Monthly Archives: February 2021

THE EXCELLENT EIGHTIES: Tomboy (1985)

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Editor’s Note: No sooner did we finish our review of Tomboy for Mill Creek’s B-Movie Blast 50-film pack, we discovered it’s also on their Excellent Eighties 50-film set. It’s a fun film that bears recycling and repeating. So here we go with a new, second fresh take on the film.

Tomasina “Tommy” Boyd isn’t like the other girls. No, she’s not sneaking into school and switching her gender like Terri/Terry Griffith. But unlike all her friends, she’s more into fixing and racing cars than boys. This is presented as something completely out of the sphere of reality, as if she were some mutant.

Herb Freed, who directed Tomboy, has a pretty fun resume, with movies like Beyond Evil, Haunts and Graduation Day to his credit.

For some reason, this confident woman has a crush on a total jerk, racecar driver and male chauvinist Randy Starr (Gerard Christopher, Superboy), who doesn’t take her seriously because, you know, she’s a girl.

Certainly, the main reason to see this is because Betsy Russell has the lead. Modern folks may know her from the Saw movies, but for my generation, she was much better known for starring as Molly “Angel” Stewart in Avenging Angel, as well as appearances in Private School, Cheerleader Camp and Camp Fear, which steals its poster art from Body Count.

I love that someone once asked about Russell how the trailer for this movie positions Tomasina as a strong woman and then cuts to her in the shower. Teh actress replied, “I’ve never really paid attention to that. I guess strong females still have to take showers. They still like to feel sexy, so I don’t think there’s one thing that should stop someone from feeling sexy and showing their body if that’s what they choose to do. I don’t think it makes any difference in the world.”

Kristi Summers from Savage Streets and Hell Comes to Frogtown plays our heroine’s friends, who cares more about boys than cars and she’s normal, of course. Plus, Cynthia Thompson — Cavegirl! — and scream queen Michelle Bauer also show up.

If this movie came out in 2020, it would be decimated on social media and rightly so. I mean, can you imagine a movie that purports to being female empowerment coming out today where the main character only proves herself by repeatedly showing off her breasts?

The Excellent Eighties: Night of the Sharks (1988)

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Editor’s Note: We jammed on this sharkster back in 2018 for our “Bastard Pups of Jaws” week. Well, when Mill Creek boxes ’em up, you watch it again, for another take. Hey, Treat Williams stars and makes everything watchable, twice.

How is it that Mill Creek hasn’t done an all-shark disc set of every Jaws ripoff out there? Well, no worries. We love our Jaws ripoffs at B&S About Movies and included this obscurity as part of our “Bastard Pups of Jaws Week” on December 19, 2018. And we love our shark flicks so much, we rolled out a “Bastard Sons of Jaws Week.” Like we said: we love our shark flicks. And to the Italian, Spaniard, and Mexican filmmakers that make them: we thank you. And while we’d rather Micheal Sopkiw as our “Brody,” we get the very cool and always game Treat Williams in the bargain.

And a great poster. And the better the poster, the badder the film. And when we say bad, we mean “bad,” as in awful, and not “so bad it’s good.”

Treat, Treat, Treat. I get it, work is work. But when you have a contract slide over to your chair on a conference table at your agent’s office and it clearly shows the project is a joint Italian-Spanish-Mexican production . . . maybe just eat Campbell’s Tomato Soup and Cheese Sandwiches for a just a bit longer until a network TV guest spot pops up (you were great as ex-football star Jake Stanton on “Spiraling Down” for Law and Order: SVU, by the way). But there’s mortgages to pay and taxes to cover. Plus . . . you get a really nice vacation on a producer’s dime in the Dominican Republic (that’s doubling for Miami, Florida, and Cancun, Mexico, here).

Sure, other actors have done a lot worse than Night of the Sharks for just those reasons: but political intrigue, diamond theft, and man-eating pet sharks?

So we meet David Ziegler (Treat Williams; we’ve reviewed several of his films; we love ’em ‘ere at B&S), a ne’er-do-well beach bum who makes his way as a shark hunter with his buddy and business partner, Paco (Holy Crap! Antonio “Huggy Bear” Fargas from Starsky and Hutch!). Oh, and they have a “Cyclops” — their pet man-eating shark.

Then we meet David’s film-flaming brother James (Italian actor Carlo Mucari as the Americanized Charles Mucary); he’s got a corrupt businessman (John Steiner, aka Overlord, from Yor, Hunter from the Future) — with connections to the President of the United States — on the hook, so he decided to extort $2 million in diamonds. And James runs to David for help and upsets his peaceful, beach bum existence. And along comes the assassins. And David’s ex-wife (Janet Agren from City of the Living Dead, Eaten Alive!, and Hands of Steel), of course, gets involved to screw David for the diamonds that he took from James’s dead hand.

Or something like that. Yawn. When does the action start? When do get to the “We need a bigger boat” part?

Anyway, David decides to kick ass like a gunless-MacGyver — using only his martial arts skills, an array of blades — and his shark buddy. And along the way, Christopher Connelly from Atlantis Interceptors shows up as a priest because, well, it’s an Italian film and all Neapolitan ripoffs must have a priest in them, regardless of genre.

The twist of this mess is that it’s not even a shark movie: it’s a political intrigue-cum-diamond heist-cum mobster movie that figured a nice big shark on the theatrical one-sheet would sucker people to see the movie. And it worked. And don’t let it work on you. But it’s the always likeable Treat Williams — who always reminds me of Kurt Russell and vise-verse and how they never played brothers in a movie is beyond me.

Sure, you can stream Night of the Sharks on Amazon Prime with a subscription, but why? We found a freebie stream 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.

THE EXCELLENT EIGHTIES: Portrait of a Showgirl (1982)

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I’ve watched plenty of Steven Hilliard Stern movies, like The Park Is Mine, The Ghost of Flight 401, Miracle On Ice, Mazes and Monsters, Still the Beaver, Not Quite Human (written by Alan Ormsby!), I Wonder Who’s Killing Her Now? and Murder In Space, but he’s probably best known for his redneck opus, Rolling Vengeance. It’s probably the best — and only — movie where a man reacts to the death of his wife and children by making a monster truck and killing everyone responsible.

This is Showgirls with the sleaze dialed down for TV consumption. But hey — it’s got Rita Moreno as Rosella DeLeon, an old dancer trying for one more run and in love with Joey DeLeon (Tony Curtis). Then there’s Jillian Brooks (Lesley Anne Warren), the New York dancer. And newcomer Marci (Dianne Kay, Eight Is Enough) as the innocent girl new to Vegas.

It’s not going to change your life, but it’s definitely a great Sunday afternoon watch. Does anyone still do that? Well, I do.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Happy Cleaners (2021)

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“Have you ever wondered if our family is blessed or cursed?”
— Kevin Choi

Being a third or longer-generation child in the U.S. is sometimes hard enough: but be a child of immigrant parents steeped in the ways of the old country. My pop’s parents came here from Europe and his dad, my grandfather, never got on board with the “wild life” of Americans. The stories my father told me of him and his father’s battles over the “old” vs. “the new” were many and shaped the values I hold today. The most eye-opening aspect of Happy Cleaners: regardless of your family’s origin of birth, as much as we are different is how much we are the same; the same in our trials, tribulations, and values.

And I am reminded that a skin cell is just that: a cell filled with melanin.

One day, as a young man, as I conducted business at — ironically enough — a dry cleaner as I picked up my suits and pressed shirts, I noticed a person come to stand next to me at the counter. His hands, which met at the wrist with a long-sleeve business shirt, were albino-to-translucent (not white). When I lifted my head to greet the man, he was an African-American. At the time, I was aware of the skin condition know as vitiligo, as result of Michael Jackson’s affliction, but never experienced it close and personal: it was an eye-opening experience for me. At that moment, I realized that we are all the same, inside and out: the only difference between us is the pigmentation in our skin cells (we are all translucent-equal at our base). After that, the loves and joy, the trials and tribulations, the disappoints and triumphs we experience are all the same. We walk the same road, together, and our goals are all the same: for the Earth really is a single, perfect sphere.

So goes the plight of Korean-American Kevin Choi. His mother and father (the fantastic Hyang-hwa Lim Charles Ryu) struggle to instill traditional homeland values in their American-born children Kevin and Hyunny (the equally stellar Yun Jeong and Yeena Sung) tempted-influenced by all that western culture has to offer. Their parents operate a struggling dry cleaning business in Flushing, Queens, with the hope their strict values and hard work will inspire their children: they instead succeed in pushing their children away. And with that, the children struggle with the dichotomy of their lives: Why did their parents make the personal sacrifices to give their children a better life in America, only to caution and forbid their children the ways of American life. Does family loyalty go to the point where the children must carry on a family business — along with their family’s debts. Does one give up their dreams (in Kevin’s case, moving to Los Angeles) for family?

Happy Cleaners is the dual feature film writing and directing debut by New York City born-and-bred Korean-American animator and documentary-reality television editor Julian Kim and Peter S. Lee; the filmmaking duo previously worked on — along with actor Yun Jeong (here, as Kevin, in his leading man debut) — on the dramatic short, Call Taxi (2016). Well-received on the festival circuit, winning an “Audience Award for Best Narrative” at the 2019 CAAMFest and “Emerging Filmmaker Award” at the VC FilmFest at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, the film is now available across all domestic streaming platforms.

In a Hallmark and Lifetime drama-glut cableverse that’s nullified the family drama genre at the theatrical level, Happy Cleaners is a film that reminds us that poignant family dramas (Robert Redford’s 1980 directorial debut Ordinary People comes to mind) can still be brought to theater screens to inspire our intellects and stir our souls. In a current Hollywood obsessed with tentpole movies and explosive popcorn balls of the comic book (Wonder Woman 1984 is now out in theaters) and Micheal Bay variety (his latest Transformers flick is in pre-production), it’s nice to see filmmakers with a desire to bring family dramas to the screen. Hopefully, Hollywood will remember Kim and Lee come the 2021 award season.

You can enjoy this U.S.-shot, English-language film (with occasion English-Korean subtitles) courtesy of Korean American Story.org via all the usual online streaming platforms. The mission of the non-profit organization is to capture, create, preserve and share the stories of the Korean American experience by supporting and promoting storytelling in all forms that explore and reflect the ever evolving Korean American story. KAS seeks to be an inclusive hub that bridges gaps between communities and desires to instill cultural awareness and pride among the Korean American community.

And with films like Happy Cleaners, they’ve succeed. And we look forward to their next production.

About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies and publishes short stories and music reviews on Medium.

THE EXCELLENT EIGHTIES: Twisted Obsession (1989)

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Originally titled El Sueño del Mono Loco (The Dream of the Mad Monkey), this is based on the Christopher Frank book. While it has the 90’s genre of erotic thriller attached to it, this is very much in the world of the giallo.

To wit: Jeff Goldblum’s Dan Gillis is a stranger in a strange land, one of the key tropes of the giallo, a writer in Paris who has been left behind by his wife and suddenly a single father to his son Danny. A writer by trade, he’s brought in by a producer to work with an enfant terrible young director named Malcolm Greene on a script.

Ironically, the actor playing that young director — Dexter Fletcher — would grow up and move on from acting (he was Baby Face in the absurd and wonderful child gangster musical Bugsy Malone) to directing some of today’s biggest films, such as Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman.

What draws us closer to the psychosexual domain of the giallo is that Gillis soon becomes obsessed by Malcolm’s sister Jenny (Liza Walker from Hackers in her first film). While presented as somewhere in her teens, she’s also a lolita who possesses the sexual attention of every man she meets, from our protagonist to her brother.

Miranda Richardson also figures in as Dan’s disabled agent who, like everyone in this movie, just wants to get horizontal with one of West Homestead’s favorite sons.

I’m not saying this is a good movie. I’m just saying that it’s interesting that somehow Goldblum made two movies one after the other — this and Mister Frost  — that are borderline bonkers horror experimentations that no one really talks about. This is after he was a star from The Fly and yet here he is, making really strange movies in foreign lands. Leave it to a Mill Creek box set to bring this to my attention.

The Excellent Eighties: My Chauffeur (1986)

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This is one assignment that I enjoy and don’t mind re-reviewing, even though we reviewed it before, back on April 19. 2019, as well as including it as part of our “Drive-In Friday: Slobs vs. Snobs Comedy Night” feature.

Why?

Because we love Deborah Foreman as much as we love innocuous ’80s comedies. So, for its inclusion on its first Mill Creek set, in this case, their Excellent Eighties set, we’re taking another crack at it. Granted, it’s not all very good, but it’s better than most of the lost ’80s comedies of the Mill Creek sets we’ve unpacked this February.

Not only have we watched My Chauffeur more than once — the same goes for Deborah’s work in Valley Girl, April Fool’s Day and Waxwork. Again, swoon, Deborah Foreman. She recently popped back up in 2020’s Grizzly II: The Revenge. And they should have given her a bigger part — beyond a walk on — in the abysmal 2020 Valley Girl remake — which should not exist. And now that’s she back, Lifetime and The Hallmark Channel needs to put Deborah on the shortlist for their films. I can attest for Sam, as well as myself, that we would watch everyone of them. Yes, even the Hallmark ones. All for the love of Deborah Foreman.

Look, women wearing a man’s suit — going back to Diane Keaton setting the tone in Woody Allen movies — is hot. So our hormones run a wee-bit hot when Deborah Foreman slips into a tux and heels. For she really was the “New Wave Carole Lombard crossed with Shirley MacLaine.” And she never broke through. And instead, we got Jennifer Anniston, who is only Jennifer Anniston by way of her celebrity marriage to Brad. If not for that, Jen would be in Courtney Cox land with the rest of the who-cares Friends cast. At least Deborah Foreman can stand tall on talent alone.

Anyway, Deb is Casey Meadows, who comes to work as a limo driver for Brentwood Limo Services. Brentwood is the “golf course,” if you will — since all ’80s comedies lead back to Caddyshack. Howard “Dr. Johnny Fever” Hesseman runs and E.G Marshall from Creepshow owns Brentwood. And Hesseman’s McBrider hates Casey. The other drivers hate Casey, since, well, driving is a “man’s job.” They even set her up for failure with a troublesome rockstar — and she pulls though and makes the client happy.

Along the way, love blooms between Foreman’s commoner driver and E.G’s son played by Sam “Flash Gordon” Jones — on his way to the late ’80s post-apoc slop that is Driving Force and the early ’90s Basic Instinct wannabe that is Night Rhythms. Penn and Teller show up. Linnea Quigley (still at it in The Good Things Devil’s Do) shows up. Oh, and there’s some shenanigans with an oil shriek that gets Casey fired. And all the loose ends between all of the characters ties up nicely, even though how everyone is “connected” is a wee-bit incestuous. But that was “comedy” in the ’80s.

It’s not the greatest comedy. It’s not Caddyshack. But it’s alright (yuk, yuk!). And you can watch it on Tubi and Vudu for free. Here’s the trailer and a scene clip to sample.

We’ve since taken a deep dive into the career of this film’s writer-director, David Beaird, with a review of his much loved, second feature film, The Party Animal.

About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.

The Excellent Eighties: Tuareg: The Desert Warrior (1984)

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Okay, ye purveyor of B-Trash, let’s unpack the caveats:

  1. While that looks like a rendering of Michael Sopkiw on the one-sheet, this isn’t a repack of Blastfighter made to look like a First Blood/Rambo sequel — although that film was inspired by the adventures of Rambo.
  2. While it looks like it’s a Mark Gregory War movie — of which he made four, plus three Thunder movies — themselves each inspired by Rambo — this isn’t a repack of any of those movies. (We break those flicks down as part of our “Mark Gregory Week” tribute.)
  3. Do not do what I did and confuse this with Jim Goldman, aka John Gale, aka Filipina Jun Gallardo’s Mad Max apoc-poo Desert Warrior starring Lou Ferrigno.
  4. No, this isn’t a Stallone Rambo foreign repack with bad art work.
  5. Yes, as incredible as it may seem, the Mark Harmon in the credits — in lieu of Michael Sopkiw or Mark Gregory (!) that should be starring — is the same Mark Harmon you’re now watching in reruns from CBS-TV’s NCIS.
  6. This is, in fact, a Enzo G. Castellari’s production, aka The Desert Warrior, aka Tuareg: The Desert Warrior, aka Rambo of the Desert Warrior, which makes no sense. Why not Rambo, the Desert Warrior or Rambo: Desert Blood?

Now, when you see the dependable name of Enzo G. Castellari — the man who gave us Inglorious Bastards, 1990: The Bronx Warriors, Escape from the Bronx, and Warriors of the Wasteland, you know you’re getting intriguing action, and a bag o’ chips.

In a desolate section of the Libyan-Algerian Sahara once ruled by the French, Gacel Sayah (Mark Harmon), a Tuareg tribal leader (in tanning make-up and blue contacts), offers refuge to two government fugitives. When soldiers from the newly-installed Arab regime demand the “war criminals” be turned over to them, our desert Rambo refuses, based on the region’s ancient, scared laws. When the soldiers murder one and kidnap the other war criminal, Sayah mounts a bloody campaign to rescue his charge, for so says “the law.”

If you’ve watched any of Enzo’s westerns — A Few Dollars for Django and One Dollar Too Many — then you’ll know that Enzo was into desert-based mayhem long before Stallone came on the scene, so what you get with this much HBO-aired ditty is a war-modernized Spaghetti Western. And be it western, poliziotteschi, or post-apocalypse, Castellari never disappoints, non-A-List Hollywood budgets be damned.

By the time Harmon went all spaghetti-Rambo in the joint, he got his start with guest shots as cops on Adam-12 and its ’70s sister show, Emergency (which I’ve seen these past months as Antenna TV reruns). Harmon also starred in two, failed one-season series with the cop procedural-dramas Sam (1977) and (the one I remember watching first-run) 240-Robert (1979). He was one season deep into his breakthrough role as Dr. Robert Caldwell in the NBC-TV medical drama St. Elsewhere when Tuareg: The Desert Warrior was released. But I have a feeling Harmon probably filmed this Italian romp long before production on the series began — with Enzo holding back the film (due to creative or cash flow issues), then realized he had a “star” in his film. As for Harmon: when it came to crossing over to a theatrical career, he went for comedy instead of action, with the (date night) flops Summer School and Worth Winning (both utter awful) and some military drama with Sean Connery (that I am too lazy to research, but also sucked) and eventually, like David Caruso before him, came back to television.

When you think that Harmon is the guy from TV’s NCIS . . . made-up to look Middle Eastern . . . makes this spaghetti Rambo an even more fascinating watch. And you can watch this Mill Creek box set public domain ditty on You Tube or get your own copy as part of their Excellent Eighties 50-Movie Pack.

About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.

THE EXCELLENT EIGHTIES: Delta Force Commando (1988)

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Robert Freese contributes to many different magazines, zines and websites such as Videoscope, Rue Morgue, Drive-in Asylum, Grindhouse Purgatory, Horror and Sons and Lunchmeat VHS. (His most recent piece, about the 80’s video distributor Super Video, can be found here). He also co-hosts the Two Librarians Walk into a Shelf podcast so he has an excuse to expose library patrons to ninja and slasher films. 

An unnamed terrorist leads a team of mercenaries onto a United States military base in Puerto Rico to steal a nuclear weapon. Commando Lt. Tony Turner witnesses the gang’s getaway. His pregnant wife is killed in the crossfire.

Vowing vengeance for his murdered wife and unborn child, Turner immediately commandeers Delta Force pilot Capt. Samuel Beck’s Mercedes and directs him at gun point to follow the goons. From this moment forward, Turner and Beck follow the rebels to Nicaragua and senselessly blow up so much property there is little left for Col. Keitel and the Delta Force calvary to sift through when they finally catch up with the rogue commandos.

For me, Delta Force Commando is perfect Saturday afternoon entertainment. It is an excellent example of the kind of movies I would rent with my brothers on VHS and devour over the weekend. All the thrills we craved to burn through a lazy afternoon are delivered here by the truckload: non-stop action, the obligatory scene where the hero packs his duffle bag with weapons, torture with some wires and a Diehard car battery, multiple shootouts, hand to hand smack-downs, a scar-faced villain, throwing knife mayhem, sling-shot mayhem, crossbow mayhem, macho one-liners, bodies destroyed in meaty bullet hits and copious, glorious explosions. They blow up everything in this movie: cars, buses, jet fighters, helicopters, trucks, bodies, bridges, buildings… I lost count after forty-three explosions, and every last one of them was old school gunpowder and gasoline pyrotechnics, no doubt pulled off by a pyro-effects wizard, probably missing a finger or two.

Fred “The Hammer” Williamson (Black Caesar) as Beck and Bo Svenson (Walking Tall Part 2) as Keitel have their names above the title, but Brett Clark as Turner, is the real star of the film. Like Michael Sopkiw before him, and Richard Anthony Crenna after him, Clark was given the chance of headlining an Italian production made for the international film market in the hopes of becoming a superstar like Clint Eastwood. Clark will be instantly recognizable to you, but you might not know him by name. We’ve been watching him since he first played one of the Camp Mohawk basketball players in Meatballs. He made all kinds of daytime soap and movie appearances. He’s maybe best known for his role of Nick “The Dick” in the Tom Hanks comedy Bachelor Party. (And if you aren’t familiar with “Mr. Dick,” you just need to watch Bachelor Party.)

Mark Gregory essays the role of the unnamed bad guy. Gregory is probably best known for his portrayal of post-apocalyptic hero Trash in 1990: The Bronx Warriors and the sequel, Escape from the Bronx. Here he sports some scabby facial make-up, short hair and a never wavering maniacal smile. Of all his performances I’ve seen, this is the first time Gregory appears to really be having fun with his character.

Director Frank Valenti (a nod to former president of the MPAA Jack Valenti, perhaps?) is really Pierluigi Ciriaci. Long time Italian movie scholars don’t need me to tell them writer David Parker Jr. is really Dardano Sacchetti.

To understand my appreciation for this flick, you really have to understand the era in which it was made. The 80’s were an amazing time of every kind of movie getting made, many receiving a theatrical release and almost all of them eventually showing up on home video or cable. One hit would begat dozens of similar follow-ups, from all over the world. Delta Force Commando was one of the many films that came into creation thanks to the always in demand action movie market and the success of films like Rambo: First Blood Part II, Commando and Missing in Action.

These films would get made, usually on low budgets, have a few recognizable stars, lots of action and sell tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of videotapes to the vid stores across the country. When Vista released this film on VHS, it was in every neighborhood video shoppe, in the new release section, right there next to 1988’s Rambo III.

For me, Delta Force Commando is way more entertaining than Rambo III. Of the two, Rambo III has some stunning action sequences, yes, but the characters talk too much, there’s too much plot and story and worst yet, the movie has a “message.” On the other hand, Delta Force Commando doesn’t have a “message” to bog down the action, and we can just munch popcorn and cheer on Lt. Turner as he turns the men responsible for his pregnant wife’s death inside out.

I had the opportunity to ask Dardano Sacchetti about his involvement with this film, as it is a film in which not a lot seems to be known about it. He had this to say, “The Ciriaci brothers had a supermarket and an oven that made bread in a small town near Rome. The oldest was very rich and the youngest wanted to be a director. My agent told me they would pay well for my script. I talked to them and they ended up making films from three of my scripts, but they did not come up roses. I only did it for the money, which turned out not to be very much, in a cloud of cigarette smoke and lots of Vodka.”

As far as the similarity of this title with a Cannon release around the same time, Sacchetti offers, “I believe my Delta Force was written a few months before the American one with Chuck Norris.”

When you’re in the mood for just watching a couple old-school guys blow up a lot of stuff in the name of vengeance, Delta Force Commando is a perfect pick.

Climate of the Hunter (2019)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: We originally reviewed this movie on December 31 of last year, but it’s finally coming out on streaming, so we wanted to remind you to check it out. It’s pretty awesome.

Mickey Reece — who co-wrote this film with John Selvidge, has made two movies a year since 2008 and I haven’t seen a single one of them. After watching Climate of the Hunter, that will definitely change. It’s all about two older sisters awaiting the return of a childhood friend named Wes, one they both have romantic feelings for. He’s definitely a writer, but he may also be a vampire.

Alma (Ginger Gilmartin) and Elizabeth (Mary Buss) can barely be in the same room with one another, but now they’re staying at their family’s cabin together, right next to the aforementioned — and very mysterious — Wesley (Ben Hall). His strange behavior has led one of the locals — the wonderfully named BJ Beavers (Jacob Snovel) — to determine that this man of letters is really a count of blood, so to speak. And as for Alma, well, she can barely stay attuned to this reality, much less be able to deal with a bloodsucker.

Of course, even vampires have families today, which include a son (Sheridan McMichael) who spikes dinner with garlic and a wife (Laurie Cummings) who must rely upon facelifts to appear as youthful as her vampiric paramour when she isn’t in an institution.

Further complicating matters is the short visit from Alma’s daughter Rose (Danielle Evon Ploeger), whose youth and beauty take Wesley’s attention away from our protagonists.

This is a film that sparkles with modern dialogue while calling to mind the cinema of the 70’s,  particularly ones that set up dark spaces where female characters slowly lose their minds. Most strikingly, one scene borrows liberally from Daughters of Darkness.

You can learn more about this film on its official Twitter page.

Sex, Drugs & Bicycles (2021)

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This is a film that takes a look at Holland — its director Jonathan Blank also made 1994’s Sex, Drugs & Democracy — to ask a very important question: Is having month-long double paid vacations, no fear of homelessness and universal healthcare the nightmare we’ve been warned about?

The country may be best known for its windmills and tulips — and let’s face it, the red light districts and legal marijuana — but the it also leads the world when it comes to free speech, animal rights, LGBTQI equality and, perhaps surprisingly, the economy and life indexes.

As America struggles to understand universal health care, this film shows how this country has figured out how to cover everyone while even paying for transgender medical procedures and sex care for the disabled.

It doesn’t shy away from the problems that this country has endured, but this is a really eye opening look at how other countries have solved issues that we face every day. One way that they do so is by highly taxing those in the highest brackets, while not allowing the CEOs of companies to pay themselves more than their prime minister. Yet they lead the world in studies of the best places to own a business and overall gross domestic product.

No place is perfect and Hollan has a history of slavery and holidays that still have no real issue with blackface — but there are some systems worth studying. This would be a good start for anyone looking to learn more. I certainly discovered so much in my watch, which moved quickly thanks to the director’s flair for storytelling and mixing in animation along with live action interviews.

Sex, Drugs & Bicycles will air as part of PBS’ Link Voices series on February 26th. You can learn more on the official site.