Tag: Larry Cohen

MasterChugs Theater: ‘The Stuff’

It takes longer than you might initially hope to see how The Stuff is going to tackle the business of selling the public junk food that may be lethal, but that’s okay. The movie, a horror film spoof written and directed by Larry Cohen plays itself as comedy, such straight comedy that at moments it is in danger of becoming absurd.

Which is also okay. It’s almost pop art. This is not an animated film but nearly a reversal, behaving like a cartoon strip, down to its purposefully stilted dialogue and the stylized poses, which also mimic the happy look of actors in a television commercial.

Satire can be a great tool. Continue reading MasterChugs Theater: ‘The Stuff’

MasterChugs Theater: ‘Black Caesar’

Last week’s review of Black Dynamite has inspired me to have yet another blaxploitation theme month. Get ready for a classic film in the genre.

It’s probably only to be expected that the most ambitious of American International’s blaxploitation movies was directed by Larry Cohen. For one thing, the performance Cohen coaxed out of Yaphet Kotto in Bone, the director’s first feature film, gave him a reputation as someone who knew how to work with black actors. With that going for him, he was well placed to take advantage of the studio’s celebrated willingness to let a filmmaker experiment provided that the finished product could still make a buck at the end of the day. But beyond that, Cohen’s movies (yes, even the bad ones) have always reflected a desire to take on more than the conventional concerns of the typical exploitation picture. With Black Caesar, Cohen set out to make a blaxploitation movie that would deal seriously with issues that most of its ilk used as disposable plot devices while simultaneously paying conscious homage to the gangster films of the early 1930’s. Continue reading MasterChugs Theater: ‘Black Caesar’