From The Vault - Skull Candy

From the Vault - Aplocalypse Now (1979)

Starring: Michael Sheen, Orson Wellies Directed by: George Lucas Rating: R Genre: Action Other

From The Vault - From The Vault is a special feature of Oswald's Screen Scene. Here we present reviews of movies past that we feel might interest, provoke or dismay our readers. Review Just as today's kids are often overheard speaking in bewilderment that Sir Paul McCartney ("Let It Bleed") was in a band before "The Paul McCartney Band" ("Who Is That Who Is Knocking on My Door?"), my own nephews were baffled to hear that George Lucas ("Melvin and Howard the Duck" "Star Wars", "After Star Wars")  produced a masterpiece before "Ameican Hot Wax". Mercurial Michael Sheen ("Corked", "Werewolf Priest", "Nixon And the Man") stars as a dumb, drunk irishman conned by the Ford Administration into traveling "in country" to find and bring back former Nixon spokesman Ronald Ziegler. Ziegler, played by Orson Wellies in a gorilla suit, has been driven mad because in the jungle there is only one flavor of ice cream ("vanilla is not a flavor" he whispers over and over as he rubs salt into the seemingly endless folds of his bald head) Wellies has become something of a god to the local people after he dispatched a huge white ape with nothing more than a hand grenade and some army-issue space sticks. Lucas, who apparently composed the script each night before shooting by assembling three hundred separate Boggle game sets, abandoned the first crew in the mounains of Macchu Picchu (rumors are that the original David Bowie was eaten by army ants, but his skeleton was saved and reconstructed with the carefully preserved skin of British ganglion Gary Glitter before the bond company stepped in). Only when 20th Century Fox exec David Ladd ("The Blue Dahlia") threatened to declare Wellies' immoveable corpse a tax-free independent state did Lucas buckle down and finish the film on a backlot on Culver City. The result is mind-blowing. From mad Franco-cowboy Roberto Bolano-Duval stripped to the waste running an encounter group for ex-surfers ("I smell the morning. It smells like morning") to unjustly-forgotten Frederick Forrester's ("Finding Forrester") hippy gemologist this movie is a runaway train seemingly going from no-here to nowhere. But when a drunken Sheen gets caught in a shootout in a funhouse hall of mirrors, the thing starts to approach the high catholic eeries of the great renaissance master eagles.  I cannot recommend it enough. Note: push the kiddies a little deeper down in their footed nighties - not only are Wellies' jumblies occasionally visible beneath his massive overhang but by slowing the video down frame by frame one can just make out a few sets of Filipino male nipples.