Cannonball Run. Cannonball. Cannonball Run II. Speed Zone.
Siskel and Ebert hated them. I love them. I’m never going to get to vote on the Oscars at this rate.
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Neo-noir dystopian science fiction? Sure. But also giallo.
Strange Days was directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by James Cameron and Jay Cocks. At once 20 minutes into the future and thirty years in the past, it still feels remarkably vital.
Criminals are committing crimes and making SQUID (Superconducting QUantum Interference Device) discs that allow people to relive their murders and assaults. Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) was once an LAPD officer, but now he works the black market, selling these memories.
Meanwhile, Burton Steckler (Vincent D’Onofrio) and Dwayne Engelman (William Fichtner) track Iris (Brigitte Bako), who is wearing a SQUID helmet. She takes whatever she filmed and hides it in Lenny’s car, all while he pines over her best friend — and his lost love — rock star Faith Justin (Juliette Lewis), who has landed a new man, record industry boss Philo Gant (Michael Wincott).
While his car is being towed, Lenny is drinking away his pain with his only friends, detective Max Peltier (Tom Sizemore) and limousine driver and bodyguard Lornette “Mace” Mason (Angela Bassett). When Lenny is given another disk, it shows him Iris being assaulted and killed. More than that, he lives through it. He goes on the run with Mace, as whatever he has on that disk she left in his car is enough to send Steckler and Engelman after him.
It’s all tied to rapper Jeriko One (Glenn Plummer), who was with Iris when he was pulled over by Steckler and Engelman and shot in the streets, killed over the anti-police lyrics in his songs. Philo has been recording his own people using the SQUID hardware with women. Lenny finds him dead, killed by Max, who has been with Faith. As if that’s not enough stabbing in the back, Max literally knifes Lenny, who removes it just in time to send his former friend hurtling to the pavement. He leaves Faith alone, heading back to Mace, who has been in love with him for a long time.
Mayor Palmer Strickland (Josef Sommer) is given all the info and stops a near-riot just moments before Mace and Lenny share a kiss at midnight.
Wikipedia refers to this as a techno-thriller, tech-noir, and a futuristic erotic thriller. Or, like I said, giallo with bullshit giallo science. It has a gorgeous femme fatale with Lewis — who sang for real — and a protagonist obsessed with seeing her one more time, even if it’s past sex recorded and lived through, even if that feels empty.
I wear yellow glasses, and when I have them on, terms like adult thriller and neo-noir appear as they should: giallo.
Back in 1948, Margaret Strauss (Emma Thompson) is killed during a robbery, and her husband, Roman (Kenneth Branagh, who also directed this movie), is executed for the crime, but not before he whispers something to Gray Baker (Andy Garcia), a reporter.
In 1991, private detective Mike Church (Branagh) is looking into the identity of a woman whom he names Grace (also Thompson), who has appeared– mute, amnesiac and with nightmares — at the orphanage that raised him. Mike asks his friend Pete Dugan (Wayne Knight) to publish her info in the paper, while hypnotist Franklyn Madson (Derek Jacobi) tries to use his skills to bring her mind back. She doesn’t, but does remember a lot about the lives of Margaret and Roman. And oh yeah — Franklyn is really Frankie, the son of Margaret and Roman’s housekeeper Inga (Hanna Schygulla), Grace is artist Amanda Sharp who paints scissor-themed photos and — man, is this an exposition dump? — Frankie killed Margaret with scissors when Roman rebuffed his mother’s love. The scissors were put in Roman’s hand, and that brings us to now, as Franklyn tries the same thing on Mike and Amanda.
Roger Ebert said that this was similar to the works of Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, saying, “Dead Again is Kenneth Branagh once again demonstrating that he has a natural flair for bold theatrical gesture. If Henry V, the first film he directed and starred in, caused people to compare him to Olivier, Dead Again will inspire comparisons to Welles and Hitchcock — and the Olivier of Hitchcock’s Rebecca. I do not suggest Branagh is already as great a director as Welles and Hitchcock, although he has a good start in that direction. What I mean is that his spirit, his daring, is in the same league. He is not interested in making timid movies.”
But hey, that ending, where — spoilers — a scissor sculpture kills the killer? Ever seen Tenebre? That said, I do like the twist that Mike was actually Margaret and Grace was Roman.
Not just a blaxploitation, not just a comic strip movie, not just a Pam Grier movie, this is also her last movie for AIP that ties in race identity, being a woman and, most essentially, Pam Grier kicking ass for 90 minutes.
Friday Foster comes from an American newspaper comic strip, created and written by Jim Lawrence — who wrote the James Bond strip — and illustrated by Jorge Longarón that ran from January 18, 1970, to February 17, 1974. She was one of the first African-American women characters to star in her own strip with only Jackie Ormes’ Torchy Brown coming before it (that strip ran in the Pittsburgh Courier, which makes me quite happy to know that my hometown sometimes does things ahead of the rest of the world). Friday started as an assistant to high-fashion photographer Shawn North, but soon became an international supermodel leaving her troubled life in Harlem behind her. Since her strip ended, Friday has shown up in Dick Tracy.
Foster (Grier) has witnessed an assassination attempt on the wealthiest African American, Blake Tarr (Thalmus Rasulala) and then her best friend Cloris Boston (Rosaline Miles) is murdered. Soon, not listening to her boss’ warning to stay out of her stories, she finds herself targeted for death.
Arthur Marks already had some comic strip experience, directing three episodes of the Steve Canyon TV series. He also directed Bonnie’s Kids, Detroit 9000, Bucktown, A Women for All Men, J.D.’s Revenge, Class of ’74, The Roommates and the “Find Loretta Lynn” episode of The Dukes of Hazzard. Writer Orville H. Hampton worked on everything from Rocketship X-M and Mesa of Lost Women to The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake, Jack the Giant Killer and episodes of Flipper, Perry Mason, Super Friends, Fantasy Island and The Dukes cartoon.
There are some great people in this, like Yaphet Kotto as private detective Colt Hawkins, Earth Kitt as fashion designer Madame Rena, Scatman Crothers, Godfrey Cambridge, Ted Lange and Jim Backus as a racist Senator. There’s even a scene with a young Carl Weathers as one of the bad guy’s goons.
The real joy of this film is the agency it affords Friday. She’s gorgeous, sure, but she can easily best any man. And when she beds more than one over the running time of the film, she’s never judged. Best of all, her blackness is central to who she is and not an afterthought.
Supposedly Marks was trying to turn this into a TV series. I wish that had happened because one Friday Foster adventure is nowhere near enough.
You can watch this on Tubi.
I hate when people make lists of the worst movies ever made, because stuff like this always ends up on it.
Whether you see it as this title or as Duel of the Space Monsters, Frankenstein Meets the Space Men, Mars Attacks Puerto Rico, Mars Invades Puerto Rico or Operation San Juan, you’re going to see something that is absolutely ridiculous. But why else do you watch movies?
Also: there is no Frankenstein in this movie.
Martian Princess Marcuzan (Marilyn Hanold, the June 1959 Playboy Playmate of the Month who is also in In Like Flint and The Brain That Wouldn’t Die) is in this, the last female survivor of an atomic war who has brought Dr. Nadir (an amazing Lou Cutell, who was Amazing Larry in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure) with her to screw with Earth.
Oh yeah and abduct women in bikinis. And drive around a lot. And deal with an android astronaut named Colonel Frank Saunders whose face gets all burned up and he ends up fighting a mutant named Mull to the death.
Look, 65% of this movie is stock footage and I wouldn’t have it any other way. So much of this just hits me in the right places. Sure, if it got made today, it would be on digital video, the stock footage would be watermarked and I would hate every single minute of it. But I love what this is.
You can watch this on Tubi.
Eww, look — that rat has a woman in its mouth,
Man, what a poster.
Directed and written by Bert I. Gordon, The Food of the Gods was ever so loosely based on H. G. Wells’ novel The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth.
The food of the gods does indeed appear to Mr. and Mrs. Skinner (John McLiam and Ida Lupino), who feed it to their chickens. Bok bok, those things grow bigger than a person, but so do the rats, wasps and even worms that eat it, so soon enough their island near British Columbia is filled with dangerous human-sized creatures.,
Meanwhile, professional football player Morgan (Marjoe Gortner) — wait a second here, what position does Marjoe Gortner, no offense, play in American football? Punter? — is hunting with his friends when one of them is killed by a giant wasp. He’s so into this that he comes back to see even more, meeting up with a dog food CEO named Jack Bensington (Ralph Meeker) who wants to sell these gigantic animals for food, his assistant Lorna (Pamela Franklin) and the pregnant Rita (Belinda Balaski) and her husband Thomas (Tom Stovall).
Giant rats killed almost everyone, but then Marjoe drowns them all because they’ve become too big to swim, which is the most BS science ever, but sure, why not Bert I. Gordon. Of course, man screws up again and lets cows use the formula and they get huge and so do the kids, eventually but not in this, that drink their milk. Doesn’t pasteurization take care of giant drugs?
This did so well for American-International Pictures that they decided to make H.G. Welles movies, such as Empire of the Ants and The Island of Dr. Moreau. They were lucky Welles was dead, because if he were alive, they’d also have to pay for using a lot of his book Mysterious Island in this, not just the source book of the same title.
Hsiang Ying (Chia Ling) has been betrayed by her master, who tells her that he killed her father before tossing her off a cliff and when she survives that and a battle with wolves, he locks her inside a cage. She’s saved by Ku (Chiang-Lung Wen) but it turns out that the real killer is his uncle, a maniac who has two skulls that sit on his shoulders and, when called upon, can fly around and bite people.
Now known as the Heartless Woman, she goes on episodic adventures that have her battling ripoffs of other martial arts movies, such as a one armed boxer (Phillip Ko!) and a monkey king. Like many kung fu films from Taiwan, the budget is low and the imagination is high. I wish it spent all the time with its heroine instead of going into comedy, but I still had a blast watching it. Seriously, the final bad guy may have the most amazing weaponry ever.
Also known as Revengful Swordswoman, this was released by 21st Century.
You can watch this on Tubi. You can also get it on blu ray from Gold Ninja Video.
You remember that interview where Vanilla Ice tried to explain why he didn’t steal Queen/David Bowie’s “Under Pressure?”
I’d like to hear whoever did the music for this movie to explain how they added a “da na na” to the theme from Halloween. Then again, there’s plenty more that this movie owes to that film.
A killer with a kitchen knife is on the prowl, killing off college kids. And he’s on the way to Lanier College during finals.
Meanwhile, a fraternity stages a mass shooting to help their members pass a chemistry test. How does this plan work? Who comes up with such a plan?
While students prepare for the end of the year, the killer is hiding among them. We have Courtney, who is the Final Girl, of course. Her roommate is Lisa, who is all into the hot professor. Well, not really hot. He’s a professor, though.
For some reason, all of the pledges can’t dare anyone. But Gary is in love with Janet and pins her, so he gets punished by being tied up to a tree, his underwear filled with ice and then sprayed with shaving cream. What? Where did this ritual come from? Who goes through with this? Even the rest of the town, like the security guard, follow these rules. What is the deal with this school?
Well, he’s tied up and the killer gets him. Then it gets his girlfriend, too. While that’s going on, Wildman, a frat guy, is looking for pain pills when he gets killed by a Universal weight machine. His friend Mark tries to find him and he gets killed.
Then we have Radish, who isn’t gay in the movie but would totally be a proud out character if this was made after 1981. He’s constantly looking for killers and has a great poster collection of old films. All his knowledge of murder doesn’t help, as he’s instantly killed.
Lisa tries to model for her boyfriend in the nude, but she gets killed, too. And now we’re down to one and the killer even catches an arrow and stabs the coach with it when he tries to save Courtney. But then he falls into a hole and she stabs him to death. That’s it. That’s the fight he puts up.
Written and directed by Jimmy Huston (My Best Friend Is a Vampire), this is pretty much Halloween with a killer who was too lazy to get a mask (he was also the fight coordinator for the film).
That said, I wasn’t bored, I laughed out loud at many of the things that Radish did and said, and I enjoyed the arrow catching scene. You’ll be filled with questions. Like, how much chaffing did the short shorts of the 80’s cause?
Back when I was a kid, I read so many Jack Chick comics. That’s because while the tracts are given away for free, the full-size comic books were always in Christian stores, and those were the only places that sold craft supplies in my small town. Chick’s Crusader comic book had six issues about Alberto Rivera, an anti-Catholic religious activist who was the source of many of Chick’s anti-Catholic theories.
Rivera claimed that he was sent to a Catholic seminary at the age of seven, and two years later, as his mother lay dying, she reportedly saw ugly creatures swarming her deathbed and realized she was headed for a Christless eternity on account of being Catholic. At her grave, nine-year-old Alberto promised to discover the truth. But before that, the Vatican sent him as a deep-cover priest with the mission of infiltrating Protestant organizations and sabotaging their leaders.
This is when Alberto learned that the Vatican was behind Freemasonry, and they worship the Virgin Mary because they’re really simping for the Whore of Babylon. In 1965, he denounced the church in a stadium filled with 50,000 people, going to war with the Jesuits, who, like the NWO, if you’re NWO, you’re NWO for life. They tortured him so severely that his lungs collapsed and he went into an iron lung. As Radiohead sang, “Faith, you’re driving me away. You do it every day. You don’t mean it, but it hurts like hell.”
Alberto asked Jesus for forgiveness, was miraculously healed, and so moved a Jesuit official that he was allowed to escape Spain and rescue his sister Maria, a nun who had also been targeted by the church, and barely made it through as she was “…bleeding to death from flagellation and other mistreatment.” Also: Jim Jones was a Jesuit.
But let’s ask Cornerstone magazine for the, well, gospel truth. “Is Alberto’s story true? No! Our intensive investigation reveals his police record, his investment schemes, his bad check‑writing, his contradictory testimony, his fabricated educational record, and his reported family abuse.”
Alberto’s story was inconsistent and shifted over time. In a 1964 statement, he claimed to have left the Catholic Church in July of 1952. Yet later, he said it was 1967, which is not a minor tweak, you know? But even after 1967, he continued promoting the Catholic Church.
Rivera had some documentation that he said proved he was a priest. It didn’t.
His sister was a maid, not a nun.
He claimed he was a priest in 1963, but he was really married with children in the U.S.
Rivera may have lied — or stretched the truth– or been compromised by a global conspiracy — about those things, but he had no problem saying the Jesuit order was behind, well, everything. Communism? Jesuits. Islam? Jesuits. Nazism? Also Jesuits.
World Wars, economic recessions, Jonestown and the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, who was Catholic? Jesuits.
He claimed that the Catholic Church was hard at work spreading homosexuality and abortion, plus some mic drops like how the popes are all antichrists and the Catholic Church worships the Whore of Babylon (two mentions in one article, so SEO scores will be high for this). Alberto was also ahead of the curve of being all in on hating Islam, as he claimed that Muhammad was manipulated by the Catholic Church to invent Islam as a tool to destroy Jews and rival Christians, and that Muhammad’s first wife, Khadijah, was a Catholic nun stationed at an Arabian monastery, acting on instructions from a bishop to marry Muhammad and launch a new religion.
But how far could Rivera go? How about the idea that the Vatican staged Fatima and picked the town because it’s the name of Muhammad’s daughter? And they also hired a Muslim killer to murder Pope John Paul II in the hopes that the guilt of that fact would make more Muslims Catholic. But aren’t they all a Catholic scheme?
This is old school non-right-wing conspiracy madness, the kind I love the most. The kind where Alberto would claim that people were constantly breaking into his home. And when he joined up with Jack Chick, well, things went wild. Obviously, the Vatican did more than start Islam. Communism, the Masons, the KKK, the mob, the Illuminati, the New Age movement, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons…they made them all. And they can’t wait to start a new inquisition.
These claims were so over the top that there was a protest by both Catholics and Evangelicals to the point that Catholic and even Protestant bookstore owners removed Chick’s product. In response, My Name? . . . In the Vatican? was released, in which Chick doubled down.
Catholic Answers said, “The impact of Alberto Rivera on Jack Chick’s universe is difficult to underestimate. It was Rivera who provided Chick with his most sensationalistic, most anti-Catholic claims and allowed Chick’s conspiracy theories to grow increasingly complex and bizarre.”
Anyways…Elijah’s Secret.
The YouTube description for this movie says, “Please enjoy this free SD screener. By watching this, you agree to share your thoughts about this Christian-based film by writing a review and posting it on AT LEAST one of the following sites: YouTube (comment section), the Harmberg Brothers website (link below), Facebook (please tag #elijahssecret and #harmbergbrothers), Twitter, your blog, and any other applicable websites. Furthermore, if you like what you see (we are confident you will), please tell your friends, family, church congregation(s), coworkers, etc., about this film and send them the website link. Thank you, we are looking forward to reading your review(s)!”
Let’s do this.
Professor Elijah Steinbeck (Wayne Harmberg, the writer and producer) has a secret. He’s not really a Baptist preacher. Instead, he’s a Jesuit who has been tasked with converting the church from the inside out as well as controlling the soul by conducting human trials.
He never counted on Captain Christopher Holmes (Casey Harmberg, who directed, wrote, produced, and did the wardrobe). Holmes is more than just a U.S. Army officer. He’s also a writer for Stars and Stripes and a God-fearing American.
According to the official site, “Additionally, this movie was filmed entirely on an iPhone 6S (a new and rapidly growing technique among filmmakers), making it among the very first feature-length films to be shot this way. It was also edited using Cyberlink PowerDirector 14, a state-of-the-art editing software with 3D, CGI and picture-enhancing capabilities. Prepare to be stunned!”
Forget being stunned, you will be gobsmacked by high-ranking Jesuit overlords meeting in public parks with no mics, clad in hoods that resemble hoodies more than holy vestments. This is also packed with footage from other anti-Jesuit films, a scene where our hero reads the Jack Chick publication The Secret History of the Jesuits and the kind of special effects that would make Neil Breen laugh.
Obviously, I wrote over a thousand words about this, and I’m going to watch it for the third time in a row.
You can watch this on YouTube.
Written by Ralph Griffin and Peter Lalonde, this is the kind of Satanic Panic that I love. Lalonde would go on to produce and write the Left Behind and Apocalypse: Caught in the Eye of the Storm movies.
This gets the most basic thing about He-Man incorrect. He-Man said. “I have the power,” not “I am the power.” That said, Thundercats was super Satanic.
Eastern mysticism was the boogeyman of this, as teachers used visualization in school, and that’s how they were taking over your child’s soul. All of the lessons — caring for yourself, we are all one people, meditation — are just Satan laughing as he spreads his wings. If this keeps up, we’ll have a cashless society, and kids will be killing each other as they play Dungeons and Dragons. Or Nintendo.
While I find these artifacts of the past amusing, I also know that the Satanic Panic never ended. Now it’s Muslims, and you can be super religious and also incredibly happy that brown people are being pushed out of your country. Didn’t Jesus — a long-haired black man who spent time with sex workers and lepers — throw the changemakers out of the temple?
You can watch this on YouTube.
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