Really Awful Movies

The broth is pretty thin for a ramen movie, and Tampopo, clocking in at 115 minutes, overstays its welcome a bit. That being said, being unaware of any other ramen-themed movie as a point of reference, this still falls squarely into the must-see camp if only as novelty.

And novel it is: a pair of truckers (Gorō and Gun) brawl at a downmarket ramen shop. The proprietor Tampopo, nurses the former back to health after his beat-down. Gorō then enlists the help of a disparate group of miscreant ram-en-thusiasts to help the widow put her noodle shop on top.

But it’s a difficult proposition.

Chefs treat their recipes with the kind of care and furtiveness usually reserved for state secrets (or ignored by ex-Secretaries of State). So, in a bunch of episodic (albeit amusing) sequences, we get some low level ramen shop corporate espionage as Tampopo and company try to find the perfect blend of thinly sliced pork, scallions, chicken stock, sardines, memna and noodles. It’s mouth-watering just writing that.

They then give the decrepit shop a makeover in order to wrest business away from competitors. Tampopo, therefore, is basically an extended version of the Food Network’s Restaurant Makeover with sight gags. And the film looks the part — positively sumptuous. Criterion Collection and Janus Films did a bang up job with the restoration.

And there is a lot of compelling Japanese weirdness to carry the day — a set piece involving a white suit-clad yazuka member (the film’s narrator) and his lover, that catapult this into the memorable. To wit, they play a game of “pass the ice cube,” but instead, using an egg yolk. It’s pretty gross stuff, and had the TIFF audience squirming.

And there’s a food prep where a chef-mentor butchers a soft-shell turtle in a scene as an unnecessary and as unpleasant as any Italian cannibal genre film (Take a listen to us chat about Cannibal Ferox on the Really Awful Movies podcast).

Bottom line: there’s a certain effortlessness and charm to be had here, and critics are rightly raving about Tampopo, if a tad effusively. The Wall Street Journal said the movie’s “Right up there with Ratatouille and Big Night when it comes to peerless movies about food.” In our space, of course, we’d be more likely to cite The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 or Eating Raoul…take that with a pinch of salt.

*** (out of 5)

While director William Lustig’s Maniac is a horror film for the ages, grounded in steely realism, Maniac Cop suffers from uber-supernaturalism.

And that’s a shame, as a much better film could’ve been made exploiting people’s natural antipathy toward police — by making the badged antagonistan Everyman nonpareil rather than the Quagmire-jawed visage of the late, hulking Robert Z’Dar.

The opener gives us a little taste of the kind of expectation upturn we might’ve had in a better movie: two Puerto Rican thugs are chasing a server outside a Greenwich Village bar, then through a park. When she spots a cop in the distance, the would-be muggers stop dead in their tracks, only to watch the girl get throttled by the very long arms of the law.

But NYPD investigators look askance at the thugs’ testimony — after all, they’re two-bit Latino hoods. No thorough Benson & Stabler (or even Ice-T) investigation here.

That scene, now there’s the crux of where an interesting (and timeless) Maniac Cop film could’ve been made, especially given the tumult of the Black Lives Matter movement today. As the Master himself Alfred Hitchcock once said, “”I’m not against the police; I’m just afraid of them.”

Instead, we get increasingly cartoonish kills as the city is put on edge: one of its own, meant to serve and protect, is attacking New Yorkers and there’s not a damn thing anybody can do about it. Anybody, that is, except the suspicious Lieutenant McCrae (the always dynamite John Carpenter regular, Tom Atkins).

He starts poking around the scene, after the wife of philandering cop Jack (Bruce Campbell) is found dead.

Now, the supernatural aspects of the film alluded to earlier, are in full, ahem…force…when the NYPD try and take out the killer. He’s impervious to bullets and has a strange, convoluted backstory about doing time at Sing Sing (although the prison shower scene is pretty intense).

It’s all rather ridiculous, as are the palm trees, as Lustig decamped from The Big Apple to shoot most of this in LA’s Culver City (of course, Maniac itself was remade in La-La Land).

That being said, the performances are top-drawer; we get genre legend Richard Roundtree as the Commish, Z’Dar as the Maniac Cop, Bruce Campbell as put-upon flatfoot Jack, Laurene Landon as his mistress. Plus, eagle-eyed viewers will spot Lustig as a hotel manager and Sam Raimi as a reporter. Even boxing legend Jake LaMotta pops up in a very brief cameo as a detective.

*** (out of 5)

[CHECK OUT OUR MANIAC COP PODCAST AND INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM LUSTIG HERE]