Nathan Rabin's Happy Place's Definitive Guide to American Movies about the Film Industry
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Goodbye, Norma Jean (1976)
Misty Rowe went from being eye candy on hayseed hit Hee Haw to starring in a feature film as Marilyn Monroe, one of our greatest pop icons. That should be a big step up in terms of role and medium but it’s a lateral move at best considering the deplorable nature of 1976’s Goodbye, Norma Jean, which professes to be history and biography when it’s really just inept, joyless soft-core pornography.
A Z-grade period film that makes the Hollywood of the 1940s look and feel uncannily like the porn world of the 1970s, Goodbye, Norma Jean follows Rowe’s tragic heroine as she attempts to make the big leap from cheesecake photo shoots and stag films to Hollywood stardom.
Along the way the buxom blonde with the aura of ineffable sadness endures a cartoonish gauntlet of abuse, exploitation and sexual assault at the hands of an endless series of leering, wolfish men with grabby hands and dirty minds and at least one evil lesbian. Goodbye, Norma Jean is every bit as intent on exploiting Monroe as its monstrous, one-dimensional predators. It’s an ugly, cheap, nasty piece of work that reduces the wildly misunderstood actress to her sexuality and her brokenness. This bottom-feeding trash is less an exploration of the cruelty and exploitation its subject received at the hands of show-business and the film industry than a callous extension of it.
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The Boneyard Collection (2008)
Horror anthology fans have learned to be wary of “funny” segments because they tend to be precious and cutesy rather than scary or guffaw-inducing. The abysmal, bargain basement 2008 horror anthology The Boneyard Collection illustrates why horror anthologies that aspire to scare people and make them laugh almost invariably do neither.
The inept fright flick combines a pair of Grindhouse-style fake trailers with segments about the intersection of filmmaking and horror. In “Her Morbid Desires” a neophyte actress gets cast in a vampire movie whose production soon amasses a formidable real-life body count as one actress after another turns up dead. In “Cry of the Mummy”, meanwhile, a mummy who was previously the last Pharaoh of the 4th Dynasty wants to break into the movie business not as an actor or a monster but as a director.
Fake trailers about a girl group playing a town overrun by zombies and witches preparing for Satan’s arrival are better if only because they’re shorter and the endless, interminable vignettes set the bar so low. The opening credits promise
“Lots of Big Name Actors” and the film over-delivers with a shockingly star-studded cast of guest stars and bit players that includes such legendary figures as Kevin McCarthy, Tippi Hedren, George Kennedy, Ray Harryhausen, Bobby “Boris” Pickett, Rod McKuen, Forrest J. Ackerman, Robert Loggia, Cassandra “Elvira” Peterson and Brad Dourif as the devil. Alas, the big name actors sink to the level of the rancid material rather than elevating it. Their participation feels like the product of pity rather enthusiasm as it’s hard to imagine anyone feeling genuine excitement over a screenplay this egregiously awful.
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