My Year of Flops (18 page)

Biblical Disco Freak-Out Case File #79:
The Apple

Originally Posted October 25, 2007

Not too long ago, in a frozen tundra known as Wisconsin, my editor Keith created a feature called Films That Time Forgot as a way of channeling our shared bad-movie addiction to semi-productive ends. Selecting films for the feature necessitated a never-ending search for the sleaziest, weirdest, most obscure films I could find.

It was easy to see why time forgot most of these films: They were terrible and dated (sometimes amusingly so, sometimes not), and aspired to do little more than glean a few quick bucks out of the public's enduring appetite for violence, T & A, and/or gratuitous break-dancing sequences. But every once in a while, I'd uncover a secret gem that took up valuable real estate in my imagination.

There was, for example,
Death Drug,
a hilarious 1978 anti-PCP blaxploitation cheapie that begins with a seemingly stoned Philip Michael Thomas ambling around a pool hall and explaining that he has played many, many roles in his long and distinguished career. Why, he's played everything from a slick-dressing cop to … uh … He was in something else too, right? But of all the classic characters Thomas has played, one part remains close to his heart: the role of a
PCP-addled musician in
Death Drug
. Deep into his insane improvised rant, Thomas assures the audience that there will be people in their lives who'll offer them drugs that'll “get you so high, so high, man, you'll need a parachute to come down,” but that this film should scare them straight.

Even without this VHS introduction,
Death Drug
would qualify as the gold standard of camp, but what makes it such a singular boondoggle is that it clumsily inserts a music video from Thomas' Reagan-era heyday into the middle of the action and expects audiences not to notice that the lead character has suddenly aged dramatically and is swanning his way through a music video even though the medium barely existed when the film was supposed to take place.

The only Film That Time Forgot that can compete with
Death Drug
for campy goodness is
The Apple,
a disco fantasia on biblical themes from the director of
Over The Top
that was released in Germany in 1978 as
Star Rock
and stateside two years later under its new title. According to show-business legend, audiences at
The Apple
's Hollywood première were so horrified by it that they angrily hurled promotional copies of its soundtrack at the screen.

The Apple
nakedly aspires to be the next
Rocky Horror Picture Show,
with a little
1984, Hair,
and the book of Genesis thrown in. It's the story of Adam and Eve reborn as an intergalactic Dionysian sex musical, only much stranger. The film takes place in the faraway future of 1994 and focuses on a hopelessly white-bread couple, Bibi (Catherine Mary Stewart) and Alphie (George Gilmour), from Moose Jaw, Canada. When the duo's nap-inducing brand of offensively inoffensive folk-rock inexplicably wins over the crowd at a Worldvision Song Festival, the hapless pair are wooed by a sinister music-world titan named Mr. Boogalow (Vladek Sheybal), who is literally the devil.

Mr. Boogalow ushers the pair into a seductive nighttime realm where sex is everywhere, temptation is omnipresent, and elaborately choreographed Broadway-style production numbers are never more than a few minutes away. Bibi quickly falls for a beefcake Boogalow protégé (Allan Love), who woos her in a production number set in
hell, with the immortal couplet, “It's a natural, natural, natural desire / To meet an actual, actual, actual vampire!”

Having satiated her natural, natural, natural desires, Bibi can no longer go back to her vanilla life with Alphie. She becomes the newest star in Boogalow's constellation and delivers “Speed,” a patriotic ode to America that doubles as a harrowing depiction of our nation as a desperate meth addict.

Alphie, meanwhile, sinks into a deep depression. Boogalow has somehow become powerful enough that everyone in the United States is forced to wear a triangular sticker promoting his record label (Boogalow International Music, or BIM) and observe the National BIM hour, a mandatory national-fitness program. Firefighters, leather-clad bikers, Coca-Cola bottlers, nuns, old people—all are forced to break into Broadway-style choreography during the National BIM hour.

Only
The Apple
has the audacity to dream up a future where a Simon Cowell–like Svengali is as powerful as Josef Stalin, and disco's bleary hedonism not only survived the '70s but grew in power until it conquered the world. Feeling adrift, Alphie eventually falls in with a group of sitar-stroking, bearded cartoon counterculture types wistfully described by their wizened leader (Joss Ackland) as “children of the '60s, commonly known as hippies.” Alphie and Bibi are joyously reunited in time for a divine fellow in a sparkling white suit (also played by Ackland) to come down from heaven in a giant space car accompanied by videogame noises and offer to whisk his children to a fantastical space paradise where Mr. Boogalow has no power.

The peculiar genius of
The Apple
is that every time it appears the film cannot get any crazier, it ratchets up the weirdness to almost indescribable levels. It belongs to the subset of movies so all-consumingly druggy and surreal that they make audiences feel baked out of their minds even when they're sober.
The Apple
is both the perfect mind fuck to see while high and a movie that makes drugs seem redundant and unnecessary.

I think everyone in the world should see
The Apple
. It should be taught not just in film classes but in regular schools as well. It should
replace the Bible and the Constitution as the cornerstone of our civilization.
The Apple
lifted my spirits, put a song in my heart, and completely validated my insatiable hunger to see an actual, actual, actual vampire by assuring me that such a seemingly sinful urge was simply a natural, natural, natural desire.

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Secret Success

Seven-Octave Butterfly-Shaped Case File #90: Glitter

Originally Posted December 4, 2007

In his last e-mail to me, my late friend and fellow critic Anderson Jones suggested that I write up 2001's
Glitter
for My Year Of Flops. Mariah Carey held a special place in his heart. I once asked Anderson if he'd ever been recognized in public during his stint on FX's
The New Movie Show With Chris Gore
. He said he'd been recognized once at a Mariah Carey concert. This seemed fitting. Carey's people were his people: They shared his deep commitment to superficiality, to the allure of big fluffy movies and sticky-sweet pop songs.

With this entry, I'm honoring a dead friend's memory by making glib jokes at the expense of one of his favorite artists. Call me a hero if you must (no, seriously: call me a hero, you must), but I'm just a guy doing my job. And being a hero. Mainly being a hero.

Glitter
arrived at a crucial moment in what I like to call the “ho-ification” of Mariah Carey. Ho-ification occurs when an actress or singer stops being judged on her body of work and begins getting judged by the work she had done to her body. It's a ubiquitous pop-culture phenomenon in which an actress or singer decides that she wants to be recognized not just as an artist but also as a sweet, sweet piece of ass.

For Carey, the process began with the music video for “Honey,” a tour de force of cheesecake iconography in which Carey indulged her 007 fantasies by playing Agent M and gallivanting about in the same
bikini Ursula Andress wore in
Dr. No.
After “Honey,” Carey was suddenly a woman with a message. That message was, “Hey, world; get a load of my tits! They're fucking great!” Her video concepts went from “having fun at the amusement park” (“Fantasy”) to “jiggling about as a scantily clad racetrack ho-bag” (“Loverboy”), which perhaps not coincidentally was also the first single from the
Glitter
soundtrack.

Carey unleashed an avalanche of criticism when she handed out popsicles and indulged in an impromptu striptease during an infamous appearance on MTV's
Total Request Live,
well into what can be dubbed the crazification process. These public-relations disasters echo the scene in
Nashville
where Gwen Welles' painfully untalented looker dispiritedly takes off her clothes in a pathetic attempt to punish/win back a crowd by giving them exactly what she thinks they really want. Incidents like these speak to the fundamental hypocrisy at the heart of our culture's attitude toward sex and exhibitionism: We leer and ogle with impunity, then, once some vague, invisible line has been crossed, turn into disapproving prudes concerned only with protecting the innocence of children.

Glitter
hit theaters at the worst possible time for Carey's previously blessed career. Her asexual early good-girl image was a distant memory, the ho-ification process had turned off as many fans as it created, and she was careening toward a nervous breakdown. The release of the film was postponed following Carey's hospitalization for “exhaustion.” But the damage had already been done. A megastar who could previously do no wrong commercially suddenly could do no right.

Even her recording career began to suffer. The soundtrack to
Glitter
was nearly as big a bomb as the film it accompanied, in part because it faced much higher expectations. At the time of its release, it was unclear whether
Glitter
would mark the beginning of the end for Carey, or a bump in the road. She has subsequently rebounded on the strength of those terrible dog-whistle ballads they pipe into malls like stale air freshener, but
Glitter
had the potential to be a career killer.

In a performance that, to borrow an old Dorothy Parker line, runs the gamut of emotions from A to B, Carey stars in the semiautobiographical
drama as Billie Frank, a striver who grows up in an orphanage after being abandoned by her white father and drunken, self-destructive African-American mother. After getting discovered by a DJ/producer named Dice (Max Beesley, in the role that launched him to anonymity), Billie becomes a backup singer for Sylk, a talentless looker played by future
Top Chef
host Padma Lakshmi.

Dice eventually buys Billie's contract from Sylk's boyfriend, Timothy Walker (Terrence Howard), and instantly transforms her into a huge star. In its busy first hour,
Glitter
hops deliriously from one music-melodrama cliché to another, finding time to include my all-time favorite show-business movie trope: Billie and Dice are riding in a taxi when they hear Billie's song on the radio. She's made it! They like her! They really, really like her! Dice orders the cabbie to crank up the volume, while Billie orders, “Gimme a dime! Gimme a dime!” so she can call up her friends and order them to crank up the radio so they can hear her. Much jumping up and down, irrational exuberance, and girlish, high-pitched shrieking ensues.

But Dice isn't too keen on sharing Billie with the world. As her star rises, his descends. The busy rocket-ride-to-superstardom arc gives way to somber piano tinkling, and Carey's acting goes from strained smiles and perky head nods to frowny faces and forehead crinkling as she reflects on how sad it is that, like, her mom and dad totally abandoned her and stuff, and her boyfriend is going crazy.

In a delicious irony, Carey's character resents being forced to vamp her way through a music video whose concept seems to be Orgy at Plato's Retreat.
Glitter
consequently has it both ways. It gets to show off Carey's assets in countless skimpy yet strangely unflattering outfits, and it gets to insist that Carey is at heart a deep, soulful artist uncomfortable with cynical attempts to exploit her sexuality.

Timothy kills Dice right before Billie can go onstage at a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden and sing a big number about her late Svengali. As if that weren't enough to satisfy the 10-year-old girl in everyone, Billie then takes a limo to the country for a joyous reunion with her now clean-and-sober mom.