45: Alien Agenda: Endangered Species (1998, Ron Ford/Kevin J. Lindenmuth/Gabriel Campisi/Tim Ritter)

Owned version: The 2002 DVD released by Navarre Home Entertainment featuring both this and 1997's Alien Agenda: Under the Skin. (There's a third film, 1996's Alien Agenda: Out of the Darkness that for whatever reason has been abandoned as VHS-exclusive.)

Acquired: October 18th, 2016 from Amazon.

Seen before?: Once on October 3rd, 2016 from a VHS I'd picked up previously. (My response was this Letterboxd capsule.) Never from this disc.

Upon a second look, this dismissiveness of that capsule seems, for the most part, appropriate. Ford's contribution, a series of interviews with various folks about the possibility of alien abductions, is negligible, mostly an excuse to open the film with some light shtick (e.g. the skeptical buffoon who pronounces "marijuana" like Mr. Mackey). Lindenmuth's first segment builds a deep conspiracy centered around two warring factions of aliens (the Shape Shifters, who want to coexist with humanity, and the Greys, who want to destroy humanity) and yet somehow comes out the other end as a banal relationship drama, with newscaster Debbie Rochon convinced her boyfriend Joe Zaso is cheating on her. (Zaso is, of course, actually an alien, which should be obvious just by looking at the dude. A unique look, that one.) Campisi's film is an endless series of scenes where its protagonist runs, drives or walks places, occasionally eluding two lumpy guys in black suits, though it does end with some pretty nifty stop-motion animation - essentially a pair of pint-sized ED-209s, but with laser guns that look like dicks. (It also looks significantly cheaper than the rest of the film, having been shot in 1992.) And Lindenmuth pops in to give us a closing segment that doubles, triples and quadruples down on the conspiracy angle to the point where no sense can be made out of the remains (though it has one great joke about the origin of the Greys). So, yeah, all in all, minimum effort. I was right.

........except for the part where I was completely wrong about Ritter's segment. Accrding to the closing credits, it's titled "Ransom," but fuck that - this is Florida Man: The Movie. See doughy Man of Action (and FL zero-budget legend) Joel Wynkoop shank a masked man holding a bazooka! See Wynkoop wander around the abandoned ruins of South Florida (played by some really shabby, run-down part of South Florida, so props to the location manager there) and have morose flashbacks to happier days! See the grafitti that screams WANNA PLAY TRUTH OR DARE? See the cannibal children chowing down on their own dad! See the bit that leads to the actual credit "SPECIAL APPEARANCE by: NATASHA the snake!" (The exclamation point is part of the credit, natch.) See Wynkoop almost drink worms! See the masked man return for a kung-fu battle! See Wynkoop get abducted by a Man in Black who fondles a silver mannequin, eats mystery meat from the neck of a severed head and threatens Wynkoop with the Meltdown Chamber! See the Man in Black tell Wynkoop, "I could have plucked your eyeballs out," right before chomping down on an eyeball! See Wynkoop sneer and snarl and kickbox and just generally do his thing! See the incredible bit where he's attacked by an alligator!

No, really, check this shit out, I can't do it justice:

What else is there to say? Amid the self-seriousness and poorly-mapped conspiracy nonsense, Ritter's overblown macho silliness is so, so welcome. The rest of the film can shrivel and blow away - "Ransom" justifies the myriad other sins this thing has. Sometimes, all you need is a little fun.

44: Alien 2: On Earth (1980, Ciro Ippolito [as "Sam Cromwell"])

Owned version: The 2011 DVD released by Midnight Legacy as their fledgling - and ultimately only - entry into the market. They had big plans, and the subsequent collapse of the label is quite the lesson in hubris and marketing. (Lesson 1: Maybe don't start your label with a bottom-tier obscurity even genre heads aren't crazy about.)

Acquired: April 29th, 2012, from a vendor stationed outside the theater as I was headed into Exhumed Films's eX-Fest, a yearly 12-hour marathon of exploitation films. This was the first and only time I've been able to attend, so it's nice to have this disc as a souvenier.

Seen before?: Once from this disc, on March 4th, 2017 - was at the time researching knockoffs of Alien and Aliens in preparation for an article I never got around to writing.

The title offers a ripoff. The subtitle promises the mythical sequel the franchise proper promised multiple times but never quite got around to making. The film itself... is all of the above and more. Alien 2: On Earth follows a group of young Italians (one of whom has telepathic powers) as they go spelunking in San Diego following a strange incident involving a returning spacecraft and some missing astronauts. Once they leave topside roughly half an hour in, they're on earth but might as well not be for all the available natural light, and this isn't lost on Ippolito. His main directorial trick is to have the intrepid climbers shine their helmets directly into the camera, which is obvious but remarkably effective and surprising in its versatility - he gets looming shadows and lens flares (there's a great one where he frames it so the lens flare stretches directly across the protagonist's eyes as she's trying to telepathically locate a missing member of the party), but he also pushes further, exploiting the enveloping darkness to send them into deep space without leaving the terra firma. Seriously, check these shot of the party about to descend, which looks for all the world like an extreme close-up of a constellation:

Or this subsequent one during the descent:

There's a conscious artistry here that belies the film's status as a low-budget ripoff - this is a film made by people who genuinely wanted to make the best film they could with the materials they had. In the world of Italian genre knockoffs, a world where people like Bruno Mattei and Andrea Bianchi can thrive, that's a refreshing thing to find.

It isn't just tricks of the light, either. The cutting is often functional but can be bluntly effective when the time calls for it, like a cut from an exploding alien rock to the flash of a Polaroid camera, or a quick shock-cut away from a little girl on a beach whose face has been turned into hamburger. (How she's crying with no face-holes left is a mystery, but the shot is kicked away fast enough that we're not left much space to think about that.) And while the cramped setting doesn't allow for much in the way of virtuoso camerawork, there's still the occasional stylistic flourish that catches attention, like the slow tracking shot starting from a rope at a man's feet that goes down the length of a prone woman's body, ending at her head, at which point her face promptly explodes and ejects something slimy.

As the creature emerges, it has one of the lady's eyeballs balanced on its head - a goofy, gross touch that puts this entirely in line with others of its ilk. Past the unique setting and the effective use of it, Ippolito's main stock in trade is enthusiastic, lumpy splatter; while the majority of the shock scenes are confined to the back half of the film, once they arrive, they're pleasingly gnarly. Heads explode, dangling bodies are emptied out, things burst from various fleshy hiding places, people are munched... it's a good time in that peculiar tempura-paint way at which Italian gore films are so skilled. The contrast between the beasts here and the one in its inspiration is interesting - where Giger's monster is sleek perfection, the low-rent cousins we get here are all blood and sinews, moist rubber mounds of tentacles and unidentifiable chunky flesh. If anything, they somewhat resemble a gluey mass of crimson, wavering stalactites, and whether that's a knowing tip of the cap to the setting, a nod towards their origins within mysterious glowing space rocks, both, or neither, it works in its way.

Alien 2 also reveals itself as a product comfortably nestled in a very specific genre/country movement when we get to the end. The missing-astronaut drama, after running as background noise for most of the first act and vanishing completely when they go into the caves, finally dovetails itself into the main story. Ippolito sets the stage tonally within the first thirty minutes - there's a concentration in finding the unsettling in the mundane, in the still darkness of a garage or the too-noisy clatter of a busy bowling alley - and that pays off once the survivors of the underworld fracas finally re-emerge into the light. For all its idiocy and dorkiness (Great Moments in Dialogue: "Where'd I find it? I found it where people find things!"), this carries with it a horror of oblivion and the inevitability of same, something it shares with Zombie and Nightmare City and Inferno and other such fully-limbic contemporaneous works. Once certain wheels have been set in motion, you can only ignore it for so long before it comes for you too.

43: Alien (1979, Ridley Scott)

Owned version: The Fox Blu-ray released in 2010 as part of the Alien Anthology set.

Acquired: January 4th, 2016 from Amazon as part of a promotional bundle they were offering combining this set and a standalone Blu of Prometheus.

Seen before?: Three times - once on VHS some time in the mid-'90s, once in October of 2003 during the theatrical release of the director's cut and once from this disc on March 9th, 2017.

 While a film student at USC, Dan O'Bannon wrote a script that would become the film Dark Star. That film, the directorial debut of fellow USC student John Carpenter, is a dry, amusing sci-fi comedy about a small crew of astronauts tasked with destroying rogue planets. O'Bannon uses this as a hook on which to hang his sympathies for the worker drone - above all else, Dark Star is about being stuck in a dead-end job, one where you hate your coworkers and they hate you and everyone is stressed and cranky and all you can do is plow ahead and dream of the day you don't have to do this shit anymore.

His next film was more or less the same thing.

If nothing else, Alien is one of the greatest portraits of the hazards of blue-collar life ever put on film. That it takes place in space and prominently features an ill-tempered murderous lifeform slaughtering its cast does nothing to diminish this - it is, in fact, a scenario only strengthened by the facts of its characters' day-to-day existence.This is, of course, not a new insight - it's been written about fairly often - but the fact that these people are just anonymous grunts doing a job, not scientists or astronauts or anyone else who might be prepared to deal with the situation makes the spectre of their potential deaths loom all the larger. Their expendability is the point - even before the appearance of the Xenomorph, there's danger enough in a job that requires those who do it to roam an isolated metal container light years away from any sort of help or backup. The hull-breach sequence is the most striking example of this - sirens screaming and flashing lights sputtering through the darkness as the crew tries to mitigate the damage while outside, the wind on an alien planet howls like a demon, shrieking a warning of disinvitation. Life is fragile, the job is dangerous and the crew is being asked to do things they shouldn't; when Parker files this exact objection, saying, "It's not in my contract to do this kind of duty," he's threatened with "total forfeiture of shares." (It's also made clear that Parker and Brett, the fix-it guys constantly working underneath the rest of the crew, are getting paid less than the rest. Hierarchies within hierarchies.) Any one of a thousand things could have gone wrong and killed everyone on board, which is one reason why Alien is already a nervous affair prior to the chest-burst.

Another reason is more sinister: The alien is clearly not the only villain on board. When things do go wrong, there's nothing and no one to reason with - all that surrounds is rickety metal run by indifferent, unfeeling computers under the thrall of the orders programmed into them by the corporate masters who sent these people into the sky to die. The opening scene contrasts the efficient workings of the autopilot system, humming away without a soul in sight, with the empty corridors of the ship proper, finally settling into the hypersleep room, a bright and fluorescently sterile room where the ship's ostensible crew slumbers away. The film hasn't even started and already the humans in the story are marked as superfluous. When things go south and the alien escapes its host, Scott keeps cutting back to Ash, his grim and impassive curiosity standing out against the screams and panic evinced by his crewmates, his inhumanity blossoming by the moment. The shock-reveal of his true nature, in retrospect, is telegraphed in a lot of clever ways; I especially appreciated his lack of sweatiness, the only being wandering through this hothouse without a drop of liquid on his brow. IN the aftermath of Kane's rupture, the crew is essentially left adrift - stonewalled from learning how to defend themselves by an unresponsive Mother(ship) and a corporate android mole. Ripley tries to find ways to reword a question about survivability to get a straight answer from Mother, utlimately settling on WHAT ARE MY CHANCES? The response: DOES NOT COMPUTE. Ash, reduced to a milk-spewing head, intones, "I cant lie to you about your chances, but... you have my sympathy." Both machines playing their part to crush the working stiff, beholden to their programming as much as the Xenomorph is beholden to its instincts towards predation. All that and it's a real motherfucker of a horror film.

Also, if this isn't the only film in which Harry Dean Stanton meows, it's definitely the best.

42: Alice in the Cities (1974, Wim Wenders)

Owned version: The Criterion Blu-ray released in 2016 as part of the Road Trilogy box set.

Acquired: Assumedly November or December of 2016, during one of Barnes & Noble's half-off sales.

Seen before?: No.

I feel like a lot of what Alice in the Cities is doing can be explained by the use of John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln on a television in a motel in which disaffected journalist Philip (Rudiger Vogler) is staying. Philip is traveling across America taking Polaroids for an ill-defined writing assignment. Televisions figure prominently in Wim Wenders' empathetic portrait of dislocation and ennui - televised images blare in hotels and motels and airports, displaying silent images of film stars and cheerful men shilling albums of Italian music and "ads for the status quo," as Philip grumbles - but nowhere does the motif seem more instructive as to Philip's journey than a brief glimpse of Henry Fonda portraying that most noble and deified of Americans. Young Mr. Lincoln is an excellent, stirring work of art that wears well the trappings of a mythopoeic construction of America the Beautiful, home to great men and great ambitions. It can be slotted neatly, if one cared to, into a certain nationalistic vision, a burnished vision of historical greatness. The film, of course, is not as simple as all that - Geoffrey O'Brien sums it up with, "Ford accepts triumphalism as a necessary evil - accepts the need for a Great Man and a monument to affirm his greatness - but his movie is not quite that monument. It is more a lament for what the world might almost have been, if there had been no need for a Lincoln to save it" - which is of course also The Point. It knowingly offers up an America that was never there, that cannot be found because to do so is to constrict one's vision.

Similarly, Philip's article is failing because he cannot find the America's he's looking for, simply because this America also does not exist - the America he hopes to find has no bearing on the country itself but is instead an outcropping of his own mind. When he exclaims about his camera, "It just never shows what you saw!" what he's really decrying is his inability to extricate the reality of his surroundings from his own lived experience within those surroundings. He can't get outside himself and really see. In this manner, it matters not what country he finds himself in - his alienation stems from within, not without. What he's searching for is himself. What he finds is a little girl.

Alice, the little girl, has problems of her own. She's traveling with a mother, Lisa, who loves her but cannot prioritize the girl's needs over her own and is fraying to bits because of it. Philip runs into the two of them at LaGuardia Airport after a pilot's strike in Germany strands them in the US for a couple days longer. Whereas Philip's existential malaise manifests as sloth, Lisa's turns into a desire for escape, and soon Philip finds himself with a new travel companion. What could (and often does in other hands) devolve into a pathos-sodden tale about a lost man who finds himself when forced to be a father figure to an adorable moppet instead blooms into something more flinty and sharp-angled, where the emotion seeps naturally out of the characterizations. A good deal of that has to do with the fact that Alice is anything but an adorable moppet. Yella Rottlander takes this assignment and runs with it, pushing forth a impressively modulated, sullen and spiky turn that nonetheless allows space for the sorts of small joys you'd expect from a kid who is still, after all, a kid (e.g. the scene with the photo booth, which also serves as a handy encapsulation of the changing relationship dynamics between Philip and Alice). Alice is, in no small manner, one of the most realistic children I can recall seeing on film - Wenders threads the needle perfectly in exactly how obnoxious to make her without tilting into Dutch territory - and Rottlander strikes nary a false note. (Interesting to see this so soon after Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, another film that recognizes that kids can be irritating without being monsters.)

Alice is a kid in a tough situation who's just old enough to know how she's being screwed and practiced at finding ways to evince frustration at not being able to do anything about it, and Philip is man without purpose or direction. In the course of Alice in the Cities, they don't solve each other's problems or change each other's lives - they merely drift together for a while, both at different stations in life yet somehow sharing a common outlook. (There's a beautiful shot where Alice is reflected multiple times in a developing Polaroid of Philip - a metaphoric depiction of a number of paths ahead of her into the future, one of which leads to becoming Philip.) Wenders's philosophical stance here can be neatly summed up in the sequence where Philip and Alice comb the city of Wuppertal looking for the residence of Alice's grandmother - a man who grew up here but recognizes nothing, having not been home in over a decade ("These old buildings are all being torn down"), and a young girl looking for a house she can't remember in a place she doesn't know, their twin levels of alienation dovetailing in ways that make them ideal travel partners. And if the film were them and only them, that would be enough.

But what really makes Alice stick is the observational notes Wenders throws in regarding the world and people around them. The two of them may be shutting out the world, but the world is not alienated from them, and there are times when, say, Philip is telling Alice a story and a tram roars by in the background, or when Philip is trying to sleep in a hotel room and NYC street noise roars in from an open window, that remind us that the world does not begin and end with these two travelers. There is, instead, a whole bustling world, one of bus passengers and greasy-spoon waitresses, sympathetic policemen and flustered ticket-counter agents, ex-girlfriends and frustrated copy editors, and every one of these people, whether glimpsed in passing or given passages of dialogue and interaction with our leads, is given enough of a suggestion of a rich inner life by Wenders than any of them could spin off into their own film. Where Philip is closed off, Wenders is generous and curious, and he understands that life goes on around you no matter what you think of it. My favorite sequence in Alice is directly after Philip, from the observation deck of the Empire State Building, spies Lisa leaving their hotel and realizes that she isn't coming back for Alice; as he trudges over to her, mulling how to break this news - or even whether he should do so - Alice is using the binocular scopes to follow a bird in flight. Unaware of the shift her life is about to take, lost in her joy, trailing a bird. Life goes on.

41: Alice in Wonderland (1976, Bud Townsend)

Owned version: The DVD released in 2007 by Subversive Cinema, after which they immediately exhaled their dying breath and shuttered.

Acquired: 2008, likely April or May, from an unknown source - I thought I'd purchased it from Amazon, but there's zero record of that, so I dunno.

Seen before?: Twice, both times from this disc - I watched the XXX cut on April 27th, 2009 and the X cut on March 11th, 2010. That second viewing led to this review.

As usual, I find myself in disagreement with my prior review, yet this time it has nothing to do with the film in question - indeed, I have little to add to my drive-by assessment. My disagreement this time comes in fobbing off an entire genre in the process of shrugging over this specific example of said genre. "who really deigns to watch porn films all the way through?" I said, and jesus what a dumbfuck I was back then, I've seen a few other classic-era porn films since then and of course you can watch them all the way through if they're good enough just like any other genre of film. Back then, with limited experience in the genre, I assumed I was safe using Alice to make that generalization; now I can simply point out that Alice is no Sex World. Always growth, that's our aim here.

If it sounds like I'm stalling, engaging in a bit of throat-clearing... well, yeah. I don't have anything to add, really, like I said. This is my third time through it, and it's not a complicated object. It hasn't gotten any less threadbare, the songs haven't gotten any more memorable, the jokes haven't gotten any less corny (seriously, they even throw in the "order in the court"/"ham on rye" gag) and Kristine De Bell hasn't gotten any less appealing. The only real point of fluctuation is on how much I think De Bell's innocent/smutty magnetism compensates for the shabbiness of the film she's in. This time around, I think that well may have finally been exhausted for me. I don't foresee going back to this disc ever again.
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Okay, maybe one thing before I go see what I can get for this on eBay - Alice hinges on the innocent naturalization of sexuality, on the idea that "good girls don't" is goofy and retrograde and everyone does it whatever their inclination because sex is good and fun and positive. Which I am very much in favor of. Yet, this film is so ham-fisted that it manages to fuck up even that easy lay-up. The "If You Haven't Got Dreams, You Ain't Got Nothin'" number is a paeon to keeping wonder and magic in your life, to avoiding the very adult temptation to get exhausted and jaded... but it does so by arguing for a certain child-like approach to the world, to the point of pleading, "If they'd just kept a little bit of kid in them..." Now, I understand that's not meant to be literal. But if you're taking a popular children's book, already made into a famous film by a children's-entertainment titan, and including a song wherein actors in children's-theater-level fur suits make the case that you should stay in touch with the child within, then immediately follow that song with a bit wherein the fur people lick Alice all over her body, including one (played, I believe, by adult-film mainstay Terri Hall) who goes for it and gives Alice her first dose of head... well, I can't help but think you're accidentally advocating pedophilia, is what.

Even if that's indeed accidental, Tweedledee and Tweedledum are totally intended to be brother and sister, it's right there in the dialogue, so all I want to do is scream WHY ARE YOU DESTROYING YOUR FLUFFY, CHEERFUL SEX-POSITIVE PORNO WITH UBER-TABOO FETISH SHIT WHY WHY WHY

40: Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974, Martin Scorsese)

Version owned: The 2004 Warner DVD release as included in the Martin Scorsese Collection box set (the same one I pulled After Hours from).

Acquired: March 5th, 2015 from Amazon.

Seen before?: No.

The child is telling a joke, his mother the only audience. It's a joke he's heard and is trying to remember, but the details aren't coming out quite right. He gets to a point, realizes he forgot something, runs back to fill in the detail. A pause, a stammer, a restatement, a change. Eventually, he arrives at a punchline, but by then the joke is obliterated, blasted out of recognizable shape by the heedless energy of the teller. His mother, his exasperated mother, evinces no response other than a grim relief that the fumbling attempt at a joke is over... so of course the child thinks she doesn't get it and heads forth to run through it again, expecting that this time she'll laugh. The mother's face crumbles into a burgeoning sob.

This joke - something about a gorilla and some testicles, if I remember correctly - is so important to Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.

Firstly, the joke stands as a representation of realism and this film's curious relationship to it. The telling of the joke is a perfect encapsulation of Tommy, the pre-teen son of Ellen Burstyn's Alice - it's youthful loquaciousness as a verbal steamroller, awkward and oblivious and pointedly vulgar. Tommy is allowed to be unsympathetic and obnoxious to a degree that doesn't often find purchase in Hollywood, where children are often shown as precocious and/or wise beyond their years, and doing so makes him feel uncannily like an actual kid reacting to stressful circumstances. This general truth to character and circumstance revealed in small ways finds its way into every corner of the film - in the embarrassed hesitance of the first meeting between the widowed Burstyn and lounge rat Harvey Keitel, in the pastoral calm of Kris Kristofferson's ranch, in the nervous, frayed desperation of Burstyn at the end of a job hunt and the ever-weakening pronouncements about the bar's lack of a piano by the bar owner whom she's begging for a singing job. There's a thread here where Scorsese, ever the cinematic omnivore, is more or less using the structures of American melodrama to tip his cap towards Italian neo-realism, and the concentration on the economically downtrodden is part and parcel there.

Except that every little touch of realism comes with something to undermine it, to blow it up into something grand and brash. Harvey Keitel turns out to be a room-smashing monster; Kristofferson's ranch has grass rendered in eye-scorching Technicolor green; Burstyn's last stand is accompanied by a swooping fast-track zoom as she hobbles into the darkened bar. Too with the joke - the truth of the scene is a kid being a kid and telling a story while disregarding whether anyone wants to hear it, but the telling is allowed to wend so long that the realism breaks and the duration becomes its own meta-joke. This is appropriate for a sober ground-level drama frayed to bits by the fact that all its characters operate out on the far edge of their emotions. Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore is a woman's-picture in the same way Mean Streets is a crime picture - it has the shape of the thing, but the violent, nervous rhythms juiced into it by its young, excitable director give it an electricity all its own, melodrama tiptoeing just up to the raw edge of miserablism before letting off the gas and sliding back towards less painful outcomes.

Getting to these outcomes, of course, is never easy - a lot of detours and dashed dreams have to occur before these people find their way to where they are. And there it's back to the joke again - it's a perfect microcosm of this film's idea of life as a long wait for an expected destination only to realize that destination isn't on the horizon and life is moving on whether you want it to or not, so now's the time to act. Burstyn spends the film pulling up stakes and running whenever things get sour, towards an imagined future of singing success in Northern California; the hard-fought satisfaction and wisdom of the ending comes when she doesn't run from another series of letdowns. The film finds its truth in the small gestures because the big ones are always revealed to be folly, emotional blowups that solve nothing because after the blowup you still have to exist. There's a beautiful scene near the end of the film between Burstyn and Diane Ladd where the former pours her heart out to the latter in the bathroom of the diner where they both work, and it's moving and fulfilling and helps Burstyn make her ultimate choice about where she's going to go with her life... and in the middle of it Scorsese cuts to Vera, the hapless young waitress who works with the two absent women, trying to manage a lunchtime rush all by her beleaguered self. Life goes on.

39: Alice Goodbody (1974, Tom Scheuer)

Owned version: The Blu-ray released in 2017 by Code Red, packaged with Those Mad Mad Movie Makers (the sanitized retitle of the film better known as The Last Porno Flick).

Acquired: Late in 2017 or early in 2018 from Diabolik DVD.

Seen before?: No.

After the deep diving of the last couple pieces, it feels a bit refreshing to splash around in a puddle. Alice Goodbody is a silly Hollywood sex comedy about a sweet, naive woman sleeping her way up the ladder of fame in exchange for an ever-mounting big break in an epic about Julius Caesar. It has nothing grand to offer aside from the breathtaking body of Sharon Kelly. It is instead content to tell the same joke with slight variations - Alice finds out who she has to sleep with next while going down on "2nd assistant production manager" Myron Mittleman (that last name, I know I know), tries to accommodate the weird sexual proclivities of whomever she's been given with a modicum of success, finds her role subsequently increased and then suffers an on-set accident that puts her out of commission and demands a delay on set. This goes through five cycles, after which Scheuer hits the blackout on a hoary eye-roller of a punchline.

Much to my surprise, I found it kind of charming.

A lot of that has to do with the wide-eyed gee-shucks charm of the voluptuous Ms. Kelly, who has the difficult task of playing this material light and cheeky without letting the innate misogyny sour it or making Alice seem like too much of a dupe. She is blessedly more than up to the task, making Alice into a sunny and optimistic sort who's up for whatever because, hey, you gotta pay your dues and who wouldn't want to be in the movies? Or maybe I'm just responding to the fact that Scheuer skirts the edge of dizzy-dame stereotypes by turning Alice into a hardcore, omnivorous cinephile - if she's spacey, it's not that she's stupid but that she's lost in her head thinking about the film she just saw or looking forward to the one she's going to see later. Seriously - her first line of dialogue sees her waxing rhapsodic about Borzage's 7th Heaven, her fateful date with Mittleman sees her exclaiming, "This is exactly how June Preisser was discovered!" and one injury is met with, "I bet nothing like this ever happened to Maria Montez!" I'm just saying, I relate to being at your job and thinking about whatever you stayed up into the wee hours of the morning to watch, how could I not, I'm weak like that.

Ms. Kelly, with her open face and big easy smile, also serves as a beacon towards the script's feathery cheer. The light touch is critical in that it manages to differentiate it from the reams of contemporaneous comedies that come off as flat sitcoms, all sledgehammer jokes and dead-air timing (e.g. the film with which it shares a disc). It feints towards setting up a dichotomy between the wonder of the movies felt by Alice and the cynical sausage-grinding that actually produces those movies, but it never gets too insistent on that cynicism - it's too busy being goofy. There's a point-of-view shot from inside Alice's vagina. The director is a dime-store spoof on Erich Von Stroheim about whom is said at one point, "He thinks De Mille mighta made it if he didn't think so small!" The legendary George "Buck" Flower figures in a food-slathered sex scene that either doubles down on Tom Jones or prefigures Hot Shots!, I can't quite decide. Flower also has a bit where he spies on a neighbor of his having sex with a man in a gorilla costume. The accidents on set, as they get more elaborate and Scheuer starts to have fun with the fact that we know a crack-up is inevitable, start to seem like a lost Final Destination entry. An elephant psychiatrist boasts of having shown a frigid female elephant pornographic films. ("Of people?" "No, of elephants!") Hell, scratch that - all you need to know is that there is an elephant psychiatrist in this film. I can't defend Alice Goodbody on any real merit. I can't say it holds up over feature length. I can't even expect I'll ever watch it again. But it was a nice surprise to actually enjoy a '70s smutcom, to a degree, and that's more value than I had expected.