DeMarco is in!

DEMARCO IS IN!

At long last, Boston boxer earns Hall of Fame induction

by Don Stradley

His fights were thrillers. He was a left-hook artist. He was built like a tugboat and could take a beating. He won the welterweight championship by beating Johnny Saxton on April Fools Day, 1955, kicking off a four day celebration in his North End neighborhood. No Boston fighter since has captured the city's imagination quite like Tony DeMarco. 

When it was announced that DeMarco will be inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame  as part of the 2019 class, the general reaction was "What took so long?"

Like another Boston sports icon, Jim Rice of the Red Sox, DeMarco had to be patient while waiting for voters to get wise. Like Rice, there was talk that DeMarco's numbers simply weren't strong enough to rate him alongside Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis and other ring immortals. But also like Rice, one had to look beyond the numbers to appreciate DeMarco's allure.

"He was our hope," said Walter Lopez (aka Wally Mambo), a friend who witnessed DeMarco's amazing effect on  post war Bostonians. "Hope for the neighborhood, for the North End, for the entire city. When he won, we all won. When he became champion, we all became champion. And that's not just the truth, it's a fact." 

The Boston Garden nearly capsized on the might DeMarco beat Saxton. DeMarco has the fight on a worn VHS tape, and occasionally puts it into a creaky old machine for visitors. They wait for the moment in the 14th round when DeMarco drove Saxton into a corner and unloaded 25 consecutive punches. Saxton was tough and had connections to the mob, but this wasn't his night. DeMarco was once asked his opinion on Floyd Mayweather. "You know who he reminds me of?" DeMarco said. "Johnny Saxton."

Friends who have known DeMarco for 70 years remember when he had trouble getting fights, and how he actually went to Los Angeles with plans to box under an alias. He couldn't get fights out there, either. He took a job driving a truck, transporting plumbing parts. From the earliest days of his career, DeMarco seemed destined for magical highs and desperate lows.

He turned pro at 16, borrowing the identity of an older kid in the neighborhood. Some key career decisions were made by coin flips in backrooms. He was shuffled around, from Boston to New Jersey to Montreal. He took fights on short notice. On some nights he bled so much he feared the ringside reporters were getting drenched with his blood. Managers came and went. He met Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. He met John Garfield and Jeff Chandler. He met Lili St Cyr, the bubble bath dancer. He won fights. He lost fights.

The Boston Garden was DeMarco's battlefield. He headlined there more than 20 times. He used to walk to the Garden from his home on Fleet Street. The night he beat Saxton, he strolled back home with the title belt. Even now at 86, he lives just up the street from where it once stood. The more modern, slightly sterile TD Garden stands in its place. He wishes the building still hosted boxing."I stay close," he says, "in case they need me for a preliminary."

Like many fighters, DeMarco came from a hard neighborhood. DeMarco stayed out of trouble, but admits to being friendly with several of the North End's alleged bad guys. He even had a passing acquaintance with Frankie Carbo, the gangland killer who controlled much of boxing during the 1940s and '50s. "We talked a few times," DeMarco said. "Never in depth. To tell the truth, I wish he had managed me. I would've  made more money." 

Taken as a whole, DeMarco's career wasn't spectacular. But he was beloved in Boston, and for a few years he was as popular as Ted Williams or Tom Brady or any other New England  athlete. Even now, when he ventures beyond his zip code, older citizens still recognize him and stop him.  "People are very kind," DeMarco says. "Here we are 60 years later, and people still remember. Sometimes I think, 'How did this happen? I'm just a little guy from the North End.'"

The little guy had some big moments. He beat Kid Gavilan, one of the all time greats, at the Garden. There was a rousing trilogy with Gaspar Ortega, a favorite of TV's golden age. Ortega once said, at a time when DeMarco seemed unlikely to ever be inducted, "I don't know why Tony isn't in the Hall of Fame. He was Mr. Excitement." 

Sometimes DeMarco shrugged it off. If the Hall didn't want him, he was fine. He had his friends and his health. He had a cozy West End apartment. The city erected a statue of him in 2012. He was happily married. Life was nice. Yet, he was hoping there would be room for him in Canastota, the shrine for boxing legends.

Friends created petitions. There were phone calls. There were mass e-mails. Every few years, some well-meaning boxing writer would try to get DeMarco's name on a ballot. Nothing panned out until this year. The late Bert Sugar once griped, "He should be in there with  Carmen Basilio because the two names belong together like pork and beans."

The Basilio - DeMarco fights were unfettered violence disguised as sport. DeMarco had only been champion for eight weeks when he went to Basilio's home turf in Syracuse. He was knocked out in the 12th. The rematch took place in Boston. DeMarco landed a brick of a left hook and had Basilio dazed. Somehow, Basilio survived. Again, DeMarco was stopped in 12.

"It was thirty years before I could talk about those fights," DeMarco said. "I was in a casino, and I looked up, and ESPN was replaying one of the bouts with Carmen." DeMarco started to crack jokes about the action. "The people around me probably thought I was crazy, but I felt good. Relieved. I finally had a sense of humor about losing."

The case for DeMarco's Hall of Fame membership gained momentum with the recent inductions of Ray Mancini and Arturo Gatti. Like DeMarco, they weren't members of boxing's elite, but they were fan favorites who fought like tigers. If they were in, the argument went, there was certainly a place for DeMarco.

When news of his  induction finally reached him, Tony D. played it cool.

“Yeah, I’d thought of it from time to time after all these years, but I didn’t lose any sleep over it,” he told the Boston Globe. “I kind of thought I might have been there sooner, you know?”

DeMarco never had a shortage of local support for the cause. Several people had hounded the Hall of Fame's executive director, Ed Brophy. The question was always the same: What exactly was the hold up?

"A lot of people were pulling for him," said writer Springs Toledo. "Jimbo Curran, a local legend who founded the South Boston Boxing Club has been haunting Ed Brophy with calls for over a decade. Ring 4 (the Massachusetts Boxing Hall of Fame) has a lot of rough characters and they've been all over Brophy, too." 

Regarding his won-loss record, which DeMarco admits isn't stellar  (he prefers to say he had 71 professional bouts, rather than break it down into 58-12-1), his record is actually better than some of the IBHOF's previous inductees.

But more important than the stats are the moments:

- Like the time DeMarco,  a 21-year-old lightweight in his first 10-rounder, overcame a 5-stitch gash over his left eye and rallied to defeat 10-7 favorite Paddy DeMarco.

- Or the one round blowout of Chico Vejar, a top rated fighter.

- Or the spectacular brawl with Wallace Bud Smith, won by DeMarco via ninth round KO.

- Or the time he headlined at Fenway Park and pounded out a decision over Vince Martinez, one of the slickest welterweights of the era.

- Or the night in 1955 when he stopped Saxton in the 14th.

That night was the payoff after many years of struggling. As an amateur he'd often sold back his trophies so he could afford his gym fees. As a pro he endured buffoonish managers, "likable jerks" who didn't know how to promote him. There were long stretches of inactivity, where DeMarco found himself in a couple of sidewalk scuffles where he knocked the hell out of some local mugs. Fearing bad publicity or a lawsuit, he made his memorable California trip. 

Life after boxing saw more struggles. He had two children who died young. He went through a stressful divorce. There were bad investments and business deals gone awry.

DeMarco stayed busy, though. He worked as a liquor salesman. He owned a cocktail lounge. He worked as a court officer in Boston's State House. He amused himself by acting in amateur theatricals, usually in dinner theater productions where he played a Mafia boss. He rarely had lines. He just wore a nice suit and looked tough.

He was often invited to attend Hall of Fame dinners and take part in the annual motorcades, but no induction was forthcoming. Sometimes it irked him. Year after year he heard about other fighters being inducted, fighters he'd beaten. He couldn't figure out why he remained a bridesmaid. Was it his short title reign? A friend who wished to remain anonymous offered a theory: "It was because he was so closely associated with Boston, which isn't well-known as a boxing city. If Tony had been from New York or Philadelphia, he would've been in the Hall of Fame years ago." 

What kept him going was a generation of Bostonians who never forgot him.

The late Herald writer Tim Horgan once said that it was difficult to compare DeMarco to any Boston athletes who came later. "He was major, there's no doubt about it. When he lost, there was sadness. It was probably more personal than when a team loses. People identify with individuals more than they do a full team. I think there was more of a personal grief about it."

"Everybody liked Tony," said Lou Lanci, an old  friend. "The old people, the kids, the cops, the priests, and the wiseguys. They all liked Tony." 

"Those people in Boston," said Ortega, "they acted like they would give their life for Tony." 

That his career amounted to anything was a long shot. Along with contracts that gave him fits, DeMarco had an undiagnosed blood sugar problem which caused him to tire in fights. He also had a problem with his nose - a mere tap would have him bleeding like Niagara Falls. Still, he was the underdog who kept punching.

"When I was a boy," DeMarco said, "I had pictures on my bedroom wall of Willie Pep, Jake LaMotta, Joe Louis, and Ray Robinson. They were my heroes. I got to meet them all, and I became a champion, too. It was only for eight weeks, but I would've been honored to be champion for one day." 

This June, Tony DeMarco will be on a podium in Canastota, about 25 miles from where he once fought Basilio. He'll receive a Hall of Fame ring. He'll deliver a short speech. Maybe there will be a plaster cast made of his fist. It will be a nice afternoon for him.

DeMarco was only a champion for a brief time, but he'll be a Hall of Famer forever.

HBO

GOODBYE TO ALL THAT

HBO says no more boxing

by Don Stradley

When I heard HBO was pulling the plug on boxing coverage, I didn't think of Mike Tyson or Larry Merchant, or the night when George Foreman, age 45 and shaped like a giant mound of pudding, landed a lightning bolt of a right hand to KO a much younger Michael Moorer for the heavyweight championship.

I thought of the Silhouette Lounge in Allston, Massachusetts.

It was a dive bar on the outskirts of Boston. It was a place for married guys from the suburbs who came into the city to cheat on their wives; for drunk BC students to play bumper pool;  for tired bus drivers to sit and have a cold one; and for the occasional prostitute from Brockton who came in to fleece the BC kids, bus drivers, and cheating husbands.

There were ferns in the window, and a James Brown cover band, and cheap wood paneling. 

Of more importance was a sign at the entrance that said WE HAVE HBO.

I saw a lot of fights there. I usually had to convince the bartender that a contest for the heavyweight championship was more important than a college basketball game, and since the clientele was usually oblivious to what was happening, I always got my way.

12/13/86 - Tyrell Biggs is fighting Renaldo Snipes. It's dull. Out of nowhere, Biggs lands a  right hand and drops him. The guy on the stool next me, drunk out of his mind, falls off his stool and crashes to the barroom floor. I yelled, "What a punch! Double knockdown!" I got a few laughs. Biggs got the decision.

I didn't have the Blue Horizon, or the Forum or the Olympic. I had a grimy bar with HBO. That was good enough.

One night the bartender said their cable service was fried. I had to run all over the city to find a place with HBO. No luck. I missed out on Tyson-Bruno.

No big deal. I'd also missed Dempsey-Tunney. But I  realized that I couldn't always rely on the Silhouette Lounge. It was time to get my own HBO hookup. And so it was that my badly heated studio apartment was soon fitted with HBO, just as a great era was  beginning. Within a five week period in 1990, HBO brought us  Tyson - Douglas and Chavez - Taylor, two of the most memorable bouts of the decade.

The good times continued. The Holyfield-Bowe fights were tremendous, with Foreman screaming, "They're gonna take Holyfield out of here in a pine box!" I remember Andrew Golota hitting Bowe in the nuts. Jim Lampley erupts: "It's as if a switch was turned on in his head and he's transported back the mean streets of Krakow!"

It was an era of heavyweight nutcases and brawling Mexican featherweights. I remember the chill on my neck as Arturo Gatti and Micky Ward stood face to face listening to the referee's pre-fight instructions.  I remember the rise of Manny Pacquiao, the endless ups and downs of Oscar de la Hoya, and of course, John Ruiz, the best clincher since Sammy "The Clutch" Angott.

And I remember the way Lampley and his colleagues remained absolutely silent during the opening minute of Lewis-Tyson, just letting the action speak for itself. I don't know if Lampley was the best to ever do it, but his odd mix of poise and emotion was damned good.

Gradually, HBO lost the magic. It went cookie-cutter. Every fight looked and sounded the same. There was a bad stretch where every fight seemed more about somebody's sick mother, or ailing girlfriend. HBO's new message was clear: boxing wasn't entertaining on its own, so broadcasts had to be padded with angles lifted from daytime dramas.

HBO was no longer in the boxing business. It was in the reality TV business. Guys who wouldn't know Muhammad Ali from Terrence Alli  were in in the production trucks, whispering in Emanuel Steward's ear, telling him what to talk about. Like a slow disease that overtakes the body, the demise of HBO boxing was gradual and then all of a sudden. I wasn't surprised when HBO recently announced it was done with boxing. HBO hadn't loved boxing in a long time.

Now and then, though, they still did wonderful things.

March, 2011.  Showtime announcer Nick Charles is brought in to do some commentary on an HBO Boxing After Dark show. He's ill with cancer and would be dead in 12 weeks. Lampley steps aside to let Charles take a mic. Nick Charles had always been an elegant and underappreciated boxing voice, and on this night he still had the chops. He called the fight, occasionally passing off to Max Kellerman, with the grace and ease of the professional he'd always been.

Listening to Nick always put me in mind of a quarterback who may not have been flashy, but always got the ball into the right guy's hands. I can't  recall who was fighting, but I remember Nick's voice, and how happy and grateful he was to be once again at ringside. It was a good moment. And HBO was nothing if not a provider of good moments. There may not have been a greater moment than the night HBO let us hear Nick Charles one last time.

I loved boxing on HBO. I loved it at the Silhouette Lounge. I loved it at The Dockside bar, where I once sat in a roomful of people who were convinced Vinny Paz had a chance to beat Roy Jones. I loved it at the Suffolk Downs horse track in Revere, where fights were shown in the clubhouse. And I loved it in my shabby little apartment, when I didn't have enough money for a light bulb but I was willing to splurge on cable. And I've loved it in the various places I've lived since those days.

But I never loved it more than the night Nick Charles made his last stand. We saw a man doing what he loved, and doing it brilliantly, even as he approached death's door. How often are we privy to such things?

We saw it, though. We saw it on HBO.

THE OLD MAN & THE GUN

Here's a nice respite for movie lovers, an elegiac tale of a whimsical old bank robber who stays in the game because there's nothing else quite like it. A fellow should do what he loves, right? The Old Man & The Gun is about Forrest Silva Tucker, the sort of gentleman bandit that Hollywood has always loved. The message has always been that it's fine to take what is not yours, as long as you're polite about it and do it with some style.

The story is set in 1981, when Tucker is well into his 70s, though bank managers describe him to the police as anywhere from 50 to 60. He's not overly jaunty, but he wears a nice suit and hat and does his robbing with a great degree of calm and professionalism. He has a couple of pals who go on jobs with him, but he seems to be the brain of the outfit.

The trio work constantly, cutting a swath through Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri. They like small banks, because they don't want to look like they're showing off, or risk going beyond their area of expertise. When Tucker meets a nice woman, a widow roughly his own age, she provides a soft diversion for him in between bank jobs. He tells her he's a robber; she doesn't believe him. As played by Robert Redford, hobbling and looking his age, Tucker is sweet and sly, and casually flirtatious. She doesn't know what to make of him, but suspects he may be more than just a nice old guy.

Redford has always been just short of being a fine actor. He's always a bit stiff, too pretty. Though he did a lot of period pieces, he always looked like a modern guy in an old fashioned costume. As Roy Hobbs, the aging baseball player in The Natural, he tried to affect a Gary Cooperish earthiness, but couldn't hide his intelligence long enough to be a convincing country hunk. Yet, he overcame being wrong for almost every part with nothing but his sheer likeability, or star quality. As Tucker, he somehow shakes off 50 years of glamor and finds himself. Tucker is strong willed, crafty, a thrill seeker, a rascal. Was this Redford all along?

Redford is so watchable here that we wonder how long he has waited for this sort of role.  All of the great actors eventually have  their "old guy" character, where they prove they can still deliver, and this is Redford's. Thinking of him, his age, his long and illustrious career, and a recent admission that he might be done acting, gives the movie a weightiness that it wouldn't have with someone else as Tucker. 

Sissy Spacek, as the widow who befriends Tucker, is nearly as good. Their scenes together are easy and charming; they like each other because they make no demands on each other. She meets him for coffee now and then, and we're nearly as happy as he is when she arrives. Gradually, she fears he might be the crook he claims to be. After all, he keeps an old revolver in his car's glove compartment, and he almost convinces her to steal a bracelet from a shopping mall, just for laughs. Still, she continues to meet him for coffee and some light conversation. "I like that truck of yours," he says. "Me, too," she says. Watching Redford and Spacek work together, hearing their simple dialog, draws attention to the outright silliness of most other movies.

Writer-director David Lowery makes the best of this allegedly true story, moving it along at a leisurely pace, giving us just enough wide open Texas scenery. Though he can't produce a satisfactory ending, there are enough gems along the way that we'll forgive him. 

My favorite scene involved Casey Affleck as John Hunt, the cop on Tucker's trail. Tucker meets him, quite accidentally, in the men's room of a Texas diner. Tucker knows who he is. He taunts him a little, tells him to straighten his tie. Hunt  knows its Tucker. As Tucker teases him, Hunt can't help but smile at the old codger's audacity. It's as good a movie moment as we'll see this year.

HALLOWEEN (2018)...

The new Halloween doesn't know whether to pay homage to the original, or to be relevant to today. So it tries to do both. The result is a competent but uninspired movie that never quite finds its own groove.

The story of Michael Myers and his stalking of Laurie Strode was sly and primal back when John Carpenter first gave it to us in 1978. The new version, from David  Gordon Green, is like a big, dumb guy trying to recite poetry.

He may have meant well,  but horror isn't Green's metier. 

True, it can't be easy to handle a classic of the genre and put your own stamp on it, and Green isn't the first to fumble in such a situation. At times, his rendition of Halloween is actually watchable. Green has directed some fine movies and television shows in the past, and though that doesn't mean he's right for the job here, his talent and style occasionally shine through. And when Carpenter's original music kicks in, at once throbbing and sinister, one almost thinks a good movie has been made. It's the screenplay that bombs. 

Jamie Lee Curtis is back as Strode. Now she's haggard, nearing 60; she's never quite recovered from her first encounter with the masked Halloween killer. She drinks a lot and lives alone in a highly barricaded house with enough weapons to fill out a Clint Eastwood movie. She's Strode as imagined by third rate writers.

When Strode isn't fending off nosy podcasters who are obsessed with Myers, she's being belittled by her daughter and son-in-law, played by Judy Greer and Toby Huss. You may recall Greer as Kitty Sanchez in Arrested Development, and Huss from a bit part on Seinfeld. (He played 'The Wiz.') They badger her with dumb lines like, "You have to put it behind you, mom!" Of course, Strode can't forget Myers, especially when she learns that he's being relocated to another mental health facility. In another ho-hum move by the writing team, he's being relocated on Halloween night. Do you think he'll escape?

Curtis, along with Carpenter, served as a producer on the film, so she must have approved of these schlocky ideas. Perhaps she was blindsided by the movie's final image, that of mother, daughter, and granddaughter, exhausted and bloody after their climactic confrontation with Myers. Maybe it seemed like a symbol of women's empowerment, or the #metoo movement. But to modernize the Halloween concept didn't make the movie any more entertaining. It's all too lead-footed and predictable to be scary.

Curtis' performance is standard for a Halloween movie. She's content to let her grizzled appearance do the acting for her.  At one point she delivers a sky-shattering scream, which makes it seem  Laurie Strode has gone totally nuts. Too bad the movie doesn't continue in that vein. The best Gordon and co-writers Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley can do is turn Strode into an ass-kicking vigilante, an earth mamma with a gun collection.

As for Michael Myers (played by two actors, including Nick Castle, from the original), he's still big and mysterious; we still don't know what drives him. The movie makes no concessions to his age, either. We see that he has some white whiskers,  but this man who would be near 70 is still enormously powerful. Maybe evil keeps him young. He doesn't use his trusty knife as much, either. Now he likes to bash people's heads against walls. He steps on a guy's head, too. The contents shoot out like toothpaste from a tube. He even bashes Strode's head against a door about 20 times. I don't know how the old gal takes it.

Universal and Miramax spent a ton on advertising, and it's nice to have Jamie Lee Curtis back, so the movie will have a big opening weekend, I'm sure. But the audience I was with didn't seem especially moved by any of it. During the closing credits, they rose as one and shambled out of the darkness into the lobby. They will see better movies this season.

VENOM...

Surprise, surprise: I enjoyed Venom. 

It succeeds just on energy and its premise, even though it is in many ways a generic Marvel Comics film. 

It exceeds expectations thanks to director Ruben Fleischer's careening delivery. He's done a lot of TV work, but his most well-known feature is Zombieland, which mixed comedy with horror and action. He's been at it since 2001, but this is his best work. 

What prevents Venom from being truly remarkable, however, is what got it made in the first place: the Marvel Comics formula. As good as Venom is, it never transcends the predictable dialog, the ersatz science and social issues that creep into comics so young readers think they're reading something "adult," when the real selling point is basically muscle bound warriors trying to prevent a worldwide calamity,  stopping now and then to argue like sitcom characters.

Tom Hardy plays Eddie Brock, a good-hearted investigative reporter who zooms around San Francisco on a motorcycle. While doing a feature on Carlton Drake (Marvel villains always have names like Carlton Drake), an Elon Musk type who is conducting experiments that are supposed to help us with space travel, Brock comes in contact with a dangerous "parasite." The thing looks like a crawling pile of metal spaghetti.

Of course, I'm simplifying. Or am I? The key to Marvel movies is that they begin with a flurry of activity to make us think there's a lot going on, but presented so an eight year-old can understand it. Hell, it's a billion dollar format. Who can squawk? (Drake talks a bit about environmental problems, but with the money made by Marvel, the company could actually stop global warming, rather than make movies about it.)

As Brock, Hardy shambles around like he's been kicked in the groin. He mumbles a lot, too, and squints. Did Hardy study acting at the feet of Tony Danza? As his ex-girlfriend, Michelle Williams is all smiles and cute boots. As Drake, Riz Ahmed is suitably villainous, though all the performances here are about as subtle as kabuki theater.

Despite the predictable nature of what is basically just another Marvel tale, this movie kicks into an unexpected gear when the parasite merges with Brock and evolves into Venom, a giant blue creature who is as powerful as the Hulk, agile as Spiderman, and capable of a good one liner. He's also hungry. ("Eyes! Lungs! Pancreases! So many snacks! So little time!") Venom would be a monster in any other movie, but he likes Earth, and he likes Brock. When he realizes another monster from space is on the way to make things difficult, he enlists Brock to help him battle the fiend, a big nasty galoot known as "Riot." The showdown, which ultimately involves Brock and Drake, could be seen as symbol of  journalism versus a big corporation, but no one goes to a Marvel movie for such highfalutin concepts. They go for thrills.

There are some impressive high speed chases through the streets of San Francisco, lots of shattered glass and car crashes, and Venom throws people around like stuffed animals. In the Marvel Universe, no one bleeds. They just get thrown around. It's a child's fantasy of being able to throw someone over a building. Somehow, this imperfect mess of a movie is strangely satisfying.  

Here's why: Venom communicates with Brock in his mind. At one point, when Brock seems to be plummeting to his doom, Venom growls, "Don't be afraid. You cannot die." A wave of genuine relief seemed to sweep over the theater. Three rows behind me a little boy echoed, "He can't die!"

The Marvel fantasy has always been about skinny outcasts developing super powers. But the deal with Venom is slightly different. It's a buddy flick. "Where I'm from, I was kind of a loser," Venom says to Brock. "But here...with you...it's different."

If Hardy and Williams display little chemistry, that's ok. It's all saved for Hardy and this monster with the long tongue. They belong together. Here's a monster who befriends you, offers immortality, and all you have to do is save the planet once in a while. Not a bad arrangement, really.

As for that kid behind me, he erupted again later. His voice shaking with emotion, he yelled, "I love Venom!"

Me, too.

LOVE, GILDA...

Gilda Radner was a veritable bag of funny bones, able to capture the  slapstick genius of Lucille Ball, the hauteur of the seventies Studio 54 crowd, the  jauntiness of a Fellini clown, yet sturdy enough to go toe to toe with any of her Saturday Night co-stars, including such heavyweights as John Belushi and Bill Murray. We just assumed she was naturally funny and having a great time. But thinking this way negates whatever it is that drives someone into comedy; with Gilda there was no shortage of angst and inner turmoil.  Love, Gilda, currently in limited release,  reveals a bit of this woman's chaotic personal life.

Early on we learn that Gilda, "decided to be funny about what I didn't have." In this thoughtful documentary from CNN Films, directed by Lisa Dapolito from Radner's audio tapes, home movies, and diary entries, we find out that there was a lot she didn't have. A bright, chubby kid from a well-off Detroit family, Radner's life was turned upside down at 14 when her father died of a brain tumor. So shocking was her dad's death that Gilda felt she didn't grow emotionally beyond the age of 14. Yet, she was a contemplative woman, perhaps inspired by the mountains of self-help gaga being sold in her day. More recent SNL cast members (Amy Poehler, Bill Hader, Maya Rudolph) are shown reading aloud from Radner's diaries; much of it is cryptic, as if Gilda wrote in a shorthand meant only for herself. Still, the snippets reveal an intelligent, observant woman,  at once amused and disappointed by her surroundings. She suffered from a major eating disorder and depression, and questioned the usefulness of fame even as she craved it. 

In some ways, hers was the traditional showbiz tale, where a gangling girl achieves extraordinary success but never quite finds happiness. Lonely, perhaps in search of a father figure, she gravitated to the men she worked with, and since most were comic mad men like Murray and Dan Aykroyd, it was one romantic failure after another. That is, until she met  the gentler, more sophisticated Gene Wilder. Though she appeared in a few movies with Wilder, it appeared that Gilda, by then, was less concerned about performing. After five years of SNL, at a time when when the show was a cultural touchstone, anything else would be a letdown. "I could be happy working in a shoe store," she says after her SNL days, "making the customers laugh." She remained funny, even in her final years as she dealt with ovarian cancer. She died at 42.

Gilda Radner was mesmerizing on  SNL  because she was a throwback performer. While her co-stars were doing impressions of Nixon and  Kissinger, or making sly drug references, she was hurling herself into walls, wearing crazy wigs, and speaking in funny voices. Loose limbed and rubbery featured, she was an Al Hirschfeld caricature come to zany life. Along with this was a likability factor unmatched by any female SNL performer since.  She was also a bit raunchy, partial to what she called "gross pig humor." How could we not love her?  

Unfortunately, Dapolito handles her subject like a delicate flower. Though well-done, Love, Gilda feels like a typical release from CNN Films. We watch and think, Yes, Gilda was brilliant. Yes, she died young. And that's it. Dapolito should've taken a tip from Radner and gone for more laughs. She also makes a big mistake by not mentioning Radner's classic song, "Let's Talk Dirty To The Animals." Perhaps it was too crude, or would disrupt Dapolito's mission to show the sad face behind the clown makeup.

BOOKS: INSIDE THE COMBAT ZONE

LIVE NUDES! DANCING! IN THE FLESH! 

New book chronicles the neighborhood where a dude once flicked a burning cigarette into my face

by Don Stradley

 

If someone were to pay tribute to Boston's old Combat Zone by sculpting certain key faces on a mountainside, the Mount Rushmore of our 1970s "adult playground" would have to include Princess Cheyenne (the thinking man's stripper who danced to the music of Genesis and Cat Stevens); Wilbur Mills, the US Senator whose career was ruined by his untamed affection for stripper Fanne Foxe; Andrew Poupolo, the Harvard football player who was stabbed to death one night after a game; and of course, William Douglas and Robin Benedict, the Tufts professor and the hooker whose skull he crushed. Of course, dozens of others would think they belonged, including every pizza shop owner, prostitute, corrupt cop, pimp, transvestite, and city planner, and anyone else who ever urinated on the sidewalk at 3:00 AM back when the Zone was Boston's throbbing night spot. Inside The Combat Zone, Stephanie Schorow's feisty new book, gets 'em all, some fleetingly, some in detail; if the city never creates a monument for the desperate, colorful characters who populated the Zone, Schorow's book will do.

For a place the Boston Globe once labelled a "Coney Island for the emotionally scarred...the place for the emotionally and sexually deformed," many remember it fondly. Why not? There were rock 'n roll bands, and mobsters, and kids working their way through college as bartenders and strippers. (For students looking for a summer job, the Zone must've seemed like a depraved summer camp.) Still, this stripped down story of Boston's most notorious neighborhood isn't exactly a glowing advertisement. Schorow gives plenty of attention to the eccentric, glitzy atmosphere, and where there are strippers and alcohol there are usually some laughs, but she doesn't ignore the violence and drug abuse and the occasional mysterious death. Schorow's style is brisk but informative; she trims the fat, and though there was some mighty interesting fat in the Zone that might've given her another five chapters, she was probably smart to keep the book lean at 150 or so pages. Her writing, perhaps honed by her years with the Herald and The Associated Press, is tight as a rim shot behind a burlesque dancer.

The recurring theme is that the Zone was fine until you started thinking you could handle it. The Combat Zone didn't set out to destroy people, but when certain folks thought they had things under  control, whether they were smart-ass hookers or Ivy League stars who thought they were untouchable, the Zone had a way of swallowing them up and spitting them out. Then again, little old ladies who worked at nearby department stores often wandered into the Zone for a slice of pizza, unscathed, unbothered, for years. Inflatable love dolls staring out from porn shop windows didn't phase them a bit.(Where do the old ladies go now that the Zone has been replaced by sushi restaurants and high rise apartment complexes?)

Schorow has written many books about Boston history, and Inside The Combat Zone offers enough  interesting background to satisfy the most curious Boston buff. She describes the vanishing of old Scollay Square, where sailors on leave during WW2 liked to stop in for a drink and a brawl; how urban renewal caused changes in the city, and how the always changing pornography laws kept the x-rated movie houses hopping to stay ahead of the game. Other authors might've placed more focus on the Zone's unsavory side, or been more graphic about the murders and dead hookers, and I might've liked to know how AIDS and crack affected the Zone, but Schorow does things her way and keeps the nasty stuff on the fringes. She's at her best writing about the strippers, those strange creatures of fantasy who were, in actuality, just young creative women trying to make a living. And some, indeed, lived fabulously for a while. As one dancer recalls, "Looking back is like watching a movie, so many lives ago." The only thing Schorow didn't quite get was the actual smell of the Zone, that  pungent mix of disinfectant, marijuana smoke, open garbage dumpsters baking in the sun, and buckets of soapy water thrown on the walls of alleys to erase whatever god-awful shit had gone on the night before. There was also the unique scent of dirty bookstores, all rubber and plastic, where magazines were packaged in a kind of thick, odious shrink-wrap; when you walked out you feared the tell-tale scent of porn had gotten onto your clothes and could never be washed out.

MANDY...

Nicolas Cage has given up. That's how it seems in Mandy, a sluggish piece of artsy drivel that has him avenging the death of his beloved girlfriend  after she's killed by an evil cult leader. Cage, who has become known for his over the top performances, doesn't even seem to be having fun.

There's a scene at the end where Cage, covered in blood so all we can see are the whites of his eyes, grins insanely into the camera. It's as if he's saying, Look what happened to me. I was supposed to be the great actor of my generation, not Sean Penn or Daniel Day-Lewis. But here I am in this piece of crap...

Gushers of blood spewing from mouths, giant phallic symbols used as weapons, a chainsaw fight, and several scenes of cartoonish violence, all contribute to this mindless dreck.

Viewers know they're in trouble early when Cage has a scene with his beloved Mandy (Andrea Riseborough). They're lying together after, we assume, a bit of the old in and out. "What's your favorite planet?" he asks. She tells him Jupiter, and explains that the storms on the planet's surface could swallow up Earth. "That's wild," Cage says. And they gaze into each other's eyes, as if their love connection is unbreakable. Ugh.

The watered down Death Wish plot has the idyllic couple - they live together in a mansion in the woods (Did they build it? Are they squatters?) - being ambushed and taken away by a religious sect. The Charles Mansonish leader, an androgynous rock star wannabe named Jeremiah (Linus Roache), wants Mandy for his own puzzling needs. He even conjures a trio of demons to help with the abduction.

Of course, the idea of a religious cult being able to whip up demons has potential, and the demons are plenty hideous - one of them has a penis that turns into a big sword - but in this movie the demons aren't especially effective. And neither, apparently, is Jeremiah. When he can't get aroused during some weird sex ritual, Mandy crosses a line by laughing at him. The lesson we learn here is to never mock a cult leader. Jeremiah responds by burning her alive in front of Cage.

Tied up in barbed wire - A Christlike image, I suppose - Cage manages to escape and hunt down the cult members. To carry out the mission, he arms himself with a high powered bow and arrow, and forges a giant battle ax that looks like the grill off an old Chevy.

A gun might have been better, and certainly lighter to carry, but writer/director Panos Cosmatos obviously wanted to set Cage loose like a Norse berserker.

The movie is visually daring  - Cosmatos and cinematographer Benjamin Loeb have created something that looks like an old issue of Heavy Metal come to life, with nods to fantasy artists  like Frank Frazetta and Boris Vellejo - but Cosmatos' is clueless about action and narrative; he slows everything down to a crawl. The film's stupor is not helped by the hammering dirges of King Crimson on the soundtrack. Cosmatos may think he's putting viewers into a sort of drug haze, but the effect is more like a long, uncomfortable nap.

Cage, looking burly and grizzled, isn't allowed to act much here. He does a lot of grunting and sneering, though he does have a remarkable scene where he downs a bottle of vodka and wails in sadness at the loss of his love. It looks silly at first - he's in his underwear - but partway through he seems to  tap into something primal; the grief is, for a moment, painfully real. Unfortunately, we never cared much about Mandy, so we're not feeling anything. She was just some dippy woman in a Black Sabbath T-shirt.

On a side note, Mandy is set in 1983. What was Cage doing that year? He was appearing in Valley Girl as an ersatz punk rocker. That was a charming movie. Remember it? Now we get Mandy, a silly thing.

BOOKS: THE OUTSIDER (by Stephen King)

Suffer The Little Children

The Master of Horror Mails Another One In

 By Don Stradley

Stephen King is still at it - his latest horror opus is a 560 pager with references to psychic vampires, Bram Stoker, body snatchers, shape shifters, Edgar Allen Poe, and Mexican superstitions,  not to mention the every day horrors of skin cancer, snake bites, suicide, and the American legal system - but he's lost a bit off his fastball. This isn't a knock on him; like a veteran pitcher, he can still take the mound and get guys out with nothing but junk pitches and guile. In this case, he sets up a plot where a beloved little league coach is arrested for killing and defiling a child, even though there are plenty of witnesses that saw him miles away at the time of the boy's murder. Hell, he's even caught on film at a teacher's conference. Yet, the coach's fingerprints and DNA are all over the murder scene. How could this fellow be in two places at once? That's the premise of The Outsider, a dirge-like police procedural with a few supernatural flourishes. It's not terrible, but King's intriguing set up dissolves into a routine rehash of his favorite tropes; it's old hat. It marches slowly to a dreary, predictable climax. 

Late in The Outsider, we're told: "Reality is thin ice, but most people skate on it their whole lives and never fall through until the very end." In this novel, which seems written with a mini-series in mind, such bromides are dropped by characters with grating  regularity. It's a strange world, we're told over and over again, with all kinds of weird stuff in it. Every character we meet seems to have an eerie story from the past, some unexplained event that still gives them the heebie jeebies. If not, they've seen a weird movie or read a weird story. And of course, there are the skeptics who don't believe such nonsense. Gradually, the non-believers are convinced, and off everyone goes to kill the monster. This is only after a few hundred pages of conversations about DNA samples. King works hard to get his details right, but much of The Outsider reads like a dummy's guide to forensics.

In many ways,  it's the same story King has been writing since The Stand and Salem's Lot and It. There's a creepy villain who does some terrible things, and a bunch of good citizens rally together to track him down. This time, the menace is an otherworldly bogie who can turn itself into anyone, provided it makes some physical contact and draws some blood. He, or it, is a nasty thing, feeding off of pain and sadness, hiding out in caves while it morphs into its next identity. It can project itself into your dreams, or get into your mind, a bit like Freddy Krueger without the lame jokes. He enlists a seedy detective named Jack Hoskins to do his grunt work while he hibernates;  Hoskins is a reasonable version of Renfield doing the bidding of this third rate Dracula wannabe, but it's not enough. The novel is short on chills and long on bum dialog.

King brings back Holly Gibney, a character from his recent novels. She's his Miss Marple, a spinsterish solver of mysteries. Middle-aged, prim, highly medicated, occasionally depressed, Holly appears halfway into the book to assist the band of merry men on the hunt for this evil creature who kills children. She's not King's greatest creation, but her appearance in The Outsider draws attention to the blandness of the other characters. The various Howies and Ralphies who populate the story are interchangeable and forgettable; Holly, at least, has some memorable quirks, whether it's her love of old movies, her loyalty to Walmart, or the way she can make a blackjack out of a sweat sock. From King, one expected more out of these characters and their dark adversary. The good guys sleepily go about their business of finding this demon, and when he's found, he barely puts up a fight. Holly squares off with him at the climax. Yes, scrawny little Holly. It's enough to make you wonder why  King is so smitten with this woman. Is it her underdog quality? Is it her stunted personality? Regardless, not even she can redeem this tired, plodding novel, of which the best writing is reserved for a quick description of one character's sciatic pain, how "it cinched her like a thorny manacle." This bit, which lasts only a few paragraphs, and the poor woman's inability to sleep, was a lot scarier than the stupid spook in the cave. 

TERRIFIER...

With Halloween upon us, you owe it to yourself to meet Art the Clown.

As far as murderous clowns go, Art is sui generis. In Terrifier, the most recent bloodbath from director Damien Leone, Art is on a rampage that rivals his feature debut in All Hallows' Eve (2013). 

Here, Art slashes, chokes, and shoots his way across the splatterzone. He cuts off heads and sets them on fire; he slits a woman in half; he wallows in blood in ways we haven't seen since Herschell Gordon Lewis' Wizard of Gore. 

Yeah, he's a jerk.

Still, his utter remorselessness is what makes him so fascinating. Few maniacs have had so much fun while stomping a victim's face in.

Terrifier, in fact, could've been called Art The Clown Having a Good Time. 

This time, Art wanders into a pizza joint where he sees a couple of young ladies coming home from a costume party. One makes the mistake of taking a selfie with him. She winds up in his warehouse, hanging by the ankles.

The plot? There's not much of one. It's basically about people coming into Art's radar and being destroyed, defiled, and demolished.

Even a seasoned horror buff like me flinches at some of the violence here. But why? Is it because we don't think Art can possibly top himself, and then he does?

It's not that the gore is realistic. At one point Art decapitates a fellow and kicks his head across the floor; the head sounds hollow, like a volleyball. This, perhaps, is the secret to Leone's success. Other directors work hard to capture reality; he makes a case for obvious fakery. I think of the Grand Guignol in Paris during the 1800s. Audiences knew what they were seeing wasn't real, yet they kept that place in business for years.

In Art the Clown, Leone has created an entity of pure meanness. I think the fake heads and unreal blood are acceptable because Art's meanness is so tangible.

What I like best about Art the Clown is that he just merrily trots from one murder to the next. Other filmmakers might try to  give him a backstory, but frankly, I'm tired of hearing how sharks are angry because of global warming, or how the aliens want our DNA because our species might die out. All filmmakers can learn from Leone; just get to the good stuff and let 'er rip. 

Sadly, Leone is less assured when working with conventional plots and dialog. His recent Frankenstein Vs The Mummy was a talky dirge that was overlong by 20 minutes. He's better off in the smash and grab style of his Art the Clown movies. He directs these the way an evil six year-old might direct a film, one horrific tableau after another. 

Beyond the sickening violence, Terrifier benefits from the cinematography of George Steuber, a regular Leone collaborator who gives this movie the sheen of an old amusement park postcard, mingled with a 1970s Italian horror flick. For a movie that looks like it was shot in a bus station toilet, it's surprisingly artful. At times Leone frames Art so lovingly and carefully, you'd think he was Josef von Sternberg working with Marlene Dietrich.

At the center of this grim cartoon is  David Howard Thornton as the clown. He's the second actor to play Art (the character was first played by Mike Gianelli) and he's fine at portraying the clown's  goofy, masturbatory glee. 

Leone also toys with our expectations. At one point a woman caresses the clown's face and says, "Have you never felt a mother's love?" Art begins sucking his thumb and curls into a fetal position. Then he scalps her. With that, Leone gives us a tremendous treat; we are relieved to see Art show vulnerability, and then doubly relieved to see that he's still a monster. 

Leone's movies tend to appear at horror film festivals, and then go straight to DVD. The unbridled sadism is probably too much for mainstream distributors,  which is a shame. Leone has a fine director's eye and he can ratchet up the madness as few directors can.

Still, I don't know how much more Leone can do with Art the Clown. Maybe, after two movies, the character is used up. If so, that's fine. I loved this guy from the moment I saw him. I loved his jaunty little hat, his enormous clown shoes, and his nasty black lips. Mostly, I loved his ruthlessness. With Art, there's  no clowning around.

THE PREDATOR...

At its best, The Predator recalls some of the great sci-fi adventure films of the past.

At its worst, it's just a loud, clunky piece of modern filmmaking, loaded with dumb jokes, dizzying cliffhangers, and mile-high explosions.

This is the sixth entry of a series that began in 1987, and since none of the first five were memorable, this one had  a good chance to stand out. I'm not sure if it's better than the others, but it feels slick and potent; Twentieth Century Fox pounded it down our throats with advertising, so the company obviously hopes to reignite a franchise that never meant much in the first place.

What the series has in its favor is a cool looking monster, a strutting space warrior with a nasty attitude. Yes, his helmet looks like an inverted bedpan, but he's a  tough critter. Sadly, he has to share the screen with a lot of lame humans. 

Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook) is a military assassin who encounters a predator during a  maneuver in Mexico. He's promptly sent to a psyche ward (but not before stripping a dead alien's armor off and mailing it home). On the bus to the clinic, he meets a bunch of lovable losers (known as "The Loonies") who will assist him in fending off another round of predators from space. Conveniently, all of the loonies had backgrounds as weapons experts and chopper pilots.

McKenna's son, however, (Jacob Tremblay) inadvertently receives the predator's armor in the mail and turns it into an ersatz Halloween costume. He's a shy little kid, not only autistic but also a genius on many levels. He's the proverbial magic child often found in these movies, and you just know he'll figure deeply in the story.

Soon, another predator is on our planet searching for the first one. Not only is he bigger,  meaner, and uglier than previous predators, but he brought a couple of "space dogs" with him. They look like giant bull mastiffs if designed by H.R. Giger. 

Eventually, the movie is awash with predators, snipers, space dogs, loonies, scientists, and two-faced government agents. The action is bloody, and blindingly fast, but lacks wit and imagination. Men are sliced in half as casually as being punched in the face.

Midway through The Predator  we realize all of the characters have been introduced, the plot has been laid out, and that it's not going to get any better. Your choice is to either walk out, or hang in there and enjoy the noise and spectacle. Maybe you'll like Tom Jane as the loony with Tourettes; he twitches and says a lot of dirty words.

Or you can wait for the Predator. He's not hidden away; he's in many scenes, and at one point he even speaks. It turns out he's collecting human DNA  because he wants to create some kind of predator-human hybrid. There's some babbling about the human race coming to an end because of global warming, but I can't imagine the predators being improved with our puny DNA in their systems.

All I can figure is writer/director Shane Black likes those alien conspiracy programs on the History channel. 

Black acted in the first Predator  31 years ago. He went on to write several successful screenplays, including the first two Lethal Weapon movies. He specializes in a kind of goofy action slapstick that doesn't really fit in a space adventure. It's like smearing relish on a banana split.

Oddly enough, the first half of the movie was surprisingly entertaining. There were visual nods to some great old movies of the 1950s - This Island Earth, Forbidden Planet, and even The Thing - that made me think The Predator might actually succeed. The space ships were lithe and menacing, the crash landings were exciting, and the cinematography by Larry Fong was pristine.Weapons glistened; intestines oozed; the space creatures were breathtaking.

Then it morphed into a generic modern movie where problems are resolved by kickboxing and blowing things up. Even Olivia Munn, who appears as a scientist, becomes an action hero of sorts, leaping around and brawling like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible.

We can almost imagine the pitch meeting, with Black telling the Fox executives, "It will be like One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest meets Predator." The execs, after googling One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, gave him the green light, as long as the second half featured a lot of fireballs and exploding nonsense.