Brian De Palma is a talented director, but he’s not too good about concealing his idea thefts. While some directors make it so you don’t even notice an homage (or plagiarism, depending on how you see it) until they mention it in an interview or a commentary track, some of De Palma’s movies feel like he literally grabbed a couple of his favorite movies, took DNA samples, and created cloned offspring. They are different from the parents, but not so different that you can’t see the eerie similarities. Ironically, my favorite De Palma film of the ten I’ve seen is BLOW OUT, his merging of elements from Coppola’s THE CONVERSATION and Antonioni’s BLOWUP but despite its lineage as a copycat film, it’s a really good thriller that stands up on its own.

BLOW OUT stars John Travolta on the cusp of the career abyss he would sink into for over a decade. There is something sad and almost anticipatory about his performance here, like he can sense the end coming, that is absolutely perfect for the role. He plays Jack Terry, a sound man working for a low-budget horror studio in Philadelphia. Recording some natural sound late at night in a park, he captures a car crash (the tire blows out, hence the title). When the car plunges off a bridge into a lake, Jack dives in and rescues the one survivor, a woman named Sally (Nancy Allen). Later, at the hospital, Jack learns that the deceased driver of the car was a prominent politician running for United States President. Listening to the tape, Jack becomes convinced that the crash was no accident, that the tire hadn’t blown out, it had been shot out. No one, not even Sally, who was in the car, wants to believe him. Meanwhile, a man dressed in a phone company uniform (a very creepy John Lithgow) is tailing Jack and killing women who look an awful lot like Sally.

While BLOWUP and THE CONVERSATION are arty, cinematic exercises, BLOW OUT is a straight forward thriller. And I’m perfectly fine with that. THE CONVERSATION I dig, but I’ve never been a huge fan of BLOWUP. I’m a little too concrete a thinker for that movie, and I am a big fan of the theory I read in a book called Easy Riders, Raging Bulls that suggests that BLOWUP was only a success in America because of its ultra-explicit (for its day) sex scenes. Without those “beaver shots” as the book put it, no one would have gone. It’s debatable, but it’s a fun theory. BLOW OUT on the other hand is a bit on my level (it has a significant amount of nudity too, if such things interest you, but not as much as some of De Palma’s others).

Some of De Palma’s borrowing does have an advantage. He loves PSYCHO’s shower scene, and while that does mean you can count on just about all of his movies to feature a shower scene, it more importantly means his characters are always in jeopardy. In his best movies you never know who is gonna get killed and when, and he loves the twist ironic death; just when you think someone’s escaped, they get killed anyway. This makes his best movies, including BLOW OUT, extremely suspenseful; while we generally think the leads are pretty safe in a thriller, that’s not the case with De Palma. Add the fear factor to a genuinely smart script that milks the soundman premise for all its worth (the chase in 30th Street Station where Jack follows Sally by listening to a wire is so cool) and is so invested in its characters that it takes the time to explain why Jack is so obsessed with this case. It may be the work of a knockoff artist, but it’s the work of a talented, top-of-his-game knockoff artist.

IF YOU LIKED BLOW OUT, CHECK OUT: DRESSED TO KILL (1980), De Palma ripping off PSYCHO and lots of others, in a creepy slasher film starring Michael Caine and Angie Dickinson.

THE BAD

The tagline to the 1970 disaster MYRA BRECKINRIDGE was “Everything you’ve heard about MYRA BRECKINRIDGE is true!” At this point MYRA is long forgotten, replaced in the pages of Hollywood history by even bigger critical and commercial flops like ISHTAR, WATERWORLD, and, most recently, GIGLI. So unless you were around in 1970, you likely haven’t heard anything about MYRA BRECKINRIDGE. Nevertheless, all of these things about the film are true:

-It is boring.

-Adapted from the controversial novel by Gore Vidal, MYRA was made by 20th Century Fox. According to an executive there at the time, it nearly destroyed the studio.

-In a scene in which a man is castrated by John Carradine, there is a woman in the background, lazily flicking a whip back and forth across the floor for no reason.

-On the documentary included on the new DVD of MYRA BRECKINRIDGE, director Michael Sarne confesses that he did not want to make the film, but was desperately poor and needed the money. At least he is honest about his motives.

-Raquel Welch plays Myra, a transsexual who goes to Hollywood to try to take over her uncle’s acting school. Raquel Welch is by far the hottest transsexual I have ever seen. And you wouldn’t know it from looking at me, but I have seen a hell of a lot of transsexuals in my day.

-It is exceedingly boring.

-Mae West, retired from films for over twenty years (she had never acted in a color before), returned to star in MYRA. Though almost 80 years old, she plays a sex-crazed agent who sleeps with all her clients and tosses off one-liners in the classic Mae West fashion. My favorite (the only entertaining moment in the movie, really) comes after she asks prospective client how tall he is and he responds six foot seven inches. She says “Hmmm...forget the six feet and let’s talk about the seven inches.”

-The cast also includes famous director John Huston, a young Tom Selleck, and a young Farrah Fawcett. Selleck and Fawcett could at least chalk the experience up to youthful indiscretion.

-I’d say MYRA BRECKINRIDGE is a trainwreck, but trainwrecks are compelling; you can’t take your eyes off a trainwreck. It’s more like a model trainwreck, interesting only to the people who own the train set.

-There was a lot of drug use on the set. This may explain the fact that the movie has the narrative logic of a psychotic episode.

-Film critic Rex Reed plays the pre-op Myron, who follows Myra around the movie like a ghost. MYRA may be the first movie that makes the a protagonist’s untimely fate - being run over by a car driven by a figment of his/her imagination - more appealing an alternative than watching the movie for another second.

-Here’s a quote about Reed’s performance in MYRA BRECKINRIDGE from a hero of mine, Steve Puchalski, creator of Slimetime and Shock Cinema magazines: “Just when you figured Rex Reed had disappeared from the film for good, he starts popping up as Myra’s ever-present, invisible alter-ego - until you get so sick of his fat, pasty face that you wanna stick his dick into the blades of an electric fan.” Ouch.

-Like many bad movies, it does not end. It merely stops. The ending, though ambiguous, potentially suggests that the proceeding film was all a figment of one character’s imagination. It is my solemn wish that indeed the entire film was a figment of my imagination, that way no one else would ever have to suffer through it. But alas, it is very real, and it is very bad.

INSTEAD OF MYRA BRECKINRIDGE, CHECK OUT: GLEN OR GLENDA (1953), Edward D. Wood Jr.’s infamous first feature, about transvestites and transsexuals. It’s worst than MYRA BRECKINRIDGE in the way that few movies could be, but it’s more compelling in its badness.

THE UGLY

DIE! DIE! MY DARLING! is a psychological thriller starring Tallulah Bankhead as a crazy old woman who locks the sexy Stefanie Powers in her house, and it very likely owes its existence to the film WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?, which took aging movie queens Bette Davis and Joan Crawford and threw them into a horror movie together that made a lot of money. Movies like Hammer Films’ DIE! DIE! repackaged the idea again. As a thriller, DIE! DIE! doesn’t have a whole lot going for it, it’s fairly predictable once you know the premise, and director Silvio Narizzano loves to rip off key moments from PSYCHO.

But DIE! DIE! MY DARLING! - an outstanding title, I hasten to mention - has a secret weapon in the over-the-top outrageous Bankhead. Speaking in a bitter rasp, she hisses at her enemies and utterly embodies the fanatic her character is intended to be. I don’t doubt that her Mrs. Trefoile is insane, no I’m afraid she’s so convincing I fear for the sanity of Ms. Bankhead herself. She’s a little too good playing this crazy. Watch her lower lip in this movie, it twitches and flutters in nearly every close-up as if her whole face could break off of her body at any moment. At one point she howls like some sort of deranged, malnourished cat. She makes Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford in MOMMIE DEAREST look like June Cleaver.

Powers’ Patricia is preparing to marry her boyfriend Alan (Maurice Kaufmann), but first she agrees to visit Mrs. Trefoile, the mother of her deceased fiancee Steven. Patricia intends her visit to be a brief formality but Mrs. Trefoile has other plans. She insists Patricia stay over for the night and pray with her the following morning. Mrs. Trefoile, it is worth noting, is a devoutly religious woman who likes to lead her servants in three hour prayer services before chowing down on nourishing meals of bland mush. No condiments or meats in her house, they’re the food of the devil, you see. She also refuses to allow mirrors in her house, because they breed vanity and sensuality and force contemplation of our “vile bodies.” I’m happy to report Stefanie Powers has quite the vile body.

Patricia tries to give the whole situation the stiff upper lip, but Mrs. Trefoile quickly becomes unbearable. She has her maid stab Patricia with scissors when she wears a red garment to church - the color of the devil, you see - so you can probably guess how she reacts to the news that Patricia isn’t a virgin. When Mrs. Trefoile locks Patricia in her attic and refuses to let her leave until she repents her sins, it’s pretty clear their relationship is going through a rough patch.

It will come as no surprise to those of you paying attention that Mrs. Trefoile is a hypocrite, with a stash of booze in her closet right beside her secret mirror and lipstick. In a great scene, she smears the lipstick all over herself land talks to her dead son, asking him what she should do. I’m guessing if he were there, he’d yell “Pull yourself together Mom! Look at yourself! You look like you’ve been making out with Bozo the Clown after a bender.”

DIE! DIE! MY DARLING! is not a disaster; there are even a few scenes between Bankhead and Powers that work quite nicely as battle of wills (the film would make a field day for a feminist film theorist). But the movie is more than a little silly. I haven’t even mentioned a very young Donald Sutherland playing an idiot groundskeeper, wandering around the movie in a confused stupor, fascinated by postcards and gardening shears. Befitting a movie with three exclamation points in its title, it is way - way - over the top. Right where I like my movies starring shriveled old movie stars as religious zealots in dire need of an Extreme Makeover.

IF YOU LIKED DIE! DIE! MY DARLING! CHECK OUT: MISERY (1990), because one can never get enough of crazies chaining people up and forcing them to do their bidding.