VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the December 10, 2024 episode of the Video Archives podcast. 

I think it’s hilarious that Tarantino and Avery got people to watch Ice Castles that otherwise would never endure it. They got me!

Former skater Lynn-Holly Johnson is Lexie Winston, a figure skater on the way to the Olympics when she’s blinded in a freak accident. Withdrawing into depression, only her boyfriend Nick Peterson (Robby Benson) can coach her back onto the ice, getting her back into skates even if she can’t see.

Will she be able to skate again? Will he forgive her for leaving him for a sportscaster? Will she try the triple jump that nearly killed her?

Roger Ebert said, “Call me Scrooge; stories like this make me cringe.”

Director Donald Wrye made this movie twice, as there’s a 2009 remake with Taylor Firth and Rob Mayes in the lead parts. Lynn-Holly Johnson ‘s cameo? It got cut. Wrye also directed Born Innocent, so I can never be mad at him. As for Lynn-Holly Johnson, she would skate again in the Bond movie For Your Eyes Only.

For some reason, I have watched several ice skating movies and hate the sport. Why do I keep putting myself through this?

I wasn’t ready for Mirror, Mirror. I had no idea it’d grab me, thinking it was just another clone of The Craft. But nope. It’s something else entirely (and it was made six years before that movie).

Megan Gordon (Rainbow Harvest) is the new girl in school, a shy and withdrawn goth who is taunted and treated like shit by everyone other than Nikki and Ron, a popular girl and her jock boyfriend. Now here’s where this movie stands out. Megan isn’t one of those fake Hollywood versions of what they think goth is. She honestly looks insane in so many of her outfits, wearing tiny hats and headdresses that Vulnavia would be proud to put on. Her hair is shaved in weird places and even when she has to wear her tennis uniform, she looks incredibly out of place and uncomfortable. In short, if I was 15 years old, I would be making her the perfect mix tape.

Megan’s dad has recently died, which is why she and her mother Susan (Karen Black!) have moved. In their new home, she finds an antique mirror in her room which keeps returning even when it is taken away. Oh yeah — her dog dies too, for some reason on top of the kitchen counter, and William Sanderson (The Rocketeer, TV’s Newhart, Fight for Your Life) shows up as a weird pet undertaker who starts dating Susan.

Megan learns that the mirror gives her magic powers, which she uses to get revenge. But despite the warnings of the antique dealer who was in charge of the house’s furnishings (Yvonne De Carlo!) that the mirror grants its powers at the cost of the user’s life, Megan grows more and more addicted to having the power.

Soon, Megan starts to get everything she wants. And when she doesn’t, she kills everyone in her way. Along the way, she inverts the sexual predator role, going after the men in the movie with so much passion that they often beg her to slow down or to leave them alone.

I’m not saying this is a perfect movie. There’s an extra long sandwich-making scene that feels way off script. But Megan killing Ron is quite intense, as is the way she murders her rival in the shower. And not since 1988’s remake of The Blob has a sink been so murderous.

By the end of the movie, Megan has lost control of the mirror and it starts killing people she didn’t want it to go after. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention the scene where the mirror is coated with blood, leading to Megan making out with her own reflection.

The end takes the sisterhood between the two main characters to a frightening conclusion when seen through the mirror’s reflection.

For a straight to video 80’s horror movie that was followed by three sequels, this is much better than you’d expect.

The Dark Force 4K UHD release of this movie has a brand new 4K scan with HDR from the original 35mm camera negative with restoration and new color color correction. It also has commentary by Demon Dave and Joe’s Savage Tracks. You can order it from MVD.

Often, I refer to movies as having an all-star cast, which is really a misnomer. After all, what I consider A-list talent certainly does not fit the rest of the world. The Last Match, however, has the very definition of what I consider an all-star cast. Let’s take a look at the lineup:

Ernest Borgnine: Amongst the 211 credits Mr. Borgnine amassed on his IMDB list, none other have him leading a football team against an unnamed Caribbean island to save his assistant coach’s little girl. He was, however, in four Dirty Dozen movies and The Wild Bunch, not to mention playing Coach Vince Lombardi in a TV movie. One assumes that he took this role to get away from his wife Tova and her incessant cosmetics shilling. 

Charles Napier: As the American consul in this movie, Napier cuts a familiar path, which he set after appearing in the monster hit Rambo: First Blood Part II. For him, it was either playing bureaucrats or cops, thankless roles that he always brought a little something extra to. The exception to his typecasting is when he played Baxter Wolfe, the man who rocks Susan Lakes’ loins in the beyond essential Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. 

Henry Silva: If you need a dependable jerk and you have the budget of, well, an Italian movie about a football team that also does military operations, call Mr. Silva. He admirably performed the role of the heel — or antihero at other times in movies like Megaforce, Battle of the Godfathers, Cry of a Prostitute (in which he plays the Yojimbo role but in a mafia film; he also pushes Barbara Bouchet’s face inside a dead pig’s carcass while making love to her and he’s the good guy), Escape from the Bronx and so many more movies.

Martin Balsam: Perhaps best known for Psycho, Balsam shows up in all manner of movies that keep me up at 4 AM on nights when I know work will come sooner than I fear. He’s so interested in acting up a storm in this movie that he is visibly reading off cue cards.

They’ve all joined up for a movie that finds the coach’s daughter get Midnight Express-ed as drugs are thrown in her bag at the airport on the way home from a vacation with her hapless jerk of a boyfriend. At least he’s smart enough to call assistant coach Cliff Gaylor (Oliver Tobias), the father of the daughter whose life he has just ruined. And luckily for this film, Tobias was in a movie called Operation Nam nearly a decade before, which meant that they could recycle footage of him in combat. He also was The Stud and serviced Joan Collins, so he has my eternal jealousy going for him, too.

Who could dream up a movie like this? Oh, only Larry Ludman, but we see through that fake name and know that it’s Fabrizio De Angelis steering this ship, the maker of beloved trash such as Killer Crocodile, five Karate Warrior movies and three Thunder movies that star the beloved Mark Gregory as a stiff legged Native American warrior who pretty much cosplays as Rambo. And don’t forget — this is the man who produced Zombi, The House by the Cemetery, The Beyond and New York Ripper!

In this outing, he’s relying on Cannibal Holocaust scribe Gianfranco Clerici and House on the Edge of the Park writer Vincenzo Mannino to get the job done. For some reason, despite this being an Italian exploitation movie, we never see the coach’s daughter in jail. Instead, we’re treated to what seems like Borgnine in a totally different movie than everyone else, barking orders into his headphones as if he was commanding the team in a playoff game. 

To make matters even more psychotic, the football players show up in full uniform instead of, you know, commando gear. One wonders, by showing up in such conspicuous costumes, how could they avoid an international incident? This is my lesson to you, if you’re a nascent Italian scumtastic cinema viewer: shut off your brain, because these movies don’t have plot holes. They’d have to have actual plots for that to be possible. 

I say this with the fondest of feelings, because you haven’t lived until you witness a football player dropkick a grenade into a helicopter. Supposedly this was written by Gary Kent for Bo Svenson, who sold the script to De Angelis unbeknownst to the stuntman until years later. It was originally about a soccer team!

Former Buffalo Bills QB Jim Kelly* is in this, which amuses me to no end, as does the ending, where — spoiler warning — Borgnine coaches the team from beyond the grave!

You know how conservative folks have quit watching the NFL as of late? This is the movie to bring ‘em back, a film where the offensive line has fully automatic machine guns and refuses to kneel for anything. No matter what your politics, I think we can all agree on one thing: no matter how dumb an idea seems, Italian cinema always tries to pull it off. 

*Other pros include Florida State and arena football player Bart Schuchts and USFL player Mark Rush, as well as Dolphins Jim Jensen, Mike Kozlowsky, Elmer Bailey and Jim Kiick. It’s kind of astounding that at one point, these players could just end up in a movie without the NFL knowing. This would never happen today.

The new Cauldron Films blu ray release of The Last Match is limited to 1500 copies and the film itself has a 2K restoration from the original negative. Extras include an interview with special effects artist Roberto Ricci; American Actors in a Declining Italian Cinema, a minidoc by EUROCRIME! director Mike Malloy; Understanding the Cobra, a video essay by Italian film expert Eugenio Ercolani and commentary by Italian exploitation movie critic Michael A. Martinez.

You can get this from MVD, Diabolik DVD and Cauldron Films.

 Man, was Nello Rossati dating Franco Nero’s daughter or something? Not only did he get him into this movie, but a year later he would be the person — well, his pseudonym Ted Archer did, but you get the point — to finally get him to come back to his most famous role in Django Strikes Again. He also made the giallo La gatta in calore (assistant directed by Lamberto Bava and shot by Aristide Massaccesi!), a Napoleon-sploitation film called Bona parte di Paolina, a sex comedy called The Sensuous Nurse with Ursula Andress and Jack Palance, the poliziotteschi Don’t Touch the Children!, another sex comedy called Io zombo, tu zombi, lei zomba about four zombies running a hotel, a giallo-esque film named Le mani di una donna sola in which a lesbian countess seduces married women until insane asylum escapees chop her hands off, and an I Spit On Your Grave revengeomatic called Fuga scabrosamente pericolosa that stars Andy Sidaris villain Rodrigo Obregón.

Needless to say, I’m a fan.

Ted Angelo (Nero) starts the movie off literally telling a woman that he’s too tired to make love. Is this the great hero of Italian cinema? He seems exhausted throughout but it works; he’s a writer fallen on hard times and harder drinking. He’s supposed to be writing a book on pre-Columbian civilizations, but he’s falling deeper and deeper into depression and drunken days to the point that he’s fired by his publisher — and ex-wife — Maureen De Havilland (Miss World 1977 Mary Stävin, who by this point had already appeared in Adam Ant’s “Strip” video, Octopussy and A View to a Kill, as well as releasing the exercise album Shape Up and Dance with footballer George Best).

It seems like Ted’s luck is changing when he’s shown a ton of writings that came from a shipwreck of Spanish conquistadores. Except that the ship isn’t on the bottom of the ocean. It’s in a cave. And maybe that luck’s bad, because everyone connected with the ship, like art dealer Alonso Quintero (William Berger) is dying under mysterious circumstances. And oh yeah. That shipwreck in a cave is also inside a UFO.

The only real good luck that Ted gets is when an art historian and friend of Quintero named June (Deborah Barrymore, who is not related to Drew, but is instead of the daughter of Roger Moore and Italian actress Luisa Mattioli) helps him out.

What follows is a delirious descent into madness to the point that if you told me this was all a drug trip, I’d believe you. First, Ted is almost run over by former Nazi Heinrich Holzmann (George Kennedy, who is only in the movie for this one scene), then the camera crew he hires ends up being CIA spooks who want to murder him, then the KGB gets involved and then things get really weird.

Ted gets the idea that Maureen has the kind of connections that can save him and June. As they wait for her, a cyborg Rodrigo Obregón attacks them and only stops when he’s hit by a bull. He gets torn apart and sounds like he’s trying to say the words to “Humpty Dumpty” and man, I literallyjumped aout of my chair in the middle of the night I was so excited. He looks like Johnny Craig drew him!

Somehow, the movie then decides to top itself as another Rodrigo Obregón cyborg that looks exactly the same shows up with Maureen, who removes her skin to show us that she’s one of the aliens that have been on Earth for twelve thousand years and now are in control of most countries and multinational corporations.

At this point, is there any hope for any of us?

Yes, this is a movie where a gorgeous Swedish woman takes off all of her epidermis — of course we see her breasts, this is an Italian movie — to reveal that she’s a lizard alien that fulfills the worries of David Icke, then she vomits slime all over herself and tries to kill Franco Nero with her giant tongue.

If you told me this was an actual alien, I would believe you.

The first few times I’ve tried to watch this, I couldn’t get into it. It was too slow and felt too downbeat with Nero’s character feeling hopeless. So don’t be like me. I beg you, stick with this for an hour. Just an hour, because it’s not bad. I mean, yes, Franco Nero survives a car chase by throwing eggs, but it’s just slow, not badly made.

But the last thirty minutes make it all worth it.

When you get there, you’ll know exactly what I mean.

This is a movie all about the foreplay and then when it’s time to get to the actual sex, it’s the weirdest and best Penthouse Forum sex you’ve ever had and you feel like there’s no way that it happened and no one will ever believe you.

Also: Franco Nero screams almost every line and I respect that.

Also also: This is like a budget They Live by people who never saw that movie.

Also also also: This ends with Franco Nero living in a Cannibal Holocaust paradise and a song that sounds like something Disney characters would sing to.

The Cauldron Films blu ray release of Top Line has a 2K restoration from the original negative. Extras include interviews with Nero and Ercolani, a featurette on the alien theories of the film by parapolitics researcher Robert Skvarla and an in-depth audio commentary by film historian Eric Zaldivar including audio interviews from cast members, Deborah Moore and Robert Redcross, as well as additional insight on Italian cult films with actors Brett Halsey and Richard Harrison.

You can get this from MVD, Diabolik DVD and Cauldron Films.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the December 10, 2024 episode of the Video Archives podcast. 

Millionaire Thomas Crown (Steve McQueen) needs a new fix. He’s moved on from fast cars and boardroom deals to putting together a bank robbery just because, well, he needs adrenaline.

Investigator Vicki Anderson (Faye Dunaway) is promised 10% of the stolen money by the bank if she can get it back and learn who stole it. She quickly decides that Crown is the only person who could have pulled off this job. Along with detective Eddy Malone (Paul Burke), she closes in, but starts to be enticed by the roguish Crown.

It’s literally — and in a scene, actually — a game of chess.

Sean Connery and Johnny Carson both turned down the lead but only McQueen could pull this off. I’m not certain that audiences today can estimate his level of cool or the breakthrough moments of this movie, like how Vicky drives one of ten Ferrari 275 GTB/4S NART Spiders ever made, has 29 costume changes or that director Norman Jewison made one of the first mainstream uses of Christopher Chapman’s multi-dynamic image technique to show multiple screens of the robbery happening all at once.

Still, Roger Ebert said that this movie was “possibly the most under-plotted, underwritten, over-photographed film of the year. Which is not to say it isn’t great to look at. It is.”

I love the poster line: “McQueen, together with this Bonnie and Clyde Gal…and the slickest gang that ever robbed a bank!”

You can watch this on Tubi.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the November 26, 2024 episode of the Video Archives podcast. 

An Italian Spanish co-production, this was directed by Eugenio Martín and produced by Philip Yordan as part of three movies they’d make together, which also include Bad Man’s River and Horror Express.

After being double-crossed in an arms deal by a gun merchant McDermott (Luis Dávila) from New Mexico, Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa (Telly Savalas) and his American lieutenant Scotty (Clint Walker) attack a U.S. Army weapons depot and seize McDermott.

Colonel Wilcox (Chuck Conners) is stationed on the American side of the border and is assigned to rescue the shady McDermott, who is as bad or worse than the Mexican revolutionaries.

In his book Hollywood Exile, or, How I Learned to Love the Blacklist: A Memoir, producer Bernard Gordon goes into how little Telly Savalas and Clint Walker liked one another. Savalas made attempts to upstage Walker while — unlike their characters in the movie — Anne Francis and Walker got along quite well. Walker was also not far from a near-death experience. The actor Walker skied out of control and had his heart stabbed with a ski poke. He was pronounced dead until a doctor heard a faint sign of life and performed life-saving surgery.

Walker is pretty much Rick Dalton. He was the lead on Cheyenne before getting into Western and war movies. He eventually moved into TV movies, several of which are pretty good, including Killdozer! and Snowbeast.

Pancho Villa even has a song, We All End Up the Same”, which was written by John Cacavas and Don Black and sung by Savalas. This feels very Vietnam-era, in that Connors has a scene where the entire army can’t kill one fly. It ends as all movies should with a train on train head to head crash.

You can watch this on Tubi.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the November 26, 2024 episode of the Video Archives podcast. 

Gilbert Cates is mostly known for producing the Academy Awards, but he also made several movies. Written by Garry Michael White and Fred Weintraub from a story by Paul Heller, this was novelized by Danielle Steel.

Rich college student Michael Hillyard (Stephen Collins) and much poorer Nancy McAllister (Kathleen Quinlan) are in love and leave a piece of costume jewelry under a rock, making a promise that they will always be in love as long as it remains undisturbed.

Michael tells his mother Marion (Beatrice Straight), who as you can imagine is upset. He decides to elope, taking along his friend Ben Avery (Michael O’Hare) to be the best man. However, all three are in a car crash, with Michael being put into a coma and Nancy’s face being destroyed. His mother makes her a deal, that she will pay for her surgery from Dr. Peter Gregson (Laurence Luckinbill) as long as she never gets in touch with her son again. She thinks Michael will find her, but his mother tells him that she is dead.

Nancy changes her name to Marie Adamson and becomes a photographer while Michael designs skyscrapers. They end up meeting and he doesn’t recognize her, yet feels drawn to her. But she’s dating the doctor who fixed her face! The drama! This is a soap opera, a throwback to women’s pictures and totally ridiculous yet it isn’t boring.

Video Archives has picked this movie and Ice Castles, both movies that had theme songs by Melissa Manchester that were nominated for an Academy Award in the same year.