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Reviews
The First Deadly Sin (1980)
Sinatra's performance highlights an average crime thriller
A detective flick largely forgotten, despite being released at the beginning of the 1980's, The First Deadly Sin has a very Seventies feel to it. Perhaps this has to do with it being a film adaptation of a 1973 novel of the same name. At any rate, it's pretty devoid of the characteristics to be found in cop movies from the early 1980's going forward. Which is to say, The First Deadly Sin isn't a shoot-'em up. No crazy car chases. No punch out brawls. No explosions.
Frank Sinatra plays NYC police Sargeant Edward Delaney. Rapidly approaching retirement, Delaney is working a case of a murder committed in his precinct via use of an ice axe. Delaney discovers other murders in other NYC boroughs that utilized a similar method and investigates the crimes, trying to establish if the murders are linked. While all this is going on, Delaney's wife has been hospitalized for a possibly terminal condition.
As mentioned, The First Deadly Sin isn't an action movie. In point of fact, the plot, script, pacing and acting are all very slow and deliberate. Having not read the book, I can't say how faithful the film adaptation was to the written source material. In addition, Sinatra was in his mid-60's when the film was being shot. Thus, the slow pace, lack of frenetic action and concentration on the sleuthing made sense in that to see Sinatra at that age behind the wheel of a car burning rubber a la Steve McQueen Bullitt-style, beating suspects to a pulp or engaging in a typical action movie gunfight wouldn't have looked believable anyway.
I think in some ways it was less the slower pace and more of what the film decided to focus on that made The First Deadly Sin a bit of a slog to get through at times. A lot of screen time is used showing Delaney making one of several visits to the hospital to visit his ailing wife. These scenes quickly become redundant and make the flick drag. Mostly because despite the casting of Faye Dunaway as Delaney's wife, there's nothing of particular note going on acting-wise nor anything essential to the plot. We don't learn anything about Delaney's wife in these multiple hospital bedside visits beyond the fact that she is sick. Thus, each subsequent hospital scene elicits a reaction of "ugh, ANOTHER one of these scenes?"
There is a good twenty minute or so chunk of the film devoted to Delaney researching exactly what type of murder weapon was used, which was of interest. As was the method by which Delaney used to determine where it was purchased and by whom. My understanding is the book gave relatively equal page space to both Delaney and the killer, whereas the film version mostly concentrates on Delaney. Considering the weapon used, the gore is pretty minimal. The killer is depicted as a high functioning psycho, with no motivations beyond that of being a loon.
What stands out with the movie these days is it was shot on location in New York City, thus the viewer gets a good look at what NYC was like at the end of the 1970's. The other memorable aspect is this was Sinatra's last starring role in a motion picture and really not a role or performance that saw Sinatra projecting an aura of Rat Pack coolness. Which is to say, Sinatra just played the part in a believable way with no overemoting or histrionics. One gets the feeling of Delaney as being what he was, a detective on the beat for many years who is nearing retirement. After a decade since his last film appearance in 1970, at the time of the release of The First Deadly Sin many critics remarked that it was a pleasure to see Sinatra return to the screen with such a performance.
At any rate, The First Deadly Sin didn't do well at the box office. Sort of came and went. Some of which I might put down to the movie being a bit of a throwback by the time the dawn of the Eighties arrived re: pacing and tone. However, Sinatra's performance to one side, I think the biggest problem with The First Deadly Sin was just too much by way of slow, unnecessary sequences which needlessly extended the running time to roughly an hour and 45 minutes and by extension made it that much more of a slog to get through.
Meatballs 4 (1992)
At the bottom of the pile is where one finds Meatballs 4
I was in my early 20's when this was originally released in 1992. While I suppose it is possible this movie was actually screened in an actual movie theater back then, I tend to guess not. I only recall ever seeing this flick via home video which makes one suspect it was a direct to home video/direct to cable tv production from the get-go.
As other reviewers have pointed out, this movie wasn't initially conceived as being part of the Meatballs franchise. Which makes sense, since there are literally no references to any of the other Meatballs movies to be found here. I'm guessing the production got the rights to license the Meatballs title at some point during filming and attached the franchise name to the picture to wring perhaps a few more dollars out of the thing than would have otherwise been found under whatever the working title had been...I'm guessing 'Waterski Summer Camp' or something clever along those lines.
Which is basically what the movie is, in terms of a plot. A summer camp centered around waterskiing, jet skiing, parasail skiing, etc. Not really a summer camp per se in the traditional sense, as the 'campers' are all young to mid twentysomethings (and the female 'campers' are frequently disrobed).
Circa 2024 and a few decades of smut via the interwebs, Meatballs 4 will doubtless make little sense to anybody under the age of 30. However, this is the type of softcore flick teen boys used to check out back in the day via late night cable tv for a little not too explicit nudity before portable high-speed wireless naked sexy time was just a click away. As such, Meatballs 4 was really just brief glimpses of some honeys baring their hineys and boobies. There is one 'sensually explicit' scene lasting 5 seconds which involves a topless guy and a girl topless lying down, getting ready to have some nookie. And there it is...even on the simulated humping score, Meatballs 4 fails to deliver.
Which is in keeping with the rest of the movie, ostensibly billed as a comedic drama. Ostensible in that it delivers no laughs and even less drama. The plot, such as there is one, concerns two rival waterski camps. One of them (the 'evil' waterski camp) wants to put the other one (the 'good' waterski camp) out of business. Rather than just doing so, both camps for some reason agree to a ...winner take all waterski competition(?) as a way of settling their economic differences.
As other reviewers have also pointed out, it is a case of low hanging fruit to point out how dreadfully unfunny and ineffective Meatballs 4 is. Mostly because Meatballs 4 was just a ham-fisted, cynical cash grab from start to finish. I mean, what other conclusion was a viewer ever supposed to reach when the star of the film was Corey Feldman? Feldman was tapped to portray an ultra-hip, effortlessly funny, physically attractive and cool waterski instructor. A proposition that was just as ludicrous in 1992 as it is today and watching Feldman in Meatballs 4 strutting around like he actually believes he WAS ultra-hip, effortlessly funny, physically attractive and cool - oh, Feldman wasn't ironically trolling us back then - well, let's say that the word 'cringe' was also as applicable in 1992 as it is today. Of particular note is a camp dance scene where Feldman busts out his Michael Jackson style dance moves. Try watching THAT without rolling your eyes.
There is perhaps ten minutes of assorted water sports footage sprinkled throughout Meatballs 4. Nothing particularly stunning to watch, though. Nothing that astounds a viewer in terms of water sports on film. I guess the other thing Meatballs 4 had, er...'going for it' was the addition of then Playboy model Cristy Thom to the cast and appearing topless in several scenes in all her silicone-enhanced glory. It's mildly amusing watching the scenes with the expanded cast and being able to visually note which extras were chosen because they were females willing to get topless as opposed to the extras chosen to merely fill out crowd scenes.
Ski Patrol (1990)
At this late date it's difficult to get too upset at how lame the movie is...
As a teen in the 1980's and someone prone to watching all sorts of b, c and z-grade movie junk, I was somewhat surprised when I came across this 1990 title recently. Surprised as in wondering how I could not have seen or even heard of this flick before. I mean, as the proud owner of Hot Dog The Movie and Ski School 1 AND 2 (not to mention all the Police Academy movies), it almost seemed like a cinematic misdemeanor that I hadn't seen Ski Patrol.
I suppose I should say that had I saw Ski Patrol back in 1990, doubtless I would have shaken my head in contempt at how dumb and inept Ski Patrol was. And I wouldn't have been incorrect in thinking so. Then again, when the biggest names in your movie are Ray Walston and Martin Mull - and even those two are barely in the movie for all of 15 minutes - expectations shouldn't be set particularly high.
Even by that diminished standard, Ski Patrol is very lacking in several of the key areas that constitute the archetypal 1980's wacky teen boner comedy and despite being released in 1990, Ski Patrol is VERY much along the lines of a 1980's wacky teen boner comedy...albeit an inept one.
Ski Patrol DOES establish the Snobs vs. Slobs/Unlikeable Winners vs. Lovable Losers scenario, so at least that box got checked off. The problem lies squarely with the casting, in that the cast is chock full of non-charismatic, unfunny, amateurish actors doing non-memorable, unfunny things. It's just one of those deals with a comedy where if the comedy falls flat the movie falls flat. By that score, Ski Patrol is the equivalent of a can of soda opened and left sitting on a counter for several hours. A lot of second- and third-rate sight gags and scenarios that perhaps a kid of 6 years old would find mildly amusing. Which, I suppose is in keeping with the PG rating. Yep, Ski Patrol is rated PG. Now, why a movie is clearly trying to be a wacky teen boner comedy yet also attain a PG rating is a mystery to me. Not even a PG-13 with a brief glimpse of some side boob. Nope. A single 10 second shot of a couple of girls in some not particularly skimpy bikinis is about all the sensuality this flick has to offer.
What I will say Ski Patrol DOES have are some great sequences of people doing advanced skiing. No, really. I found the skiing sequences well filmed and exciting to watch. So, there's that, I suppose.
Even with all that said, though, it'd be a bit too easy to beat up on this 35-year-old failed comedy too much. And Ski Patrol really doesn't deserve to be beat up on that much, either. It's just this non-offensive, unfunny movie...a bit of a rip-off in terms of sort of representing itself as something it wasn't re: the boner comedy angle - since it was neither funny nor revealing - but hardly a crime against humanity. Something clearly designed back then to churn out a quick buck in a few theaters, a few more quick bucks in the video rental stores then be duly forgotten.
Halloween II (1981)
Solid sequel, better than most of the other Halloween sequels...
Right up front, I will say that at the end of the day, the first Halloween movie was really the only one that really worked well from start to finish.
In some ways, it's always felt disingenuous when I hear someone refer to all of the many Halloween movies as a 'franchise' since for me the object of a franchise is to have a consistent product from one location to the next. Or, in the case of a series of movies, from one film to the next. By and large, the movies in the Halloween series that came after the 1978 original haven't even been good movies as individual films, much less in comparison to the original.
However, Halloween 4 was a good effort. Halloween 7 was a good effort. For me, though, the only REALLY decent sequel has been the first sequel, 1981's Halloween II.
Some of that has to do with the manner in which Halloween II (1981) was written and produced. It is basically a direct continuation of the storyline from the ending of Halloween 1978. Thus, there's no plot involving Michael Myers niece. There's no Curse of the Thorn. It's not a Rob Zombie redneck white trash remake. It's not a bunch of woke/DEI gibberish along the lines of what the most recent Jamie Lee Curtis produced sequels have been. Halloween II (1981) is literally what the ad campaign tagline said it was: More Of The Night He Came Home.
With John Carpenter and Debra Hill returning as writers/producers and Dean Cundy returning as cinematographer, this sequel looks and feels like the first movie. Several cast members from the first movie also return, including key actors Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasence. Carpenter and Alan Howarth revised the musical score and soundtrack. While Carpenter also directed a few sequences of the movie involving reshoots, most of the footage was shot by Rock Rosenthal. Rosenthal has said he basically tried to recreate the atmosphere of the first movie as best he could, and by that standard he did a capable job.
Part of the reason I knocked some stars off the rating had to do with a few aspects of the movie I found to be a bit eye-rolling and silly. I would say in general that as is the case with a lot of sequels, Halloween II's biggest struggle was measuring up to the film that came before it. Halloween 1978 was a very simple and very effective scary movie. In the three years between Halloween 1978 and Halloween 1981, a glut of slasher movies were released, all of which tried to outdo Halloween 1978 in terms of violence and gore via bloody special effects. The thing of it is, Halloween 1978 got the job done by and large using implied violence and suggestion rather than graphic violent depictions. Halloween II (1981) felt compelled to be competitive with the other slasher flicks which followed in Halloween 1978's wake, so with Halloween II there were a lot of nods to the Tom Saviniesque splatter-type effects (hypodermic needle in the eye, razor blade in the mouth, skin burnt by scalding water) that the first movie didn't have.
Another aspect of Halloween II (1981) that fell under the generalized trap of sequelitis was the need to have a significantly larger main cast than the first Halloween had. Whereas Halloween (1978) mostly concentrated on Laurie Strode, her two girlfriends, Dr. Loomis and Michael Myers, Halloween II had a dozen or so main characters. None of which were particularly distinctive as written. It's always been this weird juxtaposition for me in that I liked the actors and their acting, but the sheer amount of characters meant that none of them really got a lot of screen time, thus when they start getting knocked off I didn't really feel as much for them as I did the characters in the first Halloween. I'd also say that by way of script function, in Halloween II the Laurie Strode character spends most of the movie injured, lying in a hospital bed, going in and out of consciousness. Juxtaposed to Laurie Strode in the first Halloween movie, where Jamie Lee Curtis turned in such a compelling performance. It really isn't until the last twenty minutes of Halloween II that Laurie Strode wakes up and displays a bit of the energy from the first movie that made her memorable.
It must also be said that Haddonfield Memorial Hospital, where most of the action takes place, only has seemingly about a half dozen staff working there on the overnight shift. The locations used for filming denoted a hospital of a decent size with large buildings, yet only 6 people working the overnight shift? Another moment of silliness comes late in the film where we learn that Laurie Strode is Michael Myers's sister. Now, as to why John Carpenter felt that angle added anything to the movie I can't say. Personally, I always thought the Michael Myers character worked better in the first movie when his choice of Laurie Strode as a victim was seemingly random, thus Michael Myers had no discernable motive. Like, better to have no motive than a silly motive...I mean, who cares if she is his sister? And the ending (with the shooting of the eyes and the flailing around and slashing at the sounds of the unplugged ether and oxygen hoses) always seemed more than a bit ham-handed, even back in 1981.
Overall, though, Halloween II (1981) is a solid sequel. Not as good as Halloween 1978 but it manages to conjure up enough of the atmosphere of the original to provide a few jumps, scares and creepy moments.
Rainbow Bridge (1972)
Useful (to a point) for the Hendrix fan...
My first exposure to this movie was in the mid-1980's when I was in my teens. Had been playing guitar starting in 1982, had appreciated Hendrix via an older relatives record collection. Back in the 1980's, Hendrix on home video was fairly limited, thus for the avid Hendrix fan anything was appreciated.
Even within that context, though, Rainbow Bridge as far back as when I first saw it in the 1980's came off as a bit of a rip-off. Back then, I didn't know the history of the production or any of the behind-the-scenes stuff. I just knew the results I was seeing onscreen.
Said results for me boil down to what more than a few reviewers on this site have said about this documentary, in that by and large it certainly is a filmic time capsule depicting all the self-important, drug-deluded, acidhead babble righteousness of the late 1960's American hippies. One of those "hey, man, let's just start filming and see what happens!" things that were all the vouge in the late-1960's/early 1970's.
One of the producers of the film was also Jimi Hendrix's manager. As a result, a by multiple accounts reluctant Hendrix was coaxed by his manager into performing a couple of concerts to be filmed for the hippie be-in 'cast' and said manager used the attachment of Hendrix as a means of securing financing for the movie.
A couple months after Hendrix filmed the movie, he died. A little more than a year later, the movie got released and a soundtrack featuring some Hendrix music he had been working on in the studio in the months leading up to his death was put out.
As is abundantly clear by now, THE primary (really, the ONLY) calling card for Rainbow Bridge was the participation of Hendrix. The sole reason there remains any continued interest in the movie is because Hendrix was involved in it.
On those terms, Rainbow Bridge is...okay. Hendrix, Mitch Mitchell and Billy Cox turned in competent performances. Nothing particularly astounding in comparison to what they were doing in the summer of 1970 live re: Atlanta, or Berkley. But good. It should be noted, though, that within the context of the Rainbow Bridge movie there is only a little more than a 1/4 hour of Hendrix performing. The full audio sets of Hendrix performing the gigs used for the Rainbow Bridge film wouldn't be issued until 2020 as part of the Live In Maui release.
So, with Rainbow Bridge, one is left with 15 minutes or so of Hendrix playing and the remainder being a bunch of filthy hippie deadbeats yammering a bunch of stoned gibberish that they doubtlessly found extremely profound when they were saying it although probably less so the following day (or year, or decade) when they finally came down, man!
Twisters (2024)
Low expectations slightly subverted...
Okay. I was in my mid-20's when Twister came out in 1996. As such, Twister was never a case of some cherished childhood film that I would have felt was sacrilegious to even try and make a sequel to. Although Twister boasted a capable leading cast of actors I liked, it was never as if I thought any of their performances in Twister were THE definitive performances of their careers. In a dumb, big budget disaster flick, it's the disaster that is the star of the film. By those standards, Twister was a competent enough movie, albeit a movie I saw once, enjoyed and pretty much went on to forget in the subsequent near-30 years since it hit theaters.
Therefore, when it heard about Twisters, I figured I'd give it a shot. If for no other reason than the logic that the CGI would be better by leaps and bounds than it was in 1996. I didn't care if Twisters had ANYTHING to do with the characters in the 1996 Twister. I didn't even really care (or so I thought) who was in the cast of Twisters, because in a movie such as Twisters the storms are the thing, right?
Well...
To boil it down, my problems with Twisters are twofold.
1) Sadly, Twisters from start-to-finish is chock full of the handheld shakycam footage combined with editing whereby a new image/camera angle appears onscreen literally every 5 seconds. All of this works to the detriment of the CGI and the storm sequences.
2) I couldn't find a single character in the movie I cared about, nor many people in the cast who could even act adequately enough for a tv sitcom much less a feature film (even if it was just a disaster movie). This was particularly noteworthy regarding (although far from exclusive to) lead actress Daisy Edgar-Jones. Okay, fine, I'm past 50 years old, thus perhaps not expected to even know (or care) who she is or have seen anything else she has done. But...she can't act. And this would have been perhaps less noticeable in a rom com or tv sitcom but in a 2-hour movie where she gets the bulk of the screen time by way of her character getting the bulk of the screen time, her performance stands out like a sore thumb. Partly because she is at best adequate and partly because the 2-hour movie has about an hour of storm scenes and an hour of non-storm scenes where the focus is on character development. That hours' worth of non-storm scenes, trying to watch Daisey Edgar-Jones act, I honestly couldn't help but wonder if this girl was related to one of the producers of the movie in terms of how did she get this part? I mean, this is a movie where an estimated $150 to $200 million got dumped into the budget. At least with lead male actor Glen Powell, despite perpetually oozing douchebro male 'charm' he LOOKS and ACTS like a recognizable version of a traditional male lead actor. Not a good actor, but adequate for a popcorn big budget flick. Edgar-Jones is just this charisma free void of talent...did she get the role as a result of entering a contest via some trendy social media app?
Again, though, so as not to seem unduly harsh toward Edgar-Jones, the rest of the cast were just as forgettable. Even Powell, who I first saw in Top Gun Maverick, is clearly being positioned as the Next Big Action Star but beyond his good looks there's nothing there. The Twisters cast could have been replaced with any number of working actors to no detrimental effect, whereas at least with the first Twister by the end of THAT one the viewer sort of grew to care about Hunt, Paxton, Hoffman and the rest.
Anyway, I suppose I shouldn't complain. Clearly, Twisters 2024 was approached by everybody involved in making it as just product from start-to-finish and wasn't trying to pass itself off as anything it wasn't. It was just attach the project to an old movie title, film this bunch of hacky actors driving around Oklahoma, load on the CGI, jiggle the camera a lot, schlep it into theaters, hopefully make a quick buck and onto the next one.
Can't wait for the new Alien reboot!
Up the Creek (1984)
Animal House knock-off...with white water rafting
Forty years on (God, I'm gettin' old), 1984's Up the Creek circa 2024 definitely comes across a bit more timely than timeless. From the beginning scenes it's evident this is lowest common denominator humor, and a bit odd that this R-rated movie aspired to a level of comedy that would specifically appeal most to American males in their mid-teens since ostensibly that demographic wouldn't legally be able to see the movie.
Then again, Up the Creek always came across as this slightly weird flick in that it wasn't a teen boner comedy because there's very little by way of females disrobed (and what little there is amounts to several brief topless shots providing a few quick glimpses of boobies). There's also virtually nothing by way of explicit curse words, either. In point of fact, had the movie been released a year later than it was, with maybe 30 seconds of editing it could have easily qualified as a PG-13 rating, said rating which began usage in 1985.
Overall, Up the Creek is basically a second-rate Animal House-style rip-off with a few dashes of Porky's, Caddyshack and Stripes thrown into the pot. The second-rate nature of the whole biz extends to the casting. The sort of 'Delta House' gang of protagonists includes Tim Matheson of Animal House fame who plays a character named Bob McGraw but is basically reprising his Animal House 'Otter' character. Fellow Animal House alumni Stephen Furst plays a character named Gonzer who I think was supposed to be a cross between Animal House characters 'Bluto' and 'Flounder' but just comes across as a fat, ignorant slob minus the humor and charm of the Animal House characters. Dan Monahan, 'Pee-Wee' from Porky's, is part of the main gang to no discernable effect (seriously, watch the movie and see if he says or does one thing you find even slightly witty or amusing, keeping in mind that one is using Porky's as the comparative standard, no less). Sandy Helberg rounds out the 'Delta'/Slob main gang and is even worse than Monahan in that Helberg is clearly trying very hard to be funny but just...isn't. Actress Jennifer Runyon is fetching, appealing and cute enough as the Love Interest. Rounding out the cast are such 1980's notables as That Guy from the TV Show Hill Street Blues, The Actor Who Played Young Clark Kent in the 1978 Superman Movie, The Actress Who Played Betty Childs in the Revenge of the Nerds Movie and The Chick Who Was in All Those ZZ Top Music Videos. Honestly, Chuck the Wonder Dog - yes, you read that correctly - was more endearing and interesting to watch than the bulk of the secondary cast.
Anyway, the plot concerns a bunch of college/university students who compete in a white-water river rafting contest. Got it? Simple enough. Hey, this isn't a complicated film, here.
There's a lot of physical comedy, but it's all very broad, cartoonish and... not particularly funny. It wasn't even particularly funny back within the context of the mid-1980's, truth be told. There are several subplots going on. The most tedious and tiresome involves a rafting team from the Washington Military Institute who after being disqualified are determined to sabotage the rafting race at all costs. This subplot kind of tries to conjure up a Stripes vibe and fails miserably at it: when the military academy scenes take place the movie grinds to a comedy-free halt and the actor Blaine Novak who plays Captain Braverman is to be singled out along with the previously mentioned Sandy Helberg as the person in the cast who flails around onscreen the hardest (making goofy faces, mugging for the camera) in an attempt to be funny and consistently misses the mark. When an actor in a comedy isn't funny the result for the viewer is a sense of irritation whenever said actor is onscreen. Whenever Helberg and Novak are onscreen trying to be funny - which is probably a good 10 to 15 minutes of the movie - it just doesn't work.
However, despite the multiple instances of comic mediocrity, at about the halfway point Up the Creek begins to...well, not quite kick into gear, but at least get moving at a brisk pace. Shot on location in Oregon, Up the Creek starting at mid-point features a decent amount of neat white water river rafting sequences. Much of which contain the actual cast in actual rafts actually doing the rafting. A few shots were obviously stunt doubles, but by and large it was the actual cast doing the work on an actual river (as opposed to punching up all the action via CGI). The rafting sequences were competently shot and even in 2024 are exciting to watch. In truth, the rafting sequences (along with a stunt involving the facade of a house that was built next to the river specifically for the production and blown up toward the end of the movie) and the inimitable Chuck the Wonder Dog were the primary aspects of Up the Creek that made it somewhat distinguishable from the glut of Animal House-style Slob Comedy flicks that overpopulated the 1980's.
Given the overall tepid observations I've made throughout the review, why 7 stars? Well, it'd be disingenuous of me if I didn't disclose that perhaps a fair amount of the rating is derived directly from my own personal sense of nostalgia. Up the Creek was one of the first movies I saw at the then-new multiplex cinema that had recently opened up in my hometown. Back then, in a world before surveillance cameras were everywhere, you could theater-hop. Theater-hopping being the act of showing up when the cinema opened for the day, buying a ticket for the Noon matinee and then leaving one theater and sneaking into the next when the ushers weren't looking. Which is how my 14-year-old self saw Up the Creek back in 1984. It'd also be a fib on my part if I didn't disclose that back then I thought (even despite having snuck in and seeing it for free) Up the Creek was a bit...lame. However, it was FAR from the lamest in terms of mid-1980's dumb comedies. And that's all Up the Creek ever aspired to be: a dumb comedy that churned out a few bucks at the box office. It never pretended to be anything it wasn't. Nor did it aim higher to be anything than it ended up being within the context of a comedy movie. It was never trying to compete on the level of Animal House. Or Caddyshack. Or Stripes. Or even Porky's, when you got right down to it.
Hey, now THERE are a few tag lines the movie could have used in the trailers/ad campaign back in the day:
"Far from the lamest of the dumb comedies out there!"
or
"It's not trying to be as good as Porky's!"
Manson (1973)
First (and still the best) filmed documentary on the Manson family
A documentary made during the Tate-Labianca trials, Manson (1973) has always sort of gone under the wire in terms of programs, films and books that have focused on Charles Manson and his 'Family'. It got a very limited theatrical release in 1973, was pulled from distribution due to a combination of lack of financing and copyright ownership disputes - at one point being banned from being theatrically displayed in the US - managed to get produced in a very limited vhs run in the late 1980's by an apparent mafia-connected bootlegger, was (once again) yanked from distribution and finally in the mid-2000's one of the original co-directors of the movie began selling 'authorized' copies of the movie one could purchase via a website that sent orders to a dvd production facility located in Canada.
Got all of that? Whew!
Anyway, for those who have an interest in Manson, all the stumbling blocks this documentary encountered which in turn made it a rarity in the days prior to a free youtube upload were a shame. A shame because Manson (1973) remains, to me, one of the better documentaries made about the subject.
I will say that having seen so many poorly made programs/exploitation flicks/'docudramas' about the subject it seems like not a terribly high bar to hurdle. Yet it is precisely the amount of poorly made productions about the subject that makes Manson (1973) seem so good by comparison.
The filmmakers, Robert Hendrickson and Laurence Merrick, had the permission of Charles Manson to film the Family, thus granting them exclusive access to the participants. That access extended to filming at Spahn Ranch, Barker Ranch and various Death Valley locations the Family used to haunt. What results is as close to a real depiction of what Family life was like as one can get. Far more realistic than a docudrama shot on location with actors.
Since the filming began after Manson and his co-defendants in the Tate-Labianca trials were already incarcerated, there is VERY little footage of Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten (who were already in jail and unable to be interviewed) or Charles Watson, nor really that much of Manson himself, for that matter. However, there is a LOT of interview footage of the Family members circa 1969-1972 who weren't incarcerated along with former Family members and Family associates. The documentary isn't particularly sympathetic to Manson and his family, though. Which is to say that the Family didn't do themselves any favors re: their image. While I have long believed that once the media began in 1969 to focus on the Family these drugged up hippies tended to sort of amp up or exaggerate their approach to life for the cameras at times - they were astute enough in their dope fog to realize that their lifestyle and connection to the Tate murders was attracting more attention to them than anything else they had ever done would - enough of the reality of who they were managed to make it onscreen.
The result is a rather unsettling portrait of a bunch of people in their late teens and early twenties engaged in a bout of acid-laced groupthink. Honestly, they all parroted that Manson babble to the point where you felt there was precious little distinguishing one Family member from another in terms of personality. They didn't call the Family a hippy death cult for nothing.
Counter-balancing the Family are interviews with former Family members, associates (including people who were housed with either Manson or his co-defendants in jail, along with a few others who had partied with the Family at Spahn) and the like. Since all of it was filmed while the Manson trials were happening, there is an immediacy in terms of recollections...very 'in the moment' and very different from the barrage of Manson documentaries that began being churned out in the early 2000's because the footage isn't the same old newsreel footage from ABC/NBC/CBS of various people walking down the courtroom halls or the Family sitting outside the courthouse on the corner that have been overused for the last thirty years. Also, one is watching the actual people involved, rather than a bunch of actors doing re-enactments of things that happened which is ANOTHER overused aspect of the glut of televised Manson documentaries flooding the likes of MSNBC since the year 2000 or so.
Not quite ten stars because there are several points where the editing fell prey to the filmmakers sort of artificially emphasizing the creepy nature of it all, which is a bit of a disappointment since the Manson Family was plenty creepy on their own without the post-production dramatics thrown in. BUT considering this is a 50-year-old documentary, it holds up amazingly well.
The Fog (1980)
One of my least favorites of Carpenter's
I've never enjoyed 1980's The Fog.
Odd, since on paper the movie should be something right up my alley. It was made during the decade-long streak when Carpenter was making his best movies, from 1978's Halloween through to 1988's They Live. The movie was directed by Carpenter, written by Carpenter and Debra Hill, who had collaborated with Carpenter on many of the movies during that 10-year hot streak. The production team responsible for many of those movies was in place, including cinematographer Dean Cundey and production staff member Tommy Lee Wallace. The cast included many of Carpenter's frequent favorites one saw in many of those other movies, including Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Atkins, Charles Cyphers, Adrienne Barbeau and Nancy Loomis among others.
In the end, as is the case with virtually any movie, it boiled down to the story being told and how the story was executed onscreen.
The Fog concerns itself with a mist that begins to periodically settle over and recede from a small coastal town circa 1980. Within the mist are contained the ghosts of merchant sailors who were killed in a shipwreck off the coast of the town about 100 years before. As it turns out, the ghosts are after the remains of the cargo that sunk with them a century ago in the form of a gold cross hidden in a local church.
I will say that Carpenter does conjure up a sense of dread regarding the scenes when 'The Fog' rolls into the town. Building up a degree of impending doom was always one of Carpenter's strong suits as a filmmaker, and that is on ample supply here as it was in all his other films of the period. The cinematic atmospherics were effective enough, to be sure.
What dissipated 'The Fog' for me was a lack of solid characters along with a lack of a payoff to all the buildup of impending doom. The various characters in the movie, despite being played by actors I have liked in Carpenter's other movies, aren't really as well-defined as the characters in Carpenter's other movies. I found myself not really caring much about Jamie Lee Curtis's hitchhiker character, nor Barbeau's local radio disc jockey, nor the townsfolk in that none of them held any particular interest for me, thus when they ended up being placed in peril I didn't have much of anything by way of emotional investment as to if they escaped harm or not.
The plot itself - Ghost Pirates trying to claw back their Lost Treasure - honestly came off in 1980 as a clunky bit of business more suitable for an episode of Scooby Doo or a relic from an early 1960's Hammer Horror flick than something worth filming when The Fog was made. One might say anything Carpenter did in the wake of 1978's Halloween was bound to be a letdown, yet I didn't feel letdown by The Thing (1982) or Escape From New York (1981) ...no, The Fog was a flimsy premise from the get-go.
In addition, the payoff of The Fog was so muted. There were several instances throughout the movie as mentioned of the mist rolling in and receding. The big climax involved most of the main cast being cornered in the church where the Golden Cross was hidden, trying to fend off the Ghost Pirates concealed by the mist. Well, for anyone who by this late date hasn't already seen the movie, I won't go too deep into specifics beyond commenting that the climax was both abrupt and underwhelming. Even when first viewing the movie as a kid, my response was "lame." Apparently, there is an emerging consensus in some quarters that The Fog is one of those flicks that has been reassessed with the passage of time re: its overall effectiveness. Not so far as I'm concerned: while I can still find enjoyment to this day in watching those other great Carpenter flicks put out from 1978-1988, I've given The Fog several viewings over the last few decades and my reaction has remained consistent. That being it was a well-cast, well-filmed movie about a plot and subject matter that was both out of step with where horror cinema was going and spent 90 minutes setting up a scenario with a weak payoff.
The Trial of Billy Jack (1974)
8 out of 10 stars with a major caveat
The Trial of Billy Jack is both a bad sequel and a bad movie in general terms.
Its predecessor, 1971's Billy Jack, is a movie I have enjoyed for literally decades now. Billy Jack (1971) was an effective movie. Independently made with a hodge-podge of financing, in some ways Billy Jack was very reflective of the politics and societal conflicts of the time. There was a definitive bias as to who the protagonists (Billy Jack, the hippie kids at 'The School') and the antagonists (the local police, a majority of the local conservative townsfolk) were. Even so, in the character of Billy Jack, actor/producer/writer/lead actor Tom Laughlin created a main character that was unique. Billy Jack was a mixed-race Navajo Indian, former Green Beret/Vietnam War veteran and an accomplished martial artist. He lived on an Indian reservation in the American Southwest and is the protector of a progressive, counterculture school (named the Freedom School) and its students from the local, conservative townsfolk who don't like the school or the hippie students who go there.
In Billy Jack, the scope of the action and conflict is small, confined to the school and the town. In terms of an Us versus Them, the movie is easy to follow in terms of who is onscreen and what the plot points are. Billy Jack was released independently and literally through word of mouth it went on to eventually take in $32 mil 1971 USD. Not bad for an indie flick made for less than a million, released with virtually no fanfare and no advertising!!
Well, after Billy Jack became a smash success, the big-time studios came calling. Now assured financing and distribution by Warner Brothers, Tom Laughlin via the success of Billy Jack (1971) had earned the right to call all the shots and do as he pleased. He did. The result: The Trial of Billy Jack.
I guess the single most descriptive word to describe The Trial of Billy Jack is bloat. Whereas the first Billy Jack - perhaps via necessity of a small budget - was fairly lean in terms of the scope of the narrative, The Trial of Billy Jack is all over the place in terms of essaying and commenting upon the social issues of the day. While in Billy Jack one got to know many of the students of the Freedom School individually, in this sequel I'm hard-pressed to remember more than a couple of them because there are so many of them and they are given scant screen time. The scattershot nature of the plot means that the narrative is constantly running from one scenario to the next, leading to both confusion and exhaustion on the part of the viewer: what is happening? Why is it happening?
Billy Jack (1971) was just under 2 hours long yet seemed to fly by. The Trial of Billy Jack runs upward of 3 hours, the result of which is that there probably is a similar amount of action in both films but because the sequel is so much longer it gives off the effect of much less happening, making The Trial of Billy Jack a long (and at many points, uneventful) slog to watch.
The Trial of Billy Jack did do well at the box office, largely due to a very wide opening weekend release, but receipts dropped off quickly once the word-of-mouth regarding the bloated nature of the sequel got around. Why 8 out 10 stars from me? Because I love bad movies, and The Trial of Billy Jack is a bad, bad movie...made all the more so by how much I loved the first movie. Why not 10 out of 10 stars, then? Because The Trial of Billy Jack is simply too long with too little going on. There are several cringeworthy scenes that I enjoy sneering at in a snarky way, but about half of the 3 hours finds little to nothing of interest happening onscreen and the movie is drowned in this early 1970's Radical Left mantra in terms of a political tone that has aged about as well as a pair of bell-bottomed jeans.
Zapped Again! (1990)
Ugh
I'll be the first to say that the first Zapped! Movie, released in 1982, was hardly a landmark of American comedic cinema. It was a dumb teen boner sex comedy starring Scott Baio and Willie Aames, where the plot was sort of loosely based on the movie Carrie in terms of the telekinesis angle but by and large was an excuse to have some lowest common denominator laughs along with viewing some boobies. Zapped! Was just the kind of thing me as a horndog 13-year-old would find entertaining while viewing late night on HBO, which showed the Zapped! Flick seemingly a billion times in 1983.
7 years or so on from there, to virtually zero fanfare came the sequel nobody particularly wanted nor asked for in the form of Zapped Again! My own memory of this was as a rental from the local video store, while others may or may not have seen it aired on USA Networks Up All Night broadcast. Either way, Zapped Again! Was a cynical, humorless cash-in that was doubly disappointing since, as mentioned, the first Zapped! Hardly set high bar in terms of excellence.
I suppose the differences between the two were responsible for the end results. In Zapped! One had the novelty of both Baio and Aames as sort of co-male leads coming off of featured roles in hit tv shows. In Zapped Again! The male lead is...Todd Eric Andrews, a name circa 1990 that made video renters scratch their heads and say..."who?" In Zapped! Baio and Aames were surrounded by other actors (Scatman Crothers, Greg Bradford, Heather Thomas) who had a degree of name recognition in the late 1970's/early 1980's. Zapped Again! Is, by and large, populated with a bunch of unknowns in the major speaking roles...actors and actresses one had never heard of before and would never hear from again. Sprinkled throughout Zapped Again! Are some brief cameos by a few actors one HAD actually heard of, but these were folks (Linda Blair, Karen Black) whose career peaks by the time 1989 rolled around were way behind them and obviously showed up on set for maybe a day or two, made a few quick bucks and scuttled off.
Which I suppose sums up Zapped Again! In that it feels exactly like what it is, which is a direct to home video selection attached to a previously commercially successful title, cheaply thrown together with a minimum of care or concern, quickly rushed into rental stores to make a cheap buck off of folks who saw the title at their local video rental store and said to themselves "hey, I liked Zapped! I didn't know there was a sequel...what the heck, I'll rent it."
Unfunny (in point of fact, cringe-inducing watching what feeble attempts there were at comedy) and forgettable. Look, like I said, the original Zapped! Was hardly the highwater mark of filmic comedy, so the fact that Zapped Again! Failed to amuse isn't a case where I'm going to pretend this lame sequel was a cinematic betrayal of the original re: excellence. However, Zapped Again! WAS ostensibly supposed to be a dumb teen boner comedy...there's no laughs to be had, nor is the movie even mildly stimulating on an erotic level.
Not everything made decades ago is worth rewatching for the nostalgia factor, particularly things that stunk on ice the first time around. You've been warned.
Terror Train (1980)
Early - and not particularly good - entry into the 1980's slasher genre
For all the 'Scream Queen' hype attached to her name, Jamie Lee Curtis really only appeared in one horror flick I'd consider thoroughly excellent, which would be John Carpenter's 1978 Halloween. Anybody who retorted to that statement with "what about The Fog...or Halloween 2...or Prom Night...or Terror Train?"...I mean, all tastes being subjective, a person would have zero chance of convincing me any of those were as good as the original Halloween.
What some people tend to forget or overlook is that while Jamie Lee Curits did turn in a great performance as Laurie Strode in the first Halloween movie, her performance was far from being the only reason the first Halloween movie worked so well. The first Halloween had a simple - yet by and large believable - premise, along with a highly capable group of people both in front of and behind the camera.
Anyway, in the wake of 1978's Halloween taking in $80 million at the box office on a production budget of $300,000 there were no shortage of aspiring filmmakers and movie studios who were willing to take a gamble on making a low-budget, Halloween-styled horror flick that might provide a big payoff. Hence the decade-long 1980's boom of 'slasher movies' that followed in Halloween's wake. An early entry into this genre was 1980's Terror Train.
Shot in Canada in late 1979, Terror Train was, as mentioned, an early attempt to cash in on the Halloween-formula, all the way down to casting Jamie Lee Curtis as the lead. Part of the problem is that by the time Terror Train came out in 1980 the movie theaters had been oversaturated with a glut of slasher movies that had also been rushed into production in 1979 in the wake of Halloween's success.
However, for me, the biggest problem I've always had with Terror Train is just the ridiculousness of the premise combined with the genuine unlikability of the majority of the characters. The plot concerns a group of seniors in college having a drunken New Year's Eve bash aboard a train. Four years prior, as freshmen, these seniors had played a nasty prank on one of their then-fellow freshman which caused him to have a psychological breakdown and leave the college. Said freshman has decided to board the train for the senior bash and murder the former classmates responsible for the prank one by one. I'm not giving away anything by saying that, as the movie makes it abundantly clear both that this is what is happening and who is responsible for the murders.
Since the identity of the killer is known from the get-go, Terror Train by default isn't a whodunit. As to the victims, perhaps I've gone a bit too far to say they were all unlikeable, but in general terms they were certainly non-distinguishable/interchangeable in that they all sort of blended into this mass of drunken, stoned people in their early 20's that I didn't feel any particular affinity for one way or the other.
Even with that hurdle, the largest stumbling block for me with Terror Train has always been the situational premise of the train itself. Simply put, in terms of suspension of disbelief Terror Train is a flop. The train itself consists of 5 or 6 cars total as seen from the exterior shots of the thing barreling down the tracks. Yet the interiors depict a train able to have a sleeping car, a disco dance floor car, a magic show car, a bar car, a caboose, an engine room car, a lounge room car, etc. And each of these individual cars are seemingly able to accommodate dozens of people at a time if needed. At one point, it is discovered there is a killer aboard the train. So, the train stops, everybody disembarks and for some flimsy reason decide to GET BACK ON the train?!
Even as a slasher, Terror Train takes a long time to get gory. There's virtually zero suspense since usually The Killer shows up and stares for several minutes before dispatching his victims. I dunno...for me, the movie didn't work well even back in the early 1980's when it first hit cable tv and hasn't gotten any better over time. In point of fact, the joke even back in 1980 was that so many of those cheap-o horror movies were being churned out so quickly they were running out of holidays or locations for the movie titles, and Terror Train was one of said titles inserted into that punchline. Couple of decent moments here and there re: slasher nostalgia but overall forgettable.
Ruby (1992)
8 out of 10 stars, for all the wrong reasons
It'd be difficult to pick a winner between Oliver Stone's JFK and the film Ruby in terms of judging a race between the two movies as to which flick took more liberties with...er, um, 'historical interpretation' of the known facts surrounding the Kennedy assassination. I'd perhaps have to give it to Stone's JFK, if only because that movie had a longer run time.
Ruby was really no less ridiculous than Stone's JFK, nor less laugh-inducing. With both movies, as to how the amount of patently ridiculous conclusions ended up in the screenplays it always helps me to remember the axiom of many a conspiracy theorist, in that 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.' Or, put another way, just because there's no proof something didn't happen doesn't mean it didn't happen.
At least with the movie Ruby, the scope of the story is appreciably smaller than that of Stone's JFK. I suppose by necessity any movie concerning Jack Ruby would be, since Ruby was a fringe player.
Anyway, onto the plot. In a nutshell...Jack Ruby is a nightclub owner in Dallas, Texas in the early 1960's. Originally hailed from Chicago, had a life of low-level crime in the Windy City in the 1930's. Small-time stuff. Doubtless had some accomplices back then who were affiliated with organized crime associates along the lines of street level soldiers in the Mob. So far, that much is verifiably true. From there, Ruby the movie goes on to infer that somehow Jack Ruby is also simultaneously an informant for the Dallas Police Department as well as an informant on organized crime for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in a civilian undercover capacity. In addition, Ruby has also been entrusted to break out a high-level Mafia don out of a Cuban prison. Also, Ruby has been tapped by a Central Intelligence Agency agent to assassinate Fidel Castro with a rifle. Along with all this, apparently Jack Ruby was also on a familiar enough basis with the leading Mafia figures of the country to both dine and socialize with them on an infrequent basis.
I could keep going on re: itemizing the outlandish claims the movie Ruby makes regarding the activities and involvements of Jack Ruby. Rather than bother doing so, I'll just start asking questions about what I've already listed.
If Ruby was so connected with so many important people, why does he keep whining throughout the movie about tax problems he has concerning his nightclub? Shouldn't he have been able via his connections to have had those problems taken care of? Unless, of course, he wasn't nearly as connected with ANY of the important people the movie claims he was.
Why could the CIA entrust the assassination of Fidel Castro to a nightclub-owning, street-level hustler from Dallas, Texas? Conversely, if Ruby were as important in mafia circles as the movie claims he was, why would the CIA entrust the assassination of Fidel Castro to such a person as that?
Would President Kennedy have had so much difficulty getting laid that he would have found it necessary to fly to Las Vegas to have a tryst with a stripper procured for him by the Mafia via Jack Ruby? I know there are shades of Judith Campbell Exner in there, but it wasn't as if JFK was attending an Appalachia-style conference in order to hook up with Exner.
Does David Ferrie strike anybody as the kind of individual with whom one would confide a plot to murder the president to? Or as the kind of individual who would be on a first-name basis with leading organized crime figures?
Wouldn't one think that a policeman guarding the entrance of the Texas School Book Depository in advance of the presidential motorcade arriving (a circumstance that, like so many others in the movie, never happened) would have remembered being told by Lee Harvey Oswald that it was okay to let an unidentified man into the TSBD because he was there to watch the motorcade with Oswald?
The above are just a few of the many, many questions one asks oneself while watching the movie. Just general inquiries that question the logic and rationality of the inferences Ruby the movie makes. I suppose if one is predisposed to believe President Kennedy was murdered by a conspiracy then it is fairly easy to buy into what Ruby the movie is trying to sell. Myself, I can't help but laugh at the absurdity of it all, hence the 8 out of 10 stars: honestly, I look at Ruby (1992) as a comedy.
The kicker is that in the end according to Ruby the movie, Jack Ruby ends up deciding to shoot Oswald entirely of his own volition anyway. Not because the Mafia ordered Ruby to do so as a means of silencing Oswald, as so many other theories suggest. Nope, in Ruby (1992), Jack Ruby shoots Oswald because in doing so he will "blow the whole conspiracy wide open". As to exactly how shooting Oswald was supposed to accomplish this the movie doesn't explain. Nor does the movie explain why, if it wasn't a murder of opportunity re: Ruby being by happenstance physically proximate to Oswald during the basement parking garage transfer but was something Ruby planned, Ruby left his beloved dog in his car when he went to shoot Oswald. Nor does the movie chronicle how Ruby stalked Oswald at the police station throughout the 48 hours between Kennedy's shooting and Oswald being shot. The movie DOES depict Ruby as somehow being able to view Dealey Plaza and the assassination from his vantage point at the Dallas Morning News building, even though in reality that building was several blocks away and didn't have a view of Dealey Plaza.
Sherilyn Fenn plays a character named 'Candy Cane' which is a composite of real-life Carousel Club stripper Candy Barr along with JFK mistress Judith Campbell Exner and self-proclaimed JFK assassination witness Beverly Oliver, a crank who emerged in 1970 claiming at the tender age of 17 to have been standing across the street from the Grassy Knoll when Kennedy was shot and photographed the whole thing using a type of camera that didn't exist in 1963. I mean, that the co-lead character in the movie is somebody who not only didn't exist but has composite elements of a known fabricator and fantasist tells one all one needs to know about credibility and Ruby (1992).
Another 48 Hrs. (1990)
At best, a second-rate rehash of the first movie
Overall, I think Another 48 Hours is the victim of bad timing and lazy sequelitis, sequelitis defined as the tendency for a well-received original to spawn inferior sequels.
Part of the problem is that Another 48 Hours was put into production just after Eddie Murphy's best movie work - from 1982's 48 Hours through to 1988's Coming To America - had ended. Unfortunately, the realization that Eddie Murphy's best movie work was already behind him wasn't a notion people fully realized back in 1990, hindsight being 20/20, etc.
With the first 48 Hours movie in 1982, Murphy was riding the wave to stardom. He was the hottest comedian on tv via his classic Saturday Night Live characters. His comedy album Comedian was selling like hotcakes. His appearance in 48 Hours cemented his stardom. He deserved every bit of it from where I sat. Eddie Murphy in the early 1980's was hilarious.
48 Hours was an entertaining movie. The pairing of Nolte and Murphy felt new and fresh. There had been previous crime dramas set in San Francisco, but director Walter Hill utilized the city to good effect. The secondary cast were stocked with effective character actors turning in memorable performances even when limited to only a few scenes or a fairly minimal amount of screentime. Good action scenes. A violent, gritty movie that one could buy into because for the most part the action scenes and characters were grounded in realism enough to where the viewer wasn't overly busy thinking about plot holes or reacting to scenes with an attitude of 'this kind of stuff only happens in the movies'. On top of it all, Eddie Murphy was at the top of his game as the wisecracking convict, making audiences belly laugh out loud in theaters coast to coast.
Eight years on, Murphy's career was successful to the point that he was calling the shots in terms of script approval, camera angles screenplay development and a host of other moviemaking aspects that he hadn't when he was making the first 48 Hours. With his earlier movies, Murphy merely had to show up and be funny. By the time Another 48 Hours was being made, Murphy had the stature in the industry to expect and demand approval for virtually all aspects of a film he was involved in. Unfortunately, by the time the 1980's ended, Murphy was no longer merely content with being funny onscreen. Murphy wanted to be taken as seriously as a tough guy action figure and a romantic male lead capable of dramatic acting as he was a comedian. And therein lies the downward trajectory of Murphy's movie career, which began with 1989's Harlem Nights and followed through Another 48 Hours and beyond to Boomerang, Vampire In Brooklyn and the like: the rationale that because Eddie Murphy was highly entertaining and lucrative in comedic roles he would therefore be as much in other types of roles.
On paper, seemingly the major ingredients for a decent sequel to 48 Hours were there. Murphy and Nolte returned to reprise their roles. Director Walter Hill also came back. For me, the problem was one general to most movie sequels, where the sequel figures it has to go bigger in all aspects to be better than the original. Thus, Another 48 Hours has more violence, more gunshots, more bloody squibs, more action scenes (featuring plenty of explosions - funny, the first 48 Hours got by without showing any). What Another 48 Hours doesn't have is a secondary character that proves either as menacing, endearing, empathetic or as memorable as the original movie. Nor does Another 48 Hours have a plot as believable (or even a plot one can easily follow) as the first movie.
Lastly, with Another 48 Hours, the sequel didn't have the comedic newness of both Murphy and Nolte as screen partners nor Murphy in general...the comedy material simply wasn't there in Another 48 Hours and Murphy came across like he thought he no longer had to try particularly hard onscreen for laughs. I'd also be remiss in not pointing out that Another 48 Hours is basically a beat-for-beat remake of the first 48 Hours re: plot structure. All of which left me with the impression of Another 48 Hours being paradoxically both lazy and overblown. Intentionally overblown in the stunt and action department perhaps in an attempt to distract from the fact that, in the end, Another 48 Hours has nothing new to offer that the first movie hadn't already served up much, much better - in a far simpler, effective and funny way - the first time around.
Grease 2 (1982)
I'm definitely in the guilty pleasure camp re: Grease 2
Make no mistake that Grease 2 was a turkey at the box office when released to theaters in 1982. Probably deservedly so to a degree, because Grease 2 certainly didn't have a male lead who was as charismatic or could dance as well as John Travolta, nor did Grease 2 boast a female lead who could sing as well as Olivia Newton-John.
And unlike 1978's Grease which was part of the late 1950's nostalgia craze that had been saturating American culture in the 1970's, Grease 2 was set in the year 1961, which wasn't exactly a year America was retro-crazing over in the early 1980's.
However, shortly after barely breaking even financially during the initial 1982 US theatrical run, Grease 2 was in fairly heavy rotation on various movie channel stations (HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, The Movie Channel) that were just finding their way into American living rooms with the mass advent/installation of cable tv in the early 1980's. Thus, even though Grease 2 didn't set movie theater attendance on fire in 1982 plenty of folks had a chance (or, literally, hundreds of chances) to see it at home as 1983 dawned. At the tender age of 13 in 1983, I was one of those folks.
The thing about Grease 2 is...it's dumb. Dumb in any number of ways. Dumb musical numbers with dumb lyrics. A dumb script with dumb lines. In addition to dumb, Grease 2 is also inept. Inept in as many ways as it is dumb. Grease 2 is a movie musical boasting a main cast who, by and large, can barely sing in key much less sing well (Adrian Zmed and Lorna Luft excepted...pity neither of them are the leads). Grease 2 is a movie musical boasting a main cast who, by and large, can't dance together in terms of choreography much less dance well, with the male and female leads in particular being the worst singers and dancers out of the bunch. Grease 2 is also supposedly a sequel to Grease but character-wise has only the loosest connections to the first movie and virtually all of those connections are restricted to bit characters from the first movie.
However, I've always found Grease 2 to be stupidly and ineptly...charming. I've probably seen this flick upwards of 3 dozen times since 1983. Each time I watch it, from start to finish I remark to myself how dumb it all is. It was that way when I was watching it on HBO in 1983. It was that way when I had it on a pan and scan fullscreen vhs tape. It was that way when I began watching it on widescreen DVD and it remained that way when I bought it on blu ray. Bring on the Ultra HD 4K scan of Grease 2: I'm ready!!!
Don't get me wrong. Grease 2 is a bad movie. Even if it weren't a sequel to Grease and all the connections to Grease had been omitted and it was put out as a movie musical called, say, 1961...it'd still be just as awful. But, as I said, for me it is charmingly awful. Charmingly awful in that I never got the sense that Grease 2 was a cynical cash-in on Grease from top to bottom. When watching it, I got the sense that the cast were trying their very best at the time in terms of the singing and dancing and acting. That's where the charming aspect comes in. Even though when I watch Grease 2 I can't help but muse to myself how dumb it all is, I've never taken a snarky attitude toward it. More of an attitude of "oh, who cast this movie? Why cast a musical when so few of your leads can sing?" or "why make a musical with so many dance numbers when so few of the main cast can dance well?" and watching the principal characters trying their best to sing and dance despite being able to do neither well.
It was an early role for female lead Michelle Pfeiffer and male lead Maxwell Caulfield, both of whom were unknowns in 1982. Both of whom are the weakest dancers and singers in the main cast (Caulfield barely even dances in the film, while Pfeiffer's 'Cool Rider' is an eye-roller), all of which - like so much else in the movie - really makes you wonder what the producers of Grease 2 were thinking while the thing was in production. But, again, Grease 2 has always elicited an emotion from me along the lines of thinking the whole biz was a well-intended yet goofy misfire on the part of everyone involved rather than some cinematic equivalent of a crime against humanity. I mean, you DO get these diehard fans of 1978's Grease who think Grease 2 was nothing less than a criminal offense punishable by death or some such nonsense. For Pete's sake, it's 2024: lighten up and let it go. Altogether now...gotta go back, back, back to school again...whoah-oah, I gotta go, back to schoooooooool...again!
Escape from L.A. (1996)
Never thought this was quite as bad as seemingly everyone else did
When I think of John Carpenter's best work, it basically boils down to the years of 1978's Halloween to 1988's They Live.
I suppose part of why I feel these were Carpenter's best years was that I was in my late pre-teens when Halloween came out and at the end of my teens when They Live was released. A lot of Carpenter's stuff during that decade seemed to resonate best with adolescent males, of which I was one. Thus, I just LOVED Escape From New York...in part, I suppose, because I was still young enough when that came out that movies had the ability to transport my imagination. I was still young enough back then that I hadn't yet became cynical and was totally able to buy into the premise of that movie without wondering about the ton of plot holes that seemed so obvious decades later.
Plot holes ably pointed out by the hosts of my favorite youtube movie-centered channel (really, the only youtube movie-centered channel I watch so I suppose it is by default my favorite) RedLetterMedia, such as 1) why would one of the most valuable pieces of real estate on the planet, Manhattan Island in NYC, be turned into a prison? And 2) why would the President of the United States be played by an English actor with an English accent? And on and on.
However, the guys at RedLetterMedia also pointed out that whatever else on could say about Escape From New York, the one thing that was true was the cast and the production treated the material seriously. Escape From New York was clearly a B-movie, but one where all the performances were acted seriously. Which I think is another part of why Escape From New York worked as well as it did.
Which brings us to Escape From L. A.
Even though I was in my late-20s when it came out, I was looking forward to Escape From L. A. I was hopeful it would be a neat blast backward to the Carpenter style I had enjoyed in my early teens. Kurt Russell looked like he had kept himself in reasonable physical condition. Carpenter, Russell and Debrah Hill all had written and produced the movie, with Carpenter back behind the camera directing. Surely if anybody could get a sequel to Escape From New York right it would be John Carpenter, Kurt Russell and Debrah Hill...
Well...
I think part of the problem as to why Snake Plissken's jaunt to the West Coast came up a bit short had to do with Escape From L. A. being a bit TOO much like Escape From New York in terms of the plot points or beats of the movie. Whereas Escape From New York felt like an original premise back in the early 1980's, Escape From L. A. circa 1996 in terms of general storyline structure came off a bit too much like an intentional copy of Escape From New York. As such, throughout the viewing of Escape From L. A. everything feels too familiar. Like Carpenter, Russell and Company were too afraid to deviate from the original New York formula. Comes across as playing it safe.
The other part of the problem is that unlike Escape From New York most of the cast in Escape From L. A. are either underplaying their parts or hamming it up and going over the top. Outside of Russell, nobody else in the L. A. cast feels like they're taking the material seriously. Thus, as a viewer, I found it impossible to suspend disbelief and take the movie seriously.
Finally, Escape From New York demonstrated an effective use of matte paintings, miniatures, animation and the like to create a believable movie world environment. Escape From L. A. had a much larger budget than Escape From New York did, yet somehow having more money seemed to work to the detriment of the sequel re: world building. A lot of the settings looked far more synthetic and professionally set dressed than those in New York. And there was a lot of very, very clunky CGI in the sequel which looked as bad in 1996 as it does in 2024. One might say CGI in 1996 was still in the early stages, yet the first film in 1981 managed to get the job done better without the aid of any CGI.
In the end, Escape From New York had an underlying sense of menace. Escape From L. A. was just a bit too cartoonish. Not the worst sequel I've ever seen but fell a bit short of the mark. Some good moments here and there...I dunno. Maybe the whole Snake Plissken premise was only bound to work well once the first time around.
Amityville II: The Possession (1982)
An odd mixture of repulsion and ridiculousness sprinkled with fact
With the box-office success of the first Amityville Horror movie, seemingly a sequel was inevitable. The problem being that the 1979 movie The Amityville Horror (based on the 1977 book) didn't really have much material by way of a 'sequel' to conjure up, since it slowly became apparent after the first Amityville Horror movie that the subjects of that film - the Lutz family - had made up the stories of the house being haunted and the supposedly non-fictional book and movie were a bunch of bunk.
The one truthful aspect of the Amityville Horror book and movie was that a grisly murder spree had taken place there just prior to the Lutzes moving in. In 1974, 24-year-old Ronald DeFeo Junior murdered his parents and his four younger siblings via shooting them with a shotgun while they slept in their beds. During DeFeo's subsequent trial his lawyers proposed several theories for what happened, running the gamut from varying degrees of drug-induced insanity to self-defense. DeFeo himself gave multiple accounts over the decades of his subsequent incarceration as to what happened, claiming at different times that 1) he killed everybody, 2) he had no memory of killing anybody, 3) his eldest sister Dawn helped kill some of the family and 4) 'somebody' else of whom he either couldn't be sure of or couldn't mention who wasn't Dawn helped him. Local lore claimed the house itself was built on the site of an ancient Indian burial ground (a claim that has never been confirmed via ANY type of historical records) which made the property (and, by extension, DeFeo) 'possessed' and that DeFeo and his eldest sister Dawn may have been involved in an incestuous relationship.
Got all that? Whew! Good.
Well, after the Amityville house passed from the Lutzes to different owners - none of whom ever claimed anything by way of supernatural happenings - the producers of Amityville 2 decided to, er...um, 'fictionalize' the DeFeo murders as the basis for the script/screenplay for Amityville 2. Thus, the sequel is a prequel...of sorts.
I guess a bit of context in 2024 is useful as to explaining how the whole Amityville myth got rolling in the late 1970's in the first place, being that back then most people outside of the regional metro New York area had probably only heard of the Amityville house via the book and the 1979 movie. Back then, by and large it was word of mouth in terms of the rumors surrounding the DeFeo case and the Lutz family. Everybody loves a haunted house story, and supposedly this one had some basis in fact. So, into that vacuum of rumor and urban legend came 1982's Amityville II: The Possession.
Being a prequel, the plot loosely concerns itself with the DeFeo family. For screenplay (and, assumedly, legal) purposes, their names are changed to the Montelli family. Most of the Montelli children don't look Italian, but whatever. Amityville 2 throws in a priest called to bless the Montelli house in a throwback to a similar role for Rod Steiger in the first Amityville Horror movie. The Montelli parents physically slap each other around, with the Montelli father in particular being violently physically abusive to the entire family (a claim the real-life Ronald DeFeo Junior made after the murders). The eldest Montelli siblings (named 'Sonny' and 'Patricia') engage in incest after Sonny is possessed by some sort of malevolent spirit which - like the first Amityville movie - originates from the basement of the house. About mid-film, Sonny embarks upon a murderous rampage, shoots the entire family in a rather disturbing sequence, is subsequently arrested and alternates between claiming not to know what happened and while incarcerated intermittently revealing to the priest that he is possessed by a demon. The priest sneaks Sonny out of prison, brings him to the Amityville house, performs a ritual to rid the demon from him and eventually Sonny is cured and returned to prison. The movie ends with the empty house and a FOR SALE sign on the front lawn, presumedly just before the Lutz family bought it.
In factual terms. Amityville II: The Possession is only loosely based on fact. In real life, Ron DeFeo Junior was aimless junkie in his early twenties who was basically supported and overindulged by his parents because they refused to make him accept any meaningful responsibility. In Amityville II, Sonny Montelli is depicted as a decent, Waspy-type with no references of any kind made toward drug addiction. The DeFeo's never had a priest who was meaningfully involved with the family in terms of spiritual counselling vs. Amityville II's priest who actually saw incidents of violent physical domestic abuse, much less heard a confession from the eldest DeFeo daughter claiming she had incestuous relations with her brother. Ronnie DeFeo Junior was taken into police custody within 24 hours after the murders took place, confessed to the crimes while in police custody, remained in custody throughout his subsequent trial and a year after the murders was found guilty of six counts of second-degree murder and sentenced to six sentences of 25 years to life: DeFeo was never sprung from prison via a fictitious priest, taken back to the crime scene and subject to an exorcism. It may seem foolish to go to the lengths I have to explain the reality versus the movie fiction except for the fact that there is apparently no shortage of simpletons out there who blather drivel along the lines of "well, the first Amityville Horror movie was a bunch of bunk, but the second movie was true!" The second movie was 'true' inasmuch as the bare skeleton of the screenplay/script was based on some fact. However, the vast bulk of what ended up onscreen was the product of Ronnie DeFeo's ever-changing story combined with a couple of fraudster parapsychological ghost hunter hoaxers called the Holzers who latched onto the Amityville story immediately after the 1977 book and 1979 movie were commercially successful.
As mentioned, the movie itself is this peculiar blend of uncomfortable moments coupled with laughable attempts at movie horror. Most of the first half of the movie is where most of the disconcerting moments happen, including the violent domestic abuse, incest and the murder sequence. The second half of the movie, unfortunately, goes off the rails into these ridiculousness scenes of Sonny being possessed and the fictitious priest saving his soul that come off as a bunch of half-baked, third-rate leftovers from The Exorcist. ALL of which adds up to an unpleasant and at times disturbing viewing experience with plot holes wide enough to drive a tractor trailer through. There have probably been upwards of a hundred plus films released since 1979 with the word Amityville in the title, yet virtually none of them have dealt truthfully and/or factually with the one incident that verifiably happened there. I suppose for that one would need an accurate true crime documentary.
Saturday the 14th (1981)
Awful in 1981, hasn't gotten better with age
This thing deservedly flopped when it was initially released during a limited US theatrical run in 1981. Deservedly for all sorts of reasons.
Circa 1981 in the United States, the cinematic horror genre had completely moved away from the traditional Dracula/Frankenstein/ Wolfman/Creature from the Black Lagoon template and slasher flicks were all the rage. Which sort of begs the question as to why anyone doing a horror movie spoof in 1981 would be bothering with the traditional horror template mentioned above since the genre itself had changed. I mean, in 1981 to title your horror spoof film Saturday the 14th and NOT make a slasher parody considering the popularity of the Friday the 13th films at the time...comes across as either clueless or an intentionally misleading attempt to bait and switch.
The production itself comes off as a cheap one in terms of the sets, costumes and the like. One reviewer at the time mentioned that Saturday the 14th resembled something made quickly for not much money specifically to be shown on tv, and I can't disagree with any of that.
All of the above had confused me for ages until I recently dug a little deeper and found out the flick was produced by Julie Corman - Roger Corman's wife - for Corman's production company New World Pictures. After finding that out, suddenly it all made sense to me. From the meager cheap feel of the entire production to the misleading nature of the ad campaign and how dashed off the whole biz came across...watching it, it feels like the entire movie took at most a week to make. A horror movie spoof that is neither funny nor scary. It also explains a fairly lengthy section mid-film involving an actress, Kari Michaelsen, who disrobes and takes a bath. The actress was about 19 years old when the film was shot, though she's playing a character who is clearly supposed to be under 18 years old. This makes the lingering camera work featuring her in her panties, then in the tub barely covered by bubbles followed up by her running around barely wrapped up in a towel a bit disturbing: Roger Corman certainly never shied from nudity although as far as I can remember it involved women playing characters who were supposed to be over 18. The bathtub scene here feels like watching an underage girl be exploited: even though the actress was just barely legal and nothing by way of explicit nudity was shown, the implication re: the age her character was supposed to be was both clear and creepy, to be frank about it.
I can't say the cast didn't make an effort, but there was a limit to what they could do considering the weak script, dialogue and jokes. Honestly, I couldn't see anyone rating this thing 5 stars or higher unless they were doing so purely for nostalgic reasons...like, say, they were 10 or 11 years old in 1981, got a kick out of watching the movie back then and rewatching it nowadays gives them a warm retro cuddly feeling. And I can understand that, but that isn't the same as saying in general terms that Saturday the 14th is a good movie, because it isn't.
Alien³ (1992)
Some bold choices although ultimately a letdown...
For quite some time (ever since I first saw the movie in the theaters all those years ago, actually) I've been on the fence about this third installment in the Alien franchise, my opinion as to if I actually liked the movie sort of teetering and tottering back and forth.
One thing for sure is Alien 3 suffered from a lot of pre-production and post-production problems. This was widely reported on at the time of the initial US theatrical release and is something easily detectable by the viewer while watching the film. It literally feels like it went through the multiple scripts and script revisions that it did, and it wasn't surprising that when the film started shooting there still wasn't a completed script.
I think a larger part of the problem was just sequelitis in general. By the third go-around, the entire concept of the Alien as a monster had really ran its course in terms of being effective. From the single Alien in the first movie to the multiple Aliens (including the gigantic Queen alien) in the first sequel Alien 2, the audience had already viewed the gamut of the monster's various forms. The audience had already seen not just one but two satisfying conclusions regarding the Ripley character escaping doom. Really, there was nowhere left to go with the concept and the franchise, but Alien 2 was highly profitable so a third entry was seemingly inevitable.
I will say that Alien 3 didn't play it safe by manner of playing to presumed audience expectations. Somebody once likened the first Alien movie to a Haunted House ride and the second Alien movie to a roller coaster. The choice to follow-up James Cameron's bombastic, over-the-top Aliens/Alien 2 (make no mistake: Aliens was a fantastic sequel) was to scale everything back. THAT decision left many viewers both surprised and perplexed.
However, that choice by definition also limited the scope of the flick. What the movie was left with was Ripley, this time in the very barren, filthy setting of a male prison camp fighting against a single Alien creature. Unlike the first two Alien movies, where Ripley was a part of an ensemble cast of memorable co-stars/characters that the viewer liked/empathized with, for me there wasn't a single co-star/character in Alien 3 that I either liked or cared about. In point of fact, I had a difficult time at points even distinguishing one male prisoner from the other, which wasn't helpful when the single Alien creature began attacking them: who is this being killed? Another unlikable male prisoner? Why should I care?
At roughly the halfway point of the nearly two-hour movie I had largely lost interest, another aspect that wasn't helpful considering there was still almost another hour to go. As to the ultimate conclusion, Alien 3 opted to go a much darker route than the first two movies...this time there wasn't a sense of relief for the viewer as to how Ripley ended up. Again, I will say that was a bold choice re: not playing it safe. However, the ending - much like the rest of the movie - is dour, glum and a downer.
6 stars, mostly for the set design and the willingness of the production to try something new. One certainly can't say Alien 3 wasn't distinct from the first two movies, or that it was a paint-by-numbers sequel. But of a bummer, though. These days circa 2024 I consider Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986) the only two films in the entire Alien franchise worth watching or remembering. Alien 3 is admittedly a bit better than the rest of what followed but that isn't saying much.
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
Not a movie I've ever enjoyed, thus why such a high rating?
I had the misfortune at the age of 12 years old to have bugged my father to take me to see this movie in the theaters when it was released in 1982. Back then, I had seen the original Halloween movie on tv and was scared out of my wits. Hadn't seen Halloween 2 (that one didn't get a tv version release right away) but was desperate to see Halloween 3. My father eventually caved in, took me to see Halloween 3 - probably just so I would shut up about it - and when it was over he said he didn't know what the fuss about all these modern horror movies was over since Halloween 3 wasn't all that bad. I, on the other hand, felt totally gypped. No Michael Myers? Instead, a dumb story about some deadly rubber Halloween masks, robots and a silly jingle played over and over again?
One common lament fans of this entry in the Halloween franchise make is that Halloween III: Season of the Witch gets unfairly maligned because it is unfairly compared to the other Halloween movies that have Michael Myers in them. Well, as you've read, I can tell you from my experience there was a bit of deception going on with this movie regarding the ad campaign leading up to the theatrical release. The tv commercials were very brief and didn't present a clear image as to what the movie was or wasn't about. Many years later, I read that the movie wasn't made available for reviewers back then to see pre-release. Simply put, these things were done in order for Halloween III to make a fast buck at the box office before the word of mouth about not only the movie having no Michael Myers but also being dumb no matter what the title leaked out. Context of the times, when pre-internet one would have to wait usually until at a bare minimum a couple days after a movie was released to the theaters before the reviews were printed in the newspapers.
Anyway, ten or so years go by and one Halloween weekend I happen to catch the flick on a scary movie marathon on cable tv. Ever since then, for the last 3 decades or so I watch it once every couple of years. Mostly because I enjoy watching bad movies, partly because of nostalgia regarding my own experience seeing it as a kid. Yet I still can't quite figure out why, since Halloween III: Season of the Witch was, is and always will be such a frustratingly dumb movie. Frustrating in that you have such a babe like Stacey Nelkin in the movie yet the scenes she was in where there should have been full-on nudity DIDN'T have full-on nudity. Frustrating in that it wasn't scary in the least, and this was true even when I was 12 years old. Dumb because it's just one plot hole after another and one scene after another that even within the logic of the movie causes one to scratch their head and go "huh?"
Silly from start-to-finish, no satisfaction on the horn dog front, no gore, scares or thrills and chills. Yet, if I'm being truthful, Halloween III: Season of the Witch is a far more entertaining watch than the majority of the other films in the Halloween franchise released after the first one in 1978: with the exception of 1981's Halloween 2, 1988's Halloween 4 and 1998's Halloween 7 I find I plain can't watch any of the other flicks in the franchise. For reasons that still prove somewhat elusive but probably fall in general terms under the "so bad it's good" ethos, Halloween III: Season of the Witch is a guilty pleasure I find myself coming back to every couple of years...and finding that incessant Silver Shamrock jingle playing on a loop in my mind for weeks afterwards.
The Rosebud Beach Hotel (1984)
Even my enthusiasm for 80's b-movie junk has limits...
I've watched this movie probably a half-dozen times over the last 40 years or so (yeah, yeah, a waste of my time/life, whatever), yet I'm at a loss as to why...so much for the idea of age equating wisdom.
It may be due to having seen this first late at night via whatever premium cable movie channel it aired on in the mid-1980's when I was a teenaged horndog on the lookout for a little t & a on television. Sort of a wistful nostalgia for a time when seeing women disrobed wasn't readily available anywhere at anytime with the mere click of a button or swipe of a screen.
I should also say I've enjoyed other flicks lead actress Colleen Camp has been in. I always liked Christopher Lee in the Hammer Dracula stuff. Fran Drescher isn't an actress I've ever much liked, although her appearance in this movie was very early in her career thus she wasn't yet amping up her accent and annoying vocal mannerisms.
I think a lot of it has to come down to The Rosebud Beach Hotel just being a film I couldn't make sense of. It wouldn't be inaccurate to define it in the strictest terms as an 80's sexploitation comedy except for the fact that it was neither stimulating nor was it funny. There is a bare-bones plot which I'm fine with in that I never really required the boner comedies I enjoyed in my teen years to have intricate storylines.
I didn't find the amount of characters and subplots (of which there were many) by default to be either confusing or inhibiting. It just all came down to the sight gags and one-liners failing to connect with me. Very dumb jokes on a very juvenile level that failed to amuse me when I was 15 years old back in 1985. Then again, what else does one expect when your movie has Eddie Deezen as the onscreen comic relief? As another reviewer elsewhere mentioned, even the nudity here feels forced and out of nowhere, as if the director or producer or whomever suddenly decided mid-film that it was time to show some boobies. Mind you, I had no objections then (nor do I now) about nudity on film, but nudity on film is one of those things where if it isn't approached with at least some eroticism the result is awkward, as is the case here.
Let's see, what else? The movie was shot on what appears to be a cheap grade of film. Pretty grainy, visually. In addition, the movie barely rounds out at 83 minutes and I'd wager a good 10 minutes of those involve the opening and closing credits that recycle footage shown again during the movie to list the cast and crew over. About the only positive aspect I enjoyed circa 2024 was seeing and hearing Cherie and Marie Currie sing several tunes that certainly screamed mid-80's hair metal pop rock.
Alien Resurrection (1997)
Only 4 stars may seem a bit harsh...
Only 4 stars may seem a bit harsh. Particularly to diehard Alien fans who enjoy everything and anything Alien-related.
For me, I think part of my 'problem' is that I was around at the beginning when the first films of the franchise were released theatrically. I can remember when the particulars of the Alien concept were new, fresh and exciting. People in space encountering space monsters was hardly a new film concept even when the first Alien film was released. What WAS new was how genuinely innovative and scary the first Alien film was. Unlike its forerunners of the 1950's and 1960's - which were rarely particularly scary, realistic or violent - Alien 1979 was a VERY visceral film. The penetrative nature of the face huggers morphing into the explosive chest bursters which then evolved into the relentlessly vicious and lethal aliens...simply put, Alien 1979 was uniquely in a class of its own. Brutally effective.
The follow-up, Aliens 1986, was to my mind one of the few sequels of any genre or franchise that managed to live up to the original. Alien 3 was an honest albeit uneven attempt at making an interesting sequel. The problem from a creative standpoint was the same problem so many movie sequels run up against (and precious few are able to surmount) in that as with so many other things in life oftentimes the first time is the most exciting time specifically BECAUSE it's new, refreshing and unknown. Thus, while Alien 3 DID undertake said honest effort at creating a movie that in many aspects wasn't a slavish carbon copy of either Alien or Aliens, in the end the Alien core concept of face hugger/chest burster/full-size Alien was something the third movie could neither afford to ignore nor was it something the third movie could really do much by way of innovation with, either. Simply put, the third time wasn't a charm. However, a bold - and seemingly final as far as the Ripley character was concerned - ending for Alien 3 at the very least ensured that the franchise would conclude on memorable terms before it had devolved into a pale carbon copy of those core concepts.
Well, Alien 3 also made $100 million at the box office. Creative concerns never trump financial ones when there is still a dollar to be made. Which brings us to 1997's Alien Resurrection.
Alien Resurrection was the first film in the franchise I was, by and large, just plain bored watching. The cast, even the actors I'd liked in other films, turned in a bunch of mediocre performances portraying characters that I found I had little to no feeling for. As such, I felt little to nothing by way of urgency as to if any of them survived being attacked by the Aliens. The two main characters were a genetic clone and a robot, making identifying with either of them a fruitless endeavor for me as a human viewing the movie. The face hugger attacks elicited a yawning response. The main setting (ostensibly a space-based military research facility which looked basically like the space freighter of the first Alien flick) was overly familiar, as was most everything else in this 4th installment, most of which came across as paint-by-numbers in terms of the plot and script. There was an attempt to evolve the character of Ripley via the clone angle, but Weaver looked as visibly bored onscreen for this 4th go around as I felt watching her.
Honestly, the only film in the franchise after Alien 3 that I've semi-liked is Prometheus. Mostly because at least with Prometheus it wasn't the same old Alien core concept trotted out once again. Sadly, after Prometheus the franchise went right back to the traditional face huggers, chest bursters and the traditional full-size aliens, yet minus any memorable human characters one cares about. Now, here in the spring of 2024, I guess there's another Alien flick to come out this summer which is supposed to take place between the events of 1979's Alien and 1986's Aliens...it's called a 'roots film' instead of a sequel. I think I'll opt not to see that flick and instead stay home and...I dunno, maybe take a nap. Or maybe watch Alien 1979...or Alien 1986. Fortunately, those movies still hold up.
Damien: Omen II (1978)
Off-the-wall in spots, effective in spots, ridiculous in spots
I've enjoyed this flick for decades. As far as sequels go in general, it's not the worst. It IS, however, all over the place in terms of efficacy. It's a feeling I've had since I first saw it all those years ago.
A lot of plot holes and chronological problems. First off, the sequel was released only two years after the first Omen movie. Yet the story has jumped ahead seven years in the narrative. At the end of The Omen, the Damien character seems aware of who he is re: the Antichrist. Yet The Omen II had Damien starting the film seemingly unaware of who he is in this respect.
Like the first flick, Damien: Omen II sees characters who pose a threat to Damien dispatched in a series of bizarre, seemingly unconnected accidents. In the early stages of the film, before Damien is aware of who he is, the deaths are presaged by the appearance of a raven who stares at the victims. That's right, a...raven. Surely a menacing animal symbolic of Satan, right? Although I suppose ravens and crows ARE symbolic of death in literature, so there's that, I suppose. Still, a bit of letdown from, say, the rabid attacking dogs of the first Omen movie.
Also, like the first flick, Damien: Omen II has various adult characters who assist and/or protect Damien. The most confusing of which is a young Lance Henriksen who portrays an instructing officer at young Damien's military academy. Confusing in that despite having seen the movie at least a dozen or so times since the late 1970's I still can't quite figure out why this particular character exists. He seemingly doesn't do anything of note re: helping/assisting Damien. He just sort of stands around, watching. At one point he DOES tell Damien who he actually is, but that's about all, really. And wouldn't Damien have found that out eventually anyway?
I will say with respect to inventive death scenes, Damien: Omen II holds up alongside the original Omen movie well. I'll also say that. Much like The Omen, the sequel is populated for the most part with a solid cast of actors. All of whom play the material straight and serious. Jonathan Scott-Taylor did quite a good job as Damien Thorn. William Holden provided the right amount of age and gravitas for his role. Lee Grant was a delight to watch, even when she was occasionally chewing scenery as it were. Robert Foxworth was probably the weakest in the cast in terms of ability, which sadly showed onscreen regarding scenes with his character as the focal point.
I think a lot of what made Damien: The Omen II fall short from the first Omen movie was just perhaps a bit too much going on, plot-wise. Combined with a lack of focus, or a central focal point. By and large, The Omen 1976 was told from the perspective of the Gregory Peck character, Robert Thorn. There were several scenes told from the perspective of Robert Thorn's wife, as well. The relative sparseness of main characters kept the narrative on track and helped the viewer build a connection with who was onscreen. Damien: The Omen II has upward of a dozen main characters and four primary settings. The net effect of this is a disjointed narrative, bouncing from one location to the next and one group of main characters to the next. There are multiple death scenes involving secondary characters who had either only just been introduced to the film a few scenes before or had a minimal amount of screen time earlier in the movie. All of which makes the character of Damien at times feel like a co-star in the movie that he was ostensibly supposed to be the focus of: Damien disappears offscreen for large chunks of the film. This was fine for the first Omen movie, where Damien was 4 or 5 years old and barely spoke. However, as a speaking teenager in the sequel who discovers he is the Antichrist, one would think Damien would have a bit more to say and a bit more to do. Particularly since, as mentioned, actor Jonathan Scott-Taylor was a very capable child actor. One is often wishing to see more of Damien and less of William Holden, Robert Foxworth and Lew Ayres diddling around inside various boardroom meetings at the Thorn Industries high-rise building in downtown Chicago.
However, regarding general sequelitis, Damien: The Omen II manages to capture enough of what made The Omen 1976 work well to squeak by as an effective sequel. A heck of a lot more effective than the follow-up, Omen III: The Final Conflict.
Parasite (1982)
Has been a guilty pleasure of mine despite being a mediocre movie
In truth, I'm not really sure 'pleasure' would be quite the word to use, either. However, it is a flick I've watched easily a dozen or so times over the last 40 years or so.
In the continuing spirit of full disclosure or truthiness, I can't even rightly say as to why I still watch this flick once every couple of years. Looking back, I suppose I can understand why I watched it when it was first aired on the various premium cable tv movie channels in the early 1980's, in that I was 13 years old and would watch whatever dumb movies were on HBO, Cinemax, Showtime or The Movie Channel. And make no mistake in that Parasite, even by b-movie standards, is a dumb movie.
I wouldn't quite say Parasite was a terrible movie, though. It's certainly not memorably bad in a ''so bad it's good'' way. The urban legend was that once Demi Moore got really famous in the late 1980's/early 1990's she attempted to have the major nationwide home video franchises remove all the copies of this flick from their inventories so nobody would ever see it. Which never made sense to me in that by the time she supposedly had enough clout in the industry to even make such a thing happen Parasite by then wasn't even being shown on cable tv. Nobody remembered the movie. Even beyond that, Demi Moore's part in the movie wasn't anything for her to have been ashamed of or embarrassed by. Her acting was competent enough in that she did the best she could within the limitations of the budget and script. She didn't have to do any nudity or anything. Plus, Parasite 1982 in essence was about the monster and the 3D; nobody cared who starred in it.
Despite my longstanding personal fondness for the movie, though, I really couldn't recommend it to anyone who didn't have a nostalgic fondness for early 80's junky b-movies. I definitely wouldn't recommend it to anyone born in 1990 or later. I've never seen the movie in an actual theater in 3D, but I can certainly say in terms of home viewing Parasite isn't scary or suspenseful in the least. It never was, really. The monster looks like an oversized leech...and that's about it. Looks like the movie was filmed in Death Valley or somewhere in the western US desert country. Lots of dust, dirt, cacti...
Overall, forgettable.
Janis (1974)
A collection of Joplin performance and interview clips
My review description may seem a bit blunt, but it literally describes what this 1974 flick is. It's not a documentary. Nor is it a docudrama. Nor is it a rockumentary. It is just over an hour and a half of Janis Joplin concert footage combined with Joplin interview snippets. And nothing more than that.
Which is fine. Particularly if one just wants to see and hear Joplin perform and periodically talk in an interview setting. Well, that's exactly what you get. Virtually nothing by way of others looking at the camera and saying why they think Janis is so great. Definitely not a nostalgia trip, either: the film was put out four years after Joplin passed away and has nothing by way of filmed interviews conducted after Joplin died. Thus, it's not recollections from people who knew her filmed thirty years or more after the fact.
Not quite ten stars for the reasons others have mentioned as far back as the initial theatrical film critic reviews in late 1974. Some of those reasons being the lack of a chronological approach in reference to the placement of the performance clips in the film. Little to nothing mentioned or referenced re: Joplin's pre-1967 life. No interviews with any of the band members in any of the groups who played with Joplin, nor were there any interviews with family or friends. As one reviewer commented back in 1974, there is no narration or commentary...not even as much of a mention in the movie that Joplin died. Contrast all of that with the 1973 film about Jimi Hendrix, where at least one has some sort of a sense of who Hendrix was offstage before he became famous as well as how his fame affected him.
Overall, though, 1974's Janis: A Film is useful in providing an undiluted look and listen to Joplin the singer and performer. Far as I know, this has never been upgraded to dvd form in the United States.