Monthly Archives: June 2022

Mill Creek Through the Decades: 1990s Collection

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Mill Creek’s Through the Decades: 1990s Collection has some great movies for a great price like Housesitter, White Palace, One True Thing, Donnie Brasco, The Devil’s Own, The Matchmaker, Anaconda, I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Freshman and The Deep End of the Ocean. You can get it from Deep Discount.

I’ve really been enjoying these Mill Creek decades sets, as I haven’t seen so many of these movies, as within these decades I’ve mostly devoted my time to genre films. That means that while I may not love every movie that I watch, I at least get to see something different.

The quality of each film is good and while there aren’t any extras, again you’re getting ten higher budget movies for one low budget price. I’d recommend these sets to anyone who wants to add new movies to their collection or if you’re like me and want to do an exploration of mainstream film that you otherwise missed.

Here’s a recap of each film:

Housesitter: After a one night stand, Gwen moves into Newton Davis’ empty home outside the city without telling him. When the neighbors start to ask questions, Gwen tells them that she’s Newton’s new wife.

The Matchmaker: Marcy, a senator’s aide, arrives in Ireland to trace her boss’s Irish roots and happens to arrive in a quaint country village just in time for its annual matchmaking festival. A young, single woman kicks local matchmakers into a frenzy.

White Palace: Young ad executive and widower Max Baron is still picking up the pieces after the death of his wife. One night, he meets 43-year-old waitress Nora Baker, and the two soon begin a heated love affair despite their obvious differences.

One True Thing: A career-driven New York woman is forced to leave behind the big city life to take care of her seriously ill mother. While back home, she learns more about her parents lives as people apart from her.

Donnie Brasco: FBI agent Joe Pistone infiltrates the New York City mafia and forms an unlikely bond with mobster Lefty Ruggiero. Before long Pistone begins to question where his loyalties lie.

The Devil’s Own: Police officer Tom O’Meara begins to uncover his house guest’s true identity as an IRA hitman/gunrunner, a secret that puts his family in mortal danger.

The Freshman: A first-year film student starts working with a New York mobster who resembles a famous movie mafioso and is soon swept up a world of crime and fine dining.

Anaconda: A film crew in the Amazon rainforest gets caught up in a game of cat-and-mouse between a crazed hunter and the jungle’s deadliest predator.

I Know What You Did Last Summer: Four teenagers are stalked by a hook-wielding killer with knowledge of their terrible secret.

The Deep End of the Ocean: The family of a kidnapped child is shocked when nearly a decade later, the child resurfaces as the “adopted” son of their new neighbor.

Mill Creek Through the Decades: 1990s Collection: The Deep End of the Ocean (1999)

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The Deep End of the Ocean was based on the 1996 novel of the same name by Jacquelyn Mitchard, the first novel selected by Oprah Winfrey for Oprah’s Book Club. It’s all about what happens when Ben, the youngest son of a family, is kidnapped and then found nine years later, living in the same town where his family had just moved. What are the odds?

Beth Cappadora (Michelle Pfeiffer) lost the three-year-old Ben at a class reunion when he was just three. She has a nervous breakdown and neglects her husband Pat (Treat Williams) and other sons Vincent (Jonathan Jackson) and Kerry (Alexa Vega).

A decade and a new town later, all seems well, except when Sam (Ryan Merriman) shows up to cut the grass and she just knows that he has to be Ben, a fact that no one but Detective Candace “Candy” Bliss (Whoopi Goldberg) believes.

Can the family come back together? And is that Tony Musante from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage as a grandfather? Yes to both.

Mill Creek’s Through the Decades: 1990s Collection has some great movies for a great price like Housesitter, White Palace, One True Thing, Donnie Brasco, The Devil’s Own, The Matchmaker, Anaconda, I Know What You Did Last Summer and The Freshman. You can get it from Deep Discount.

Mill Creek Through the Decades: 1990s Collection: I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The next movie in the Mill Creek Through the Decades: 1990s Collection originally ran on the site on August 30, 2020.

Lois Duncan’s I Know What You Did Last Summer was first published in October 1973. Duncan wrote several books that featured young girls in trouble, including Summer of Fear, which was made into a TV movie directed by Wes Craven.

She got the idea for the book when her daughter Kerry told her that she and her best friend had unknowingly been courted by the same boy. She wondered if the boy had deliberately done this, creating a different personality for both of them, and worked his way into their lives to drive a wedge between them. She later read a story about a hit-and-run and put together the story that became the novel (and the loose inspiration for this film).

Sadly, Duncan’s life became tragic after the unsolved murder of her youngest daughter Kaitlyn. Her last horror novel would be Gallows Hill — which filmed for TV as 1998’s I’ve Been Waiting for You  — after which she’d concentrate on non-fiction works about her daughter’s case, psychic phenomena and books for kids, like Hotel for Dogs (which was also a movie). Before her death in 2016, ten of her best-loved books would be reissued and modernized with new covers and bits added about modern technology.

She would tell Absolute Write that very same year that she was upset with this take on her book: “I was appalled when my book, I Know What You Did Last Summer, was made into a slasher film.  As the mother of a murdered child, I don’t find violent death something to squeal and giggle about.”

Screenwriter Kevin Williamson had already had success with Scream, which made him the go-to writer for teen horror. He took the source novel, added some inspiration from growing up the son of a fisherman and added the urban legend — stay tuned for these movies — of The Hook to create a new trope of kids who try to wish away the past. for what it’s worth, the poster originally said “from the creator of Scream” until Miramax sued Columbia Pictures.

Unlike the aforementioned Scream, this movie is very much an old-fashioned slasher, despite its initial lack of blood. A throat slashing and the crab factory death were added after the initial cut was viewed to add more danger, as was the character in danger all over again post-script, which would become a thematic inclusion for all entries in this series.

For those that argue these things and wonder, “Is it a giallo?” I opine that it is more on the side of slasher. Yes, there are gorgeous people in it, but there’s a marked lack of fashion, music and, to be honest, the strangeness that that genre is imbued with. That said, the hook-carrying bad guy very much does feel like he belongs there.

The story takes place in Southport, North Carolina. Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt),  Helen Shivers (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Barry Cox (Ryan Phillippe) and Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze Jr.) are on their way to the beach late at night on one of their last summers together before college pulls them apart when an event unites them all. They hit a pedestrian and instead of allowing their lives to be ruined, they dump the body in the ocean.

By the way, the mountain road that they are driving along is the exact same highway from Hitchcock’s The Birds.

The issue is that their lives are all changed by that one evening with only Julie able to escape the town and go to college. When she returns, the notes that say, “I know what you did last summer,” and the gaslighting campaign begins.

Jennifer Love Hewitt became a big deal from this film, beyond her fame from Party fo Five, even singing the song “How Do I Deal” on the soundtrack. She’d appeared with Jamie Lee Curtis in House Arrest earlier that year and when Curtis was filming nearby, she came over to wish her luck on her first role as a scream queen and would be a consistent visitor to the set.

While actually written before Scream, when studios wanted nothing to do with slashers, the success of that film allowed for this one, while making it seem like a rip-off. Such is Hollywood.

The success of this film led to I Still Know What You Did Last Summer and I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer.

Mill Creek’s Through the Decades: 1990s Collection has some great movies for a great price like Housesitter, White Palace, One True Thing, Donnie Brasco, The Devil’s Own, The Matchmaker, Anaconda, The Freshman and The Deep End of the Ocean. You can get it from Deep Discount.

Repligator (1998)

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When I spoke to Bret McCormick (who made The Abomination, one of my favorite movies) about Repligator, he said “I was trying to match Roger Corman’s record of five films in one year: in my case it was Takedown, Time Tracers, Bio-Tech Warrior, Repligator and (finally) Rumble In the Streets.

I had challenged Keith Kjornes to write the script in a week. This is what he came up with. Keith was a very talented guy. A funny actor and solid writer. He did an interesting film years later — The Devil’s Tomb with Cuba Gooding Jr. and Ron Perlman.

I had absolutely nothing to do with the story other than accepting it. At the time I felt it poked fun at the military in the same way my favorite writer, Terry Southern, had done with Dr. Strangelove. The military, by and large, is headed up by guys who like to destroy things — guys who have society’s approval to be thugs. They take themselves very seriously and I think it’s a good idea to poke fun at them once in a while.

It’s a matter of record that I was eager to walk in Roger’s footsteps back then. This was my attempt to make five films in a single year and to shoot one in four days a la Little Shop of Horrors.”

Shot in 3 days on 35mm film at the Remington York Studio in Irving, Texas — with additional footage shot a year later on 16mm with Gunnar Hansen and Brinke Stevens at Aries Productions in Arlington, Texas to increase the run time — Repligator starts with Dr. Goodbody (Stevens) conducting an experiment of the Sexual Hologram Interface Terminal (S.H.I.T.) that allows her to see the fantasies of Private Libo (James Bock). We see a fantasy of his wife and her friend Buffy, as well as him getting to see Goodbody’s, well, good body. 

Pay attention. While you will see this same exact footage again later, this is the only time that Stevens appears in the movie.

After the opening, Colonel Sanders, Colonel Sergeant (Rocky Patterson (Doc in Nail Gun Massacre, R.O.T.O.R.) and General Mills who have come to witness Dr. Oliver (Kjornes, the writer, writing himself into some exciting moments and proving that movies are awesome) and Dr. Kildare’s (Hansen) machine firsthand. Dr. Fields (Randy Clower, Fatal Justice, Bio-Tech Warrior, Time Tracer) invites himself along, hoping to witness an epic failure and gain Oliver’s funding.

If those names don’t clue you into the feel of this movie, Dr. Laurel Hardy’s (TJ Myers, a former Miss Lubbock Teen Texas USA) will.

The machine they get to check out is an organic digital replication double helix genetic coding scrambler on a 1680 wave link with the maximum thrust at about 40 gig. Yeah, I memorized that. It basically turns men into women. So Dr. Oliver adds his mind control and creates a weapon for the government that sends mind-controlled women after enemies. But when the women go back into the machine for a return trip, they turn into alligator women.

Did Jess Franco steal this for 2012’s Al Pereira vs. the Alligator Ladies?

Also: anyone killed by an alligator turns into a zombie. Sometimes a gay zombie. This movie is in no way concerned with offending anyone or everybody.

Repligator has some music that may seem familiar to you. Well, to me. After all, I watch way too many Andy Sidaris movies. The soundtrack was created by Ron Di Uulio, who wrote the song “Return To Savage Beach” and did the soundtracks for the Sidaris movies Day of the Warrior, The Dallas Connection and Enemy Gold as well as Mountaintop Motel Massacre and Honeymoon Horror.

A lot of the crew also worked on an industrial movie called Risky Business: Employee Violence in the Workplace that I really want to see, hoping that it captures the energy of this.

Repligator sounds and is ridiculous. But so what? The world is a dark and horrible place filled with apathy and soul crushing failure. This is anything but. It’s a movie dedicated to entertaining you in the short time it had to get made and with the low budget it was given. You’ll remember it long after watching a movie that cost thousands of times what this did.

Malevolent Ascent (2010)

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David Wascavage makes two kinds of movies, both awesome. One side is silly monster movies, like Suburban Sasquatch, Fungicide and Zombies by Design. The other is deadly serious and something sinister is happening beyond the fabric of normal life like Tartarus and this movie. I’m a fan of pretty much everything he does and this one pushes his filmmaking the furthest I’ve seen in all of his films.

Seven normal people are on an elevator that crashes and leaves them trapped inside a building. As they get their bearings and try to figure out how to escape, they soon discover that one of them has no intention of seeing any of them survive.

You know, M. Night Shyamalan was also raised in eastern Pennsylvania (born in Mahé, India, and raised in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania) while Wascavage is from West Chester. This film reminds me of a Shymalan idea but with five-figure budget, cardboard sets and CGI that can’t mean computer generated imagery, this lo fi auteur makes movies that I remember long after three or four what a twist Shyamalan movies have come in and out of theaters.

Damien Colletti is really great in this and brings the best acting I’ve seen in one of the director and writer’s films. Speaking of greatness, this description on the director’s site makes me want to watch this all over again: “A psychopath pursues victims throughout a collapsed mental hospital, as they learn that their survival and their very lives are struggles against the perils of life. Malevolent Ascent is a thrilling horror film that takes the viewer deep inside the bowels of a collapsed building, and personifies humanity’s desperation to fight against the unknown.”

I don’t plan on getting on any elevators anytime soon.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Zombies by Design (2006)

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I have functional OCD and ADD, so when I found out that every Dave Wascavage movie is on Tubi, I ran hard and fast toward them all, drinking them in. Zombies by Design has one of his better concepts: what if a Trading Spaces show was airing a live marathon and a housewife plans on having her mad scientist husband’s lab be the room that gets fixed up? And what if that scientist was planning on unleashing zombies on the world?

This movie cost $17,000 and that’s about what the catering budget is for a half day of a Hollywood shoot. With that money, Wascavage fills the screen with plenty of gore and lots of that MS Paint-influenced CGI of his that I love so much. Seriously, it was disconcerting when i first saw it but now, after seeing all of his movies, I demand it.

The zombies have these little glowing antenna on the back of their heads that allows them to be controlled. There’s also a control noise that I swear made my dog more upset than anything since all of the nonstop screams of Alucarda.

There are also plenty of limbs being ripped clean off, which I demand from zombie films. I also like that Wascavage keeps using the same crew, like Juan Fernandez, and writes the movies with his wife Mary, making this a family affair.

There’s a near Fulci moment where a cameraman sees the zombies coming and does absolutely nothing, deer in the headlights until they toss him on a table and rip his arms off and eat his guts. By the end, the crew of the home renovation show is riding in a panel truck and just trying to escape a suburban bedroom community awash in blood, gore and piles of clothing also covered in more blood.

These days, zombie movies have become disposable and boring junk, a fact which makes me beyond sad. Wascavage gets tons of credit here, because he made a movie packed with fun that never gets old.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Junesploitation 2022: Pushed to the Limit (1992)

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June 11: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is free! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

The youngest of five children born in Hollywood to a Greek father and a Latino mother, Mimi Lesseos started learning martial arts at the age of six. She came to the attention of wrestling fans in 1988 when she wrestled for the American Wrestling Association and feuded with Madusa Miceli over their women’s title. She also teamed with Wendi Richter on occasion and was even featured in the December 1989 issue of Playboy holding — well, lying face down on a bed nude — the AWA World Women’s Championship belt, even though she never won it.

She was wrestled in the LPWA (Ladies Professional Wrestling Association), for CMLL in Mexico and in Japan before going into stuntwork, appearing in Man on the Moon, The X-Files, The Scorpion King and Million Dollar baby, as well as often working as Jane Kaczmarek’s stunt double.

After appearing in the wrestling movie The American Angels: Baptism of Blood, the Erik Estrada biker movie The Last Riders and the Lorenzo Lamas kickboxing film Final Impact, Mimi decided to make her own movie. as she wanted to play a fit and strong female character who was not “sleazy or muscle-bound”.

She wrote, starred in and produced the movie, raising half of the $600,000 budget through an investor while she provided the other half, by selling property and fighting in Japan. That’s also where she found a distributor and got worldwide distribution after taking Pushed to the Limit to the Cannes Film Festival.

Director Michael Mileham, the godson of Jessica Tandy, ran camera on Blazing Stewardesses and The Glove, as well as serving as the director of photography on Psychic Killer, Uninvited, Revenge of the Cheerleaders, The Lonely Lady and Black Shampoo.

Mimi claimed this movie was autobiographical. Then again, we already know Bloodsport was supposed to be that way for Frank Dux and he was stretching the truth too.

Well, imagine if Van Damme stopped the action to go visit his parents, catch his racist brother doing blow and then went to Vegas to be a showgirl — a moment that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie — instead of just doing the splits straight for the Kumite?

Because Pushed to the Limit has a Kumite too.

Her brother Johnny (Greg Ostrin) gets shot up being a moron to crime boss Harry Lee (Henry Hayashi) and her man Nick (Michael M. Foley) gets hurt too, so she decides that she needs revenge. As she tells her Miyagi-figure Vern (Verrell Reed), “I’ve been pushed to the limit.” As you may know, I react to the title of a movie being said in a movie as if Pee Wee just said the secret word. Imagine my sheer joy when the mentor answered back, “You’ve been pushed to the limit?”

To be fair, the stupid brother said this joke to a Triad gangster: “What do you call two gooks in a fast car? The Gooks of Hazzard.” He deserved to die.

So how does she get her pound of flesh? By entering Harry Lee’s basement casino Kumite and kicking the hell out of Ms. Inga (Christl Colven, who only acted in this movie and otherwise has done makeup for Full Moon movies) but not until that gigantic butch brawler breaks the neck of Mimi’s best friend.

The training that she gets to get to this point is without a doubt the dumbest martial arts training I’ve ever seen committed to a film and I’ve watched tons of Jackiesploitation ripoffs of Drunken Master. I get what Miyagi wanted to teach Daniel-San with fence painting. I have no idea what Vern’s lesson of hide and seek around palm trees, much less his “become the tree” mantra and then asking her to punch the tree is supposed to teach. She also uses flying dropkicks in an actual fight and then Vern sends four dudes to jump her in an alley and the moment she starts killing them, everyone gets an extended sitcom end credits laugh out of the whole misunderstanding. Vern may also have low level ESP and never takes off his headband; he seems like every sensei I’ve ever met making a killing from teaching the secrets of the Orient to white kids who only learn synchronized katas and never the much needed way of the exploding fist or poison hand Dim Mak Death Touch of Count Dante.

There are also notable people in the cast, like “Dirty White Boy” Tony Anthony, Paula Meda (who is in several of the Donald Jackson Rollerblade movies), Vivian Wickliffe (an amazon fighter from Armour of God), a guy named Ulf Ranger playing Jack Stud making me wonder which fake name is better and Amy Barcroft who was Amazing Amy in the aforementioned The American Angels: Baptism of Blood.

None of the sitcom level music matches what is happening on screen. Phones randomly ring in the middle of dialogue which isn’t microphoned well at all. The action is so poorly directed that you wonder if the old WCW camera crew made this. The ending — the ending! — has a misdirection kill of the boss, a total pro wrestling ending where Inga gets knocked out, Lee runs in with a gun and Inga comes to and breaks her boss’ neck instead of her opponent’s because she’s confused. Also body slams are used in fights to the death.

I tell you all of this to tell you that I loved this movie. I loved every single second because it seems like — and is — a vanity project that made its way to me thirty years after it was filmed, aging like only finest of wine can.

I’m saying none of this to be ironic. I legitimately loved every single frame so much so that I tracked down every single other Mimi Lesseos movie and am practically devouring them. Guess what — they’re all as good as this. Maybe better.

You can watch this on Tubi.

TUBI ORIGINAL: Romeo and Juliet Killers (2022)

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On June 15, 2009, police found the body of Joanne Witt in the bedroom of her home in El Dorado Hills, California. She’d be stabbed at least twenty times by 19-year-old Steven Colver, the boyfriend of her 14-year-old daughter Tylar Witt, who claimed that she “put my hands on my ears, closed my eyes and hummed” while Steven repeatedly knifed her mother, ending the assault with a slash across the throat.

She plea-bargained and testified against her former boyfriend, whose defense team claimed she had three personaities: Tylar,  her angel form of Alex and the demonic Toby.

Why did Joanne have to die? Well, she’d found the diary that detailed the sex life that the two shared and had threatened to go to the police. The two teens had discussed running away to San Francisco and committing suicide on their four-month anniversary, but went with murder as a backup plan.

The world of TV movies has always ripped movies from the headdlines. Now, Tubi is here to do the same with Romeo and Juliet Killers.

Tylar (Leigha Sinnott) and her mother JoAnne (Kelly Sullivan) have never gotten along. After all, Tylar was so wild as a child that JoAnne found herself slapping her and drawing blood, an incident that the young girl holds over her head at all times. JoAnne must be doing ok otherwise — their house is huge, big enough to have a gate that you need buzzed into. But Tylar is wild and all she wants to do is hang out with her friends Graham Cracker (Bradley Hender) and Squishy (Ashlei Foushee) at a Mexican restaurant that strangely only employs gringos.

It’s there that she meets Boston (Zachary Roozen), a waiter at the restaurant that is probably named something like Pan Blanco. He charms her with talks of threeways, drugs and his oh so mysterious name, which is teased and never explained. She never even comes home, leading to JoAnne’s neighbor and annoying best friend Val (Alicia Ziegler) and her cop husband Ron (Darren Dupree Washington) to suggest some tough love, like a tracker on her phone. You know, snitches being snitches.

That’s when Tylar and Boston get a sneaky plan. He claims that he’s just broken up with his lover God (Cooper Devaney), a young gay kid and not the God that churches believe in, in case you wondered, because wow, that would make this a different movie. She thinks Boston is a nice kid with no family and home who balances out her wild child, so she offers him a room in their house. And right under her nose, he starts doing the act of darkness with her little girl. They have some horizontal refresments. Dance the forbidden polka. Go heels to Jesus. Place condensed milk into the waffle. Rough up the suspect. Do the dirty deed. The dipsy doodle. The hibbety-dibbety. The mysterious dance.

I think they make love when she’s at work.

You can see where this is all going but director Lindsay Hartley —  a former Lifetime movie star and soap opera actress, so she knows the story beats — realizes that she’s on Tubi and not basic cable, which means that Boston is bi and there’s a scene where JoAnna catches him in bed with God — again not the Almighty — and he follows her, nude, into the hall and puts her hand on his gland while she cries in agony.

She does not kick him out of the house for this.

There’s also a nude bathtub lovemaking scene and an absolutely deranged moment where our killers knife mom multiple times and then make love in bed next to her, getting blood all over their nubile bodies, then sleep cuddling her dead body.

Writers Peter Hunziker and Cynthia Riddle have credits like Bob the Builder and the RoboCop: Alpha Commando cartoon that may not prepare you for what they’ve created here. They did, however, also write 2014’s The Brittany Murphy Story.

This film is wildly forgiving of its male killer and much less of its female murderer, who seems deranged from the first moment we meet her and therefore the best character in this movie. I appreciate when a simple ripped from the headines film goes for it and leaves good taste at the door.

This one leaves good taste a few towns over after it fingerblasted it.

My favorite character in this is the neighbor cop husband who just wants to be left alone. His wife keeps pushing and snooping and invading privacy and he’s like “Baby, let me sleep.” He also uses the phrase Kama Sutra in his interrogation — while his wife watches from the other side of a two-way mirror in the squad room which I don’t think happens. She also shuts down another cop with her knowledge and her husband says, “I’d just listen to my wife” with an exasperate sigh and you feel his ennui.

Also a movie where bad kids choose to hang out in a Mexican restaurant every single scene we see them. It’s super clean and they’re the only ones in there so their bad ass aura is suspect.

This movie exists in its own stupid universe and I’m here for all of it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Mill Creek Through the Decades: 1990s Collection: Anaconda (1997)

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Directed by Luis Llosa (The Specialist) and written by Hans Bauer and the team of Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr. (who wrote Top Gun, The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas, Legal Eagles, Turner & Hooch, The Secret of My Success and Dick Tracy together), Anaconda tripled its $45 million dolalr budget at the box office by basically making a slasher with a giant snake as the killer.

It’s an easy set-up: a film crew is shooting a National Graphic documentary about an indigenous Amazonian tribe and sails right into trouble thanks to snake hunter Paul Serone (Jon Voight, chewing scenery to the point that I was worried that he’d have to give his Oscar back).

Soon, director Terri Flores (Jennifer Lopez), her cameraman Danny Rich (Ice Cube), Dr. Steven Cale (Eric Stoltz), production manager Denise Kalberg (Kari Wuhrer), her boyfriend Gary Dixon (Owen Wilson), narrator Warren Westridge (Jonathan Hyde) and Mateo the boat captain (Vincent Castellanos) have found their own heart of scaly darkness and not everyone — quite possibly no one — will make it home alive.

The CGI for the anacondas cost $100,000 per second. You could probably do that level of CGI on your phone now, which may speak more to the quality fo 1997 CGI than 2022 technology. What you won’t have is Frank Welker, the master of animal voices, to do a snake voice for you.

This movie is dangerously dumb and I love it. I can’t even front — I realize that it is in no way a good movie and worse, it’s a multimillion dollar movie that a 70s movie would make for a quarter of the cost and probably be even better.

Mill Creek’s Through the Decades: 1990s Collection has some great movies for a great price like Housesitter, White Palace, One True Thing, Donnie Brasco, The Devil’s Own, The Matchmaker, I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Freshman and The Deep End of the Ocean. You can get it from Deep Discount.

Mill Creek Through the Decades: 1990s Collection: The Freshman (1990)

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Director and writer Andrew Bergman read about nightclub owner Vincent Teresa being arrested for smuggling a near-extinct lizard into the country and thought it’d make a great movie. Imagine his fortune at getting Marlon Brando into the movie for just $3 million dollars.

Bergaman said, “On one level you’re like, I’m going to direct this guy!? But at the end of the day you say, well, somebody’s got to direct him, so what the hell, it’s going to be me. And he was really a pleasure to work with. It’s not like you’re dealing with George Burns in terms of a comedy god. Getting Marlon to do things was sometimes like turning around an aircraft carrier because he had a way he wanted to do it. But you could get him there. He was terribly respectful and funny.”

This is the same Brando who publicly condemned this movie as the “biggest turkey of all time” and wanted an extra $1 million for one more week of shooting or he’d keep on making fun of the movie in the press. When they did pay, he began to publicly praise The Graduate.

Clark Kellogg (Matthew Broderick) is studying film at NYU but before he even gets to his dorm, his luggage is taken Victor Ray (Bruno Kirby), which brings him into the world of Carmine Sabatini (Brando), who is pretty much just playing himself from The Godfather. Now he has a job doing deliveries for the secretive boss, like picking up komodo dragons from the airport for The Gourmet Club, a group of elites who eat endangered animals while Bert Parks sings for them.

He’s also pursued by government agents trying to get info on the Sabatini crime family as well as Carmine’s daughter Tina (Penelope Ann Miller) who acts as if they’re to be married. Is Carmine really going to serve those animals? Or is something else happening?

I love the meta aspects of this film, like Clark’s teacher Arthur Fleeber (Paul Benedict) making his class watch The Godfather Part II while Clark’s heart is obviously in exploitation. He has a poster for The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik Yak up in his dorm.

Mill Creek’s Through the Decades: 1990s Collection has some great movies for a great price like Housesitter, White Palace, One True Thing, Donnie Brasco, The Devil’s Own, The Matchmaker, Anaconda, I Know What You Did Last Summer and The Deep End of the Ocean. You can get it from Deep Discount.