Bomb, Bomb, Bomb: Partners, Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen, When Time Ran Out

BOMB, BOMB, BOMB: PARTNERS, CHARLIE CHAN AND THE CURSE OF THE DRAGON QUEEN, WHEN TIME RAN OUT

I could only make it through about 30 minutes of Partners and that’s more than enough for at least about 10 lifetimes, I’d say. I gave up on the picture for good around the fourth time star Ryan O’Neal uttered the epithet faggot. Yeah, Partners basically plays Cruising for laughs. Ha-ha, funny … about as funny as punching somebody’s mother in the face.

I consider Partners the absolute worst film from 1982, at least among the 70 or so films that I have seen thus far in my 42 years on this planet. It supplanted Amityville II: The Possession, a lovely little number incorporating blood, vomit, incest, matricide and patricide, fratricide and sororicide, and demonic possession. Never mind Inchon, a $46 million Korean War epic that bombed mightily at the box office with only a $5.2 million return. Never mind Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which features one of the least likable lead characters (Dr. Dan Challis) and lead performances (Tom Atkins) in recent memory. Believe it or not, Partners beats those other films in sheer unpleasantness.

Did longtime TV director James Burrows use Partners for his audition for Will and Grace? I seriously doubt it, because Partners is one of the nastiest pieces of work I have ever seen. Burrows has directed more than 1,000 TV episodes, including 237 Cheers and 75 Taxi and 32 Frasier. Thankfully, Burrows stuck with television after Partners.

Early in the picture, O’Neal asks his boss how he got stuck partnering up (literally) with gay records clerk Kerwin (John Hurt) to infiltrate and investigate a series of murders in the Los Angeles gay community. Anyway, Chief Wilkins (Kenneth McMillan) tells our matinee idol, “Because you’re a good cop, a real good cop. And because of your cute ass.” Maybe that’s how O’Neal himself got the gig. O’Neal certainly dressed up for the part, wearing a ridiculous tank top and then a leather garb in just the portion I watched before saying Roberto Duran on Partners.

— As I sit here before this keyboard and ponder my next direction, I consider how I endured all 95 minutes or so of Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen, another great big smelly turd from the early ’80s like the ones mentioned about three paragraphs up.

When folks express this incredible nostalgia for the ’80s, undoubtedly it’s not Charlie Chan or Partners or Inchon, for that matter, they’re nostalgic about, because they SUCK in the immortal words of Al from Caddyshack. Then again, if I have learned anything over the years writing about movies or music online, it’s that somewhere in this great big world there’s a cult following Howard the Duck or Halloween III, for example, and they just might flame you for not cherishing their cult object in the same way they do.

Charlie Chan asks us to believe Peter Ustinov (1921-2004), Richard Hatch (1945-2017), and Angie Dickerson as characters of Asian descent. Sure, I believe the Englishman Ustinov as fictional Belgian detective Hercule Poirot (a character he played six times, including features Death on the Nile, Evil Under the Sun, and Appointment with Death) and Roman emperor Nero in Quo Vadis, but I call it more of a stretch to consider him as Chan in 2020, nearly 40 years after the film was made. It’s even worse for both Hatch and Dickerson.

Charlie Chan features plenty of the broadest comedy and frenzied overacting by a rather distinguished cast that also includes Lee Grant, Brian Keith, Roddy McDowall, Rachel Roberts, and Michelle Pfeiffer early in her career. Hatch plays Chan’s fumbling bumbling stumbling grandson Lee Chan Jr. and I’ve watched so many films lately with fumbling stumbling bumbling would-be detectives that I now grumble and rumble when I see them on the screen. I’m thankful my Grandma never behaved like the one played by Grant in Charlie Chan. Keith’s police chief says ‘Goddamn’ about 50 times. McDowall and Roberts play Grant’s domestic helpers, Gillespie and Mrs. Dangers respectively, but they both provide little help to Charlie Chan since they are both in the grand tradition of melodramatic domestic help in the movies; Mrs. Dangers calls to mind Patsy Kelly’s frantic maid in The Gorilla. Pfeiffer could have dialed the perkiness down a notch or few and still have saved enough for the rest of her career. Nearly all of these characters are cringeworthy.

— When Time Ran Out came out Mar. 28, 1980 and it eventually fell about $16 million short of making its $20 million production budget back at the American box office.

Later that year, on July 2, Airplane parodied Airport specifically and disaster movies in general, and became one of the biggest hits of the summer and the entire calendar year.

The failure of When Time Ran Out and the success of Airplane signaled the end of the disaster movie, at least in the form that dominated the first half of the seventies with The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake, and Towering Inferno and then dribbled out pure unadulterated dreck the final half of that decade like The Swarm, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, and Meteor. Since I mentioned Meteor, I also have to mention Avalanche, which provided disaster footage recycled in Meteor as if being in one disaster of a disaster movie just simply was not enough.

Master of disaster Irwin Allen (1916-91) produced at least half the films mentioned in the paragraph right above this one and he even stepped in the director’s chair for the turkey bombs The Swarm and Beyond the Poseidon Adventure. Allen called on Rollercoaster director James Goldstone for When Time Ran Out, which features the required number of old time movie stars, hot commodities, and fledgling character actors. When Time Ran Out should have been called Take the Money and Run, though Woody Allen and Steve Miller already used it for a comedy (1969) and a hit song (1976).

We have William Holden (1918-81), Paul Newman (1925-2008), Jacqueline Bisset, Ernest Borgnine (1917-2012), James Franciscus (1934-91), Burgess Meredith (1907-97), Red Buttons (1919-2006), Barbara Carrera, Pat Morita (1932-2005), Veronica Hamel, Edward Albert (1951-2006), and Alex Karras (1935-2012), as well as a volcano, a tidal wave, etc.

Seemingly half of the cast takes part in a glorified soap opera before the molten lava really begins to flow and they have to repeat business from Beyond the Poseidon and seemingly every other disaster movie of the era. Here’s that glorified soap opera: Holden proposes to Bisset very early in the movie and she turns him down because she’s in love with Newman, who’s not the marrying kind and anyway he does not seem to much care for Bisset but maybe he’s just masking his true feelings toward her with standard male bluster. Franciscus is married to Hamel but he’s fooling around with half-brother Albert’s significant other Carrera. Just wait, it gets better, Albert does not know that he’s Franciscus’ half-brother … and Holden and Hamel are sleeping together. I think I just about nailed it down and you’re right if you’re thinking all that seems like too much plot for such a dimwitted movie.

You’re also right that I hated these characters and their miserable lives, and rooted for the volcano to wipe them all out.

Especially Franciscus, who takes chronic disbelief in the face of impending disaster to new lows in When Time Ran Out. Unfortunately, an incredibly shoddy special effect leads to an incredibly unsatisfying death for Franciscus’ character. We crave to see him bite the dust or eat molten lava in spectacular fashion, and what we get is just plain laughable.

Of course, just plain laughable describes about 99 percent of When Time Ran Out.

Believe it or not, costume designer Paul Zastupnevich earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Costume Design and went against winner Tess, The Elephant Man, My Brilliant Career, and Somewhere in Time, all of them period films where the look of the film itself becomes another important character.

Yeah, I hope the 1981 Oscar broadcast used a shot of Newman in his utterly ridiculous Urban Cowboy garb.

Zastupnevich received a nomination for the same award two years before for his edgy, state-of-the-art costume work on The Swarm, beekeeper outfits. The Agatha Christie Hercule Poirot period murder mystery Death on the Nile won the prize.

I hate to say it, but time ran out on this review because I don’t want to consider When Time Ran Out any longer than I already have.

Partners No stars; Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen 1/2*; When Time Ran Out *

The Swarm (1978)

THE SWARM

THE SWARM (1978) One-half star

Many comedies wish they could make me laugh as hard as I do at the ridiculous disclaimer at the end of the 1978 Irwin Allen film THE SWARM: “The African killer bee portrayed in this film bears absolutely no relationship to the industrious hard-working American honey bee to which we are indebted for pollinating vital crops that feed our nation.”

Were the folks at Warner Bros. seriously afraid of alienating the American honey bee?

I’ve read that the American Bee Association considered suing Allen for defaming the honey bee … and that must be why we ended up with that jive disclaimer right before the end credits. But, honestly, why stop there? The director, writer, and actor guilds should have sued Allen for defaming their respective trades, because this has to be the worst use ever of a $21 million production budget (reports vary on the $), seven Academy Award winning actors (Michael Caine, Olivia de Havilland, Ben Johnson, Jose Ferrer, Patty Duke, Lee Grant, and Henry Fonda, but none of them earned for this movie), and 800,000 bees with their stingers removed.

I’ll never forget THE SWARM because it’s not easy forgetting one of the worst movies ever made. I caught it (not all of it, though) for the first time in either late 1997 or early 1998, home alone late afternoon during my freshman year of college. I returned from class and found this disaster pic flipping channels. It was somewhere in the middle and I watched the rest. The lousy special effects, the cornball everything (premise, plot, dialogue, acting, title), and that darn disclaimer stuck with me. …

I’ve caught up with THE SWARM a couple more times or I’ve watched it at an interval of once every 10 years. It still rates about the exact same as the first time watching it, though, but I guess I have watched it a couple more times after the first as a honest reminder of what a bad movie’s truly like.

Guess we should give a lot of blame for THE SWARM to Allen (1916-91). The Master of Disaster produced THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE, THE TOWERING INFERNO, THE SWARM, BEYOND THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE, and WHEN TIME RAN OUT, the last three of which helped kill off the disaster films that were so popular in the 1970s. THE SWARM earned $7.7 million, BEYOND THE POSEIDON $2.1 million, and WHEN TIME RAN OUT $3.8 million.

Allen also directed THE SWARM and BEYOND THE POSEIDON. In THE SWARM, he kills two genres in one movie, combining disaster with the killer animal genre that became a dominant exploitation staple after the incredible success of Steven Spielberg’s JAWS in 1975.

It was David Hannum, not P.T. Barnum, who came up with the legendary quote, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Should have been Irwin Allen, though, because his films really take us for suckers one and all. Fortunately, we are better (smarter) than that.

Stirling Silliphant (1918-96) wrote the screenplay for THE SWARM and he wrote both of Allen’s biggest hits, THE POSEIDON and TOWERING INFERNO. He also won an Academy Award for his screenplay for Best Picture winner IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT. (Silliphant’s erratic credits include VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, SHAFT IN AFRICA, and OVER THE TOP.)

Unfortunately, his work on THE SWARM will go down in infamy.

Helicopter pilot: “Oh my God! Bees! Bees! Millions of bees … (later on) Bees! Millions of bees!” Of course, it does not help matters that the bees sometimes look more like painted-on black dots.

There’s some dynamite exchanges in THE SWARM. I’ll highlight just one.

Dr. Crane (Caine): Are you endowing these bees with human motives? Like saving their fellow bees from captivity, or seeking revenge on Mankind?

General Slater (Richard Widmark): I always credit my enemy, no matter what he may be, with equal intelligence.

“No matter what he may bee,” maybe they should have stripped Silliphant of his Academy Award for writing that one.

There’s more howlers in THE SWARM: “Houston on fire. Will history blame me, or the bees?”; “I know people look at me and think that I’m just the man behind the aspirin counter, but inside I love you”; “They’re more virulent than the Australian Brown-Box Jellyfish”; “By tomorrow there will be no more Africans … at least not in the Houston sector.” This dialogue indicts inself.

THE SWARM is one time where calling a film a train wreck is literal.

A train wreck, by the way, that kills Olivia de Havilland, Ben Johnson, and Fred MacMurray, two of the film’s seven Academy Award winning actors. Johnson (1918-96) fared better later as the conductor in the horror film TERROR TRAIN. I really did not want to mention that de Havilland, Johnson, and MacMurray form a romantic triangle in THE SWARM. Let’s just get past that and move on immediately, unlike the movie.

Having such an all-star cast, by the way, backfires miserably for THE SWARM, because I start thinking about movies like ZULU (Caine), THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD (de Havilland), THE LAST PICTURE SHOW (Johnson), DOUBLE INDEMNITY (MacMurray), THE MIRACLE WORKER (Duke), and ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (Fonda), for example, rather than what I am supposed to be watching.

Some of the stars have smaller roles than others. Yeah, and I almost forgot about Richard Widmark, Richard Chamberlain, and Slim Pickens, though I mentioned the always skeptical, always boneheaded General Slater played by Widmark. How could I forget though about Mr. Pickens? According to Cinemorgue Wiki, Pickens died cinematic deaths in THE LAST COMMAND, A THUNDER OF DRUMS, DR. STRANGELOVE, MAJOR DUNDEE, ROUGH NIGHT IN JERICHO, PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID, BEYOND THE POSEIDON, THE BLACK HOLE, and THE HOWLING. They missed an opportunity in not killing Pickens in THE SWARM. I mean, his death scenes in DR. STRANGELOVE and PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID are legendary.

I am rambling, just like THE SWARM itself.

When you watch THE SWARM, please try and keep in mind that Paul Zastupnevich received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Costume Design. Unbelievable, just unbelievable, like THE SWARM.

Leprechaun (1993)

LEPRECHAUN (1993) One star
“Just turn off your brain and enjoy the movie.”

Sure everyone’s heard that argument before in their lives when you have the sheer audacity not to enjoy a movie that somebody else holds dear. You think it’s dumb, stupid, idiotic, a waste of precious time, et cetera, and you think, hey, wait, how can you possibly enjoy anything by turning off your brain. I found this priceless bit of information on the Internets, “You may have heard that the brain has a pleasure center that lets us know when something is enjoyable and reinforces the desire for us to perform the same pleasurable action again. This is also called the reward circuit, which includes all kinds of pleasure, from sex to laughter to certain types of drug use.”

This train of thought occurred during LEPRECHAUN, a “brainless” film that left my reward circuit rather unrewarded and so my brain traveled elsewhere. I wanted to enjoy the movie, but it was a 92-minute slog that indulged thoughts like, for example, why did I not just watch the far superior KILLER KLOWNS FROM OUTER SPACE again or, after seeing Mark Holton in the role of Ozzie in LEPRECHAUN, maybe I should have looked up TEEN WOLF instead, films that reward my reward circuit because they’re not dumb, stupid, idiotic, wastes of precious time. (Are you glad that you bought that LEPRECHAUN box set for cheap at Walmart in Grove, Oklahoma, boy genius? How are you going to get through that series, especially since you rarely drink anymore?)

“Leprechaun brainless” entered into Google returned 22,700 results and you guessed it, “Just turn off your brain and enjoy the movie” receives airing in the defense of director Mark Jones’ magnum opus. In fact, the first search result calls LEPRECHAUN “a hilariously bad horror movie” and features the line “It ain’t the greatest, but it’s good for brainless entertainment.”

The Cheat Sheet calls LEPRECHAUN the sixth funniest B-movie of all time — TROLL 2 and TOXIC AVENGER top the list and other gems in the top 25 include No. 8 KILLER KLOWNS, No. 9 PIRANHA, and No. 22 PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE. The Cheat Sheet illustrates the case for LEPRECHAUN with a still from LEPRECHAUN 3 captioned as being from the first LEPRECHAUN.

The only laughs that LEPRECHAUN generated from me are what one might call bad laughs.

What’s a bad laugh?

It’s the experience of the following dialogue exchange, for example, from the Luciano Pavarotti bad laugh masterpiece, YES, GIORGIO (1982).

Giorgio Fini: Pamela, you are a thirsty plant. Fini can water you.

Pamela: I don’t want to be watered on by Fini.

Or the disclaimer at the end of Irvin Allen’s THE SWARM: “The African killer bee portrayed in this film bears absolutely no relationship to the industrious, hardworking American honey bee to which we are indebted for pollinating vital crops that feed our nation.”

Or finding both the killer doll in CHILD’S PLAY and the killer leprechaun in LEPRECHAUN laughable in a bad way.

Did I mention that LEPRECHAUN runs 92 minutes?

Why, oh dear Lord why.

It runs those 92 minutes at a snail’s pace. No, make that at the pace of a three-toed sloth, a mammal that averages a distance of only 0.15 miles per hour.

LEPRECHAUN feels like it moves 15 minutes per hour, so we’ve just seen GONE WITH THE WIND rather than LEPRECHAUN. Ha!

For example, there’s a sequence where the leprechaun kills a police officer that makes five minutes feel like forever.

And that just about describes LEPRECHAUN.

Barring her uncredited role as “Dancer in McDonald’s” in another epic cinematic train wreck known as MAC AND ME (1988), Tory Reding was Jennifer Aniston’s first feature film role. You might have missed her as Ferris Bueller’s sister in 13 episodes of “Ferris Bueller” (TV).

Apparently, Aniston, who’s been in her fair share of bad movies outside her 1999 duo of OFFICE SPACE and THE IRON GIANT (voice work), feels more than a wee bit embarrassed by LEPRECHAUN. I can totally sympathize with her.

LEPRECHAUN is neither good enough nor bad enough to be any good.