“Al Franken,” Jim Beatty, the first man to run a sub-4-minute mile indoors, said “was the best track and field promoter this country has ever had.”įranken, one of the most influential figures in American track and field’s golden era from the 1950s through the 1970s, died at the age of 96 on Wednesday at his Los Angeles home. If track and field, as is often suggested, is a three-ring circus, then Franken was one of its leading ringmasters for parts of four decades. “And it wrapped its paw around me and I almost had to go change my shorts.” “He had this big-ass Bengal tiger in the shot with me,” Seagren said recently, laughing at the memory.
Franken was promoting both one of his track meets and a circus at the same time and arranged a photo shoot of Seagren with one of the circus’ biggest stars. 27, 2019 Last Modified: Jan.Nearly two decades later Olympic pole vault champion Bob Seagren had a somewhat less glamorous Franken-orchestrated brush with show business. Look for cameos by Gunnar Hansen (as a Nazi mechanic) and Tony Todd ( Candyman) as a clerk at an adult book store. Even the tamer cut got the film banned in the UK, Ireland, Canada, France and Norway. The version distributed by Lionsgate had to be trimmed by 23 minutes to receive an R-rating, but the 91-minute-long director’s cut has by now become available. What’s more, it should be commended for its sweet climax, abrasive music and gutsy, uncompromising approach: you don’t often see 10-year-old girls repeatedly stabbed with a butcher knife and their faces sliced with a razor. There are plot holes despite the fact that there’s no plot to speak of and the nods to the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre are pathetic in their obviousness, but gore hounds will lap this up and it’s easier on the eyes than most of the similarly ultra-violent, mean-spirited shot-on-video dreck out there. But at the end of every month, it leaks out.”), likes listening to Hitler’s speeches while doing push-ups and had a granpappy who was in the Waffen-SS. What compels him to commit these atrocities is: the fact that he’s incredibly misogynistic (“It's ironic.
He photographs attractive, purebred American sluts for a living then kills them after work, leaving tons of incriminating evidence at every crime scene. The dumb-as-dirt characterization of the villain, which makes Ulli Lommel’s and Bill Zebub’s serial-killer-themed exploits seem deep and insightful in comparison, the retarded dialogues (“I gotta shoot some girls tonight.”), the embarrassingly wooden acting, and the glaring lack of a dramatic structure are all pure video underground, the place where Palumbo crawled from (see Nutbag, his debut).Ī German photographer (Garett) hates America with a passion, yet lives in Las Vegas, and resents his mommy for being a common whore. Let me assure you that good production values and quality splatter FX (plenty of it!) are the only two things that separate it from, let’s say, The Great American Snuff Film. It could also be argued that with a budget of 2,000,000 USD, the amount of publicity received, and the fact that director Nick Palumbo managed to shoot on 35mm film stock, MSP could hardly be considered “underground”. In fact, it could be argued that MSP’s fate of being picked up by Lionsgate and released theatrically on an international scale (as a limited NC-17 release in the US and mostly for festival showings in Europe), was a sure sign of the dawning extremization of mainstream tastes. One of the last underground torture horror films released before the subgenre became mainstream with the Saw sequels and Hostel.
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