After his directorial debut I Wanna Hold Your Hand, Robert Zemeckis would make this comedy which I seem to remember playing on HBO all the time — which is not a bad thing.
With the tagline “Like new, great looking and fully loaded with laughs,” this film is one of those great set up a concept and deliver sight gags and hijinks along the way movies. It was shot in a month at the Darner Chrysler-Plymouth dealership in Mesa, Arizona, with star Kurt Russell producing some commercials for Darner’s inviting customers to come in and shop while the movie was being made.
Russell plays Rudy Russo, who dreams of being a Senator while working for the New Deal used car lot, which owned by the elderly Luke Fuchs (Jack Warden). The old man promises to give Rudy ten grand for the campaign if he keeps his business alive in the face of competition from his brother’s lot, Roy L. Fuchs Pre-owned Automobiles, which is right across the street. Roy is also played by Warden, who only agreed to the role if he could do both parts.
Roy then pays stunt driver Mickey (Michael Talbott, who was Switek on Miami Vice and has some great cameos in movies like Carrie and Manhunter) to drive his brother around in a highly dangerous manner, giving him a heart attack so the evil brother can collect the insurance money. Rudy catches on, steals his boss’s body and buries it in the back of the lot with help from the superstitious Jeff (Gerrit Graham) and Jim (Frank McRae, who was a team with John Candy in both 1941 and National Lampoon’s Vacation). They tell everyone that Luke is on vacation in Florida, including his estranged daughter Barbara Jane (Deborah Harmon), who Rudy quickly falls in love with.
The two lots go to war with exotic dancers and exploding cars being used to drive people into each car lot until the claim that New Deal has a mile of cars is challenged in court and our heroes have to line up an entire mile of cars or lose the lot.
So many of my favorite people are in this, including Joe Flaherty, David Lander, Michael McKean (yes, Lenny and Squiggy), Penthouse Pet of the Year 1979 Cheryl Rixon, Grandpa Al Lewis, Dub Taylor, Betty Thomas, Wendie Jo Sperber (who gets involved with a whole different kind of car mechanic scene in Moving Violations), Marc McClure and Dick Miller. It’s definitely worth a watch if you can track it down and is just as much fun as I remember it from watching it as a kid.
“I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living or get busy dying.” — Andy Dufresne
In 1998: It was the battle of the Earth-destroyed-by-asteroid epics Deep Impact vs. Armageddon.
In 2008: Award-winning Spanish director F. Javier Gutierrez got Hollywood’s attention with Before the Fall (Tres días, aka Three Days), his debut feature film produced by Antonio Banderas. The Daily Telegraph‘s Rebecca Davies opined in her review of the film’s U.K. theatrical release that Gutierrez’s lower-budgeted, introspective disaster-drama sci-fi, thriller, and horror amalgam proved armageddic meteorites crashing into the Earth could be both intelligent and moving.
And Davies was right, for the brilliance of Before the Fall was in its reality of a fait accompli-world: In 72 hours — it was all over. There would be no retrofitted space shuttles delivering drilling teams to plant nuclear warheads. No satellite grids of the Geostormvariety would repel the devastation. No “planet engines” of The Wandering Earth class would be built. There would be no secret nuclear weapon platforms from the Star Wars dropping Meteor* to save us. Instead, Gutierrez asked us the deeper, non-CGI question (sans Liv Tyler’s ever-perfect glycerin tear drops): What would you do in those last three days of your life? And, if you’re besieged by evil during that time, would you go to any lengths to save yourself and your family? During the inevitable end of all existence on Earth, would you still fight back?
Before the Fall was a box-office smash across Europe, so much so that Wes Craven — courtesy of the film’s horror-cum-slasher elements — wanted to remake it. And, as with most Hollywood projects (whatever happened with the 2008-announced prequel and the 2012-announced sequel to I Am Legend?), the remake met with the usual project development problems. However, as a consolation prize, F. Javier Gutierrez booked a mainstream Hollywood gig with Rings (the 2017 one that starred The Big Bang Theory‘s Johnny Galecki). And Gutierrez, with modern-horror maestro James Wan, co-produced the Maria Bello-starring Demonic.
And as our consolation prize: Instead of a remake of Before the Fall, we get this less introspective, more CGI’d and somewhat similarly-plotted — and unfortunately COVID-scuttled and PVOD-saved** — Greenland starring Gerald Butler, he of the previously mentioned world-disaster romp, Geostorm. And as with Geostorm, Greenland deserves — needs, as with Tom Hanks’s recently streaming-scuttled Greyhound — the BIG SCREEN for its art to be fully appreciated.
Now the smarmy critic inside will say: Goodbye, introspection. Hello, CGI.
And the fan of the always-delivers Gerald Butler will say: Hello, best of both worlds.
Goodbye Geojunk. I’ll stick with Virus.
So, while we have a bona fide action star with our leading man, gone are the physics-defying, space-bound feats of strength. What we do get with Butler’s heroic-father John Garrity is John Cusack’s Jackson Curtis from Roland Emmerich’s 2012, as the gruff, straight-laced Garrity attempts to transport his family to safety with the world falling apart. However, unlike the cartoonish improbability tropes of 2012 (e.g., long black limousines jumping highway crevices), we have a patriarch that deals, not with the ubiquitously cocky, mission-compromising astronauts or failing nuclear warheads (or, in Gerald’s case: planet-killer storms, terrorists, or angry Egyptian gods), but the best and worst of humanity as he attempts to reach the film’s titled landmass that offers sanctuary to those intelligent enough (and their lucky family members) to rebuild society.
So, is Greenland as weird, i.e., unique, as Before the Fall?
No.
Is Greenland disaster-trope laden with the check-off-the-list characters we’ve seen before — and expect — in an A-List world destruction?
Sure.
Before the Fall was War of the Worlds of the Tom Cruise-remake variety — sans the aliens and a lower budget — with Cruise’s Ray Ferrier dealing with Tim Robbins’s deranged, inferred-pedophile Harlan Ogilvy for the entire film. And while many reading this review may not know of the film, this reviewer is reminded of the philosophical talk-cum-action of No Blade of Grass*˟, with that film’s John Custance (a great Nigel Davenport) who flees with his family from a devastated London on a Mosesesque quest to a Scottish-bordered safe haven, as well as the equally-obscure Richard Harris-starring Ravagers. However, courtesy of its $35 million budget, while we get a little bit of the “why we’re here and what are we gonna do now” yakity-yak in the proceedings, we get a lot of the CGI set-design scope of the I Am Legendvariety — sans the we-didn’t-mean-them-to-be-campy Beatles’ Blue Meanies blood-suckers-who-always-manage-to-keep-their-pants-on tomfoolery.
Butler’s John Garrity, a Scottish structural engineer living in Atlanta, Georgia — with an estranged wife and diabetic son, natch — attempts to reconcile with his family as they host a backyard party to watch the “harmless” passing of Clarke, a recently discovered comet. Only, Clarke turns out to be not so harmless. And courtesy of John’s knowledge — which will be needed in a post-apoc world, natch — he receives an automated phone call, informing him that he and his family have been selected for emergency sheltering.
Then a comet fragment hits Tampa, Florida, and the state is laid waste — for starters. And the natural disaster logistics race to the world’s largest island — against the freaked-out, greedy hoards of humanity — is on.
Written by Chris Sparling, who wrote Gus Van Sant’s (Last Days) Sea of Trees, as well as the Spanish horrors Buried, The Warning, and Down a Dark Hall, Greenland was to be directed by acclaimed South African director Neill Blomkamp (District 9, Elysium). Then the film fell into the equally-capable hands of reformed stuntman Ric Roman Waugh (Universal Soldier, Gone in 60 Seconds, Days of Thunder). Waugh came into his own as a screenwriter and director with the Gerald Butler-starring Angel Has Fallen. The duo is currently in production on the latest Mike Banning adventure, which begun with Olympus Has Fallen, titled as Night Has Fallen. And to Waugh’s credit: based on the trailers and poster that forgoes artsy-impact images, he may have given us a large-scale B-Movie, but one that ditches the grandiose and the bombast for realism that harkens back to Before the Fall. This ain’t no Bay-os strewn Armageddon or Deep Impact, my fellow apoc rats.
Making its theatrical debut in Belgium in July 2020, Greenland exceeded its COVID-era box office expectations as it rolled out across France, China, and Mexico. Here, in the U.S., we can watch Greenland as a $19.99 PVOD beginning December 18. Those bypassing the PVOD platforms will have to wait until the early months of 2021 to watch it as a HBO Max exclusive, and in the U.K., Canada, and Australia via Amazon Prime.
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 for B&S Movies.
Disclaimer: We didn’t receive a screener or review request. We just love apoc-cinema and Gerald Butler around the B&S offices and wanted to kibitz about the film.
* Be sure to check out our “Exploring: After Star Wars” featurette with links to over 30 reviews of post-Star Wars films.
** A fate also suffered by Aneesh Chaganty’s recently released and reviewed Run.
*˟ Be sure to join us in our month-long tribute to apoc-cinema with our two-part “Atomic Dust Bin” round-ups with links to over 70 film reviews.
So if you were ever saying to yourself, “I wish someone would make a socially undeeming biker movie that brings back the old bikerspolitation movies of the past but has no morals whatsoever,” you’re in luck. I’ve found a movie for you.
The Impalers were on a rape and murder spree when they barely escaped a battle with a rival biker club called Satan’s Own. As they run to a cabin deep in the wilds of North Georgia, their home invasion turns wrong when it turns out that the scientist whose home they’ve taken over has plenty of deep, dark secrets hidden in his basement and an even bigger one stalking the woods outside.
Director James Bickert has thrown everything into the kitchen sink for this, with Nazis, zombies, rampant nudity and tons of gore in nearly every frame. It’s not perfect, mind you — the performances are what you expect for a low budget film and the biker on civilian violence is beyond brtual, but for those that love absolute junk — and I say that as a compliment to this film — you need to get this movie between your legs.
It was followed up by the even more insane — I didn’t think it was possible — Frankenstein Created Bikers, which I found to be an even better movie that this one.
Also known as Femme Dangereuse (Dangerous Woman), this Jean Rollin-directed movie is all about an Asian woman known as the Car Woman. This role was specifically written for model Tiki Tsang, who is actually Australian. Rollin worked on this film until he grew too ill to complete it, then edited it years later*.
The Car Woman kills throughout the film, leaving a toy car behind as a calling card for each murder. Literally the entire film is a series of episodes with people meeting Car Woman and getting killed, whether they are women who get an army of doomed prostitutes to help them, a boyfriend and girlfriend who end up shot and stabbed with a golden fork respectively or a photographer and her model in New York City.
You have to love that Car Woman cocks her gun every time she shoots it, which isn’t needed after the first shot. It’d just waste ammo. This is what I think of when I should just be watching Jean Rollin movies and staring at all of the women, huh?
*It was shot on 16mm and originally intended for a direct-to-video release, although it did have a brief theatrical appearance in 1993. No usable print or negative of the film exists today, so what you get on video is what you get.
Before Paul Walker and Vin Diesel’s exploits in The Fast and the Furious, there was Harry Hamlin and Joseph Bottoms in this film that first chronicled the real life street racing communities of Los Angeles. However, in this tale, they don’t pull a “Point Break” and use their street racing exploits to front a crime wave: they’re just a group of competitive friends who race their high-powered cars up and down a dangerous and deadly mountain road known as Mulholland Drive — to become the “King of the Hill.”
Here, we get all of the actors we care about: Joseph Bottoms, Deborah Van Valkenburgh (The Warriors), Seymour Cassel (Trees Lounge), William Forsythe (Smokey Bites the Dust). Yeah, this rocks. Oh, yeah. And some guy name Dennis Hopper (The Last Movie) shows up.
So, did Neal H. Moritz, Rob Cohen, Paul Walker and Gary Scottt Thompson pinch this forgotten VHS-to-HBO obscurity? Well — did they — as Sam pointed out, pinch (even more so) 1987’s No Man’s Land starring D.B. Sweeney and Charlie Sheen thirteen years before (also reviewed this week, search for it)? Nah, it is surely coincidental: their film was a film where Days of Thunder collided Donnie Brasco — and those were released waaaay after King of the Mountain and No Man’s Land.
Leigh Chapman based the screenplay on “Thunder Road” written by David Barry for Los Angeles’ New West Magazine. The characters of Hamlin’s Porsche-obsessed driver and Dennis Hopper’s Corvette aficionado were based on the article’s real-life subjects of Chris Banning and Charles “Crazy Charlie” Woit. Director Noel Nosseck made his debut with the Richard Hatch-starring, Crown International Pictures’ vansploitationer, 1975’s Best Friends, as well as the 1981 TV Movie biker flick, Return of the Rebels, which starred Barbara Eden, Don Murray, and Christopher Connelly (Atlantis Interceptors).
You can watch this on You Tube . . . and wet your whistle with this clip of the final race.
While this played in theaters — where I saw it — it made its way to HBO — where I saw it again — then eventually to VHS in the ’80s. The film found its way into the grey market via VHS-to-DVD rips sold on eBay. However, in 2016, the film was officially released in the U.S. for Digital HD and Video On Demand services through iTunes and Amazon Prime.
Update: As we went to press, we discovered Kino Lorber acquired the rights to King of the Mountain with plans to re-release it to Blu-ray on November 24, 2020. The brand new 2K Master also features interviews with star Harry Hamlin and director Noel Nosseck. You can learn more about Kino Lorber’s complete roster of films at their official website and Facebook, and watch the related film trailers on You Tube.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Movies.
I have a real weakness for Charles Band’s movies. I think any study of the past articles on this site will point to this, but today’s example is 1977’s Crash!, a movie where Sue Lyon plays a wife who has to deal with a jealous husband played by José Ferrer who keeps trying to kill her. So she does what any one of us would do. She uses black magic to get back at him.
Will the burned visage of Reggie Nalder show up? How about John Carradine? What about the gorgeous Leslie Parrish, who pretty much created C-SPAN and was a major activist in addition to being a frequent talk and game show host? As you can see, Mr. Band knows exactly what I want, which is possessed cars and occult 1970’s buffoonery.
You have to love that Band has a best of montage right before the end of the movie, reminding us of all the vehicular non-driver homicide that we’ve already watched, which includes a giant dog against a possessed wheelchair.
This movie just barely beat The Car to theaters, but that movie blows it away in almost every way, except that this has Carradine cashing a check and Sue Lyon making my heart flutter. Otherwise, I’ll stick with Anton LaVey’s gas guzzler in the desert, if you make me pick. You didn’t, so I’ll just let you know that I enjoyed this, but I’m also a sucker for things blowing up real good and Satanic shenanigans.
Before Vin Diesel mounted up a Mitsubishi in the The Fast and the Furious franchise and before Jason Statham slid into the cockpit of a BMW for Luc Beeson’s The Transporter franchise, there was George C. Scott (The Changling) in this Richard Fleischer-directed (Fantastic Voyage! The New Centurions! Soylent Green! Mr. Majestyk! . . . The Jazz Singer?, Amityville 3-D?) crime-drama concerned with Scott’s aging American career criminal that once a drove for Chicago’s organized crime rings now living in self-imposed exile in a southern Portugal fishing village.
He comes out of a nine-year retirement to drive an escaped killer Paul Rickard (Tony Musante of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage) and Rickard’s girlfriend (Trish Van Devere) across Portugal and Spain into France. The police — and Harry’s former mobster cronies — follow in hot pursuit.
On the press junkets, Scott said that, for the longest time, he was looking for a Bogart-like meaty part, and he took The Last Run because it was an “an old fashioned adventure picture with a kind of a ‘Bogart part,’ featuring the lonely, separated man trying to make a comeback. It’s the sort of thing that people can enjoy.”
Guess what. No one enjoy it. My dad did: he liked its The French Connection-cum-Bullit vibe. Critics, such as Roger Ebert, pounced on the film and pontificated that it would have been better that if John Huston, the original director, hadn’t dropped out. That, without Huston’s touch, Scott ended up in a Hemingway imitation instead of an actual Hemingway adaptation.
So nostalgia mileage may vary. If you dug Gene Hackman in The French Connection and the Roy Scheider knockoff The Seven Ups, you’ll dig The Last Run with Scott — even if it fails as a Hemmingway homage. But it’s certainly a hell of a lot better than seeing John Wayne in McQ attempting to out “bullet” Steve McQueen in Bullit.
As part of our May 2023 tribute to Roger Avery and Quentin Tarantino’s weekly podcast tribute to their days at Manhattan Beach’s Video Archives, here’s the link to their take on this George C. Scott favorite.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.
If there was one movie that was hard to rent at my neighborhood mom and pop video store, this would be it.*
Leonard Maltin gave this movie his dreaded BOMB review, comparing it to 1950’s car race and 1970’s roller disco movie films. Yeah, Leonard. Wondering why everyone liked it so much?
Shot in Alberta, Canada — look for a young Robin Bougie from Cinema Sewer — this movie may have failed in theaters. but like I said above, it was a top rental film for what seems like forever.
Cru Jones has two choices: take the SAT in order to attend college or race Helltrack, which could mean $100,000, a new Chevrolet Corvette and fame. His mom, Talia Shire, whines so much that you wish that Stanley Kubrick would arrive to cause PTSD to take her out of this film, but no, she just cries that he’s throwing away his future. He is, near-fifty-year-old me can tell you, but have you seen Helltrack?
The thing I never understood about this movie was how could Mongoose have allowed themselves to be portrayed in such a negative light? They were such a big BMX company and in nearly every scene, their owner Duke Best is out to get Cru and to push his own rider Bart Taylor.
Before she went to jail for that college scam, Lori Loughlin played the tough tomboy that the hero fell in love with. Here, she’s Christian Hollings and she BMX bike dances with Cru, setting hearst aflutter. For more Laughlin roles like this, see Secret Admirer and Back to the Beach.
The evil Reynolds twins who try and destroy Cru on Helltrack grew up to be Chad and Carey Hayes, the writers of the remake of House of Wax, as well as The Conjuring movies.
Man, this movie still leaves me with so many questions. How could the town raise $50,000 so quick for Cru? How does he have the money to sign up Bart when he gets kicked off the Mongoose team? Why did my grandparents buy me a Schwinn that weighed as much as a Harley when all I wanted was a BMX bike?
This movie wasn’t on DVD or blu ray for years until Vinegar Syndrome did a limited release. It’s streaming now, so you can finally legally watch it.
Also, look for pro wrestler Hard Boiled Haggerty, who yells to our hero, “Go balls out!” before the Helltrack** race. That was the films original title.
*Other movies that fit this bill are Thashin’, The Dirt Bike Kid and The Toxic Avenger.
**None of the stunt racers could complete a lap of Helltrack, with major worries about the giant hill that starts the race. The entire scene took two weeks to film.
Prohibition bootlegging of the 1930s gave birth to NASCAR: that’s a fact. And one of those bootleggers — and the sport’s biggest success stories — was Junior Jackson, who got his start behind the wheel hauling illegal liquor through the North Carolina foothills.
The script by Williams Roberts (The Magnificent Seven, The Devil’s Brigade, one of Charles Bronson’s better post-Death Wish movies, 10 to Midnight) was based on Tom Wolfe’s (Bonfire of the Vanities) award-winning article, “The Last American Hero,” published in a 1965 issue of Esquire (which is how William Harrison’s “Roller Ball Murder,” aka Rollerball, got its start). It’s all directed by Lamont Johnson, who gave us the war drama (The McKenzie Break, the military-paranoia drama The GroundstarConspiracy, and, wait for it . . . one of the better Star Wars clones: Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone).
Jeff Bridges (on his way to an Academy Award “Best Supporting Actor” nod for next year’s Thunderbolt and Lightfoot with Clint Eastwood) stars as Junior Jackson, a moonshiner and amateur stock-car driver that stays one step ahead of the law — until he experiences an epiphany when his father is sent to prison for moonshining.
His new commitment to racing faces obstacles from Ned Beatty as a cheapskate promoter and Ed Lauter as a race-team owner who refuses to let Junior field his own pit crew led by his brother, played by Gary Busey. Romantic entanglements come in the form of Valarie Perrine who plays her affections against Junior and his main competitor on the track, played by William Smith (who jumps behind the wheel again in David Cronenberg’s Fast Company). In case you haven’t noticed: that’s all of the actors we care about at B&S About Movies.
This movie has it all: a great cast backed by a great script courtesy of Tom Wolfe and Williams Roberts, along with solid direction by Lamont Johnson. And . . . while the film didn’t exactly light up the box office for 20th Century Fox, it helped catapult Jim Croce’s “I Got a Name,” which served as the film’s theme song, up the charts (a process that was repeated when it was used in that same capacity in the Mark Walhberg’s 2006 football drama, Invincible).
Not everyone remembers this early entry in Jeff Bridges’s career, but it slides into the DVD racks nicely, right alongside fellow A-List race epics Red Line 7000 with James Caan, Grand Prix with James Garner, Le Mans with Steve McQueen, and Winning with Paul Newman. For me, it’s as good, even better, than Days of Thunder with Tom Cruise (no offense, Tom; it’s due to drive-in nostalgia with pops).
You can learn more about Junior Johnson with this eulogy published upon his December 2019 death at NASCAR.com. You can read a digitized version of Tom Wolfe’s article as part of the University of Virginia’s archives.
Rarely airing on ’70s UHF-TV and ’80s pay-cable, and poorly distributed as a hard-to-find Fox Home Video VHS, The Last American Hero finally made it into the digital marketplace as high-quality DVD in 2006 and is readily streamable on all the usual platforms — but we found a copy on You Tube. Watch the trailer, HERE.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.
Ike White is one of those musical obscurities, like Jim Morrison’s doppelganger from 1974, The Phantom, or “Sugar Man” Rodriquez, dubbed as a Bob Dylan doppelganger (ironically, both are from Detroit), that you won’t read about in Rolling Stone Record Guides or musicpedias. Ike White is an artist — like unheralded R&B soul artists Gil Scott-Heron and Shuggie Otis — that should have been as chart-topping on radio station playlists and Billboard sales charts as Stevie Wonder. Or Al Green. Or Curtis Mayfield. We should speak of Ike White with the fervor afforded to George Clinton and Bootsie Collins. And King Sunny Aide. And Sun Ra. And Taj Mahal.
And, for a time, Ike White was. Then he simply vanished.
Ike White — sans our mentions of the chart-topping and commercially-aware artists of George Clinton, Al Green, Curtis Mayfield, and Stevie Wonder — was an artist for record geeks. For he was an artist you heard of in the dusty, molded cardboard repositories of vintage vinyl outlets and record swap meets. He was a man doing life for murder; a multi-instrumentalist (even drums) discovered by the man who discovered Jimi Hendrix and took War and Sly and the Family Stone to the top of the charts. Sadly, even with the patronage of Jerry Goldstein and, eventually, Stevie Wonder himself — who secured Ike a new attorney and successfully got his prison sentence suspended — Ike White was a troubled soul beyond help.
And after one critically-acclaimed album — recorded inside prison — and an offer from CBS-TV to produce a TV movie about his life, Ike White went off the grid for over 40 years — like “Sugar Man” Rodriquez.
And like the similar-themed document Searching for Sugar Man, a film which reignited the forgotten musical career of Rodriquez, so could have The Changin’ Times of Ike White. Instead, this BBC-TV production does not offer us the expected, uplifting fairy tale ending; it instead shifts from a life document into a twisted mystery about a man that many thought they knew; a life more complicated than anyone could have imagined.
This is the one time when you drop your hesitations on watching a documentary for your evening’s entertainment — and watch it. You’ve never seen a documentary about a life with character revelations and plot twists like the life of Ike White.
You can learn more about the film at its official Facebook page and at Kino Lorber. You can listen to Changin’ Times, Ike White’s debut album — recorded with a backing band of Santana bassist Doug Rauch (also did a stint with Davie Bowie) and Sly and the Family Stone drummer Greg Errico (a walking rock ‘n’ roll Venn diagram) — in its entirety, on You Tube.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.
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