FAREWELLI'S

RIP to Farrelli’s Cinema and Supper Club on Scottsdale Road, which has closed after a decade of providing dinner & a movie in a plush yet comfortable setting. I first went there shortly after it opened (shortly before 9/11), to see The Tailor of Panama & write an article about the place for the Tribune.

In the ensuing years, I racked up many good memories there. The Wife & I went dozens of times, including several Thanksgivings & New Years; we took my mother-in-law there during the last year of her life, when she could no longer see but could still thoroughly enjoy The Queen & Breach in all their talky glory. My pals Dave & Dewey & I saw For Your Consideration there; Barry Graham & I went for the Midnite Movie Mamacita’s presentation of the deranged Hausu, & I went for the Mamacita’s late show of Terror of Mechagodzilla. This past Easter, The Wife, The Kid & I saw Rango there, over a delicious brunch.

I liked Farrelli’s from the start, but I honestly didn’t think the place stood a chance. I was slightly surprised it lasted ten months. To survive ten years—these particular ten years, especially—is a real achievement.

RIP also to actress Patricia Breslin, from William Castle’s Homicidal & I Saw What You Did, passed on at 80.

MY TWO CENT(IPEDE)S

Moviemakers who deal in extreme or sadistic violence have been known to defensively pooh-pooh the notion that their work might inspire real-life imitators. But Tom Six, Dutch writer-director of last year’s disgusting-but-compelling The Human Centipede (First Sequence), is afflicted with no such modesty. The main character of his “meta” follow-up, The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence), is an obsessed fan of the original who seeks not only to reproduce the atrocity depicted therein, but to expand upon it.

For the (perhaps fortunate) unitiated: The Human Centipede (First Sequence) was about a German surgeon (the unforgettable Dieter Laser) who for no particular reason other than to see if it could be accomplished, created a human “Siamese triplet,” with a gastric tract running mouth-to-anus-to-mouth-to-anus-to-mouth-to-anus, out of two young American women & a Japanese man he'd taken captive. The Doc met a bloody fate at the end, & it appeared that the three members of his pathetic creation were also doomed, so it was hard to grasp how a sequel would work.

Here’s how: The protagonist of The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence), opening today at The Royale in Mesa, is Martin (Laurence R. Harvey), a gnome-like attendant in a featureless & very poorly supervised London “car park” (parking garage). Martin lives in a shabby little flat with his horrible ratbag of a mother (Vivien Bridson), who blames her son for the imprisonment of his sexually abusive father. His other roommate is a large centipede in a terrarium, which his loathsome psychologist (Bill Hutchens) suggests may be a phallic symbol representing his rage over his father’s abuse.

Martin obsessively watches Human Centipede the first on his computer screen at work, & keeps a scrapbook devoted to the film. He even takes seriously the movie’s tongue-in-cheek hype line: “100% Medically Accurate.”

Indeed, Martin seems determined to put this claim to the test. He keeps abducting people, & secreting them, bound & gagged, on the floor of a rented warehouse. His victims include customers who are rude to him at the car park, among others—he even lures Ashlynn Yennie, one of the actresses from the first film, to London with the offer of an audition for Quentin Tarantino.

Martin’s plan is to construct his own, highly ambitious human centipede, this one consisting of twelve subjects. The second half of the film is excruciatingly devoted to his efforts to complete this gruesome task—without, of course, any surgical skills or training & with workshop tools instead of surgical instruments.

So, how to review this thing? It’s both so revolting—it’s much, much more graphically gory than the first film—& so ridiculous that I found much of it almost unwatchable, & might have shut it off if I wasn’t reviewing it. I can’t say I found it particularly enriching, or that I think the world would be a notably poorer place if it didn’t exist.

Having said that, I must admit that this is by no means an artless piece of moviemaking. In some ways, it’s perhaps a more unified, less obviously padded-out piece of work than the original. Six achieves a despairing, Dante-esque horror at times, in the images of Martin’s writhing victims.

Harvey, too, is a potent presence as Martin. Unless I missed it, he never speaks a word in the film, but he has the unsettling stillness of a Beckett clown, & his face can erupt with homicidal rage or grief or glee. He’s one creepy little nudnik.

I wouldn’t blame any critic who didn’t care to split the hair that separates The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) from blackhearted torture-porn trash. But I will; I can’t quite dismiss the movie as that. I can acknowledge, at some level even admire, Six’s talent, & the transgressive vision that gave rise to this ghastly worm-that-turns fantasy.

But that doesn’t mean that I enjoyed it, or that, to anyone other than a hardcore-horror completist, I’d recommend it. Six got what he wanted out of me with this movie—he won. As with A Serbian Film a few months ago, at some point I gave up on these victims & just wanted the movie over. I just barely was able to, you know, leg this one out.

SPINAL ZAP

On my honor, I don’t watch Dancing With the Stars. But a friend of mine who does told me about Ricki Lake & her partner dancing the tango to Bernard Herrmann’s great Psycho theme, & said that it was excellent. I watched it here, & he’s right, it is.

As we roll toward Halloween, yet again we turn to Turner Classic Movies to provide us with…

Monster-of-the-Week: …our weekly nightmare: This time it’s the title creepy-crawly of 1959’s The Tingler, a sort of big centipede-ish critter which, scientist Vincent Price discovers, attaches itself to the human backbone during moments of terror, on which emotion it feeds. Hence the tingling.

Directed by William Castle from a script by Robb White, the movie is perhaps best remembered for Castle’s notorious gimmick “Percepto”—theater seats electrically wired to produce a mild, tingler-like jolt in audience members. Unless you have a Taser & are masochistic, this effect is difficult to reproduce while watching the film now—it plays, by the way, at 9 p.m. (MST) on Monday, October 17. But even without it, The Tingler, though obviously preposterous, is bizarre & imaginative, probably my favorite of Castle’s films as director.

By the way, I recently became Facebook friends with Castle. Considering that he died in 1977, it’s enough to give you a you-know-what down your spine…

LOVELY RITA'S

One of my great pleasures in visiting my beloved hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania—in the warmer months, that is—has to be partaking of the delicious Italian ice at Rita’s on Gore Road. So you can imagine my delight in learning that there are now two Rita’s locations here in the Valley, where we really need them: at 4730 E. Indian School in Phoenix, & at 83rd Avenue & Union Hills in Glendale.

RIP to the beautiful Diane Cilento, of Tom Jones, The Agony and the Ecstasy & The Wicker Man, among other films, departed at 78, & to the fine character actress Doris Belack, best known as the keen-minded, intrigued soap opera producer in Tootsie & as a tough judge on many episodes of Law & Order, passed on at 85.

RIP also, by the way, to the 2011 season of the Arizona Diamondbacks, regrettably ended last Friday after Game Five of a superb National League Division Series with the Milwaukee Brewers. Looking forward to next season, boys. For a change.

HEADIN' OUT TO EDEN...

RIP to the reliable, high-testosterone character actor Charles Napier, departed at 75. The Platonic ideal of the term “lantern-jawed,” Napier appeared in Russ Meyer flicks & as scowling heavies on TV & in films like The Blues Brothers & Rambo, but got to show his versatility as a fixture in many Jonathan Demme movies, including Melvin and Howard, Something Wild, Married to the Mob, Philadelphia & perhaps most memorably as the Tennessee Corrections Officer that Hannibal Lecter gets the better of in Silence of the Lambs.

But I’ll always have a soft spot for Napier's guest shot on Star Trek, as Adam, the cheeriest of the space hippies in the notorious third-season episode “The Way to Eden”:

Listen to him singing “Yea Brother” (rather well) here.

BUSHY CHANEY

Once again, the October schedule for Turner Classic Movies provides us with…

Monster-of-the-Week: …another classic selection: Lon Chaney, Jr. in his signature role of the hapless Larry Talbot…

…in 1941’s The Wolf Man, a man who is pure in heart & says his prayers by night, but still turns into a half-lupine maniac when the moon is full. There isn’t much good one can say about last year’s remake The Wolfman, with Benicio del Toro, but it did at least show, by comparison, the excellence of the original, which plays on Monday, October 10, at 6 p.m. (MST).

HEALARIOUS

Ten years ago today, the TV series Scrubs debuted on NBC. I’m not suggesting that there should be some National Day of Remembrance for this august anniversary, but I do want to take a moment to appreciate Scrubs. Its ubiquity in reruns may make it easy to take for granted, but it’s a great sitcom.

Indeed, I think there’s a solid case that Scrubs, which ran for nine seasons over two networks & so heavily in syndication that it seems almost unavoidable when channel-surfing, can take its place with the best sitcoms of all time. For all its obvious success, I’m not sure the show has ever quite gotten its due. It very deservedly won a Peabody Award, but it had only a handful of Emmy nominations, & only a couple of technical-category wins—the excellence of the show’s writing &, especially, its acting were largely ignored.

For the uninitiated: Scrubs, created by Bill Lawrence, followed the career & personal life of Dr. John “J.D.” Dorian (Zach Braff), a young intern at Sacred Heart Hospital, in an unnamed city. A gushy, overenthusiastic innocent, J.D. shares his struggles with his inseparable best friend & roommate Christopher Turk (Donald Faison), a surgical intern, with Elliot Reid (Sarah Chalke), a sweet but brittle fellow intern who becomes J.D.’s on-again/off-again romantic interest, & with veteran nurse Carla Espinosa (Judy Reyes), who in the course of the series marries Turk.

J.D., who narrates the episodes, is obsessively driven to achieve a father-son bond with his boss & role model, Dr. Perry Cox (the magnificent John C. McGinley). This sneering misanthrope has a penchant for spewing complex arias of sarcastic abuse on everyone, but especially on his adoring, & undaunted, young disciple, to whom he refers either by various female names, or simply as “Newbie.”

Among the show’s many secondary characters are the curmudgeonly Chief of Medicine Dr. Kelso (Ken Jenkins), the depressive hospital counsel Ted Buckland (Sam Lloyd), Cox’s mocking ex-wife Jordan (Christa Miller), & the hospital’s janitor, known simply as Janitor (Neil Flynn). He's given to bizarre non-sequitur verbal flights, & also makes it his mission to torment J.D.

It occurs to me that to someone who has never watched the show, the description above would likely make Scrubs sound like ordinary sitcom fare, a bit more ambitious than usual in terms of number of characters but otherwise almost boilerplate. The show’s originality isn’t in its format. The laughs arise from the depiction of J.D.’s fantasy life—again & again, he casts his eyes upward at an angle & we see one of his preposterous, often surreal daydreams, inventively staged. This was perhaps the first live-action series to attempt the speedy inserted-gag vignettes developed by animated shows like The Simpsons & The Family Guy.

But the program’s real distinction is its honesty about the inner life of the American male, particularly the movie-&-TV-fed all-American white boy embodied by J.D., & played so fearlessly by Braff. Speaking as a specimen of the same, I wish I could report that the narcissism & infantilism of J.D.’s megalomaniacal-yet-mawkish hero fantasies is exaggerated, but I can’t.

I’ve often wondered if this embarrassing candor isn’t the secret both of the show’s staying power with audiences & of its lack of critical acclaim. What Scrubs says to the audience is: you’re not cool. You may be a nice person, you may be a competent person, you may even cure the sick & comfort the afflicted. But for all that you walk around every day fantasizing about being cool, you aren’t. You’ll never be like your hero Dr. Cox—indeed, over the course of the seasons we gradually come to see that Cox himself is a self-loathing emotional wreck & a poseur.

Like many shows that feature single protagonists, Scrubs bogged down a little when it focused on J.D.’s love life—his interminable dithering over whether he really loved Elliot or whichever gorgeous guest star it was became tiresome at times. Other than that occasional minor annoyance, Scrubs was a near-perfect half-hour, year in and year out, delivering silly laughs & rich characterization, expertly balanced. Even its “Jump the Shark” ninth season, which moved the action to a medical school & introduced a new set of characters, was pretty good—it featured, among other merits, riotous & utterly overlooked work by Dave Franco (too-little-known brother of James).

Finally, while Scrubs was never pretentious, it also was quite capable—unlike, say, the equally brilliant & funny but somehow emotionally aloof 30 Rock—of startling moments of seriousness. Maybe because of the mortality inherent in the medical setting, it had a dramatic gravity underpinning the broad shtick.