Monthly Archives: February 2022

Mill Creek Through the Decades: 1970s Collection: For Pete’s Sake (1974)

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Henrietta and Pete Robbins (Barbra Streisand and Michael Sarrazin) are a struggling couple who have to deal with the insults of their sister-in-law Helen, who tells them that an early marriage took away Pete’s chance at success. Yet when Pete gets an insider trading tip — this type of thing was somehow perfectly legal in 1974 — she borrows three grand from a Mafia loan shark and finds herself unable to quickly pay them back, which means that she’s sold to Mrs. Cherry and rented out as a call girl, but she fails again and again to satisfy any of her clients and starts adding up even more debt.

It was written by Stanley Shapiro (How to Save a Marriage and Ruin Your Life, Pillow Talk) and Maurice Richli (The Pink Panther) and directed by Peter Yates, whose career has movies like Breaking Away and Mother, Jugs and Speed as well as Bullitt, The Deep, The Dresser and Krull.

It’s a light farce and while Streisand didn’t like the movie, it was a success.

Through the Decades: 1970s Collection is new from Mill Creek. It also has A Walk In the Spring Rain, Dollars, Fun With Dick and Jane, The Owl and Pussycat, The Anderson Tapes, The Horsemen, The Stone Killer, Brother John, Gumshoe and The Last Detail. You can learn more on their site and order it from Deep Discount.

Mill Creek Through the Decades: 1970s Collection: The Owl and the Pussycat (1970)

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Written by Buck Henry, based on a stage play by Bill Manhoff and directed by Herbert Ross, The Owl and the Pussycat was a huge romantic comedy hit. It stars Barbara Streisand (who did a nude scene for the film that was cut at her request and then published by High Society; Babs sued) as a prostitute who also has acted in two TV commercials named Doris who finds herself living with Felix, her writer neighbor (George Segal) when she’s evicted. Then, they both get evicted when he tries to cure her hiccups.

They end up moving in with Barney (Robert Klein), a friend of Felix, but their arguing — followed by lovemaking — leads to Barney and his girlfriend (Marilyn Chambers, credited as Evelyn Lang, two years before she went Behind the Green Door) leaving. Hijinks, as they say, ensue, like the fact that the two can’t stop falling in love — and driving each other crazy — and that well, Felix may already have a fiancee. Will these two ever just get along?

Mad Magazine #145 had a great parody of this movie, The Fowl and the Prissycats, written by Stan Hart with pencils and inks by Angelo Torres.

Hey! Roz Kelly is in this and so is an uncredited Tom Atkins!

Interestingly enough, Sidney Poitier was supposed to play opposite Streisand, yet it was decided that audiences weren’t ready for an interracial romance. Which is even weirder, because this started on Broadway with Alan Alda and Diana Sands as the principals.

Through the Decades: 1970s Collection is new from Mill Creek. It also has A Walk In the Spring Rain, Dollars, Fun With Dick and Jane, For Pete’s Sake, The Anderson Tapes, The Horsemen, The Stone Killer, Brother John, Gumshoe and The Last Detail. You can learn more on their site and order it from Deep Discount.

Saul At Night (2019)

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As a result of a bizarre experiment, Saul Capgras ihas become used to a life of isolation at night, while the rest of the city — and his family — all sleep under a mandated curfew. Saul is the only person left awake at night — perhaps by choice or sacrifice — and he yearns to experience the lives of his family, despite never seeing them awake ever.

Then, he meets Amalur, who avoids her family because she doesn’t want to know that life has gone on without her.

From 10 PM to 6 AM, the world sleeps while Saul and Amalur roam the world, the only connection left with others being the notes left in a basket for them. And, at times, a beeping monitor forces them to take pills and answer the questions of a computer.

Unfortunately, Saul and Amalur speak different languages and can’t understand one another, which is better than the life Saul has been leading, which finds him using large dolls to take the place of his loved ones.

The first full-length movie from director and writer Daniel Miska, Saul at Night uses science fiction to tell us all a story about being alone, about loss and about how our worlds can be so far apart. There’s a lot to try and understand here, with no easy answers, but I found it especially poignant given the trapped world that we’re all living in, then escaping briefly, then living in again.

Saul At Night is available on AppleTV, Amazon and Altavod from Utopia.

JESS FRANCO MONTH: Gritos en la noche (1962)

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The Awful Dr. Orloff stars Howard Vernon stars as the surgical villain, who with the help of his blind minion Morpho, is out and about and taking the flesh of women to fix the face of his daughter.

Concerned with how the film would be handled by Spanish censors, Franco made a safe version for his home country and another for British and Spanish audiences that had some nudity. And still, Spanish censors were worried that this movie would damage the reputation of their country, so Franco set it in France.

Sure, it’s a riff on Eyes With a Face, but it also is the kind of movie that Franco would return to again and again, even making a sequel two years later, El Secreto del Dr. Orloff and remixes like The Vengeance of Doctor Mabuse, Jack the Ripper and Faceless.

This is where Franco starts and the films that follow would riff on these themes, like a doom band surrounded by smoke playing the same notes over and over but so loud that your head starts to buzz and you keep hearing the same notes and then the riff changes and for Franco, that’s a quick zoom and women just lounging as murders happen all around them and then the riff gets heavier and chugs and moves and you’re in another reality where blind men are ordered by their masters to get alabaster skin for the daughter they love and you can’t wait to buy a shirt before you drive home in the snow.

You can watch this on Kino Cult.

The Awful Dr. Orloff is also on the ARROW PLAYER. Head over to ARROW to start your 30-day free trial. Subscriptions are available for $4.99 monthly or $49.99 yearly. ARROW is available in the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland on the following Apps/devices: Roku (all Roku sticks, boxes, devices, etc), Apple TV & iOS devices, Android TV and mobile devices, Fire TV (all Amazon Fire TV Sticks, boxes, etc), and on all web browsers at https://www.arrow-player.com.

JESS FRANCO MONTH: Mondo Cannibale (1980)

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Also known as The Cannibals, Die Blonde Göttin, White Cannibal Queen*, A Woman for the Cannibals and Barbarian Goddess, this cannibal film — did you get the context clues — has director Jess Franco doing his best to make an Italian movie, what with Al Cliver (who is also in Franco’s Devil Hunter) and Sabrina Siani (Conquest, The Throne of Fire, Quest for the Mighty Sword) in the cast and its appearance as a category 3 video nasty.

Franco only did these movies for the money, but he still takes some time to make this film look halfway decent. He luckily has Siani as Lana, a girl whose mother was killed before she was kidnapped and made into, well, a white cannibal queen. Now, Cliver — her father — has to come back to the jungle and rescue her.

Franco wrote this with an uncredited Jean Rollin and co-directed it with Francesco Prosperi who made the aforementioned The Throne of Fire as well as Gunan, King of the Barbarians with Siani.

So while Franco disliked everything about this movie, I loved the slow motion blood and guts munching, the fact that the cannibals all looked like movie punks and that for being, well cannibals, they all wore very civilized looking sandals. It’s a good idea to have support and protection for your peds in the green inferno.

Also. Cliver only has one arm because these guys already ate it before, you know, killing his wife and stealing his daughter and turning her into their blonde goddess. Franco himself shows up in this and somehow, he has the worst dubbing of any character in the movie, which endears him to me even more and makes me think, well, at least everybody equally gets painted with the same brush.

You can watch this on Tubi.

*That’s the name R. D Francis reviewed this under when he did a Jess Franco triple feature.

JESS FRANCO MONTH: The Castle of Fu Manchu (1969)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: As we celebrate this month of all things Franco, we’re bringing back our August 19, 2021 of this Sax Rohmer adaption. 

Man, Christopher Lee may rival Donald Pleasence for not being able to say no — I say this with full knowledge that the former turned down Halloween while the latter said yes to that series more than he should have — and here he played Sax Rohmer’s “yellow peril” character of Fu Manchu, who is joined by his just as sadistic daughter Lin Tang. She’s played by Tsai Chin, who was a Bond girl twice in You Only Live Twice and Casino Royale, topped the music charts with “The Ding Dong Song” and played Auntie Lindo in The Joy Luck Club.

Rosalba Neri is also in this and you know, as bad as this movie might be, Rosalba Neri is in it. You should be so lucky as to get to spend 92 minutes with her.

This is the fifth and final time that Sir Lee played Fu Manchu, if you can believe that. Also starring in this movie is plenty of pilfered footage, including the entire opening effects coming from A Night to Remember and the dam bursting being taken from Campbell’s Kingdom.

There’s lots of fog, which I appreciate, and a plot about freezing the oceans, which I am also totally down with. Man, is Fu Manchu the good guy?

Mill Creek Through the Decades: 1970s Collection: Fun With Dick and Jane (1977)

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Dick and Jane Harper (George Segal and Jane Fonda) were living the American dream, but when Dick’s aerospace job got liquidated due to the fuzzy accounting of his boss Charlie Blanchard (Ed McMahon, and if you think I’m not doing a week of movies that Ed was in, you don’t know me) and have to suddenly figure out how to save everything they have, even if Jane’s parents believe that poverty is going to be the best lesson they can ever receive.

The best answer to their problems? A life of crime. While Dick and Jane try to keep the people they’re stealing from to be those even more on the wrong side of the law than them, they still worry that they’re getting too used to being criminals. Can they give it up? Or is the lure of easy money just too much?

This movie was based on a story by Gerard Gaiser, which was scripted by David Giler (who wrote Myra Breckinridge and The Parallax View, as well as serving as the producer and rewriter of Alien as part of his partnership with Walter Hill), Jerry Belson (who popularized the line, “When you assume…” in a script he wrote for The Odd Couple) and Mordecai Richler. It’s directed by Ted Kotcheff, whose career is all over every genre, from the scares of Wake In Fright to the sports film North Dallas Forty, the original Rambo movie First Blood and Weekend at Bernie’s.

That said — this has a homophobic scene followed by George Segal in blackface, so…1977 everybody. A year I was alive in, can remember and yes, it’s even more racist today, so we’ve made progress. Not enough progress, but some.

Through the Decades: 1970s Collection is new from Mill Creek. It also has A Walk In the Spring Rain, Dollars, The Owl and Pussycat, For Pete’s Sake, The Anderson Tapes, The Horsemen, The Stone Killer, Brother John, Gumshoe and The Last Detail. You can learn more on their site and order it from Deep Discount.

Mill Creek Through the Decades: 1970s Collection: Dollars (1971)

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You know, I’ve never really liked Warren Beatty and then this movie — and several others on the Through the Decades: 1960s Collection like Lilith and Mickey One — totally changed my mind.

A Hamburg, West Germany bank has privacy laws that are quite favorable to an entire rogue’s gallery of criminals who need a place to keep their money safe from the government. Meanwhile, bank security consultant Joe Collins (Beatty) has been planning on stealing all of their cash along with sex worker Dawn Divine (Goldie Hawn).

From there, the criminals — like Las Vegas mobsters, military men who’ve just made money off an illicit drug deal and a brutal killer known only as the Candy Man — start hunting Joe and Dawn for their money across nearly all of Europe.

This was directed and written by Richard Brooks, who also wrote Key Largo and directed and wrote Blackboard Jungle, In Cold Blood and Waiting for Mr. Goodbar. This isn’t as successful as those, but Beatty and Hawn have a fun chemistry and are both filled with such charm that I couldn’t dislike this movie.

Through the Decades: 1970s Collection is new from Mill Creek. It also has A Walk In the Spring Rain, Fun With Dick and Jane, The Owl and Pussycat, For Pete’s Sake, The Anderson Tapes, The Horsemen, The Stone Killer, Brother John, Gumshoe and The Last Detail. You can learn more on their site and order it from Deep Discount.

Mill Creek Through the Decades: 1970s Collection: A Walk In the Spring Rain (1970)

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Producer Stirling Silliphant wrote the screenplay for this movie, based on novel A Walk in the Spring Rain by Rachel Maddux. Silliphant’s best known works are In the Heat of the Night, The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure, but he also created Route 66 and did the screenplays for Village of the Damned, The Swarm, Charly and Circle of Iron amongst many other movies. And oh yeah — Over the Top.

He was also close friends with Bruce Lee, who he studied from and included in movies he wrote like Marlow and the TV series Longstreet. Together, they worked on The SIlent Flute, which was eventually made as Circle of Iron. Lee would coordinate the fight scene in this movie between one of the leads, Will Cade (Anthony Quinn), and his son.

Cade is the next door neighbor of writer Roger Meredith (Fritz Weaver) and his wife Libby (Ingrid Bergman), who soon finds her way into his bed due to the lack of interest of her husband. Everything seems perfect, but the city calls the Merediths back, just as Will’s son stalks and assaults Libby in the woods, which ends up with the aforementioned fight between father and son that ends up costing son his life.

Perhaps most amazingly, the actor who plays the son is Tom Fielding, who we know today as Tom Holland. Yes, the same Tom Holland who wrote The Beast Within, Class of 1984, Psycho II, Cloak & Dagger and created the Fright Night and Child’s Play films.

In the end, the city wins out over true love. And this movie didn’t do well with audiences or critics. But  hey — Quinn and Bergman are awesome, as you’d expect. 

Through the Decades: 1970s Collection is new from Mill Creek. It also has Dollars, Fun With Dick and Jane, The Owl and Pussycat, For Pete’s Sake, The Anderson Tapes, The Horsemen, The Stone Killer, Brother John, Gumshoe and The Last Detail. You can learn more on their site and order it from Deep Discount.

Lockdown (2021)

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This was once called COVID-19: Invasion.

And yes, that’s Kevin Nash — the one-time Diesel, Vinnie Vegas and Oz — playing a man named Rex who leads a militia that is looking to murder the homeless people living in a deserted school in the hopes that it’ll stop the newest and most deadly strain of COVID.

Director and writer Micah Lyons (The Runners) has created this story of a future that pretty much is tomorrow, which doesn’t exactly make me happy, but here we are. I mean, if this movie is to be believed, by 2035 — just thirteen years from today — there will only be 29 million people left on Earth. Rex asks his son Justin to look up the perfect man to lead the mission to kill off the street people, a former soldier named Hap Rollins, who refuses. Except that Hap soon realizes that his sister  Courtney is living in that school and will be targeted by the militia.

With a tagline like “If COVID doesn’t kill you, they will,” you kind of know what you’re getting into with this movie. I’d like to think that this isn’t how the world will go, but when I see the intolerance on both sides of the fight, it makes me realize that I probably should be loading up on the kidney beans like Hap and his wife.

I really want Kevin Nash to do more movies, because he’s an engaging personality and lots of fun. He just needs a role that uses his natural good humor and coolness to better advantage. He’s really good in the few minutes of screentime that he has, so hopefully he gets more of a chance to stretch soon.

Lockdown is available on DVD and VOD from Uncork’d Entertainment.