My Year of Flops (29 page)

When the diamond smugglers head to Lisa's Pleasure Island to track down the negatives, wisecracking cop Sheila Kingston (O'Donnell) and partner Fred Lavery (Aykroyd) follow in hot pursuit, hoping to get to Elliot before the bad guys can retrieve the photos with extreme prejudice.

Once the film makes it onto the island, it veers among three distinct tones: the giggly, embarrassed sex comedy about O'Donnell and Aykroyd; a New Age romance; and the thriller-by-numbers action of the diamond-smuggling plot, which feels arbitrary even by the lenient standards of gratuitous diamond-smuggling subplots.

To help pass the time, I pretended
Exit To Eden
was secretly a Kubrickian science-fiction drama about a mysterious island staffed and populated entirely by sex androids. That would explain a lot, from the robotic performances and affectless line readings of Delany and
her minions to the dearth of plausible human emotion on display. Certainly flesh-and-blood human beings would never utter lines like the following:

The BDSM elements of
Exit To Eden
amount to little more than kinky window dressing for a vanilla romance between a woman reluctant to give up power for fear of getting hurt, and a man afraid of embracing his kinks out of fear of being branded a pervert. Just how staggeringly banal and wholesome is the film's fierce head dominatrix? When Elliot asks Lisa what she likes best in bed, she giggles, “What do I like to do best in bed? I like to giggle. Cuddle and giggle. After a long day of smacking people, it's nice to cuddle.”

It's a measure of the film's almost comic inertness that I wound up thinking, “I hope they get back to that scintillating diamond-smuggling subplot. All this sex is boring me to tears.” Over 120 glacially paced minutes of cinematic torture, the film somehow manages to make kinky sex seem dull and tacky.

Exit To Eden
is a doddering old square's take on the outer limits of sexuality, a blandly sentimental romance decked out in leather, lace, and spikes. In case there're any lingering doubts about its romance-novel soul, O'Donnell's narration ends with the following moral: “So what did I learn from this case? No matter what your sexual preference, true love is still the ultimate fantasy.”

Exit To Eden
was a huge critical and commercial flop domestically, though it did much better in Japan under the title
Happy Sexy Go-Go Naked China Beach Lady Fun Movie.
Exit To Eden
was supposed to open minds and liberate repressed libidos. Instead, it's an unintentional infomercial for sexual repression.

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Failure

Maniacal Death-Orgy Case File #107: Tough Guys Don't Dance

Originally Posted April 16, 2008

Norman Mailer was a hero to many. He never meant shit to me. Though I have a soft spot in my heart for anyone with Mailer's genius for self-promotion (as seen in his tome,
Advertisements For Myself
), I have a hard time getting past the tough-guy posturing. Given Mailer's reputation, it's a miracle that he made it well into his 80s without dying of testosterone poisoning or meeting an undignified end wrestling a mountain lion. If Ernest Hemingway is the god of the great literary church of machismo, the great alpha-male all other two-fisted, hard-drinking wordsmiths prostrate themselves before, then Mailer is at least a minor saint, especially now that he's bare-knuckle brawling angels up in heaven.

Mailer toiled diligently to create the impression that he wrote with a half-empty whiskey bottle in one hand, a sawed-off shotgun in the other, and a dead hooker at his feet. Acolytes could be forgiven for imagining that he had gasoline and bourbon running through his veins.

Writer-director Mailer's 1987 thriller was the product of a brief period when beloved Israeli schlock merchants Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, the geniuses behind
The Apple
and
Over The Top,
tried to buy a little respectability by throwing money at famous (or at least notorious) figures and hoping against hope that great art (or at least healthy commerce) would ensue.

So in the span of just a few years, Golan and Globus produced Barbet Schroeder's Charles Bukowski adaptation
Barfly
and
Death Wish 4: The Crackdown,
Jean-Luc Godard's
King Lear
and
Braddock: Missing
In Action III,
Norman Mailer's
Tough Guys Don't Dance
and
Masters Of The Universe
. It's tempting to place Mailer, that distinguished man of letters, on the side of artists and deep thinkers, but
Tough Guys Don't Dance
isn't even smart, pretentious trash. It's pretty much just trash.

Some DVDs are worth renting just for their trailers.
Tough Guys Don't Dance
is such a film. In the theatrical trailer, “America's most controversial author” addresses the camera directly while clutching a fistful of comment cards from a test screening. “Bold, innovative, wonderful!” crows the first one. “Stinks!” jeers the second. The comments that follow swing drunkenly between rapturous praise and scathing condemnation. “A movie not to miss” is followed by “a giant death orgy with lots of maniacs.” “One of the best, most original films I've ever seen” is chased by “One of the worst ever. My grandmother could do better.”

I could go on, but I'll skip over the praise and center on the hateration. “Whoever wrote this has never read a good book,” Mailer reads from one card, before hurling it aside in a manner that unmistakably conveys, “
Read
a good book? I've only written, like, every good book, ever!” Ever the showman, he saves the best for last, literally winking at the screen after rasping, “The devil made this picture.” That is clearly the highest praise Mailer has ever received.

This ballsy “You're probably going to hate this filthy, disgusting, hateful movie, which is an affront to good people and basic decency” approach was probably the smartest way to sell
Tough Guys
. The trailer isn't selling quality so much as danger, image, attitude, sex, sleaze, and Mailer himself. Mailer's performance throughout is a marvel: He's deadpan, but a shameless ham. If the film that this trailer so indelibly promotes were half as entertaining as its auteur reading comment cards, it'd catapult instantly to the upper tier of Secret Successes.

So it pains me to report that as far as giant death orgies with lots of maniacs go,
Tough Guys Don't Dance
is unforgivably dull. Or at least that's what I would have told you after seeing it for the first time. At the risk of contradicting myself, I would like to take back everything I've just written. I was shocked and delighted to
discover that upon repeat viewings, nearly all of
Tough Guys
' flaws become subversive strengths. I knew going in that
Tough Guys
was a polarizing film. I never imagined that my opinion of it would shift so radically the second time around, from visceral hate to warped appreciation.

My reaction represents in microcosm the public's split response to many cult movies and notorious failures: loathing and ridicule, followed by revisionist acclaim. Cult films often fail in their initial release as art and drama, only to succeed with future generations as comedy and camp.

But enough pussyfooting: Let's get to the booze, broads, bodies, and bullets. You know, the good stuff. In his greatest bad performance, a ghostly pale, perpetually hungover, sex-obsessed Ryan O'Neal (such a Method actor!) stars as Tim Madden, a bartender, writer, chauffeur, drug dealer, and full-time fuckup in the midst of a downward spiral. His days blur together in a dispiriting orgy of drinking, fucking, and blackouts, interrupted by the occasional discovery of decapitated heads and accidental tattoo acquisition. Oh, and he might be a murderer. Or he might be getting set up by a psychotic, weed-addled small-town police chief (Wings Hauser) with a closet full of skeletons and a disconcerting habit of waving around a giant machete while stoned and drunk.

Or the guilty party might be a foppish bisexual multimillionaire dandy with an irresistible jones for the low life and a grudge against Tim for stealing his party-girl wife, Patty (Debra Sandlund). Tim and Patty, incidentally, met when Tim and his then-girlfriend Madeline Regency (Isabella Rossellini) answered a personal ad for orgy partners placed in
Screw
magazine by Patty and her then-husband (magician Penn Jillette), a group-sex-loving, fantastically well-endowed preacher named Big Stoop. During my first viewing, I remember thinking, “You know, this movie isn't anywhere near as much fun as a film with an orgy involving Isabella Rossellini, Ryan O'Neal, and Penn Jillette as a group-sex-loving, fantastically well-endowed Southern preacher named Big Stoop should be.” The
second time around, however, I dug the surreal incongruity of it all, particularly the words, “He must have the longest cock in Christendom,” coming out of Ingrid Bergman's daughter's impeccably sculpted mouth.

Mailer caught flak throughout the years for his perceived sexism, but this film nobly depicts womanhood in its infinite variety. The film's strong, empowered female characters range in personality and disposition from cum-crazed cock addicts to jizz-hungry fuck monkeys to sex-obsessed orgy enthusiasts.

In addition to slipping the debauched likes of Patty and his ex-girlfriend the old salami surprise, Tim makes sweet, sweet love with a former porn star–turned–society wife (Frances Fisher) while her emasculated husband watches in horror. What initially struck me as bad pulp and vulgarity minus any redeeming energy or vitality eventually came together as a Gothic, tongue-in-cheek parody of blood-splattered tough-guy melodrama.

I even came to love that Mailer's he-men and she-sluts use words like “screw,” “bang,” “broad,” and “dame” without a hint of irony.
Tough Guys
traffics in the lively patois of the scuzzy barroom. It's locker-room banter with a literary bent and caveman swagger. Here are some particularly juicy snippets of hard-boiled banter, Norman Mailer–style:

And this exchange, between Tim and Hauser's police chief, Alvin Luther Regency:

Alvin:
Life gives a man two balls. Use 'em. It's a rare day I don't bang two women. As a matter of fact, I don't sleep too well unless I get that second hump in. Both sides of my nature are obliged to express themselves.