Schlock Destinations: CULT FICTION DRIVE-IN 2011 — Day 2

Day 1 of Cult Fiction was pleas­ant but it was merely an appe­tizer com­pared to the smörgås­bord that was Day 2.  The orga­niz­ers really out­did them­selves on Saturday, stock­ing it with a dizzy­ing array of Q&A ses­sions with cult movie stars for every taste and then topped it all off with a double-feature pre­sented under the stars.  The end result offered far more bang for your buck then fans typ­i­cally get from larger-sized conventions.

Your Humble Reviewer began the day early with a 10:15 screen­ing of a film pre­sented via a DVD-R taken from a rare Japanese video cas­sette release.  Only a hand­ful of early-rising con­ven­tion­eers made it to this screen­ing — but they were rewarded with a rar­ity that none of them will soon forget…

WELCOME HOME SOLDIER BOYS: when fans of 1970’s film­mak­ing say “they don’t make ‘em like they used to,” THIS is exactly what they’re talk­ing about.  This road movie/drive-in shocker/Vietnam War alle­gory was pro­duced by 20th Century Fox in 1972 and is the kind of thing that no major stu­dio would touch today.

With Richard Compton (Macon County Line) direct­ing and Guerdon Trueblood (The Candy Snatchers) script­ing, this film lays out the tale of a quar­tet of sol­diers who have just returned from Vietnam.  Joe Don Baker is the leader of the group, with Alan Vint, Paul Koslo and Elliott Street round­ing out the four­some.  They’ve brought back a sense of rest­less­ness and vio­lent ten­den­cies that they have a hard time curb­ing.  When they’ve had enough bad breaks and mis­un­der­stand­ings from the civil­ians and hus­tlers sur­round­ing them, they snap in a way that brings the war directly to the doorstep of small-town America.  The finale shows no one involved any mercy and will leave you slack­jawed.  This one’s only avail­able via grey-market deal­ers but it’s well worth hunt­ing down.  It’s doubt­ful that Fox will ever put this back into circulation.

After a mid­day break for lunch and con­ven­tion room vis­its, the after­noon brought an onslaught of Q&A ses­sions.  Here’s a quick break­down of the pan­els, with a bit of descrip­tion to give a sense of how each played out.

Larry Bishop: he offered some fas­ci­nat­ing insights into how his con­tro­ver­sial Hell Ride biker opus came to be.  Basically, a friend of his was par­ty­ing with Quentin Tarantino, who put him on the phone with Bishop.  Tarantino told him he was going to write, direct and star in his own biker opus.  It was also inter­est­ing to hear that Bishop ini­tially wrote his script as a 400-page novel (!) — the man­u­script is briefly seen in the film — and later adapted it to proper screen­play for­mat.  During the Q&A ses­sion, Bishop told some fun sto­ries about Wild In The Streets, includ­ing one about how he and Richard Pryor held up the shoot by being late and thus got into big trouble.

Dyanne Thorne & Howard Maurer: one might expect a hard­boiled atti­tude or tales of debauch­ery from the star of Ilsa: The Wicked Warden and her hus­band… but the results couldn’t have been fur­ther from the truth.  Instead, the duo of Thorne and Maurer came off like an inter­est­ing aunt and uncle duo who had col­or­ful sto­ries to tell about the chal­lenges of show­biz.  They were refresh­ingly hon­est about the qual­ity of the Ilsa films — Maurer con­fessed to throw­ing the first Ilsa script at the wall before encour­ag­ing Thorne to take the gig on a “hey, it’s a job” basis — but they also owned their expe­ri­ences, as their charm­ingly upfront choice of attire revealed (her in fetish black leather, him in an Ilsa t-shirt).

Lynn Lowry and Camille Keaton: this panel was called “The Goddesses Of Grind” and sur­pris­ingly was one of the least event­ful entries.  Both Lowry and Keaton had pleas­ant per­son­al­i­ties but ques­tions were a lit­tle sparse — in Keaton’s case, it might be tough to ask ques­tions about I Spit On Your Grave because it remains so con­tro­ver­sial today — and the two thus had to rely upon famil­iar sto­ries.  That said, it was pleas­ant to lis­ten to them and both remain lovely and engaging.

Don Opper, Dee Wallace Stone and Liane Curtis: this was the Critters reunion panel.  Questions were a lit­tle slow to start but every­one had some­thing inter­est­ing to say once it got going.  It was revealed that New Line is on shaky ground when it comes to pay­ing resid­u­als to the stars of the Critters series and that Curtis secured her role in Critters 2 because she could drive a stick shift.  The unex­pected sur­prise was that Stone and Opper both told funny sto­ries about the chal­lenges of work­ing with Don Johnson — Stone worked with him on Nash Bridges, Opper on Miami Vice — and how his diva per­son­al­ity cre­ated chal­lenges on the sets of those shows.

Fred Williamson: if you’ve ever read an inter­view with Williamson, you know that he gives good quote — and the Hammer did not dis­ap­point in this ses­sion.  He ran through some famil­iar tales — how he broke into act­ing, why he became a film­maker — but he also revealed some sides of his per­sona that don’t always come through inter­views.  For instance, he asserted that he knows what he mar­kets is a per­sona in the Clint Eastwood/Charles Bronson vein, not a tremen­dous depth of act­ing tal­ent (Your Humble Reviewer thinks he under­es­ti­mates him­self there).  He also let it be known that he under­stands he’s been in a lot of junk but he takes great pride in doing his schtick with con­sis­tency regard­less of the cir­cum­stances.  Other inter­est­ing dis­cov­er­ies: he impro­vised his big speech in From Dusk Till Dawn and directed the last twenty min­utes of Blind Rage (the Filipino film­mak­ers flew to L.A. to get him to pro­vide their finale).  He was ener­getic and fun from start to finish.

Pam Grier: the finale of the Q&A ses­sions was worth the wait.  Grier is not only lovely and charm­ing but turned out to be a very engag­ing pub­lic speaker.  Though she took ques­tions near the end — includ­ing one enter­pris­ing geek ask­ing her out on a din­ner date — the major­ity of her ses­sion was a sort of spo­ken autobiography/one-woman show piece.  She was in a life-story frame of mind from work­ing on her auto­bi­og­ra­phy so she told a lot of sto­ries about how her upbring­ing as a hard-working coun­try girl influ­enced her approach to her act­ing career.  Grier also revealed how she dealt with a seri­ous can­cer scare in the late 1980’s and how it influenced/changed her views on med­i­cine and how to main­tain one’s well-being.  Her mel­low but engag­ingly told sto­ries were a per­fect way to close the Q&A part of Cult Fiction.

After a break for din­ner and relax­ing, Saturday evening brought another dou­ble dose of film screen­ings under the stars on the blow-up drive-in screen.  Your Humble Reviewer made it out there ahead of time and was rewarded with a gor­geous sun­set.  This was a truly pic­turesque set­ting for an out­door screen­ing an appre­cia­tive lit­tle crowd gath­ered for the final evening of cin­ema alfresco…

COFFY: Pam Grier stuck around to intro­duce this 1973 gem, which remains one of the best films to emerge from the blax­ploita­tion era.  Not only do you get Pam Grier in a fear­less, b-movie star-making per­for­mance, you also get Jack Hill at the height of his pow­ers direct­ing the kind of tough yet smartly-crafted film that has endeared him to exploita­tion fans all over the world.  It deliv­ers the expected sex and vio­lence with a cre­ative flair but also gives the audi­ence a com­plex hero­ine worth get­ting invested in and some bit­ing com­men­tary on both the drug trade and the all-pervasive nature of cor­rup­tion.  It also helps that the film is lib­er­ally sprin­kled with the kind of unique, highly spe­cific details that stick in the mem­ory, like the hero­ine plant­ing  razor­blades in her afro to fend off a hair-pulling attacker.

CRITTERS 2: Liane Curtis and Don Opper intro­duced this one.  Taken on its own terms, this sequel to the sur­prise hit Critters is mod­est stuff.  It’s a mod­est small-town-versus-monsters tale that is enlivened by the occa­sional inspired set­piece — like the title mon­sters attack­ing a man in a bunny suit, who promptly crashes through the win­dow of a fully-packed church.  It was more inter­est­ing as a reflec­tion on how post-Nightmare On Elm Street era spent the lat­ter half of the 1980’s look­ing for another fran­chise to fol­low Wes Craven’s sur­prise suc­cess.  The best part of the film was Barry Corbin’s like­ably sar­cas­tic turn as the town’s burnt-out for­mer sheriff.

For the hard­core convention-goer, there was still a mid­night screen­ing of Pieces — but this is where Your Humble Reviewer checked out for the night, fully sati­ated by a day packed with cult movies and their beloved stars.  It was truly an action packed day, one worth every penny of the mod­est admis­sion fee.