Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978) is a movie with a certain reputation, and it's not a good reputation.  It was not a commercial success, and it was savaged by critics and angry Beatles fans upon release.  On the other hand, I've been on a steady diet of Bollywood for the past few decades, so I am no stranger to confusing plots, endless musical numbers, and respected actors who are chewing the scenery and being well paid for it. 

Heartland, USA is an idyllic, if fictional small town that is most famous for being home to the legendary Sergeant Pepper and his Lonely Hearts Club Band, who managed to win the First World War for the allies by being so gosh-darned inspiring.  (I think - the movie isn't really clear on this point.)  After the war the band spent a few decades going in and out of style, but eventually time catches up with us all, and when the Segeant died, he left his magical instruments in the care of the town's mayor, Mr. Kite (George Burns).  The instruments were kept in the town's wax museum, and as long as they remain in Heartland, the people of the world would know happiness and peace.

After twenty years a new Lonely Hearts Club Band forms, led by Pepper's grandson Billy Shears (Peter Frampton) and featuring the Henderson brothers, Mark (Barry Gibb), Bob (Maurice Gibb), and Dave (Robin Gibb).  Billy's brother Dougie (Paul Nicholas) is the manager, while Billy's sweetheart Strawberry Fields (Sandy Farina) is there to provide wholesome small-town charm.  They're a big hit in Heartland, and powerful music mogul B. D. Hoffler (Donald Pleasence) thinks they can be a big hit everywhere.  He invites the band to come out to Hollywood and sign with his label.

This is a rock musical about the music industry made in the Seventies, so when the boys reach Hollywood they are immediately seduced by glitz, glamor, while Billy is literally seduced by Lucy (Dianne Steinberg), the lead singer of girl group Lucy and the Diamonds.  Meanwhile, in Heartland, real estate mogul Mean Mr. Mustard (Frankie Howerd) and his assistant (Carel Struycken, Star Trek's Mr. Homn) arrive in town in a high tech van with a supercomputer and two lady robots (Anna Rodzianko and Rose Aragon).  Their mission is to steal the instruments, and they do, easily, because they're just on display in the museum.  Mustard also wants to steal Strawberry Fields, but he never gets the chance.

Once the instruments are gone Heatland immediately becomes seedy and corrupt, which is just what the sinister and mysterious Future Villain Band wants.  Strawberry takes a bus and arrives in Hollywood to find the Lonely Hearts Club Band, and while she's miffed about the Billy and Lucy situation, she quickly moves past it, because they have instruments to recover.  That means visits to evil plastic surgeon Maxwell Edison (Steve Martin) and crossing guard turned cult leader Father Sun (Alice Cooper).  During the fight with Father Sun Billy is accidentally electrocuted, but after Strawberry sings her namesake song, Frampton comes alive.  

 While the band is adventuring they are not performing, so B. D., Dougie and Lucy arrange for a benefit concert to help clean up Heartland and hopefully restart the planned national tour.  The concert is good enough that while Earth, Wind and Fire are performing, Dougie and Lucy have the chance to steal all the money, and Mustard manages to recover the instruments and kidnap Strawberry while he's at it.  

The boys rush to rescue Strawberry and the instruments from the Future Villain Band.  Who could the mysterious mastermind be?  Turns out it's Aerosmith.  Unfortunately, Strawberry is the smart and competent one, so it doesn't go well.  The next scene is Strawberry's funeral, and Billy is about to jump off the roof, but then Magical Flying Billy Preston appears from Heartland's weather vane to fix everything.  Yes, it really is that abrupt.

 Summarizing the plot makes it sound more sensible and comprehensible than it actually is, but that's okay, because the plot is only there to help string the songs together.  There are a lot of songs, and the covers vary in quality; Earth, Wind and Fire's cover of "Got to Get You into My Life" is probably the high point, and Frankie Howerd's "When I'm Sixty-Four" might be the nadir.  (There is competition.)

 But even that doesn't convey how weird this movie is.  Despite the songs, this is basically a silent movie.  There is no dialogue, and the story is conveyed through the songs, intertitles, and some narration by George Burns.  The actors convey emotion through facial expressions, among other things, and they do a decent job.  It's a fascinating experiment, but why would you hire Donald Pleasence and not give him any lines?

 This is probably not a good movie, but it is definitely an experience, and there are days when we all need Magical Flying Billy Preston to help us.

 

 

Stupid Zombie Hitler.

 

 

Horror comedy is still a thriving genre in Indian cinema at the moment, and  Pallu Padama Paathuka (2023) is yet another horror comedy, this time relatively light on the horror and heavy on the comedy.  Or "comedy."  This is an incredibly broad Tamil farce, and the good news is that over the years I have built up a resistance to broad Tamil farces.  The bad news is that after Go, Goa Gone I have surprisingly high standards for Indian zombie comedies.

 After a cold open involving a young man getting more than he expected form his girlfriend during a forest rendezvous, the movie introduces us to Gopi (Shah Ra), a voice actor who dubs Bear Grills into Tamil.  Gopi is kidnapped and brought before Don Varadha (G. M. Kumar), who is rich, powerful and blind.  Varadha recognizes Gopi by his voice and thinks that he is Bear Grills, and wants him to guide him in the forest for a very important reason that I didn't quite catch.  They meet a zombie, and the movie jumps ahead four years.

In the next scene, a group of strangers meet on a cliff overlooking Kanjuthanni Forest.  They all intend to take their own lives, and they all have tragic backstories which are told in flashbacks.  It's all classic movie tragedy, including a man whose boyfriend is getting married to a woman, a man fired just before his wedding, a man who discovers that his family are really a cult of Satanic cannibals who plan to sacrifice him on his birthday, and a man who set off a chain of accidents that killed his entire family by dropping a bar of soap.  And then there's Mahesh (Dinesh), widely known as "Revolting Mahesh," who unwittingly set off a popular uprising after he was arrested for getting drunk while sitting on a voting machine.  Mahesh is our hero, though he's every bit as hapless as the others.

After drinking together, the group decide to explore the forest, and they meet a swarm of zombies.  Fortunately they are rescued by Sathya (Sanchita Shetty),  a two-fisted action scientist.  Unfortunately, she drugs them, intending to use them as zombie bait, though she changes her mind and rescues them again at the last minute, getting bitten by one of the zombies in the scuffle.  Fortunately she doesn't change completely yet, and tells the men that she has an antidote in her home.  They make it to her compound with only one casualty, and she injects herself with the antidote and introduces her partially zombified father, Rohit Sharma (Anand Babu) and drops some exposition.

Sathya and her father were working on a military project dubbed "Project Cthulhu," which which was . . . supposed to create unkillable zombies, so I suppose it was a success.  (Project Cthulhu's logo which is just the Hydra emblem from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so the evilness is pretty easy to spot.) Rohit and Sathya had second thoughts about creating an undead army, but the military took the formula by force and accidentally released it in the compound, thus creating the current zombie outbreak.

The good news is that the zombies are pretty much confined to the forest, so they can just leave.  Sathya knows the way and offers to lead them, and along the way they meet Gopi, who is not dead and instead living in the woods as a half-crazed survivalist.  Mahesh is completely in love with Sathya at this point, and he writes a letter to propose to her, but after he gives it to her she is kidnapped by Nazi zombies.  Gopi provides the necessary exposition: Rohit tested the formula by using it to animate the frozen body of Adolph Hitler (Hareesh Paradi), and Hitler now has his own compound full of uniformed and relatively loyal zombies.  There's a problem beyond the fact that they brought back Hitler - Zombie Hitler came back obsessed with sex, and he is convinced that Sathya is Eva Braun, either because he thinks she looks like Braun or because she's the only woman in the area.  

 Mahesh and his friends must rescue Sathya from Zombie Hitler, and at this point the movie pretty much abandons horror entirely, treating the zombies as a bunch of guys in unconvincing makeup, and after a bizarre item number Mahesh and Hitler have to compete in a drinking contest for Sathya's hand.

This is broad farce, one of the broadest farces I have ever seen.  And that is a problem, because the movie is leaning hard into the absurdity of the premise.  This movie wants to be so bad it's good, but you can't make a movie that is so bad it's good on purpose, because you wind up winking at the camera rather than taking your own movie seriously.   Some of the jokes land well, but many of them do not, and the film relies on lazy and sometimes homophobic innuendo.

It is not fair to compare this with Go Goa Gone, a movie with an actual budget and some A-list stars.  But it's not the budget that sinks Pallu Padama Paathuka, it's the writing.  Go Goa Gone puts some work into making its slacker heroes grow and change, treats its zombies as a consistent threat with consistent rules, and has an actual theme that develops over the course of the film, and Pallu Padama Paathuka does not.

 

 

Noir for the whole family!

 

 

 Raymond Chandler famously defined his hard-boiled detectives by saying "But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world."  In Sampradayaini Suppini Soodapoosani (2026) the mean streets belong to a rural Indian village, and the man who is not tarnished nor afraid is Sriram (Sivaji), an incorruptible civil servant.  

Sriram is responsible for approving construction projects in the village, which means that he is constantly being offered, and refusing, bribes.  One enterprising thug decides to try intimidation instead, threatening to kidnap Sriram's son Mittu (Rohan), and Sriram critiques the kidnap plan and offers a more practical scheme instead.  He explains to the baffled thug that Mittu is obsessed with making Youtube reels, and he's already filmed himself attacking people in the hopes of going viral.  The thug switches to threatening to kidnap Sriram's wife Utthara (Laya), but she's overbearing and overprotective, willing to use loose wires to shock a hapless burglar.  The thug decides it's better to walk away quietly.

 Later Sriram has a public argument with  Vikram (Prince Cecil), the corrupt and womanizing head of the village's police department.  The next day Vikram shows up at Sriram's house, invites himself in and leers at Utthara for a while.  And when Sriram makes it home, there's a dead policeman on the couch, shot in the head by . . . .Mittu, who was playing around with Vikram's gun.  Sriram's first instinct is to turn himself into the police, reasoning that after the public argument no one will believe that he didn't shoot Vikram anyway, but Utthara urges him to put aside his rigid ethics for a while and help her to hide the body, and he reluctantly agrees despite knowing that wackiness is bound to ensue.

Meanwhile, the corrupt MLA (Sharath Lohithaswa) is worried about the monthly "gift" he's supposed to send to his superior.  The "gift" (a large bag of money) is usually placed in the trunk of a sportscar belonging to his personal assistant, who happens to be Sriram's next door neighbor, before being picked up by one of his men and then delivered.  This time the money has not arrived on time, and when they send someone to check the car, it's gone, because Sriram and his family "borrowed" it while looking for a way to hide the body.  It's a fun family roadtrip, with Vikram in the trunk!

Despite appearances, there is an actual mystery here, though Sriram is more focused on protecting his family than solving anything.   It's also technically a comedy, though the jokes aren't a real focus either.  Instead, this is very much a quirky character piece, with Sriram meeting a large cast of eccentrics as he tries to reconcile his rigid code of ethics with the fact that he's trying to cover up a murder.  Can he stay the best man in his world, or does he have to give that up to protect his family?  

And will they ever get Mittu the counseling that he so desperately needs?