Making a Whore Movie

Don’t fear for your children just because someone in Making Michael Jackson’s Thriller (Vestron/Palace) keeps saying how proud he is to have made a whore movie. He means a horror movie. Michael Jackson’s Thriller, starring Michael Jackson, was the video promo of his hit single. Making Michael Jackson’s Thriller is an hour-long video about how they made the promo, and is itself now a hit video, available at low price so that your offspring can talk you into buying it for them and then drive you crazy with it.

You could do worse, although after your first look at Michael Jackson it might seem hard to imagine how. He is not the prepossessing tot some of us remember from the heyday of the Jackson Five. Four of the Five having hived off, Michael has been left older, taller and weirder. He is very handsome in a nose-job sort of way, but a fluorescent light has been turned on behind his eyes, making him look like an all-night delicatessen, or Little Richard turning into a wolf. This is a big help in the ‘Thriller’ number, which is all about turning into a wolf.

The number, which is really a bit of a plod, occupies the first few minutes of the tape. Michael sees a werewolf movie with his girl and then, while walking her home, turns into a wolf himself. Zombies rise from the grave and join in the dance, their artfully tattered flesh suggesting death, corruption and a high capital outlay.

The rest of the tape is about how they spent the money. It turns out that Michael’s features, though vulpine from the start, were assisted in their transformation by plastic whiskers, yellow contact lenses, etc. There is much proprietorial talk from the film director John Landis, who looks pretty horrible himself, but perhaps the children will not notice.

What they and you will positively like, however, are the plentiful samples of Michael dancing.

As a singer he is good in the Frankie Lymon sweet-scream tradition, but as a dancer he is in the Bojangles bracket, a fact attested to by Fred Astaire, who taped Michael’s performance of ‘Billie Jean’ at the Tamla 25th Anniversary Concert and told him next day that he was a great little mover. That same performance is included here and you will bless the rewind button for letting you see how Mr Jackson sings with his feet. All there is is him, the microphone and the band.

A better number better sung and better danced than ‘Thriller’, if it doesn’t teach your children that a big budget isn’t everything, it might at least take you back to the real magic of Motown, when the choreography was limited and sharpened by how long the backing vocalists had to spin on the spot before getting back to the mike. But you can’t tell the young ones about your memories. They want their own memories, which Michael Jackson is now supplying. Watching him turn into a wolf is as delightful to them as watching them turn your money into a cheap tape is depressing for you.

After the monster success of Raiders of the Lost Ark as an own-your-own-feature-film video, Flashdance (CIC) is the next bid to work the same trick. The difference, however, is that Flashdance is not enough of a movie to be a bargain at the low price. Despite a large helping of Jennifer Beals’s pretty if impassive face, a low price is just about right. Anyone overwhelmed at getting so much for so little will have to be a big fan of the same young lady’s pretty but not at all impassive behind, which does a lot of high-frequency vibrating in close-up.

There are rumours that someone else’s bottom was used for the tight shots, while Jennifer’s actual fundament was in the dressing-room learning its moves for next day, but after my recent analysis of Barry Manilow’s gluteal histrionics I don’t want this column to get a reputation for being bum-struck. Sufficient to say that Flashdance is predicted on one assumption: that Ms Beals’s harmonically agitated tush is a brave sight.

So it is, but perhaps its effect would be less if the rest of her had more to do. The plot is from any episode of Fame. A welder by day, Jennifer dances provocatively in a bar by night, but what she really wants to do is get into ballet school. She is so talented that all she need do is apply, but it takes her the whole movie to get her courage up, because of the timidity induced by social deprivation. Not, be it noted, social inferiority: this is an American movie, not a British one.

Pittsburgh is exquisitely photographed, as if it were Venice. The urban blight looks as good as in Rocky and similarly survives scaling-down for the small screen, but only Ms Beals’s well-turned body can explain the video’s chart-topping sales in the United States, where Dad’s undivided attention proved that here was a show for all the family, and not just for the daughter dreaming of being a ballerina, or anyway dreaming of being a movie star dreaming of being a ballerina.

As for the dancing, apart from a few glimpses of the longed-for ballet class it is all disco, with all of disco’s limitations. Ms Beals strutting about and punching the air is a lot more appealing than John Travolta doing the same thing, but the choreographic vocabulary is inherently famished. A solitary sequence of break-dancing by street urchins is the most alive part of the picture. In break-dancing, even if the music is monotonous, the different parts of the body are at least reacting differently. One of the break-dancers does a flat fall on to his back that will make you wonder if that wasn’t how the style got its name. Ms Beals looks on with the mysterious smile of one who will soon throw away her lunch pail, tie on a pair of satin point shoes and marry her Porsche-driving boss, who despite owning the factory is a macho hunk.

Erstwhile macho hunks now buckling at the knees might be revived by Playmate Review (CBS/Fox), the latest attempt by Playboy magazine to repackage its ethos in video form. Its predecessors, Playboy Video Collector’s Edition I & II, tried hard to give you something of the mag’s fabled scope and sweep, including enough obiter dicta from Hugh M. Hefner to convince you that he might indeed be the greatest philosophical brain since Hugh M. Hegel. But the centre-fold girls were undoubtedly the main event, and this latest compilation, subtitled ‘ 10 Intimate Playmate Portraits’, sensibly includes nothing but.

The Playmates, like the heroine of Flashdance, don’t want you to think they are just pretty bodies. Called such names as Kelly Tough and Shannon Tweed, they have deep reasons for taking their clothes off. ‘I’m excited about the oppatoonity to be a Playmate. I think I’ve learned a lot about myself ’ She has learned, among other things, how to go big-game fishing in the nude. ‘I dew feel like I have an affinity for the ocean.’ Inevitably this affinity is best demonstrated by a lot of lying around naked on deck, alone with the sea and with nobody else in sight except the camera crew hanging from the mast-head.

‘I have the greatest family,’ says Patti Farinetti. ‘My mother’s behind me in everything I dew, and she’s very proud of me. Wherever we go, she says, “This is my daughter! The one who was in Playboy!”’ All the girls have supportive mothers. (‘Supportive’ is an American word meaning ‘insane’.) Some of them even have supportive boy-friends, such as Kim McArthur’s fiancé Cal. ‘I think Kim has grown a great deal because of her involvement with Playboy.’

The emphasis on self-realisation is universal. ‘Look where I am today,’ says Patti or Kelly or Kim or Shannon. ‘It’s really unbelievable.’ And it really is. Kelly Tough, for example, is out in the woods, lying around starkers next to a camp fire. ‘Noodity and camping go together as far as I’m concerned.’ Kelly seems undaunted by the possibility that a bear might eat her, or worse. ‘After you become a Playmate you learn confidence,’ she says gratefully, having interpreted the camera’s unrelenting attempt to get between her legs as an offer of assistance in her quest for fulfilment.

Clearly she is a nice girl. They are all nice girls. With the current clamp-down on hard-porn videos, soon these nice girls will be all that’s left. It should be a comfort, but somehow they are far scarier than the hookers, perhaps because they find it all so natural. That’s it: they have nothing to hide.