April 18: Vroom — A movie mostly about cars.

William F. McGaha, co-wrote, directed,  produced, and stars in this as Scott, a young car racer who will remind you that he deserves to be on the track to the point that you will absolutely hate him. So yeah, he can do anything except make you love him in this movie.

What this movie does have is a great theme song, “Speed Lovers” by Billy Lee Riley, and also an appearance by the band Randy Little and the Holidays, who rock out two numbers, “You Love Everybody” and “A Living Doll.”

Scott Clayton, the character that McGaha plays, is the son of a famous mechanic and being asked to fix a big race by Atlanta organized crime figure Pinkerton Bentley (David Marcus), who plies him with sodas and go go dancers.

Fred Lorenzen — The Golden Boy, Fast Freddie, The Elmhurst Express and Fearless Freddy — plays himself and at the time, he was a majorstar in NASCAR, winning the following races from 1962 to 1967: the Atlanta 500, the World 600; the Volunteer 500, the Western North Carolina 500; the Mountaineer 300 and the Old Dominion 500 in 1963; the Southeastern 500 at Bristol; the Atlanta 500; the Gwyn Staley 400 at North Wilkesboro; the Virginia 500 at Martinsville; the Rebel 300 at Darlington; the Volunteer 500; the Old Dominion 500 and the Charlotte Motor Speedway National 400 in 1964; the Daytona 500; the Virginia 500; the World 600 and the National 400 in 1965; and the Old Dominion 500 and the American 500 in 1966 and Daytona 500 Qualifier in 1967. In 1963 alone, he made $122,000 in winner’s prizes, a figure which would be $1.2 million dollars in 2023 money. That’s kind of like having Michael Jordan show up in your regional Florida movie.

McGaha would go on to make Bad Girls for the Boys, The Shrink and one of the oddest biker movies ever, J.C., which yes, is about a motorcycle riding Jesus. He wrote this with Fred Tuch, who went on to be an art director for the shows Manimal and Galactica 80 as well as the art director for Pennies from Heaven, the storyboard artist for Mannequin and an illustrator on Blue Thunder.

April 18: Vroom — A movie mostly about cars.

This is as much a car movie as it is one about people making the dumbest decisions. Like therapist Orianna (Mimi Rogers), who decides to try a technique in which she tries to put Penny (Rachel Miner) right into the trauma she has avoided since her parents died in a car accident. Immersion therapy? I don’t know. I went to art school. But then, while on a road trip with penny, Orianna hits a hitchhiker and instead of calling the police, she decides to give that injured man a ride.

What follows is the hitchhiker stabbing one of their tires and nearly killing them. Well, he goes all the way and murdered Orianna,then wedges the car between two trees and tortures Penny by making her do her breathing exercises and, you know, cutting off one of her toes when he isn’t murdering everyone around her.

Mickey Jones, who teamed with Michael Ironside in the series version of V, and Michael Berryman are in the cast. Directed by Richard Brandes, who wrote the script with Diane Doniol-Valcroze and Arthur Flam  (who were also the writers of the vehicular homicide movie Hit and Run and the movie Kill By Inches, which is about a murderous tailor who can’t measure anything properly and thus becomes a killing machine), this movie literally has Mimi Rogers dead in the car for most of its running time. What a role.

Also: the same license plate on the car in this was the plate for Nash Bridge‘s 1970 Plymouth Barracuda, a car that Bridges claimed they only made 14 of. Well, it’s actually a 1971 Plymouth Hemi ‘Cuda, a Plymouth Barracuda with a Hemi V8 and a special design that really was only for one year. According to Hot Cars, this model had not only the distinctive fender gills of this car and the shaker hood from the 1970 edition, but also four headlights and improved taillights. But Nash may have been off on how many there are, as estimates go from single digits to eleven made. Eleven! These things sell for around $3.3 million. So that means the cars for the show were custom-made fakes. There were four cars: a 5.5-liter Barracuda with a shaker hood, two 5.2-liter Barracudas and a 7.2-liter version that were all made by Frank Benetti and his Same Day Paint and Body Shop in Newhall, Los Angeles.

April 17: Party Over, Whoops — Select a movie from 1999.

Dick Maas is known for his Dutch language films like The Lift, Amsterdamned, Flodder, Prey and Sint, but this is in English and finds American pharmaceutical executive Walter Richmond (William Hurt) taking his wife Cathryn (Jennifer Tilly) and their 10-year-old mute ever since a major trauma daughter Melissa (Francesca Brown) to Amsterdam.

Melissa gets lost and sees Bruno Decker (Corey Johnson) kill Simon Van der Molen (David Gwillim), the attorney of her father’s boss Rudolph Hartman (Michael Chiklis) to keep the side effects of a new medication secret. She’s saved by a homeless man named Simon (Denis Leary) but is soon being menaced by Decker and Hartman, as well as Billy Boy Manson (Michael A. Goorjian), a rock star who tries to assault her. And she’s not even a tween yet.

Do Not Disturb flirts with giallo, perhaps not as much as Amsterdamned, with the stranger in a strange land idea of a girl who can only communicate by dry erase board lost in a foreign country. I read a great thought on Maas by Letterboxd user Dan Prestwich, who said that the director makes films that are like a “children’s film except with an R-rating.” He excels when it comes to getting past the plot and all those contrivances and getting down to chase scenes and action.

April 17: Party Over, Whoops — Select a movie from 1999.

This is the first full-length feature to use computer-generated imagery for the synthesis of human visual speech. And yes, it made $36 million dollars on a $12 million dollar budget, but man, I don’t want to hate Bob Clark. Not the Bob Clark who made Black Christmas, Porky’s, Deranged, Deathdream and Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things. Then I remembered that Bob Clark also was the director of Rhinestone even if he also made A Christmas Story and man, life is sad sometimes.

Dr. Elena Kinder (Kathleen Turner) and Dr. Heep (Christopher Lloyd) have figured out that babies are, true to the name of this movie, geniuses that speak in a secret coded language called Babytalk. When they grow up, they lose this knowledge. One of the orphans they have stolen, Sylvester, escapes and meets his twin brother Whit (they are played by Leo, Gerry and Myles Fitzgerald) and gets adopted by Dan (Peter MacNicol) and Robin Bobbins (Kim Cattrall).

Man, this movie makes me sad for Ruby Dee and Dom DeLuise. I mean, Dom was in some horrible films and this makes Munchie, Sextette and The Silence of the Hams look like movies that critics say take big swings and are singular experiences.

Who is to blame for this? Jon Voight.

Jon Voight, the man whose accent in Anaconda was so bad that I demanded he lose his Oscar, had this movie as part of his production company and worked to convince Clark that it was a good idea.

It wasn’t.

There’s also Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2, which Clark directed and Voight played the final boss in, which there’s also a TV series that only aired in Italy and the Far East, but has gone direct to video and appeared here as Baby Geniuses and the Mystery of the Crown Jewels, Baby Geniuses and the Treasures of Egypt and Baby Geniuses and the Space Baby. I know that someday I’m going to watch these movies because I’m kind of insane and love to hurt myself.

I still love Bob Clark. But man, this movie worked hard to make me despise him.

April 17: Party Over, Whoops — Select a movie from 1999.

How?

Why?

Larry Harmon, one of the writers of this movie, is better known as Bozo the Clown. He was also smart, buying the rights to Bozo from Capitol Records and franchising local Bozo shows in nearly every major U.S. market and in other countries. In 1961, he went even bigger and bought the merchandising rights to the likenesses of Laurel and Hardy, making a cartoon with Hanna -Barbera and performing Stan’s voice (Jim MacGeorge, who played Stan on Get Smart, ended up being Hardy. Yes, that’s kind of weird). He held the rights so long that he was able to make this movie 38 years later.

The co-director and co-writer with Harmon was John R. Cherry III, the former advertising man who created Ernest P. Worrell and directed all of his films. When Jim Varney got too sick to make movies, he decided to make this, a film with the aim of reintroducing Laurel and Hardy to the new millennium.

To play Oliver Hardt, Gailard Sartain (who was in the Cherry-discovered comedy team of Chuck and Bobby with Bill Byrge; they’re also in the Ernest movies). And for Stan Laurel, why not Bronson Pinchot, who was a long way from Beverly Hills Cop by 1999. To be fair — I’m a big fan of Pinchot and see him as someone who never got the opportunity to how what he could do. Just watch True Romance to see him in action.

Somehow, the comedy team is in modern day Florida where they protect Leslie Covington (Susan Danford) from a mummy who wants to destroy her father, archeologist Henry Covington (F. Murray Abraham, who in 1999 was a long way from Amadeus).

Harmon also appears as the owner of Bozoworld, getting all his media into the movie.

Supposedly, the answer to why they are in 1999 is that the characters are the great-nephews of the legendary comedians. Yet why do they sound and act exactly like them? Why do they dress as if they came from a hundred years ago? Do people know who Laurel and Hardy are in this universe? Are they not mindblown that two non-brain addled — well, maybe — adults are dressing and acting like their uncles? Do they have too explain all the time that they are the great-nephews of Laurel and Hardy? Did Laurel and Hardy make love to their mothers in some act of family shame to ensure that the genes would keep passing through the holy bloodline? Are they legacy characters like The Phantom and Starman?

Who is this movie for? Anyone still alive that cared about the characters would be upset that someone else is doing a deep fake of them in real life. And anyone else would have no idea who they are. Does anyone else know that in a short called “Sons of the Desert” Laurel and Hardy were in a fraternity called the Brotherhood of the Nile and that totally means they should encounter a mummy at some point?

This was made in Cape Town, South Africa. This seems like the right place, I guess.

You can watch this on YouTube.

April 17: Party Over, Whoops — Select a movie from 1999.

Kevin Alyn Elders directed three Iron Eagle movies before he decided that the world needed a Dennis Rodman solo adventure. Here, The Worm is Simon, an Interpol agent, and he made this movie because there was a basketball league lockout in 1989.

Robert Downey Jr. was in this for a few days and dropped out. He was replaced by Dane Cook which is the antonym of an upgrade. Go ahead. Look it up.

Written by Moshe Diamant (feardotcom), Rudy Cohen and Andrew Miller, this movie makes Double Team look like The Killer. Also: John Pinette plays a cyber monk named Brother Micro. There’s also a girl by the name of Claire Fence (Natalia Cigliuti)who is kidnapped but doesn’t know it that Cook is supposed to save, as well as an old enemy named The Dancer (Emma Wiklund from the Taxi movies) that wants to fight Simon again. Or have sex with him. Or have fight him while having sex. And an arms dealer named Ashton (Jerome Pradon) who is behind so much of this.

You know, I have no problem with athletes making movies. My love for Stone Cold is loud and repeated. But Rodman kind of snarl whispers every line and totally seems like he should be the villain in his own movie.