Rock 'n' Roll High School (1979)

Ramones - I Just Want To Have Something To Do

Hollywood Boulevard (Joe Dante; Allan Arkush, 1976)

On April 20, 1979 Rock 'n' Roll High School debuted in Austin, Texas.

Caddyshack 2

Rock 'n' Roll High School (1979)

My rating: 4/10

It's a 70s teen comedy, so of course it's rapey as fuck in parts, and if the script crawled any further up the Ramones' collective asses they'd be unable to perform due to all the paper stuck in their teeth, but I guess the soundtrack's pretty good.

An episode of Joe Dante's and Josh Olson's The Movies That Made Me podcast where Dante and his buddy Alan Arkush (Rock 'n' Roll High School) tell stories about editing trailers and movies for Roger Corman.

Claudia Jennings as Deneer, French lobby card for Les gladiateurs de l'an 3000 (Deathsport) (USA, 1978 dir: Henry Suso, Allan Arkush).

Not exactly what I do here usually but it is on my Drive so here it is.

Destroy All Movies!!! - The complete guide to Punks on film.

Get it from my Google drive HERE

Read the Amazon description below

The most dazzlingly insane film reference book of all time, Destroy All Movies!!! is an informative, hilarious and impossibly complete guide to every appearance of a punk (or new waver!) to hit the screen in the 20th Century. This wildly comprehensive release contains A-to-Z coverage of over 1100 feature films from around the world, as well as dozens of exclusive interviews with the cast/creators of crucial titles like Repo Man, Return of the Living Dead, The Decline of Western Civilization and Valley Girl. Also examined are several hundred prime examples of straight-to-VHS slasher trash, Brooklyn skid row masterpieces, Filipino breakdancing fairytales, no-budget apocalyptic epics and movies that shouldn't even have been released, many of which have never been written about. Plus hundreds of eyeball-smashing stills and posters, many in full color! Interviewees include screen veteran punk musicians Richard Hell, Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat, Lee Ving of Fear, Exene Cervenka and John Doe of X, Keith Morris of Black Flag and Circle Jerks, Chris D. of The Flesh Eaters, Youth Brigade's Shawn Stern, Sickie Wifebeater of The Mentors, Ivan Kral of the Patti Smith Group and many others. Also featured are conversations with filmmakers Penelope Spheeris (the Decline of Western Civilization documentaries, Suburbia), Mark Lester (Class of 1984), Martha Coolidge (Valley Girl), Alex Cox (Repo Man), Lech Kowalski (D.O.A.), Allan Arkush (Rock 'n' Roll High School), Amos Poe (The Blank Generation), Susan Seidelman (Smithereens), Slava Tsukerman (Liquid Sky), Alan Sacks (Du-beat-e-o), Eric Mitchell (Underground USA), Brian Trenchard-Smith (Dead End Drive-In), Dave Markey (Desperate Teenage Lovedolls), Bruce LaBruce, and NYC transgressor Nick Zedd. Performers like Mary Woronov, Eddie Deezen, Clint Howard, Jon Gries, P.J. Soles and Dick Rude speak out, plus countless other actors and creators from the frontlines of punk's big-screen explosion. Destroy All Movies!!! nails down decades of insanity with superhuman research, vicious precision and electrically charged stills and images, and is the first and final definitive armchair roadmap to punk and new wave on celluloid. Five years in the making, this pulse-bursting monument to lowbrow cultural obsession is a must for all film fanatics, music maniacs, anti-fashion mutants, '80s nostalgists, sleazoids, cop-killers and spazzmatics!

Scream Factory has revealed the specs for its Private Parts Blu-ray, which releases on June 6 via Scream Factory. The 1972 horror-comedy marks the feature directorial debut of Paul Bartel (Death Race 2000, Eating Raoul).

Ayn Ruymen, Lucille Benson, John Ventantonio, and Laurie Main star. Philip Kearney and Les Rendelstein wrote the script. Gene Corman, brother of Roger Corman, produces.

Private Parts has been newly scanned in 2K from the interpositive with DTS-HD Master Audio Dual Mono. Special features are listed below.

Special features:

Audio commentary by film historians David Del Valle and David DeCoteau (new)

Interview with actress Ayn Ruymen (new)

Frivolous Gravitas - Filmmaker Allan Arkush on the movies of Paul Bartel (new)

Still gallery

Theatrical trailer

In the sleaziest corner of Los Angeles, the King Edward Hotel has a new arrival in the form of Cheryl, a runaway teen. She’s hoping to put her life back together – but somewhere in the musty halls of the King Edward lurks another guest who just loves to chop people apart.

Pre-order Private Parts.

Rock ’n’ Roll High School

Director Allan Arkush (plus an uncredited Joe Dante) Stars PJ Soles, Dey Young, Vincent Van Patten, Clint Howard, Ramones USA 1979 Language English 1hr 33mins Colour

‘Oooh baby, fun fun, rock rock rock rock rock ’n’ high school’

This is a cheerfully daft exploitation comedy made under the wing of B-movie king Roger Corman. It’s fun, campy and quick – I don’t think the filmmakers expect you to care about the characters, but do want you to laugh and presumably bop your head along to some songs. It doesn’t have the forensic approach to parody that Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker brought to Airplane!, but more of the gags worked than I expected.

The plot (for what it’s worth) is this: Riff Rendell (PJ Soles) is obsessed with the Ramones, and has written a song she wants to them to play. Her best friend, science nerd Kate Rambeau (Dey Young), has a huge crush on the captain of the football team Tom Roberts (Vincent Van Patten). Tom, despite his notional position at the top of the school social hierarchy, has no luck with girls because of his terrible small talk. Both he and Kate seek the help of Eagleberger (Clint Howard), the school’s entrepreneurial solver of all problems, very much in the lineage of Catch-22’s Milo Minderbinder. And attempting to spoil all the fun is disciplinarian new principal Miss Togar (Mary Woronov). 

I’d always thought of this as ‘the Ramones movie’. You get their songs early on, but they themselves first appear about halfway through to play a gig. By the end (at the gig and elsewhere) they have played at least nine songs by my count, which is a lot (although of course, being the Ramones, the songs are short). They aren’t required to do much acting – I think only Joey has any dialogue. 

Apparently, the producers spent a while trying to get a band to agree to be in the movie, and the Ramones were a far way down the list. That tracks – there’s nothing about Riff’s fandom that feels specific to da brudders and the idea that they would be an easy consensus favourite in any high school seems fairly movie-like. But I’m a fan, so their presence definitely worked for me. 

As does the film as a whole – it was a lot better than I was expecting. Maybe the involvement of Joe Dante, the future director of Gremlins and Small Soldiers, helped. (Character actor Dick Miller, who was in everything Dante directed, pops up here.) For those who like a knowing meta-chuckle, you’ve got Mary Woronov as the anti-rock’n’roll authority figure – back in the 1960s she and Gerard Malanga were the (sometimes whip-wielding) dancers in Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable accompanying the Velvet Underground. 

Surprisingly enjoyable…

(So yes, a 1979 release, but nevertheless part of my Every girl should be given an electric guitar on her 16th birthday series of reviews)

TGIF

Lou Reed (Variety, 10/27/13)

Lou Reed died on this date 10 years ago, and Variety asked me to write an appreciation, which I re-post here. **********

From the remove of 47 years, it is difficult to adequately calibrate the impact of “The Velvet Underground and Nico,” the debut album by the New York band fronted by Lou Reed, who died Sunday at 71. Bearing a cover by Andy Warhol that could literally denude itself (“peel slowly and see,” the legend read), the LP was a shock to popular music’s system. It addressed topics – heroin addiction, sexual aberration – that had hitherto been taboo in popular music, and mounted Reed’s literally stunning lyrics in a matrix of molecule-rearranging noise. It is one of those few records of which this can be said: Nothing like it had ever been heard before, and it permanently altered notions of what was possible, and permissible, in rock music.

While Reed was capable of shaking the foundations of propriety with compositions like “Heroin,” ‘I’m Waiting For the Man” and “Venus in Furs,” and would push the boundaries even further with subsequent outbursts like “White Light/White Heat,” “I Heard Her Call My Name” and the orgiastic “Sister Ray,” he proved he was no one-trick pony. He was capable of penning the most tender and empathetic ballads in the rock canon – “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” “Pale Blue Eyes,” “I’m Set Free,” the astonishing “Jesus.” He also proved that he was a rock classicist at heart with such much-covered standards as “Sweet Jane” and “Rock and Roll,” the latter of which may be the definitive statement of the joy that lies at the heart of the music.

After Reed exited the Velvet Underground after years of infighting and discord in 1970, he embarked on a solo career that was characterized over its course by periods of extreme risk, infuriating sloth and intermittent brilliance. He wrested glam from the British with “Transformer”; took his own stab at rock opera with the lush, depressive “Berlin”; ground ears to pulp with his two-LP noise extravaganza “Metal Machine Music.” Using more conventional elements of rock music but seasoning them with his hectoring style, he forged such highly personal latter-day works as “Street Hassle,” “The Bells,” “The Blue Mask,” “New York” and “Magic and Loss.”

Because he was a thorny, restless and often reckless spirit who proceeded to the tattoo of his own drum, his work could succumb to abject failure: Witness his Edgar Allan Poe homage “The Raven,” his misbegotten collection of guitar pieces “Hudson River Wind Meditations” and his last release, 2011’s “Lulu,” a much-maligned collaboration with Metallica.

But such failures were ultimately understandable and could even be anticipated, since from the start of his career Reed’s rep, and ultimately his import, rested on his willingness to take chances. That was never a sure way to conquer the charts, but it was a route to change, and Lou Reed permanently altered the musical landscape. Seemingly answerable to no one and nothing other than himself and his own artistic impulses, he became, to his discomfort, an exemplary figure. His influence has long been a given; especially in the punk and post-punk era, dozens of bands embraced his sound and style. Watching early sets by such groups as L.A.’s Dream Syndicate was like watching young, half-formed performers groping towards their own essence, with Reed’s work as a road map.

As a personality, he could be prickly, harsh, forbidding; his confrontations with music journalists held the status of legend. The caricature is maintained in “CBGB,” the recent film about the New York punk club, in which a character called “Lou Reed” makes a cameo appearance, with fangs out. Reed played himself best. In Allan Arkush’s 1983 rock movie “Get Crazy,” he portrayed a rock star named Auden. It is not a great picture, but he elevated it with his presence. He gets the last word in the film, under the credits, singing, in his wobbling, drawling voice, a song called “Little Sister” – a heart-on-the-sleeve number with a corking, lyrical solo at its end.

It’s surprising, sweet, loving. But then, he was an artist of many dimensions, and surprise was so much of what Lou Reed was all about.

"Get Crazy" Review

Yesterday I watched "Get Crazy" directed by Allan Arkush and starring various and sundry people including Malcolm McDowell. It even has Lou Reed singing a song. I must admit that I thought the song was not particularly good and neither was his performance. This did get moderately good reviews although sometimes several years after its appearance. It has its amusing moments and it is certainly taking itself in a very light hearted manner, having fun in and with the movie. Nevertheless at this point it seemed not that particularly innovative and entertaining to me. It wasn't bad. I just didn't find it that great. It is more a movie that one can pass time with while maybe reading emails but no major concentration needed, no significant thoughts will occur. It has fairly obvious parodies of musicians and styles of the time. It is just a fun, light movie, just not my cup of tea. From IMDb: "Mega-promoter Colin Beverly plans to sabotage the New Year's 1983 concert of small-time operator Max Wolfe. Wolfe's assistants Neil Allen and Willie Loman find romance while trying to save the drugs, violence, and rock and roll from Beverly's schemes."

On August 4, 1979 Rock'n' Roll High School debuted in New York City.

Trailers From Hell: Allan Arkush on ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS

The title is risible but Roger Corman's landlocked monster movie boasts more than a few genuinely eerie moments, particularly when the titular creatures begin to communicate using the voices of the people they've murdered.