A Moving Violation
By Wrongtom
Here at Motive Unknown, we love Wrongtom’s music as well as his writing. So, we decided to commission him to write a series of articles for our Friday Digest mailout. Here’s instalment #1. Follow Wrongtom on Twitter here.
I moved house during a pandemic last week, I wouldn’t recommend it. A long strenuous week shifting thousands of records and obsolete pieces of dusty studio gear in the back of our waning Yaris which we’d acquired from my girlfriend’s grandad who’d been advised to stop driving in his mid 90s. I don’t think it’s something I’ll forget in a hurry, it’s hard to think about anything else now.
But here I am, in my half finished home studio reflecting on the mistakes I might have made which led me to be so ill-prepared for these unprecedented times. Perhaps dedicating the best part of my adult life to marginalized music wasn’t a wise decision? “That can’t be it” I reassure myself whilst I dust off one of 4 vintage tape echo units I probably haven’t used for a couple of years.
But this is no time to wallow, not publicly at least. We’re all stressed. The question is how do we cope? Here, in this new house, we haven’t quite sorted out the Virgin Media box, and so, starved of Now TV and Netflix, I’ve found solace in another obsolete medium, the humble DVD. With no charity shops to offload 12 years of cumulative tat, there’s now a few boxes of these discs cluttering up the living room.
I took a dive and returned with a handful of neglected gems like The Corpse Grinders and A Grin Without A Cat, but somehow grotty b-horrors and impenetrable artist-film didn’t fit the mood; this Covid-riddled world is perhaps no place for the likes of Ted V Mikels or Chris Marker. On the other hand Return To Oz and *Batteries Not Included felt like the warm and welcome hug from an old friend we’ve all no doubt been craving for the past few weeks.
I’ve often looked back at the glut of oddball sci-fi/fantasy/comedy movies which Hollywood churned out in the mid 80s, wondering who signed off on the likes of Howard The Duck, One Crazy Summer and The Garbage Pail Kids Movie. Who was the target audience for Mannequin? Young girls you might assume, but that doesn’t stop the hero’s ex going to bed with her sex-pest colleague, having shunned his advances for the best part of an hour and twenty minutes, only to find he can’t maintain an erection.
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Yet this is a film about a Princess — an ancient Egyptian one played by the very un-Egyptian Kim Cattral — who skips out of an arranged marriage by traveling through time until she winds up as a mannequin in a failing Philly department store where she falls in love with a troubled 20-something artist who’s best friend, Hollywood, throws shade left right and centre, owning everything as if he’s just rolled in from a downtown Philly ballroom. WHO… WAS… THIS… MADE… FOR?? This, I should add, was three years before Paris Is Burning hit the screens, and about 25 years before most people watched it.
Mannequin has a great score. In fact a lot of these films do, assuming you enjoy the final strains of electro before hip hop took hold. Hungarian composer Sylvester Levay laid down some glacial synth-funk for Mannequin, whilst Russian-born Stanislas Syrewicz supplied rat-a-tatting drum machines for the misfiring Biggles: Adventures In Time. Even Prince’s awful(ly good) Under The Cherry Moon has smatterings of Linndrums in the incidental music hidden amongst evergreen hits like ‘Kiss’ and ‘Mountains’. I’ve wanted to put out a comp of this stuff for years, if anyone out there needs a surefire tax write-off.
One especially perplexing entry in my “who the hell funded this?” DVD selection is Julien Temple’s Earth Girls Are Easy. A hot mess of a movie which seems to forget it’s a musical for prolonged periods before knocking you sideways with another Nile Rodgers penned number. On paper it might seem like Nile lost a bet but it’s actually a great soundtrack with welcome editions from the B52s, Depeche Mode and Carole Davis, last seen dealing with a flaccid sleazebag in Mannequin. Fun fact: Carol also co-wrote ‘Slow Love’ from Prince’s Sign O’ The Times LP, though she never met him, he simply bought the song off her and reworked it.
It seems strange now that Nile would team up with Temple who’d recently upped sticks to LA after the financial car crash of Absolute Beginners here in the UK. In the mid 80s Nile could do no wrong, whereas Temple almost derailed Earth Girls too. Luckily for us it happened, and not only do we get to bask in the glory of Geena Davis singing “The Ground You Walk On” as she trashes her cheating fiance’s house, but we’re also treated to Jeff Goldblum performing jazz piano, offering a fleeting glance into his own future over at Decca Records.
I can actually tell you who funded this madness: historic French bank Crédit Lyonnais who no doubt regretted their investment after it recouped less than half it’s $10 million budget. Distributor DEG filed for bankruptcy, almost toppling Dino DeLaurentiis’ reign over schlock-Hollywood. Temple wouldn’t make another feature film for almost a decade.
A brief mention should go to Lucasfilm’s Howard The Duck. What purports to be a kid’s film features a queasy bed scene with Lea Thompson and the titular man-duck, and another with Howard working in a seedy sauna full of randy couples. Most notably is the edition of an obligatory sleazy band manager refusing to pay his group’s wages until the singer “stops holding out” on him. Presumably theirs was a verbal contract hastily relinquished during a bar fight with duck man, overseen by celebrated character-actor Richard Edson who had only recently quit a handful of New York no-wave bands including Konk, The Offs and Sonic Youth to make this. Thomas Dolby had his hand in the soundtrack to this celluloid structure fire by the way. I love it.
There’s one film from this era I couldn’t face though, Richard Pryor’s final starring role, Moving from 1988. Could I bear watching Pryor tormented by a team of wayward removal men? Hell no! Could I stomach an hour and twenty nine minutes of a gaunt and frail Pryor mumbling his way through the script knowing this went into production not long after he was diagnosed with MS? Absolutely not. But did I want to hear Howard Shore’s long forgotten score? Do I even need to answer this?
If you’re not familiar, Shore has composed for countless films including most of Cronenberg’s work, a fair bit of Scorsese, and Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy for which he won two Oscars. He’s arguably better than this movie, we’re all better than this movie, but there’s still something appealing about a guy at the top of his game slumming it in some trash like Moving. I can’t decide if he phoned it in or simply used it as an opportunity to experiment, but the electro-tinged beat downs and synth horns make it almost watchable, assuming you haven’t just gone through the hell of uprooting your entire life when you’re supposed to be staying home and saving lives.
Most of these film scores aren’t available, and at present I couldn’t tell you where you could watch most of these movies, assuming I haven’t put you off entirely, but I’m sure they’re up there streaming somewhere in the ether, so happy hunting!
P.S. There’s actually a fascinating tale behind why Mannequin ticked so many audience boxes and yet none at all, but that’s for another day.
