows up floating face down in the Seine, wearing nothing but one of those inflatable sex harnesses. She was the daughter of a wealthy American industrialist and a would-be journalist who was planning to do a big expose on the Circle’s sex slavery ring. (Can you imagine the scandal, the outrage — women doing sexual things for money in a place like Paris?)

The industrial magnate who is the girl’s father puts a lot of HIS millions and his not-inconsiderable political influence to work finding the person responsible for his daughter’s murder, which should have been any easy thing since about half the population of Paris seems to know all about the Circle. So the American Embassy guys, whom Andrea has been talking to in order to see if they can help get her brother out of prison, are also working on the murder. What’s particularly weird is that the American Embassy guys are most outraged about the murder because every bit of the murdered girl’s body hair had been removed! Every bit! (To which we say, “Hellooo — ever heard of Nair?”)

I think we can all agree that this is a plot that definitely shows signs of thickening, and thicken it does, but I won’t tell you too much more for fear of spoiling things. Let’s talk about the bondage instead.

The Classic Elements

How do I know this is a classic bondage fantasy? Let us count the ways:

How’s this for a classic bondage pose? Lowery practices slave positions while watching the “Sweatin’ With the Slavegirls” video. This one would be binding position, as you can see by Lower… Low… uh … her … uhm … mmmmmmmm… oh, to hell with it…

The special harnesses with inflatable straps that, in addition to improving cleavage, can be used as torture devices via some special attachment that is place somewhere in the vicinity of her pussy.
The frequent assertions that as a slave of “The Circle” Andrea’s body belongs to them for the three month term she signed up for
Slaves of The Circle have to undergo special training. All we see of this training is Andrea watching a video of a woman demonstrating correct slave poses, for reasons we’ll go into later.
Prior to being admitted to the Circle Andrea has to go through a humiliatingly thorough medical exam which includes a full OB/GYN exam, a breast exam to see if she’s had implants, and precise measurement of her neck, wrists and ankles f or her collar and cuffs, as well as the rest of her body.
The slaves live in special apartments which are fitted out with cameras, giving them no privacy whatsoever. Every move they make while in the apartment is visible to their unseen masters.

Lowery bends over and takes it right up the old wazoo for her art. That’s entertainment AND dedication!

Well, if that isn’t a bondage fantasy, I don’t know what is. Now, let’s get to that little bit about the training. It’s made clear soon after Andrea joins the Circle that she must undergo special and extensive training before she can serve her masters. Before that can happen, though, Andrea does a little dancing in front of a camera hidden behind a mirror while her billionaire master March watches. During the dance, Lowery pumps about 150 million gigawatts of sexual energy into her performance and March is transfixed by her beauty and sensuality and who wouldn’t be? Lowery is so hot in this movie that all you can do is stare at the screen while your brain turns to putty and your dick turns to blue steel.

Lowery dances naked before a mirror unaware that there’s a camera behind it and our brains are melting… melting!

So it’s pretty easy to understand March’s feelings in this matter. March’s trainers, however, are outraged. They object that Andrea hasn’t gone through the training yet. Obviously, they want to get their hands on Andrea, too, and who can blame them? But March reminds them that he writes the checks, and he wants Andrea the very next day, and so he gets his way. Capitalism at its finest!

The only bondage in “Vicious Circles,” a pair of loose thumb cuffs and a collar chain.

This leads up to the film’s only bondage scene, in which she’s chained to the ceiling by her collar and bound by thumb cuffs which are also attached to her collar. She’s also tortured with a mysterious thingie inserted into the crotchal region of her inflatable harness, a scene which was mostly cut from my copy of the film, though even those who have seen the unedited version of the film are not very clear on how the harness tortures her, or where the thingie is inserted, so I’m sure I didn’t miss much.

Lowery writhing while cuffed and chained.

A chained, thumb cuffed, harnessed Lowery writhes in agony as the wazooifier does its mysterious but clearly painful work.

Now, the point is that skipping her training was a big mistake, the single biggest mistake the filmmakers made. It was a mistake, not just in terms of missing out on some sex, nudity and bondage, but in terms of dramatic impact as well. People who reviewed the film complained that it wasn’t sexy enough and that nothing really happened, and they’re both essentially lamenting the lack of a training sequence.

A training sequence straight out of a bondage fantasy would have added plenty of sex, bondage and nudity to the film. It would have added plenty of drama as well. One of the main problems with Vicious Circles is its lack of dramatic tension.

Threatening things are happening, but nobody seems to be in any real jeopardy. Life in prison seems agreeable if dull for her brother. Andrea’s torture scene is pretty dramatic, but there’s no buildup for it and it’s over quickly, so it doesn’t really increase the drama that much.

If there had been a training sequence, with Andrea tied in tight bondage, locked in tiny cages, flogged, taught to sexually satisfy from positions of submission, etc., it would have given viewers a clearer idea of the kind of situation she was getting herself into. Perhaps she could have encountered other women farther along in their training who were frighteningly submissive. The training sessions could have been relatively brief, but cut back to periodically to keep the bondage and dominance theme going and also ratchet up the drama — what would happen next, and could Lowery keep her cool under the increasingly strict bondage regimen as she tries to get her half brother out of prison? And will the regimen grow so intense that SHE winds up floating in the Seine?

Ultimately, we have to figure that the man who wrote and directed “Vicious Circles,” Alexander Whitelaw of “The Crying Game” fame, didn’t have the vision or the nerve to fully realize his bondage fantasy on film — something he may have achieved more fully in “The Crying Game.”. The bondage fantasy elements were clearly what could have unified and intensified the story into the sexual and dramatic thriller Whitelaw was clearly reaching for, but just as clearly didn’t reach.

Lowery seduces an American Embassy functionary, who doesn’t realize that she’s not the hapless victim of circumstances, but a fully self-actualized woman capable of making things happen.

What we are left with is an unrealized bondage fantasy featuring a brilliant performance by Carolyn Lowery. Lowery has the advantage of playing one of the very few interesting female characters in B-movies. The key to her character lies in something she tells an American Embassy guy whom she’s seducing.

“People keep trying to treat me like a pawn,” says Andrea, “but I’m a queen.” Eventually Andrea proves she is a queenly sort of woman (not to be confused with the queenly sort of man in The Crying Game). Watching the men around her consistently underestimate her because she’s a woman who has taken on the role of slavegirl is one of the subtle pleasures of this movie. Like most mainstream types, the men in Vicious Circles think submissives are doormats — this movie demonstrates just how dangerous such thinking can be. If the dramatic punch of the movie had been increased and the plotlines a little less predictable, we would have had a topnotch film here, the sort of film that Linda Fiorentino had in The Last Seduction.

At some level, March must have realized that Andrea was a queen — he put her on a pedestal — not just any pedestal, but a ROTATING pedestal.

Passion Network

Wonderfully, Needlessly Complicated

(Editor’s note: This review was written years ago. It has been rendered outdated by the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. I’ll address that in a post on my blog soon.)

Look, actual graphics in a Skinamax film! There goes the special effects budget! A pretty cool graphic, too, the sort of thing you might expect to see on a 70s detective novel.

I have a weakness for movies like Passion Network, OK? Not because it’s a Skinamax film — though that helps, definitely. It’s because it has a wonderfully, needlessly complicated plot about secret sex clubs that cater to the tastes of the wealthy and degenerate — one of the staples of Internet bondage porn stories.

Passion Network is a wonderful framework for bondage fantasies that misses out completely on the bondage. In fact, the one bondage-like segment — a spanking delivered to gorgeous protagonist Stephanie Beaton’s very spankable butt — is edited almost completely out — it lasts for less than two seconds. Unlike Velvet, Passion Network is fun even without the bondage, in part because it’s so baroquely silly.

The story starts with Beaton reporting the shooting death of her husband to a couple of disbelieving cops. And frankly, I don’t blame them, because her story is, well, needlessly complicated.

The first part of her story seemed immensely believable to me, however, since it involved Beaton writhing on a bed lasciviously and then being discovered writhing there by her husband, and then making love to her husband. Beaton is a gorgeous redhead who appears to have made adroit use of self-tanner to make her complexion — and I mean every square inch of her complexion — match her hair. Beaton writhes so beautifully that she looks like a coppery pool of shimmering woman-lust. I BELIEVED that part of the story, alrighty.

A coppery pool of shimmering woman-lust — BELIEVE it.

It seems that her husband and her were really, really good at having sex with one another. Olympian-level fuckers, in fact. Somehow (it’s never explained how) the people of the Society of The Ring (aka the Passion Network) find out what great fuckers they are. The Passion Network finagles them into coming to one of their wealthy enclaves, where they both have sex with lots of people (and Stephanie, as already reported, gets spanked).

The many faces of Stephanie. Left, she’s smokin’ a ciggy and lookin’ cool as she tells her story to the cops. Center, she grimaces over a one-second spanking. Right, her agent informs her how little she’s getting paid for being in this flick.

After their session, they meet one of the Passion Network‘s higher-ups who tells them they have an incredibly high sexuality quotient (whatever the hell that is) and that their sexiness makes them good prospects to join the Passion Network, where they’ll be given lots of money to have sex with other members of the network on a strictly voluntary basis.

Stephanie smells a rat and wants out immediately. Hubbie is interested in the deal — the huge amounts of money and all the sex with lots of different beautiful babes interests him for some reason.

Now, you gotta give Passion Network half a credit for thinking to ASK a question that begs to be asked in movies of this type: “What’s the big deal with wealthy people setting up situations where less wealthy people are forced to have sex with them against their will?” This is the VERY question I’ve asked myself time and again while watching films with such plots, which occur in bondage-themed stories with amazing regularity.

Lets’ face it, if you’re wealthy in America — say, you’re a millionaire — you can enjoy the sexual favors of very attractive women for what is, to you, chump change. For a few hundred bucks at most, a hot babe will be kneeling at your feet, sucking your dick and doing whatever else you might like.

So, what’s the point of setting up these elaborate schemes which often involve murder, kidnapping and other illegal activities, just to get a something you can have for pocket change without getting involved in activities that can land you in jail? (OK, theoretically hiring a prostitute COULD land you in jail, but the odds are very low, and so are the penalties, whereas murder, kidnapping, etc. carry some HEFTY time.)

If all you want is straight sex, or even kinky sex if it’s consensual, you just pay willing women what are to you small sums of cash and you’re THERE!

The fact that Passion Network has a protagonist with the presence of mind to ask such a question is an indicator that somebody involved in the movie had a little something on the ball — probably the scriptwriter.

Scene from Passion Network, old man sitting at desk talking.

“You are obviously intelligent young people. Therefore, I’m going to have to ask you to ignore the fact that what I’m about to tell you makes no sense.”

Unfortunately, the question isn’t adequately answered, in fact, it isn’t answered at all, for reasons that seem to make sense later in the film, but which ultimately make no sense at all.

And I can’t reveal any more than that about the story without giving away the twists of what’s a surprisingly twisty little plot, for a Skinamax film. Considering all the gratuitous sex scenes they packed into the film, they really did a great job of keeping the plot rolling along. They used the cop interview format to provide a lot of narrative exposition that went from sex scene to sex scene very easily and naturally — as if it were an episode of Law & Order that instead of showing the suspects being interviewed and the guilty being rounded up, showed the suspects having sex — which on most Law & Order programs would be enough justify an arrest.

What I’d like to see is something LIKE Passion Network but with a bondage theme. The REASON the sex club would be secret would be that the wealthy people running it were depraved evil captor types who, when they’re not working on plans to dominate the world, like to have some genuine sex slaves to play with. Not ho-for-dough sex slaves, the real thing, which would explain all the kidnapping and secrecy and such.

And it wouldn’t have to be a straight-ahead sexual bondage story, you could have tons and tons of vanilla sex as part of the slaves’ training and performance, along with all the sexual bondage. Something for everyone, as it were.

All the bondage and captivity would add a LOT of dramatic urgency to the story, which is missing in the case of stories cast in the mold of “Passion Network” because it’s so hard for normal folk to figure out what’s so terrible about people having sex.

Playboy will probably never pick up on the dramatic potential of bondage in such stories, as it has pretty much eschewed bondage themes, but you know, Spike is gonna need content as it develops, as will other men-oriented stations (FX seems to be moving in that direction).

Maybe someday soon there’ll be a Passion Network with all the DiD action you could ask for. In the meantime we have Passion Network in all its silly, needlessly complicated glory. That’s something, alrighty.

No, she’s not YAWNING! That’s former Playboy Playmate Devin de Vasquez livening up a couple of sex scenes in Passion Network with some enthusiastic writhing and humping. Even without bondage, Passion Network is still fun to watch. And this seems a fine way to end our review.

buck rogers review

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century:
Search for The Cheese

Here it is: arguably the most explicit slavegirl action in this two-part episode of Buck Rogers. That’s the actual phrase “Slave Girls” right there in the title! How’d they get that past the network censors?

The Buck Rogers in the 25th Century TV series (1979-1981) has come out on DVD and is also being rerun on the SciFi Channel, which is how I came to see the classic “Planet of the Slave Girls” two-part episode.

The episode is a classic in the sense that it is one of the most complete examples of “missing cheese” ever created in a medium famous for missing the cheese.

“Planet of the Slavegirls” is noticeable for its complete lack of slavegirl imagery. There is some bondage imagery — Colonel Wilma Deering and a native leader are cuffed for a time after being captured. And there are some identifiable slavegirls. But there’s no one who looks like a slavegirl (i.e., half-naked, in bondage or both) or who is treated like a slave girl — ordered about, whipped, dominated, used sexually in a nonconsensual manner (on TV, this would be something as innocuous as kissing or just an unwelcome hug.)

There were women identified as slavegirls who pretty much behaved like and were treated like waitresses in a nice restaurant, and who were dressed in skirt and blouse thingies that would pass muster at most suburban American high schools, malls, parties, etc.

In short they were slavegirls in name only and it’s hard to imagine why, based on “Planet of the Slavegirls,” anyone would find being a slavegirl any less appealing than waiting table at Applebee’s or Houlihan’s.

Here’s a slavegirl from the Planet of the Slave Girls serving some food. Note the lack of chains and ropes on her as she does so. Note the lack of nudity as she does so. She’s wearing a nice pair of matching slacks under that blouse. We have women like this on Earth, who serve people food while fully clothed. We call them”waitresses.” We use a different word for them because … they’re not slavegirls.

To understand why this is so bad, let’s explore the concept of cheese within the realm of entertainment. Cheese is that part of any entertainment which makes people want to watch it/read it/hear it/whatever. Cheese is the bait which brings the mouse through the maze. Cheese is the payoff for an entertainment. In comedies, it’s the chance to laugh your ass off. In action movies, it’s fighting and shooting people and blowing people up, hopefully bad people. In horror movies, it’s getting the bejezus scared out of you. And in porn, it’s getting turned on watching people be naked and/or have sex.

As I pointed out in my essay on the failure of the Birds of Prey TV series, when you advertise that you are going to have a particular kind of cheese on your show, you must follow through. If people come to your show or movie or whatever expecting a particular kind of cheese and they don’t get it — whatever the reason or rationale might be — they quickly figure out that they’ve been hosed and they stop watching your show. As occurred with Bird of Prey, which advertised sexy fighting babes as their cheese and then almost entirely backed out on the sexy babes and didn’t have all that much fighting in the first few episodes, leading to its cancellation in less than half a season.

Buck Rogers lasted two seasons (one of which was truncated by a strike) but it clearly had trouble delivering the cheese it promised, and the “Planet of the Slavegirls” episode is symptomatic of its problems.

If you have an episode of ANYTHING entitled “Planet of the Slavegirls” and you do not deliver so much as a single image of hot women being dominated while in ropes, chains, etc., then you have failed to deliver the cheese. You are in fact a cheese tease, promising rich helpings of ripe cheese, and delivering none.

I would say “Shame on you!” except that I’ve never seen any evidence that TV or movie creators understand the concept of shame, and besides, the punishment for being a cheese tease isn’t a waggling finger or a scolding, but a sudden and precipitous decline in interest in your entertainment among your audience — something TV and movie creators most definitely fear and hate, or “understand” as they put it. Especially after it happens to them.

Just ask the folks who made Birds of Prey.

Now, the cheese that the Buck Rogers in the 25th Century series as a whole promised was not slavegirl cheese (except in that one episode). Buck Rogers’ cheese could best be described as “Thrilling Wonder Science Stories!” by which we mean harebrained melodramas which use futuristic science as a taking-off point for flights of fantasy that would embarrass a 10-year-old.

Buck Rogers didn’t deliver on THIS cheese either, and that’s what sealed its fate.

Basically Buck Rogers delivered two kinds of cheese, neither of which worked demographically. First and foremost, it delivered kiddie fare cheese. The kiddies got Twikki, a childlike robot that pretty much worshipped Buck. They got Hawk, a heroic birdman character who had feathers on his head instead of hair. And they got lots of episodes featuring “cute” characters — munchkinlike aliens and such. A lot of viewers who were kids when Buck Rogers aired have fond memories of it, as well they might. Unfortunately, prime time is not the place to be pandering exclusively to the kiddies.

The other cheese it delivered was barely concealed erotic fantasy centering on Buck Rogers as the object of its affection. This is definitely a fantasy that would have appeal to some audiences — women and gay males — but not to what is generally conceded to be the target demographic of science fiction shows, young males and male teens, and children. Just on demographic grounds, most of the postpubescents are going to be straight, so few of them are going to be inclined to get all dreamy-eyed over Buck, no matter how enthusiastically Twikki pimps him out.

Although Erin Grey as Wilma Deering was putatively the hottie of the show, and wore a lot of skin-tight Lycra to prove it, the real focus of the sexual ogling of the show was often Buck. For example, we’ve already established the severe lack of hot babes in chains in both Part I and Part II of “Planet of the Slavegirls.” Well, there was another episode, “Planet of the Amazons” in which Buck gets a little damsel in distress action. Buck is captured by Amazons, then auctioned off as a slave, stripped down to his shorts. There was plenty of ogling of Buck in THAT episode. If “Planet of the Slavegirls” had been half so attentive to delivering the slavegirl cheese as “Planet of the Amazons” was to delivering the slaveboy cheese, it would have been quite the memorable episode for its older male audience instead of the near-total disappointment it was.

Unfortunately, most children who watched the show were uninterested in both slavegirl and slaveboy cheese, or sexy cheese of any kind, and the older viewers being overwhelmingly male and straight meant that almost all of those who were not indifferent to the Buck-as-hottie theme would have been offended by it.

In any event, the real cheese of science fiction of the Buck Rogers sort is amazing stories, essentially stories of the fantastic set in the “real” world. The goal is to have the audience staring at the screen wide-eyed with wonder at the amazing things they are seeing.

Buck Rogers didn’t really show it’s audiences a lot of amazing things. The show apparently assumed its audience had a near-infinite interest in seeing the main characters jet around in tiny spaceships in outer space, re-using the interstellar jet fighters of Battlestar Galactica, by all appearances. This probably was great eye candy and pretty amazing the first five times it happened — i.e., the first five episodes. But by the tenth episode, it was dullsville. What’s more, the dullness was unrelieved by any other kind of amazing wonder science stuff.

As The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone and the original Star Trek have proven beyond reasonable dispute, it is entirely possible to come up with amazing wonder science stuff without spending a lot of money on special effects. All you have to do is mine the huge vistas of written SF for ideas.

Here’s an Orion slave girl from Star Trek, The Next Generation. Although not bound, note her hot body barely held in check by her extremely skimpy costume. HUGE improvement over Buck Rogers’ slave girls.

For example, Star Trek came up with a story about a race of beings who live at a rate of speed that is vastly higher than ours, moving so fast they are invisible to humans, and their prolonged conversations are just the buzzing of a gnat to the crew of the Enterprise, a theme that had been explored thoroughly in various SF stories and even in comics (perhaps you’ve heard of “The Flash”). This required virtually nothing in the way of special effects and what was required was old hat by the 1920s (i.e., having formerly invisible characters suddenly appear in the middle of a scene).

Or there’s the famous Twilight Zone episode “It’s A Good Life” about a boy born with telekinetic and mind-reading powers which give him absolute powers over the unfortunates in the town he lives in, allowing him to kill and maim others on a whim — based on a story by Jerome Bixby. Once again, virtually no special effects required. And the classic Outer Limits episode “Demon with a Glass Hand” was written by SF author Harlan Ellison, as was the classic Star Trek episode “City on the Edge of Forever.” Both required some special effects and props, but nothing to strain the budget of a TV series.

The success of these series depended on the brilliant imaginative visions that were embedded in their stories, not special effects. (Caveat: I personally love good special effects, especially CGI, but I also love a good story.)

Buck Rogers completely ignored this source of super amazing science wonder in favor of a long succession of tired stories that provided nothing to distract viewers from the show’s general dullness. The first season consisted almost entirely of Cold War-like battling between the Earth forces and various factions that want to destroy them, generally in unimaginative ways. When the space battle stuff got old, they had nothing but kiddie cheese.

The series’ creators seemed to have realized that they’d screwed up terribly in the first season, and in the second season the series was entirely redone. Buck, Wilma and the two robots are now part of the crew of the Searcher, a ship that looks for humanities’ lost tribes, groups that were scattered among the stars when a nuclear war devastated Earth.

This was an improvement over the first season, but not much of one, because the writers were not much better than most comic book artists at coming up with thrilling science wonder stories. In one episode, for example, the Searcher encounters a group of seven self-important aliens in a ship loaded with unstable weapons, who look and act a lot like munchkins. The aliens have semi-magical powers but have never seen a woman. They find Wilma Deering very interesting for this reason.

Even though season two was a move in the right direction, it had probably lost its audience pretty thoroughly in season one, because it was canceled at the end of the season, its only mourners the children who were young enough to go for stuff like munchkin aliens, and the cast, writers and crew who were drawing paychecks from the show.

No cheese, no show.

The show could have done a LOT better than it did.

The thing about the 1920s-1930s era super amazing science wonder stories had a peculiar power because the authors and most especially their audience were almost completely unaware of the limits of science and technology, or for that matter of the physical limits of the universe. Basically they were squeezing stuff out from the id and using any half-mad concept of science and technology they could come up with to justify it.

How else to explain stories like ‘The Girl in the Golden Atom” a classic from the 1930s? A scientist invents a super microscope, looks at a scratch in his wedding band with it, and discovers that it is inhabited by a tiny little hottie who spends her time singing and dancing in a little dress made of ‘opaque glass.” He visits her tiny world and discovers that not everybody there is a hottie, and since in the author’s tiny little moral world, physical deformity equals moral decay, you can imagine there are some adventures to be had.

Amazing stuff. Tiny hotties in your wedding band! People living and struggling inside the very atoms that we are made of, their lives unseen and unknown to us for so long!

This is clearly brain-damaged swill by modern standards, but it’s CLASSIC brain-damaged swill, so you can imagine the wild-eyed yammerings characteristic of lesser works that were contemporaneous with it, though you would probably be better off if you didn’t. That said, the lack of knowledge permitted all sorts of really imaginative, amazing riffs on science and technology, riffs which laid the groundwork for the Golden Age of science fiction in the 50s and 60s and every comic book ever produced right up to the present. The childlike ignorance of much of science was in some cases accompanied by an ignorant delight in the possibilities offered by a universe expanded by their “knowledge” of science and technology. Buck Rogers and his contemporaries were just hobbyhorses to get the young readers to the amazing super wonder science stuff that was the cheese they craved.

Now, if Buck Rogers’ creators had realized this and mined the pulps and all of written SF hard for thrilling super science wonder story ideas, they mighta had a contender on their hands. They did not.

The people who figured out that if you want to remake old genre pieces successfully, you have to bring a new approach to providing the cheese have been ENORMOUSLY successful. The most notable among them are George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.

Yeah, THOSE guys, and the particular movies they did this in were their most successful: Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Star Wars was a revised version of the old science fiction serials like … Buck Rogers … and Radar Men from the Moon. Lucas figured out that with state-of-the-art special effects and a full two-hour span, he could take those old serials and make something that would wow modern audiences just as the old Buck Rogers serials wowed audiences in the 1930s. The audience would get the same breakneck stories full of derring-do and strange adventure, but with special effect you could actually enjoy, rather than laugh at. And there is every indication that Lucas was right.

Spielberg pulled the same trick with Indiana Jones, using modern special effects, camerawork and stunts to muscle up the old foreign/exotic adventure format (anyone remember the Perils of Nyoka?) to modern standards, and darned if THAT didn’t succeed as well.

People call Lucas and Spielberg geniuses for creating these movies, and perhaps they are, because making a film involves a lot more than figuring out the cheese (though you’re unlikely to be a success unless you manage that).

Figuring out the cheese is a lot like chess, which is to say, it’s a lot simpler and more direct than it looks.

Figuring out winning combinations in chess, as any top player and most books on the topic will tell you, is not a matter of examining obscure moves involving pawns on the side of the board and seeing where they might lead. Instead, you look at the simplest, most brutal, powerful moves you can make — putting the king in check, capturing the queen, forking a rook and a bishop, that sort of thing — and working backwards from there, examine how your opponent might counter those moves, and how you can overcome your opponents’ counters — to arrive eventually at a combination that your opponent cannot overcome, which might begin with an obscure pawn move.

In the same way, when you plot a movie, you look at the most powerful dramatic elements it contains — the horror, the comedy, the sense of wonder –and plot how to deliver them, working backward to overcome an audience’s inability to suspend disbelief or a character’s lack of motive. It’s always a lot easier if you work backward in that way.

Let’s look at how this chesslike approach to planning a story might have worked in the case of “Planet of the Slavegirls,” with the writers looking for the cheese from the outset, and working backward:

First writer: “Let’s do a ‘Planet of the Slavegirls’ episode!”

Second writer: “Great idea! It’s real pulp stuff!”

Third writer: “I agree, great stuff! Now, what’s our cheese here?”

FW: “Naked slavegirls in chains!”

SW: Naked slavegirls in chains having sex!”

TW: “OK, that’s the cheese alrighty, but as you will recall Buck Rogers is a TV show with a large underage audience. There will be no naked women in chains having sex, however cheesy that might be.”

SW: “Well of course not. But we have the next best things to nudity: lycra and spandex!”

TW: “True enough. So we’ll have lycra and/or spandex clad cuties in chains. But not having sex.”

FW: “Maybe not full on doggie style humpa-humpa, but I don’t see why Buck can’t at least kiss or hug a chained-up cutie. She could be grateful for being rescued by him, or desperate to make him want to rescue her from her chains, and unaware that he’s such a nice guy that he’ll rescue her on general principles.”

TW: “OK, as long as the clinches don’t go too long. So, we got lycra and/or spandex clad women in chains, one or more of them kissing and and/or hugging Buck. That’s our cheese. Now, how do we get to it?”

FW: “Well, given the fact that it’s called “Planet of the Slavegirls” I think we gotta go with a story about a planet where women are enslaved. And given that Buck is a hero, he’ll have to rescue them.”

SW: “Could be the evil Draconians up to their usual tricks.”

TW: “I’m thinking if we went with Princess Ardala being involved, we could slip in a little female domination and submission stuff. She could go around treating the poor female slaves terribly.”

FW: “Maybe she could have a slavegirl who got out of line chained to a post and then have her whipped while Wilma and the other slavegirls watch in horror.”

TW: “That’d be great, and we could keep the standards and practices people happy by never showing her actually getting whipped, just cutting away right after the whip guy raises his whip, to Wilma and the slavegirls wincing in horror.”

SW: “With a big, nasty whip sound and a scream of pain while they wince.”

FW: “On the other hand, if we had the slavegirl gagged before she’s whipped, we get extra slavegirl cheese, and her muffled screams might be as dramatic as loud ones.”

Here’s that whipping idea illustrated by a panel from the original Flash Gordon comic strip … drawn sometime between 1934 and 1944. Note that Dale is pretty much naked and bound. If they could get away with that in a 1940s comic strip, why couldn’t the 1980s Buck Rogers do … anything?

TW: “I’ve got it! ALL the slavegirls are gagged ALL the time. Why? Because they’re WITCHES, and if they talk, they can cast spells on their captors.”

FW: “‘Planet of the Slave Witches!’ Oh, we’re talking major cheese here!”

TW: “And the best part is, it ties in with the main Buck Rogers super science cheese. The witches are actually the women of an advanced race who’ve discovered how to project their will onto another using their voices, making that person do what they wish so long as they are within the sound of their voices. They use it to control their planet in a benevolent sort of way, but then Princess Ardala get wind of their power and decide to take over and use the witches as part of a plot to take over Earth by having the witches make Earth council leaders disable Earth’s defenses.”

SW: “And of course, Ardala will dispatch at least one witch to make Buck do HER bidding.”

TW: “Goes without saying.”

FW: “And Wilma isn’t going to sit still for THAT, so she’ll do something, probably something foolish, and get caught by the Draconians and enslaved along with the witches.”

TW: “Goes without saying, but I’m glad you said it.”

SW: “So how are the Draconians going to take over a planet run by people who can make you do their bidding just by using their voices?”

TW: “Hmm, that does present a problem.”

SW: “Nah, we’ll just have the Draconians sneak in and drop sleep gas on the witch planet from space, then swoop down and gag and bind the witches while they’re out cold.”

FW: “Sleep gas?”

SW: “It’s super wonder science, man.”

And so on and so on. The point is, they STARTED with the cheese, and built the story around it, which is the right way to do it — make sure your audience gets the reward the story offers. If you do that, you might avoid doing really stupid things — like creating an episode of a TV show called “Planet of the Slavegirls” that features no hot chicks in chains.

Take it from a master, folks. Here’s George Lucas’ take on a slave girl, i.e., Slavegirl Leia. Hot chick, i.e., drug-addled Carrie Fisher, check. Skimpy outfit, check. Bondage gear, check. The really smart guys always get things right. This is NOT someone who could be called Waitress Leia!

Sandra Bullock Bondage Model

Sandra Bullock – Bondage Model

You don’t ordinarily expect to obtain solid proof of time travel by staring at the covers of science fantasy bondage novels and watching movies, which I imagine is why people don’t often try to.

But there it is: Sandra Bullock, born in 1964, was clearly the model for the cover of John Norman’s Slavegirl of Gor, first published in 1977. Just look at those pictures — the resemblance is striking.

But Bullock would have been 13 at the time of its publication, 12 at the time the cover art was created. Obviously, far too young to model for it at the time. So, the only conceivable explanation is that Sandra Bullock latched onto some hitherto unknown time travel technology and traveled back in time where she got the Slave Girl of Gor modeling gig.

Of course, that seems like a lot of trouble to go to just to get a modeling gig for a fantasy book cover. You have to figure it couldn’t pay a lot by anybody’s standards, much less the standards of a superstar like Bullock, traditional book publishers being some of the cheapest skinflints on the planet.

So, why would she have done it? Only one explanation makes sense — Bullock’s time travel device works both ways. She is able to go to the future, and in the future she learned that she would star in a movie based on the novel Slave Girl of Gor and that it would be a megahit that would permanently loft her into the world of megasuperstardom.

And she would also learn that the break that gave her the inside track on the role of Judy Thornton, slavegirl of Gor, was the fact that she looked exactly like the model on the cover of that 1977 printing of Slavegirl of Gor.

So she hopped in her Wayback Machine and got the gig to seal the movie deal for herself.

The only other explanation for this chain of events is that the resemblance between Bullock and the Slavegirl cover model is purely coincidental, and that I have taken things wildly out of proportion. And I mean, c’mon. THAT sort of thing never happens in the real world.

Warlords Bad B-Movie Bondage

Warlords

How low can slavegirls go?

“Now, hang on to that shackle real good, honey. It looks like it’s about to fall off. This is a Roger Corman film and they’re not gonna shoot a retake for something like that.”

The harem girl fantasy has fallen on hard times in recent decades. You want to see the full extent of the hard times that harem girl themes have fallen to nowadays? Watch Warlords. It’s a Roger Corman film about a bunch of morons running around in the Southern California desert after the apocalypse, killing and chasing each other for little or no reason. Which is to say, it’s pretty much the same as half the flicks Corman has produced in the last decade or two.

Warlords is not even the worst of the post-apocalyptic hairballs Corman has coughed up — that “accolade” remains the property of Aftershock, which has absolutely nothing going for it. Warlords at least has Dawn Wildsmith, Brinke Stevens, Michelle Bauer, Debra Lamb and sundry harem girls in bondage. But that’s about all it has.

Still, this is about the only exploitation film in recent years (it was made in 1988) to feature an actual harem with slavegirls and everything. One dances with a sword balanced on her head, another gets friendly with a snake, a third lies on the floor with her back bent at one of those impossible angles that trained (and limber) belly dancers can manage.

Dawn Wildsmith and David Carradine are the stars of the movie, and they along with B-movie veterans Ross Hagen, Brink Stevens and Sid Haig do their best to de-lousy the movie, but there’s not much they can do with all the nothing they’ve been given to work with. Wildsmith plays a post-apocalyptic female adventurer who starts out the movie wearing a leather harness around her breasts (which, sadly, are covered) and winds up in a black vinyl dominatrix boustier with fishnet stockings. Carradine is a semi-mystical warrior sort who’s clearly destined to defeat the evil warlord and his mutant henchpersons.

The sets consist entirely of some old cars in the desert, some tents pitched in the desert, and the desert. We are talking cheap-ass moviemaking here. Worse yet, we’re talking a movie that looks cheap-ass. James Cameron once said that every penny of the millions that were spent on Titanic were right up there on the screen. I suspect that Warlords had a budget that barely made it to four digits — and every bit of that penury is up there on the screen. There are some shots of helicopters flying around shooting missiles and some shots of tanks and blown up cities in the opening, but rest assured they’re clips from other Roger Corman films. Nobody’s bank account was harmed in the making of this movie.

Contrast that with the gorgeous sets, costumes and so forth in Son of Sinbad and you get a real feel for how far the harem girl theme has fallen. Granted, some of the harem girls are willing to spill their beautiful breasts and butts out of their costumes, and there was plenty of bondage, but it’s a poor substitute for, well, EVERYTHING ELSE THAT MAKES A MOVIE A WORTH WATCHING!

The harem girl theme is particularly harmed by the cheapness of Warlords. Harem girls and belly dancers are part of a fantasy of wealth, opulence and high culture. It’s really convincing in movies like Son of Sinbad and Kismet. The harem girls in those films looked like the finest beauties of a rich and powerful land, trained for years to be a dream of pleasure and beauty for their owner, full of passion and fire and the ability to display it through dance.

But when everything is as unremittingly drab and piss-poor as it is in Warlocks, what you see is a bunch of cheap hoochies tarted up in spangles and shaking their butts. (Not that I think the actresses in Warlords were that, I just think the ugliness of the film made them look like that.)

This may have been the intent of Warlords — to show how badly culture had degenerated after the apocalypse, but if so, you have to wonder — why would anybody want to watch a bunch of jerks drive cars through the dirt and try to knock each other off the road to the accompaniment of loud noises? Hell, you can do that in real life easily enough just by going to a NASCAR rally and it’s a lot more exciting with more cars and better driving. And if it’s naked dancing girls you want, your average strip club has women who are better dancers, often much nakeder, generally in much more glamorous surroundings, and much, er, friendlier than the ones in Warlords. And if you want to see degenerate mutants on a toot, just visit DragonCon or go clubbing late at night at any major urban center.

Movies are supposed to offer fantasies that outstrip real life, but Warlords can’t even MATCH real life.

Barbarian Queen: The Second Best Gorean Movie Ever Made

*You mean this dungeon tour includes bound rape at no extra cost?”*

One of the things your fancy, big-city print movie reviewers like to do in order to show how observant they are, is focus on some minor character who doesn’t mean a whole hell of a lot to the overall plot.

We’re gonna do that in our review of Barbarian Queen, which is perhaps the most Gorean of the Gorean movies out there, matched only by Deathstalker. But we’ve got a good reason for our focus — all the other characters are so predictable that focusing on them would put most readers to sleep in seconds.

Barbarian Queen starts out with a wedding of peaceful forest dwellers. Things do not bode well for this marriage, as a horde of black leather-clad horsemen are charging through the forest even as the villagers deck their hair with flowers and stroll about happily, as peaceful forest dwellers are wont to do.

Soon the horsemen are amongst the villagers, raping and killing and pillaging as uninvited wedding guests were wont to do in barbarian times (maybe this is how large weddings got started).

One of the women who is raped is the bride-to-be’s little sister, Taramis (played very well by Dawn Dunlap) and she’s dragged off by the horsemen for more raping. They leave the village a burning shell filled with corpses.

“I can’t believe I’m doing a topless scene on such a tacky set!”

Unfortunately for the party-trashing horsemen, who are minions of neighboring King Argan (played by Frank Zagarino) they do not manage to kill everyone in the village. Most notably they fail to kill Amethea (played by Lana Clarkson) the queen of the village and the bride-to-be, and several of her best warriors. They dispatch the straggler horsemen who’ve remained in the village to get in that last bit of pre-Christmas raping and looting. Then they hit the trail, their goal: track down King Argan and turn him and his followers into shish kebobs as well as rescue any amazonians who’ve been captured by the evil scum.

The rest of the movie concerns Queen Amethea’s quest. She uses the same kind of investigative techniques that private eye Ginger MacAllister used in the Ginger movies — she and her entire entourage head for the Argan’ capital, where the villains capture them, thus lulling them into a false sense of security. It seems a little extreme, but these were barbaric times, and apparently there is no more important investigative goal than developing a false sense of security in the villains.

Meanwhile, Taramis has gone through quite a few changes. Her sisters’ wedding turned into a mass raping and pillaging — of her personally — and the problem didn’t even originate with the in-laws. Instead of a nice card, she got raped by a group of smelly warriors in black leather. Then they dragged her off to their camp at the river where they rape her some more and maybe torture her a little, but mostly they torture one of their other captives. Not that we see any images of her being molested, but it’s obvious that something like that happens between the scene where she’s dragged off by Argan and his goons and when she’s found later on.

Well, it definitely puts Molly Ringwold’s character’s problems in Sixteen Candles in perspective. When Queen Amethea and her warriors attack the camp and kill all the enemy warriors after finding their torture victim, they find Taramis a naked, whimpering wretch cowering under some furs in a corner.

“Well if I’m going to be terrified, it’s great to have nice furs to cower under.”

Taramis’ plan is that they go back to the village because everyone will miss them at the wedding. Apparently the rape and abuse she’s suffered has caused her mind to slip a cog, and she’s not able to absorb the fact that the village is a smoking pile of rubble and most of its residents are dead.

The Amazon warriors take Taramis with them, since she’s clearly in no condition to do much for herself, spending most of her time sitting around with a vacant, troubled look in her eye. (You see a lot of B-movie actresses doing this sort of thing a lot, but in this case it’s intentional.)

(The usual function of characters like Taramis in movies like Barbarian Queen is to serve as justification for all the whupass that the good guys eventually lay on the bad guys. Typically their fate is to go all googly-eyed and blubbery-lipped at some critical moment and die a pointless death, generally in pretty short order, they having served their purpose in the plot. But Taramis is a different kind of victim.)

Amethea and friends head into town to remove King Argan’s head from his shoulders, in the predictable manner of barbaric heroes and heroines on a quest, where they join up with the survivors of another village that was smushed by King Argan. Disguised as peons, serfs, slavegirls, lowlifes and assorted ne’er-do-wells, they scope out the place. Soon they blunder into King Argan’s palace, where Amethea and her lieutenants are promptly captured and imprisoned, either sent to the dungeons or forced to be harem slaves. Complacency-lulling is rarely accomplished so quickly and easily.

Taramis, who got the harem slave option, takes her first opportunity to run up to King Argan and tell him she wants to go with him. As in be his special girlfriend, not just follow him around, we guess. Then she goes back to her little-girl thing and asks him if he will give her a cat or a dog. (Getting cute with someone whose minions have recently raped the shit out of you is kinda after the fact — let’s face it, the relationship is off to a bad start.) But this does not deter Taramis, nor does it deter King Argan, who says, in effect, “Isn’t that the kid we raped the shit out of back at the river camp? Oh, well, let’s clean her up, no harm in her.”

“I’ll give you a pussy if you give me a doggie.”

Why King Argan would accord Taramis any special status when she’s already his harem slave and he’s already got a ton of harem slaves, we don’t know — maybe the little-girl thing got to him, or maybe it was just the novelty of a harem slave volunteering to have sex with him and smiling at him and all. In any event, he lets her be his favorite, in much the same way a fisherman might toss a fish that jumped into his boat into the hold.

Thus, Taramis becomes King Argan’s bitch, or “consort” as they called it back then. She gets to follow King Argan everywhere wearing a sexy black leather costume when she isn’t serving him in his chambers. We don’t know what she does or doesn’t wear when she serves him in his chambers, because there are no scenes showing her serving him in his chambers.

From a bondage fan’s perspective, and that is the one I favor, this is the only major flaw in a film that is quite generous with bondage imagery throughout. And we’re not even saying that there ought to be a bondage scene between Argan and Taramis, though of course we’d be the last to complain if there was, and it would certainly be in keeping with Argan’s generally dominant personality and Taramis’ generally submissive one.

But what we’re really wishing for here is a little more character development for Taramis, because she’s by far the most interesting character in the movie.

Amethea is predictably brave and good and determined, and her warriors are predictably brave. Argan is predictably evil and determined, and his minions are predictably vile and vicious.

Only Taramis fails to behave in a manner that is completely predictable to your average 10-year-old moviegoer (who frankly, should not be allowed to watch this film or read this review). So we wonder, “What’s going on with Taramis? Why did she decide to hang with King Argan? Was it Stockholm syndrome, where a victimized person identifies with their persecutor, much like the many middle class people who vote Republican? Does she have a secret plan to use her familiarity with King Argan to help her friends? Or is she just drawn to him because he seems to be powerful and therefore sexy?”

A scene or two of Taramis serving Argan in his chambers would go a long way toward clearing this stuff up. You don’t even have to have an explicit sex scene — though we wouldn’t complain about that, either, and Dunlap had done some of that in her earlier works — but basically we just want something to establish the nature of Taramis’ relationship with Argan and how she feels about it. Let us into Taramis’ head a little bit, people!

Of course, a dominant/submissive sex scene would help establish the vileness of King Argan and make clear the extent that Taramis has gone to in hooking up with him, but we’d be fools to second-guess someone as intelligent as a B-movie screenwriter.

*“So, sis, YOU want to be the big victim of King Argan now, eh?” Left, Amathea is on display in Argan’s dungeon, where Argan and Taramis (right) stop by for a visit.*

There is an interesting and telling scene later where Taramis meets up with her sister Amethea while she’s lulling Argan into complacency. Amethea is stretched out spreadeagled on a flat vertical table in Argan’s dungeon, naked except for her thong and tied hand and foot. She’s looking kinda sweaty and bothered, too, because Argan’s very Jewish-looking torturer has been giving her his attention for some time. Definitely not feeling her best. When Taramis pops in with her man Argan, she doesn’t reveal that she recognizes Amethea, and Amethea doesn’t reveal that she recognizes Taramis. They’re like two ships that pass in the night, and it looks like it’s gonna be a very long night indeed for Amethea.

Fortunately, shortly thereafter, the torturer gets horny for Amethea, rips her thong off, and tries to rape her right there on the table (see the picture at the top of the article). But Amethea’s warrior training has apparently included doing brutally lengthy and intense kegels, because while the torturer’s got his dick in her she grabs it with her pussy and squeezes it so hard that he immediately becomes her completely compliant servant. She orders him to free her from her bonds, which he does, allowing her to shove him into a conveniently placed vat of acid, resulting in a painful death by dissolving, and allowing Amethea to make good her escape.

All in all, one of the great bondage scenes in Gorean films, if not the greatest, then a definite contender.

Taramis’ final scene seemingly answers all questions about her plans. A tournament in which some of Amethea’s warriors are slated to fight to the death turns into a general rebellion against Argan’s tyrannical rule. During the course of it, Amethea and King Argan end up in a swordfight to the death. Seeing that King Argan is about to skewer Amethea with a real sword (as opposed to the pork sword he’s been skewering Taramis with) Taramis whips out a knife and thrusts it into Argan’s back, killing him.

So you have to figure Teramis didn’t really like Argan.

Then again, maybe not. Lots of women carve up the men they love, especially when their relationship begins with gang rape. It’s hard to picture Taramis’ feelings for Argan as anything but conflicted. Or maybe Taramis, as a result of the trauma she’d been subjected to, had come to the conclusion that the only way to survive in her barbaric world was to be on the best possible terms with whoever held the most power — not out of cynicism but in a naive response to the brutality she’s been subjected to. This would explain why she fails to come to Amethea’s rescue when she sees her sister naked and tortured in the dungeon. Arguably, Amethea was in more desperate straits then, but Argan was in power then. Later, when Argan is fighting Amethea for his life and his subjects are in open rebellion, Argan has clearly lost his power and Taramis feels safe in attacking him.

That would also explain why, as soon as they were in King Argan’s domain and she saw that King Argan’s domain had actual buildings, she knew which side to join.

There’s just one thing about all this theorizing — it brings us to what I call the comic book critic’s conundrum, a problem that’s also present in B-movies.

There are a lot of adults who love comics — I’m not one of them, but being a fan of B-movies, I’m hardly in a position to feel superior to them, though of course I do feel superior.

Anyway, these adults will sometimes write lengthy screeds about the hidden psychological aspects of Glowing Gigantic Man or the aesthetics of death by electro-ray. Some of it can be interesting, insightful and amusing, but on the few occasions I’ve read such work I’ve always had an uneasy awareness that the story being written about is most likely a pile of adolescent testosterone spew and nothing more.

Similar pitfalls exist in B-movies. One searches for insight, intelligence, characterization and so forth, but mostly one finds formulaic scripting, acting and direction at best, or the garbled natterings of wasted minds at worst.

So, when you find an almost developed character like Taramis in a script whose other characters are pure cardboard, you have to wonder — have you found something good or are you projecting qualities into the film that actually don’t exist? Could Taramis have been written as she was out of sheer random impulse, rather than as a part of a carefully considered characterization?

The evidence of the film argues that the truth lies somewhere between these two extremes. I don’t think the scriptwriter, Howard R. Cohen, or director, Hector Olivera — whoever was responsible for the way Taramis’ character developed — consciously wanted to portray Taramis as a person damaged by the trauma of sexual abuse and coping with it as best she can in a world where it’s not rape if the woman isn’t a member of your own tribe.

If the filmmakers had taken that route, they might have had a few sex scenes between Taramis and Argan in which it becomes clear that in submitting herself to Argan sexually, she’s neurotically revisiting the trauma of her rape. It might even have made sense to have Taramis encouraging Argan to tie her up and dominate her to make their sexual relationship more rape-like. The fact that such scenes are absent indicates that there wasn’t any conscious development of the theme.

I strongly suspect that the writer developed Taramis’ character without being consciously aware of what he was doing, just thinking of her as a contrast to Amethea and her brave warriors. But I also suspect that the author had absorbed some knowledge of how victims of sexual trauma behave, and that this subconsciously informed the development of Taramis’ character, without any conscious awareness on the author’s part.

The same subconscious sophistication may also be responsible for the capable exploitation of the bondage, rape and torture themes in the movie, which makes it so much better than most Gorean films, which typically, and sadly, lack sophistication of any sort.

Taramis’ little-girl act with King Argan and her inability to so much as give a conspiratorial wink to her naked and tormented sister point out what a damaged creature she is, thus adding a great deal of pathos to her role and the film. Unfortunately, with all the other charcters being all cardboard, all the time, and Taramis’ screen time totalling less than five minutes, and her lines totalling less than a dozen, she just doesn’t have that much of an effect on the movie as a whole. If we’d just gotten a little more into Taramis’ head, it could have added a lot of depth to the movie.

This is typical of B-movies though — on those occasions when they do come up with juicy characters or interesting themes, they have a way of botching or ignoring them somehow.

Pat Powers Reviews