Karzzzz is a remake of the 1980 1980 Indian Hindi-language movie that was based on The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, although influenced by Indian beliefs on reincarnation. While not a big movie upon release, Karz has grown in influence over time, inspiring remakes like Yuga Purusha; Enakkul Oruvan and this film, as well as Chances Are.

In fact, the original movie is so well-thought-of that even the titles of songs from that movie ended up becoming movie titles. Dard-e-dil, Paisa Yeh Paisa, Main Solah Baras Ki, Ek Hasina Thi, Aashiq Banaya Aapne and Om Shanti Om all owe their origins to Karz.

Ravi Verma and Sir Judah have been battling over the rights to thousands of acres of vineyards and Ravi wins the court case, then marries Kamini, the love of his life. As they fly to meet his mother and sister, he doesn’t know that Judah and his wife are working together. She sabotages the plane and parachutes out, becoming a princess, leaving his family penniless and killing him.

25 years later, Monty is a rock star in South Africa, but he has memories of a life he’s never lived. He’s in love with Tina, but must discover what Kamini means to him, how he can reclaim his past and save his mother and sister.

Karzzzz was not well-received but I wanted to cover it because it’s amazing that The Reincarnation of Peter Proud had an influence long after it left American theaters, even if it isn’t in its home.

Jonah Hex was written — and was intended to be directed — by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor. who made both Crank movies, Gamer and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. Creative differences with Warner Brothers caused them to leave the directing to Jimmy Hayward, who had only made Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who! before this. He was replaced by Francis Lawrence (I Am Legend, Constantine) on the reshoots.

Josh Brolin, who played Jonah Hex, told the Nerdist, “Oh, Jonah Hex, hated it. Hated it. The experience of making it — that would have been a better movie based on what we did. As opposed to what ended up happening to it, which is going back and reshooting 66 pages in 12 days and that being…

Listen, I understand it’s financiers, you’re trying to save their money and it becomes a financial thing, but if — there’s this thing called revenge trading. And I’m disciplined enough to know you never do it. But with Jonah Hex, if I had $5 million — which is always how I saw that movie. I remember when I was talking to Warner Bros. about doing that movie, High Plains Drifter is what I put on the TV, I said, “That’s what I wanna do.” I would do that movie still. If I ever had the balls to spend $5 million, which I don’t, I would do that movie, ’cause that’s the version of that movie that would have been successful, for sure. And it didn’t need to cost anything more than $8-$10 million.”

Look, I get it. Jonah Hex is a character that appeals to me, but I am not the audience you make $80 million dollar movies for.

Created by writer John Albano and artist Tony DeZuniga, Hex was abused by his father, sold as a slave to Native Americans, accepted and then abandoned by his tribe and finally joined the South in the Civil War before losing faith in their battle for independence when he saw that the black experience was the same as the slavery of his childhood. He attempted to surrender to the North and was used to kill all of his old regiment, which branded him as a villain to both sides of the war, just as he reconnected with his tribe and ended up being branded with the Mark of the Demon when the chief scarred his face with a heated tomahawk for defending himself in battle and killing that chief’s son. He then becomes a bounty hunter — and goes into the future after the end of the world for some time — and then there’s this movie, which for some reason adds occult powers to the character, as he can now speak to the dead.

The movie changes the origin to have Hex as a Confederate cavalryman who refuses an order from Turnbull to burn down a hospital and then kills Turnbull’s son in self-defense. Years later, Turnbull kills Hex’s family and brands his face. Native Americans revive Jonah with mystic powers and when he thinks his enemy has died in a fire, he becomes a bounty hunter. However, Turnbull has survived and is planning to destroy the U.S. with a nation killing weapon designed by Eli Whitney.

There’s a great cast here. John Malkovich is Turnbull, his main assistant Burke is Michael Fassbender and Will Arnett, Michael Shannon and Aidan Quinn are all decent in this. Megan Fox pehaps has a horrible accent, but she does some nice stunts and looks the part.

The movie is just 80 minutes and feels barely put together, rushed to meet a release date more than if the movie was done. It’s a real shame, because the idea of the movie is good and if given to the Italian Western style movie that it should have been, it could have been so much better. Not every comic book movie should be a blockbuster.

Bill Murray doesn’t have an agent and has a phone that people call him on to try to hire him. He claims that he thought one of the screenwriters of this movie, Joel Cohen, was Joel Coen of the Coen Brothers.

Why would the Coen Brothers make a Garfield movie?

Murray has been telling this story as far back as a GQ interview in 2010, “I thought it would be kind of fun, because doing a voice is challenging, and I’d never done that. Plus, I looked at the script, and it said, “So-and-so and Joel Coen.” And I thought: Christ, well, I love those Coens! They’re funny. So I sorta read a few pages of it and thought, Yeah, I’d like to do that.

So they went off and shot the movie, and I forgot all about it. Finally, I went out to L.A. to record my lines. And usually when you’re looping a movie, if it takes two days, that’s a lot. I don’t know if I should even tell this story, because it’s kind of mean. What the hell? It’s interesting. So I worked all day and kept going, “That’s the line? Well, I can’t say that.” And you sit there and go, What can I say that will make this funny? And make it make sense? And I worked. I was exhausted, soaked with sweat, and the lines got worse and worse. And I said, “Okay, you better show me the whole rest of the movie, so we can see what we’re dealing with.” So I sat down and watched the whole thing, and I kept saying, “Who the hell cut this thing? Who did this? What the *bleep* was Coen thinking?” And then they explained it to me: It wasn’t written by that Joel Coen.”

Co-writer Alec Sokolow doesn’t believe Murarry: “He knew it was not Joel Coen well before he met Joel Cohen. It’s a funny take. And it kind of defends him against the criticism of making such an overtly commercial film. But it’s complete horse shit.”

But hey. Murray got to record his dialogue in his apartment and on the set of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

I have no idea how you make a narrative movie out of Garfield, but these guys did it, and they made John into Breckin Meyer and gave him Jennifer Love Hewitt as a love interest. And if there can be fanservice for Garfield — umm, yes there can be, I may own several Garfield shirts and still am enraged that Kennywood took out the Garfield mill ride, a fact that I’ll go on and on about any time you’d like to know more — there is in this movie, as all of the characters — yes, there are more than just Garfield — show up, with Jimmy Kimmel as Spanky, Debra Messing as Arlene, Alan Cumming as Persnikitty, Nick Cannon as Louis the mouse, David Eigenberg as Nermal and Brad Garrett as Luca.

Odie doesn’t talk.

Murray still did the sequel, Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties, with less confusion.

Now for the cosmic coincidence. When they made The Real Ghostbusters cartoon, Murray’s Dr. Peter Venkman was voiced by Lorenzo Music, who is the actor best known for the voice of Garfield.

You can watch this on Tubi.

I’ve heard two stories of how Keanu Reeves ended up in this movie.

The first is that a friend forged his signature on the contract to be in this film and he did it rather than get involved in a lengthy legal battle.

The second is that Reeves was playing hockey with director Joe Charbanic and verbally agreed to play a small role in the film in order for Charbanic to get the movie funded. The problem was that his role ended up being one of the leads.

Regardless of the truth, Reeves was paid union scale for the movie while his co-stars like James Spader were paid at least a million.

The actor reached an agreement with Universal Pictures in which he would not disclose what had happened until a year after the film’s US release. In return, Universal agreed to downplay Reeves’s involvement in marketing (he did no press) and asked the film’s producers to give Reeves more profit participation. Since the movie was in first place for two weeks, he ended up making $2 million dollars.

A year later, he told the Calgary Sun “I never found the script interesting, but a friend of mine forged my signature on the agreement. I couldn’t prove he did and I didn’t want to get sued, so I had no other choice but to do the film.”

So when critics — like the aforementioned Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw, who said, “Short of getting Angela Lansbury or Rodney Dangerfield or Lassie for the part, the miscasting could not be more complete. Keanu is profoundly wrong as a serial killer.” — hated this movie and Keanu was nominated at the Razzie awards for Worst Supporting Actor, he still honored the agreement.

FBI Special Agent Joel Campbell (Spader) was too late to save a woman from a serial killer, so he leaves for Chicago, where he deals with migraines and has just one friend, his therapist Dr. Polly Beilman (Marisa Tomei). But when a girl dies in his building and the photos get mailed to him, obviously the killer has followed him. Despite FBI Special Agent Mike Ibby (Ernie Hudson) and Detective Hollis Mackie (Chris Ellis) asking him to come back, he wants to avoid the case.

Then, David Allen Griffin (Reeves) sends him a photo of another girl and tells him that if he doesn’t save her in nine hours, she’ll die. He keeps repeating this game with the detective, telling him that he considers him a good friend. And when he takes Beilman, he really gets to Campbell.

At least it has “Roads” by Portishead on the soundtrack.

Jamie Lee Curtis had this to say about Virus: “Rob Reiner, for his 40th birthday, had a bad show business party where everybody brought show business clips. Rob’s was playing a hippie on Gomer Pyle: USMC singing “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Virus is so bad that it’s shocking. That would be the all time piece of shit. It’s just dreadful. That’s the only good reason to be in bad movies. Then when your friends have bad movies you can say “Ahhhh, I’ve got the best one. I’m bringing Virus.””

She also tried to get director John Bruno fired and replaced with Halloween H20 director Steve Miner as she felt that he was horrible. Up until this movie, Bruno had mainly worked in special effects and had only directed the “Soft Landing” opening of Heavy Metal and the Universal Studios ride T2 3-D: Battle Across Time.

Based on the Dark Horse comic Virus by Chuck Pfarrer, who wrote the script along with Jonathan Hensleigh (Jumanji, Armageddon, the director of the Thomas Jane Punisher) and Dennis Feldman (Just One of the Guys, The Golden Child, the first two Species movies), Virus is about the crew of the tug boat Sea Star — drunken captain Robert Everton (Donald Sutherland), navigator Kelly Foster (Curtis), engineer Steve Baker (William Baldwin), Squeaky (Julio Oscar Mechoso), deckhand Hiko (Cliff Curtis), crewman Richie Mason (Sherman Augustus) and first mate J.W. Woods, Jr. (Marshall Bell) — who have lost their cargo due to a storm and decide to check out the wreck of Russian research ship Akademik Vladislav Volkov.

So, you know, Alien. That’s because a signal has made its way through space, hit the space station Mir and killed everyone on the Volkov except for Chief Science Officer Nadia Vinogradova (Joanna Pacuła). This energy brings dead people back to life, replacing their body parts with machinery to create zombie robots that look incredible and made me understand why Donald Sutherland demanded that he do all of his scenes in makeup in one day, because that had to take forever.

Michelle Pfeiffer made her debut in this movie and still isn’t all that happy about it, saying ” to star in the film to her age at the time, saying, “I hated that film with a vengeance and could not believe how bad it was. At the time I was young and didn’t know any better.”

The total budget for the production was $11.2 million, almost double the budget of the original, but hardly anyone* was coming back other than producer Allan Carr. He was getting $5 million for the sequel and it was three years since Grease was a success. Composers Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey, director Randal Kleiser and actors John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John weren’t coming back. So Carr got Patricia Birch — who choreographed the first movie — to direct and choreograph this. It’s the only theatrical movie she’d ever direct, but she did make Cyndi Lauper’s videos for “Money Changes Everything” and “True Colors.” Sadly for her, she’d also been pulled into another movie that co-producer Robert Stigwood made, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I hope she got paid enough.

You know who else was in a bad spot? Ken Finkleman. He was writing this movie and Airplane 2 while also directing that movie, all at the same time. Two hits whose original creative teams refused to come back for the bigger budgeted sequel. This, as you may guess, is usually a recipe for disaster. Speaking of projects after this with 80s singers, he’d go on to write the Madonna vehicle Who’s That Girl.

There was an idea to get Travolta and Newton-John to be a married couple that ran a gas station. Thankfully, they refused and I could keep the morbid fantasy in my head that they both drowned in Grease and the entire movie is the fantasy they have while the oxygen leaves their brains. There was also the idea to base the sequel around Jeff Conaway and Stockard Channing, who would be playing a 37-year-old — and still fabulous — teenager. They also turned it down.

While Pfeiffer was an unknown, Maxwell Caulfield was already a Broadway star. And also unlike her, his career paid the price for this movie bombing. He told MovieTome, “Before Grease 2 came out I was being hailed as the next Richard Gere or John Travolta. But when Grease 2 flopped nobody would touch me. It felt like a bucket of cold water had been thrown in my face. It took me 10 years to get over Grease 2.”

It’s 1961, school at Rydell is n session and The Pink Ladies — Sharon Cooper (Maureen Teefy, who was also Lucy Lane in another bomb we need to get to, Supergirl), Paulette Rebchuck (Lorna Luft, half-sister of Liza and one of the girls in Where the Boys Are ’84), Rhonda Ritter (Alison Price, who is also in the aforementioned Airplane 2), Dolores Rebchuck (Pamela Segall, the voice of Bobby Hill) and their leader Stephanie Zinone (Pfeiffer) — and The T-Birds — Goose McKenzie (Christopher McDonald, who most people would say is Shooter McGavin but he’s also in The Black Room), Louis DiMucci (Peter Frechette, The Hills Have Eyes Part II), Davey Jaworski (Leif Green, Joysticks) and their leader Johnny Nogerelli (Adrian Zmed from TJ Hooker!) — are battling over the fact that Stephanie just dumped Johnny.

Frenchy** (Didi Cohn) has come back to school to get her diploma and gives Michael Carrington (Caulfield) a quick tour of the school. He’s an English exchange student who coincidentally happens to be a cousin of Sandy because the UK and Australia are the same thing. He falls for Stephanie, who ends up kissing him accidentally at a bowling alley, but she’ll only date a motorcycle-riding man. Michael is smart enough to do the T-Birds homework, earning the money and the cred to get a bike of his own and becoming the mysterious Cool Rider who saves them from the Cycle Lords — formerly the Scorpions — and gets Stephanie all hot and bothered.

So yeah — mistaken identity, dudes trying to date rape their ladies by pretending a nuclear war is happening, Tab Hunter as a teacher, Olivia Newton-John’s first husband Matt Lattanzi as one of the Prep-Tones (they got married after being meeting on the set of Xanadu), Katey Segal’s twin sisters Jean and Liz, Andy Tennant (whose career somehow survived being in this, Sgt. Pepper’s and 1941), Connie Stevens as Miss Yvette Mason, Mrs. Gretzky Janet Jones as a girl who missed her last two periods and Ninja 3 and Breakin’ star Lucinda Dickie as a female greaser.

There were going to be four Grease movies*** and a TV series and everything was going to be great. Of course, it didn’t work out that way.

Except in Kannada (South India), where the script was turned into the 1987 blockbuster Premaloka.

*That’s not exactly true. Frenchy (Didi Conn), Principal McGee (Eve Arden), Coach Calhoun (Sid Caesar), Blanche Hodel (Dody Goodman), Eugene Felsnick (Eddie Deezen), Craterface (Dennis C. Stewart) and Mr. Spears (Dick Patterson) all came back for another helping.

**Frenchy disappears halfway through the movie, never to be seen again.

***The rumors that Disney made the third script as High School Musical are just that. Rumors.

The story of X may have been three years early, but the video revolution — driven, as all technology is, by sex — changed the world of pornography, moving it from the fleshpots of 42nd Street and dirty book stores into suburban living rooms. In 1982, there was still the glimmer of hope that the Golden Age of Porn — that starts with Bill Osco’s Mona and ends sometime around 1984 or so with The Dark Brothers’ 1984 mind-twisting New Wave Hookers — would find new life, better budgets and a more appreciative audience.

Yet videotape would open up adult for everyone and by the 90s, few films had a storyline, instead given to gonzo explorations of “can you top this” madness with few exceptions, such as the output of John Stagliano (who may have popularized gonzo, but could also create a coherent and interesting narrative film like Buda), the glossy Michael Ninn glamour movies, Andrew Blake’s Night Trips, Phillip Mond’s Zazel, John Leslie’s Chameleons and Curse of the Cat Woman, the aforementioned Dark Brothers and ridiculous parodies of existing films.

Yet in 1982, a movie could be made that transcends its adult origins and uses them to make you as the viewer complicit in the action on screen.

Stephen Sayadian only made seven adult films (this film, as well as two sequels to Nightdreams, two Untamed Cowgirls of the Wild West and two Party Doll-a-Go-Go films which take the staccato editing and weird dialogue to its absurd limit on sets that had to cost absolutely nothing yet with a cast of all-stars such as Raven, Madison Stone, Patricia Kennedy, Bionca, Jeanna Fine, Nikki Wilde and Tianna Collins and yes, I wrote that from memory) as well as the somewhat spiritual sequel — or at least next steo — to this movie, the mainstream — yet still delightfully insane — Dr. Caligari. A veteran of advertising and design — he worked on the posters for The Fog, The Funhouse, Ms. 45 and Dressed To Kill which took inspiration from the iconic The Graduate poser — Sayadian used the alter ego of Rinse Dream to make his films, much as Gregory Dark would adopt a new name for his porn changing efforts.

The script — yes, adult movies can have a script — was written by Herbert W. Day, who is really Pittsburgh native Jerry Stahl, the son of a coal miner who later became Pennsylvania attorney general and a federal judge. He found that he had a talent for writing short stories, was the humor editor for Hustler and also discovered a love of hardcore drugs. To fuel that, he started writing for TV shows like Moonlighting, Twin Peaks, Thirtysomething, Northern Exposure and, perhaps most intriguingly, ALF. He’s also written ten episodes of CSI which have been the most aberrant examples of that show to middle America, which is wild as he introduced viewers of the grandparent network CBS to furries, infantilism, a measured story about transgendered people and introduced Lady Heather, the potential bad girl love interest of lead Gil Grissom, who was played by Return of the Living Dead III star Melinda Clarke. His autobiographical novel Permanent Midnight was a success and made into a movie starring Ben Stiller.

Years after a nuclear war, nearly every survivor is a Negative, often shambling zombie-like humans who become vomitous if they attempt to copulate. To attempt any hope at remembering what human contact was like, they come to Café Flesh, a place where Positives make love while they watch, often engaging in surrealist scenes that defy the ability of the viewer to become titillated.

That’s the point. Where the goal of nearly all pornography is to get the viewer off, Cafe Flésh casts you as a Negative, stuck at home with no one next to you, as far from true warmth and, well, flesh as the puking crowd — Richard Beltzer is one of them — gathered to watch and watch and watch.

It also feels like the vaudevillian stage of the men’s club gone to Hell, as Max Melodramatic (Andy Nichols, who also played the doctor in Nightdreams) introduces live sex acts with people dressed as rats or milkmen surrounded by men dressed as demonic babies. Even the typical jerk-off scenario of a female oil tycoon lies with a gigantic pencil while her secretary repeatedly intones, “Do you want me to type a memo?”

Is the film making light of the fact that male performers had often become interchangeable, their faces are obscured for most of the movie?

Angel (Marie Sharp) came from Wyoming, where they found that she was Positive and she’s been forced into the slavery of the club, performing with each man that they bring on stage. However, one of the audience members, Lana (Michele Bauer, using her Pia Snow name here before she would go on to appear in so many horror movies like Demonwarp, Evil Toons, Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama and Jess Franco’s Lust for Frankenstein and Mari-Cookie and the Killer Tarantula In Eigtht Legs to Love You) has been keeping have Positive diagnosis a secret as she doesn’t want to hurt her boyfriend Nick. Yet as she watches the famous Positive Johnny Rico (Kevin James, who speaking of nuclear war is also in the porn parody Dr. Strange Sex) — someone liked Robert Heinlein — go through his motions with Angel,  her frustrations take hold and she takes the stage.

Screen Slate has an amazing article that details the music of this movie, which Sayadian describes as “…like an Elmer Bernstein score from the ’50s, only played with the most modern synthesizers available at the time. I thought: old vibe, new technology.” There’s a lot to learn about composer Mitchell Froom — and the rest of the film’s creators — at that site.

By the way — Sayadian didn’t direct Rockwell’s “Someone’s Watching Me” video. That would be  Francis Delia, who directed Nightdreams as F.X. Pope. Seeing as how Stahl and Sayadian wrote that movie, I can see how some may make the mistake. Delia was a producer on this film as well as the director of photography.

Café Flesh isn’t for someone who is looking to get off. I can’t even imagine those that were confronted by it in adult theaters, as it punches you in the face with its AIDS allegory while daring you to find a single erotic thing in it. Strangely enough, I’d always heard that an R-rated edit was made so that mainstream audiences would see it at midnight shows, but Sayadian stated — in the above linked Screen Slate piece — that the movie was an “R-rated movie, funded by X-rated people” and that he was forced to add the sex scenes by the money men behind the budget.

He said, “I got financing from three guys — two were hardcore producers and one was a Harvard business grad who somehow got lost in the porno world.” After adding in the adult scenes, he told Froom, “I want you to extend some of these pieces because we may have to put porn in there. And all I can say is, I want the music to be as disturbing as possible. I don’t want it to be hot or sexy or anything like that.”

That said, the moans of joy that came from this movie show up in a place that many have heard them, White Zombie’s Blade Runner quoting — “Yeah I am the nexus one I want more life” — “More Human than Human.”

Tonino Ricci — often using the Americanized name Anthony Richmond — was an Italian exploitation director and you know what that means. He jumped genres. From mob films (The Big Family), westerns (Bad Kids of the West) and White Fang ripoff after doing second unit on the original (Zanna Bianca alla riscossa) to sharks (Cave of the Sharks, Night of the Sharks), horror (Bakterion), post-Conan peplum (Thor il conquistatore), aliens in the Bermuda Triangle (the baffling and wonderful Encounters In the Deep), war (I giorni dell’inferno), sexy romance (Pasión, Storia di arcieri, pugni e occhi neri), Raiders of the Lost Ark remix (I predatori della pietra magica) and a family-friendly dog movie (Buck and the Magic Bracelet), he really did it all. And then he made two post-apocalyptic movies, this one and the mocie that inspired this, Rush.

Working from a script by Jaime Comas Gil (A Fistful of Dollars, the insane Adam and Eve vs. the Cannibals) and Eugenio Benito, this starts with stock footage of modern life that’s soon blown asunder by b-roll and stock footage, signaling that the end times have come and gone*. Soon enough, Rage (Bruno Minniti, who was the hero in just about every Ricci movie from Thor the Conqueror on; he used the name Conrad Nichols in nearly all of them) must lead Werner, Omar and Mara through the Forbidden Zone to get uranium and battle the man he gave a scar — and the name Scar — and an entire army of his motocross soldiers and you know what this is all about? A cryo chamber with a Bible in it. Can Rage and his team take a train across the wasteland and deliver the Good News from Alpha Base to Gamma Base?

They do it all to the jazziest post-nuke boogie you’ve ever heard by Stelvio Cipriani. The rest of the movie may look dingy and a bit boring, but man, that cat can swing.

*One of those nukes is really the Friendship-7 launch, because we can still hear mission control say, “God speed, John Glen.”

You can watch this on YouTube.