Really Awful Movies

When a medical simulation dummy becomes a surrogate father figure (wait, what?)…well, let’s just say you’re in for some serious weirdness. Pin, aka, Pin: A Plastic Nightmare is one of the more underrated (and as is often the case, under-seen) horrors from the 1980s, an era dominated by oblivious campers, clandestine romps, and masked assailants (not that there’s anything wrong with that. Slashers can be beautiful).

Pin is such a marked departure from…pretty much everything, that it is much-see material regardless of epoch. It’s even a kind of spiritual cousin to Cronenberg’s early tax shelter films (and like Rabid, Pin was filmed in Montreal).

And similar to Burnt Offerings or The Sentinel, director Sandor Stern lures viewers into Pin’s world through a gable window as neighborhood kids speculate as to who/what it is that’s gazing down on them from above.

Creepy stuff out of the gate.

Creepier still, taskmaster doc, Linden, teaches his two kids Ursula and Leon about the birds and the bees, through the eponymous mannequin (“Pin,” short form of Pinocchio) and hair-raising ventriloquism. But this is a film that both throws voices, and viewers for a loop, as when Linden and the kids’ mother is claimed in a car accident, fatherly duties go to the man made of plastic.

Like other films of the era, there’s childhood trauma involving sex. In this case, it’s Leon witnessing one of his father’s nurses, getting it on with the singular expression mannequin in his pops’ office. When his younger sister comes of age sexually, a mentally deteriorating Leon controls her “needs” to the best of his abilities, solo and through Pin.

Some reviewers have pointed out the near-inevitable similarities to Psycho; however the Freudian subtext is anted up in Pin.

And speaking of psychology, a New York Times reviewer pointed out, “Although the viewer can never be fully sure, it seems as though his blank, receptive facial expression is even capable of slight changes…” It’s almost like the “auto-kinetic effect” in visual perception studies, whereby viewers in a totally dark room, perceive a stationary dot on the wall, as moving. In the case of Pin, the brain “fills in” what would normally be a face with all its human expression.

*** 1/2 (out of 5)

[Check out our podcast discussion of Pin on the Really Awful Movies Podcast!]

“…Silver wings upon their chest
These are men, America’s best
One hundred men will test today
But only three win the Green Beret…”

First Blood. Because the movie’s title is said in dialogue and Stallone drops choice ass-whoopings on a bunch of arrogant townie cops who don’t know who they’re dealing with…

What more do you need in a movie? The answer is unequivocally nothing, but there’s a bonus of scene-stealers Brian Dennehy and Richard Crenna as a belligerent sheriff and silver-smooth Colonel Trautman respectively, adding class and gravitas to a movie that probably deserves neither.

When you think about was considered to play John J Rambo, it makes you woozy, a who’s who of Hollywood machismo, who announce themselves by their surnames: Pacino, Eastwood, De Niro, Newman, McQueen, Nolte, Garner…

Ultimately, Sly came in, did a script re-write and the rest machine-gunned its way into the national consciousness, a $125 million dollar worldwide success.

“Drifter” Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) ambles into a hick town in the Pacific Northwest, and is immediately hounded by Sheriff Teasle (Dennehy). He’s taken downtown (or whatever the equivalent is in this one-stoplight burb) on trumped up charges, and while being processed, has flashbacks to his stint in a Vietnam jail. Rambo cannot be held by mere mortals, and beats the holy tar out of the entire precinct, before fleeing, commandeering a motorcycle, and hightailing it into the woods. Call in the National Guard. No really.

There are quite a few deviations from the 1972 source novel by David Morrell:

1. Rambo (no middle “J” initial like la Homer J Simpson) is more of a Born on the Fourth of the July hippie than the comparatively “kempt” (if that’s a word), Sly Stallone.

2. The initial conception of the character was more combative, violent, and generally antagonist (in the novel, he disembowels one of the jailers, whereas in the film the CO gets off with a comparatively easy elbow to the face).

3. The introduction of Rambo’s old war pal character, whose widow we meet in the opening frames, a change meant to humanizing him.

and

4. In the novel, Rambo flees jail confines in the nude, probably taken out for ratings concerns.

Still, all changes make perfect sense and what we’re left with is cracker-jack stuff, never a dull moment, with some incredible lines courtesy of Rambo mentor Colonel and intervener Trautman: “You don’t seem to want to accept the fact you’re dealing with an expert in guerrilla warfare…A man who’s been trained to ignore pain, ignore weather, to live off the land, to eat things that would make a billy goat puke.”

***3/4 (out of 5)

[CHECK OUT THE FIRST BLOOD PODCAST!]