VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the July 6, 2022 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.

How important is this movie to Quentin Tarantino? Well, it’s the movie his character is watching in Planet Terror and he referred to it as “harsh, harsh, harsh.” He also took the name of Pam Grier’s character Alabama for his first published script, True Romance.

Director Gerry de Leon is a force of exploitation nature, making movies like The Blood Drinkers, Curse of the Vampires and the two efforts he co-directed with Eddie Romero, Brides of Blood and The Mad Doctor of Blood Island. They’re not fancy efforts but they’re sure entertaining.

Carol “Jeff” Jeffries (Jennifer Gan) is in love with Rudy (Charlie Davao), but little does she know that her lover is running an empire of sex, drugs and gambling on the seas. Once he realizes the cops are closing in, he uses her to stash his drugs and she takes the heat.

In the horrifying prison where most of this movie takes place, Jeff finds herself at odds with, well, everyone.

There’s Pam Grier moving beyond prisoner victim to guard abuser as Alabama, spouting off incendiary dialogue like this as she tortures Jeff inside a room she calls The Playpen:

Jeff: “What kind of hell did you crawl out of?”

Alabama: “It was called Harlem, baby. I learned to survive, never have pity. This game is called survival. Let’s see how well you can play it. I was strung-out behind smack at ten and worked in the streets when I was twelve. You’ve got a long way to go.”

Even the other prisoners can’t get along with her, like Alabama’s claimed woman Theresa (Sofia Moran), Sandy (Judy Brown, already a veteran of The Big Doll House) and heroin-loving Stoke (Roberta Collins, who also spent time in The Big Doll House and Caged Heat) who thinks she can get more heroin from Jeff’s man Rudy.

After taking abuse the entire movie, Jeff decides to head out into the jungles, which is filled with even more horrible people than inside the prison. Things get, well, horrifying for all concerned with an assault/drowning sequence that had to be really uncomfortable for viewers. Or maybe they whooped it up at the grindhouses during that sequence. Who can say?

As for me, I loved Collins in this. She wants her next fix so badly that she’ll poison a sandwich, unleash a snake on someone and then throw acid in someone’s face. Most girls will just ruin your life. She’ll kill everyone you know. Marriage material.

A group of friends set off into the Scottish Highlands in search of the cabin that Rhona’s (Lauren Lyle, Outlander) father has left for her. Yet the further they get from civilization, the worse things get. That’s because a series of bad decisions puts the group up against Carla (Nicolette McKeown), a veteran whose skills at survival — and outright murder — may be too much for even several of them to handle.

Directed by Ryan Hendrick, who co-wrote the script with Meliá Grasska, this film has a shocking moment where a fight between two of the men — Scott (James Watterson) and Andy (Eoin Sweeney) — get in a fistfight. Scott knocks Andy down with a punch and a branch goes directly through his leg, severing an artery. As they are far from help with no way of getting a phone signal, Carla does what her training taught her. She kills the man to put him out of his misery because the only other way is a slow and agonizing death. 

That said — you can imagine how the rest of the group feels at seeing one of their friends get his throat slashed ad him spraying blood.

Yet by the end of the film, you realize that this isn’t necessarily a mercy killing, Not when she sneaks up behind Heather (Layla Kirk) and lynches her, leaving her body for the rest to find.

Once they find their way to the cabin — and a cave nearby — Rhona and Scott decide to set a trap for Carla. Yet she’s trained and they’re just normal civilians. Yet by this point, Rhona seems like she’s gone into full survivor mode and that freaks out Scott’s male instincts.

Mercy Falls is a movie that has incredibly strong female characters and gorgeous scenery, places that we haven’t seen before in America, and builds a real sense of tension by the end of the film. There are real stakes here between the two women at the heart of the story.

I think it’s hilarious when in slasher movies — well, this isn’t fully a slasher but has elements — when the final people decide to pause and make sweet love when death is so close. Then again, people do have sex directly after funerals a lot, so maybe it’s a way of staring death in the face and proclaiming that you’re alive. I do love that the camera slides from a fireside lovemaking moment to Carla outside, cutting an apple with a knife and smiling.

The gore in this is more than effective. It feels like something you don’t want to dwell in, moments of hearts pumping blood as people die. The violence in this has consequences and it’s not just a simple stalk and slash.

The beauty of Tubi is that it opens up new worlds for us as viewers. We now reside in a world that allows us to instantly bring the vision of a Scottish indie filmmaker into our living room and watch how they would tell this story, see the world that they see every day and be entertained by it. That’s something to celebrate.

You can watch this on Tubi.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the July 19, 2022 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.

Filmed at Andy Warhol’s summer home in Montauk — he also shows up as himself — Cocaine Cowboys is the story of Dustin (Tom Sullivan), who starts the movie being interviewed by Warhol, who acts like he doesn’t know the tale we’re about to hear even if he’s the one that saves the day.

In his November 1, 1978 diary, Warhol said, “Tom Sullivan came by to show Cocaine Cowboys to us on a Betamax. He was smoking marijuana, and it was funny to smell it at the office. Paul Morrissey watched a little of it and said it was too slow, and Brigid was in and out and thought so, too, but I liked it. And I decided I’m not so bad in it. They only let me do one take and I think if I’d been able to do more I would have gotten better. But I was better than in my first film, The Driver’s Seat.”

Sullivan had come into the orbit of the Warhol Factory during the days of Studio 54. The story of his life in this movie is, well, pretty much the story of his life. He was described as having a “pirate-king image” and having “pockets overflowing with wads of cash and a black-leather-gloved hand disfigured in a fiery plane crash.” He was sleeping with both Warhol’s personal assistant Catherine Guiness and former First Lady of Canada, Margaret Trudeau.

He also brought “two German geeks” with him: producer Christopher Gierke and actor turned director Ulli Lommel, who would use the Warhol connection in his resume for the rest of his life, endlessly remaking and remixing The Boogeyman and making serial killer movies. Ah, maybe I’m being disingenous. He did work with Fassbinder and again with Warhol for the film Blank Generation.

Writer Victor Bockris said, “Sullivan and Lommel cooked up a story about a drug smuggler who tries to get out of the business by turning himself into a rock star. A band was rounded up and, in imitation of the Rolling Stones, Montauk was used as a base for their rehearsals. The veteran actor Jack Palance was made a cash-in-advance offer he could not refuse to star as the band’s manager and shooting commenced in June.”

During the filming, the police busted the movie for weapons possession and took $25,000. The night before, Albert Goldman claimed that “the Colombians had shown up and threatened to kill him (Sullivan) and he gave them a million in cash.”

The movie is an attempt to tell the real story of Sullivan’s life. His band is ready to make the big time, but their manager (Palance) makes them move cocaine to make extra money. One day, while traveling by plane, they notice a cop car at the airport just as they’re about to land with enough powder — more on powder in a minute — to go to jail beyond the end of time. They toss it near an estate and head out on horses to get it back.

They don’t try all that hard. They just hang out, play music, convince a maid to have a baby powder-aided makeout session and then Andy solves the case like an animated cartoon dog.

So yeah: a marijuana dealer’s vanity project that has the man who gave Indiana Jones his hat (Richard Young), Lacey from The Boogeyman (and Olivia, too), Palance proving he didn’t know the meaning of the word no and Warhol getting paid four grand to use his house and show up and take Polaroids of people while playing himself.

Sullivan died two years later at the age of 26. Needless to say, it was sudden and mysterious.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Sources

Warhol Stars. Cocaine Cowboys. Accessed May 11, 2023.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the July 19, 2022 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.

As a kid, I was obsessed with seeing Dark Star. This film, which combined the talents of John Carpenter, Dan O’Bannon, Ron Cobb, Greg Jein and Bob Greenberg, was constantly in the pages of Starlog.

When I finally saw it — it played theaters until 1980 and then I was able to rent it when I got older — it didn’t live up to what I wanted it to be. Now, watching it as an old man instead of a kid just starting his life, I get it. It finally makes sense to me: even a job in space is totally going to suck, no matter how fantastic the worlds we get to travel to.

Twenty years into their mission to destroy unstable planets with Thermostellar Triggering Devices so that these worlds don’t threaten future colonization of other planets, the crew of the Dark Star has all gone insane. Or dead, as Commander Powell — voiced by Carpenter — is just a voice from cryostorage.

Lieutenant Doolittle dreams of surfing. Sergeant Pinback — O’Bannon — claims to be Bill Frug, a liquid fuel specialist, and says that the real Pinback is dead. Corporal Boiler has grown obsessed with his mustache. And Talby just watches the universe go by. None of them will be able to escape the crushing ennui of this voyage or a ship that is falling apart, filled with talking bombs that have learned Cartesian doubt.

In the end, all you can do is surf out into nothingness and burn out instead of fading away.

This started as a 45-minute 16mm student project with a six grand budget, but to get it in theaters, it needed more footage and to be pushed to 35mm to get in theaters. John Landis got the filmmakers in touch with Jack H. Harris, who padded the film some more. O’Bannon would later say that somehow “the world’s most impressive student film and it became the world’s least impressive professional film.”

Beyond writing and starring in the movie, O’Bannon also designed several of the film’s special effects, including one of the first usages of hyperspace in a movie. The influence of this movie goes beyond that, as O’Bannon would use the sequences with the evil ball to write Alien and the British show Red Dwarf would take the ball — pun unintended — and run with an entire series based on the themes of this movie.

As for influences on the movie, Phillip K. Dick’s idea of frozen dead people communicating from beyond definitely informs the commander. O’Bannon would later adapt We Can Remember It For You Wholesale and Second Variety as Total Recall and Screamers. Plus, while I don’t want to give away the ending, but it’s the exact same way that Ray Bradbury’s Kaleidoscope wraps up.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed by Sudeshna Sen, who co-wrote the script with Anjali Banerjee — based on the book Looking for Bapu by Anjali Banerjee — this movie is about the bond between Anu (Diya Modi) and her grandfather Bapu (Abhijeet Rane).

Her parents are too busy to see much of her, but he provides her with not just food and companionship, but spiritual and emotional support. When he dies while they watch birds together, she refuses to let him go, seeing his ghost and deciding that she will become a Buddhist holy person, shaving her head and attempting to bring Bapu back.

This is impossible, but the journey will bring together mother, father and daughter. The deepest connection remains between her and Bapu, as when she sees a photo of him at a young age, they look like they could be the same person. This brings her tears of joy.

At once a story of the immigrant experience and growing up to accept grief, Anu is an interesting film that has growing talent behind and in front of the camera.

OK, so confession time. Back in the early 1990s, I often would call a talk line to meet people. It’s how I met my first wife. And it was for the same reason why one of the characters in this movie says he started to use Nightalk. I worked 90 hours a week, I hated going to bars and I was too shy to meet people. When it was just my voice and my mind, I could be as charming as I wanted to be.

Imagine my surprise when this Tubi original was released and it’s not about internet dating but instead, phone lines. What is this, a remake of Party Line? For the record, I am very much in favor of this.

Brenda (Ashley Bryant, Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer) is a cop with a troubled past: a short marriage that wasn’t sexually or emotionally fulfilling; a mother who died tragically; a brother who killed himself even more tragically when he couldn’t live up to the expectations of their cop dad; a dad who can’t forgive his dead son or properly grieve for his dead wife. She throws herself into a career as a cop, leaving behind her choice of art history, and we’re a decade into her cop life and the first case she’s in charge of.

Working with her partner Jimmy (Ted Hallett), they investigate the death of a woman who has been erotically asphyxiated. They start to look into her life and learn that she was a user of Nightalk, the same service that Brenda’s best friend Dixie (Emily Andrews).

Brenda’s big cop brainstorm: use the service to find out who the killer is. But along the way — as she related to her therapist (Rena Polley) — she ends up falling for Tom (Al Mukadam), who regales her with dominant — well, not really, more on that in a bit — fantasies while she jills off as Madame Butterfly plays in the background.

But what if Tom is the killer? What if you’d never seen a single 80s erotic thriller and thought, “This is sexy” and Cinemax is a distant memory and you missed out, my friend. That said, this movie made me laugh throughout and even more so when I learned that its director Donald Shebib is in his mid-80s and hasn’t made a movie in a decade. And yes, we’re all getting older by the day, but there’s a difference between getting old and not understanding what you’re making. But who am I to doubt someone who once directed episodes of T and T, My Secret Identity and Street Justice?

I mean, it’s competently made — I could go without the flashes as transitions — but we’re past the time of phone dating, not to mention when you have a smartphone, there’s no need to print everything out nor does anyone stare at their home screen while talking on the phone. This also has the kind of dialogue an old man may write for a young girl to say and for that, we can thank Claude Herz, who is two years older than Shebib. The talk of sexual choking comes off so clinical — yes, I get they’re cops — and so robotic that I’m certain that no human being has ever talked like this.

As for Tom’s fantasies, they are as vanilla as they get. An old fashioned on a subway train while you’re both in shorts? A handyman watching you take a shower? It’s as if no one has ever had an erotic moment in their lives and at the end, when — spoiler — Brenda finally tells Tom that she wants him to be the dominant man of their phone sex, he just gets on top and tells her he loves her and they climax together before going to look at a botanical garden which is…well, kind of far from kink.

What tops that is that these two have been talking on the phone for what seems like a few weeks and when she interrogates him at the station, he doesn’t recognize her voice. Is she that good of a cop? Well, seeing as how she had no idea that she was so close to the killer — is this a giallo? I say that because the least likely person is the murderer and yes, the police are fumbling in the dark — I don’t think she’s all that great of a detective.

But hey, Art Hindle is in it, so I was going to watch it just because I love when he’s in movies. Even though I’m not Canadian, I feel some surge of pride when I see him in films and make sure to have back bacon, a toque and a bottle of maple syrup on hand to properly celebrate him (for better Art Hindle movies, turn to Black Christmas, The Brood, Winter Comes Early, The Octagon and Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

I also loved how when Tom said cock in his fantasy phone sex, it was like he was looking around to see if it was alright for him to say it. For a movie where the lead is supposed to — to paraphrase Trent — find happiness in slavery, the release she actually gets is so non-kinky that it could air on prime time TV. This is the unsexiest movie about sex that I have ever seen and I’ve seen all of the Cannon sex comedies like Hot Chili (and Hot Resort) and made it through multiple viewings of Bolero, so I must be some kind of masochist myself and will now need a Nightalk voice mailbox so I can have people tease me with viewings of even worse and less sexy sexy movies.

Also: This is not ageist. Gregory Dark is 65 and if he wanted to make a new erotic thriller, I would pay thosands of dollars to his Kickstarter.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Five former best girlfriends — Sam (Laura Welsh), Alana (Jax Kellington), Barbara (Chynna Rae Shurts), Miles (Allegra Sweeney) and Mikki (Nicolette Pullen) — get back together two years after a school dance prank gone wrong. A joke that turned deadly when their former friend Ashley (Savannah Raye Jones) comes back with a gun. 

Now, she’s in an institution and they’re dealing with the guilt. Could a weekend together be the exact thing they need to move on? Or is a slasher going to kill every one of them? Well, it’s not called Pillow Party Massacre for its health.

Director and writer Calvin Morie McCarthy (Amityville Poltergeist) really loves slashers and that comes through in this. It has a great score by Feeding Fingers, awesome practical effects by Chad Buffett and Maddie Goodwin (Vengeance, a Friday the 13th fan film that’s way better than that sounds, as well as Conjuring: The Beyond) and has enough kills and scenes that pay tribute without feeling like a rip off.

Jackie Chain is back as “Kevin” Chan Ka-Kui, the Hong Kong cop he played in Police Story and Police Story 2. It’s also the first movie that the former Michelle Khan, now Michelle Yeoh, would make after her divorce. The two stars got into a stunt competition during filming and both kept doing more dangerous stunts, until Chan had to admit that they were both going to die.

He’s not lying. This movie is famous for the scene where Yeoh jumps a dirt bike onto a train — I love that people say, “Well, it was on a track” and they don’t realize that she’s still riding a dirtbike onto a moving trail — and that’s just one of the many stunts that keep on escalating.

How wild does it get?

In a Hollywood Reporter round table, when asked what scene he would put in a time capsule or to show to aliens, Tarantino picked the last scene of this movie. As big time directors like Ridley Scott and Danny Boyle laughed at him, he said, “Aliens would watch and be amazed at what they saw” and the scene “could actually give you an understanding of cinema and all its bells and whistles and the movement.”

Ka-Kui is sent to Guangzhou, where Interpol director Inspector Jessica Yang (Yeoh) explains his next assignment: he must stop drug lord Chaibat (Kenneth Tsang) by getting close to him. To do that, he’s to go undercover and break the crime boss’ henchman Panther (Yuen Wah) out of prison. A thankful bad guy, Panther invites Ka-Kui to join the gang.

The first problem? They end up in Ka-Kui’s supposed hometown, but the cops are ahead of the criminals and have set up a family for him, with Yang as his sister. They also make it look like the brother and sister team kill a cop, making them seem like even better choices to join Chaibat.

Chaibat tests the heroes by sending them on dangerous missions, like killing everyone that deals with his main grower and rescuing his wife Chen Wen-Shi (Josephine Koo) from a huge prison in Kuala Lumpur. She won’t give him the password to his Swiss bank accounts otherwise, so it’s not motivated by love.

The problem? Ka-Kui’s girlfriend May (Maggie Cheung) is also there, leading a group of tourists, and thinks her boyfriend is cheating on her once she sees him with another woman. She ends up taken by the gang and the cops are forced to break Chen Wen-Shi from jail, which leads to the near-twenty minute long action that closes the film, the scene that Tarantino picked as the one he would save above all other movie moments.

He’s not serving hyperbole. That scene is that good. The rest of the movie is, too. Sure, Jackie made better, but if you judge this purely on how entertaining it is, it’s really hard to beat.

The 88 Films limited edition of 3000 for Police Story III: Supercop has a slipcase with new artwork by Sean Longmore, an 80-page collector’s booklet featuring new writing by C.J. Lines and interview with John Wakefield, six lobby cards and a double-sided poster.

The film is available as both a 4K UHD presentation of the Hong Kong cut and a 4K UHD presentation of the international U.S. cut. There’s audio commentary by Frank Djeng, features on all of the actors and the director, outtakes, behind-the-scenes footage, trailers, T.V. commercials, teaser trailers, and even the TV commercial where Yeoh first met Chan. I honestly don’t know if there will be a better version of this movie ever released. You can get it from MVD.

Directed and written by Lowell Dean, the same man who made WolfCop, this movie takes everything that was wonderful about the original and makes it bigger and more ridiculous. I mean, if all we got out of this was the poster that looks just like Cobra, it would be a success.

Sergeant Lou Garou (Leo Fafard) is still promoting the town of Woodhaven, except now that includes alien parasites, which are coming within cans of Chickenmilk Stout created by Sydney Swallows (Yannick Bisson), who also owns the new hockey stadium.

This is the kind of movie where Astron-6 (Matthew Kennedy, Adam Brooks and Conor Sweeney) can show up as a gang of evil Santa and elves, there’s an extended human on werecat love scene, Kevin Smith as the mayor, Officer Tina (Amy Matysio) being one of the few capable cops in town, Willie (Jonathan Cherry) returning after being replaced by an alien and a plot that’s pretty much ripped off from Strange Brew.

If you loved the first one, well, this is more of a good thing. If you don’t have much appetite for silliness, well, you’re going to hate it. Me? I’m waiting for WolfCop 3: Season of the WolfCop. Or maybe WolfCop 3D.

You can watch this on Tubi.