Keepin' Busy With Safari Movies

I am in the process of writing an article about safari movies, a rather weird sub-genre, for Detroit's underground cinema magazine Cashiers du Cinemart. My relationship with Mike White, the editor in chief, goes a long way. We "met" back in the days where he was still a pretty big tape trader, looking for rare movies and often ending up with washed out, 14th generation copies of gems we all thought lost - or undistributed. We were all doing it. Buying a VHS 20-tapes pack a week, and mailing away.



I had access to a mythic place at the time : the basement of St-Eustache's Vidéogie rental store. I would go there every week with my friend Trucker G, and lurk in the darkness of the basement for hours, looking at the never-ending stashes of tapes among which you could find the most surprising and rare threats. I would rent 7 movies a week - one for each day - and I was allowed to keep 'em for seven days for the friendly price of 7.77$. I eventually became friends with Marc, the manager, because every time I would climb up the stairs back to everyday life, covered in spiderwebs, my treasure under the arm, he would have to recreate the movie titles in his system and put barcodes on the tapes - most of these movies had not been rented in more than ten years.

Long after I stopped going there, not because I had rented everything I wanted, but mostly because Trucker G was too busy to give me rides, Marc would come to see me in Laval, where I lived, and bring me gifts he would "borrow" from the huge collection his employer didn't care about : Joe de Palmer porn rarities, THE MONK with Franco Nero, and Joe d'Amato's Canadian-shot BILL CORMACK LE FÉDÉRÉ, starring Fabio Testi, and in which the villain is named "Cariboo".



Mike White was always on the lookout for rare titles too, so we eventually hooked up on the web and started trading tapes by mail. He didn't care about ending up with French dubbed versions of the movies he seeked, and I didn't mind his generosity - he was one of the first folks out there to buy a DVD burner and to send digitalised versions of VHS tapes on convenient DVD-Rs, and received only tapes in return.

Right now, he is putting up the 15th issue of the Cashiers and my article needs to be sent to him by April 1st. I usually don't have any problems with deadlines, and I'm pretty confident I'll make in right on time, but there are still a few things I need to tune up. Some of the movies I have watched a few months ago are a blur now, so I'll need to run them at full speed in my VCR and take notes. I also haven't watched Hong Kong's CRAZY SAFARI yet and can't bring myself to finish the impossibly boring Bitto Albertini no-brainer THREE SUPERMEN IN THE JUNGLE.



I also forgot to include CANNIBAL WOMEN IN THE ADVOCADO JUNGLE OF DEATH, a JF Lawton-directed Shannon Tweed vehicle. I still have the tape lying somewhere - I remember beginning to watch it, and stopping because I was falling asleep. I also couldn't find Michele Lupo's AFRICA EXPRESS (1975), some kind of "prequel" to Duccio Tessari's SAFARI EXPRESS (1976). I am under the strong impression that both movies were shot back-to-back but released separately, as they feature the same cast (down to the monkey !), and pretty much the same synopsis.

On top of this rather peculiar assignment - that I personally assigned to myself, that's the beauty of working with Mike White - I also have my debut reviews to write for Contamination, the new Montreal french language free quarterly magazine about genre cinema. That would include Kevin VanHook's DEATH ROW, a TV movie called DEAD & DEADER, with Dean Cain, and the recently released ANIMAL. Did I mention the end of my semester that's getting nearer ? So yeah, I might be burned out pretty soon, after all.

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The year it was made was unclear on the VHS sleeve of BABY LOVE, this demented Alastair Reid flick. The VHS release date was mentioned, as well as 1965 and 1974 for various copyrights. Turns out that it was made in 1968, making it almost more daring than Joël Séria's MAIS NE NOUS DÉLIVREZ PAS DU MAL. One thing's for sure - it couldn't be released nowadays, in any format.



It was jailbait Linda Hayden's first movie, and she was 15 at the time. She is also supposed to be 15 in the plot. And she's one fine-looking mama. The movie works pretty well at manipulating the viewer, trying to excite him with eroticism and then turning the wheels around to throw guilt in his face. Although her last serious role dates back to the BOYS FROM BRAZIL adaptation of Ira Levin's book by Franklin J. Schaffner, also starring Gregory Peck, she has been active in television series until '97, when she disappeared from the map. However, between BABY LOVE in '68 and THE BOYS... in '78, she has appeared in enough movies to keep you busy for a while.

The story is reminiscent of Pasolini's TEOREMA (released the same year, and loosely based on Nabokov's LOLITA) and of Max Pécas' LES MILLE ET UNE PERVERSIONS DE FÉLICIA (1975), in which Béatrice Harnois, as Félicia, fucks up a couple's life beyond repair by seducing them all. While I haven't yet seen TEOREMA - nor its 1993 remake SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION, directed by Fred Schepisi and starring none else than... Will Smith, apparently inspired by a true story and a guy named David Hampton - I can safely assume that its themes are deeper than those of BABY LOVE, a rather unsuccessful attempt at showing teen skin with moral reasons.



Luci, quite litterally a young slut, loses her mother one grey afternoon, coming home from school to find her in the bath with sliced wrists. The suicide note asks her former lover, a middle class journalist called Robert (Keith Barron of 1976's AT THE EARTH CORE), to take care of Luci. Robert has a beautiful wife (Ann Lynn, who appeared in STRIP TEASE MURDER in 1961 and has done a lot of TV work since then) and a son, and they immediately adopt Luci as a member of the family. Luci, however, will soon use her tight body and innocent looks to seduce 'em all, and will eventually be a menace to their relationships.

The story is interesting enough, and it's funny to wait & see who will fall for Luci, and who will resist. It's also a decent enough portrait of the typical British middle class family, complete with heavy drinking and flacid sleazyness. It would feel like a TV movie if all the nudity was cut off, but then again, the subject matter is quite heavy and the flick is pretty daring for its time.

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I have finally fell victim to BON COP BAD COP. I resisted to its premiere at Fantasia last year, to its original theatrical release, and to the DVD. But when I saw that the monster had crawled its way to ICI's top 20 of the best made-in-Québec films ever, I almost fell off my chair. Either my flair was dead or something was up. I decided to check it out for myself.



Éric Canuel, the director, introduces the movie. He seems pretty proud. He mentions the extras, and then the Éric Lapointe-penned song "Tattoo", written specifically for the movie, whose video is also featured. My nausea started then. But rest assured, it didn't last long.

Apart from the first scene of the movie, which is filmed in such a shaking way that your eyes can't seem to focus - probably intentional, since it's about a guy waking up from some kind of drug-induced stupor while being tattooed in a dark room by a villain wearing a hockey mask - the rest is pretty flawless, from a technical point of view. Grim colors, lots of filters, and a gorgeous cinematography to booth. The movie itself is an attempt at creating the perfect bilingual buddy movie, while making the big bucks with two markets at once : english and french speaking canadians. I don't see how it could be relevant to anyone outside of Canada, because they wouldn't get 90% of the jokes.



David Bouchard (humorist turned comedian Patrick Huard) and Martin Ward (THE INSIDER'S Colm Feore) are two cops, from Quebec and Ontario respectively, who are reunited on a case when a victim is dropped from a helicopter and lands directly on the "Welcome to Ontario" sign. Since the body is split in two, the case is shared, so they reluctantly team up and try to find a weird killer who eliminates corporate players in the hockey industry.

I don't think that there's a real respect of police procedures here, as these two guys basically do what they want. They beat up suspects, burn down evidence, and basically behave like wild animals, resorting to cartoonesque violence that's worrysome in that kind of "family" entertainment. There is some sex and a lot of violence, and hockey jokes and references that many people won't get - including me. However, the players here are strong; HU$TLE's Sarain Boylan appears as Martin Ward's slutty sister; humorist Louis-José Houde plays a funny motormouth coroner; Pierre Lebeau an improbable police chief; Nanette Workman cameos as a ballet teacher; and finally the breath taking Lucie Laurier poses as Huard's ex wife, with which the lucky bastard still lives. The breast jokes aren't spared and we love it like that.



We can't say that time doesn't fly when watching this movie - after all, the rythm's been ameliorated by various cuts, and the team behind it all is comprised of seasoned pros. Éric Canuel has steadily turned out action-packed comedies and dramas since 2001 (LA LOI DU COCHON was his first full length feature) and Patrick Huard does more acting these days than stand up comedy, after debuting in 1997 in Claude Fournier's J'EN SUIS !. You knew you wouldn't find a fine intellectual analysis of the Ontario / Québec relationships when this movie was made, so why expect more ?