Under the Cherry Moon (1986)

Whilst covering Shanghai Surprise the other week, I mentioned in my post on it that it was nominated in 6 different categories at that years Golden Raspberry awards. Well it transpires there is a movie that did even worse that same year and I'm not talking about the injustice that is Howard the Duck being awarded worst picture (total bollocks.) Oh no, there was a movie that received nominations in a shocking EIGHT categories!! And it won in 5 of them! Including a tie for worst picture with Howard the Duck. And that movie is Under the Cherry Moon. A 1986 Romantic Musical Comedy-Drama (really...?!) directed and starting Prince Rogers Nelson better known by his performing pseudonym: Prince. I don't usually do this, and this movie somehow hasn't ended up on the list of movies considered the worst of all time but part of me is intrigued to see just how bad this actually is. I am... not a massive Prince fan I will be frank with you, I mean the guy was an undisputed guitar playing genius and you can count some of his songs amongst the greatest songs ever written, no doubt, but I don't really have any of his records inside my vast collection. Just never been an artist I've particularly gravitated to. Under the Cherry Moon was his directional debut, and is a movie that by all accounts failed commercially really aside from the soundtrack: Parade which absolutely smashed it. I think just that, in of itself, should already give you a bit of a hint on how this one is going to go. I'm going to go out on a limb, having done zero homework beforehand, a take a punt on it being a fairly weak, lacklustre thin storyline that exists purely to hold together a narrative between high calibre, above average musical numbers? Let's see how that works out for me.

I am... roughly 20 minutes in to this movie and so far I have no idea what the fuck is going on... but our main protagonist; Mr Christopher Tracy (Prince) works as a piano player somewhere in France and with his... associate? Associate: Tricky (Jerome Benton) appears to be on the search for an incredibly wealthy woman to marry, on the assumption that he / they can get incredibly rich out of it somehow. Despite already being romantically involved with wealthy divorcee Mrs Wellington (Francesca Annis). Learning that wealthy heiress Mary Sharon (Kristen Scott Thomas) has just turned 21 and is therefore now filthy fucking rich, Christopher turns up at her birthday party and catches her attention but Mary initially seems less than impressed by him and ends up having both him and Tricky thrown out. The following day, still obsessing about her encounter with Christopher, Mary pays a visit to the restaurant he works at to deliver a message; that Mrs Wellington wants to see him that evening. Whilst there she dances with Tricky and after Tricky talks sweet nothings at her about finding the right women, IE: her, she invites him to a fancy restaurant before she is whisked away herself for a dance with Christopher where she reveals she knows exactly what he is up to and accuses him of being a gigolo. Arriving at Mrs Wellingtons... mansion... Christopher discovers Mary sent him there with hopes of him sabotaging a clandestine relationship Mary's father is having with Mrs Wellington, but Christopher connects the dots and races out of there before he's discovered. It later transpires that Mary only inherits the huge, massive amounts of never-ending wealth that she is entitled to if she marries some guy named Jonathan, who appears to have been personally hand picked by her father to wed his daughter. Mary it appears, has other ideas. For some reason, Mary decides to go for a meal with Tricky and Christopher where, after exposing her as being sheltered and spoiled, the pair take over the rest of the restaurant for a dance number with Mary either drunk, or loosening up and embracing a "common" culture I err.. am not 100% sure to be quite honest. It ends when Mary's father turns up, crashes the party and escorts his daughter away. After the party Mary phones Christopher and leaves him with the vaguest of suggestions that she wants him to have sex with her, which leads to a slightly awkward scene where Christopher almost nearly gets it on with Mary's mum, when he mistakes her window for Mary's only to have to dash when the father returns home. I'm an hour in by this point and err... yeah this is quite bad. Christopher and Tricky are moving around town the following morning and in conversation, both confess they are falling in love with Mary but Tricky suggests they need to make some money and split for Miami quick before Mr Sharon's bodyguards beat them to within an inch of their life. Behind Tricky's back, Christopher and Mary arrange to meet that evening at a racecourse where the pair eventually end up making out and getting physical. Afterwards, Christopher literally phones Mary's dad, Mr Sharon himself, and tells him he's going to marry his daughter and threatens to expose his secret affair if he tries to do anything about it. Returning the following morning, Mr Sharon accuses Mary of jeopardising her upcoming marriage and putting the family at risk, but Mary reacts angrily and pushes him away before storming off. Equally Tricky reacts angrily with Christopher, accusing him of jeopardising their partnership and their plan. Later that evening when he spots Christopher and Mary together he blows the lid on the whole scheme, demanding that he gets his cut from Christopher when he marries Mary. Mary realising the truth, stomps off angrily and disappears in a chauffeur driven car. Christopher goes to see Mrs Wellington, I err... don't know why... where she passes on a message from Mr Sharon - a cheque for $100,000 if he promises not to see Mary again. Christopher turns it down with his own message; "fuck you." and as he's leaving Mrs Wellington imparts on him that Mary is leaving for New York at midnight. Racing to the airport, Christopher convinces Mary to leave in his car with him and the pair end up reconciling. Learning that his daughter has been "abducted" though, and seemingly controlling half the city, Mr Sharon sends the police, the coastguard and his personal entourage of bodyguards after Christopher to bring Mary back, but learning from Tricky - they're friends again now - that they are on the way Christopher escapes via speedboat to a coastal hideout where he and Mary have been hanging out only to be shot the moment he steps on dry land by the coastguard, dying in Mary's arms. In the closing scenes we learn that Mary now lives alone, refusing to be with anybody else, but has Tricky employed as a landlord for her own personal apartment block investment.

Yeah this was a bit crap really. I was sort of into it in that I wanted to see how they were going to wrap everything up in the last 20 odd minutes of the movie but for the most part I was just not feeling this one for most of the movie to be honest. It felt like a weird art project and not even really that much of a movie at all. I mean, there was some thinly veiled storyline about a conman eventually falling in love with one of his intended targets but it really felt so thinly applied that it almost didn't matter and, as I kind of anticipated, was more just the glue to try and assemble some kind of movie together for musical set pieces. Of which, there were hardly any to be honest! Like, 2, 3. But plenty of musical segways to introduce the original music from Prince. But in terms of an actual movie, this was just not very good.

Prince is a talented musician. Of that there is no doubt. But he was just massively out of depth in this one. Or if not out of his depth, the role and character he was trying to play was just massively too ambitious. He's a good looking guy and he has an aura about him, but he was basically just playing a guy that could seduce anybody male or female with a batting of his eyelids. And there was no real substance behind that really. It's a shame because there was glimmers of potential showing in this movie and I know he goes on to appear in a couple of other movies but I think with a more substantive role and with more script to work with he might have been able to carve out a career as an actor. But absolutely not based on most of his performance in this one. He was playing Prince in what was basically a 1 hour 30 minute music video.

Conversely though, I felt some of the other people in it were fairly decent. I was warming towards Jerome Benton as Tricky and I kinda wanna see what else he's done that might actually be good! I also thought Kristen Scott Thomas as Mary Sharon was decent, although at times a little typecast and stifled by basically just being the love interest, she managed to display a depth that went beyond that and I think she could genuinely be very good in other things. Thankfully she later gets that opportunity and smashes it out the park with English Patient. But this is a solid debut from her and one of the few positives to come out of this movie!

But since I'm talking about positives I do have a few nice things to say. I like the way the film was shot and produced. The whole thing is in black and white which at first I didn't really like, but it grew on me as the film developed, and it had a kind of old film aestetic to it that you get with old 50's movies that I guess was supposed to try and ham up the romantic edge to the movie. It didn't work... but it looked nice and I appreciated it. Equally there was also some very good camera work and good use of cinematography to at least make the movie visually interesting if nothing else.

But uh yeah, that's mostly where the positives end for me. I just didn't get it. I think. I don't think it really appealed to my sense of humour. Either that or it just wasn't funny. And I found it a bit of struggle early on to fully understand what was going on and how the movie was setting the stage. There wasn't a great deal of exposition, it was more just bizarro dialogue exchanges and weird over the top reactions to things... The film settled down a bit and told a bit more of a story later on, but it still had this weird kind of surreal plot development thread throughout the rest of it which made it a bit difficult to follow but more importantly even more difficult to take seriously as proper movie. Instead it again, felt like some kind of unsettling art project on how not to make a movie.

I can't say I even really appreciated the musical numbers, arguably this movies only redeeming feature, and that mostly stems from the fact that I'm not really a Prince fan. Maybe they were great if you are, I err... really don't know... but they sort of felt more important and more vital than the movie and that the movie was more there to introduce you to them, rather than them there to compliment the movie. As a result it made the whole thing kind of insignificant... and the thematic choices of the songs didn't really fit the rest of the framing of the movie anyway?  They were more there for you if you were a Prince fan and I think difficult to enjoy otherwise.

But I think perhaps the biggest arrow in the Achilles heel for this one and the one thing that, even if you overlooked everything else, was the dialogue. It was pure bollocks. Prince said some of the most cringey, second hand embarrassing stuff I think I've ever seen in a movie and there was just no substance to any of it. There was one scene, one scene, where they got a little bit serious and there was a danger of an actual movie breaking out, and that was the cafe scene where Christopher and Tricky confess to each other they are falling in love with Mary. That was it, the rest of it just felt so cliché and un-substantive that it was difficult to actually take it seriously. And I don't know if that was intentional, the movie does frame itself as a comedy after all, or just lacking in development, but either way it did nothing to improve this movies chances of developing any credibility. And you can forgive technical and production shortcomings to a degree but when the things your characters are doing and saying in a movie look and sound awful. You're going to have an awful movie.

Yeah this was not very good really. And for the numerous faults Shanghai Surprise might have had, by comparison it was a far better movie. But even without comparing the two, by it's own merits this was quite poor and a bit of a difficult commitment to make it through to the end. Potentially really only interesting if you are a Prince fan and can absolutely buy into that fandom. But as a standalone movie to be appreciated for it's own appeal; there is very little here for you. It's not terrible, and it's not the worst thing I've ever watched. But it wasn't a very good movie and not really an enjoyable watch for me. 1 out of 5 mostly because a zero just feels a bit too harsh. But only barely.