EDITOR’S NOTE: Arthur the King was on the CBS Late Movie on August 13, 1987.
If you were British and didn’t get a role in Excalibur in 1981*, a year later, you could have been in Arthur the King, also known as Merlin and the Sword. It was directed by Clive Donner, the man who brought us The Nude Bomb, Charlie Chan and the Dragon Queen, Old Dracula, Spectre, Luv and What’s New, Pussycat? It was written by David Wyles, who also wrote Treasure: In Search of the Gold Horse.
Katharine (Dyan Cannon) is exploring the caves around Stonehenge — Where a man’s a man and the children dance to the Pipes of Pan — and ends up falling and waking up stuck in the cave where Merlin (Edward Woodward, The Equalizer, which had to be mentioned in the CBS ads) and Niniane (Lucy Gutteridge, Top Secret!) have slept and argued for a thousand years. Oh, what a cast — King Arthur (Malcolm McDowell) is a jerk, so you can figure that Guinevere (Rosalyn Landor) ran away more than that she was kidnapped by MorganLe Fay (Candice Bergen, yes, really). She’s rescued by Lancelot (Rupert Everett) and, as you know from the legend of Arthur, they fall in love.
Filmed in Yugoslavia and sitting on the bench for three years before CBS decided to air it as a three-hour TV movie, this is the kind of movie that if you love the legends, you’ll hate, because it feels like, well, a TV movie shot in Yugoslavia. But if you don’t, you’ll wonder why it’s more about Gawain (Patrick Ryecart) and Ragnell (Ann Thornton) than Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
In this, Morgan is the aunt of Mordred (Joseph Blatchley), Arthur’s evil bastard son, instead of Arthur’s half-sister, which makes the story even darker. But you know, incest and 1980s TV maybe didn’t mix. This also rewrites the ending with Merlin astral projecting himself back in time, possessing Excalibur and stabbing the life out of Mordred.
Spoilers, sorry.
Teri Tordia from Julia shows up, as does Mary Stavin from Top Line and Strike Commando 2. Yes, I realize she was in A View to a Kill and Octopussy, as well as the videos for “Strip” and “Ant Rap” by Adam Ant, but I know her from what I know her from. Carole Ashby was also in both of those movies and this, too, so maybe they found something to talk about. Perhaps they made fun of Alison Worth because she wasn’t going to get to be in A View to a Kill. I offer this conjecture knowing Octopussy was made a year later and A View to a Kill three years after. More Bond girls? Maryam d’Abo was in this, too! Yes, she’s in The Living Daylights, but don’t we all know her from Xtro?
Lancelot is the real hero of this story, defeating an entire army of bad guys all by himself and a dragon before exiting as a hero. That dragon, well, look, we don’t need to talk about the effects, do we? I’m trying to be nice.
Malcolm McDowell is the kind of actor who can play King Arthur and Merlin. I am referring to Kids of the Round Table. He’s also very Eric Roberts in that if you say his name out loud three times, he shows up in a $2 million budget straight-to-Walmart movie.
I have never seen Candice Bergen throw a fireball, and now I have.
*Unless you’re Liam Neeson. He was Grak in this and Gawain in that.
July 14-20 Vanity Project Week: “…it might be said that the specific remedy for vanity is laughter, and that the one failing that is essentially laughter is vanity.” Are these products of passionate and industrious independent filmmakers OR outrageous glimpses into the inner workings of self-obsessed maniacs??
Director, writer, producer, editor and composer John Valley made this comedy which is also tragedy, in the best of ways, and one that reminds me that in the last five years, the world has gotten so weird that even the conspiracies in this movie seem wonderfully wholesome by comparison to the reality we’re living in.
Well, I mean, as much as ritualistic lizard alien sex abuse can be wholesome.
First, let me explain something.
Pizzagate was a conspiracy theory that went viral in 2016. Supposedly, hacked emails between John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, and politician Anthony Weiner contained coded messages that connected several high-ranking Democratic Party officials and U.S. restaurants with an alleged human trafficking and child sex ring.
One of these places was Comet Ping Pong Pizza in our nation’s capital. The rumors of that place having a child sex ring were debunked, yet on December 4, 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch of Salisbury, North Carolina, opened fire inside the building. He told police that he planned to “self-investigate” the conspiracy theory and ended up in jail for four years, dying five years later when he pointed a gun at a cop when stopped.
An arsonist also tried to set the building on fire and fake customers even called to jam up the phone lines. Since then, Pizzagate morphed into Frazzledrip, which is all about Hillary Clinton killing a child and drinking its blood, as well as posts about giving children panda eyes. Amazingly — but not at all — these stories often come from white supremacist social media shared on Twitter, 4chan and Reddit before being reported by Alex Jones and his ilk. After all, who doesn’t want the kind of political firepower that comes from the left wing being exposed as a Satanic cabal of New World Order moving children all over the world for sex?
QAnon rose out of this and well, you know how that all went.
Depressed by the fact that the fun world of conspiracies was ruined, like everything else in the world, by these people? Well, maybe we can talk about this movie.
Karen Black (Alexandria Payne) used to work for Terri Lee (Lee Eddy), a very Alex Jones media person who is worshipped for telling the truth in the face of the mainstream (read that as Jew, they sure want to say it) media. Terri wants everyone to know that lizard aliens — or, more specifically, one soccer player who once thought he was Jesus– have a Road to Damascus moment, and this happens. They’re real and are eating children beneath an Austin, TX pizza place. Fired, Karen decides to prove her theory by filming at the pizza shop. But who can take her?
This brings her to a militia meeting, where she meets Duncan (Tinus Seaux) — the film was once called Duncan — a redneck, ultra-right man who believes Terri Lee, her cause, and her claims. He also has a rebel flag on the front and back bumpers, a huge Nazi tattoo and racist ideals, which soon take a backseat to how he feels about Karen. I mean, he shoots another white guy who calls her the n word, but is that because he sees himself as the hero in his own The Turner Diaries or is he truly noble?
The question is, once Karen and Duncan get there, will they find anything? The movie goes to black and doesn’t tell us exactly what happened. Were there lizard aliens? Did they make it to the basement? All we know is that Duncan has opened fire and killed plenty of people, at least one of whom we’ve watched on screen. Now he’s on the run and has nowhere to go but to be another lone nut killer.
That is, unless he can get to Terri Lee. She’ll know what to do.
But can even the people we depend on to guide us through conspiracies not be complicit? How did people feel when Alex Jones was figured out? And now he’s turned on the President, so what happens next? Man, at least Art Bell took a last ride to the other side before we’d have to hear him support that side or take another twentysomething wife so soon after the last one died. It’s hard to have heroes when everyone is bought.
I’ve never been more cynical or more sure that everyone is out to get me than right now, and yet here I sit, down deep in my movie basement, writing my little articles and making dick jokes. The Pizzagate Massacre is, however, a stunning work of art that gives me hope, that shows me that people get it and makes me miss the days when weirdos could just be weird and not running the show.
Most folks only know EC Comics for Tales from the Crypt — OK, maybe MAD Magazine — but the truth is, there were a ton of other titles that that venerable publisher released. Just in the horror realm, they also had the Vault of Horror (yes, there was an Amicus film with that title) and Crypt of Terror. But there was also Weird Fantasy, Weird Science, Crime SuspenStories, Shock SuspenStories, Frontline Combat, Piracy, Weird Science-Fantasy and even the New Direction post-Comics Code books Impact, Valor, Extra!, Aces High, Psychoanalysis, M.D. and Incredible Science Fiction.
I was surprised that none of these other EC Comics had ever gotten a movie or series until I learned about Two-Fisted Tales.
Strangely enough, as Harvey Kurtzman was the editor of the book, these war stories didn’t always follow their title and often had a very anti-war prejudice. Kurtzman had been drafted in 1942 and knew the horrors of war firsthand. As he saw the other war comics on the news racks, he was upset by how much they glorified war. He saw no heroes in his stories, only people trapped in situations beyond their control. He would later comment in The Complete EC Library: Two-Fisted Tales Volume 1, “Nobody had done anything on the depressing aspects of war, and this, to me, was such a dumb—it was a terrible disservice to the children.”
I guess no one explained that to anyone who worked on this show.
In 1991, a TV pilot was put together by producers Joel Silver, Richard Donner and Robert Zemeckis. Other than using the logo and some of the art in the opening, that’s pretty much all that feels like the comic. Instead, this is very similar to Tales from the Crypt, with William Sadler played Mr. Rush, a violent man who connects all of the stories.
“Showdown,” written by Frank Darabont and directed by Richard Donner, is the story of a gunfighter’s last stand. “King of the Road,” written by Randall Jahnson and directed by Tom Holland, is about a drag racer’s past coming to haunt him. Brad Pitt appears in the one. And “Yellow,” written by Jim Thomas, John Thomas, A. L. Katz, and Gilbert Adler, and directed by Robert Zemeckis, is about a soldier who keeps letting down his military man father. It’s the best episode in here, with great acting by Kirk and Eric Douglas, Lance Henriksen and Dan Aykroyd.
Of the three, “Yellow” is the only one based on an EC Comics story, as it was taken from the first issue of Shock SuspenStories and was written by Al Feldstein and illustrated by Jack Davis.
Sadly, this was a letdown, and after one airing, the three episodes all appeared as part of Tales from the Crypt. I was always upset when the show didn’t use the material it was based on. This is really no different, but the last tale is tense and brutal, a rare Zemeckis-directed story that isn’t overly dependent on special effects.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Children of the Night was on the CBS Late Movie on July 8, 1988.
“Don’t hide what you feel inside
Don’t let anybody stand in your way
Just let the music take you higher
Now are you ready to rock
Children of the night?”
Yes, that may be a Whitesnake song, but this TV movie prefers “Hell Is for Children.”
Kathleen Quinlan plays Dr. Lois Lee, the founder of Children of the Night, a non-profit organization that works to support youth who were involved in prostitution. She started as a college student who started to take sex workers into her home for protection and in the film, she runs into pimp Roy Spanish (Mario Van Peebles) and they battle over one of his girls, Valerie (Lar Park-Lincoln in her first movie).
Director Robert Markowitz made plenty of TV movies that played the CBS Late Movie, including the Maximilian Schell-starring The Phantom of the Opera. It was written by William Wood, whose career stretched back to the early 60s, Vickie Park and producer Robert Guenette, who directed some of my favorite BS movies, such as The Mysterious Monsters, The Man Who Saw Tomorrow and The Amazing World of Psychic Phenomena.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Smokey and the Bandit Part 3 was on the CBS Late Movie on April 29, 1988.
I’m fascinated by the fact that at one point, this movie may have been called Smokey IS the Bandit. Articles at. the time said that the plan was to feature Jackie Gleason as both Smokey and the Bandit with the original version filmed from October 1982 to January 1983. Test audiences reacted poorly, finding Gleason playing both parts confusing, so reshoots were filmed in April 1983, with the Bandit scenes re-shot with Jerry Reed playing the role. That’s one story. Another is that Gleason was only Sheriff Buford T. Justice, but would become the Bandit when he took on the challenge of the Enos brothers. An early trailer for Smokey IS the Bandit had Gleason appear in character as Justice to explaining to audiences that to defeat the Bandit he would become his own worst enemy.
Why no Burt? He and Hal Needham were making Stroker Ace and after two of these movies, he seemingly had no interest.
According to Snopes, the jury is out on this story, but I want to believe. They cite Hick Flicks: The Rise and Fall of Redneck Cinema by Scott von Doviak, which states that no such movie exists or was even planned: “An urban legend persists (propagated by Leonard Maltin, among others) that Smokey and the Bandit 3 was originally filmed as Smokey IS the Bandit, with Gleason playing both title roles. After a disastrous test screening, Jerry Reed took over the role of the Bandit in reshoots, or so the story goes. In reality, it’s hard to believe this idea ever got past the pitch meeting, and not so much as a production still (let alone a full-blown bootleg copy) of the supposed original version of the movie has ever surfaced.”
However, the Ocala Star-Banner did report as the movie was being filmed, “As in the first two films, Texas Sheriff Buford T. Justice, played by Jackie Gleason, is hot on the tail of Bandit. This movie originally was titled Smokey Is the Bandit, with Gleason playing both roles, but that idea was scrapped and Jerry Reed, who played trucker Cletus Snow in the first two films, will play the Bandit and drive the black and gold 1983 Trans Am.” Similar articles appeared in trade papers in 1982.
There is also evidence of the trailer, mentioned above:
And there’s a photo of Gleason as the Bandit.
Finally, my last proof is that in May of 2016, a 114-page script for Smokey Is the Bandit was posted online. Written by Stuart Birnbaum and David Dashey, this was listed as the final draft and very similar to what was shot for the film, with no scenes of Jerry Reed, Gleason showing up as Bandit (who has no dialogue other than his giggle), Dusty Trails being a member of the Enos family and a very similar ending.
The Lost Media Wiki even has an image of a heavy-set stuntman playing Bandit and he looks just like Gleason, not Reynolds.
As for the movie that was really filmed, it was directed by Dick Lowry (Project: ALF, Archie: To Riverdale and Back Again, The Jayne Mansfield Story) and had eleven scripts from writers Stuart Birnbaum (Summer School, The Zoo Gang), David Dashev (The Fish Who Saved Pittsburgh) and Gleason, who had final script approval. He said of the story, “Why do we even need writers?” Keep in mind that Gleason was 67 at this point and had already seen a dead alien thanks to Nixon, if the rumors are to be believed. After all, he had a UFO-shaped house that he called The Mothership.
But I digress.
It all begins with Sheriff Buford T. Justice retiring. The Enos brothers (Paul Williams and Pat McCormick) make a bet with him, just as they did with the Bandit, but he turns them down, looking to relax. Yet even a few hours of retirement is too much for him, so he takes them up on their wager: $250,000 against his badge if he can transport a large statue shark from Miami, Florida to Austin, Texas.
Justice and his son Junior (Mike Henry) avoids all of their traps, so the Enos family hires Cledus Snow (Jerry Reed) to dress as Bandit, drive a similar car (Grandson of Trigger) and steal the shark back. He also picks up a girl named Dusty Trails (Colleen Camp) at a used car lot, just like the first movie, to help him.
The hijinks include a battle with bikers at the Gator Kicks Longneck Saloon, a chase through the Mississippi Fairgrounds, an orgy at the Come On Inn that ends with Buford being pursued by a muscular woman named Tina (Faith Minton) and Buford actually winning the bet. Then, he goes to arrest the Bandit and has his mind destroyed when he realizes it’s Cledus.
Let’s get deep. Buford and the Bandit come to the understanding that their lives have no meaning without one another. A Smokey. is nothing without his Bandit, so to speak. The Bandit — now Reynolds after a short, contracturally obligated cameo — drives off with Tina as Buford leaves his son behind.
To make this even stranger, in 1983, Gleason was also in The Sting II, a movie that didn’t have Robert Redford and Paul Newman. 1983 was the year of this, as Curse of the Pink Panther also came out berefit of Peter Sellers.
A good portion of this film is very Boogeyman II, as it repeats almost everything we’ve loved in the first two movies. This makes us judge everything we see after and what we find is lacking, despite how much we love the characters. Just like the speech at the end, we need Reynolds with Gleason. Otherwise, what’s the point?
July 14-20 Vanity Project Week: “…it might be said that the specific remedy for vanity is laughter, and that the one failing that is essentially laughter is vanity.” Are these products of passionate and industrious independent filmmakers OR outrageous glimpses into the inner workings of self-obsessed maniacs??
This whole thing started with “The Karate Rap” in 2012. Or 1986, when the video was made. 2012 seems to be the year it went online, according to Punching Day.
“Relax, and breath / Keep training, you′ll get it / Ich ni san shi, come on everybody / Train Karate / Ich ni san shi, come on everybody / Train Karate / (Karate train your body all the time)”
This video has a Karate Dog.
The man behind this is David Seeger, who followed that rap video with episodes of The All New Mickey Mouse Club and mixtapes of daytime soaps, like All My Children: Daytime’s Greatest Weddings, All About Erica, Luke and Laura Vol. 1: Love on the Run and Luke and Laura Vol. 2: Greatest Love of All.
It always comes back to Anthony Geary.
The son of Hal Seeger (a TV producer and the director of a cartoon, Batfink) and the brother of Susan (who wrote episodes of Blossom and Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper), Charbie Dahl (a creative consultant on Family Matters), Efrem (who produced and wrote Queer as Folk) and Mindy (34 episodes of The West Wing and Bloodfist VII: Manhunt), David directed, wrote and stars in this as Sensei Dave.
An evil martial artist named Tiger (Robert Scaglione) challenges every martial artist in the world to Kumite. Only Sensei Dave shows up, looking like the whitest of all great white hopes, a man who keeps his black belt in the freezer. Why? Look, that’s going to be the least of your questions after watching this.
Will this movie reuse footage from “Karate Rap?” Will footage from Batfink slow the plot to an absolute crawl? Will the entire Seeger family, including Dad, appear as one of the bad guys? Of course. But are you ready for the idea that Sensei Dave can heal any wound and can also send his spirit out of his body? Or that Tiger has a much cooler training facility complete with bikers and women in lingerie that looks like the VCA ripoff porn of Mortal Kombat? Let’s call that movie Mortal Kumbat. Oral Kombat? Oral Cumbat? Mortal Kumblast: Finish Her? Fourplay With Goro?
Anyways.
Tiger has been trying to kill Sensei Dave since he was a baby. He once kicked his baby carriage down the steps — someone alert Erica Shultz — and Dave also stopped him from beating up unhoused people, who revealed that he would be Karate Jesus someday.
That day is now.
Hal Gaudy (Dave’s dad, Hal) is funding Tiger, who has drug dealers in his karate school. Locker rooms — for reasons. He makes a fair amount of money betting on Tiger’s fights. They draw as well as indie pro wrestling, which is to say, not well. They also own a cable TV channel and keep Tiger on staff as a hitman, complete with a miniature scythe. A kama. A sickle. You get it. They have killed so many people along with Tiger that they need a map for their yard to remember where people are buried, which is totally not something the police would use against them in court.
Also: Thanks to Punching Day, I know Tiger’s rap that he says before he kills someone: “Do you know the truth about the tiger’s tooth? Does it cut, does it puncture, does it rip? Let me give you a tip!”
So many questions: Why does Tiger live above a porn store in a small apartment with giant pictures of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Bart Simpson? Are we to infer that America is a fascist bully because the evil man’s girl wears a U.S. flag for lingerie? Or are we just to know that because it’s true?
Tiger and Sensei Dave battle on a boat, and by the end, Sensei Dave is left dead in the water. Literally. Drowning dead. Dave’s ghost leaves his body and visits his pregnant wife and his sister, Sister Sensei — now the movie makes sense and also you will scream yourself hoarse if you scream the secret word scream every time they say the title — to avenge his death. Or find his body. Or something.
Sister Sensei is a big Hollywood star — well, Mindy was trying — and doesn’t have time to avenge her brother’s death. So he starts haunting her, and sometimes, it feels like all of the images and sounds and effects overload to the point that you may think you licked one of those blue stars the teachers warned you weren’t stickers but instead LSD.
To get his sister — who has never done karate — to fight, his ghost pervs on her in the shower and does an impression of Max Headroom mixed with Garth Algar, complete with early 90s video effects. But whatever. It’s time for a montage, and Mindy becomes Sister Sensei and is given Dave’s belt, and no one is all that sad that Dave is dead.
Remember Exposed! Pro Wrestling’s Greatest Secrets? That same audience shows up for the fight between Tiger and Sensei Dave, who shows up, only for Sister Sensei to take the fight. Keep in mind that this is a comedy, and then watch these scenes and the aftermath, where Sister Sensei’s face looks like a hamburger. Funny!
Sam’s favorite trope: Sister Sensei’s tale of the tape photo is her publicity picture.
Instead of following all the signs in the crowd — where did these people get these signs and how did they know to bring “equal rights” signs when Sensei Dave was supposed to be there and there was no hint of Sister Sensei taking the booking — that empower women, Sensei Dave enters his sister’s body to fight, all while his very pregnant wife pulls a Mary in a manger and breaks water right there, giving birth backstage. Look, I have been backstage at MMA and pro wrestling shows. This is no place to be born. It’s also not the place to have a baby, but you wouldn’t be surprised how often that happens.
Sensei Dave leaves her body and causes it to wash up on shore after being dead and bloated in the river for five days, and he just gets up and lives, like two days better than Jesus’ record, and the unhoused people from his past proclaim him to be the karate messiah.
As for his sister, Tiger beats her so severely that she dies.
You read that right. His sister straight up gets killed, and her spirit also leaves her body. She goes “Into the Void” — “Rocket engines burning fuel so fast / Up into the night sky, they blast / Through the universe, the engines whine / Could it be the end of man and time?” — and is now in Karate Heaven.
You know who else is there?
Tiger.
Yes, the Karate Void is part of the Martial World, and anyone who fights can be in it at any time. Imagine how Sister Sensei feels, dying and being trapped there — I wish this had a Street Fighter II countdown screen with her bloody as it counted down from ten to one — and then the guy who karate killed you can just show up at any time to make fun of you for dying at his hands. Anyways, she knows Karate Magic and comes back to life, knocking him out.
Sensei Dave’s wife has the baby on the filthy concrete.
But wait…two years later, and Dave’s wife Holly spins to the camera and says, “Tiger?”
Yes, we’re getting a sequel. Sons of the Sensei.
But we never got it.
Yet.
Hellhammer taught us, “Only death is real.” But in this movie, even the final beyond is not infinite. These people die more than the X-Men when Chris Claremont wrote it.
This took 19 years to be released. It aged, like wine. Or stinky cheese.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The World According to Garp was on the CBS Late Movie on September 11 and November 27, 1987.
For some reason, my parents let me watch this when I was ten and between someone losing their penis in the mouth of a lover when their car is hit from behind and the tragic ending, I was changed. In fact, the end upset me so much, as it made me realize that I too would die, that I didn’t sleep for days.
Directed by George Roy Hill (Thoroughly Modern Millie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, The Great Waldo Pepper, Slap Shot, Slaughterhouse-Five, Funny Farm) and written by Steve Tesich (Breaking Away), this was based on the book by Clifford Irving.
T.S. Garp (Robin Williams) was born after his mother, Jenny Fields (Glenn Close), took advantage of a brain-dead tailgunner, injured in combat during World War II. She mounted him, he got her pregnant, he died, Garp was born. Jenny writes Sexual Suspect, the story of her life, and becomes a feminist icon, while Garp marries Helen (Mary Beth Hurt), has two boys named Duncan and Walt, and becomes a fiction writer.
A girl named Ellen James (Amanda Plummer) has been assaulted and her tongue cut out. The women who gather around Garp’s mother all begin to cut out their own tongues, despite Ellen telling them not to. Helen cheats on Garp; he rams into the car where she is going down on one of her students, causing the death of their son, Walt and Duncan to lose an eye. His mother is killed by an assassin, and he can’t even go to her funeral until transgender football player Roberta Muldoon (John Lithgow) sneaks him in.
Speaking of Roberta, she’s why Irving wouldn’t write the script: “It was the early 1980s when George Roy Hill asked me if I would write the screenplay for Garp, but I knew we didn’t see eye to eye about Roberta. George was a World War II guy; he couldn’t see past the comedic part of a transgender woman who’d been an NFL player. A pity, because John Lithgow, who was cast as Roberta in the film, could have played her as I wrote her. Roberta is a force of normality in an otherwise extreme world; she is the only character who loves Garp and his mother equally, the only character who isn’t in a rage about someone or something. I declined to write the Garp script because George wouldn’t do Roberta my way.”
At the end, Garp is shot and is airlifted to the hospital and maybe Heaven as he remembers his mom throwing him in the air as “When I’m 64” plays. I had loved that song as a kid, so hearing it in this way horrified me.
This is the fifth year I’ve participated in the F This Movie! month-long event.
For those of you new to Junesploitation, here’s how it works: each day of the month has its own theme, and you’re supposed to watch a movie that ties into that theme. How you interpret the connection is entirely up to you, which means if you have no interest in exploitation or genre movies that’s ok and you can still join in!
This episode isn’t edited as much as normal episodes — just stream of consciousness on thirty movies with minor tweaks to audio.
B&S About Movies 
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