Questions About Grindhouse, Flying Pancakes and More!

• Apr 18, 2007 08:35 PM ET
• by Maitland McDonagh

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Question: Grindhouse did horribly at the box office - it made a mere $11 million. Any idea why it did so poorly when it opened to mostly positive reviews? - Michael

PS.: I love you and the gang on the podcast, I have recently been getting into exercising and am listening to every episode you have ever recorded... very fun!

FlickChick: Thank you, Michael. As to Grindhouse, there's a very real irony in the fact that back in the day, real grindhouse movies made money despite negative reviews (or, more often, no reviews at all in the mainstream press), while Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's loving homage got terrific reviews and did poorly.

I can think of a number of explanations: I suspect some people were put off by the three-hour length of Death Proof/ Planet Terror plus trailers. I think Rodriguez and Tarantino may have overestimated the number of moviegoers who share their enthusiasm for the down-and-dirty horror/sci-fi/road-rage movies of the 1970s, and have forgotten that you have to be in your forties to be nostalgic for them. That means that a lot of the core moviegoing audience is too young.

I think putting Death Proof second may have been a miscalculation, because it's my impression that there are far more hard-core Tarantino fans than there are Rodriguez fans. All that said, I'm betting Grindhouse will do bang-up business on DVD. The length won't be an issue on DVD - in fact, it could easily be longer - and people will be able to get together and make watching it a social event. After all, DVD is where everyone under the age of 40 discovered grindhouse movies in the first place.

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Question: I remember seeing a movie in the 1970s about a creature under the sand that sucked up its victims from underneath. Was it the movie called Blood Beach? - Rani

FlickChick: Yes, it was. And speaking of grindhouses, I have fond memories of seeing Blood Beach - which was actually released in 1981 - from the balcony of the gloriously rundown New Amsterdam on bad old 42nd Street. The theater, which was built to house Florenz Ziegfield's famous follies (in the '70s and '80s you could still see his initials woven into the filthy carpeting, assuming you dared put your face that close), and has since been restored and is home to Disney's The Lion King. But Blood Beach is as sleazy, cheesy and just plain dumb as ever.

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Question: As I child, I remember going to an independent movie theater in the early- to mid-1980s. I am trying to find the name of the movie I saw, but all I remember is a scene with flying blueberry pancakes. Am I crazy? - Elana

FlickChick: You don't sound crazy, so I'm going to proceed from the assumption that you're recalling, however dimly, a scene from a real movie. That said, the best idea I have is that you may have seen a sorry little sci-fi/horror picture called Without Warning (1980). In it, alien sportmen hunt human game, their weapon of choice something that has variously been called a flying pancake, a fanged flapjack or a lethal Frisbee. The movie's claims to fame are that it marked the career nadir of such Hollywood golden-agers as Jack Palance, Martin Landau, Neville Brand, Cameron Mitchell and Ralph Meeker, was the movie debut of a young David Caruso, and appears to have inspired Predator (1987).

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Question: Do you think there will be a second part to The Descent? I thought it was great and it makes sense that another group of women could go looking for the original ones and find out what's in the cave and what happened to their predecessors. I would love to see a Part 2. - Jeffrey

FlickChick: Although no Descent (2005) sequel has been officially announced, some recent interviews with U.K. writer-director Neil Marshall suggest that you may get your wish. Though Marshall has no plans to write or direct a second Descent movie, he did have some idea about what could be done, and he put an unidentified screenwriting team to work fleshing out his plans. The only thing he's said about the plot is that he doesn't want it to be a rehash of the first but with different women. He told BloodyDisgusting.com that "based on the reaction of people we struck a nerve with the claustrophobia scene. A lot of people say that scene is the one that stuck [with them]. The monsters they can deal with. And a bit of the claustrophobia they can deal with. But the combination is definitely something we want to incorporate into the sequel, by putting the monster and the girls in a really tight spot." Just by the way, Marshall was also talking about a sequel to his first film, the werewolf picture Dog Soldiers (2002), even before The Descent opened. It even has a title - Dog Soldiers: Fresh Meat.

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Question: I know for a fact that there is a movie called The Electric Grandmother. It's about this family of three kids who, I think, have lost their mother; a box comes out of this helicopter and when they open it up there's a robot grandmother who spurts milk out of her fingers and does a bunch of other crazy things. I haven't been able to find any proof that this movie actually exists. Please tell me it does, and that I'm not making these crazy stories up! - Ellen

FlickChick: The Emmy-nominated, made-for-TV movie The Electric Grandmother absolutely exists: The trouble is that it's long out of print on tape and has never been unavailable on DVD. It's based on the Ray Bradbury story "I Sing the Body Electric" and stars the late, great Maureen Stapleton as the robo-granny. VHS tapes of the film occasionally show up on eBay, but you're far from the only person with vivid memories of it, so be prepared to bid aggressively.

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Question: Who is the African-American female singer in Kiss Me Deadly? - Jo

FlickChick: Her name was Madi (or Mattie or Mady) Comfort, and she was a professional nightclub singer who performed with Duke Ellington's band in the early 1950s; he apparently wrote "Satin Doll" (with Billy Strayhorn and Johnny Mercer) for her in 1956. Comfort was married to bass player Joe Comfort, who worked with such well-known musicians as Lionel Hampton and Nat Cole, and did studio work on a number of Frank Sinatra records produced by Nelson Riddle. As far as I can tell, Kiss Me Deadly (1955) was Madi Comfort's only movie credit - the number she sings is "I'd Rather Have the Blues." Nat King Cole's version of the same song is heard in the film's opening sequence. She died in Whittier, California, in 2003 at the age of 79. The only other information I've been able to uncover about Comfort is that she has been linked to the Black Dahlia murder case via George Hodel, a Los Angeles-based doctor who was considered a suspect and whom Comfort is said to have known. Hodel's son, Steve Hodel, wrote a book called Black Dahlia Avenger in which he argues that his father was indeed the killer of Hollywood-fringe figure Elizabeth Short, and maintains an extensive website about the case. That's where I found the references to Comfort's interviews in connection with the case.

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