“Like John Carpenter, who’s featured on the B Side of the Reader this week,” begins the J.R. Jones, and we should mention that he’s referring to Miles Raymer‘s piece on the influence of Carpenter’s film scores on contemporary electronic dance music (with a Spotify playlist as a sidebar, no less), “Joe Dante is one of those rare Hollywood filmmakers who trade in horror and fantasy but still command the respect of auteurists. Partly this is because he knows his film lore (I once had the pleasure of hearing him introduce the W.C. Fields comedy It’s a Gift), but mainly it’s because his movies are so smart. Since Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) he’s operated well inside the parameters of Steven Spielberg’s fun-at-all-costs ethic, yet movies like Gremlins (1984), Matinee (1993), and Small Soldiers (1998) are also witty and slyly subversive. Dante appears in Chicago at Music Box on Friday for a double feature of his latest movie, The Hole, and a midnight show of Gremlins 2: The New Batch. On Saturday at Nightingale he’ll preside over a rare screening of The Movie Orgy, an epic montage of pop-culture effluvia he first presented in 1968.”
The Reader‘s put up another page gathering capsule reviews of all three films: Jonathan Rosenbaum on Gremlins 2 (“plentiful gags and lighthearted satire spiked with Dante’s compulsive taste for movie references”), Jones on The Hole (“the sense of a roiling subconscious beneath the basement floor is so potent that even the stock scares on tap—a murderous clown doll, a little girl in ghostly white dress—are creepily effective”), and Ben Sachs on The Movie Orgy: “At once a send-up and a celebration of American kitsch, it draws on 50s drive-in movies, vintage commercials, and TV westerns (there are also lengthy clips of Abbott and Costello and other comedy legends). Dante’s accomplishment here is to make everything seem fake: footage of early A-bomb tests and video of Richard Nixon’s Checkers speech seem like products of the same garish showmanship that produced Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. Dante has presented this in various versions over the years, some running more than seven hours; this one clocks in at 280 minutes.”
Gabe Klinger‘s organized these screenings and he and Ben Sachs have a good long talk with Dante in the Reader (parts 1 and 2). Among the topics covered: 3D, special effects, and the affinities between Gremlins 2 and The Movie Orgy. The Chicagoist‘s Rob Christopher notes that Gabe Klinger, “with whom we’ve had many engaging chats about film festivals and cinema rarities, will soon be leaving Chicago for his new job at the MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation in New York. Though it’s pretty sad to see him go, we have to admit that sounds like one sweet gig. Gabe will be at the screening, so if you’re a cinephile you owe to yourself not only to check out this film rarity but also wish Gabe the best.”
Peter Sobczynski at eFilmCritic on The Movie Orgy: “Dante’s films do more than just demonstrate his keen knowledge of cinema history—they also show a smart and informed grasp of what is going on in the outside world as well and at a time when most movies try to be as blandly inoffensive as possible, his films often work in impassioned critiques of current social issues, especially in regards to America’s post-WW II misadventures, as well as impassioned calls for healthy anarchy and a questioning of authority in all forms, whether it is in the form of the military, the media or even your next-door neighbors. (Homecoming, an episode that he directed for the Masters of Horror series in which the soldiers killed in our excursions in Iraq and Afghanistan rise from the dead and demand the right to vote, is by far the strongest bit of political satire to emerge in America in a long time.) At the same time, there is often a streak of idealistic innocence that runs through most of his work that helps prevent it from just become cynical exercises in trash cinema—exactly the kind of thing that one might expect to find from a filmmaker who was mentored in his early years by both Roger Corman and Steven Spielberg.”
Last November, David Bordwell wrote up an appreciation of Dante’s work in general and The Orgy in particular—for which Trailers from Hell offers yet more linkage.
Update, 8/17: Ben Sachs, writing in the Chicago Reader, notes that, in the Orgy, “the difference between a pro-military fantasy of soldiers gunning down giant bugs and the pro-military fantasy of Vietnam War recruitment ads is only a difference in kind. Dante would make similar arguments in his later Matinee (1993) and Small Soldiers (1998), but he wouldn’t again make such a blatant antiwar statement until his 2005 TV movie Homecoming. On second thought, maybe The Movie Orgy isn’t ‘antiwar’ so much as ‘pro-peace,’ turning film exhibition into a party where strangers come together in good cheer and laugh at old images together. Everyone seemed to be having a great time at Saturday’s screening—including Dante himself, who stood modestly at the back of the room for the first few hours, possibly recalling the days of showing the work at college campuses.”
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