I want to know what it was like to live in the 1983 of 80s throwback movies, where it’s always neon-lit and set to synth. I kind of remember everything being woodgrain and dismal, but to quote The Hold Steady, “I’ve survived the eighties one time already. And I don’t recall them all that fondly.” You know, outside of all the movies that came out back then.
Joel (Evan Marsh) is a horror movie journalist, aspiring movie writer and pretty much incel who yearns for a roommate that wants nothing to do with him. After trying to play detective and get her latest boyfriend Bob (Ari Millen) to break up with her, he stumbles upon a self-help group for serial killers. Bob is one of them, throwing off his ruse as a taxi cab killer, and leading to the killers stalking him.
This movie makes the most of a David Koechner cameo, as well as appearances by Robert Maillet (formerly WWEs Kurrgan), Julian Richings (the janitor in Urban Legend) and Amber Goldfarb as Carrie, one of the killers who may be more than she seems.
Much like everything that came after Scream, this film desperately wants to take the piss out of the slasher genre while falling to the failings of said films. It says nothing new, it brings Patrick Bateman-lite in as its bad guy and at least has funny cops. Director Cody Callahan also made the two Antisocial movies, as well as The Oak Room, which is also about bad things happening at a bar, and Let Her Out.
You may enjoy this. As for me, if I want to be awash in endless nostalgia, I know that I have plenty of better slashers to indulge in. I’d recommend Just Before Dawn, The Prowler or, well, anything made before 1983 to be perfectly honest.
Emma Maddox as returns to her Maine hometown, haunted by the mysterious death of her brother Mikey years ago. As she reconnects with his best friend Tommy, the two rekindle their romance just as she begins to uncover the web of lies within her birthplace. Downeast is a story of crime, revenge, and the hope for a new life.
Directed by Joe Raffa (who also directed the Maine-centric Dark Harbor and co-wrote the script with Greg Finley, who stars as Tommy), this film realizes that small town America is a place of lies, debts and darkness. Tommy is just keeping his head down and trying to just live out his life. Now, he’s back in the world of the mob that he just wanted to forget. Maybe he could have been a boxer once, but now, who knows what will happen?
Downeast is now availble on demand from Gravitas Ventures and APS Films.
Drive-In Asylum #22 is here! The newest issue is bursting with retro thrills related to your favorite horror, cult and exploitation films.
There’s are interviews with Candace Hilligoss from Carnival of Souls, underground filmmaker Jon Moritsugu (My Degeneration, Terminal USA), and Italian actor Giovanni Lombardo Radice (City of the Living Dead, Cannibal Ferox) and movie reviews like Satan’s Cheerleaders, The Last Match, The Prowler, Zombie Lake, The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!, Hanging By a Thread and much more.Plus as usual, #22 is loaded with the vintage newsprint ads that you love
DIA #22 is 60 black and white pages (with some pages on colored paper), 5.5 x 8.5 inches in size. You can get it right here!
Based on the novel By the Great Horn Spoon! by Sid Fleischman, this was the last Disney film directed by James Neilsen, who also made Dr. Syn, Alias the Scarecrow; The Moon-Spinners; Summer Magic; Gentle Giant and Moon Pilot for the studio. It also boasts songs by the Sherman Brothers, who produced more movie scores than any other songwriting team in history. They’re best known for their songs from Mary Poppins as well as one of the most performed songs of all time, “It’s a Small World (After All).”
After Jack (Bryan Russell) and Arabella Flagg (Suzanne Pleshette) are orphaned in Boston, Jack and the family butler Eric “Bullwhip” Griffin (Roddy McDowall) head for the gold rush in San Francisco. Jack is obsessed with the books he’s been reading about the Wild West, which leads them across the country and into the orbit of the villainous Judge Higgins (Karl Malden).
Wrestling fans will enjoy seeing Mike Mazurki, who in addition to being a grappler and a heavy in plenty of movies, was also the first president of the Cauliflower Alley Club, an association of professional wrestlers. He plays Mountain Ox, who boxes against McDowall.
And Disney history fans will get to see Jimmy MacDonald, the voice of Mickey Mouse from 1947 to 1988, as a percussionist in the saloon scenes.
How do you recapture the magic of a film that took so many by surprise, even if it was calculated to do exactly what it set out to accomplish? Then again, until Rocky II came out, this was the most successful sequel in history.
Producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown realized that if they didn’t make this movie, someone else would. You know who wouldn’t be coming along? Director Steven Spielberg, who referred to sequels as “carny tricks” and had such a bad time making the original that there was no way he was getting back on the boat.
John D. Hancock, who wrote and directed Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, was the pick to make it instead but after execs saw the dark movie he was making, they let him go. Of course, the fact that he didn’t want Universal President Sidney Sheinberg’s wife Lorraine Gary (Ellen Brody) to be on the boat rescuing people may have had something to do with his firing.
There’s also the matter of what his version of the movie was going to be about. Taking the idea that the town of Amity was in debt to organized crime, the film would open with a boarded-up ghost town with no tourist economy — and the mob coming to collect — being saved by a new resort being built on the island before a second shark appears.
Strangely enough, this is when Spielberg considered returning, planning a movie based on to direct Quint’s Indianapolis speech. However, the sequel would have to wait a year until he could make Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Production designer Joe Alves and Verna Fields proposed co-directing the film, but the Directors Guild of America objected to one of their members being replaced by a crew member who was not in their union. Jeannot Szwarc, who made Bug and eventually Santa Claus: The Movie and Supergirl, came in.
You know who wasn’t all that happy at this point? Roy Scheider.
The actor had quit The Deer Hunter two weeks into production due to creative differences, so Universal offered to just let him out of his three-movie contract if he made Jaws 2. He claimed that there was nothing new to do in the movie. He went so far as to act mentally deranged so they would fire him, but his new deal made him 400% more than the first movie and got a percentage of the film’s net profit.
However, he pretty much got along with Szwarc like a human and a shark. He felt that the director ignored the principal actors and was wasted time with extras and technical shots. In a mediation meeting, talks devolved into physical violence and then letters were exchanged.
You have to love that the very day a new hotel opens on Amity Island, a new great white shows up and starts killing divers and water skiers before surviving a boat explosion to murder even more people and a killer whale. Take that, Orca!
Police Chief Brody knows it’s a shark. He tells Mayor Larry Vaughn again and you’d think Larry would learn by now, but he claims there’s no way a second shark could come to Amity. And you’d think that Brody’s son Mike would know by now that sharks are out to kill you and all of your teenage friends, but if people weren’t stupid, we wouldn’t have a movie.
I’m certain I saw this at a drive-in as A Spaceman in King Arthur’s Court, because I am sure I saw nearly every Disney 70s movie at the drive-in. As for kids born later than me, you can be forgiven for thinking that this movie is A Kid in King Arthur’s Court as they are the same movie down to the role of Merlin being plated by Ron Moody.
Dennis Dugan plays Tom Trimble, the astronaut who goes back in time, but today he makes movies like Jack and Jill, Grown Ups and You Don’t Mess with the Zohan. But here, he’s a dude going back to Camelot and wowing them with stories of Uncle Miltie, which seems dated even when I realize that this film is 42 years old.
Also — why is Merlin the bad guy in this? Maybe I shouldn’t be wondering these things and just enjoy myself, which is pretty much what I’ve been doing with Disney week. I wonder what post-Star Wars kids thought of this.
Pat Roach shows up. That guy — between being a German mechanic, a guard and a gestapo that fights Indiana Jones, General Kael in Willow and the Toth-Amon in Conan the Destroyer— is the best bad guy ever.
Russ Mayberry, who directed this, is probably better known for his TV work. The only theatrical movie he made outside of this — that I can think of — is the biker movie The Jesus Trip.
Get ready to join special guest Dustin Fallon from Horror and Sons this Saturday on the Groovy Doom Facebook page starting at 8 PM East Coast Time. This week, we’re celebrating the announcement of the moon wobble with seeing two ways the world could end.
Rats! What do they want from us? Well, if you’ve ever watched the show, you know that you can watch the ads for the movies, discuss the films and then make a themed mixed drink. Here’s the first recipe. Drink responsibly and by that we mean don’t spill your shaker all over the place.
This one is pretty simple. Pour the juice, rum, then cola over ice and enjoy. For extra fun, drop in the cherries and pretend they’re rat eyes staring at you in the dark of the wasteland.
Based upon the 1949 book Lottie and Lisa by Erich Kästner, The Parent Trap is the kind of movie Disney made in the early 60s — sure, it’s funny and financially successful, but it also has the kind of high quality that gets a movie nominated for two Academy Awards.
Teenage girls Sharon McKendrick and Susan Evers (both Hayley Mills) meet at Miss Inch’s Summer Camp for Girls* and they hate one another near instantly. Their outright anger at the fact that one another even exists leads to a fight that destroys the annual summer dance, which lands them in isolation for the rest of the summer. That’s when they find out that they are twin sisters who were split up by their parents, Mitch Evers (Brian Keith) and Maggie McKendrick (Maureen O’Hara, who only made one movie for Disney because they billed Mills over her). Yes, in the non-family court world of the Parent Trap, child custody is as simple as simply taking the child you want and never communicating with each other — much less letting the kids know their twin exists — ever again, which really feels like mental child abuse.
But hey! Let’s have fun! The girls decide that they want to see the other parent they are missing, so a haircut and some studying up on each others’ lives goes down and before you know it, Sharon is Susan and Susan is Sharon. If this sounds kind of like The Patty Duke Show, well — they were cousins and producer, writer and creator Sidney Sheldon spent a week with star Duke and discovered she had two very different personalities, which led to his concept of identical cousins. Not to get super dark — I mean, I already talked about mentally abusing children, so why not, right? — but years later, those two sides of Patty’s personality would be explained because she had manic depression. And yet a hot dog made her lose control!
But I digress…
As they switch lives, Sharon as Susan learns that Mitch is getting married to a younger woman who only wants his money (Joanna Barnes, who went to the same school and won the same poetry award as Sylvia Plath; a magazine article that she wrote convinced her to become an actress. In a neat moment of serendipity — which is not just the isolation cabin that Sharon and Susan work out their differences in — Barnes would play the mother of her character’s daughter in the Lindsay Lohan-starring remake, which not only puts it in the same universe as this film, but supposes a monumental coincidence where Barnes’ character would meet two sets of families with two sets of separated twins. I am not good at math but I cannot even calculate how big of an improbably integer this must be). That’s when the girls conspire to bring their parents — who literally seem like they want to outright murder one another, which means their arrdvarking must be volcanic and always make twins — back together.
This movie has everything you want out of live-action Disney. An unreal situation in the real world. Songs by Richard and Robert Sherman. A love story. And plenty of sequels that didn’t come out until the 80s and involved Sharon hooking up with Tom Skerritt, Susan getting down with Barry Bostwick and a honeymoon to Vegas. There’s the aforementioned remake, a Disney+ series in production and more than one cover movies of The Parent Trap made in India, including 1965’s Kuzhandaiyum Deivamum and 1966’s Leta Manasulu, both of which star Kutty Padmini.
*Mrs. Inch is Ruth McDevitt, who was bird shop owner Mrs. MacGruder in The Birds. You can also find Nancy Culp in a pre-Beverly Hillbillies role as one of the counselors.
“Lunch’s defiantly unfashionable sort of feminism is the main point of interest in this documentary. Viewers will . . . marvel at a woman who, at 60, seems just as fierce as she was 40 years ago.” — John Defore, The Hollywood Reporter
Filmmaker Beth B and multi-media artist Lydia Lunch have been friends since the late ’70s, when both integrated themselves into New York’s “No Wave” movement: Beth B* excelled in film; Lunch drifted towards music. Taking her cues from Patti Smith, Lunch burst onto the scene with Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, which reached a national audience when Brian Eno (David Bowie, Taking Heads) included the band on his 1978 No New York compilation.
After her work as a singer and guitarist in Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, she fronted the band 8-Eyed Spy, then broke out on her own as a solo artist with the albums Queen of Siam (1980) and 13:13 (1981). During this period, she transitioned into acting, working with the experimental, “No Wave” filmmakers Vivenne Dick, James Nares, and Beth B, for whom she worked with an early James Russo (Beverly Hills Cop, Donnie Brasco, The Postman) and Ann Magnuson (Making Mr. Right with Malkovich) in the noir-homage, Vortex (1982). Lunch also worked with low-budget undergrounders Nick Zedd and Richard Kern (each known for Geek Maggot Bingo, 1983, and Sonic Youth’s “Death Valley 69,” respectively**). Lunch also worked with director Amos Poe (later of the more mainstream-distributed Alphabet City (1985) with with Vincent Spano of Over the Edge; Rocket Gibraltar (1988) with Burt Lancaster) on his early feature, Subway Riders (1981).
First collaborating with Sonic Youth on their album Bad Moon Rising (1985), for that album’s college radio single, “Death Valley 69,” she came to collaborate with that band’s bassist, Kim Gordon, as the guitarist and lead vocalist in Harry Crews. The band released the lone album, Naked in Garden Hills (1987), in honor of the Deep South, dark-noirist author of the same name (his books The Gospel Singer (1969) and The Knock Out Artist (1988) were adapted as songs on the album).
For this first documentary on Lunch’s career, Beth B secured the insights of fellow New York scenesters, and artists inspired by her, such as Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, Donita Sparks from L7, and Henry Rollins. Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over became available in select theaters and national streaming on June 30, 2021, by Kino Lorber. You can also learn more about the film’s virtual screenings at KinoMarquee.
* As part of our “John Doe Week” of film reviews, courtesy of the film starring his ex-wife and X bandmate Exene Cervenka, we reviewed Salvation! (1987), Beth B’s parody on organized religion and the mass communication medium of television. We also reviewed Lydia Lunch’s appearance in Mondo New York(1988), as well as taking a look at The Blank Generation (1976) — a 16-mm black & white DIY documentary co-directed by Lydia Lunch and Patti Smith Group guitarist Ivan Kral with director Amos Poe — in the context of our review for Ulli Lommel’s Richard Hell-starring Blank Generation (1980).
** Richard Kern’s other MTV 120 Minutes-era alternative rock videos include King Missile’s “Detachable Penis” and “Marilyn Manson’s “Lunchbox.”
Other female punk/new wave musicians who transitioned into film that we’ve reviewed are the late Christina Amphlett of the Divinyls in Monkey Grip (1982), Nena in Hangin’ Out (1983), and Nina Hagen in Cha Cha (1979). While we haven’t reviewed them, Debbie Harry of Blondie fame, and later of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), appeared in Amos Poe’s Unmade Beds (1976) and The Foreigner (1978).
There more rock ‘n’ roll on film — including many punk and new wave-inspired films — with our “Rock ‘n’ Roll Week” blowouts (Part 1 and Part 2). Is there a “Part 3” on the way? Oh, you bet! Join us during the last week of August through the first week of September for thirty more films concerned with rock and radio. Oh, speaking of radio . . . be sure to visit our round up of “Exploring: Radio Stations on Film” . . . and we get into Gen X/Grunge films with our “Exploring: 50 Gen-X Grunge Films of the Alt-Rock ‘90s” featurettes.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.
One of the joys of Disney+ is discovering things that you never knew existed. Did you ever know that Robert Townsend — yes, the man who made Hollywood Shuffle — directed and starred in a superhero movie two decades before the recent Marvel movie boom and The Incredibles?
Bronze Eagle (Townsend) is super strong and can fly. His wife, Warrior Woman (Alex Datcher), is just as strong and can outfight nearly anyone. Their children Silver Charge (Kasan Butcher) and Molly have all manner of powers. Even the grandparents in this family, like Steel Condor(Sherman Hemsley!) and Doris (Joan Pringle) are superheroes. The only one that isn’t is Scott (Michael J. Pagan), who may never get powers if he hits puberty before they manifest.
Writer Dan Berendsen was also the scribe for numerous episodes of Sabrina, the remake of The Initiation of Sarah and the movies for Hanna Montana and The Wizards of Waverly Place.
It’s not the best superhero movie you’ve seen, but the idea that aluminum foil is the kryptonite for our heroes is pretty funny. And I dig the eventual hero name that Scott gets, Warrior Eagle.
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