FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1999. All Rights Reserved

Video Vulture by John Tebbutt Recently, I’ve been hit with a full-blown, Godzilla-sized case of laryngitis. I haven’t been able to speak for two weeks now, and it’s driving me nuts! My kazoo won’t work, I’m lousy at sign language, and my friends haven’t heard the phrase, "Y’know, there’s a movie with a cast made up entirely of trained birds" in a long time. Aargh! Oh yeah, this week’s topic is movie characters who can’t speak. • Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979): Pursued by a mob of zealots, Brian (Graham Chapman) jumps down into a hole, accidentally landing on the foot of a crazy old hermit. "Oh, my foot!" cries the old coot, who then curses bitterly at having broken his decades-long vow of silence. He then gives Brian a good chewing-out, now that his vow’s been screwed up. Eventually he winds up bouncing up and down singing "Hava Nagila." (I understand how he feels.) • Lightning Jack (1994): Likable Cuba Gooding Jr. plays Ben Doyle, a mute orphan who becomes sidekick to a roguish Aussie bank robber named Lightning Jack Kane (Paul Hogan). Gooding’s wordless performance is very funny. At one point, he shoots himself in the foot during a botched bank job – his eyes bug out and his mouth opens wide, but no sound comes out. Cringing with embarrassment, Jack leads his limping, silent buddy outside, while the bankers try to stifle their laughter. • Mute Witness (1995): Nicely suspenseful yarn about a mute girl who witnesses a murder while filming a movie in Moscow. Scenes in which the heroine really needs to yell for help will have you on the edge of your seat. Best bit: the breathless chase scene right after the murder. Look for Sir Alec Guinness in an unbilled cameo. • The Tingler (1959): I’ll bet you didn’t know that a hideous grub-like monster lives in your spinal column. When you get scared, it grows bigger, until it crushes your spine. The only way to stop it is to scream, which releases the tension and shrinks the monster back down. (Hey, if it’s in a movie, it must be true!) Judith Evelyn plays a mute woman who gets nobbled by the beast ’cause she can’t scream! • Blood Feast (1963): The much-talked-about "highlight" of this ground-breaking gore film is the famous tongue-removal scene. In it, a cow’s tongue the size of a football (and covered with raspberry jelly and preservatives) gets pulled out of a woman’s mouth. Apparently, director H.G. Lewis’s biggest challenge in filming this scene was finding an actress with a big enough mouth to accommodate the huge tongue. • The World According to Garp (1982): T.S. Garp (Robin Williams) is shocked when he learns of the existence of a group of women who cut out their own tongues as a political statement. He channels his outrage into a non-fictional book on the subject... with tragic consequences. • Twilight Zone - The Movie (1983): In the episode "It’s a Good Life," a young boy has the frightening ability to alter reality at will. As the camera glides through various rooms in his weird house, we see what this little monster has done to his bossy sister... she has no mouth! Other speechless characters appear in The Piano, Flesh + Blood, The Spiral Staircase, The Road Warrior, Castle Freak, and any Marx Brothers movie.

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