We were excited to take part in the 9th annual Junesploitation, a month-long celebration of exploitation and genre film that’s sponsored by F This Movie!
If you’ve come here from reading one of our Juneploitation posts, we hope you’ll keep coming back to read what we have to say about movies! Thanks to F This Movie! for making June such a fun month.
Phew. We did it! Twelve Ron Marchini films in two days. You know the drill! Yee-haw, let’s round ’em up!
Born in California and rising through the U.S. Army’s ranks to become a drill sergeant, in his civilian life, Ron Marchini earned the distinction as the best defensive fighter in the U.S.; by 1972, he was ranked the third best fighter in the country. Upon winning several worldwide tournaments, and with Robert Clouse’s directing success igniting a worldwide martial arts film craze with Enter the Dragon (1973), the South Asian film industry beckoned.
After making his debut in 1974’s Murder in the Orient, Marchini began a long friendship with filmmaker Paul Kyriazi, who directed Ron in his next film, the epic Death Machines, then later, in the first of Ron’s two appearances as post-apoc law officer John Travis, in Omega Cop.
Ron also began a long friendship with Leo Fong (Kill Point) after their co-staring in Murder in the Orient; after his retirement from the film industry — after making eleven dramatic-action films and one documentary — Ron concentrated on training and writing martial arts books with Leo, as well as becoming a go-to arts teacher. Today, he’s a successful California almond farmer.
In the annals of martial arts tournaments, Marchini is remembered as Chuck Norris’s first tournament win (The May 1964 Takayuki Kubota’s All-Stars Tournament in Los Angeles, California) by defeating Marchini by a half a point. Another of Chuck’s old opponents, Tony Tullener, who beat Norris in the ring three times, pursued his own acting career with the William Riead-directed Scorpion.
You can learn more about Ron Marchini with his biography at USAdojo.com. An interview at The Action Elite, with Ron’s friend and Death Machines director Paul Kyriazi, also offers deeper insights.
Ron, second from right, with Chuck Norris, shaking hands, 1965. Courtesy of Ken Osbourne/Facebook.
Black tee-shirt image courtesy of Spreadshirt.Art work/text by B&S About Movies.
We love ya, Ron!
About the Review Authors: Sam Panico is the founder, Chief Cook and Bottle Washer, and editor-in-chief of B&S About Movies. You can visit him on Lettebox’d and Twitter. R.D Francis is the grease bit scrubber, dumpster pad technician, and staff writer at B&S About Movies. You canvisit him on Facebook.
Image banner design courtesy of Mike Delbusso/Splatt Gallery.**
Well, so goes another theme week blow out on movies set in outer space, so let’s round ’em, up, space cowboy. No, we didn’t review that mainstream movie, nor Armageddon or Deep Impact or Geostorm. Don’t you know the B&S About Movies’ jam, by now? And, why yes, we did go overboard, again. See, you do know our jams.
Phew! And we still haven’t reviewed them all. You know the B&S motto: Never Say Never. We’ll do it again.
** From the Facebook pages of Splatt Gallery, Southeast Michigan’s largest public collection of concert posters, gig posters, lowbrow and street art, about their theme/banner posting:
1978 was the year of the spaceship. The Electric Light Orchestra’s Out of the Blue tour used a stage construction that had the band performing inside a giant spaceship, a prop so massive that the set-up time required ELO to only use it every other show for most of the tour. The band Boston released their second album, again, as with the first, with their signature spaceship illustration by artist Roger Huyssen — the same artist that illustrated the cover for Sky King’s 1975 Secret Sauce album.
The cover art for the Live in London album by Andrae Crouch featured a keyboard transformed into a space craft, and drummer Lenny White released a concept album titled The Adventures Of Astral Pirates. A band from France called Space, who had a disco hit with the song “Magic Fly,” performed in spacesuits.
George Clinton, who had landed a mothership on stage for nearly two and a half years, temporarily parked his spaceship in a hanger and embarked on an “Anti-Tour.” Parliament-Funkadelic’s mothership now resides in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, but it is a smaller replica built in the mid 1990s. The story of the strange fate of the original mothership can be read in an archived post at the Washington Post.
About the Authors: Sam Panico is the founder, Chief Cook and Bottle Washer, and editor-in-chief of B&S About Movies. You can visit him on Lettebox’d. R.D Francis is the grease bit scrubber, dumpster pad technician, and staff writer at B&S About Movies. You canvisit him on Facebook.
Pittsburgh-based artist Ed Piskor has made some incredible comics, including issues of American Splendor, Wizzywig, Hip Hop Family Treeand X-Men: Grand Design. Now, he’s unleashing Red Room, a comic that fans of our site will love, because it’s basically an exploitation slasher gore film on paper.
Red Room is about a group of killers who use the anonymous dark web and nearly untraceable crypto-currency to live-stream the senseless slaughter of their victims for entertainment. Each issue of this 12-part series is a complete self-contained story.
Piskor gets the whole feel of why we love slashers, which I think comes from teen years of bicycling from video store to video store to find the latest transgressive movie experiences, as well as buying every bootleg he could find at conventions.
Make no mistake, Red Room features the kind of gore that you’d see in the world of Italian cinema or in the films of Takeshi Miike. Nothing is held back as the world of killers like Poker Face, Donna Butcher, Mistress Pentagram and more basically annihilate people for the gratification of sick bastards like, well, me and you.
This is comics as close to the works of D’Amato and Mattei as it gets. I’m really excited about this series and happy that Piskor sent us some advance copies so we could get the word out. If you love slashers, EC Comics and social commentary all in one very bloody package, Red Room is quite literally the best comic book of the year.
You can get Red Room from Fantagraphics or at your local comic book store this week!
Born in the Southern Detroit suburb of Wyadotte along the Detroit River as Harvey Lee Yeary, Lee Majors got his start like most burgeoning actors of the day: he did his time in a studio-sponsored acting school, in Major’s case, at MGM with acclaimed acting teacher Estelle Harman, who guided the careers of Tony Curtis and Rock Hudson.
But — like Kurt Russell — before acting, Harvey Yeary was all about sports. And his skills in track and football at Middlesboro High School in Kentucky led to a scholarship at Indiana University. A back injury during his first college game while attending Eastern Kentucky University ended his collegiate career. And, like Kurt Russell, who torn out a shoulder and ended his potential professional baseball career, Harvey Lee Yeary pursued his second love: acting.
Using his degree in Physical Education (he also has a degree in History), he worked as a Recreation Director in the Los Angeles Parks and Recreation Department. Among the many industry professionals he met during that time was Dick Clayton, James Dean’s agent. Liking his personality, looks and physique — and the fact he had stage acting experience back in Kentucky — Clayton suggested Yeary try acting professionally.
Soon after, at the age of 25, the man we came to know as Lee Majors booked his first, although uncredited role, as Joan Crawford’s cheating husband in Strait-Jacket. Then he booked his first credited role in a 1965 episode of TV’s Gunsmoke. After a support role in the 1967 Charlton Heston-starring western Will Penny (directed by Tom Gries of Earth II fame), Lee Majors beat out 400 young acting hopefuls, including another ex-college football player, Burt Reynolds, for a co-starring role as Heath Barkley on the ABC-TV western series, The Big Valley. Then came Majors’s first starring role in The Ballad of Andy Crocker, which aired as an ABC-TV Movie of the Week. In 1971, Majors then landed the co-starring role of Jess Brandon for the three-season run of the ABC-TV law drama, Owen Marshall: Counselor at Law.
And all of that work with the ABC network paid off: Lee was offered a leading-man role that would change his life and turn him into our beloved pop icon: USAF Colonel Steve Austin, a character created by Harve Bennett (The Astronaut, Salvage I) for a series of three TV movies eventually picked up as a four-year run TV series.
And the rest is history. And we reviewed Lee Majors’s film history all of this week, from Sunday, April 18 to Saturday, April 24.
But why?
Well, yeah, because Lee’s 82nd birthday is on April 23, but also, because we dig Lee Majors and our ’70s childhood memories. For when you’re immortalized twice as a toy and have not one, but two, lunch boxes, and two board games with your likeness, well, your career kicked ass and a bag o’ chips. And while the bionic eye on our Steve Austin action figure (it’s not a doll!) eventually fogged up, and the button in the back that controlled the bionic arm broke, and the skin we peeled back to reveal Steve’s bionic modules dry rotted, Steve Austin still kicked our full-sized G.I Joe’s asses.
Image Left: Courtesy of retroquest42/eBay. Image Right: Courtesy of zapwow/Pinterest.
fImage Left: Comix Effect and Toy Wonder/eBay. Image Right: Sodium Pen/eBay.
In 1988, Lee tried for a third TV series, with Reed Down Under, aka Danger Down Under, an Australian TV1 and NBC-TV co-production that was not picked up for series on either network.It was recut into a home video/theatrical release, Harris.
Here’s the film’s we reviewed this week, by year of release:
And Lee’s career just keeps on truckin’! We were stoked to learn that Lee is in post-production on his 127th project, the U.K.-produced Renegades, in which he co-stars with . . . wait for it . . . Danny Trejo and Michael Pare! So, oh, hell yeah. When you give us a movie with Danny, Micheal and Lee Majors, we are so there. You can learn more about Renegades, scheduled to hit all streaming platforms in 2021, at Variety.com. And yes, you impressionable youngins, you know Lee as Brock Williams, Ash’s pop, in the second and third seasons of Starz’s Ash vs. Evil Dead.
Photo courtesy of Matt Klitscher/Starz Entertainment. Read Lee’s interview about the show at USA Today.com.And there’s more deep Intel on Lee’s career — as he speaks about his role on Ash vs. Evil Dead — at AV Club.
In 2010, upon the release of the 40-disc, 100-hour DVD box set of the series (hey, it’s only $239.95!), Lee sat down with Vanity Fair for an extensive interview about the series and its lasting pop culture status.
America’s couple. We loved them!
While we didn’t get a chance to review them, you may be interested in checking out two more of Lee’s films that we discovered: When I Find the Ocean (2008; on Tubi) and the just-released Narco Sub (2021; official website).
We dig you, Lee. Keep on thespin’.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies. You can read his music journalism pieces and short stories on Medium.
This weekend at the Riverside Drive-In Theater in Vandergrift, PA, it’s time for the semi-annual trek to see some of the best movies of all time in the place they were meant to be seen, the drive-in.
Admission is still only $10 per person each night (children 12 and under free with adult) and overnight camping is available (breakfast included) for an additional $10 per person.
I’m beyond excited to see Pieces again and Edge of the Axe is a movie I continually try and get people to watch, so I’m even more delirious at the opportunity to watch it in the cool, crisp night air.
Here’s a drink to make and bring along. If you hunt me down — chances are I’ll have on an Argento shirt and a Severin hoodie (plus shorts, because that’s how 48-year-old Western PA teenagers dress) — I may even pour you a cup.
Angela in the Woods AKA Camp Arawak Bugjuice
2 oz. sweet tart moonshine*
2 oz. cranberry juice
2 oz. orange juice
.75 oz. peach schnapps
Pour everything into a shaker with ice. Shake it up and watch out for curling irons.
Serve with plenty of ice.
We also added a variation.
Russ’s Big Drill AKA Eyes of the Pizza Man
2 oz. cherry bomb moonshine*
3 oz. pineapple juice
1 oz. orange juice
1 oz. cherry vodka
.5 oz. maraschino cherry juice
Mix everything up in a shaker with some ice. Hold on tight to your machete.
It usually gets cold at these April shows, so here’s a drink to warm you up.
Where Do You Want to Sleep, Dr. Challis? AKA Season of the Pumpkin Spice White Russian
2 oz. vodka
3 oz. pumpkin spice creamer
2 oz. Kaluha
1 oz. Fireball
Mix it all together and stir with ice. Or, if you’re feeling frisky, heat it up.
Jump into bed with a robot and drink up.
Becca wanted me to add that pumpkin spice creamer may be hard to find this time of the year, so she shared how to make your own:
2 tsp. pumpkin pie spice
1.25 cup pumpkin puree (not pumpkin pie filling)
4 tbsp. light brown sugar
1 cup milk
1 cup heavy cream
I can’t wait to see everybody this Friday night. Make sure to say hello! I’ll even have a box of DVDs to trade!
Toast spices in a medium saucepan over medium heat for a minute or so. Then, whisk in puree and brown sugar and heat for thirty seconds before taking them off the stove.
Add milk and cream, then whisk.
Cool to room temperature, then use or store for using later.
Another day of giant monsters is in the book and for now, Tokyo can rebuild.
To see the last run we did of these movies, you can check out the recap of the original Kaiju Day Marathon. We also have a B and S About Kaiju list on Letterboxd.
On the Son of Kaiju Day Marathon, we watched these films and shared these stories:
We’re doing another day of kaiju madness. Yes, an entire day of giant monster movies last week wasn’t enough, so we’re getting excited about Godzilla vs. King Kong starting on HBO Max on March 31.
This time, we’re going deep with kaiju from around the world as well as some articles about the history of giant monsters and an article about King Kong-themed pro wrestlers.
We may have gone a little crazy over there finally being a new King Kong and Godzilla movie and posted way too many articles for you to read. Our lack of sleep is your gain, so please enjoy this list of everything we posted as well as all of our past giant monster movies.
To celebrate the March 25 release of Godzilla vs. Kong, we’re going to blow this site up like Anguirus was back in town with at least one kaiju-related post every single hour until we go back to bed at midnight.
That’s right — get ready to take deep dives into Kong, Godzilla and all manner of creatures in between, with columns from R. D Francis and Jennifer Upton, along with some of our favorite giant monster articles all the way back to the first weeks of the site.
Here’s to stomping cities into dust and picking up buses and throwing them back down!
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