The ups and downs of Renny Harlin’s career is pretty amazing and demands further investigation in the future. How does one recover from Cutthroat Island? As we brace for Harlin to make a return with a new The Strangers movie in 2024, this project needs to come to life.

Until then, The Long Kiss Goodnight.

Harlin and his leading lady, Geena David, were married from 1993 to 1998, but she filed for divorce shortly after her personal secretary, Tiffany Bowne, gave birth to Harlin’s first child, Luukas “Luke” Harlin in August 1997. As the time lines up, some of that affair was during the making of this film. I don’t know how that colors your enjoyment of this film.

It did well — but writer Shane Black wondering if it would have done better with a male lead — and some of that is because their past film, the previously mentioned Cutthroat Island, did so bad.

Davis has a fascinating career as well, She told Vulture in 2016, “Film roles really did start to dry up when I got into my 40s. If you look at IMDb, up until that age, I made roughly one film a year. In my entire 40s, I made one movie, Stuart Little. I was getting offers, but for nothing meaty or interesting like in my 30s. I’d been completely ruined and spoiled. I mean, I got to play a pirate captain! I got to do every type of role, even if the movie failed.” Yet where I’ve always admired her is that while she’s attractive, that hasn’t been the main reason why she’s been so remembered, starting back in Tootsie.

In this movie, she plays two sides of the female experience: amnesiac good girl schoolteacher Samantha Caine and unstoppable badass Charlene “Charly” Elizabeth Baltimore. She only fully engages in her real Charly self when she’s nearly drowned on a water wheel while completely nude, which seems like a subject drenched with some subtext. Regardless, she’s the capable one of team she forms with Samuel Jackson’s detective, Mitch Henessey. And yet at the end, she is comfortable enough to put that life behind her again — without amnesia leading her to follow that path — and become a partner to a man and a mother.

The real success of the film is that the people who made it loved what they did. It’s one of Jackson’s favorite films he was in to watch — he was killed in the original cut until an audience member loudly protested during an early test viewing — and Davis said, “I love that movie. My character might be my favorite role—it’s a close call between Thelma and that one. Anyway, that movie came out great and got some good reception, but it didn’t soar to heights, let’s say, perhaps as we wanted it to.” As for Harlin, it’s his favorite of his movies, saying, “…it’s just very simple. It’s a movie that had a really good screenplay, which meant that I was able to get really good actors. It’s always challenging to make a movie, but it sure makes it easier when you have a good screenplay like in that one. When you have characters that are complex, and you have good drama and have some humor and some good action, you kind of have all the ingredients. When you have that you don’t even need some crazy special effects — you just need to let the characters do their thing. It was a great experience.”

You can listen to The Cannon Canon episode of The Long Kiss Goodnight here.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Nothing gives me greater joy than when our site gets mentioned on my favorite podcast, The Cannon Canon. There are a few movies they’ve covered that I haven’t, so it’s time to fix that.

If the world was a better place — and it’s not, trust me — we’d have had more than one adventure of Jackson Healy and Holland March. Director and co-writer Shane Black said, “I think it’s a little premature to consider a sequel. I don’t believe in jinxes necessarily, but we really need people to see this one before we can even talk about that. We’re up against some stiff superhero competition and we just need people to, you know, maybe see Captain America six times, but not the seventh and see us instead.” Later, he’d say that the movie didn’t make enough but he’d love to make another one.

March (Ryan Gosling) is a private eye who is hired by adult film starlet Misty Mountains’ (Murielle Telio) aunt Mrs. Glenn (Lois Smith). Misty’s dead, but she’s seen her alive, which leads his case to Amelia Kuttner (Margaret Qualley), someone associated with Misty who has hired Healey (Russell Crowe) to scare off the detective. After they’re attacked, they learn that Amelia, her now-dead boyfriend Dean and Misty were working on a movie that combined pornography and investigative journalism. They’re soon hired by Amelia’s mother, a Justice Department official named Judith (Kim Basinger) and that’s when the twists and turns you expect of the noir kick in.

An attempt to bring back the era of Vanishing Point, co-writer Anthony Bagarozzi said that the name The Nice Guys aimed to be ironic and non-descriptive, as the two main characters were “literally the two worst people that we could think of and then trying to make that fun.” That said, “one breaks arms for a living and the other cons old ladies out of money.”

This movie is so 70s that they hired former Playboy centerfold photographer Arny Freytag to shoot the Misty Mountains photos. He shoots with a huge camera — an 8″ x 10″ view — which needs up to fifty flash heads. Instead of a digital shot with smaller flashes, this means that each light must be specially placed and targeted to illuminate a small area of the photo. He says that he uses each light as one of his brush strokes, illuminating each area as he incrementally builds the final image.

Speaking of sequels, you could see this as one for Russell Crowe. He’s always said that he wanted to play Bud White from L.A. Confidential again. In both movies, he’s a dumb brute who protects women and has to deal with the intelligence of Kim Basinger. They’re both set in L.A. and this is twenty years later, so it could be a spiritual sequel. He’s also said he’d love to make a sequel to The Nice Guys. I mean, they did get those business cards.

You can listen to The Cannon Canon episode of Nice Guys here.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Nothing gives me greater joy than when our site gets mentioned on my favorite podcast, The Cannon Canon. There are a few movies they’ve covered that I haven’t, so it’s time to fix that.

Directed by John Flynn from a screenplay by Paul Schrader and Heywood Gould, based on a story by Schrader, Rolling Thunder is the story of a man who should by all rights be dead. He might be, when you get down to it. U.S. Air Force Major Charles Rane (William Devane) has spent seven years as a POW in Vietnam. They throw a parade for him, but there’s no real joy for him back home in San Antonio. His wife Janet (Lisa Blake Richards) has moved on and who can blame her for needing a man? You can’t blame his son Mark for not looking at him as anything but a stranger. And you can’t fault the town itself for the strange way that they view him as some ghost or as an object, like Linda Forchet (Linda Haynes), the girl who wore his ID bracelet every day, sees him. There’s nothing in him to return affection or even emotion. All they can do is give him some piece of the American dream. A brand new Cadillac and 2,555 silver dollars, one for every day he was captured.

That’s when The Texan (James Best), Automatic Slim (Luke Askew), T-Bird (Charles Escamilla) and Melio (Pete Ortega) — the Acuña Boys — bust in, take those silver dollars and try to torture a man who has been tortured by the best. They mangle his hand in a garbage disposal and when his son tries to save his dad by bringing out those silver dollars, they just shoot him. Kill his wife, too.

Only one person may know how he feels. Master Sergeant Johnny Vohden (Tommy Lee Jones). They were in Hanoi together all that time. He’s so disconnected from this world that he’s signed up for another ten years in Airborne. So when Rane uses Linda to get intel, when he finds those boys, he doesn’t even need to be asked to be in on the revenge. It’s just what has to be done.

After a disastrous test screening — Devane said “the Mexicans set the theater on fire! They were really, really, really down on it,” Twentieth-Century Fox pretty much gave the film to American-International Pictures who made a lot of money off it.

Part of the reason why that test screening went so badly was that the hand in the garbage disposal was much worse in the original cut of the film. It was filmed with a lamb shank for the hand and when the scene played, writer Heywood Gould said, “One woman fainted, another person ran into the lobby and demanded his money back, and another guy was so freaked out, that he entered in his car in the parking lot, and crashed into another car.”

Rolling Thunder shows up in the work of Quentin Tarantino quite a bit. Beyond the company that he assembled to re-release movies — Rolling Thunder Pictures — the seven years reference in the Christopher Walken speech in Pulp Fiction is a direct reference to how long Rane was a prisoner. There’s an Acuña Boys cup in Jackie Brown, an actual Acuña Boys gang in the second Kill Bill and an ad for a fake restaurant in Grindhouse. Is it any accident that his acting teacher was James Best?

As you can imagine, Paul Schrader didn’t like the movie. He doesn’t like much. But I kind of love that about him, you know? In Schrader On Schrader, he says that he wrote the movie to criticize U.S. involvement in Vietnam as well as fascistic and racist attitudes in America. Rane was originally written as a white trash racist, with many similarities to Schrader’s more famous character Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver. In fact, Bickle was in the script in a cameo. Schrader claims that he wrote a film about fascism and the studio made a fascist film. There is a newspaper clipping about Rane — spelled incorrectly — at the end of Taxi Driver, so these movies are in the same cinematic universe, a term I know Schrader would attack me for using in connection with his art.

You can listen to The Cannon Canon episode of Rolling Thunder here.

Voltati… ti uccido (Turn Around… I’ll Kill You) — also known as Winchester Bill and If One Is Born a Swine — was directed by Alfonso Brescia and written by María del Carmen Martínez Román (Crypt of the Vampire, Jess Franco’s Vampiresas 1930, Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot!) and Renaro Polselli.

Ted Shaw (Conrado San Martín) owns most of the goldmines in town, other than just one, the mine of old Sam Wilton (Spartaco Conversi). Shaw sends bandits to take care of the elderly mine owner, but he didn’t count on him hiring Winchester Billy Walsh (Richard Wyler AKA Richard Stapley, The Girl from Rio, Dick Smart 2.007) to protect him. Then, Bill must fight Mexican outlaw El Bicho (Fernando Sancho, Return of the Blind Dead).  

He does have the help of several brothers who get tortured and buried up to their necks while the enemy army bears down on them. Luckily, good saves the day.

I’m always amazed at the longevity of Italian creatives. Brescia would go on to make movies in nearly every genre, often using the name Al Bradley. There’s the strange Ator sequel Iron Warrior, his run of Star Wars clones such as Star Odyssey (see this article for more on those movies), giallo (Ragazza tutta nuda assassinata nel parco, the late in the game Omicidio a luci blu with David Hess and 90s crush Florence Guérin), poliziotteschi (Napoli serenata calibro 9), mondo (Nel labirinto del sesso) and even the space, porn and ripoff hybrid The Beast In Space.

As for Polselli…well, I just spent an entire week on his movies.

I’ve been trying to work my way through the non-horror films of Polselli and they’re fine, but I was missing something, Missing women standing wide-eyed and screaming, tree branches being used for the most nefarious of reasons and strange rituals happening for no reason at all. Thankfully — after much searching through some of the most nefarious of websites — I have found Casa dell’amore… la polizia intervene AKA House of Love… The Police Intervene.

My excitement was palpable just from the IMDB summary: “Three young hobby archeologists witness a Satanic ritual in a secluded villa. Instead of helping poor female victims they decide to secretly document the events.”

Hobby archaeologists! Satanic ritual! Secluded villa! This movie is my new plans for the day.

Directed by Polselli and written by long-time associate and often production manager Bruno Vani, this has Polselli using the name Ralph Brown and also having access to footage from the unfinished movie A Virgin for Satan by Alessandro Santini. That film was co-written by Vani and the ritual scenes in this film come from that film.

According to an article in Nocturno, this was called I torbidi misteri della sensualità (Obscure Mysteries of Sensuality) and was a reworking of another Polselli script for a movie called Tilt that was based on the Manson Family. In that script, a cult named The Children of Satan conducts an occult marriage ceremony with a nude bride covered with the blood of doves. What could have been…