CHEETING DEATH

RIP to—& apparently this isn’t a joke—Cheetah the Chimp, believed to be Johnny Weismuller’s costar in the Tarzan movies of the ‘30s, passed on at—again, this is supposedly true—80 years old.

[Update: The more one reads about this, the more suspicious the claims about this chimp seem. Obviously I’m no primatologist, but I believe that a chimp reaching the age of 80 would be equivalent to a human living well over 100, & apparently this isn’t even the first time that this claim has been made about an aged chimp in a sanctuary.]

In memory of actor & accent coach Robert Easton, also passed on last week…

Monster-of-the-Week: …the nod goes to the largest and most formidable of the title invaders in The Giant Spider Invasion, Bill Rebane’s Wisconsin-made (& thus, perhaps not coincidentally, very cheesy) drive-in fave of 1975.

This arachnid, who devours Easton as a lecherous farmer, was played by a Volkswagen in a spider suit,  driven backwards—the taillights served as its red glowing eyes.

HOLIDAY WRAP

It’s an unusually crowded Christmas week for movie releases; here, very briefly, are two that I caught up with:

The Adventures of Tintin—Steven Spielberg directed this animation of the Belgian comic books by Hergé. The title character, voiced by Jamie Bell, is a Poil de Carotte boy reporter who gets caught up in an intrigue involving a ship in a bottle, car & motorcycle chases, hidden treasure, pirates, pickpockets, mirages, a glass-cracking opera singer, etc. etc. Working from a script by Stephen Moffat, Edgar Wright & Joe Cornish, Spielberg is in masterly form here, even if the most vivid character in the film—by far, really—is Tintin’s dog Snowy ("Milou"), always way ahead of the action & saving the day.

We Bought a Zoo—The title is the answer to a question: What did you do because of your grief over your wife’s untimely death? Desperate to reconnect with his kids, Benjamin Mee (Matt Damon) buys a rundown rural California animal park that comes handily equipped with Scarlett Johansson as head keeper. The script, very loosely adapted from Mee’s memoir by Aline Brosh McKenna & director Cameron Crowe, freely mixes broad comedy & teen romance with pretty somber bereavement drama. The result isn’t quite the lightweight entertainment that it's being marketed as, & it’s a little overlong, but on the whole it’s an agreeable picture, well-acted & beautifully shot, & though Crowe doesn’t allow them to upstage the humans, the animals are lovely.

RIP to Robert Easton, passed on at 81. A veteran character actor whose credits ranged from The Red Badge of Courage to Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea to The Giant Spider Invasion, he’s most famous as one of Hollywood’s busiest dialect & accent coaches.

Finally, a wistful note: My pal the Midnite Movie Mamacita has announced that her venue The Royale in downtown Mesa will be closing permanently at the end of business Christmas Eve, after just six lively & memorable months. This comes two months after the closing of Farrelli’s on Scottsdale Road; Barry Graham suspects here that FilmBar downtown could be the next to go.

Best of luck to the Mamacita on whatever her next venture may be. The Royale’s final selection is, appropriately, both seasonal & deeply f**ked-up: Black Christmas, a Canadian horror picture of 1974 (the French-Canadian version was known as Un Noel Tragique). Employing techniques that John Carpenter would popularize four years later in Halloween, this influential film offers us the POV of a panting, slavering maniac stalking a sorority house just before Christmas break, ogling such residents as Olivia Hussey, Margot Kidder and Andrea Martin. John Saxon plays the cop, and Keir Dullea is on hand as a creepy pianist.

Though it's no more realistic than any other slasher movie, this one has a pervasive luridness that makes it a really queasy, unsettling piece of work, and somehow the queasiness is magnified by the fact that it shares a director, the late Bob Clark, with that warmest, funniest, most beloved of Christmas movies, 1983's A Christmas Story. It might be called The Anti-Christmas Story.

Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays to all, & to all of us, a lifetime of Christmases infinitely merrier than the one depicted in that film.