Lots of Henry Farrell’s stories got turned into movies. Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, Such A Gorgeous Kid Like Me, How Awful About Allan, The House That Would Not Die, What’s the Matter with Helen?, The Eyes of Charles Sand and, most famously, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
His first book, The Hostage, was turned in to this low budget Crown International film, which was directed by Russell S. Doughten Jr., who would go on to executive produced the entire A Thief In the Night series of Christian pre-millenial madness. God bless you, Mr. Doughten, for all you have given to me.
A kid named Davey Cleaves sneaks on to a moving truck driven by the bonkers man named Bull (Don Kelly, a TV star who died young as this is his final movie) and his partner Eddie (a very young Harry Dean Stanton).
John Carradine shows up, as he does at least seventeen times a week in movies that I watch, as does Ann Doran, whose career started in the silent era.
This was the first movie ever shot in Iowa. What a joy for the state when a drunken John Carradine was arrested in Des Moines, as he was disturbing the peace by loudly acting out various Shakespeare plays.
You can watch this on Tubi. Or You Tube. Or turn to the Mill Creek Explosive Cinema set that we’ve been covering all week.
There was a hole in the B&S About Movies schedule at 12 noon on Friday, March 13. And I can’t think of another film more fitting than Dohler’s third film, Nightbeast, to slide into the VHS shelf between Crown International’s Terror in the Jungle*—the worst jungle flick of all time—and Ed Hunt’s The Brain (coming up at 3 pm)—the most whacked-out horror flick of all time (yes, even more whacked-out than Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator).
I have to admit: When Dohler came back from his decade long, self-imposed celluloid exile after The Galaxy Invader (which is, pretty much, the SAME movie—to a very sad, lesser effect—as his The Alien Factor and, of course, Nightbeast; which is why I’ve passed on reviewing it, myself), I never went back to his oeuvre, which revived with Blood Massacre (1991), then six more films until 2007.
Oh, the nostalgia: I’ll always remember Donnie for his “Big Four,” 16-to-35mm drive-era, SOV ’80s** precursors (which I lump into my SOV lamenting and pontificating at the site, for it’s all about the “vibe” of it all): The Alien Factor (1978), Fiend (1980), Nightbeast (1982), and The Galaxy Invader (1985), each of which end up on some variation of an ‘80s video fringe critic’s “Ed Wood’s School of Filmmaking” worst-of lists. As for me: Dohler is the Tommy Wiseau of sci-fi and horror. His films may be incompetent, but he, like Ed Wood before him, had a lot of heart. A lot. Sure, you can call Don an awful filmmaker . . . but he is an inspired one.
As part of the site’s March 2019 review of The Galaxy Invader, in promotion of the new Rifftrax version of the film, we briefly explored Dohler’s backstory, so we’ll dispense with the history lesson and pop-in his VHS ‘80s classic and get to reviewin’!
It’s the same . . . but different.
As with The Galaxy Invader, we have ourselves another Earth-stranded alien chasing rednecks though the woods. And as with John Carpenter and Don Coscarelli not taking any chances with their sequels to Escape from New York and Phantasm, Dohler crafted Nightbeast as a sequel-remake of his debut film, The Alien Factor—which also a has an alien loose in the Americana backwoods. And even for a Dohler film, Nightbeast shows a vast improvement in quality. As it should: The Alien Factor was shot for, get this, $3,500; he upped his game for Nightbeast to $14,000. And it’s so good that it made the U.K Section 3 “Video Nasties” list, which we touched on in our “Exploring: Video Nasties Section 3” overview.
What the hell? “Music by Jeffrey Abrams” in the opening credits? Not the J.J Abrams from the Star Trek and Star Wars reboots? Yep. Everyone has to start somewhere, and a teenaged Double-J started with a Don Dohler film.
And that film starts out really good—considering its budget—with decent matte, modeling, and camera-plate work that rivals any of Alfonso Brescia Star Wars knockoffs (watch Star Odysseyand compare), and reminds of Charles Band’s Laserblast (1978; only Nightbeast is the better film), as an alien ship comes out of a space-warp over Jupiter and a subsequent meteor collision causes it to crash on Earth—in the hick town of Perry Hall. (Did you ever notice how these alien spawns always land/crash in a “hick town” in these flicks, e.g., Alienator, anyone?)
Coolness that makes me want to watch, again!
So, you say you can only afford the (honestly, for a Dohler film, they’re very impressive) head and hands for your Gigeresque alien? Not a problem, pop that bad boy into a silver lamé jumpsuit and get to the killin’.
And we get our first kill (again, for a Dohler film, it’s impressive) with a ray gun that dispenses a redneck-dufus in a colorful lightshow-animation. And when it’s not gunslingin’, our xenomorph lets loose with some pretty decent on-a-budget eye-pops and gut rips. And bonus: this movie isn’t afraid to disintegrate two kids.
And that’s pretty much the whole film in a nutshell. The local sheriff’s department is dispatched and he gathers a redneck posse that, as with William Malone’s Creature(1985), uses the old The Thing from Another World “trick” of setting a trap-by-electricity.
How loved is this movie? Director Panos Cosmatos runs the film on a TV in a scene from his 2018 film, Mandy. And that impressive alien costume and model work? Those were designed by John Dods. He would come to work on the Poltergeist, Ghostbusters, and Alien franchises. You can also see his early work in the video fringe nasty, The Deadly Spawn (1983).
You have two choices to watch Nightbeast for free: You Tube has it commercial free, and it’s also on TubiTV. While on TubiTV you can also queue a copy of John Kinhart’s Don Dohler documentary Blood, Boobs & Beast. If you’d like to own both, they were packaged as a 2009 Troma DVD double feature. Vinegar Syndrome’s reissue doesn’t include the documentary, but it’s loaded with behind-the-scenes extras.
Be sure to click that SOV ’80s tag, below, to open yourself up to a world of 16mm and camcorder-shot films that populated our video store shelves.
** Click through our SOV category tag to discover more SOV films from their ’80s VHS birth to the digital and phone-shot brethren of today.
About the Author: You can read the music and film reviews of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook.He writes for B&S About Movies.
Seeing as how we’re all going to be trapped in our houses forever, I’ve decided to start a new feature here. Each Friday, I’m going to share four movies that I’d play for an all-night drive-in feature if I had my own drive-in.
Want to share your four films and the reasons why? It’s easy! Just write to bandsaboutmovies@gmail.com or add a comment below. We’ll get in touch and share your festival with the world.
Make sure to drive with your parking lights on and clean up after yourself. And don’t forget to try our snack bar, which will remain open until the last feature starts
MOVIE 1: Endgame (Joe D’Amato, 1983): There are post-apocalyptic movies. And then there’s Endgame, a movie that has just about every Italian genre star who meant anything in 1983 all playing a deadly game show that is The Running Man before The Running Man.
Al Cliver — from Zombi and The Beyond — plays the hero, but the real stars of the show are the supporting players, like B&S About Movies patron saint George Eastman as best friend and better enemy Kurt Karnak, the psychic Lilith (if I have to tell you who Laura Gemser is, get outta my drive-in), Gabriele Tinti, Al Yamanouchi, Gordon Mitchell (Dr. Frankenstein from Frankenstein ’80), Bobby Rhodes and a Michele Soavi cameo (he was the second unit director).
The always name-changing D’Amato (born Aristide Massaccesi) used the name Steven Benson on this one. You’ll recognize it’s one of his movies that minute Gemser is forced to make love to a mutant fish-man who screams, “Look at me while I rape you!”
Blind ninja monks led by psychic children. Mutants driving around on golf carts. Dialogue like, “You’re too famous to disappear in a city that grows smaller every day.” A Spaghetti Western ending. I want to watch this ten times in a row all over again right now.
You can see this on Amazon Prime, because it’s not available anywhere else.
MOVIE 2: Dial Help (Ruggero Deodato, 1988): It seems like my drive-in is all about movies that are impossible to find on home video. Oh well — that’s what being outside (or in your car) for a movie is all about.
This baffling end of the Italian horror boom movie has it all, if all means a nonsensical at best story, killer telephones, gorgeous camerawork, a piercing Claudio Simonetti soundtrack and a scene where Charlotte Lewis puts on her finest lingerie and jumps into a bathtub because the phones command her to do so. Man, I love telephones.
Have you ever seen a movie where a payphone decimates a would-be rapist with thousands of quarters? No. You have not. And guess what — this isn’t available on DVD over here.
MOVIE 3: Enter the Devil (Mario Gariazzo, 1974): By this point in the evening, all of the kids have gone home or are asleep. So that means it’s time to let the real crazy stuff out of the film canisters.
This film — based on a real story, but come on, we all know that’s bullshit — is about Daniela, an art student who is studying a cursed church when one of the thieves crucified next to Jesus gets down off his plaster cross and makes sweet, sweet love to her on the altar. And that’s but the beginning of this completely reprehensible 70’s occult gem.
Ivan Rassimov plays Satan. What more can be said? You’ll watch this while downing some moonshine and pizza with hot sauce all over it and love every minute.
Also known as The Eerie Midnite Horror Show, this is available on DVD, including several Mill Creek anthology sets. Be a maniac like me and spend way too much money on the out of print Code Red release!
MOVIE 4: American Tiger (Sergio Martino, 1990): My love for this film knows no boundaries. I am more than an advocate for it. I am an acolyte. And I know no better time to play it than at 4:30 AM, when everyone is either asleep or in another state of bliss. This is the perfect time to savor this late-period Sergio Martino film.
Donald Pleasence plays a televangelist who is locked in an eternal war with a Chinese woman who may also be a cat. Of course, she’s a Persian. His son is into being cucked and secretly videotapes former Olympic gymnast Mitch Gaylord to have a tryst with his redhead wife, which involves wearing his jeans in the shower before some men show up and blow his boat up real good. Also, Pleasence isn’t even human, but instead, a poor Southern accent spewing warthog. Bring edibles.
You can watch this night now on Amazon Prime. It comes out in May — FINALLY – on blu ray. Preorder it now!
The drive-in is closed. Please be careful pulling out and watch for your fellow drive-in lovers. Make sure you take the speaker off your car before you pull away. See you in not too many moons!
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This post originally ran way back in November 2019 as part of our Pure Terror month. If there’s one thing Mill Creek Entertainment knows, it’s being green and recycling. If you’re a fan of their sets like I am, you soon realize that you often have the same movie multiple times on multiple sets. After I got the Explosive Cinema set at Eide’s Entertainment, I knew that my OCD would demand that I review this entire set, too. So here’s Terror In the Jungle, a movie that I love.
I kind of wish that I was alive in 1968 just so I could have been part of this movie. Seriously, I’ve never seen a film that so quicky changes its tone and central theme so quickly, abandoning characters that its taken time to set up for an entirely new situation. And then we get the airplane, with swinging bands playing on it and people going bonkers before it crashes? I want to live in this insane world.
After we meet all these folks — bound for Rio — we better not get too used to them. Except for little Henry Clayton Jr., who is taking his stuffed lion to live with his mother after his parents split up. There’s also Mrs. Sherman, who may or may not have killed her husband, but has a suitcase full of money and is given to insane crying jags. And there’s an exotic dancer on board as well! And some nuns, traveling with one of their dead sisters in a coffin! And then there’s a band! And a rich dude that talks about cannibals!
Everybody is having so much fun that the band plays their big hit and Marian, the exotic dancer, shows off and even the nuns enjoy it. However, the movie soon turns into sheer insanity, as the plane begins to crash. Money spills all over the plane, a nun gets pulled out of an open door and half the cast abruptly dies. Seriously, somehow this went from “Soft Lips” to dudes getting their foreheads split in half and a gory death with a birdcage. I have no idea what brought on this narrative shift.
Then, to top all this off, every single other person we met is eaten by alligators.
You read that right.
The entire cast is dead.
Everyone except Henry, who is now floating down a reptile filled river in the coffin of a dead nun.
What the actual hell is going on here?
The natives — yes, the cannibals that were discussed on the plane that call themselves the Jivaros — find Henry and thanks to his blonde hair and the magic of 1968’s worst special effects, he has a halo. The leader of the tribe declares that he is a god, except that one of them thinks he has to die. So he chases Henry into the jungle and the kid’s stuffed lion transforms into a real lion and eats the dude.
So wait — is Henry really a god?
This is a movie that starts with the declaration that “This picturd was filmed on location in the Jivaros Regions of the Amazon Jungle. Without the assistance and encouragement of the Government of Peru it would not have been possible.”
It’s also the kind of movie that randomly has Fawn Silver be Marian, the exotic dancer. If you don’t know who she is, she’s Criswell’s assistant in Ed Wood’s Orgy of the Dead.
It also has three directors — Tom De’Simone directed the plane sequence, Andrew Janzack the jungle parts and the temple close was directed by Alex Graton. That may explain the strange narrative leaps that this makes.
Let’s break down each director.
Tom De’Simone went on to become adult film director Lancer Brooks, as well as creating some of my favorite films, like Hell Night, Reform School Girls and Chatterbox. Andrew Janzack never directed another movie, but was the cinematographer for The Undertaker and His Pals.
Alex Graton would finally direct another movie eleven years later, a romantic comedy entitled Only Once In a Lifetime that has Claudio Brook — yes, the same Claudio Brook who was in Luis Buneul’s The Exterminating Angel — in it.
I love IMDB because it has comments directly from De’Simone in the review. I’ll share it below for your enjoyment:
“OK, now it’s my turn to weigh in on this disaster. I’m the director who’s credited with this fiasco but in my defense I have to explain that there were three directors on this film and we all suffered under a producer with no experience, no taste, no sense and worst of all, NO MONEY.
I was fresh out of film school working as an editor when I was introduced to him when he was looking for a director. I convinced him I could handle a feature having already won two awards at film festivals for two shorts I had done. This was the biggest mistake in my life. Once on, for a mere $50 a day, I realized what I had gotten into. He hired a bunch of non-SAG actors who actually PAID HIM to be in his movie. None had any experience in front of a camera and all the characters were his creation. I was stuck in that plane mock-up for two weeks with these desperate souls trying to create something from nothing. The script was only half written when we started and he said he would finish it when we got to the jungle. When we completed the plane interiors, including the now famous “crash” scene, the rough cut was 83 minutes long and we hadn’t even reached the jungle part of the story.
I told him we had to make some serious trims, both for time and for performances. He refused to cut anything. He was so in love with the crap we had he actually once said he believed that the actress playing the stewardess would win an Oscar for her scream scene in the fire. I knew I was doomed. We argued over and over about what I felt should be dropped, trimmed and eliminated until I had it. I walked from the production and that wonderful salary. Undaunted, he went to Peru and used the cameraman as the replacement director. Down there they wrote the second half of the script and shot it as he wrote it.
Back in LA they now had a bigger disaster, naturally. The film was way too long, badly shot, badly acted and unwatchable. He and this second director fought, as did I, and he then walked away as well. Now the producer was over a barrel. He had sunk what little money he borrowed and still believed he had a hit on his hands if he could just get it finished. He hired a third guy to come in and fix the problem. This genius hired a bunch of extras, put bad wigs on them and went to Griffith Park in LA and shot more crap that was even more laughable than what they got in Peru. After that the producer shopped around for stock footage of native ceremonies and came up with some god-awful crap from a 40’s schlock film and cut it in . . . the final disaster is what’s on screen. I’ve lived in shame my entire career because for some reason I always get the credit for making this turkey. I was one of three victims! The entire debacle was the brain child of the producer and none of us had a chance in hell to make it any better than it was doomed to be from the start.
And that’s the truth.”
In case you haven’t realized it yet, I love this movie. Like, beyond love. I’m going to bother everyone I know to tell them just how great it is and then laugh when they look at me and wonder why I enjoy this blast of craziness so much. Beware!
In the same way that I’m dispositioned to despise anyone from Upper St. Clair or Mt. Lebanon — Pittsburgh-centric content, yinz guys — I’m also usually on high alert to dislike Oscar bait like this film. So let me get all my vitriol out of my system before it begins: for a movie that people are proclaiming as a human experience of war, all I could see were the technological advancements and filmmaking tricks that allowed for the continuous shot style of the first half of this movie.
It’s fine. It was up for the biggest prizes in movie making and yep. It’s a fine movie. It has no real soul or reason for you to watch it more than once, but this may be more of an indictment of this reviewer than this film.
It left me cold and I felt like I was begging it for warmth. Just a casual outline of the events of the movie seem like they could be moments worth viewing, such as the choice to save or murder the downed German pilot. Instead, they are just moments.
Sam Mendes has had a wonderful run so far, between his highly regarded James Bond films, Jarhead, Road to Perdition and American Beauty. He has an eye for huge visuals and the ability to tell a great story. This isn’t a small movie, despite really only centering on one character’s experience in the war.
I probably enjoyed the scenes with the drunken soldiers blessing Schofield and Blake before they ventured into No Man’s Land more than anything else in the movie. Although I wonder what the narrative point is of the film, which informs us at the end that everything that the leads have endured was truly for nothing, as the orders will probably change in the next week. This is not the first movie I’ve watched recently that offered little to no hope. Or maybe that was just life itself.
Again — I felt like this movie was an awesome technical achievement. Perhaps the self-congratulatory nature of Hollywood and the press put me off, as I didn’t need to hear its creators sing its praises so much. Or perhaps a steady diet of Mexican, Phillipino, Hong Kong and Italian junk movies have eroded my movie watching abilities, only allowing me to savor movies where black-gloved madmen strangle women and gas-guzzling mutants rise from the grave.
Oh, yes. I love this movie! I bow at the altar of Coleman Francis. I bow.
For I came here to see Jimmy Bryant and the Night Jumpers do the “Tobacco Worm” and the “Stratosphere Boogie” . . . and eat popcorn . . . and drink coffee. Lots of coffee, even more so than in a Bill Rebane flick (Invasion from Inner Earth), but smoke even more, just like in, well, a Coleman Francis movie. (Oh, since you asked: Jimmy and the boys are sort of a redneck, twaggy bluegrass version of Booker T. and the M.G’s; please tell me you know of the iconic instrumental “Green Onions” and get that reference. Don’t make me feel like an old bastard.)
“Yeah, I call B.S on the pseudo-intellectual B&S About Movies writer,” you say. “You never heard of them or the movie, R.D, until Sam bought the Mill Creek “Explosive Cinema” 12-pack.”
Sorry, ye mighty Internet Warrior. You’d be wrong.
Because of my longstanding love of rock ‘n’ roll and movies; slumming, collecting, and working in the vintage vinyl marketplace, doing road work, and working on the radio, I thrive, THRIVE on rock ‘n’ roll movie oddities and obscurities. If a flick has even the slightest cameo by a rock band in it, I’ve tracked down that movie and seen it. Even more so with today’s public domain catchall disc sets. Back before the digital realm, I taped ’em off UHF-TV and have shelves of 6-hour mode recorded VHS tapes packed with these flicks.
The Skydivers is the second of three films written and directed by Coleman Francis (1961’s The Beast of Yucca Flats seated his Ed Woodian fate, along with 1966’s Night Train to Mundo Fine), primarily a TV and Drive-In flick bit actor who appeared on episodes of Dragnet and turned up in Russ Meyers’s Motorpsycho! and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and had a somewhat larger part in the juvenile deliquent rock ‘n’ roll flick, 1959’s T-Bird Gang, which is just one of the many made in the backwash of 1955’s Rebel Withouta Cause and Blackboard Jungle. (Now I am really missing the old AMC Network’s “American Pop” film series. Tears.) While I have never seen the riffed version, MST3K took The Skydivers to task in the ’80s; perhaps you’ve seen that version.
The Skydivers is not, however, a rock ‘n’ roll or juvenile delinquent flick: it’s a bargain basement film noir of the Double Indemnity (1944) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) variety. It does not, however, qualify as “explosive cinema” and it is as out-of-place alongside Tony Tulleners’s Scorpion(1986) on the Mill Creek “Explosive Cinema” set as it is seeing me sitting in front of a plate of sushi or inside a Starbucks. So don’t be fooled by the movie’s tagline: “The first feature length motion picture showing the daredevils of the sky who free fall from heights of 20,000 feet with only a ripcord between life and death!” (Insert yawn, here.) “Thrill jumping guys, thrill seeking girls, and daring death with every leap,” indeed. Not in a Coleman Francis joint.
Anyway, Anthony Cardoza . . . wait, where do I know that name from . . . holy B&S About Movies, BatSam! Tony starred in . . . speaking of . . . Ed Wood’s Night of the Ghouls and directed Alvy Moore (The Witchmaker) from TV’s Green Acres in Smokey and the Hotwire Gang. Yep, and Coleman Francis helped ‘ol Tony in the production of another humdinger, Bigfoot.
Anyway, Tony-boy is the producer behind this vanity project as part of a unhappily married couple who owns a decrepit airfield-skydiving school in the middle of nowhere New Mexico. Of course, Harry is the loser-dickhead who dragged his wife Beth (don’t be confused; actress Kevin Casey, in her only role, is a “she”) out into the desert—and he’s the one who’s restless and cheats on her. And the woman, Suzy, he’s cheating with is a femme fatale (Marcia Knight, Mako: The Jaws of Death) who’s had enough, so she seduces another guy to kill him. But wait, the wife is restless as well and she’s having an affair with her husband’s army buddy.
And they plot against each other. And they jump out of planes. And they sit in coffee houses and listen to a couple tunes from Jimmy Bryant and the Night Jumpers—who are the only reason to check out this mess.
And they’re the only reason I know this movie exists. And now: you know it exists. Email your disdain to the fine folks at Eide’s Entertainment in Pittsburgh for carrying that cursed copy of the Mill Creek “Explosive Cinema” set and selling it to Sam (we love you, guys!).
You can watch TV-taped VHS rips on You Tube without the riffing, but I think you’ll need the MST3K riffed version to make it thought.
That, and a nice, strong pot of coffee. Stratosphere Boogie, babydoll!
You can also find a copy of this Coleman classic on this Mill Creek set.
About the Author: You can read the music and film reviews of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook.
Set in 1965, this movie is all about Fran and Marcy, two Fine Air stewardesses. Derrick is a British photojournalist who wants to interview them for his documentary.
The statement for the film claims that it “makes a contemporary socio-cultural statement regarding the meme of “the good girl, drawn bad.” Wives of The Skies clarifies the impact of the overarching “men’s gaze” which objectifies women as carnal sex objects men seek, while they look for love… along the way, addressing the primitive issue of Trust vs. Mistrust, Wives of The Skies displays the Japanese art of Kinbaku.”
Yes — the Japanese BDSM art of tight binding.
It was written and directed by Honey Lauren, who was in Vice Academy 5 and 6 before starting to make her own films. She was inspired by the men who order the 1960’s airline uniforms off of eBay, which sent her on the path of making this film.
Wives of the Skies is the winner of 24 awards, including Best Film at the New York Cinematography Awards and Best Original Screenplay at the Indie X Film Festival.
You can see it at these places and dates:
Pictures up Film Festival: April 3rd – 5th in Los Angeles, CA
Mill Creek Explosive Cinema set, you are one strange duck. You assault us with Crown International Pictures releases that have been seen by tens of people and then, in the middle of it all, give us a black and white war movie from the mid 60’s about women in combat. How do you do what you do?
North Korea: A bunch of citizen soldiers have to take out a mortar position and make it back to the safety of Uncle Sam, but that’s not as easy as it seems.
Jim Davis, Jock Ewing himself, leads the men. Don “Red” Barry, who played Red Ryder, shows up, as does Tristram Coffin (Rocket Man from King of the Rocket Men) and L.Q Jones, who we all know would someday make The Brotherhood of Satan and A Boy and His Dog, films that just blow my mind for how astounding they are.
Director Ken Kennedy would go on to be the set decorator for Return to Boggy Creek. He also directed the women in danger movie The Velvet Trap and the 1990 version of The Legend of Grizzly Adams, which starred Gene Edwards as Grizzly. Who? He was one of the stuntmen from the TV series. L.Q. Jones is in that, too.
This would be Margo Woode’s last film, as she played heroine Nurse Lt. Laura Fleming.
A gung ho movie about Americans winning the war in Korea. So there’s that. You can download this from the Internet Archive if you want to see a war movie that just about no one else will watch in 2020.
After watching Claire Folani kicking ass in Inferno: Skyscraper Escape (and we remember her holding her own alongside Jackie Chan in 2003’s The Medallion), I decided to give another one of her action movies a spin—this one with the added benefit of Bruce Willis. Ah, but the caveat emptors are afoot as this is another one of those films where Willis is barely it. That’s because this show belongs to Mark-Paul Gosselaar—yes, Zack Morris from the Saturday morning TV series Saved by the Bell.
After the manipulative Karen’s (Claire Forlani) contracted diamond heist for her ex-lover Eddie (Bruce Willis), a sociopathic crime boss, goes awry (that’s her story; she ripped him off), he wants her dead. Better yet, he’ll kidnap her and recruit Karen’s ex-partner and lover Jack (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), the “Michelangelo of Thieves,” to steal an armored car carrying $30 million in jewels as her ransom. And why would Jack help Karen? Well, she’s pregnant . . . with his child (that’s her story). Who’s screwin’ who here—literally and figuratively: everybody. The double-crosses—amid the blood and bullets—are everywhere.
As with my review on Line of Duty, I won’t sugar coat: the reviews on this one aren’t great. Does this, like Line of Duty, pushes the limits of Die Hard, Lethal Weapon and Speed inspired-credulity? Oh, hell yes. But again, I say: screw credibility. Enjoy the retro-‘80s/’90s action ride. Relish the smarmy-cheesy one-liners, the over-the-top gun battles, the car explosions, the boat vs. Jet Ski chases, and the beach-front dock shoot out.
Now, would the producers have liked to have secured the services of the Chrises Evans or Pratt for their leading man? Perhaps Zoe Saldana for their leading lady?
Sure they would. What producer wouldn’t?
But I think Gosselaar—who’s more than capable—carries this action film on his shoulders against the resumes of Chris Evans and Chris Pratt with self-confidence. And while the series wasn’t all that great, Gosselaar was very good as the burnt-out professional ballplayer in Fox TV’s short-lived sports drama, Pitch (honestly: he was the best thing in the series), and he’s proven his adult-sized comedic chops in ABC-TV’s currently airing Mixed-ish. While Gosselaar has done a quite a few U.S cable TV movies, he also held his own in his first overseas theatrical film for producers Randall Emmett and George Fulra, 2015’s Heist, a crime drama starring Robert De Niro and Jeffrey Dean Morgan.
You’ve seen a few of prolific producer Randall Emmett’s 113-and-climbing resume (his longstanding co-producer is George Furla) in U.S theatres with Bruce Willis’s 16 Blocks (2006), Nicolas Cage’s The Wicker Man (2006), Al Pacino’s 88 Minutes (2007), Jake Gyllenhall’s End of Watch (2012), and Sylvester Stallone’s Escape Plan (2013) and Escape Plan: The Extractors (2019), and his most recent work on Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019). The rest of Emmett’s films—as with Precious Cargo—make their U.S debuts as direct-to-DVDs or online streams, and appear as theatricals in the overseas Eurasian markets.
Emmett also produced several films in the prolific direct-to-DVD oeuvre of writer-director Steven C. Miller (Arsenal and Line of Duty) with the films Extraction (2015), Marauders (2016), First Kill (2017), and Escape Plan 2: Hades (2018). Emmett even found his way into B&S About Movies’ “Amityville Week” of reviews with Amityville: The Awakening (2017). Again, Emmett is prolific: he has eleven more films in 2020 in various states of filming and pre-post production.
Writer Max Adams is new to the game and building on his promising resume of eight writing credits, which includes Steven C. Miller’s Extraction (starring Bruce Willis; also of First Kill) and the aforementioned Heist. Precious Cargo marks his commendable directing debut. The screenplay was based on his well-received 2008 Florida State University film school short, while the feature-length version of Precious Cargo became a national finalist in the 2010 Script Pipeline screenplay competition. His recent work, the positive-reviewed two-season military drama Six, aired on The History Channel.
Sorry, there are no TubiTV freebies on this one. You can pick up the DVD of Precious Cargo at your local Redbox (or stream it) or you can stream it on Amazon Prime, Google Play, You Tube Movies, and Vudu.
About the Author: You can read the music and film reviews of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook.
Yes. At first glance this looks like an Asylum Studios mockbuster inversion of 2018’s Skyscraper. But let’s be honest: Didn’t that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson “summer blockbuster” stupidly steal from The Towering Inferno and Die Hard?
Yep.
And the studio knew it. Just look at these “tribute” posters (below) to both of those disaster-film antecedents. And you know those ridiculous “prosthetic leg” stunts we guffawed at? Well, this Euro-production has its share of the impossible as well. . . .
Along with all-over-the-place accents from its unknown bit-player, international cast. . . .
And the wood in the acting department is adrift.
And don’t be poster duped by Inferno: Skyscraper Escape either. This is another Christmas Icetastrophe (which, ironically, rips off The Rock’s San Andreas) where the image on the poster never occurs in the movie. And, shouldn’t it be a woman hanging off the chopper? (Oops. Plot spoiler!)
Actually, it’s a woman doin’ the chopper hangin’, but okay.
Holy déjà vustendhal syndrome, Batman!
So, did you read our B&S About Movies review for Skyscraper, yet? Then you’re up to speed. But wait . . . this Euro-Towering Inferno comes with a very cool twist: this time, it’s the man who is the whiny bitch-boy damsel-in-distress and the wife is the kickass mountain-climbing structural engineer.
Briana Bronson (Claire Forlani, Precious Cargo) is a career woman gallivanting in Paris while working on an Antwerp-under construction skyscraper project; her soon-to-be-ex-hubby Tom is the stay-at-home dad with two whiny-bickering, smarter-than-the-adults teens (is there any other kind in these movies?) back in Antwerp, Belgium. Of course, the building’s destruction serves as the catalyst to bring them back together—as all biblical Armageddons do.
While hammering out the details of their divorce (Briana’s evil-greedy bosses set her up in an “affair”), they all end up trapped on the 60th floor when a “gas leak” ignites the spire of glass and metal (see Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, China’s Shanghai Tower, and Taiwan’s Taipei 101; but the more accurate across-the-channel The Shard in London is the model here). Since hubby Tom is the “Neve Campbell” (and since this all ties into The Rock and San Andreas, he’s the “Carla Gugino”) of these action proceedings, it’s Briana who goes “The Rock” on everyone’s ass and saves the day.
If you watch American network television, you’ve seen the series work of British actress Claire Forlani. She was Queen Igraine on Starz’s Camelot (2011), portrayed Lauren Hunter on NCIS: Los Angeles and Alicia Brown on Hawaii Five-O for CBS-TV, and she’s currently on NBC-TV’s Departure. But Forlani’s been around since the early ‘90s, with support roles in Kevin Smith’s Mallrats, Nicolas Cage’s The Rock, and Brad Pitt’s Meet Joe Black, along with a long list of direct-to-DVD and Euro-produced films. (Australian actor Jamie Bamber from SyFy’s Battlestar Galactica reboot is her husband, Tom.)
The Eurasian theatrical one-sheet.
The director behind this French-Belgium co-production shot in Bulgaria is Eric Summer: don’t worry, I never heard of him either. But he has a pretty impressive resume of French language television series and TV movies. He made his international film debut with the 2016 animated feature Leap! starring Elle Fanning (Maleficent, The Neon Demon).
However, chances are you’ve seen (but may not know it) the work of Phillip J. Roth (I sure have, and do), the writer behind this film originally known as Crystal Inferno during its overseas theatrical run. His direct-to-video/cable career stretches back to the early ‘80s with the sci-fi-actioners Prototype X29A (Terminator rip) and A.P.E.X (love ‘em both; still have the cable-taped VHS), Digital Man (Universal Solider rip), Total Reality (Total Recall rip), Velocity Trap (Demolition Man rip) and Interceptor Force (both with the always-welcomed French-bred action star Oliver Gruner). And while you can say most of his films are rips of popular films, there’s no denying that 2016’s Arrival starring Amy Adams ripped Roth’s own 2001 cable-aired Epoch (right down the floating stone monolith space-spires). Most recently, you’ve seen quite a few of Roth’s sequel productions in the Boogeymen, Death Race, Doom, Jarhead, Lake Placid, TheMessengers, Sniper, Taken, Wrong Turn, and SyFy’s monster-shark franchises.
But even with the Phillip J. Roth pedigree, and my having seen the aforementioned films from his resume during my video store days, I have to admit I didn’t know this movie existed. I discovered it by accident on TubiTV—as result of my searching for a copy of the Frank Harris-directed Skyscraper starring Anna Nicole Smith from 1996, which I linked in the mini-career retrospective included in my Mill Creek “Explosive Cinema” reviews for two of his Leo Fong-starring films: Killpointand Low Blow.
And truth be told: If you want to be trapped in a Murphy’s Law skyscraper, you want it to be Roth’s monolith—and not Anna Nicole Smith’s. Sorry, Frank, I love ya, brother, but Roth’s wins the Towering Inferno sweepstakes this time.
Don’t believe me? You can check out both—Inferno: Skyscraper Escape and Skyscraper ‘96—for free on TubiTv and compare. Since this was rolled out internationally market-by-market and not worldwide-premiered, the release dates are all over the place: it premiered in Europe in 2017 (before The Rock’s 2018 version), Asia in 2018, the U.S in 2019, and made its worldwide, free online streaming debut in 2020.
About the Author: You can read the music and film reviews of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook.He also writes forB&S About Movies.
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