Rock 'n Roll's Best Egg Salad Sandwich
The best bit is the Caped Madman...

DVD hasn't been quite as effective as video in helping us pass around the truly bizarre and obscure. VHS tapes were a quick, easy, and rapidly degnerating way of passing along whatever weird sh!t of the week or month movie geeks were really into. They looked bad. They sounded bad. But until the sharp quality of DVD, we didn't know that our movies didn't have to look that bad.

Especially in the days before legitimate director's cuts, there were a whole mess of bad video dubs of alternate versions of films that had shown in other countries. Occasionally someone somewhere managed to get ahold of a work print of a movie and have it transferred to tape. That's how I got to see the five hour version of Apocalypse Now. Of course, that generated two letdowns. For one, it's tough to watch a five hour movie that only has production sound and no music or sound effects. The other is that most of my favorite stuff got left out in Redux. I can say that the five hour version is really enhance by watching the Hearts of Darkness documentary.

Anyhow, I'm way off course.

My initial point was that it was in some ways so much easier to get lost in a vault of the cinema arcane with video tape....well, intially anyway. Slowly but surely many rinky-dink would-be distributors with a DVD burner have started putting out our least favorite $1 bin flicks out on a digital medium. The great irony is that rather than spending the money and doing a nice or even decent transfer, they actually make their digital dubs off the same crappy video they were circulating the decade before DVD. Well,...not all of them are terrible, but too many are.

DVD's a few years ago were primarily the products of the studios, and only a few upstarts were really putting anything out. Though some of the movies the studios decided to release were decidedly questionable, there was a lack of the truly random. That's not really a problem so much anymore....

You know you're in sad shape when you're looking at a DVD, and you have to ask yourself if what's on it is worth the minimal amount of time spent on the transfer, the printing cost for the sleeve, the nickel in plastic for the DVD and the case, or even the cost of the shrinkwrap. (The best is when they actually put one of those security tags inside them when you know they couldn't give this things away much less get anyone to steal it.)

Ok, so I've said a lot of negative stuff...but that's because it's funny. The truth is, all kinds of stuff, nicely or poorly done, is finally available for viewing and/or discovery. Nothing beats seeing something for the first time in it's original aspect ratio and with digital sound (assuming you find one that's not fullscreen and in mono sound even though the movie wasn't). That being said, let's look at what I looked at last night.

J-Men Forever (1979, d. Richard Patterson, written by Peter Bergman and Philip Proctor)

You'll notice that I mentioned the writers. Proctor and Bergman were both members of the comedy troupe The Firesign Theater. The Firesigns began in the late 60's doing long often improvisational comedy shows on the radio and then began simultaneously cutting albums featuring their brand of cut-and-paste media manipulations (newscasts, commercial spots, etc.). One of their most famous and beloved characters was Nick Danger: Third Eye, a parody of Sam Spade style radio crime fiction, and a perfect example of square culture meets hippie surreality. Hence the FBI (G-men) parody seems right up their alley....particularly when you consider how they chose to do it.

Woody Allen's What's Up Tiger Lily? is generally regarded as the first major movie to take another film and redub it with a new story. For those of you who haven't seen it, Allen took a Japanese spy film, removed all the dialgure, re-edited, and then reassembled it with a new soundtrack provided by a team of comedic performers. The result, in my book, is still hilarious. Oddly enough, it's the only Woody movie that non-Woody fans will watch and the only one that many Woody fans never seem to have seen.

J-Men acts a little differently. It takes footage from a myriad of serials from the 30's and 40's, slices it up, redubs it, and splices it back together into one story. Here's the story....

The Story: The fearsome Lightning Bug is attempting to destroy the world by broadcasting dangerous Rock 'n Roll on a strictly Easy Listening America, and creates a international and interplanetary cabal to help him distribute marijuana to cleancut Americans to further his cause. Luckily, the J-men spring into action to save the world with the likes the Lone Star (Captain America), The Rocket Jock (Commander Cody), The Caped Madman (Captain Marvel), et al.

The Review: Comedy albums are pretty much built to be laugh-a minute. That's how they keep your attention. Movies, being both a visual and audible medium, tend to get old or tiring if they try to keep up too frantic a pace for too long. Airplane lays it on pretty thick, but even it takes moments to slow it down or even out the yuks. J-Men Forever doesn't seem to learn this lesson as it keeps hurling it at you fast and furious.

The problem comes with the source material. Laying jokes on the dialogue track is one thing, but the action in each scene stays the same no matter what. So you're limited by the acting and scene speed of your forty year old source material. If a joke flies, then it flies. If it flops, then a lot of time it just floats around on screen until the next opportunity opens up. Also, as the movie is piecemeal and in a constant rush, it never seems that coherent or compelling...again, the laughs have to save the day, and they aren't always enough.

Having said that, the movie is quite successful in blending the many sources together in one story. Perhaps the best device is merely explaining away the multitude of bad guys as the Lightning Bug's various disguises. Throughout the movie is a steady stream of J-men and villains alike who are constantly and conveniently eliminated every few moments explaining why they have to call in someone else. Also, the constant barrage of carnage footage (buildings exploding, cars driving off cliffs) begins to generate laughs for sheer over-the-top-ness.

There's fun to be had with each to of the super heroes featured in the film. Granted the filmmaker's had nothing to do with it, but the Lone Star's (Captain America's) costume alone generates a healthy gut laugh. The best, to me, by far was the Caped Madman (Captain Marvel) who let's loose a operatic yodel each time he flies through the air before attacking a foe. Furthermore, for all the talk of screen violence today, the Captain Marvel of yore seems to show a disturbing amount of ruthlessness for a super hero.

In the end, it was a highly enjoyable piece of work that definitely thrives on its own novelty. I'm not sure it has the re-watch factor that Tiger Lily has, but I'm sure I can at least get one or two more viewings out of it. I can certainly see getting a case of the mad chuckles if one was to watch this one with a few drinks in 'em.

"We're overwhelmingly overconfident, I mean, we're whelmingly confident!"

Cheers.