Director Noriko Yuasa’s Japanese feature Performing Kaoru’s Funeral is an engaging look at laying to rest someone who people only thought they knew. Lighthearted, poignant, and with both humorous and jaw-droppingly dramatic moments, the film examines the family members, work associates, and other acquaintances of the enigmatic title character (Kano Ichiki), a screenwriter whose life suddenly ended in an accident.
Kaoru’s will stated that her ex-husband from 10 years earlier, unlucky actor Jun Yokotani (Koji Seki), be the chief mourner at her funeral in the rural village of Okayama, where she grew up. Unsure of what to do while there, he meets a group of people who were close to Kaoru, including her nine-year-old daughter (Chise Niitsu), who doesn’t know who her father is — and she isn’t the only one without that information.
As Performing Kaoru’s Funeral unfolds — with a screenplay by Takato Nishi — its characters and situations provide commentary on different Japanese societal topics including sexism, along with a wry comment on the inability for original films to be greenlighted in Japan. Yuasa paces the film nicely; it breezes along and unveils mysteries, bringing smiles and lumps to the throat in fine fashion, with a stellar ensemble cast, and gorgeous cinematography courtesy of Victor Catalá.
Laurence Kendall (Kurt Russell) is a wanderer, a model stranded in the middle of nowhere who happens upon the farm of Elroy “Bud” Burkhardt (Dennis Weaver), a wheat harvester who is dealing with economic issues and also dying of cancer. He has a daughter named Marlene (Mare Winningham) who dreams of leaving Kansas and a son Dougie (Rossie Harris) who ran to Canada during the draft. Somehow, this hardened farmer will become like another father to this young man who has never worked hard in his life.
Directed by Joseph Sargent (Jaws: The Revenge) and written by Ken Trevey, this is a really dramatic, well-made TV movie, a reminder of a time when Dennis Weaver was a big star and Kurt Russell was unproven as an adult actor. Plus, you get Wilford Brimley as an opposing rancher and plenty of gorgeous scenery.
Director Kiyotaka Oshiyama’s anime feature Look Back is a coming-of-age tale that puts its two main characters and viewers alike through the emotional wringer. Fujino (voiced by Yumi Kawai) is a school girl whose manga in her elementary school’s newspaper draws a lot of praise from her fellow students — until it is suddenly overshadowed by the manga drawn by shut-in student Kyomoto (voiced by Mizuki Yoshida). Tasked by her middle school teacher to deliver a graduation document to Kyomoto, Fujino is surprised to learn that the girl is a fan of her work. The two work together as high schoolers and craft award-winning manga, splitting apart when Kyomoto announces that she wants to study art at university rather than continuing their success as a professional team.
There’s much more to matters than what I have described here, and I don’t want to spoil what happens in this fast-paced, poignant feature, so suffice it to say that Look Back, based on the autobiographical manga Chainsaw Man by Tatsuki Fujimoto, delivers shocking tragedy, an alternate reality/”What if?” scenario, and plenty of smiles along with lumps in the throat as the bittersweet drama involving the two unlikely friends unfolds. The animation looks terrific, from scenes early on depicting Fujino’s comedy manga to emotionally heavy portrayals where facial expressions are wonderfully conveyed. The voice acting by the original Japanese cast is also top notch. Oshiyama has crafted a touching anime feature in Look Back that leaves plenty to mull over long after its final frame.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Wiz was on the CBS Late Movie on October 5, 1984.
As discussed in the article on this site about Return of Oz, nearly every Oz movie has been a failure until Disney’s Oz the Great and Powerful. While we traditionally believe that the 1939 version was a success, it wasn’t a financial success until it was re-released in 1949 and then became beloved when it was on TV.
The Wiz lost $10 million nearly forty years after.
The Wiz: The Super Soul Musical “Wonderful Wizard of Oz” premiered in Baltimore in 1974 and won seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical. Ted Ross and Mabel King would reprise their roles as The Lion and Evillene, but when Motown made this movie, Stephanie Mills was out as Dorothy and Diana Ross was in. First, she was turned down by Barry Gordy and then she got Rob Cohen of Universal Pictures to finance The Wiz if she were to play the lead role. Other roles would include Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow, Nipsey Russell as the Tin Man, Lena Horne as Glinda, Thelma Carpenter as Miss One (instead of Addapearle as in the stage play, but writer Joel Schumacher didn’t use any of the original book by William F. Brown) and Richard Pryor as the Wizard.
Saturday Night Fever director John Badham was to direct, but he couldn’t see Ross as Dorothy, so he left and Sidney Lumet (known for movies like Dog Day Afternoon and Network) was hired. He’d never made a musical and little if any comedy.
Back to that script. Schumacher was influenced super into Werner Erhard and the Erhard Seminars Training movement, as was Diana Ross. While some say that EST is used to “transform one’s ability to experience living so that the situations one had been trying to change or had been putting up with clear up just in the process of life itself,” others charge that it was mind control or an attempt at creating a “totalitarian army.”
Cohen said, “Before I knew it, the movie was becoming an est-ian fable full of est buzzwords about knowing who you are and sharing and all that. I hated the script a lot. But it was hard to argue with Ross because she was recognizing in this script all of this stuff that she had worked out in est seminars.” A lot of what Glinda says at the end of the movie is L. Frank Baum filtered through EST — “Home is a place we all must find, child. It’s not just a place where you eat or sleep. Home is knowing. Knowing your mind, knowing your heart, knowing your courage. If we know ourselves, we’re always home, anywhere.” — as is the song “Believe In Yourself” — “If you believe / Within your heart, you’ll know / That no one can change / The path that you must go. Believe what you feel / And know you’re right, because / The time will come around / When you’ll say it’s yours.”
If there’s anything positive from this film, it’s the fact that both Michael and LaToya Jackson were able to move into a Manhattan apartment, all on their own for the first time in their life. Michael got to go to Studio 54; he impressed Quincy Jones with his work ethic so much that Jones agreed to produce Off the Wall. He would also produced Thriller and Bad. Jones compared Jackson to Sammy Davis Jr.
However, the film was a commercial failure and may have even hurt all black films for some years to come, as Hollywood kept pointing to how this movie bombed. It cost $24 million, made $13.6 in theaters and CBS paid $10 million to air it, but it still was seen as a loss. Michael came out as a star, but this was the end of Diana Ross as a movie star.
I’ll never understand why Dorothy was 24 years old in this instead of a child, but that’s what Ross wanted and that’s what she got. Yet there are things that really work in this for me, like the urban scapes that make up Oz — critics hated that and well, they were wrong — and the four crows are fun villains.
The CBS version cuts a lot of footage so that it fit into a three hour running time. I can’t even imagine how long the commercials were for this when it was on the CBS Late Movie.
I could write an essay on legendary Japanese actor/director Takeshi “Beat” Takano’s new samurai epic Kubi — in which he, yes, stars and directs — but instead let me tell you succinctly that this film rules!
The cast of characters equals, if not exceeds, those of many of Shakespeare’s plays, and although subtitles helpfully call out the names and positions of characters — rivaling in speed and number those shown in Shin Godzilla of government officials — memorizing who’s who is not a requirement here, because you’ll be too enthralled with the majesty on display to feel confused. Kitano doesn’t skimp on the violence and gore, and believe me, there’s plenty of it, what with all of the double-dealing, double-crossing, intrigue, playing for position, toying with affections, and so on. Takeshi Hamada’s cinematography is absolutely gorgeous, capturing the drama in all of its blood-splattered glory, with beautiful sets and landscapes, to boot.
The plot concerns a battle for feudal power in 16th century Japan, when the evil Lord Nobunaga (Ryo Kase) — you’ll hate him right off the bat, and things only get worse when he is involved — is due for an overthrow. One of his lords, Murashige (Kenichi Endo), fails in an attempted rebellion and escapes. Nobunaga promises his other lords, including Hideyoshi (Kitano) and Mitsuhide (Hidetoshi Nishijima), that whoever brings Murashige to him alive will be the successor to the throne. There are loads of subplots, but I’ll save those for first-time viewers to discover.
If you love samurai epics, Kitano’s marvelously helmed, wonderfully acted, beautifully lensed and scored, and shockingly violent Kubi is must-see viewing. If you love first-rate cinema, you should also consider this a requirement. Kubi has absolutely secured a spot on my list of top favorite films of 2024.
Bleeding Skull’s Top 50 (July 7 – 13) The middle-brow champions of low-brow horror, Bleeding Skull has picked out some of their favorites from the SWV catalog. They neglected to put I Drink Your Blood or EEGAH!on the list, but I think I can forgive them since they included Ship of Monsters.
Rogelio A. Gonzalez made more than 70 movies, but I wonder if he ever made anything near as good as this movie, which is perhaps one of the strangest films I’ve ever had the delight to witness.
I was wondering how to even describe this movie. Basically, Gamma (Ana Bertha Lepe, Miss Mexico 1953 and a third-runner up for Miss Universe) and Beta (Lorena Velazquez, Miss Mexico 1960 and also Zorina queen of the vampires in Santo vs. Las Mujeres Vampiro) have come from Venus to find men to repopulate their planet. Of course, they can’t resist biting people or falling in love with Lauriano (Eulalio “Piporro” Gonzalez, one of the kings of golden age of Mexico comedy and the literal embodiment of Northern Mexican culture), a singing cowboy.
Sure, that would set up a great movie, but this is Mexico. Which means that the ship has a robot named Tor who is collecting a whole bunch of monsters — why, the title translates as Ship of Monsters, surprise! — and those monsters are about to go crazy. There’s Uk the cyclops, the many armed Carasus, Prince of Mars Tagual, Utirr the spider and the dinosaur skeleton named Zok. Also, Tor falls for a jukebox. And some of the special effects were ripped off from the Russian movie Road to the Stars.
Imagine if Ed Wood lived in Mexico, had a better budget, lucked out and had magnificent actresses willing to wear swimsuits and high heels, as well as a singing cowboy. Then we’d cut open slice open a peyote cactus and make him sit in a cave until he made this and it still might not this charming and odd.
Bleeding Skull’s Top 50 (July 7 – 13) The middle-brow champions of low-brow horror, Bleeding Skull has picked out some of their favorites from the SWV catalog. They neglected to put I Drink Your Blood or EEGAH!on the list, but I think I can forgive them since they included Ship of Monsters.
In 1965, director Massey Cramer and writer Bob Corley made The Legend of Blood Mountain. It’s a comedy about reporter Bestoink Dooley (George Ellis), who comes to Blood Mountain to learn about the legend — see what I did there? — of the creature who is said to rise when a drop of blood is spilled. Everyone else thinks there’s a serial killer, even if we didn’t know what that word meant, as Robert Ressler first used it in a presentation in 1974.
In 1975. Donn Davison — the manager of the Dragon Art Theatre in Gainesville, FL, as well as the director of the “Asylum of the Insane” inserts in She-Freak, Honey Britches and Moonshiner’s Woman, plus the producer of Secrets of the Gods and The Force Beyond; even more, he was a hype man for Film Ventures International and played a folklore expert in Crypt of Dark Secrets and the antiquities expert in Mardi Gras Massacre — must have seen how much money that The Legend of Boggy Creek was making. So he took that aforementioned movie — now ten years old — and added on some “real people” and himself up front as an expert. Then, he shared it with the world.
When he refers to himself as a “World Traveler, Lecturer and Psychic Investigator” who are we to say he isn’t?
If you’re wondering who Bestoink Dooley is, he was the host of the Big Movie Shocker, which aired on Fridays at 11:30 p.m. on Altanta’s WAGA-TV Channel 5. Played by George Ellis, he was also in the movies Swamp Country, Honey Britches (which was renamed and re-released as both Shantytown Honeymoon and later Demented Death Farm Massacre) and Moonrunners, as the villain Jake Rainey. That movie kind of disappeared, but would return when its director Gy Waldron took the concept and narrator Waylon Jennings and went to Hollywood to sell it as The Dukes of Hazzard. Ellis never got to play Boss Hogg.
According to this amazing article in Oxford American, “The Bestoink Dooley Fan Club,” Ellis also bought a theater known as the Festival Cinema. Atlanta magazine described it as a venue where “patrons would often come as much as 30 minutes before the show started to sit in the plush lobby in white sculptured chairs and leaf through copies of Sight and Sound or talk in muted voices and sip the complimentary Viennese coffee.” Despite introducing the city to the French New Wave and New German Cinema, Ellis was broke. So he started showing porn and got arrested for obscenity. Years later, he’d open other theaters — the Film Forum at Ansley Mall, the Film Forum on Peachtree and the Bijou Cinema — all places where “You can trace the roots of Atlanta’s film culture through these theaters.”
As if this movie doesn’t have enough nexus points, the bikini-clad daughter of a town doctor who falls for Dooley by the name of Phyllis Stinson is played by Erin Fleming. She’s also in Hercules in New York, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) and Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York but is best-known as the secretary and manager of Groucho Marx. While many of the actor’s friends admitted that she did much to revive his popularity and getting him an honorary Academy Award Marx, many also believed that she psychologically and physically abused him. After his death, she was ordered to repay $472,000 which she had taken from his estate. She’s gorgeous in this movie, yet sher life went so wrong over the last few decades she was in this plane of reality. She was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, arrested for carrying a concealed and loaded gun and lived out the rest of those dark years homeless and delusional before shooting herself at the age of 61.
Nearly everyone in this is either overacting, reading off cue cards — Davison is wearing sunglasses so you can’t tell that he is doing exactly that — or repeating lines because they think that someone is going to edit this movie.
Well, there is editing ten years later, as the strange original monster has been replaced with fog and a sasquatch.
“BIG FOOT” is more than a legend… They swear to God it’s true!” That’s the kind of words that get people in theaters and drive-ins. You know what else helps? Having your own theme song.
“The Ballad of McCullough Mountain” by Tim York is the kind of theme kind of demanded after Boggy Creek. As for three year old me, this movie may have terrified me as much as the frozen Bigfoot that came to the parking lot of my K-Mart. My aunt went to see it and brought back pictures. I remember yelling at her, because now Bigfoot knew that I knew he was here.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Maneater was on the CBS Late Movie on September 26, 1975 and May 9, 1977.
Directed by Vince Edwards — Ben Casey himself — and written by Edwards, Marcus Demian and Jimmy Sangster, Maneater is another retelling of The Most Dangerous Game, this time with two couples — Nick and Gloria Baron (Ben Gazzara and Sheree North) and Shep and Polly (Kip Niven and Laurette Spang) — who are on an RV vacation.
Look, if you go on an RV trip in a 70s movie, you’re dead.
As their camper breaks down, they’re helped by Carl Brenner (Richard Basehart), who is the owner of two tigers. As money is low, he’s been feeding them by causing accidents and having the tigers get a buffet of tourists. But first, he has his wife Paula (Claire Brennen) serve them a rattlesnake dinner. Then he shows them his private camp area and offers it to them, which they should have said no to, because after dinner he was going on about conversation starters like “Men kill for pleasure. Animals kill to survive.”
What follows is cats chasing humans and Ben Gazzara proving that while he’s a city boy, he knows how to survive.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Avalanche was on the CBS Late Movie on June 28 and September 4, 1985.
Corey Alan directed a ton of TV, 1971’s The Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio and this Rock Hudson-starring disasterpiece in which the much beloved actor plays ski resort owner David Shelby, a man who owns a ski lodge so we can all totoally identify with him. He also invites his ex-wife Caroline Brace (Mia Farrow!) to visit in the hopes that he can convince her that he’s a changed man.
His opposite is Nick Thorne (Robert Forster), an environmental photographer who knows that that David has built his resort where he shouldn’t. One look at the title of the movie should tell you what’s coming next. When Caroline battles Nick over being a control obsessed freak all over again, well, she ends up in Nick’s arms just in time for David’s business partner’s plane to crash into the mountain and send the snow into everyone’s lives.
The end of this movie — after so much destruction and loss of life — is really all about Mia Farrow choosing between Rock Hudson and Robert Forster. I mean, what else should this be about?
Originally budgeted at $6.5 million, producer Roger Corman cut that amount –will the shocks ever end? — before shooting began in Colorado. There’s plenty of styrofoam for snow, which is kind of obvious. It was still the most expensive movie that New World ever made.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Mind Over Murder was on the CBS Late Movie on July 30, 1982.
Suzy (Deborah Raffi, Death Wish 3) is a dancer who suddenly has psychic visions where time slows down and she can witness a strange bald man (Andrew Prine, as creepy as it gets) assaulting and murdering women. Her boyfriend Jason (Bruce Davison) refuses to believe her but she gets some help from government agent Ben Kushing (David Ackroyd) and his partner Ted Beasly (Robert Englund). She can see the bald man killing everyone on an airplane and they hope that she can use her Eyes of Laura Mars powers and stop him.
Also known as Psychomania, Are You Alone Tonight? and Deadly Vision, this was directed by Ivan Nagy and written by Robert Carrington (Venom, Wait Until Dark).
This is the best IMDB review ever: “Deborah Raffin punched in the stomach? If this is the same movie I’m thinking about, what I recall the most is the lead girl (very pretty) Debra Raffin (I think) was punched real hard in the stomach by a bald guy. The punches weren’t seen but they were heard and then she was seen on her knees, doubled up on the floor – suffering for a long period of time, holding her stomach and bent over. I was rather young when I first saw this movie and I remember that scene of the girl on her knees, bent over double holding her stomach and in so much pain. I remember think How could someone do such a thing to such pretty girl? Her acting in the part was superb. She acted as though she had really been punched in the stomach.” 10 out of 10 stars.
Speaking of creepy, Prine is incredible in this, yelling dialogue like, “What do you want to do first? Make love or die?” She also gets to see him shirtless and glistening with oil while wearing pants that feel painted on as he stalks and kills several women.
And creepier still, let’s talk Ivan Nagy. A former bookmaker for the mob and boyfriend of Heidi Fleiss; he also directed episodes of CHIPs and HBO’s The Hitchhiker, as well as the movies Captain America II: Death Too Soonand Pushing Up Daisies. He made Deadly Hero, a film where an unbalanced cop becomes a hero after killing the stalker of a woman, then becoming obsessed with her, as well as the Gary Coleman as an arsonist TV movie Playing With Fire and Intimate Encounters, a TV film where Donna Mills get all sexed up. But it’s his movie Skinner that this reminds me of, a giallo-style thriller that has a killer pursuing Ricki Lake and being pursued himself by a scarred Traci Lords, one of the many sex workers that he’s cut off their skin but the only one who has survived. It’s beyond scummy in the way that only someone who knows the world they’re writing about can create.
After that movie, Nagy went into adult films, directing Izzy Sleeze’s Casting Couch Cuties, Trailer Trash Teri and Wild Desire.
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