Thorne Smith died before he could finish The Passionate Witch, which was completed by Norman H. Matson. Smith was a lifelong drinker who still turned out some incredibly popular books, like the first two Topper novels, which is a much sexier story than the movies that were made from it.

Director René Clair was looking for a new project and shared the book with Preston Sturges, who thought that it would be a good vehicle for Veronica Lake. Dalton Trumbo was signed to write the script, but the final film had numerous writers, including Robert Pirosh, Marc Connelly, André Rigaud and Clair.

Frederic March plays numerous members of the Wooley family, all of whom have been cursed by Jennifer (Lake) and her father Daniel (Cecil Kellaway), who were burned at the stake for witchcraft. Before death, Jennifer has cursed the Wooleys to all marry the wrong woman for all time.

Hundreds of years later, lightning splits the tree where their ashes were buried, freeing them to continue to haunt the Wooleys, this time in the form of Wallace, who is running for governor and about to marry the rich and spoiled Estelle Masterson (Susan Hayward). The trouble is that she soon falls in love with Wallace, causing no small matter of scandal, as his would-be father-in-law J.B. Masterson (Robert Warick) is funding his political campaign.

Obviously the inspiration for Bewitched, this movie succeeds because of Lake, who was as charming and hilarious as she was gorgeous. Here’s how weird Hollywood is. During World War II, Lake changed her trademark peek-a-boo hairstyle — which covered one eye —  at the urging of the government, as they wanted to encourage the women working in factories to have safer hairstyles. Her career never recovered to the same level of fame she had before the hairstyle switch.

By 1951, on the verge of a nervous breakdown and bankruptcy, Lake ran away, left her husband and flew alone to New York. In 1969 she told the New York Times, “They said, “She’ll be back in a couple of months.” Well I never returned. Enough was enough already. Did I want to be one of the walking dead or a real person?”

She was arrested more than once for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct while living far from her famous past in the all-women’s Martha Washington Hotel in Manhattan, working as a waitress in a cocktail lounge as Connie de Toth. She lived in the Bahamas, did summer stock, wrote an autobiography — in which she said that she wasn’t a sex symbol but instead a sex zombie — and made Flesh Feast before dying of acute hepatitis and acute kidney injury, the result of years of drinking.

She deserved better. This film is glorious and magical proof.

Leslie Caron, an actress who knew Clair, said that he spoke with affection when remembering Lake, saying “The trouble with her is she didn’t have confidence in herself. Nothing could convince her that she was beautiful. It was a fight every morning to get her to face the camera.”

Before we had the internet, the fact that Alyson Milano was topless and had sex scenes in a movie was a big deal. She plays a virgin named Charlotte Wells who has a boring boyfriend named Chris and a vampire named, well, The Vampire played by the bassist of Spandau Ballet, Martin Kemp*, who thinks that she’s the reincarnation of a past lover. She’s also visited in dreams by the sapphic powers of another vampire, Marika (Jennifer Tilly, who yes, I can admit to finding attractive to say the least).

I wonder how Tony Micelli felt about a movie where his little girl furtively masturbates while a vampire repeatedly slams the head of Cheryl Ladd’s daughter against a door and then licks the blood? This was Jordan Ladd’s film debut, as well as the first movie for Rachel True from The Craft. Plus, there’s Rebecca Ferratti (Talena from the Gor movies) and Charlotte Lewis from The Golden Child and one of my favorite deranged Italian movies, Dial: Help. 

Director Anne Goursaud edited several of Coppola’s movies and would direct Poison Ivy II the following year. She said this movie cost $500,000 and made $15 million just in video sales. Yes, Alyssa Milano was a draw, as she was also in that aforementioned direct to video sequel.

*Oddly, a crew member commented to Kemp what a great job the makeup department had done on the prosthetics. The veins in his forehead were bulging out and looked great. The only problem was he didn’t have any makeup on. It was actually an undiagnosed brain tumor.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Based on the 1973 novel by Max Ehrlich, who adapted it for the screenplay, The Reincarnation of Peter Proud is about, well, Peter Proud (Michael Sarrazin). He’s a college professor who keeps dreaming of a man being murdered by Marcia (Margot Kidder), as well as another woman and places that he comes to learn are another life.

He’s driving his girlfriend Nora nuts with all his ranting of reincarnation, his doctors have no answers and a documentary on TV leads him to Massachusettes, where he begins to travel to the places he has only seen in dreams, meeting an older Marcia and falling in love with her daughter Ann (Jennifer O’Neill, The Psychic), despite everything in the movie leading you to believe that he’s her father.

In fact, he admits that he is to Marcia, which pretty much seals his fate. But hey — reincarnation!

Director J. Lee Thompson had a long and pretty great career, starting in the 1950s with movies like The Weak and the Wicked and Yield to the Night, which were written by his second wife Joan Henry. He’s best known for The Guns of Navarone, Cape Fear, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, Battle for the Planet of the Apes, The Evil That Men Do and Happy Birthday to Me. He would work for Cannon Films for the last movies of his career, with stand outs like 10 to Midnight, The Ambassador, King Solomon’s Mines, Murphy’s Law, Firewalker, Death Wish 4: The Crackdown, Messenger of Death and Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects.

This was a pretty big movie when released, but isn’t that well remembered, at least in America. It was remade as Karz in India, which has been remade several times. Then again, reincarnation always makes more sense in India.

Karzzzz is a remake of the 1980 1980 Indian Hindi-language movie that was based on The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, although influenced by Indian beliefs on reincarnation. While not a big movie upon release, Karz has grown in influence over time, inspiring remakes like Yuga Purusha; Enakkul Oruvan and this film, as well as Chances Are.

In fact, the original movie is so well-thought-of that even the titles of songs from that movie ended up becoming movie titles. Dard-e-dil, Paisa Yeh Paisa, Main Solah Baras Ki, Ek Hasina Thi, Aashiq Banaya Aapne and Om Shanti Om all owe their origins to Karz.

Ravi Verma and Sir Judah have been battling over the rights to thousands of acres of vineyards and Ravi wins the court case, then marries Kamini, the love of his life. As they fly to meet his mother and sister, he doesn’t know that Judah and his wife are working together. She sabotages the plane and parachutes out, becoming a princess, leaving his family penniless and killing him.

25 years later, Monty is a rock star in South Africa, but he has memories of a life he’s never lived. He’s in love with Tina, but must discover what Kamini means to him, how he can reclaim his past and save his mother and sister.

Karzzzz was not well-received but I wanted to cover it because it’s amazing that The Reincarnation of Peter Proud had an influence long after it left American theaters, even if it isn’t in its home.

Jonah Hex was written — and was intended to be directed — by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor. who made both Crank movies, Gamer and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. Creative differences with Warner Brothers caused them to leave the directing to Jimmy Hayward, who had only made Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who! before this. He was replaced by Francis Lawrence (I Am Legend, Constantine) on the reshoots.

Josh Brolin, who played Jonah Hex, told the Nerdist, “Oh, Jonah Hex, hated it. Hated it. The experience of making it — that would have been a better movie based on what we did. As opposed to what ended up happening to it, which is going back and reshooting 66 pages in 12 days and that being…

Listen, I understand it’s financiers, you’re trying to save their money and it becomes a financial thing, but if — there’s this thing called revenge trading. And I’m disciplined enough to know you never do it. But with Jonah Hex, if I had $5 million — which is always how I saw that movie. I remember when I was talking to Warner Bros. about doing that movie, High Plains Drifter is what I put on the TV, I said, “That’s what I wanna do.” I would do that movie still. If I ever had the balls to spend $5 million, which I don’t, I would do that movie, ’cause that’s the version of that movie that would have been successful, for sure. And it didn’t need to cost anything more than $8-$10 million.”

Look, I get it. Jonah Hex is a character that appeals to me, but I am not the audience you make $80 million dollar movies for.

Created by writer John Albano and artist Tony DeZuniga, Hex was abused by his father, sold as a slave to Native Americans, accepted and then abandoned by his tribe and finally joined the South in the Civil War before losing faith in their battle for independence when he saw that the black experience was the same as the slavery of his childhood. He attempted to surrender to the North and was used to kill all of his old regiment, which branded him as a villain to both sides of the war, just as he reconnected with his tribe and ended up being branded with the Mark of the Demon when the chief scarred his face with a heated tomahawk for defending himself in battle and killing that chief’s son. He then becomes a bounty hunter — and goes into the future after the end of the world for some time — and then there’s this movie, which for some reason adds occult powers to the character, as he can now speak to the dead.

The movie changes the origin to have Hex as a Confederate cavalryman who refuses an order from Turnbull to burn down a hospital and then kills Turnbull’s son in self-defense. Years later, Turnbull kills Hex’s family and brands his face. Native Americans revive Jonah with mystic powers and when he thinks his enemy has died in a fire, he becomes a bounty hunter. However, Turnbull has survived and is planning to destroy the U.S. with a nation killing weapon designed by Eli Whitney.

There’s a great cast here. John Malkovich is Turnbull, his main assistant Burke is Michael Fassbender and Will Arnett, Michael Shannon and Aidan Quinn are all decent in this. Megan Fox pehaps has a horrible accent, but she does some nice stunts and looks the part.

The movie is just 80 minutes and feels barely put together, rushed to meet a release date more than if the movie was done. It’s a real shame, because the idea of the movie is good and if given to the Italian Western style movie that it should have been, it could have been so much better. Not every comic book movie should be a blockbuster.

Bill Murray doesn’t have an agent and has a phone that people call him on to try to hire him. He claims that he thought one of the screenwriters of this movie, Joel Cohen, was Joel Coen of the Coen Brothers.

Why would the Coen Brothers make a Garfield movie?

Murray has been telling this story as far back as a GQ interview in 2010, “I thought it would be kind of fun, because doing a voice is challenging, and I’d never done that. Plus, I looked at the script, and it said, “So-and-so and Joel Coen.” And I thought: Christ, well, I love those Coens! They’re funny. So I sorta read a few pages of it and thought, Yeah, I’d like to do that.

So they went off and shot the movie, and I forgot all about it. Finally, I went out to L.A. to record my lines. And usually when you’re looping a movie, if it takes two days, that’s a lot. I don’t know if I should even tell this story, because it’s kind of mean. What the hell? It’s interesting. So I worked all day and kept going, “That’s the line? Well, I can’t say that.” And you sit there and go, What can I say that will make this funny? And make it make sense? And I worked. I was exhausted, soaked with sweat, and the lines got worse and worse. And I said, “Okay, you better show me the whole rest of the movie, so we can see what we’re dealing with.” So I sat down and watched the whole thing, and I kept saying, “Who the hell cut this thing? Who did this? What the *bleep* was Coen thinking?” And then they explained it to me: It wasn’t written by that Joel Coen.”

Co-writer Alec Sokolow doesn’t believe Murarry: “He knew it was not Joel Coen well before he met Joel Cohen. It’s a funny take. And it kind of defends him against the criticism of making such an overtly commercial film. But it’s complete horse shit.”

But hey. Murray got to record his dialogue in his apartment and on the set of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

I have no idea how you make a narrative movie out of Garfield, but these guys did it, and they made John into Breckin Meyer and gave him Jennifer Love Hewitt as a love interest. And if there can be fanservice for Garfield — umm, yes there can be, I may own several Garfield shirts and still am enraged that Kennywood took out the Garfield mill ride, a fact that I’ll go on and on about any time you’d like to know more — there is in this movie, as all of the characters — yes, there are more than just Garfield — show up, with Jimmy Kimmel as Spanky, Debra Messing as Arlene, Alan Cumming as Persnikitty, Nick Cannon as Louis the mouse, David Eigenberg as Nermal and Brad Garrett as Luca.

Odie doesn’t talk.

Murray still did the sequel, Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties, with less confusion.

Now for the cosmic coincidence. When they made The Real Ghostbusters cartoon, Murray’s Dr. Peter Venkman was voiced by Lorenzo Music, who is the actor best known for the voice of Garfield.

You can watch this on Tubi.

I’ve heard two stories of how Keanu Reeves ended up in this movie.

The first is that a friend forged his signature on the contract to be in this film and he did it rather than get involved in a lengthy legal battle.

The second is that Reeves was playing hockey with director Joe Charbanic and verbally agreed to play a small role in the film in order for Charbanic to get the movie funded. The problem was that his role ended up being one of the leads.

Regardless of the truth, Reeves was paid union scale for the movie while his co-stars like James Spader were paid at least a million.

The actor reached an agreement with Universal Pictures in which he would not disclose what had happened until a year after the film’s US release. In return, Universal agreed to downplay Reeves’s involvement in marketing (he did no press) and asked the film’s producers to give Reeves more profit participation. Since the movie was in first place for two weeks, he ended up making $2 million dollars.

A year later, he told the Calgary Sun “I never found the script interesting, but a friend of mine forged my signature on the agreement. I couldn’t prove he did and I didn’t want to get sued, so I had no other choice but to do the film.”

So when critics — like the aforementioned Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw, who said, “Short of getting Angela Lansbury or Rodney Dangerfield or Lassie for the part, the miscasting could not be more complete. Keanu is profoundly wrong as a serial killer.” — hated this movie and Keanu was nominated at the Razzie awards for Worst Supporting Actor, he still honored the agreement.

FBI Special Agent Joel Campbell (Spader) was too late to save a woman from a serial killer, so he leaves for Chicago, where he deals with migraines and has just one friend, his therapist Dr. Polly Beilman (Marisa Tomei). But when a girl dies in his building and the photos get mailed to him, obviously the killer has followed him. Despite FBI Special Agent Mike Ibby (Ernie Hudson) and Detective Hollis Mackie (Chris Ellis) asking him to come back, he wants to avoid the case.

Then, David Allen Griffin (Reeves) sends him a photo of another girl and tells him that if he doesn’t save her in nine hours, she’ll die. He keeps repeating this game with the detective, telling him that he considers him a good friend. And when he takes Beilman, he really gets to Campbell.

At least it has “Roads” by Portishead on the soundtrack.

Jamie Lee Curtis had this to say about Virus: “Rob Reiner, for his 40th birthday, had a bad show business party where everybody brought show business clips. Rob’s was playing a hippie on Gomer Pyle: USMC singing “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Virus is so bad that it’s shocking. That would be the all time piece of shit. It’s just dreadful. That’s the only good reason to be in bad movies. Then when your friends have bad movies you can say “Ahhhh, I’ve got the best one. I’m bringing Virus.””

She also tried to get director John Bruno fired and replaced with Halloween H20 director Steve Miner as she felt that he was horrible. Up until this movie, Bruno had mainly worked in special effects and had only directed the “Soft Landing” opening of Heavy Metal and the Universal Studios ride T2 3-D: Battle Across Time.

Based on the Dark Horse comic Virus by Chuck Pfarrer, who wrote the script along with Jonathan Hensleigh (Jumanji, Armageddon, the director of the Thomas Jane Punisher) and Dennis Feldman (Just One of the Guys, The Golden Child, the first two Species movies), Virus is about the crew of the tug boat Sea Star — drunken captain Robert Everton (Donald Sutherland), navigator Kelly Foster (Curtis), engineer Steve Baker (William Baldwin), Squeaky (Julio Oscar Mechoso), deckhand Hiko (Cliff Curtis), crewman Richie Mason (Sherman Augustus) and first mate J.W. Woods, Jr. (Marshall Bell) — who have lost their cargo due to a storm and decide to check out the wreck of Russian research ship Akademik Vladislav Volkov.

So, you know, Alien. That’s because a signal has made its way through space, hit the space station Mir and killed everyone on the Volkov except for Chief Science Officer Nadia Vinogradova (Joanna Pacuła). This energy brings dead people back to life, replacing their body parts with machinery to create zombie robots that look incredible and made me understand why Donald Sutherland demanded that he do all of his scenes in makeup in one day, because that had to take forever.

Michelle Pfeiffer made her debut in this movie and still isn’t all that happy about it, saying ” to star in the film to her age at the time, saying, “I hated that film with a vengeance and could not believe how bad it was. At the time I was young and didn’t know any better.”

The total budget for the production was $11.2 million, almost double the budget of the original, but hardly anyone* was coming back other than producer Allan Carr. He was getting $5 million for the sequel and it was three years since Grease was a success. Composers Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey, director Randal Kleiser and actors John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John weren’t coming back. So Carr got Patricia Birch — who choreographed the first movie — to direct and choreograph this. It’s the only theatrical movie she’d ever direct, but she did make Cyndi Lauper’s videos for “Money Changes Everything” and “True Colors.” Sadly for her, she’d also been pulled into another movie that co-producer Robert Stigwood made, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I hope she got paid enough.

You know who else was in a bad spot? Ken Finkleman. He was writing this movie and Airplane 2 while also directing that movie, all at the same time. Two hits whose original creative teams refused to come back for the bigger budgeted sequel. This, as you may guess, is usually a recipe for disaster. Speaking of projects after this with 80s singers, he’d go on to write the Madonna vehicle Who’s That Girl.

There was an idea to get Travolta and Newton-John to be a married couple that ran a gas station. Thankfully, they refused and I could keep the morbid fantasy in my head that they both drowned in Grease and the entire movie is the fantasy they have while the oxygen leaves their brains. There was also the idea to base the sequel around Jeff Conaway and Stockard Channing, who would be playing a 37-year-old — and still fabulous — teenager. They also turned it down.

While Pfeiffer was an unknown, Maxwell Caulfield was already a Broadway star. And also unlike her, his career paid the price for this movie bombing. He told MovieTome, “Before Grease 2 came out I was being hailed as the next Richard Gere or John Travolta. But when Grease 2 flopped nobody would touch me. It felt like a bucket of cold water had been thrown in my face. It took me 10 years to get over Grease 2.”

It’s 1961, school at Rydell is n session and The Pink Ladies — Sharon Cooper (Maureen Teefy, who was also Lucy Lane in another bomb we need to get to, Supergirl), Paulette Rebchuck (Lorna Luft, half-sister of Liza and one of the girls in Where the Boys Are ’84), Rhonda Ritter (Alison Price, who is also in the aforementioned Airplane 2), Dolores Rebchuck (Pamela Segall, the voice of Bobby Hill) and their leader Stephanie Zinone (Pfeiffer) — and The T-Birds — Goose McKenzie (Christopher McDonald, who most people would say is Shooter McGavin but he’s also in The Black Room), Louis DiMucci (Peter Frechette, The Hills Have Eyes Part II), Davey Jaworski (Leif Green, Joysticks) and their leader Johnny Nogerelli (Adrian Zmed from TJ Hooker!) — are battling over the fact that Stephanie just dumped Johnny.

Frenchy** (Didi Cohn) has come back to school to get her diploma and gives Michael Carrington (Caulfield) a quick tour of the school. He’s an English exchange student who coincidentally happens to be a cousin of Sandy because the UK and Australia are the same thing. He falls for Stephanie, who ends up kissing him accidentally at a bowling alley, but she’ll only date a motorcycle-riding man. Michael is smart enough to do the T-Birds homework, earning the money and the cred to get a bike of his own and becoming the mysterious Cool Rider who saves them from the Cycle Lords — formerly the Scorpions — and gets Stephanie all hot and bothered.

So yeah — mistaken identity, dudes trying to date rape their ladies by pretending a nuclear war is happening, Tab Hunter as a teacher, Olivia Newton-John’s first husband Matt Lattanzi as one of the Prep-Tones (they got married after being meeting on the set of Xanadu), Katey Segal’s twin sisters Jean and Liz, Andy Tennant (whose career somehow survived being in this, Sgt. Pepper’s and 1941), Connie Stevens as Miss Yvette Mason, Mrs. Gretzky Janet Jones as a girl who missed her last two periods and Ninja 3 and Breakin’ star Lucinda Dickie as a female greaser.

There were going to be four Grease movies*** and a TV series and everything was going to be great. Of course, it didn’t work out that way.

Except in Kannada (South India), where the script was turned into the 1987 blockbuster Premaloka.

*That’s not exactly true. Frenchy (Didi Conn), Principal McGee (Eve Arden), Coach Calhoun (Sid Caesar), Blanche Hodel (Dody Goodman), Eugene Felsnick (Eddie Deezen), Craterface (Dennis C. Stewart) and Mr. Spears (Dick Patterson) all came back for another helping.

**Frenchy disappears halfway through the movie, never to be seen again.

***The rumors that Disney made the third script as High School Musical are just that. Rumors.