One A Week Reviews #44: Butterfly

Butterfly

Ok, the first thing to address with Butterfly is that Pia Zadora isn't horrible. She's not... great, but she's not as gawd-awful here as you'd believe based on her reputation.

What first strikes a contemporary viewer, 20 years away from the height of her reputation and 30 from the release of this and The Lonely Lady, is how much Jessica Alba resembles her.  Zadora's millionaire husband at the time produced Butterfly, and while I'm not sure why he's so enthusiastic about getting her (admittedly slammin') body displayed (male preening pride?), you have to appreciate that he's created a handsome, well-produced period piece filled with recognizable stars of the time. Zadora is young, with a baby face and killer body, but she's not an awful actress here.Being surrounded by Stacey Keach, an obviously drunk Orson Welles, and James Franciscus doesn't hurt either. Edward Albert,  Stuart Whitman, and George "Buck" Flowers are on hand, as well. Best casting of all? Ed McMahon and June Lockhart show up as a pair of rich, affected comic relief parents of a wealthy character.

Butterfly is based on a James M. Cain novel, and if you've never read him you simply must. Kady, a manipulative temptress in the Cain tradition, shows up suddenly in the life of her lonely father Jess (a quite-good and surprisingly lean Stacey Keach) and seems to be as interested in an intimate relationship as she is in a filial one. She's also rather obvious in her motivation, which is to get her hands on the silver in the closed mine he tends. She's greed personified, while Keach's Jess wears the broken heart of a parent who feels they failed on his sleeve. In other words, he's a painfully easy mark. One wonders how the material was sold to Keach to get him to engage in the scene of frozen-faced brain-freeze as he slides his hands around to Kady's breasts in the bathtub... then escalates from there.

(There's some spoilers and a bonus video from here on in, kids. Fans of campy crap beware!)

31 Flavors of Horror #24: The House Where Evil Dwells

What would getting ready for Halloween be without watching some Haunted House movies. Here's one for the 31 Flavors of Horror that I remember seeing as a kind on USA, some Saturday afternoon, and it messed me up! I remember this one as being bleak, and scary and sad... and I'm sure it doesn't hold up now. But with a cast that's Edward Albert, Doug McClure, and Susan George, how can I not give it another look see?

Bonus: This was directed by the same man who made Motel Hell, and if you've never seen it... go, now! 

31 Flavors of Horror #24
The House Where Evil Dwells

In both the movies and real life, a bitchin' piece of real estate will get snatched up off the market even if it is the site of multiple homicides. In the movies, however, they do tend to come with ghosts. I think it's safe to assume from the title that there'll be ghosts in this.

I think this movie banks on its American audience not knowing anything about 1840's Japan, or Japanese culture in general, beyond what they've seen in Kung Fu pictures. The House Where Evil Dwells opens on a man with a bad, feudal-Japanese pseudo-ponytail haircut visiting a young woman at a country house. She serves him tea, gives him a small sculpture of a beast thats making "the beast with two backs,"and plays that haunting Shamisen string-music that I find completely atonal but mesmerizing. That music is heard by another badly ponytailed man who rushes up to the house to investigate. Ooh, I betcha he's the hubby. He sees the man and woman kissing as shadows through the rice paper wall, and a kimono getting undone.

You can't blame him, I guess, for breaking in like a slo-mo Hulk, through the paper, sword drawn. Our molasses Ninja hubby wrecks the place up and lops loverboy's arm off and then his head. Next, he slashes the Geisha-wife's throat and kills her as well. Then, after doing in her musical instrument - dude, she wasn't that bad- he commits harikiri and... credits.

Well, that was a depressing way to open a movie... and being that it's based on a novel, this doesn't bode well for the rest of the film.

(Bad 80's styles! Over-tanned Susan George! Incredibly uncomfortable Doug McClure! It's all inside...)