Weekend of Clunkers

Despite no longer being part of the world of full-time work, I still seem to do most of my film watching at weekends.  Which means that I usually have to choose my viewing matter carefully, as I don't want to risk wasting my watching hours on absolute clunkers.  Sometimes, however, I get it badly wrong.  This past weekend, for instance, two thirds of my viewing experience was disappointing, t put it mildly.  The fault was entirely mine - poor time management with regard to other activities meant that I just couldn't schedule my first choices, so I was left trawling through various low-rent streaming services looking for alternatives.  To be fair, one such choice, William Lustig's Vigilante (1982) - which I'd been meaning to watch for a while, anyway - turned up trumps.  The others - a poorly dubbed and edited Kung Fu film and a Canadian obscurity - turned out to be pretty much the dregs.  With regard to the former, I should have learned my lesson years ago that most Hong Kong martial arts films are pretty ropey, even without the bad English dubbing and choppy editing in their export versions.  They're turned out cheaply and without much care - 18 Bronze Girls of Shaolin (1983) was no exception, with a confusing story that made no sense whatsoever and poor production values.  The Canadian film Title Shot (1979) looked more promising, even boasting a Hollywood A-lister in Tony Curtis, (albeit well past his prime, but nonetheless a genuine star).  But it quickly became clear that Title Shot was actually something of a vanity project on the part of Richard Gabourie.  Who?  I hear you ask.  Well, he was a Canadian actor who decided that only way he was going to get a leading role in a Canadian film was if he wrote it himself.  The result was Three Card Monte (1978), which garnered some critical acclaim and won Gabourie a couple of awards, but did little at the box office.

Title Shot was his follow-up. Clearly deciding that the way to get popular success was to make a genre film, this time around Gabourie wrote himself a crime thriller, with himself in the lead as a troubled cop who finds himself caught up in a gambling conspiracy.  The problem is that Gabourie simply wasn't a compelling enough actor to play this sort of lead - his screen presence is limited and his characterisation one-note.  Curtis' presence in the film provides a harsh contrast: even when dealing with material as weak and inferior as Title Shot's script, he is fascinating to watch, dominating his scenes.  Said script so poor that the film becomes so confusing as to be incomprehensible, with sub-plots seemingly forgotten about half way through and a main narrative so tangled that it becomes impossible to follow, unable to hold the viewer's attention.  As far as I could make out, it involved Tony Curtis' character somehow trying to play the odds on boxing matches with the aid of computer analysis, before resorting to plotting to assassinate the heavyweight champion during a match.  (Presumably the idea being that the other boxer - in whom Curtis had a financial interest - would then be named champion by default).  Despite seemingly interminable scenes of exposition, none of these plot points ever seem to be properly explained.  The film can't even provide a proper climax - while the assassination is foiled, Curtis doesn't seem to be brought to justice, his character seemingly having been forgotten about.  It didn't help that the whole thing looked incredibly scuzzy, although, to be fair, the version I saw did look as if it might have been a tenth generation VHS copy.  On the plus side, underneath the scuzziness, the film does have quite a gritty feel, mostly shot on some wintry looking (and feeling) Toronto locations, but ultimately that wasn't enough to compensate for a poor script and weak central performance.  Still, it does feature Michael Wincott's first film appearance, as a robber, so that's something in its favour, I suppose.