inspectors71 Reviews

The Death of Stalin (2017)

I Feel So, So Creeped Out!

[9/10 · 26 May 2023]

Oh, Lordy, how close were these characters to the real people? If you want to learn how illegitimate governments use and abuse power, this is your movie. Forget Seven Days in May, Downfall, All the President's Men, etc. This black-hearted comedy is about the machinations of the Politburo (or whatever these cunning clowns called themselves) to carve up power at the end of the reign of the 2nd worst mass murderer of all time, Josef Stalin. The callous disregard for the most basic respect for human life leaves one horrified, but the machine-gun delivery of snide and snark between these murderous clowns makes you squirm on the sofa. You know who the "good guys" are which, in itself, shows that same disrespect for human life. You feel conflicted because you've picked sides, and I picked Nikita Khrushchev, and not because he was played by Steve Buscemi ("Shut up, Donnie!).

If you have no knowledge of the story of the power struggle after Uncle Joe vapor-locked and rolled to a halt, then accept that the history isn't terribly accurate, but who the hell cares? The viewer sees the mad rush to grab, grab, and grab when the megalomaniacal monster moves on to a luxury suite in Hell. These monsters seem human. I'm totally sure that a black comedy about Adolph or Mao would have the same cunning sleazeballs trying to add to the world's supply of worm food. You wouldn't shoot for a sequel. Everything you need to know is right here.

What I found so disturbing about TDOS was the casual nature of killing people. Prisoners, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, NKVD leaders die with a terrified shout of "Long live, Stalin" and a sharp crack of a pistol. Sometimes that seems to go on and on and on in the echoing background cells of the Kremlin. You get used to the background noise.

So, if you have a taste for the sort of humor you might find in "Best in Show," wherein one character exclaims how romantic it was to lock eyes on each other from their respective corner Starbucks, if you enjoy the feeling of being conflicted about picking good guys when everyone is saturated with Marxist evil, and/or if you like rolling back the video to find out if he or she really said THAT, then sit back and sip that vodka slowly.

The Last Winter (1983)

The Curse of Memory

[12 April 2023]

I have a very vague memory of seeing this movie on a commercial channel in, I think, 1992. I've always had a thing for Kathleen Quinlan, and when I saw the an ad, I figured why not.

I have only the blurriest recollection of the Last Winter. Yom Kippur war. Two gals looking for their missing-in-action husbands. The two woman skinny-dipping. Edited-for-television. Wishing I could see Quinlan's butt. Hint of a lesbian relationship between the two wives?

I think.

Yet, with all the blur, I have a feeling it was a good movie, that there was a real emotional tension for the two women hoping, praying for the homecoming.

I can't even remember how the movie turns out, but I do have a feeling that a recommendation is in order.

Bone Tomahawk (2015)

Fugly

[5/10 · 2 February 2023]

There were so many things to dislike, hate, and/or projectile-vomit from this ghastly horror that I am a little embarrassed about how I couldn't wait to grab some alone time to watch Bone Tomahawk. This is a gorge-suppressingly awful movie that is too long, more tedious than suspenseful, and features a man getting scalped, strangled, and split in two, crotch to chops. I thought the water buffalo in Apocalypse Now had it easier.

The movie vaguely reminded me of John McTiernan's The Thirteenth Warrior (with a dash of Quest for Fire). In TTW, an Arab diplomat hooks a ride with Beowulf and his posse. The blood flows like spaghetti sauce as the "Geats" fight it out with a tribe of spider-worshipping Neandernasties.

Here, a mini-posse of 1890s Southwesterners go on a rescue mission into desert badlands held by a pack of "Trogladytes." Where McTiernan drives the narrative at a bone-crushing pace, Bone Tomahawk crushes bones, slices scalps and genetalia, and makes the characters almost impossible to like. Kurt Russell, a man who has a voice as gritty as his stare is cold, is so restrained that the fire he brought to Tombstone is almost snuffed out.

I suspect the movie tried to present the good guys as flawed and believable, but we get tired of endless trudging through the outback of the Southwest while the characters use arcane language.

As I'm writing this, I'm slowly changing my mind about the blandness of the characters. Maybe they are, in their own way, working class anti-heroes, but I just wanted a bit more savagery on the part of the "good guys."

I'm going to hit "submit" now and hope my wife has not prepared spaghetti for dinner.

Dressed to Kill (1980)

Ugh! petro-gel in my eyes.

[4/10 · 23 August 2022]

Wow. Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill is about as derivative, dopey, and dreary a murder mystery, made by an A-List director, as can be. Any movie that can make Michael Caine look ridiculous (you'll know why) needs to be appreciated for its awfulness.

I think De Palma may have grown up wearing Hitchcock costumes, speaking in "presentation grammar," and breathing funny because, if the Hitchcock clichés got any thicker, you'd expect Jimmy Stewart and Anthony Perkins to put in guest appearances.

What we do get is a murder mystery that, I swear, has 1/3 of it in long, mysterious, and meaningful pieces with no dialogue, orchestral overindulgence, and, apparently, a belief that, if you smear petroleum jelly on your lens-like a Guccione centerfold-to get a dreamy feel, you wind up with a gooey lens and an audience thinking, "What the hell?"

I have never liked Angie Dickinson. I've always thought she was a brittle excuse for a sex symbol on screen. Here, she's a mother and widow who thinks she isn't attractive to men. She has a therapist, Michael Caine, who oozes the sort of calm professionalism that would make most people say "Ewww!" We get totally invested in her pathetic character.

And then she's gone.

The audience starts to chant what-the-hell.

We meet Nancy Allen, the nasty cheerleader-type in Carrie, and we get invested in her. Allen's character, a hooker, is more sympathetic than Dickinson's.

Remember that this is a murder mystery, so you would expect some exsanguinatin'. I wasn't kidding when I told you that the first third of the movie is this artsy-fartsy setup for the real movie about the prostitute who doesn't want to get jammed up with a murder charge. The mad-as-a-hatter baddie keeps popping up to scare Allen spitless, there's a scene with a group of thugs who chase her through subway trains, Dennis Franz looks like a short, fat, balding disco king, and Dickinson's son drives around on the cutest little moped.

I'm getting bogged down in the tall grass here, so I'll wrap it up.

Just to let you know, it's been an hour since I finished Dressed to Kill, and I cannot remember how the lunatic gets it in the end.

Oh, yeah. The movie ends with another long, meaningful, oh-so-elegant piece of stylized camera work that would make you long for ol' Alfred himself.

On a positive note, Nancy Allen looks really good in the shower, but the thinking part of your brain will be asking if seeing her in the altogether was worth the last 100+ minutes.

Nope.

The Holcroft Covenant (1985)

A Pleasant Little Waster

[6/10 · 22 August 2022]

John Frankenheimer made a lot of great to good movies. This one isn't one. The Holcroft Covenant is a mildly entertaining waster of time. It has interesting people, a plot that has pared down from one of Robert Ludlum's labyrinthine novels, and green European settings.

Yet, it is bland to the point of walking away. Michael Caine is a pair of comfortable shoes, Victoria Tennant is pretty, and the rest of the cast seem earnest enough.

It's an "almost" movie. Kind of like the story Harry Truman liked to tell about the black man in Independence, Missouri who Truman saw drinking a bottle of whiskey on a curb. Truman asked how he got the whiskey, and the man on the curb said from his employer.

Harry asked, "How is it?"

The black man said, "Almost."

"Almost?"

"Yessuh, if it was any worse, I wouldn't drink it, and if it was any better, he wouldn't have given it to me."

That's The Holcroft Covenant.

Almost.

Winter Kills (1979)

From gems to turds!

[4/10 · 22 August 2022]

Richard Condon wrote the book this movie is based on, but, since I didn't read the book, I don't know if Winter Kills (1979) is faithful and, therefore, idiotic. Condon was the author of The Manchurian Candidate, and I have no freaking idea what happened--if the movie is, as I said, faithful.

It's that bad.

Making a dark comedy about the assassination of a US President is a stretch. When the whole film, something like 95 minutes (?), tells a heavy-on-meaning, disjointed, and ludicrous mirror image of the JFK assassination, anyone with a shred of maturity would want to scream.

Especially when Sterling Hayden shows up with a flock of WWII armor and tries to blow Jeff Bridges off the planet. He can do it too. Bridges is driving a Ford Pinto, and one good hit will make a beautiful fireball.

John Huston is there, looking like the ancient monstrosity we all came to know and hate. He's the Old Joe Kennedy. We get to meet the second shooter. Bridges has no visible profession, and you can't make a living on running your fingers through your hair at dramatic moments unless you're in the movies.

There's a hooker with an empty space where her heart should be. Bridges finds out that the love of his life is a sham. Couldn'ta seen that one, for sure.

By the end, you know nothing, you feel pretty much ripped off, and Jeff Bridges practices his Big Lebowski look to perfection. Oh, but you do get to see John Huston get his just desserts in a really important and meaningfulish image at the end of this boring trash.

Folks, have at it.

Go Ask Alice (1973 TV Movie)

Rewiring your brain

[7/10 · 12 August 2022]

I remember a friend of mine, a drug counselor at a high school in Southern Idaho, telling a kid who was circling the drain with drug abuse, that she was a recovering addict. She stunned the kid with her personal story of how, every waking minute of every day for the rest of her life, she would want to get high. Use drugs long enough, and you get rewired. Instead of food or air or love or shelter or sex being the most important thing to be acquired, it was getting high.

I had never heard that before, and that was 25 years ago. All of a sudden, if I thought of Go Ask Alice, a 1973 TV-movie based on the ersatz anonymous diaries of a girl, also circling the drain, it made sense. I just thought she was weak.

Like my dad, with respect to bourbon and painkillers.

Weak.

Within the boundaries of what the ABC "standards and practices" people would allow in this movie, Go Ask Alice is painful to watch. It looks authentic because the producers were pushing the network as hard as possible.

It's 72 minutes long, and you can see where the story gets cut to fit in the 90 minute running time. My only complaint is that fragmentation. Would it have killed the network to throw in an extra 26 minutes of running time in a 2-hour slot.

But that's 49 year's worth of water under the bridge. Jaime Smith Jackson portrays Alice. When the film was shot, she was 24 years old, but she nails a 9th grade vibe. What makes the movie work is that, as she spirals, runs away, eats out of garbage cans, and winds up in a shelter run by Father Andy Griffith, her hair gets filthy, with puke and twigs snarled in the mess. Her face is bruised and dirty, and they took off the makeup that allowed a 24 year old to look 10 years younger.

Jackson grows old right in front of our eyes.

Let's be honest. I watched this on TV in the fall of 1973 because I was taking a health class in 9th grade, and the teacher said to watch it.

Two things happened. I got the point, and I fell in love with Jaime Smith Jackson.

As for the book, I heard it was actually a novel, sold as an anonymous set of diaries. I'd like to pretend the book, and the movie, were real.

Vera Cruz (1954)

Robert Aldrich on the upswing

[7/10 · 12 August 2022]

This is a great movie. Unfortunately, it's almost 70 years old, and that means fewer and fewer people will get to see it. Vera Cruz has everything a good, solid, and edgy movie should. The two male leads are poles apart. There's a pretty girl, a corrupt emperor, a dandy, a "crapton" of gold, a gang of cutthroats, and some fine exteriors.

On top of that, you don't know for sure if you can trust the good-good guy, and you know you can't trust the bad-good guy.

Aldrich has crafted a ripsnortin' adventure, and even though Burt Lancaster steals the show, Gary Cooper is the guy who will force him to give it back.

The only other movies I have seen that were as pure in entertainment were Rio Bravo, the original The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, and Five Card Stud. I think it says something for westerns that three quarters of the movies I have mentioned in this review were oaters.

Finally, at the end of the movie, I looked up when the film was made, and I was startled that it was produced in 1954. The film is edgy because nobody's pure, no immaculate white hat anywhere to be seen. By the end of the 1950s, Hollywood was experimenting with how much studios could get away with and still receive a Production Code seal of approval. Think of Anatomy of a Murder and Psycho. How they got made is beyond me. That is, if they had been made five years earlier.

Vera Cruz is somewhat morally ambiguous. Gary Cooper is a mercenary, and his character isn't quite as squeaky as we would expect. Just look at his eyes when he and Lancaster are setting up the details to take a countess from Mexico City to Vera Cruz.

He may be a good guy, but he's workin' the angles, folks!

So, with all that said, it would behoove you to convince a young un' to sit down to enjoy a flesh and blood western adventure. Maybe give the kid 15 minutes--just think of the concept of "courtesy bites."

Maybe you'll get lucky, and he or she will not complain when the hook sinks in.

Billy Two Hats (1974)

Hey, let's make a movie in Israel that's set in Arizona!

[6/10 · 12 August 2022]

After watching Ted Kotcheff's Billy Two Hats, I thought to myself that the movie is a pleasant little nothing of a western, but that there must have been a belief that Israel might be the location for a whole new generation of spaghetti westerns, but in this case, something like, Lox and Bagel Westerns.

I don't know enough of traditional Jewish food to know if that joke was worth it. So, forgive my ignorance.

The best part of Billy Two Hats is Desi Arnaz, Jr.'s wide-eyed, gob-smacked look when he hears or sees something he didn't anticipate. It actually works. The character has been through a hellish upbringing, but he's still innocent enough to be stunned by human ugliness.

Arnaz is an old guy now, and I don't know if he did much after this movie, but there was an inkling that he could have grown into a fairly substantial character actor.

Gregory Peck is just embarrassing. That Scottish stuff that comes out of his mouth is like sticking a car key in your ear to clean it and somebody comes by and bumps your elbow. Peck had good hair, though, and his later scenes, stuck under the wagon, were better because he didn't say much.

David Huddleston and Jack Warden are fat and mean, respectively.

So, nothingburger? The only reason I watched this movie is that I thought the title was intriguing way, way back when I watched a "making of" preview at the end of some network movie that ended fifteen minutes before the late news on the ABC affiliate. I thought the idea of a western shot in Israel was cool. The actors seemed familiar.

I never saw the movie, not even when it got shown on regular TV.

This is where I'd normally say something snarky about my being wise in high school, but it wasn't true. I watched Billy Two Hats because it was convenient. ROKU TV is free. I had time to spare.

Actually, you don't kill time, you murder it.

The Shadow Riders (1982 TV Movie)

The decline and fall of Andrew v. McLaglen

[4/10 · 11 August 2022]

Go back. Watch Shenandoah, and Chisum. How about The Last Hard Men? Throw in Ffolkes. I can't think of any other Andrew V. McLaglen films that I liked to sort of liked to tolerated. Oh, yeah . . . The garbagey Devil's Brigade and the dull-as-dishwater Fool's Parade.

The dude did a lot of movies, some of them really fun. Others were unintentionally funny. The second I saw McLaglen's name on the TV movie from 1982, The Shadow Riders, I knew that the man wasn't getting theatrical work any more. He had to go to the boob tube to pay the bills.

The Shadow Riders is, apparently, based a story written by Louis L'Amour, but I'm thinking it could have been a product of L'Amour's second cousin, twice removed's talented 8th grader in a creative writing class.

Don't think of that as an insult to the 8th grader. Talented kids often excel at creative writing, but the seasoning and maturity of the writing still needs work.

The Shadow Riders is cliched and shallow, a throw-away movie done on TV (because this junk wouldn't get green-lit for a big screen).

But, this is the sort of junk that would pull in viewers, older ones who just wanted something pleasant to watch. Tom Selleck, Sam Elliot, Katherine Ross, and Ben Johnson are the big names that would have had people plunk down in front of their big box TVs back in the day.

The movie's 40 years old, but they still make throw away stuff like this on all sorts of cable networks and streaming channels.

I wish I hadn't watched it on Tubi. Not counting commercials, it was 100 minutes of brainlessness. It did have Geoffrey Lewis, one of my favorite character actors (the lead bad guy in High Plains Drifter), but his costume is soaked in the same dishwater as the story and the dialogue.

Skip it or watch it. I'm ambivalent.

Inception (2010)

Why Aspirin was created.

[5/10 · 10 August 2022]

I have read several of the reviews for Inception, and, as with many other high concept, CGI-saturated epics, I thought I had watched a different movie. Sliced bread and two-ply toilet paper don't come close to the reverence this movie has received from contributors to IMDb.

Let's just say that, after a befuddled beginning, the science fictioner settles into a loud, incoherent, over-complicated, over-thought, headache-guaranteeing mess.

After an hour, I figured how bad can it get? I won that bet. There is an elephantine, week-long gunfight in some snowy place, a big deal with folks tied together and floating around a hotel, and lots of Leonardo DiCaprio trying to get back to his kiddies and away from the influence--I think--of his wife.

I didn't understand much. Just enough to say that I got it. Unfortunately, there was about six more hours of gunfights and collapsing buildings and, God Allfishhooks, why did I stick with this trash?

Ellen Page was cute, but, um, that/her/him/them has all changed in a dozen years.

How much aspirin before you overdose?

Red Sun (1971)

A happy little western

[7/10 · 9 August 2022]

Happy is not a word you associate with Spaghetti Westerns, but Terrence Young's Red Sun put a smile on my face. It's a fun little buddy movie--a bit too bloody for my taste in comedies--that has Charles Bronson and Toshiro Mifune up against robbers, the Commanche, Ursula Andress, and Alain Delon.

The boys are after gold and a Samurai sword, a gift from the Japanese Emperor to the president. The cultures clash, the double-crosses add up, and Bronson shows a talent for whimsy that you wouldn't think possible. Mifune is the straight man here, but he's just so darned dependable and honorable, he grows on you anyway.

There are lots of cliches, but the movie never bogs down, and it has a nice moral center. Mifune and Bronson have a fight, and Bronson gets flipped and slammed down on the ground about 6 times. He's lying there, the wind knocked out of him, at the mercy of Mifune, part of the Japanese Ambassador's security detail who has been tasked with finding the sword (or don't come back alive), and he gathers himself and says, "Okay, let's call that a draw."

Bad men aren't into self-deprecation.

Bronson is not only a diamond in the rough who slowly gives up his dream to grab some train robbery gold he helped to steal--but Alain Delon, with the wonderful name, Gauche, takes the gold for himself, and takes the number one spot on Bronson's hit parade.

Unfortunately, Mifune wants a crack at him first, money be damned.

As the movie progresses, you can see Bronson chewing on trying to figure out a way to keep Mifune from killing Delon or killing Mifune first. By the end credits, you've seen how these two men created a trusting bond, the Samurai and the gunslinger, East and West.

Red Sun is a nice surprise, as is Chato's Land. Bronson was on a roll in the early 70s, and this is one of his better works.

Saturn 3 (1980)

Where is the logic in making an R-rated movie for kids?

[3/10 · 8 August 2022]

Stanley Donen's daffy sci-fi adventure pretends to be literate and thought-driven, a movie to be appreciated by the 18-34 crowd, but, well, how do I put this?

Saturn 3 is the most amazingly incompetent, visually hysterical, and thoroughly ridiculous blob of space-pablum I've seen since the original The Outer Limits.

To watch an accomplished actor like Harvey Keitel debase himself like this, to see Kirk Douglas--Spartacus!--mug at the camera and show off his physicality at 63 in the place of acting, to see Farrah Fawcett slip a little nip here and there (and probably wish she hadn't quit the brainiac Charlie's Angels), is to appreciate the wit and wisdom of the NBC's Buck Rogers.

I saw Saturn 3 as a 21 year old. At 64, I think I may have improved a bit. The movie hasn't.

Still ridiculous and idiotic, but Farrah was something, wasn't she?

Sicario (2015)

Making Emily Blunt a nothingburger

[5/10 · 8 August 2022]

Read almost any review on IMDb, and it won't be an actual review. The writer will simply tell you the plot, and then tell you how awesome everything was or how terrible. The title will be some long-winded thing that should have been the main body of the "review." My favorite title is something like this:

"Could have been so much better!"

Unfortunately, they never tell you how it could have been better, regardless of the movie.

I'm here to tell you what would have made Sicario a movie I recommend. I didn't really care about any of the characters in the movie. The main protagonist, Emily Blunt has almost nothing to say. She's gaunt, dirty, hollowed-out, and in desperate need of a different career because being a special agent for the FBI seems to not agree with her.. Benecio del Toro is a mystery-man, a Mexican agent who seems to drift in and out of the movie when the director needs some suspense. Josh Brolin is all style, chomping on gum and wearing flip-flops.

Ask me about the plot, and I'll tell you the very basics. But my description will be listless.

Because I didn't care about any of the characters.

Characters matter. You can get the kid in the drive thru at the nearest McDonald's to read the lines, but the film makers have to tell the viewer why he or she needs to pay attention to the characters.

Movies are transactional in nature. Give and get, push and pull. Flaccid won't cut it.

So, do I recommend this movie? Sure. Why not? It's your time to waste. Yet, any movie that turns the lovely Emily Blunt into a dreary lump of skin and bones and doesn't give her much to say or do, might inspire you to say or do something else.

Books?

The White Buffalo (1977)

Dumb-dumb, dumb-dumb, dumb-dumb!

[5/10 · 8 August 2022]

I can't tell if J. Lee Thompson's The White Buffalo is a laughably bad movie with some sparks of good imagery and story telling or if it's a failed attempt at a very good movie, doomed to be compared to other, much better movies.

So, let's put it out there right now. Buffalo don't act that way. They are essentially herd herbivores that only get riled up if they are approached, antagonized, or are looking for some lovin'.

If you can suspend the disbelief of a big guy in a buffalo suit smashing through a mountain of back-lit styrofoam blocks, then you're going to be okay.

If you can accept Will Sampson as Crazy Horse, then you're another step toward forgiving this movie for its idiocies.

If Charles Bronson comes across as a believable Bill Hickok and Jack Warden, a nasty, racist sidekick, then, I think you'll enjoy this derivative nonsense about Hickok and the Chief on the hunt for a killer herbivore with a bad complexion and a worse mood.

There are moments of real drama in amongst the giggles. The suspense builds in a saloon as bad guys try to set up a killing field around Bronson and Warden. Bronson is less wooden than usual, and we begin to care about him, dopey sunglasses and all. Sampson and the boys engage in a pretty tasty firefight with some baddie Injuns, thereby cementing the Hickok/Crazy Horse partnership.

But then the Pale Bison shows up and we start laughing again. This critter is derned smart, way smarter than the eating machines I can drive twenty miles from my home to see. Our friend--we shall call him Billy--busts through that styrofoam wall, screeching and huffing, and looking for some actors to gore. In the final fight with Billy, Mssrs. Bronson, Sampson, and Warden engage in hand-to-hoof combat. It's really gory, but buffalo can take a lickin' and keep on tickin'!

When the credits rolled, I felt, well, not unsatisfied. Sidekick Jack Warden chews out Bronson for letting Sampson get the glory, and he unleashes a nasty diatribe against "red n*****s." It's not happy ending for a monster movie western.

I would say, fire up YouTube and watch it. You'll only lose 97 minutes, and you can make it up by reading a book instead of watching a Hallmark Christmas movie.

Joe (1970)

Schmoe

[6/10 · 8 August 2022]

Mad magazine did its version, Schmoe, and that was my first experience with John Avildsen's Joe, a movie about the honesty of the lower middle class in relation to the UMC. Most of the reviews on IMDb were about the cultural clash between Peter Boyle's Joe Curran and Dennis Patrick's Bill Compton, two men with very little in common.

Boyle's character seethes with a rage against the welfare state. Patrick's Compton character is a Mad Man who blurts out that he's killed a drug dealer when he visits Joe's blue-collar watering hole after losing his temper with his daughter's dealer boyfriend.

Therein lies the tension, the foul-mouthed factory drone and the upper-crust ad agency type who has drinks with only the right kind of people. These two men have an uneasy relationship, with Boyle trying to understand the UMC but thinking there's no cultural difference between him and Compton.

In a hilarious moment, Joe learns a new word--culture--and has no idea what to do with it.

Dennis Patrick is the more comfortable pair of slippers here. He played so many baddies in his career that, when he shows up, you're put at ease. I've seen this guy! Didn't he play a con-man who tried to fleece Archie Bunker out of a wad of money for "energy-efficient" windows?

Patrick sends his daughter's drug dealer boyfriend to another, hopefully better place, and, only because after blurting out what he's done to a stranger in a bar (Boyle) does the relationship blossom.

After one cringe-saturated moment after another, it becomes obvious that Patrick's daughter has washed her hands of her family. She overhears things that make her run from her parents in a blind panic.

Curran and Compton decide to go on a rescue mission to find the girl, and they're armed to the teeth. When they find the coven of hippies they've been looking for, the movie takes a ghastly turn, one I didn't completely anticipate.

Joe is a dark bit of 1970 relevancy, and it has enough surprises to make it worth watching. Peter Boyle's character is not completely repulsive, nor is Patrick's Compton. It's not a terribly fun movie, and your being entertained is unlikely. What makes Joe work is that the characters are not cartoonish stereotypes.

They can be found in reruns of All in the Family.

Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1970)

A Refreshing Heel

[7/10 · 5 August 2022]

The title of Sydney J. Furie's little, forgotten film intrigued me, and I made sure to see it on ABC way back when, about 1975. I could tell it was an R-rated movie that was edited for TV, but the movie felt fresh and thoughtful. There was so much I didn't comprehend about the story of a narcissistic heel and an insecure but driven-to-win mechanic who cross paths on a motorcycle racing circuit. Robert Redford (Halsey Knox) and Michael J. Pollard (Little Fauss) have little in common except that Halsey is a low-life manipulator in whom Little sees a chance to get out of Heat Rash, Oklahoma, and win some trophies.

Redford, a man who became very famous by being a charming bank robber/mountain man/CIA employee/Barbara Streisand's ex is a thoroughly believable heel. He slithers through lying and thieving effortlessly. He wanders around without a shirt, glib and facetious, ordering Little to do this and that, and throwing Fauss' insecurity with women in his face when they pick up a bike bunny (Lauren Hutton). It's instant love for Little, instant sex for Halsy, and it leads to Little calling his partnership with Halsy quits.

He wonders back to Mom, and Dad has passed on. All the best things that are in Little are on display when he takes up racing again, practicing and practicing, with Momma sucking down dust with a stopwatch in her hand. You can see the scar Halsy left on him, and he deals with its pain by exhibiting determination.

Then Halsy arrives, and because Little is weak, he throws in, again. Hutton is pregnant, and Redford's character has so little good in him that he simply dumps her at the hospital.

I think the kid got the better half of that deal.

Our two boys are racing now, competing against each other. Little has the confidence he lacked earlier. Halsy will always be the winner of a participation ribbon. And the saddest part of the movie is how Halsy's lack of good character changes the face and behavior of who he sees as his protege.

I thought this movie was much better than many of the reviews I read. It's clearly a flick that is designed to play off Redford's growing popularity. What Furie gets right is that, although Robert Redford's Big Halsy is the powerhouse on screen, the viewer might be more interested in Michael J. Pollard's performance. The balance of the two personalities on screen makes for a darn-fine tension. Pollard played many a wimp, but here, Fauss has a deeper well of grit than you see at the start (when he habitually lands in a dusty heap during race after race).

Speaking of dust, and heat, the whole movie seems to be covered in a fine layer of grit. There's no place to feel clean and dry. The dust is ever-present, mixing with sweat to give the characters a subtle muddy sheen. Even Lauren Hutton, who chats with Halsy about his ugly scar on his back, all the while having her bare bottom in view, winds up in a preggo smock, and she looks beaten, gritty, and ready to go home to the folks in San Francisco.

She hasn't much to do in the movie other than getting pregnant and abandoned, thereby cementing Halsy Knox as charmless and in possession of a terrible character.

So, why do I recommend this 52-year-old film? Nothing is ever new in movies. The value of watching is seeing how the story we already know is remolded into something fresh. Little Fauss and Big Halsy is a fresh movie, one that very few people saw or will see in the future. It's an actors' movie, and with the glut of pornographically stupid super-hero movies out there, it may be a refreshing change.

Real people, real situations, and a thoughtful good time.

I Walk the Line (1970)

I Schlock the Line

[5/10 · 2 August 2022]

I've been hitting the oldies, but not necessarily the goodies from the late 60s to early 70s. I remember NBC showing this movie on a Saturday night way, way back in my high school days, and I tried to watch it. I didn't get very far into it. Too hillbilly for me even with a very pretty Tuesday Weld.

47 years later, and I sit down to catch it this morning on TUBI. I was right--way too backwoods bubba for me, but I stuck with it. John Frankenheimer directed it, and that almost makes it an art film of some sort. I know so much more than I used to. I can appreciate the imagery of a film, and the very adultish-like story of a Bugtussle County sheriff falling in lust for an 18(?)-year-old gal, with lovely teeth, cold blue eyes, clean hair, and, for the boys in the audience, just a hint of headlights in those pretty little dresses she wears.

The sheriff is Gregory Peck. The supporting cast is excellent, with Estelle Parsons as Mrs. Peck, telling him that she'll do anything to keep him, the fattest snake you'll ever see in Charles Durning's deputy, and the most understanding moonshiner dad you'll wish to meet, Ralph Meeker.

Meeker is the wild card, the most interesting of the group. You keep expecting him to say to Tuesday Weld something about comin' on over to sit on yer pappy's lap and talk 'bout the furst thing that pops up. But he doesn't. Except for one time he slaps Tuesday across the face for being clumsy with a love note to Peck, he showers her with quiet affection, as he does with his boys, who seem to have full sets of brain cells, too.

Meeker just approaches the affair between his daughter, Alma, and the sheriff as a consequence of the Peck's Henry Tawes' lust knob being turned up to a 10 and the kid being gorgeous. Shee-yute, Sheriff, you kin have her, butcha gotta treat her right nice!

Durning gets wind of the affair, and the ugliness fires right up. I won't give any real spoilers here, but you just know somebody has to get his or her lights put out (hopefully not Tuesday's).

What I liked about I Walk the Line is that it didn't follow the cliche blueprint. You know, the ones from, say, White Lightning or Walking Tall. IWTL had some surprises and anti-cliches, but, in the long-run, the movie sacrifices action for acting, and I found myself nodding off when Peck slaps his rubbery lips on Weld's. He clutches then kisses her as if he's some sort of salt-sucking monster from The Outer Limits. Yech.

I'll leave it up to you. It's an actor's movie, but it's hard to care about the characters, and, since Meeker played about a thousand bad guys and weak guys on TV during my upbringing, seeing him as a non-threatening moonshiner was kind of refreshing!

Easy Rider (1969)

Cinematic masturbation

[1/10 · 29 July 2022]

Please tell me that it's over. I've been watching Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider for what seems like a year. I actually have a hangover without the benefit of ingesting any chemicals. I saw this celluloid hand-job when I was 20. It's 40+ years later, I watched the movie on TUBI, and I am less of a sentient being than this morning.

So much of this garbage is embedded in our culture's skin that I am not about to argue the movie's "merits" with anyone. From my point of view, regardless of what I think of the whole hippie generation, Easy Rider is a tedious, overblown, and hyper-artistic exercise in trying to find meaning in the adventures of two people who don't seem to have much to offer each other or anyone else.

Wyatt and Billy are the quintessential wastes of carbon.

Go ahead and pound your meaty fury on the "thumbs down" icon. I don't care.

Easy Rider is the equivalent of Judge Reinhold in the bathroom, but there's no Phoebe Cates in sight.

Auto Focus (2002)

A Buddy Holly Production

[6/10 · 27 July 2022]

Way back in 19 and 78, a big movie on screen was The Buddy Holly Story. It had humor, heart, and Holly's music being performed by Gary Busey (in his best job, outside the Dustin Hoffman flick, Hard Time). It came in a little late for the early '70s nostalgia kick of American Graffiti and Happy Days, but there was still a desire for the simplicity of the pre-dead Kennedy days.

The problem with The Buddy Holly Story is that almost none of it was true.

In the same year, Bob Crane was savagely murdered in an Arizona motel. Who did it is still a mystery. We'll probably never know who murdered him, but there are a number of different theories, and Paul Schrader's Auto Focus (2002) posits one of them, to an ambiguous point.

Schrader has gone down the pornographic road before with Hardcore. Here, he tells a story based on a real person, TV and radio personality, Bob Crane. Crane will always be known as Colonel Robert Hogan, the head of a band of resistance fighters locked in a German POW camp in World War II. Hogan's Heroes was trash, but utterly entertaining trash. The story was ludicrous, the characters were cartoonish, the Germans had IQs of toe fungus, and the whole thing had a ridiculous laugh track.

On the other hand, Crane's Hogan was the sort of hero you would want on your side, a roguish, insubordinate con-man who inspired fearless loyalty from the men in his command while instilling a fearful, loathing unease from the enemy. His mission was to NOT escape, but to play to the idiotic ego and glaring incompetence of the commandant of Stalag 13, Oberst Wilhelm Klink of the Luftwaffe.

The show ran for six seasons and, despite some criticism from TV critics at the start, became a big hit, and Crane became a big star.

Auto Focus tells the story of Crane's great luck in bagging the part of Hogan, and his relentless pursuit of bagging an ever-sicker addictive lifestyle, fueled by pornographic photos, film, and video, and the ever-willing girls who wanted to party with Col. Hogan.

Greg Kinnear's Bob Crane is spot-on, a charming and very Catholic family man who is being pulled away from a healthy family life with kiddies and Rita Wilson as his wife, Anne, by an increasing fascination with nude photographs, dirty magazines, and the whole fantasy world of pornography. Along for the ride is Crane's friend, compatriot, and enabler, John Carpenter (Willem Dafoe). Crane eventually loses his wife and family, loses his show with declining ratings due to the unpleasant reality of Vietnam, and watches his career slide under the waves. His marriage to Colonel Klink's secretary, played by the lovely Maria Bello, produces a child, but not happiness. Crane is reduced to dinner theater engagements, a type of gig he sees as beneath his star power.

When he is offered a Disney comedy called Superdad, he almost blows it with his reputation for blowing it. Disney (back when the company was family-friendly) holds the movie for years before releasing it, then dumps it onto the big screen in the middle of a lousy recession.

Kinnear, a handsome man with the same smart-alecky charm as Crane, loses his second wife, the relationship with his first set of kids, his bank account, and the tolerance of his agent, played by Ron Lieberman, a great actor with a terrible toupee. Crane tells himself that it's time to dry out and clean up, and he dumps Carpenter over the side. The movie hints at Carpenter being bisexual, and he loves to party with girls, but he longs for Crane as a friend with benefits(?).

Crane's "betrayal" of Carpenter may or may not have caused Carpenter to sneak into his motel room in Scottsdale, Arizona, armed with a movie-camera tripod and send Crane to Heaven or Hell (depending on how merciful God is with pathetic sinners).

And therein lies the rub (no pun intended). Kinnear narrates the last moments of the movie, telling the viewer about the mistakes made by the Scottsdale police, the eventual indictment of Carpenter, and his subsequent acquittal. The movie never discusses any possible organized crime connections, a part of Crane's background that was speculated on right after his murder.

This brings us back to Buddy Holly. Holly had a supportive family, unlike the movie. He hit it big in a different way than pictured. He had three "Crickets," not two. His wife miscarried after his death (not mentioned). There were so many things wrong with The Buddy Holly Story, but that great, great music and Busey's powerhouse portrayal made the audience smile, regardless of facts.

Auto Focus streamlines a sad story of a man bent on destroying himself by malfeasance and misfeasance, by doing evil and lying to himself about his evil acts. Kinnear's Crane is a mess in an Army Air Force leather jacket.

If little of this movie is true, then we must accept it as Schrader suffering from Holly Syndrome. If it's essentially true, then fans of Hogan's Heroes will always see it--and Bob Crane--with an asterisk by their names.

Hardcore (1979)

Fantasy and Reality

[6/10 · 27 July 2022]

I remember hearing about Paul Schrader's "Hardcore" when it came out in 1979. I liked-and still do-the work of George C. Scott. Rarely has a man had such a mastery of diction. He could screech and growl in a thunderous rage, and you could hear every syllable clearly. The same with Michael Caine.

The movie didn't appeal to me, which may have been the first inkling that I might become a mature adult. The story of a deeply religious midwesterner who loses his daughter to the porn industry in LA didn't seem to be worth the ticket price. I don't even know if it played in Spokane, WA. Honestly, I don't think it made a dime at the time.

The movie even had a television actress named Season Hubley, a very pretty and appealing woman who, in my mind, might show up in the altogether. The movie still didn't ring a bell.

So, it wasn't until VCR days that I started to watch the rented Hardcore, and I gave up on it after a few minutes. It had Dick Sargent (the second Darren Stevens on Bewitched) as Scott's brother-in-law. I never could stand the guy; his pinched-lips delivery of lines gave me the creeps for some reason. It was set at the start in some ice-belt/rust-belt Siberia. I saw the movie two weeks ago, and exactly where the story begins has already left the building.

Scott flies out to LA to see if the cops have any idea where his skinny little sophomore daughter has gone. They don't (and they couldn't care less), so Scott employs Peter Boyle, one of the most talented actors I've never wanted to look at, and Boyle finds a movie with the kid in it. You can imagine what Scott sees when Boyle puts him in the seat in an empty theater.

Scott rumbles and sobs, "Turn it off. Turn it off! For God's sake, TURN IT OFF!!! Boyle's character is equal parts mercenary and merciful. He tells Scott there's little he can do (but go back to Elk Liver, Indiana, and I'll call you if and when I turn something).

Needless to say that there is a reckoning between employer and private dick (and I use that slang term carefully). Boyle takes a back seat, Pa Scott takes a leave from running his furniture store, and Season Hubley pops up, cute as a button for an "adult actress."

Without going into any more detail about the plot, there are two or three scenes that stand out. Before I describe them, I think the most difficult thing about Hardcore is that I never once suspended disbelief watching George C. Scott as a deeply religious dad desperately seeking Susan-or Amy or Heather. I can't remember. He grumbles and shambles about the shabbier crooks and crannies of Hollywood, delivering lines as if he was really George C. Scott. Hey, there's Dick Sargent playing Fred or Jeff or Herbert. Hey, it's Peter Boyle as, well, the exact opposite of Joe Mannix or Jim Rockford. There's even Season Hubley! She sure is cute and perky, but naked?

Nope. Didn't buy it for a second.

There is one scene where Hubley asks Scott to explain his version of Christianity to her. I got a touch confused with the acronym TULIP that Scott explains to Hubley. She's wearing sunglasses, so you can't see her eyes crossing. It's so complex that it reminded me of a beloved brother-in-law whose ancestors hailed from Fish Lip, Minnesota or somewhere, and, before that, Norwegia. He has attempted to explain some of the Biblical details of why God is God and why you can't be and what happens in the End Times and who will be chosen and who the Proles will be who have to run this dopey planet after the good guys go. My Catholic brain says, "Dude, get out of the tall grass. You're getting wheezily weedy, and, is this how I sound when I'm lecturing in my US History classroom?"

It's a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment, and Hubley essentially says that. Scott grimaces, but presses on.

There's also a moment when Pa, wearing a laughable wig, presents himself as a porn movie producer. He's looking for just the right guy for some sort of gay blade flick. He finds one of the guys who he saw in the Turn-it-off! Scene and proceeds to beat the guy with a coffee table. So much for this poor schlub's looks. Somebody remarks that his looks aren't what he gets hired for.

Ugh.

Ugly is right. Scott's character is coming apart at the scenes, employing money, 16 mm movie cameras, and violence to find his daughter, who, by now, must be completely destroyed by this awful business. Sargent comes to save him-from himself-and bring him home. He orders the brother-in-law away.

Finally, before Scott get's on a track that will lead him to Mr. Big and his daughter, he witnesses a "snuff" film, wherein the Big Guy (no, not Hunter's daddy) walks onto a set, flicks open a switchblade, and leaves an exsanguinated mess . Scott looks disgusted, but there' no sobbing to turn off the movie (Hell, the fun of that movie has left the lobby).

To use a modern term from the Iraq War, he's becoming embedded in the action. In another movie, he would embed himself with Season, but this movie, for all its flaws, doesn't go there. Hubley, at one point in his slide, accuses Scott of being ready to dump her the second he finds his daughter. It's a heartbreaking moment because you just know it's going to happen. She's sitting there naked in a glassed-in peep-show cubicle, feet up on the sill, wide, and Scott isn't shocked anymore. He concentrates on her eyes, but you know he's thinking that this is just the way things are out here.

Daddy finds daughter. "Susan/Maggie/Brunhilda, we're going home. Put on your clothes, and you'll be eating a Bismarck by tomorrow morning!"

"Eff off, you effing effer!"

Recrimination time, and, then, this bowel-ish room in some restaurant or theater dirty bookstore (I don't know) becomes a confessional. Dad tells her he has betrayed her because he didn't help her through mom and dad's divorce. He apologizes for his iceman hereith demeanor. He begs her to forgive him.

I don't want to click the spoiler-alert button on IMDb, so you'll have to see how this turns out.

So, is this movie worth the time it takes to download Tubi? Yeah, I think so. The movie is 43-years-old, but, in this time where 60% of the internet is "fantasy," it holds up well. Paul Schrader doesn't have the reputation for making nice films, nor entertaining ones, but, if the skin and dreck don't send you packing, it's worth seeing a "near-miss" of a movie.

I wonder whatever happened to Season Hubley.

Horror of Dracula (1958)

Ooh, sugah, you treat me soo nice!

[7/10 · 8 July 2022]

Boy, this is a fun movie! It's a straightforward, fairly-faithful version of Bram Stoker, with Christopher Lee making the gals all hot and wobbly with his kisses from Hell and Peter Cushing being Sister Van Helsing, trying to put an end to the blood-sucking metaphor for . . .

Sierra Echo X-Ray!

The movie is so basic that you don't need any inner-messages (other than Lee's bites being toe-curling-good!).

We'll leave the really kinky stuff to Francis Ford Coppola's version. Needless to say that Hammer pumped fresh blood into Bela Lugosi's vampire corpse, and, unfortunately, spawned 873 sequels.

You can't keep an undead man down!

The Land That Time Forgot (1974)

Men in Dinosaur Suits!

[6/10 · 8 July 2022]

Except for a long shot of a woman bathing in what appeared to be a giant soap-filled Costco pretzel roll, I can't think of a reason this American International Picture ("Quality is just our slogan!") wouldn't have fit nicely with 1960's The Lost World and Journey to the Center of the Earth, two other 20,000 Years Under the Influence of Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs kind of flicks. It's a wonder that this amazingly stupid and completely entertaining kiddie show didn't get the MST3K treatment. It doesn't have a mean dinosaur bone in its body.

The Brits-including a Susan George lookalike bit of eye-candy-and lone Yank (Doug McClure, looking as if he had been pumping iron-if you get my drift-since The Virginian was cancelled) are good 'uns and the WWI Prussians are just so, well, sauerkraut as they splash, sweat, and scream through a smorgasbord of men in dinosaur suits, mind-controlling Neanderthals, amoebic-dysentery-filled prehistoric water, and that one poor proto-human schlub who gets scooped up by a pterodactyl, and the little rubber guy in the big rubber flying lizard has his rubber legs flapping as if he's Fred trying to get to work in his Flintstone mobile before Mr. Slate fires him.

The Land That Time Forgot is a perfect metaphor for why CGI is so destructive to young people. In 1974, this old-fashioned bit of silliness would have entertained the children and given moms a bit of a hissy for that one lone side shot of the gal in the brontosaurian bathtub.

Nowadays, five-year-olds would curse openly at the screen and go back to their thousand-dollar iPhones.

Maybe, the mind-controlling Neanderthals are doing a number on us.

The Lost World (1960)

Was anything else being held up by wires (besides the dinosaurs)?

[7/10 · 6 July 2022]

Way back in the early 70s, you could get your fill of cheesy science-fiction fun on Saturday afternoons on KHQ-TV in Spokane, Washington. If baseball was over, the station would fire up the Saturday "Creature Feature," and lay on some tasty bits of sci-fi and fantasy. This is where I first saw Irwin Allen's take on an A. C. Doyle story, The Lost World.

I loved this movie. I still do. It is the best thing Irwin Allen ever did. TLW has all the best in Saturday afternoon matinee-dom (and a critic would stress the dumb). Fake dinosaurs, good guys and frumpy-grumpy scientists, simpering bad guys and Jill St. John (who embodies--and what a body--why "females" should not go on dinosafaris), and Michael Rennie wondering where his career went wrong after betraying "Mr. Atoz" from Star Trek.

David Hedison's toupee never comes loose, Fernando Lamas rides a tree trunk into eternity, and Claude Rains seems to be having a great time at 71 as he hoofs and gritches and howls about nobody having an idea what privacy means.

I'm not kidding. Of all the Land That Time Said Screw It flicks I've seen, this is the best. It's just so much damn fun! The native girl's mini-skirt stays rigid (so that you don't get a glimpse at Amazon undies), the big ol' helicopter that gets mooshed by a whateverthehellasaurus looks sort of, well, fiberglassy, and the only sour note in the movie is Ms. St. John's character, who starts as a hotter-than-hell liberated woman and ends as a screechy little girl who's afraid of everything.

That's bad character writing, not bad acting.

I've said again and again that the best movies are the ones where you can tell the cast and crew are having a great time working. The Lost World has that vibe. When I was a kid, 50 years ago, watching a 12 year old monster movie, I picked up on that feeling that everyone was thinking, "Hey, this is fun!"

Put your logic in the car park at Heathrow, folks, Professor Challenger and his crew are going for a helluva fun ride!

And, did they have to pay the lizards union scale when they glued the horns and spikes on their faces?

Just wonderin'?

The Gorgon (1964)

I loved the little snakes in Megeara's hair hat!

[5/10 · 5 July 2022]

I wasn't sure if the giggles or the yawns would win out watching Hammer's The Gorgon, a 1964 quick-off-the-assembly-line horror (and I do mean Horror).

Sumptuous production values can't save this mess. It never quite makes sense, as Paul and Professor Burger Meister try to figure out the love triangle between Carla, Peter Cushing's character, and, well, I don't really care. I guess the yawns will win this one.

What bugged me--or snaked me--about The Gorgon is that Hammergirl Barbara Shelley is just right around thirty, and she looks forty-five. Were they trying to age her, or was her bio telling a little white snake-lie?

That's really all I got out of this Gothic groaner. Oh, and the movie gets off to a very interesting start, with interesting people and a nice, soapy conflict. Then, the interesting folks are dead, and the dull ones show up and you start yawning.

Just like reading this review.