Tag Archives: Carole Laure

Strange Shadows in an Empty Room (1976)

Posted on January 5, 2024 | Leave a comment

strange

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 4 out of 10

4-Word Review: Cop’s sister dies mysteriously.

Tony (Stuart Whitman) is a tough-as-nails veteran cop who gets the shocking news that his younger sister Louise (Carole Laure) is found dead at a party she had attended. Initially he presumes it’s George (Martin Landau) a middle-aged doctor whom she’d been having an affair with and who gave her a injection at the party, but later he realizes there might be more to the story than he thought and begins investigating other avenues that leads him to a wild and completely unexpected conclusion.

The film was directed by Alberto De Martino who had done other Italian produced films that were rip-offs of better known Hollywood hits with this one clearly being inspired by Dirty Harry. It was filmed in Montreal and Ottawa, Canada, but done by an Italian film crew making it seem more like an overseas production with very little Canadian elements to it. Overall the quality looks cheap and the story has a lot of twists that don’t make a lot of sense, or are believable.

Two that stood out right away to me is during the party scene where Louise fakes illness simply to get George’s attention to make him come over there and away from his wife. Then when he tries to help her she lets him know it was all a gag. A few minutes later she passes out for real and he responds in a worried way, but you’d think since he got taken advantaged of just moments earlier he’d presume this was just another prank and not take it seriously. Also, at her funeral Tony begins to suspect there’s more to her death than what is known and requests an autopsy be done, but an autopsy is standard procedure that should be done after any unexplained death, especially since the victim was so young, and thus seems absurd that he should have to request it only as her body is already in the casket and ready to be buried.

Whitman, who was nearing 50, looks too old for this kind of thing and it’s hard to imagine he would, in reality, be able to physically keep up with these much younger suspects who force him to chase them around in airports, along crowded city sidewalks, and even in hospitals. He’s not the most ethical guy either as he has no problem drowning one of the men he’s questioning in a sink of water as a method of interrogation, which should normally get an officer in trouble. There’s also no glimpses of his personal life, so we never learn anything about him, or see any other dimension except for his rough cop persona. Most other cop movies, or at least the good ones, do have a few scenes dealing with the policeman’s private side, but here there’s none, which makes the character flat and uninteresting. Having the victim be his sister didn’t make too much sense since she was clearly quite a bit younger than him and making her his daughter would’ve been more believable and more devastating when he has to come to terms with her darker side.

The supporting characters are, just like with Whitman’s, poorly fleshed-out. It’s hard to be intrigued who the suspects are when they all seem alike and say and do nothing that’s interesting. The film does have one long car chase, which has some impressive stunts, but it seemed unnecessary as the man driving away from the cops really didn’t have much to hide and is essentially not interrogated once Whitman catches up to him, and he offers only a little piece to the puzzle, so why tear up the city streets and completely destroy two cars if he’s not in dire trouble? Better to have saved this for the finale with the bad guy who really is the culprit than just some minor player who isn’t seen, or heard of again.

I did enjoy the foot chase through the hospital that comes at the end and even goes through a maternity ward and ultimately onto the roof of the place. The story does feature many twists and I did appreciate the way it shows how policeman can make the wrong guesses on who they think is guilty and go on many long tangents that don’t lead anywhere before they realize their mistake. However, more effort should’ve been made to create unique characters as the ones provided here are wooden and banal.

Alternate Title: Blazing Magnum

My Rating: 4 out of 10

Released: March 9, 1976

Runtime: 1 Hour 39 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Alberto De Martino

Studio: Fida

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 70's Movies, Cult, Fast Cars/Car Chase, Foreign Films, Italian Films, Movies from Canada, Mystery, Police Drama

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Dirty Dishes (1978)

Posted on September 6, 2022 | Leave a comment

dirty1

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 5 out of 10

4-Word Review: Housewife has nervous breakdown.

Armelle (Carole Laure) is a full-time housewife taking care of 2 young boys while her husband Marc (Pierre Santini) works a job designing car tires. Armelle is bored with the mundane chores that she must do day after day and looks forward to Thursday evenings, which is the one night that her and husband can go out, but since Marc’s job has become very demanding he can no longer do that, which makes her feel even more shut-in. She occasionally goes out with her two friends (Liliane Rovere, Liza Braconnier), but they’re trapped in the same thankless domestic routine as she is. One day she snaps and has a sexual tryst on her cluttered kitchen floor with an architect (Daniel Sarky) who works across the street, but this doesn’t subside her feelings of rebellion, so she steals a car, which almost gets her in an accident. Eventually her husband realizes her frustrations and promises that things will be different, but will this really bring the change that she wants?

Written and directed by the daughter-in-law of the legendary filmmaker Luis Bunuel, the film is a mixture of Diary of a Mad Housewife that came out 8 years earlier and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, which was released 10 years after this one. There’s even a bit of Jeanne Dielman mixed in for good measure. The one thing that this film does do well is focusing on the mundane tasks that she does each day, which gives the viewer a clear impression of her trapped feeling. Unfortunately it doesn’t go deeper than that and ends up just being another feminist comedy that fails to have anything unique to say from the other films from that era with the same theme.

There are a some amusing lines uttered here and there, but the laughs are sporadic and there should’ve been tighter editing, which would’ve given it a frenetic pace and made the absurd moments seem less out-of-place. There’s also a few really weird tangents that come out of nowhere including a psychotic man that invades the families picnic at a park and tries running them down with his car that has no connection to the main story and wasn’t needed as was the segment at a grocery store where Arnelle breaks up a fist-fight between two men only to find that she’s been a victim of a candid camera-like prank.

There are a couple of good poignant moments particularly the scene where the couple is lying in bed and Armelle states to her husband that she feels scared and he replies: “Why, are you afraid something is going to happen to you?” and she responds: “No, I’m afraid nothing will happen and everything will remain the same.”, which hits home the characters quandary perfectly.

Laure’s is radiant and soaking in her beauty helps smooth over the slow spots. The scene where she gets rejected as a model of a dish detergent ad because she’s ‘too beautiful and no one would ever believe she does her own dishes’ is quite funny as that’s all we’ve seen her do since the film began.

The ending however offers no conclusion or answers. The character remains stuck in the same situation that she was at the start with only vague promises from the spouse that things ‘would be different’, but in cases like these that usually means things will eventually just go back to the way things were. The viewer needs to see the change for themselves, or how the character learns to adapt to the problem by finding ways to make the monotony seem more interesting, but the film shows none of this making it feel ultimately like a waste of time as both a satire and character study.

My Rating: 5 out of 10

Released: April 19, 1978

Runtime: 1 Hour 35 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Joyce Bunuel

Studio: Planfilm

Available: VHS

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Posted in 70's Movies, Black Comedy, Foreign Films, French Films, Obscure Movies

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Heartbreakers (1984)

Posted on September 4, 2018 | 1 comment

Heartbreakers Movie Poster (1984)

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 5 out of 10

4-Word Review: Fetish artist goes mainstream.

Arthur (Peter Coyote) is an artist who specializes in erotic portraits of women that he sells to men’s magazines, but he strives to have his work seen by more people. He gets his chance to have his artwork shown at a gallery and works with his fetish model Candy (Carol Wayne) to make enough new material for it. When his former girlfriend Cyd (Kathryn Harrold) moves in with his artistic rival King (Max Gail) he becomes attracted to Lilane (Carole Laure) the manager where his artwork will be displayed, but this puts him at odds with his friend Eli (Nick Mancuso) who also has an interest in her.

This independently produced film offers nothing spectacular, but remains strangely captivating. Sometimes it’s nice not to be bombarded with a heavy-duty plot and instead just focus on someone struggling to get through the challenges of day-to-day life, which makes the situations shown here highly relatable and where this movie succeeds.

Unfortunately Coyote was not the best person for the part. He was supposed to be this guy in his 30’s even though he was well over 40 and looking it. A younger guy in is 20’s would’ve been a better fit and created more of a connection to someone just starting out. It would also help explain the character’s moments of raw, unfiltered emotion, particularly his public display of anger at King, which is something seen more in younger adults while middle-aged folks have usually mellowed out, or better able to keep their feelings in check and only letting them come out when it’s more appropriate or strategic.

Coyote’s friendship with Mancuso doesn’t work either. The film is only captivating when it sticks with the main character and expanding it out just gives it a flat, generic feeling like it wants to create a soap opera scenario that is not needed. Guys’ fighting over the same girl has been done many times before and this thing adds nothing fresh to that perspective. Besides Carole Laure’s character is so emotionless and detached anyways, while also looking as pale as a ghost that she seemed hardly worth the effort and someone most guys would probably tire of pretty quickly.

The film’s main attraction is seeing Carol Wayne in her secomd-to-last movie. She came to Hollywood with her sister Nina in the mid-60’s having already attained some fame as Las Vegas showgirls. She almost immediately got guest starring roles in TV-shows and bit parts in movies before finally attaining her most famous part as the Matinee Lady on the ‘Tonight Show’, which she did for 13 years before dying under mysterious circumstances while on vacation in Mexico. Her part here proved to be one of her biggest and she even goes topless before hopping into bed with both Coyote and Mancuso for a threesome.

Harrold, who no longer works in the acting business, is solid as the former girlfriend, but she should’ve had more scenes. Walter Olkewicz, Jerry Hardin, and Jamie Rose can be seen in brief bits in a movie that’s not bad if you come into it with modest expectations although Tangerine Dream’s loud techno, 80’s fused score doesn’t help it.

My Rating: 5 out of 10

Released: September 28, 1984

Runtime: 1Hour 38Minutes

Rated R

Director: Bobby Roth

Studio: Orion Pictures

Available: VHS

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Posted in 80's Movies, Drama, Movies with Nudity, Obscure Movies

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Sweet Movie (1974)

Posted on January 22, 2014 | 2 comments

sweet movie

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 8 out of 10

4-Word Review: Every fetish is shown

Unfairly labeled as excessive and perverse, this film is really a fascinating and intricate study into the recesses of the sexual mind. It looks at sex in all its complexities and exposes it as a very primal need with a personality of its own.

The film starts off with an amusing satire on the media and how they have commercialized sex. It involves a game show were a rich millionaire must choose which female virgin he would like for a wife and even has a doctor on hand to examine them and make sure each one is genuine.

This becomes the ongoing theme, which is how society loves to ‘package’ sex and yet really can’t. Director Dusan Makavejev feels that the sexual instinct is too deep to be able to channel completely. The rest of the film goes off on wild tangents that may not make sense to some, but the intent is not to tap into the logical mind, but instead the sexual senses. In the process it tries to bring out the sexual side of the viewer by digging deeply into their own subconscious mind.

The final result is an almost non-stop barrage of unique, lasting visuals. Some are funny, stimulating and at times even grotesque. Yet sex has all these qualities so any movie realistically dealing with it should have it as well. Overall despite the controversial approach it becomes lyrical, compelling, and quite well-shot.

By not boxing sex into any type of ‘standard’ is what makes this different from just about any other erotic film out there. Most directors seem to feel that two sweating bodies between satin sheets are all you need to make a film ‘sexy’. Here you get something much more daring and expansive by showing sex in both its beauty and ugliness. Outside of bestiality and necrophilia just about every other fetish gets examined including interracial sex, sex with minors (never shown, but strongly implied), food sex, vomiting, scatology, water sports, and even violent sex. Sometimes it gets vulgar yet still remains provocative and fascinating to the more open-minded.

Star Carole Laure is incredibly beautiful and submits herself to her demanding role with a reckless abandon that is refreshing if not unprecedented and helps make the film impactful.

There’s some really amazing sequences including having Laure carted around in a suitcase with only her head sticking out. This is also one those rare films outside of Paul Morrissey’s Trash that features more shots of the male genitals than the females.

Obviously there will be those that will find the whole thing disgusting and offensive as it is very explicit even by today’s standards. This film could very well go beyond most people’s ‘comfort zones’ so I don’t want to suggest it to anyone unless they are fully prepared for what they are about to see, but for those who are game it could come off as a unique one-of-a-kind experience.

My Rating: 8 out of 10

Released: June 12, 1974

Runtime: 1Hour 38Mintues

Rated NC-17

Director: Dusan Makavejev

Studio: Maran Film

Available: DVD (The Criterion Collection)

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Posted in 70's Movies, Crude Comedy, Erotica, Exploitation, Foreign Films, French Films, Movies with Nudity, Sex

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