Descendant (2003)

 There’s something broken deep inside ‘Descendant’ that I’m still not entirely sure I’ve identified.  It has such a fundamental lack of understanding of the mechanics of storytelling that I’ve become far more invested in working it out than it’s worth.  I know what kind of movie this is trying to be, I know the purpose of it in a commercial sense.  The people who made it were very much aware of the exact market niche they were trying to fill but I’ve yet to work out exactly how what’s on the screen was mistaken for a functional movie.

Let’s back up a step and identify the principals involved.  ‘Descendant’ is a direct-to-video movie released in 2003 during that hazy overlap period of time when DVDs were clearly set to be the future but the VHS rental market still dominated.  Netflix was founded in 1997 but by 2003 had only 1.4 million subscribers.  They wouldn’t start offering streaming until 2007.  At the time of release Blockbuster had around 5,500 retail locations, ten years later they were down to 500.  While 16:9 televisions did exist and a few television shows had begun to at least film in that aspect ratio (“The X-Files” started in 1997, “Scrubs” waited until 2009) it’s not as surprising as it seems that this, an R-rated ostensibly erotic thriller, was filmed and released in 4:3.

It was produced by Del Mar Productions, one of only two movies it made.  The name comes from the husband and wife team of Del Tenny, who co-directed this movie, and Margot Hartman, who starred as Margaret Usher.  She shared co-writing credit with Kermit Christman, the other half of the directing pair, along with William Katt (of ‘Greatest American Hero’ fame), who featured as Dr. Tom Murray.  This exact same team had previously worked together on ‘Clean and Narrow,’ a 2000 movie directed by and starring Katt.  In between the two, and minus Katt, was ‘Do You Wanna Know a Secret?’, written and produced by Tenny and Christman for Two Left Shoe Productions and which also featured Hartman.  This was one of those shameless derivatives of ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ that’s vaguely notable for starring former teen heartthrobs Joey Lawrence and Jeff Conway. 

The only person involved in ‘Descendant’ with any kind of long-term consistent history in the business was Katt, who’s consistently worked as an actor but was a writer for exactly three things in his long career, the two Del Mar productions and a 1997 movie called ‘Blade Boxer’ that I would very much like to get my hands on, especially since although Jack Beeman is credited as its co-writer I am very sure that’s a pen name for Kermit Christman.  Tenney produced some Z-grade movies in the 60’s while Hartman had some small parts around the same time, the two having presumably met on the set of 1963’s ‘Violent Midnight,’ the IMDB plot description of which reads as “A war veteran from a wealthy but troubled New England family is suspected in a series of brutal murders in his small town.”  Spoiler: the killer ends up being Margot Hartman.

Unsurprisingly there is not a lot of information available on the actual nuts and bolts of Del Mar Productions but looking at the pieces assembled it seems an awful lot like a husband and wife producer team, long out of the business, met up with Katt and Christman and decided to get back in the game.  They turned out a couple of movies, sold a screenplay around the same time, then dropped the entire thing when this movie took them nowhere.  Except for Katt, who continues to have a career as a character actor, this was the last production that any of them were ever involved with.  The company itself has long since been dissolved.  Wikipedia claims ‘Descendant’ had a budget of $650,000, or just over a million in 2022 dollars, which by anyone’s standard is a pretty low budget.  Currently not streaming anywhere remotely legitimate it can be purchased at the time of writing on Ebay for $6.99+shipping with a free bonus movie, the 2006 thriller ‘Roman,’ featuring Kristen Bell.  Again Tubi has failed me.

These stills are out of order but please keep in mind they're all from while they're dating.

In retrospect the most notable thing about this movie is its purported star Katherine Heigl, fresh off of “Roswell” and a mere two years from “Grey’s Anatomy.”  Although she’s certainly the co-lead the actual protagonist of the movie, in terms of who the movie is about and who has the most screen time, is played by Jeremy London, right in the middle of a two-year stint as Chandler Hampton on “7th Heaven.”  Everyone else in the cast were various shades of working actors, the kind of bit-part players that speak a couple of lines to the lead actors in a long-running series or are part of the shifting ensemble of a daytime soap. 

It's at this point that I would normally do a rough summary of the premise of the movie but here we run into our first problem.  I’ve watched this movie several times, took 9,846 words of notes, I projected it on a wall and furiously drank cups and cups of tea while shouting at it, but I’m not precisely sure what the premise of this movie is.  I know the elements it contains, I know the genre it inhabits, I know exactly what works of Edgar Allen Poe it’s badly referencing, I can even explain the things that occur and the order in which they happen to make up the plot, but I’m still not sure why, exactly, any of this happens.  I don’t know what this movie thinks it does.

The best I can explain is that it’s like the people who made this had seen movies, had even been in movies, had been involved in making movies before, but they didn’t understand how a movie works.  They were aware it needed to be around an hour and a half long, have a beginning, middle, and an end, needed to be set in a location and take place over a period of time, have characters in it who say words and do things, and decided that if it had all of those things then what they ended up with must have been a movie.  Things happen in this movie because the people who made it were vaguely aware of the kinds of things that were supposed to happen in the kind of movie they were trying to make so the characters just did those things without ever bothering to work out why they were being done. 

Still dating.

Another problem with unraveling this movie is that it slowly reveals information and plot points over the course of the runtime in such a way that, if you’re not paying attention, might seem to make a kind of sense but if you actually lay it all end to end it doesn’t hold together at all.  In a nutshell, nonsense and all, from what I’ve pieced together, here’s what happens.  Please note this is not how it’s presented in the movie, this is a chronological list of events:

In 1839 Edgar Allen Poe publishes “The Fall of the House of Usher.”  Instead of a melancholy short fictional story this is a true story about a real-life brother and sister with the surname Usher who had an incestuous affair which produced a son.  Upon the publication of the story the brother buries his sister alive and sets the titular house of Usher on fire, killing them both.  You’ll note this is closer to the Corman-directed movie version than the original.  The already fully grown son, seeking revenge, then kills Emily Hedgerow, the cousin of Poe’s wife, by cutting out her heart.  Seven generations later a man named Ethan Usher, a bestselling author of two previous novels under the name Ethan Poe and falsely claiming to be Edgar’s descendant, is intent on revenge against the Poe lineage at the urging of his mother Margaret Usher.  He is introduced writing bad prose then sleeps with a sex worker and kills her offscreen by cutting out her heart for reasons that are never explained.  He also has frequent visits from the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe.  We then establish the existence of Anne Hedgerow, descendant of Emily.  She has a younger brother who it is heavily implied used to sexually assault her.  Ethan Usher has travelled to the small town in which Ann lives for a book signing, which Ann attends.  She introduces herself to him as a fellow descendant of Poe.  Later in the parking lot he fights off her drunken brother.  At this point the movie decides they are now in love.  The body of the sex worker is discovered and aside from giving the local deputy a reason to be around in various scenes this never impacts the movie again.  Much of the rest of the movie is simply Ethan Usher arguing with the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe while acting increasingly erratic and Ann Hedgerow being more or less fine with this.  Ethan conspires with his mother in stubbornly vague terms about the form their revenge is going to take.  The mother at one point says he needs to marry Ann, have her change her name to Usher, and publish another bestseller.  Ethan chooses instead to kidnap her best friend, kill her doctor, and then get killed by Ann.  The last shot of the movie is Ann in bed, pregnant with Ethan’s child, smiling at the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe.

I’ve left out various flourishes, such as Ethan’s insistence on turning the Hedgerow family home into a B&B, the local deputy being just as stalkery and obsessed with Ann as the murderer, Ethan disinterring Ann’s dead mother and leaving it in the woods for Ann to stumble across, the abusive brother being attacked and left for dead yet being fine after several days of apparent outside exposure only to be instantly killed when he reemerges, and Katherine Heigl failing to hide just how desperately uncomfortable the entire production is making her.

Stiiiiiill dating.

It's important to emphasize how little of the plot makes sense, even on its own terms.  Let’s leave aside the fact that none of the above information is established or communicated at all clearly.  This movie presupposes a world in which the fictional short story “The Fall of the House of Usher,” which is a vaguely scary story that’s basically a sketch about mental illness with some light touches of gothic imagery, is instead a true story of an actual family, the publication of which forever taints their name, so much so that over 160 years later the family, stubbornly sticking to the Usher name, finally decides to have their revenge.  The only problem is that Edgar Allen Poe famously didn’t have any children, so instead they focus their ire on a descendant of his wife’s cousin.  I refuse to believe that if they’re going after that tenuous of a relation there aren’t around two hundred other people just as closely related.  This person they’ve chosen to focus on also has a younger brother, yet oddly enough none of the revenge efforts seem to involve him. 

Then there’s the nature of the revenge.  It’s never made clear or explicit in any way to the audience what actual form this revenge is supposed to take but if I squint hard enough I think I’ve worked most of it out.  Having established himself under the name Ethan Poe he has published two horror books, at least one of which is a bestseller, and is struggling to finish a third that’s acceptable to his publisher.  His mother wants him to woo the apparently last Poe descendant, marry her, and then claim his rightful last name of Usher, whereupon he will publish his third book as a bestseller under his real name.  And that’s it.  This is as much of the revenge plot as we’re told.  How having her fall in love with him under a false name will accomplish any of this is left unclear, or how any of this will act as a form of revenge.  It all goes wrong anyways as Ethan Usher has an unrelated mental illness and just ends up as a very unsuccessful serial killer.

In a very real sense the spine of the story is broken.  There is insufficient reason for revenge and the revenge itself makes no sense.  This is why I struggle so much with the basic premise of the movie, there is no engine driving any of the actions.  I don’t know why any of the characters are doing what they’re doing, what they hope to accomplish, and none of the answers supplied by the movie make any sense.  None of this is helped by the way the movie doles out information.  It fails in two respects: the mechanics of revealing information and the pace and amount of it being given to the audience.  The first is a failure of moviemaking, the second is a failure of storytelling. 

The moviemaking failures are obvious and straightforward.  For example: the opening scene of the movie is Frederick Usher murdering Emily Hedgerow in 1839.  It wasn’t until I read someone’s negative online review that I realized that the characters were played by the leads Jeremy London and Katherine Heigl, mirroring their characters in the present.  This is because London plays Usher with a dense wig, a prop mustache, and an unintelligible accent while the editing and framing is so incompetent that we never get a clear look at Heigl’s face.  It’s essentially a very poor man’s version of 1991’s ‘Dead Again.’

They're so cute together.

Another example is an embroidered handkerchief Heigl is shown staring at several times over the course of the first hour before late in the film handing it to Usher with the line “I forgot to give this back to you.”  This remained inexplicable until my third viewing when I finally realized that near the beginning of the movie, when Usher and Ann meet in the present at a bar and Usher blots a wine stain on Ann’s blouse, he does so with this handkerchief, which is never shot in any way as establishing it as anything but a bar napkin.  When Anne contemplates it’s shown to be embroidered with a clear letter “E” and another letter which, no matter how hard I stare at it, seems to be a backwards “J.”  What this is trying to convey to the audience I am utterly unable to ascertain.  Until I went back and checked I had read it as an “E” and an “H” for Elizabeth Hedgerow, but if so I’d have no clue how it would fall into the hands of an Usher and what reason he’d have for giving it to her but luckily that’s not what it is and at no point does it make Ann suspicious or in any way factor into the plot so it’s completely pointless. 

Usher is shown writing several times over the course of the movie and while better filmmakers than these have also failed at making writing seem interesting that doesn’t make it any less obnoxious.  He speaks aloud as he types, bugs his eyes, he even smokes an ornate pipe at one point.  The prose the character turns out is terrible faux-Poe.  This is directly from Usher’s laptop screen:

 

“We know that there are diseases in which occur total cessations of all the apparent functions of vitality, and yet in which these cessations are merely suspensions, properly so called.  They are only temporary pauses in the incomprehensible mechanism.  A certain period elapses, and some unseen mysterious principle again sets in motion the magic opinion and the wizard wheels.  The silver cord was not forever loosed, nor the golden bowl irreparably broken.’

 

Because these scenes are inserted more or less randomly in between the others it took multiple viewings before I realized that the movie is attempting to tell us that he’s working on the book that will become a bestseller in order to fulfill his revenge as it’s only after he types ‘The End’ that he finally moves to kill Ann.  It’s never given more emphasis than a background activity and since it’s never really established what the revenge plan actually is the fact that this is an important part of it goes completely unnoticed on first or even second viewing.

The failure in storytelling is more egregious.  This is trying to be an erotic thriller and failing hard on both counts.  There are two shots of breasts in this movie and one of them is on a corpse, so the erotic part seems to consist of the bare minimum content to get an ‘R’ rating so it could sit next to the other videos in that section of Blockbuster.  Any eroticism that might come from the interactions of the characters is immediately snuffed out both by the fact that not only is one of the leads blatantly the killer but he’s also played by London as twitchy and more than a little sleazy.  This is not helped by lines such as the one twenty-two minutes in that had me rewind the scene multiple times to make sure I heard correctly.  While strolling through what is eventually established as her large front yard Ann is explaining to Usher, after just meeting him the night before, that her mother had recently died.  The following conversation takes place:

Before the line.

               Usher: Did you love your mother?

              Ann: Loved her.  And relied on her.  I’m twenty-four, but still a kid.

              Usher: (leaning close, husky-voiced) But not a virgin.

After the line.

 It should be noted that after a pause Ann changes the subject to his next book and they almost kiss one scene later.  This is pretty representative of all of the dialogue in the movie.  Usher will say something either creepy or random or both that’s usually sexual in nature and then they make out. 

This movie is bad enough that it manages to violate Ebert’s Law of Conservation of Characters in a rather ingenious way by not having any suspects other than the obviously guilty party.  During my first watch I kept getting thrown by the movie not even attempting to establish a red herring.  Before I realized he was part of the production behind the movie I assumed that the presence of William Katt meant he must be the murderer since he was a character actor I recognized.  When he didn’t get enough screen time I started suspecting Ann’s childhood friend, the local deputy, who’s established as blatantly stalking her before I realized that the movie was somehow treating this as romantic.  These suspicions weren’t based on any actions of the characters or the way the movie was framing them, I just assumed that if the protagonist of the movie is introduced in the same scene as a character who is later found horribly murdered that the killer isn’t simply going to be that protagonist because that would be a very stupid thing to do.

In addition to removing all suspense from the movie this has the secondary effect of the audience eventually hating Ann.  As it becomes more and more obvious to us that Usher is very clearly the killer we become more and more annoyed that she’s not picking up on the all of clues and insane behavior.  This isn’t helped by the fact that Usher and Ann have three short scenes together before they’re falling into bed, planning to open a B&B, and she’s thinking about having kids.  This relationship is established as a fact without ever showing any sort of basis for it other than authorial fiat.  The entire movie takes place over the course of a week and if they’re in a scene together they’re either having sex or she’s vaguely uncomfortable because he’s acting strange.  So not only do we start yelling at the screen asking why she’s still with him we have no idea why she got with him in the first place because the relationship itself is never portrayed.  Since we don’t empathize with her we don’t care as the danger escalates because we don’t care if she dies and the more she doesn’t notice the less we give a shit.  She is literally drugged, locked in her bedroom, then chased through the woods to stumble across the corpse of her dead mother before she understands she’s in actual danger. 

The topper of the lack of storytelling ability is a fact that I didn’t realize until about the third time throug.  None of the survivors at the end of the movie ever understand what Usher was doing.  Everything Usher says to Ann after he’s chased and captured her are lines from the book he’s written and at no point does he tell her that his real last name is Usher and that he’s seeking revenge.  After the events of the movie all anyone knows is that Ann met someone who claimed to be a distant relative who was creepy around her for about a week then went crazy and killed a couple of people before dying.

Every loving couple has arguments.

The clumsy Poe references shoved in throughout are also failures, but at least the intent there is understandable.  An unexpected benefit of watching this movie was pausing to read the various Poe works they referenced for the first time since high school.  It turns out that Poe was a pretty good writer.  Naturally the movie has ravens, eventually Usher starts calling Ann Lenore, a character gets bricked up alive behind a wall, and someone is tied to a coffee table while someone swings a pickaxe at them in a pendulum-like manner.  None of these are done with any kind of style.  The ravens are either just random shots of the birds used as scene transitions or they’re just heard randomly in the background.  Usher calls Ann Lenore as a reference to the lost love in the poem even though he’s not in love with her.  Usher bricks up her friend in the basement but doesn’t quite finish and although Ann sees that he’s built a random brick wall in her basement she never bothers to check it out.  The pickaxe as pendulum thing is such a casualty of the budget that I really wish they hadn’t bothered. 

Some of them are just random verbatim Poe quotes tossed into the script almost at random.  The movie opens with a line from the poem ‘The Conqueror Worm’ that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie.  Usher drops a Poe quote in front of a character and claims it as his own only for the character to call him on it, which approaches clever except for the fact that they mangle the quote and miss the point of it as well.  The only one that’s overt enough to become actually funny is at the very end, when Ann shoots Usher and yells “Nevermore!” for absolutely no reason except because Poe.

The fact that the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe is hanging around is utterly inexplicable.  It’s heavily implied throughout that it’s just a hallucination of Usher but the movie ends with him being seen by a pregnant Ann so no, movie, you have a ghost Poe in you.  The first few times he shows up Usher reacts as if startled or alarmed, then suddenly in one scene he talks back to him, is annoyed he’s always showing up, and from that point on he’s just a random nuisance to our killer.  Sometimes he’s a silent observer, sometimes he mocks Usher’s writing, sometimes he expresses concerns for his mental health and urges him to get help, and finally he quotes himself to a dying Usher before just walking off.  He serves no function in the plot and doesn’t affect anything that happens, which would be the point if he were a ghost, and he provides no insight into Usher’s character, motives or actions, which would be the point if he were a hallucination. 

There’s so much else I could complain about.  The deputy coming to a dramatic realization after reading Usher’s book but the movie never bothering to explain what that revelation is.  The doctor, upon hearing that Ethan has a prescription for Clozapine, getting down what’s obviously a dictionary and reading that’s it’s used as a treatment “for inconsistent and dangerous behavior” rather than, y’know, schizophrenia.  The deputy grimly wiping his gun with a rag while staring at a newspaper article about Ann’s dead mother for no discernable reason. 

#relationshipgoals

 

Every piece this movie is built of is broken.  It’s already asking a lot for the audience to buy that a story they probably never read was actually based on real events that aren’t fully explained until an hour into the movie.  Then you introduce a character that’s so obviously the killer that’s it’s actually distracting.  Mix that with a romance that’s never established and makes so little sense that you start hating everyone on screen.  Top it off with a revenge plot where it’s never established what the revenge is or why it’s being sought and then end the entire thing with the survivor heavily pregnant by her serial-killer ex-boyfriend and smiling at the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe.

It’s an erotic thriller that’s not sexy or suspenseful and I’m not in the least surprised that Del Mar Productions folded pretty much immediately after this was produced and all but one of them never worked again.  The acting is bad, the dialogue is atrocious, the directing is basic, the art direction is non-existent, there are about three actual sets and the rest are random outdoor shots, but all of these are pretty minor complaints when the fundamentals are so deeply flawed.  Nothing about this movie is interesting except for maybe the presence of Katherine Heigl and I’m completely certain that other than the four principals involved in the making of this movie I’ve given it more thought than any other person in existence.  The only reason I’ve spent this long wrestling with it is that it’s broken all the way to the bottom in a way that I haven’t often seen.  Even with the worst of movies you can usually figure out what they intended to make before reality got in the way.  This was made by people who didn’t know what they wanted to say and had no idea how to say it. 

The Bear Who Slept Through Christmas (1973)

 Originally airing on December 17, 1973, “The Bear Who Slept Through Christmas” was co-produced by DePatie-Freleng enterprises, mostly known for their work on the Dr. Suess animated specials and the Pink Panther shorts, and Sed-Bar Productions, who never made anything else.  It was directed by Gerry Chiniquy and Hawley Pratt, both veterans of television animation.  It was based on a story by John Barrett, writer and producer of “Tom Smothers' Organic Prime Time Space Ride,” which would explain why the bear of the title is voiced by Tom Smothers.  The name to focus on, I feel, is the credited writer Larry Spiegel, for though the special retains a lot of the whimsical counterculture feel of the The Smothers Brothers there’s a kernel of madness here that I need to examine.

An entire decade defined by pallette choices.

Larry Spiegel’s first credit on IMDB is a writing credit for the 1972 movie ‘Hail.’  The IMDB description reads “A presidential advisor discovers that the President has assembled a secret army of vigilantes to suppress dissent and is setting up concentration camps in which to imprison protesters, hippies and other ‘social undesirables.’”  It is apparently a black comedy and not a badly regarded one, but there doesn’t seem to be a circulating copy, a rare instance where Tubi has failed me.  The same year as ‘The Bear who Slept Through Christmas’ he also adapted for the screen the 1969 novel Book of Numbers by Robert Deane Pharr, a tale of crime and corruption and ‘the numbers racket,’ the name for the lottery before it became legal when managed by the government, in a poor African American community in the South.  It was also generally well regarded, with Roger Ebert giving it three stars.  Spiegel later found some success as a producer with the cult classic “Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins” and the 2015 Keanu Reeves vehicle “Knock Knock,” directed by Eli Roth.  There’s also the rabbit hole of “Evil Town” a kind of Frankenstein’s monster of a movie cobbled together in the mid 80’s from parts of the 1977 horror movie ‘God Damn Dr. Shagetz’ about a mad scientist stealing the fluid from people’s pituitary glands to seek the secret of eternal life which was directed and written by Spiegel.

Which is not to say that all of my forthcoming venom should be directed solely at Spiegel, rather I think it’s a combination of his clear eccentricities together with the almost aggressive hippie-era whimsy of Tom Smothers and John Barrett that I would argue takes what starts as a simple Christmas tale and ends up with a kind of blissed-out nihilism that I’m still unwrapping. 

A common complaint I have with one-off animated specials is that they establish rules that make no sense within the confines of their own universes.  It’s one thing to have anything go in a gag cartoon starring Bugs Bunny and quite another to violate internal rules in a cartoon that’s at least attempting some kind of message.  For example in this special animals and humans have parallel but segregated fully developed modern societies.  The special goes to great lengths to establish that not only do bears talk and have their own civilization they also have cities and jobs and television networks exactly like humans do.  They even have their own airline which ferries sleepy bears to far away locations in which to hibernate.  The fact that they have intercontinental flight is important because halfway through the special it also establishes that this entire bear society exists within walking distance of the fully human New York City.  Although this is not a surprise to the bears, as they are fully aware of the existence of humankind, the two cultures seem entirely separated in a way that raises immediate questions.  Is this the shaky aftermath of centuries of bloody conflict?  Have they both independently decided to simply be uninterested in each other?  I would like to read a history of the delicate negotiations between the bears and the humans as they worked out which flight plans would have priority at which times.  Would bear Reagan go on to fire the bear air traffic controllers in 1981?  A throw-away line later states they also put a bear on the moon, which raises the question of a bear factor in the Cold War space race, so did there also exist a Soviet bear Russia, making it a four-way race to the moon?  This is further made muddy when our bear hero encounters humans and they are entirely unsurprised to be interacting with a talking, clothes-wearing bear. 

It's also inconsistent in its portrayal of overall sapience.  After having established that bears think and talk it also establishes that bees do the same.  Our hero bear works in a honey factory in which bees are seen as fellow workers, and after a meeting the head of the company asks that the bees get a copy of a memo.  However later our hero seeks shelter in a cave and is chased out by growling, unspeaking wolves, so as far as I can tell this is a world in which the three sentient species are bears, humans, and bees.  The possibility of a bee space program goes frustratingly unaddressed.

D'oh.

The entire hook of the cartoon is a ‘Royal Tenenbaums’ joke: everyone knows that bears sleep through Christmas, what this special presupposes is, maybe one didn’t?  This is hardly new territory, off the top of my head there’s 1970’s ‘Santa and the Three Bears’ with a similar idea.  But the problem here lies in how this bear civilization treats Christmas and how it’s never explained over the course of the cartoon.  The special fails to consider beyond the surface what kind of society it takes place in and fails to explain itself to the audience.  Normally this isn’t a problem in a cartoon unless the point of it is that it’s substantially different from our own.  That’s when the first ten minutes explains exactly how Care Bear society functions so we can later get to the scary talking book.  In a lot of ways this bear society is just an analogue for our own except in so far as it diverges in its treatment of Christmas, and that’s what causes the disconnect.  In one scene our hero becomes distracted while working on the production line and causes honey to overflow the jar he’s filling and spread onto the floor, going so far as to flood the entire production area and even seep into the boss’s office.  He is yelled at for this misdeed but in the end is given a warning, not even getting suspended or being docked any pay.  In and of itself this is fine, perhaps the boss is just being understanding, but in the same scene he’s threatened with termination for expressing mere curiosity about the concept of Christmas.  This is either just inconsistent or there’s a much darker story lurking underneath about the policing of cultural norms that the special refuses to address.  There’s a message on the company bulletin board announcing the scheduled hibernation time, and although it’s not made entirely explicit it seems like the company is the one setting an official start to the hibernation season, even though the special opens with bears already settling down for hibernation and our hero’s roommate actually collapsing into unconsciousness while walking to work that day.  It can never decide if hibernation is a necessity of bear physiology or just a societal norm.  The plot of the special involves our hero pledging to stay awake and not hibernate, with other characters openly laughing at him for this, and until the very end it’s never portrayed as being difficult for him to stay awake, making the distinction between hibernation as an inevitability or a simple choice extremely fuzzy.  It refuses to articulate its stance on biological determinism or societal hegemony as the true final authority.

So far I’m not being all that serious, none of these are enough to make me actually angry.  It’s just having some fun nitpicking and applying overly strict logic to a children’s cartoon.  However.  There are three things that make me honestly upset.  I thought the first one was enough and I was already mapping out my response as I watched the special, but then I got to the ending and the second and third problems absolutely dwarf the first.  This ending will be a thing unto itself, but let’s first talk about how the humor of the hippie movement has aged.

I mentioned above the television show “Tom Smothers' Organic Prime Time Space Ride.”  This was a syndicated half hour show that aired twelve episodes in 1971, consisting mainly of comedy sketches, cartoons, and musical acts.  It also seems to have been lost to time.  It was one of a number of series that tried and failed to recreate the success of ‘The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.’  That show ran from 1967 to 1969 on CBS and was the closest thing network television had to counter-culture on the airwaves up to that time.  It was widely considered as controversial for addressing racism, the presidency of Richard Nixon, and the Vietnam war in direct terms.  Although tame by today’s standard or even the standards of a decade later it was seen as fairly radical at the time and has since become something of a legend in tv history.

It also wasn’t very funny.  I’m old enough to remember sitting at my grandparent’s house watching reruns of this and “Laugh-In” on Nick at Night and even at the time it was just background noise while we waited for something actually funny to come on.  A lot of the humor was based on the mannerisms of the two brothers, with Dick acting as the straight man and Tom the spacey, stuttery one, which is fine as a double act but not enough to build an entire hour-long variety show around.  Much of the rest of it was hyper-topical to the time or so on-the-nose political it was clearly looking for an appreciative round of applause rather than an actual laugh.  Like other variety shows of the time it had random inserts of contemporary musical or stand-up acts.  The musical performances especially have aged just fine.  Also, as has been painfully established by the memory-holing of the Tonight Show tenure of Jay Leno, being topical and political in and of themselves do not make classic comedy.  There’s a reason people still consider ‘I Love Lucy’ and ‘The Dick Van Dyke’ show to be funny but don’t bring up the Smothers Brothers nearly as much.  It’s certainly important historically but like old episodes of “The Daily Show” it hasn’t aged gracefully.

I refuse to explain the context.

Which is to say that while I do in fact have a problem with the vocal portrayal by Tom Smothers of our hero, giving him a stop/start, loose cadence to his speech that makes even his bold proclamations of intent seem offhand and vaguely apologetic, that is not the main issue I have with the hippie roots of this special.  It’s that the ethos of the special, the animating impulse, is a general, vague rebelliousness against prevailing society not based in any specific issue or gripe with any system or form of oppression but a kind of overall idea that something, somewhere could be better so it’s our job to be nonspecifically nonconformist in a blandly useless way.  To shoehorn in some terminology, it’s signaling with no praxis.

To be specific our hero, who I can no longer avoid naming as Ted E. Bear (as far as I can tell unassociated with the Ty brand bear of the same name from the 80's), wants to resist hibernating so he can experience Christmas.  This is a fine premise for a children’s Christmas cartoon.  The concept of Christmas is vague at best within bear society, but it does exist before the start of the special.  Although it is not unfamiliar to any of Ted’s fellow bears there is a distinct lack of specificity to it.  It is variously treated by Ted and the other bears as a place, a thing, a feeling, and confusingly in one instance for what it actually is, a human belief.  At one point he’s asked if, when he finds Christmas, he’s worried he won’t be able to find his way back, while at another he attempts to buy a plane ticket there only to be publicly mocked and told it isn’t a place.  The point is that he intends to ‘find’ Christmas, whatever that means, and is derided for that ambition.  The reason for this derision is never established or explained, it’s just asserted, which encapsulates the general sense of the special, that ‘society’ is to blame in some nebulous, unspecific way that we don’t really need to think about that much, just generally resist.

To give an idea of how this comes across, here’s a raw chunk of my notes from when I watched the special.  This is after he’s caused the accident at work and his boss is yelling at him:

 

“he gets called into said office, gets rightfully reamed out, apologizes, explains he was thinking about Christmas, as if that’s exculpatory, then [the boss] goes off about how the foundation of a bear’s life is work, and one shouldn’t think, and says if he hears anything else about Christmas he’ll be fired, so they’ve done a trick I hate where they turn us against the very reasonable authority figure by making his objections to the actions of the protagonist unreasonable where there do in fact exist completely reasonable objections to his actions that have nothing to do with the philosophical point that the special espouses, the secretary later underlines this point by pointing out that he has a college degree and could be very successful at business, then explicitly underlines the point I was just making by directly stating “I think it’s dangerous to mess around with philosophical concepts.”  In the context of a bear society with an at-best nebulous relationship to a human society a fixation on the HUMAN concept of Santa and Christmas is indeed odd, and the objections of those others in that bear society to that fixation are not, on the face of them, insincere, and the way they have disingenuously tied that to a very post-hippy idea of society=work is conflating things in a frankly dishonest way, I may actually be getting a bit upset because the issues raised are both valid but very much separate and by mixing the two together in such a slapdash way they are doing a disservice to both, back to cartoon bears”

 So my objections are not necessarily to the ideas contained in the special, that I believe that going against what everyone in a society is saying is inherently wrong, it’s just that going all the other way and treating these impulses as in and of themselves good regardless of the aims or outcomes is potentially a waste of time or possibly dangerous at worst.  Ted is never given any kind of reason for this seeking of Christmas, it’s never explained from where he first learned of the idea or what drives him to want to stay awake to look for it, it’s simply established as part of his character and is never explored further.  The mere fact that he has a desire to rebel against society and seek out something seen as generally unwanted or unvalued by his society is treated by the special as inherently good and thus need be examined no further.  Again, it’s not that in and of itself it’s a problematic impulse but it’s coupled with an unwillingness to give it any kind of scrutiny or specificity that drags nails against the chalkboard of my soul.  Why you believe what you believes matters, not just the fact that you believe it.

I was also annoyed by characters directly stating things like ‘work is the only valid reason to live’ and ’philosophy is inherently dangerous.’  The aforementioned secretary actually says the line, “Things won’t be different, it’s you who are different.  Oh, Ted, they’re all laughing at you!”  Thanks for making the villains so obvious, special.  It’s fine to have bad guys and I know it’s just a half-hour cartoon but it’s of a piece with the rest of it.  There’s no examination of the assumptions behind these statements, no interrogation of why these are bad statements, they just are and can therefore be blindly resisted.

Such societal scorn.

              This is my general annoyance with how hippie humor has aged.  Sure it’s rebellious, which is a great impulse, but it’s not directed in any productive way.  It’s never aimed at a specific target, just at “the man” or “society” or “the system” without ever really delving into why things are the way they are and what could possibly be done.  Instead of anger being at the core there’s a kind of waspish dissatisfaction.  “Turn on, tune in, drop out” isn’t a declaration of revolution, it’s a declaration that I’ll be over there doing something else and I’d rather not be bothered.  In the end Ted does in fact find this cartoon’s version of Christmas but it never occurs to either him or the special that he then needs to bring it back to the rest of bear society, instead they’re completely forgotten.  Hippies suck because in the end they’re just selfish.

All this was going through my head in real time as I watched this, it’s there in my notes.  But then there’s the ending.  In order to explain how the ending to this special trumps all of that, how it’s managed to inspire me to hate something more than vacuous hippie bullshit, I must first explain how we get there.  So, after he gets fired (for going on the news and talking about Christmas and bringing the name of the company into it after being explicitly told he would be fired if he did that specific thing) and is publicly mocked for his beliefs Ted E. Bear decides to strike out on his own to find Christmas.  Despite it having been firmly established as not being a place this involves our hero marching out into the woods with just a vest, a scarf, a hat, and a suitcase.  Apparently having just picked a random direction he runs afoul of the wolves mentioned before, falls in a river, loses his suitcase between scene transitions, and suddenly comes upon New York City, which doesn’t have surrounding cities or developments in this world but just rolling hills until a hard start at a toll booth.  Ted asks the completely unperturbed toll booth operator for directions and is advised to go to 33^rd street.

Yup, 1973.

This brings us to a montage of scary 70’s cartoon New York.  He gets confused at a crosswalk (which apparently don’t exist in bear society despite the shown existence of bear cars), he gazes in awe at a parade, is chased by a dog, that sort of thing.  He’s portrayed as much smaller than the surrounding humans, which will come into play later.  Through shenanigans he finds himself inside a toy store display window, frolicking with randomly sentient toys, which just are alive without any kind of justification, a development that crops up more often in these specials than you’d think.  The toys drop some hippy-dippy stuff about how if they don’t get sold they won’t get Christmas, the special waving a vague hand at anti-capitalism, before the store closes he’s suddenly locked in for the night.  This is portrayed as a dangerous moment for ol’ Ted until you realize he’s locked inside and could conceivably just unlock any of the doors but instead he finds himself falling out of a garbage chute into a back alley.  As he exits the alley he’s greeted by a man dressed as a charity Santa, bell and everything.  Like every other human he’s completely unfazed by the small bear in clothes and asks if he can help him.  Apparently these few minutes in the human world have beaten Ted entirely down because he sadly claims that no one can, that he was looking for Christmas but maybe he was crazy for even trying.

Having none of this Santa tells him that Christmas is not a place, it’s inside himself.  When pressed for details by Ted he suddenly gets awfully vague, rattling off some generalities about how it’s a way of acting and feeling and above all giving.  It’s a problem with the script that it keeps posing the question of the True Meaning of Christmas but doesn’t seem to have any answer.  To this Ted replies he has nothing to give, which is just another meaningless line the first time through but hits like a freight train when you know where all this ends up.  Santa then sends him on his way to a specific address up the street with the promise that he’ll find Christmas there.  After some stuttery thanks Ted’s on his way.

Santa is unimpressed.

For the first time in the special we cut away from Ted where at the address we find a family made up of a Mom, a Dad, and a little girl portrayed with cartoon shorthand for ‘poor but loving.’  After establishing their economic status they go to bed for the night, after which Ted breaks into their apartment and, confused, settles down for a nap under the Christmas tree.  He’s barely shut his eyes when suddenly Santa is there, who is apparently either the real Santa or just very interested in this one family, and says increasingly vague statements on the nature of Christmas until he bails just before the family comes back into the room to find a small, sentient bear who until very recently worked at a factory, having not fully capitalized on his college degree, sitting under their tree and looking at them in confusion.  At this point the girl, upon seeing Ted, happily states that she’d asked Santa for ‘a little bear’ for Christmas, runs over, and picks him up, twirling him around as the music swells and we get a sudden montage of psychedelic Christmas imagery.  Next there’s a push-in on a final scene of the girl in bed with Ted in a smaller bed at her side, narrator Casey Kasem intoning, “And, at that, Ted Edward Bear smiled and went to sleep.  He found Christmas.”  Roll credits.

And that’s it.  That’s the end.  I’m not sure where I expected this thing to wind up but a fully sentient, albeit small, adult bear with an entire life history including, again, college and working at a factory, being the … companion of a human child for presumably the rest of his life having given himself to a stranger for Christmas … was not it. 

The questions write themselves.  Presumably this is the beginning of his hibernation, so the family is going to be presented with an immobile bear for three months curled up in their child’s bedroom.  When the spring comes what kind of awkward conversations will they have as they establish how he’s going to function as a member of the household.  What will he do while the daughter is at school?  Is he going to get a job?  What happens when she gets older and isn’t so invested in having a little bear at her constant disposal?  Does he write letters to his friends back home trying to explain his current whereabouts?  Do they come looking for him if he doesn’t and it ends up with a super tense dinner where Ted has to justify himself?

I was left frankly dumbfounded by the ending.  I was already upset for vaguely philosophical reasons, being as always annoyed by hippies and how I generally agree with them morally and philosophically but grow increasingly frustrated as they kind of wander away before they ever bother with such trivial things as specifics, but as the special drew to a close and I saw there were maybe two minutes left I was genuinely confused as to what could possibly happen, then suddenly an actual bear is absorbed into a human family and this is presented as the true meaning of Christmas.

The reason I harped on so much about how firmly this special establishes bear society is that it portrays Ted as a fully-functioning member of that society.  He has a job, has friends, attempts to buy airlines tickets, gets interviewed by the news, has hopes and dreams and struggles against a society that misunderstands and oppresses him.  He yearns for an understanding of Christmas, he seeks something beyond himself, he has the courage to seek it out and experiences setbacks but struggles on.  It doesn’t establish these things very well, but it does establish them.  And the answer he is given, the moment of catharsis the entire special has been building towards, is just a pun on the name of Ted E. Bear.

The true meaning of Christmas.

And then there’s my third and final problem with this special, the one that wraps the entire thing up into a neat little bow of utter frustration.  The title of the special is “The Bear Who Slept Through Christmas.” The entire point, the premise, the galvanizing impulse behind this story is that our main character, the one persecuted and looked down upon by the entire nation of bear people for his beliefs, a bear who left all he knows and loves for the prospect of knowing the unknowable, finding the unfindable, who risked life and limb and wolves, who braved sentient toys and toll booth attendants, counseled by possibly Santa himself, is, in fact, the one bear who does not sleep through Christmas. 

Sorceress (1982)

     In certain circles Roger Corman is held in very high esteem.  Working almost entirely in the b-movie genre for decades he’s directed some well-regarded movies such as ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ and ‘X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes.’  He’s produced many more like 1960’s ‘The Little Shop of Horrors’ and ‘The Valentine Day Massacre.’  He’s given a leg up to such figures as Francis Ford Coppola (‘Dementia 13’), Peter Bogdanovich (‘Targets’), Martin Scorsese (‘Boxcar Bertha’), and numerous others.  He’s seen as almost the ultimate producer, having reportedly only ever lost money on one film, 1962’s ‘The Intruder,’ a socially-conscious movie about racial integration featuring William Shatner in his first starring role.  He has been involved, at some level of directing or producing, on over three-hundred and eighty movies.  For the past sixty years below a certain level of budget he’s been omnipresent.

    Which is a very polite way of saying that almost everything he’s made has been complete dogshit.  The old adage is generally stated as: good, fast, or cheap, pick any two.  Corman always picks the last two and if the first ends up happening it’s a lucky accident.  That Roger Corman’s name is in any way associated with quality is survivor’s bias, we only remember the handful of good ones and let the dreck drop through the sieve of our memories.  You’ll hear people defend 1959’s ‘Bucket of Blood’ as an underappreciated classic, but that same year he also produced ‘T-Bird Gang,’ ‘Beast from Haunted Cave,’ and directed ‘I Mobster.’   For every James Cameron he’s helped there’s a Jim Wynorski, for every Johnathan Demme there’s a Cirio H. Santiago.

    There’s also Jack Hill, and there’s also the movie ‘Sorceress.’  Jack Hill was part of the Corman stable of writers and directors during the 60’s and 70’s.  These days he’s most well-known for directing ‘Jackie Brown’ and ‘Coffy,’ both starring Pam Grier, and ‘Switchblade Sisters,’ long championed by Quentin Tarantino as a grindhouse classic.  There’s also the 1967 film ‘Spider Baby or, the Maddest Story Ever Told,’ thought lost for years but remastered and redistributed in 1994 to some cult notoriety.  It should be noted that Roger Corman was involved in none of these films.  The films Jack Hill made with Corman included ‘Pit Stop,’ ‘The Big Doll House,’ and ‘The Big Bird Cage.’  1982’s ‘Sorceress’ was the last movie he made with Corman and, as it turned out, the last movie he ever made.

    The pre-production history of the film is something of an encapsulation of the entire Corman process.  To copy directly from the Wikipedia article:

‘According to Hill, Corman wanted to make the film in the Philippines, then got a deal to do it in Portugal. Hill visited that country and found out they did not have the facilities. Corman was then going to make it in Italy, which Hill thought would be ideal. Then two weeks before filming Corman told Hill he had arranged a better deal in Mexico, and that is where the film was shot.’

    Per a 2012 interview, during which Hill still sounds pretty bitter, he claims that the original title of the movie was ‘The Barbarian Women,’ which would be more appropriate (the title ‘Sorceress’ was apparently picked from a list by students from a nearby high school), that Sid Haig was originally cast in a pivotal role but Corman wouldn’t pay his fee, and that the special effects were nothing like the quality originally promised.  He also lists a number of production problems including bad weather, an explosion at a film vault, and interference from other film crews working in the area.  The finished movie is a very persuasive argument for the importance of planning and logistics in film production.  In the end Hill took his name off of the finished product as both writer and director and Corman recut the movie to his own liking.  Despite all of this the movie did end making a profit for Corman and his streak since 1962 remained unbroken.

As illustrated, apes are always funny.

    This is not to say that this is a potentially great or even good movie ruined by a low-rent version of studio interference, even the parts of the movie which show the least amount of budgetary compromise are embarrassing for everyone involved.  The acting is awful across the board, the dialogue is functional at the best of times, and while it’s hard to judge a story knowing that whole chunks of it must have been excised from the original script unless Corman chopped an entire reel out of the thing none of the protagonists ever actually do anything and more-or-less win by accident.

    Hill stated he based the story on ‘The Corsican Brothers,’ by which he meant he stole the idea of twins sharing a psychic connection.  There would be some interesting ideas in the premise of the film if they were explored even a half-step further than they are in the movie.  An evil wizard has promised to sacrifice his firstborn to a god for power, but then his wife gives birth to twins.  Before he can determine which is which he’s sent twenty years into the future, where he attempts to relocate his children and fulfill his promise.  The twins are girls but are raised from birth in hiding as boys, and after soldiers from the returned wizard kill their adopted family they set off on a quest for vengeance with the allies they make along the way.

Just, y'know, rolling dice in front of your evil wizard king.

    There are possibilities here.  The idea that the wizard has to kill their firstborn but isn’t sure which twin is which is fairly clever.  The mother is killed and thus it could be a complete stalemate as no one really knows.  This is undermined in three different ways: it’s never stated explicitly that the sacrifice will fail if he kills the wrong twin first so he could theoretically kill them both to be sure, just under halfway through the movie the firstborn twin is easily identified and separated from her sister, and in the end the ceremony is completed with another unrelated woman and it works just fine.

    The wizard being sent twenty years in the future can also be made interesting.  He’s shown to have some power base at the opening of the movie and suddenly disappearing for twenty years is going to have some pretty big consequences.  Did that base simply evaporate, in which case he’s got to start from scratch, or did it evolve and change in the decades his people waited for his return, so he has to deal with the political consequences that arose in his absence?  Is the old guard still in power, barely suppressing the youthful acolytes who were recruited while he was gone and have different ideas of what his return will mean than he intended?  Or has a new generation used him as a figurehead and his actual return is rather inconvenient for them?  Instead he just reappears, still has a bunch of soldiers, and a random princess who apparently just waited the intervening twenty years since she was maybe five is fine resuming the same deal they presumably had back then.  The only actual reason for the time skip is so the babies could grow up and get naked on camera.

It only makes slightly more sense in context.

    If you really wanted to dig into some interesting ideas there’s the fact that for the first twenty years of their lives it was drilled into the twins’ heads that they needed to present as masculine to the outside world.  The level of society as presented in the film is barely above agrarian, essentially ancient Greek on a budget.  Twenty years is a long time in that society and they would have long since been expected to take part in the family trade, begin families of their own, become fully integrated adults.  The trans and gender implications are basically woven into the text by default.  Maybe one of the twins has fully internalized a male identity, maybe the other chafes under the restrictions, as they are forced to leave their homes and travel more broadly their reactions to the gender norms of the time would vary wildly from their companions and some very interesting explorations could take place.  Instead they’re introduced as adults frolicking naked in a pond and being confused by a goat man’s erect penis.  Later on they’re bewildered when it’s pointed out they’re not men, despite having been raised with both a mother and a sister.

    The movie itself is not worth anyone’s time.  The twins are not actual characters, they are vehicles for shots of their breasts and asses.  The locations are either existing sets already built for something else or random shots of a forest.  The editing is mostly just cuts between static shots, there’s maybe a half dozen times the camera moves over the course of eighty minutes.  It meets the technical definition of a movie without in any way being an actual movie.

    In a way it’s useful as an anti-example.  There are exactly two instances of set-up and pay-off in the movie and they end up intertwining.  About a third of the way through the movie one of the characters points out that their sword is made of steel, new for the time, and it’s superior to the swords of everyone else.  This never comes up again until near the climax, when an ape grabs it.  Said ape is the hench-animal of the evil wizard’s right-hand princess, a relationship that’s never really elaborated upon.  At one point the ape is promised whichever twin ends up being not the firstborn to do with as he wishes, and it’s made very clear what that means.  Later on the wizard buries that twin alive to the ape’s frustration so he grabs the sword from where it’s fallen on the ground and gives it to one of the twins’ companions, who later on gives it to another companion in the middle of the climactic fight, where he uses it to fight slightly better than before.  The ape is never seen again and the sword is briefly useful again in killing the main henchman of the wizard, but then the wizard takes it away from him before dying to some arrows in the back.  For every other scene in the movie a concept is introduced in the same scene it becomes relevant.

This scene focuses on this creature's penis.

    Another good example is the character of Pando the satyr.  He’s introduced by peeping on the twins while they’re swimming around naked and is constantly in the background for no particular reason.  He travels with the twins and their allies even though it’s never established who he is or why he’s coming along with them.  He has no lines and aside from the above mentioned sword delivery never has an impact on the plot or other characters.  The makeup is not particularly good and the intelligence of the character varies depending on the needs of the scene, ranging from barnyard animal to almost intelligent enough to speak.  He’s also involved in a frankly bizarre part of the climax where the sight of him holding the steel sword and riding a horse causes some nearby shepherds and their flocks to join in the final battle for reasons the movie never even pretends to justify.  This is the role meant for Sid Haig.

    The ending is entirely anti-climactic.  Twenty minutes into the movie a character says a single line about invoking the name of a protective god.  He then walks into a fire.  For the first half of the movie the evil wizard keeps dropping proper names and insisting on performing a sacrifice to some evil god.  It’s not until fifty-two minutes into the movie, in a scene involving two secondary characters where they say it in passing, that it’s even established that this sacrifice is supposed to grant the wizard power to restore a previous golden age.  During said sacrifice one of the twins randomly remembers to say the name of the protective god which summons a kind of puppet manticore to appear in the sky and vaguely look menacing.  This then causes the wizard to complete the ceremony by throwing the nearest person into a fire, which summons an angry sky face.  This is turn summons about fifteen zombies from an underground crypt.  How this will re-establish a golden age is left unclear.  After some pointless pyrotechnics the manticore projects some bad special effects at the angry sky face which explodes.  The zombies are just kind of not there anymore and the wizard runs away.  The manticore reverses his special effect and disappears and the twins shoot the wizard in the back.  It ends on a line about how one of their male companions is going to now have a three-way with the twins and then the stolen theme from ‘Battle Beyond the Stars’ plays over the end credits.    

'Sup, sky face.

    When all is said and done this movie is a product lashed together with the least amount of money in the least amount of time that checked just enough boxes to get distributed into theaters and projected onto enough screens that in the end they made more money than they spent.  Every decision made had dollar signs as the deciding factor and any creative decision that wasn’t directly tied to the finances was frankly a waste of time.  I wanted to find something of use in this movie, I really did, and I can at least recognize the professionalism that went into actually making a movie that clearly no one involved with cared the least bit about, but that doesn’t make it worth watching.  In many ways ‘A Distant Thunder’ was a worse movie (although not nearly as many as you’d think) but I never for a second doubted that the people who made that were sincere in their efforts.  Those people yearned for that movie to be made and seen.  The makers of ‘Sorceress’ were doing a job that they didn’t like, and it very much shows.