For the twenty-second day of the B&S About Movies April Movie Thon, let’s talk about movies some stars would like to forget.
April 23: Embarrassment — What movies do actors or directors not put on their list of credits? Let’s dish.
All April long, we’ll have thirty themes as writing prompts. If you’d like to be part of it, you can just send us an article for that day to bandsaboutmovies@gmail.com or post it on your site and share it out with the hashtag #BSAprilMovieThon.
Here are some movies to watch:
Catwoman(2004): When Hallie Barry accepted her Razzie for this bomb, she had a great speech prepared: “You know, I’ve got so many people to thank, because you don’t win a Razzie without a lot of help from a lot of people…First of all, I want to thank Warner Bros. Thank you for putting me in a piece of shit, god-awful movie. You know, it was just what my career needed, you know? I was at the top, and then Catwoman just plummeted me to the bottom.”
She would later remark, “”While it ’failed’ to most people, it wasn’t a failure for me. Because guess what? I met so many interesting people that I wouldn’t have met otherwise, I got to learn two forms of martial arts and I got to learn what not to do, and learning what not to do is as important as learning what to do. I got a shitload of money that changed my life.”
Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995): This movie seemed like it was never coming out and that’s because stars Matthew McConaughey wanted it to go away. As for Renée Zellweger, she would remember the movie by saying, “It was ridiculous. How we pulled that off, I have no idea. I’m sure none of it was lega. But what an experience. It was kamikaze filmmaking.”
Red Sonja(1985): When asked about this movie, Arnold Schwarzenegger said, “It’s the worst film I have ever made. Now I tell my kids that, if they get out of line, they’ll be forced to watch Red Sonja ten times in a row. It must be working, because I’ve never had much trouble with any of them.”
Arnold refused to play Conan in this movie, worried about destroying the franchise. Instead, he plays Lord Kalidor, who many fans have retconned as Conan using one of his traveling names.
The story of X may have been three years early, but the video revolution — driven, as all technology is, by sex — changed the world of pornography, moving it from the fleshpots of 42nd Street and dirty book stores into suburban living rooms. In 1982, there was still the glimmer of hope that the Golden Age of Porn — that starts with Bill Osco’s Mona and ends sometime around 1984 or so with The Dark Brothers’ 1984 mind-twisting New Wave Hookers — would find new life, better budgets and a more appreciative audience.
Yet videotape would open up adult for everyone and by the 90s, few films had a storyline, instead given to gonzo explorations of “can you top this” madness with few exceptions, such as the output of John Stagliano (who may have popularized gonzo, but could also create a coherent and interesting narrative film like Buda), the glossy Michael Ninn glamour movies, Andrew Blake’s NightTrips, Phillip Mond’s Zazel, John Leslie’s Chameleons and Curse of the Cat Woman, the aforementioned Dark Brothers and ridiculous parodies of existing films.
Yet in 1982, a movie could be made that transcends its adult origins and uses them to make you as the viewer complicit in the action on screen.
Stephen Sayadian only made seven adult films (this film, as well as two sequels to Nightdreams, two Untamed Cowgirls of the Wild West and two Party Doll-a-Go-Go films which take the staccato editing and weird dialogue to its absurd limit on sets that had to cost absolutely nothing yet with a cast of all-stars such as Raven, Madison Stone, Patricia Kennedy, Bionca, Jeanna Fine, Nikki Wilde and Tianna Collins and yes, I wrote that from memory) as well as the somewhat spiritual sequel — or at least next steo — to this movie, the mainstream — yet still delightfully insane — Dr. Caligari. A veteran of advertising and design — he worked on the posters for The Fog, The Funhouse, Ms. 45 and Dressed To Kill which took inspiration from the iconic The Graduate poser — Sayadian used the alter ego of Rinse Dream to make his films, much as Gregory Dark would adopt a new name for his porn changing efforts.
The script — yes, adult movies can have a script — was written by Herbert W. Day, who is really Pittsburgh native Jerry Stahl, the son of a coal miner who later became Pennsylvania attorney general and a federal judge. He found that he had a talent for writing short stories, was the humor editor for Hustler and also discovered a love of hardcore drugs. To fuel that, he started writing for TV shows like Moonlighting, Twin Peaks, Thirtysomething, Northern Exposure and, perhaps most intriguingly, ALF. He’s also written ten episodes of CSI which have been the most aberrant examples of that show to middle America, which is wild as he introduced viewers of the grandparent network CBS to furries, infantilism, a measured story about transgendered people and introduced Lady Heather, the potential bad girl love interest of lead Gil Grissom, who was played by Return of the Living Dead III star Melinda Clarke. His autobiographical novel Permanent Midnight was a success and made into a movie starring Ben Stiller.
Years after a nuclear war, nearly every survivor is a Negative, often shambling zombie-like humans who become vomitous if they attempt to copulate. To attempt any hope at remembering what human contact was like, they come to Café Flesh, a place where Positives make love while they watch, often engaging in surrealist scenes that defy the ability of the viewer to become titillated.
That’s the point. Where the goal of nearly all pornography is to get the viewer off, Cafe Flésh casts you as a Negative, stuck at home with no one next to you, as far from true warmth and, well, flesh as the puking crowd — Richard Beltzer is one of them — gathered to watch and watch and watch.
It also feels like the vaudevillian stage of the men’s club gone to Hell, as Max Melodramatic (Andy Nichols, who also played the doctor in Nightdreams) introduces live sex acts with people dressed as rats or milkmen surrounded by men dressed as demonic babies. Even the typical jerk-off scenario of a female oil tycoon lies with a gigantic pencil while her secretary repeatedly intones, “Do you want me to type a memo?”
Is the film making light of the fact that male performers had often become interchangeable, their faces are obscured for most of the movie?
Angel (Marie Sharp) came from Wyoming, where they found that she was Positive and she’s been forced into the slavery of the club, performing with each man that they bring on stage. However, one of the audience members, Lana (Michele Bauer, using her Pia Snow name here before she would go on to appear in so many horror movies like Demonwarp, Evil Toons, Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Ramaand Jess Franco’s Lust for Frankenstein and Mari-Cookie and the Killer Tarantula In Eigtht Legs to Love You) has been keeping have Positive diagnosis a secret as she doesn’t want to hurt her boyfriend Nick. Yet as she watches the famous Positive Johnny Rico (Kevin James, who speaking of nuclear war is also in the porn parody Dr. Strange Sex) — someone liked Robert Heinlein — go through his motions with Angel, her frustrations take hold and she takes the stage.
Screen Slate has an amazing article that details the music of this movie, which Sayadian describes as “…like an Elmer Bernstein score from the ’50s, only played with the most modern synthesizers available at the time. I thought: old vibe, new technology.” There’s a lot to learn about composer Mitchell Froom — and the rest of the film’s creators — at that site.
By the way — Sayadian didn’t direct Rockwell’s “Someone’s Watching Me” video. That would be Francis Delia, who directed Nightdreams as F.X. Pope. Seeing as how Stahl and Sayadian wrote that movie, I can see how some may make the mistake. Delia was a producer on this film as well as the director of photography.
Café Flesh isn’t for someone who is looking to get off. I can’t even imagine those that were confronted by it in adult theaters, as it punches you in the face with its AIDS allegory while daring you to find a single erotic thing in it. Strangely enough, I’d always heard that an R-rated edit was made so that mainstream audiences would see it at midnight shows, but Sayadian stated — in the above linked Screen Slate piece — that the movie was an “R-rated movie, funded by X-rated people” and that he was forced to add the sex scenes by the money men behind the budget.
He said, “I got financing from three guys — two were hardcore producers and one was a Harvard business grad who somehow got lost in the porno world.” After adding in the adult scenes, he told Froom, “I want you to extend some of these pieces because we may have to put porn in there. And all I can say is, I want the music to be as disturbing as possible. I don’t want it to be hot or sexy or anything like that.”
That said, the moans of joy that came from this movie show up in a place that many have heard them, White Zombie’s Blade Runner quoting — “Yeah I am the nexus one I want more life” — “More Human than Human.”
Tonino Ricci — often using the Americanized name Anthony Richmond — was an Italian exploitation director and you know what that means. He jumped genres. From mob films (The Big Family), westerns (Bad Kids of the West) and White Fang ripoff after doing second unit on the original (Zanna Bianca alla riscossa) to sharks (Cave of the Sharks, Night of the Sharks), horror (Bakterion), post-Conan peplum (Thor il conquistatore), aliens in the Bermuda Triangle (the baffling and wonderful Encounters In the Deep), war (I giorni dell’inferno), sexy romance (Pasión, Storia di arcieri, pugni e occhi neri), Raiders of the Lost Ark remix (I predatori della pietra magica) and a family-friendly dog movie (Buck and the Magic Bracelet), he really did it all. And then he made two post-apocalyptic movies, this one and the mocie that inspired this, Rush.
Working from a script by Jaime Comas Gil (A Fistful of Dollars, the insane Adam and Eve vs. the Cannibals) and Eugenio Benito, this starts with stock footage of modern life that’s soon blown asunder by b-roll and stock footage, signaling that the end times have come and gone*. Soon enough, Rage (Bruno Minniti, who was the hero in just about every Ricci movie from Thor the Conqueror on; he used the name Conrad Nichols in nearly all of them) must lead Werner, Omar and Mara through the Forbidden Zone to get uranium and battle the man he gave a scar — and the name Scar — and an entire army of his motocross soldiers and you know what this is all about? A cryo chamber with a Bible in it. Can Rage and his team take a train across the wasteland and deliver the Good News from Alpha Base to Gamma Base?
They do it all to the jazziest post-nuke boogie you’ve ever heard by Stelvio Cipriani. The rest of the movie may look dingy and a bit boring, but man, that cat can swing.
*One of those nukes is really the Friendship-7 launch, because we can still hear mission control say, “God speed, John Glen.”
Tonino Ricci never met a genre he didn’t like or try to make a movie in, so when Tito Carpi — who wrote some of the best Italian post-nuke movies ever like Warriors of the Wastelandand Escape from the Bronx — brought a script that combined Max Rockatansky with John Rambo it was a perfect match.
Rush is the kind of lone survivor that these movies need. He’s played by Ricci’s frequent lead, Bruno Minniti, and when he finds out that Yor (Gordon Mitchell!) is hoarding all the plants and water, he decides to go into one-man war like he’s a disaffected Vietnam vet and Yor’s Untouchables are the Hope, Washington police.
This is the kind of end of the world movie where Gordon Mitchell has the most obvious stuntman ever and the soundtrack isn’t afraid to play a sax solo over the non-stop death and destruction. Speaking of Yor — the real Yor — Rush is nearly as bad of a hero as that prehistoric dude, because he gets nearly everyone but himself killed.
Yvette and Philippe (Niels Arestrup) somehow escaped the end of the world, which was mainly caused by really loud noises, and have tried to start over again. Then she gets murdered and he tries to find humans anywhere, only to discover a group of small children. He believes that he can teach them everything they know how to survive as well as how to bring back civilization. They have ideas of their own.
Tomorrow’s Children was directed by Jean Pourtalé and you know, I don’t think I’ve seen a French post-nuke movie. You can spot a young Emmanuelle Béart in the cast, too.
If you’ve seen Late August at The Hotel Ozone, you may see a fair bit of that movie in this one. For some reason, before Mad Max, movies about the end of humanity were depressing affairs. I mean, in those movies, kids do madcap things like throw weapons that cut off the heads of bad guys and not kills wives and eat dogs.
April 22: Earth Day Ends Here — Instead of celebrating a holiday created by a murderer, share an end of the world disaster movie with us. But seriously, treat the planet right! Click the image for our full list of reviews for the month!
Oh, ye producing gods Richard D. Zanuck and Jerry Bruckheimer: for when one studio or producer puts a film into production, another will put their own version-of-a-theme into production. And the Byrdian “turn, turn, turn” of those film sprockets were burnin’ the same ol’ sunny bulb down upon the same ol’ celluloid long before the dual gunfights at the O.K Corral with 1993’s Tombstone and 1994’s Wyatt Earp . . . and when Dreamsworks/Paramount and Touchstone/Buena Vista went to battle with their respective, 1998 God-brings-destruction-on-the-world romps Deep Impact (released in May) and Armageddon (July) — which continues to rain upon the Earth with the recent Greenland and its cheapjack Asylum-clones in Asteroid-a-Geddon, Collision Earth, and Meteor Moon, as well as the far superior, The Wandering Earth out of mainland China (and the earlier, 1980 Japan-produced, Earth-disaster epic, Virus). And when 2013 was the year of our battle with the terrorist-attack-on-the-White House epics Olympus Has Fallen vs. White House Down. And, since we are in a sci-fi mood: the Lucasian vs. Glen Larceny slugfest of 1978, with the Battlestar Galactica set adrift in the Akkadese Maelstrom — that’s what you get for trying to make the Kessel Run, Glen, baby.
For this disaster-in-space, “Earth Day Ends Here” epic on the 22nd day in the year of our April Movie Thon, this tale begins with producer George Pal.
The book . . . the film!
Pal purchased the rights to Robert Heinlein’s 1947 short story Rocket Ship Galileo (remembering Heinlein’s work was also behind 1953’s Bechdel test failure, Project Moonbase). With Heinlein serving as one of the film’s three screenwriters: his book was adapted as Destination Moon (1950).
Well, that worked out alright, so Pal decided to head off into space, again, by using Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie’s 1933 novel, When Worlds Collide, as his source material. For his screenwriter and director, Pal chose a couple of film noir stalwarts: Sydney Boehm, who made his mark in the genre with The Big Heat (1953), and Rudolph Maté, who wowed us with the genre-maker, D.O.A (1950) (beautifully remade — to a degree — as the recent, 2022 Australian sci-fi import, Expired).
So, when George Pal announced his end of the world epic, natch, the obvious knock offs went into production: The War of the Worlds (1953), and the more scientifically accurate, but less remembered, Conquest of Space (1955).
Then, there’s the ’50s Asylum Studios-version done by Robert Lippert, whose Lippert Pictures gave us the previously mentioned, failed, chauvinistic “matriarchy in space” romp that would be Project Moonbase. Hey, no way Lippert was letting Pal one-up him. So Lippert rushed — and beat Pal to the theaters — with Rocketship X-M (1950). While not as dry-to-boring as the previous Destination Moon, Lippert’s copy is still talky, rife with scientific boondoggles in its tale of Lloyd Bridges (Oy! It’s Commander Cain from Mission Galactica: The Cylon Attack) in command of Earth’s first mission to the moon — that’s driven off course to Mars by an asteroid storm.
First, they collide. Then, they crack: Paramount’s 1965’s Crack in the World.
Okay, enough with the backstory: let’s unpack this space influencer that its studio, Paramount Pictures, has been trying to remake for years and years, with Tom Cruise and Will Smith, alternately on the marquee.
Needless to say, the ’50s celluloid proceedings — as all films do — detract from its source materials, but still concerns the coming destruction of the Earth by way of a rogue star, Bellus. So — as with Roland Emmerich’s later inversion known as 2012 (2009) — the rush is on to build a space arc, so as to repopulate man on Bellus’ single, Earth-like planet, Zyra.
The clock is ticking: man has only eight months to get their shit together because, as the Bible’s Book of Genesis quoted at the beginning of the film: God is keeping his promise: humanity is toast.
Our heroes, Astronaut David Randall (Richard Deer; Star Trek: TOS, years later: SST: Death Flight) and Dr. Cole Hendon (Larry Keating; of TV’s Mr. Ed!), receive the usual scoffs from the United Nations. Only the vain, fat cat magnate, Sidney Stanton (John Hoyt; Attack of the Puppet People and our April Movie Thon: Day 5 entry: X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes), heeds their warnings.
The usual earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes, along with martial law, illegal weapons stockpiling — romantic interludes, because humans need the nookie, even as the end nears — and fixed lotteries to get on the rocket, ensues. Oh, the infamy of the strained acting frolicking amid those cardboard sets and flat-as-a-pancake matte paintings. No, ye Lucasian lads and lassies who bow to the blue screen: you won’t like this one. Well, maybe you will . . . if it brings on those Chilly Billy Cardille WIIC Channel 11 memories.
Now, imagine this all made, not by George Pal — but by Cecil B. DeMille, who wanted to adapt both When Worlds Collide and its novel-sequel, After Worlds Collide, as a pair of films. The guy who made the bible epic The Ten Commandments going up in space? I can see Charlton Heston in the Richard Deer role. . . . But a swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. was first considered by Pal?
Alas, Pal got his hooks into the material, first, and got Paramount on board — which closed the purse, so Pal didn’t make the “epic” he wanted to make. As for that second novel: why didn’t Pal make the sequel that was planned by DeMille? Uh, Pal deemed the brief “science fiction genre” as dead, as his next space epic, Conquest of Space (1955), failed.
Uh, but Stanley Kubrick did alright clipping that film to make something called 2001: A Space Odyssey. And that one worked out okay. Don’t believe us? Check out this You Tube comparison of the films.
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 About Movies(links to a truncated teaser-listing of his reviews).
When you have D.C. Fontana, Harlan Ellison and Richard Matheson working on a story, you know it’s going to be good. This episode of Circle of Fear has a community of six artists who discover six colorful glass containers within a storefront that has rent and location that’s too good to be true.
Ellen Parrish (Joan Blackman, Macon County Line, Shivers, Blue Hawaii, Pets), Sam Richards (Frank Converse), Jake Freeman (Tim McIntire, the voice of Blood in A Boy and His Dog), Tyne Daly (Cagney and Lacey), Brooke Bundy (Elaine in two Elm Street movies) and Paul Cepeda (Scott Marlowe) are the artists who soon find that the containers are starting to take their souls and destroy them.
Director Alexander Singer had a career that stretched from making an episode of Dr. Kildare in 1961 all the way to Star Trek: Voyager in 1998.
This is a strange episode that I’ve noticed that plenty of folks disliked. I have no idea what episode they watched, because I loved it. It’s perfect for 1973 and the end of the era of artist collectives and free love. Watch it and let me know what you think.
Hokuto no Ken is one of the most important manga in the history, selling 100 million copies, consistently being picked as one of the best manga — and anime — of all time and making more than $20 billion in total revenue.
And in the U.S., hardly anyone knows what it is.
In fact, when Sega released the video game adaptions, they called them Black Belt and Last Battle. They also edited them to remove the torrents of gore, because when hero Kenshiro calls upon his studies of the ancient art of assassination called Hokuto Shinken, he uses the body’s hidden meridian points to blow people up real good.
He’s the hero so bad ass that he tells his enemies before the battle, “You are already dead.”
The American straight-to-video live action version of the story may not be the best place for people to first be told the story, but here we are, with Kenshiro (KBA California State Light Heavyweight Champion and PKA World Light Heavyweight Champion Gary Daniels) seeking revenge in a post-World War 3 world, torn apart when the two martial arts schools dedicated to keeping the peace go to war with one another. Southern Cross fighter Shin (Costas Mandylor) has turned against his own fighting style and murdered North Star master Ryuken (Malcolm McDowell), with his son — Kenshiro — left to gain revenge. The big boss then attacked Kenshiro, leaving him with a scar in the shape of seven stars and topping that by kidnapping his lover Julia (Isako Washio).
Joining with the orphaned Bat (Dante Basco, Ruffio from Hook) and Lynn (Nalona Herron), he wanders the wasteland and battles Shin’s Crossmen, murdering each of them in spectacular fashion. Shin sends Jackal (Chris Penn) and more soldiers to take over Paradise Valley and — spoiler warning — Kenshiro kills just about every single one of them. As for Jackal, he just makes his head all mushy.
I really think this movie was cast just for me, what with Tracy “Bob the Goon” Walter, “Downtown” Julie Brown, Melvin Van Peebles (yes, the man who made Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song), Clint Howard, Tony Halme (Ludvig Borga of WWE fame, also an absolute real life villain who had an SS tattoo on his calf and was elected to the Finland House of Parliament as part of a party with very fascist views), Big Van Vader and Susan French, Aunt Elizabeth from House.
There had been post-apocalyptic movies before — End of the World came out in 1916 — and the genre was already a big deal by 1975, following The Omega Man and Soylent Green. So when most people believe that end of the world movies started in 1979 with Mad Max, they’d been around long before.
The Ultimate Warrior is pretty much a western — all good post-apocalyptic movies are — with a frontier town under attack. That town would be a small fort in what’s left of New York City, a place led by Baron (Max Von Sydow). One of his followers is a former scientist named Cal (Richard Kelton), who has developed plague resistant seeds that grow in the dead soil, creating a desert in the wasteland.
And, just like every western — and again, post-apocalyptic movie — there are gangs of bad people making the lives of good people hard. One of those gangs is led by Carrot (William Smith!) and Baron is so worried about them that he hires on a loner gunslinger — or fighter — named Carson (Yul Brynner).
Even with his abilities, the settlement is still doomed. So Baron sends his pregnant daughter Melinda (Joanna Miles) away from the citty with the goal of building a new world on a North Carolina island. But escaping the city isn’t easy and it costs nearly everyone their lives and Carson his hand, but the ultimate warrior is nothing if not resilient. Or deadly.
Director and writer Robert Clouse knew how to make a movie with fights as the main draw, as he directed Enter the Dragon and Game of Death with Bruce Lee, as well as Black Belt Jones with Jim Kelly, Golden Needles, Force: Five, The Big Brawl with Jackie Chan, Gymkata with Kurt Thomas, two China O’Brien movies with Cynthia Rothrock and Ironheart with Bolo Yeung. He also made the animal attack movies The Pack and the rats on the loose film Deadly Eyes.
And yes, this movie is where the wrestler got his name from.
For the twenty-second day of the B&S About Movies April Movie Thon, let’s celebrate a holiday created by a serial killer.
April 22: Earth Day Ends Here — Instead of celebrating a holiday created by a murderer, share an end of the world disaster movie with us. But seriously, treat the planet right!
All April long, we’ll have thirty themes as writing prompts. If you’d like to be part of it, you can just send us an article for that day to bandsaboutmovies@gmail.com or post it on your site and share it out with the hashtag #BSAprilMovieThon.
Here are a few films to check out. Man, this was hard to pick just three end of the world movies!
Warriors of the Wasteland(1984): Nobody does after the bomb movies better than the Italians. Nobody.
W is War(1983): I mean, a movie where a cop gets his cock sliced off and goes for revenge after a biker gang is crazy. The sequel, Mad Warrior, has a werewolf cyborg villain who forces his men to watch him make love under the full moon.
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