Directed by Krishna Shah and written by Joseph A. Walker, this has an incredible soundtrack by the band War. It’s based on Walker’s 1972 play.
Johnny Williams (James Earl Jones) is a house painter and poet who has raised his family in Watts. His son Jeff (Glynn Turman) is home after failing out of the U.S. Air Force flight school and his wife wife Mattie (Cicely Tyson) is dying, but Johnny tries to remain positive. Yet when Jeff kills a rival gang member and a police officer gets killed, there’s a standoff with the cops that doesn’t end well for anyone.
The cast also includes Roger E. Mosley as Big Moe Hayes and Louis Gossett Jr. as Dr. Dudley Stanton.
This is shot in an all over the place style, somethimes in striking POV shots, other times in your face African masks dominating the entire shot. There seems to be so much crammed into this movie — Vietnam, alcoholism, racism, dealing with loss, Afrocentrism, the militarism of the Black Panthers — that it doesn’t have a solid focus, but these are the kinds of movies that had to be made and stories that had to be told.
Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.
Also known as The Big Boss, Mr. Scarface and Blood and Bullets, this was directed by Fernando Di Leo. He started his career mainly being known for his writing, including A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, Massacre Time, Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man and so many more. He co-wrote it with Peter Berling, who was often in Kalus Kinski movies before writing a series of conspiracy novels about the Priory of Sion.
Tony (Henry Baer) works as a money collector for Cherico (Edmund Purdom) but he dreams of leaving his life of crime behind and settling on the beaches of Brazil. He decides to fast forward all the hard work of being a henchman by working with Rick (Al Cliver) and Napoli (Vittorio Caprioli) to rob the biggest boss of all, Scarface Manzari (Jack Palance).
It takes its time getting there, with Tony mostly cracking wise, cracking schools and, well, cracking smiles at the many ladies he sees during his days and nights of collecting blood money. He would have never even considered going after Scarface if he didn’t kill Cherico instead of repaying his debt. By the end, our hero has tracked his enemy — actually, his lifelong enemy, even if we don’t get that knowledge for some time — to a slaughterhouse where he wipes out the entire family.
Added bonus: Gisela Hahn (Devil Hunter, White Pop Jesus, Disco Fieber) is in the cast. And man, Jack Palance is so macho that he even makes a cigarette holder look manly. Like, the same kind of long effete cigarette holder that, let’s say, Cruella de Vil would use.
This movie was directed by Robert Butler, who also directed the pilots for Star Trek, Hogan’s Heroes, Batman and Hill Street Blues as well as four Kurt Russell Disney movies — Guns in the Heather, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, The Barefoot Executive and Now You See Him, Now You Don’t — and also Night of the Juggler and Turbulence. What a career!
It was written by William Bast, who had already written about his five-year relationship with James Dean in his book James Dean: a Biography and The Myth Makers, a drama about what Bast saw as the publicity-mad funeral of Dean and the damage it did to his family and hometown of Fairmount, Indiana. It was a TV movie in England and an episode of NBC’s Dupont Show of the Month as The Movie Star. He also wrote The Legend of Lizzie Borden, The Valley of Gwangi and The Betsy as well as creating The Colbys.
Bast is played by Michael Brandon in this movie. Strangely enough, in the 50s, Butler worked at CBS Television in charge of the studio audience ushers. James Dean got a job there through Bast but was soon fired by Butler. The movie also has someone else who knew Dean. Christine White, who plays a secretary, met Dean when she was his agent’s typist. She was his girlfriend from 1951 to 1954 and the two successfully auditioned for the Actors Studio. In the movie itself, White is played by Candy Clark.
There’s an interesting cast here. Amy Irving is a young Marilyn Monroe, Meg Foster plays another of Dean’s rumored lovers, Dizzy Sheridan (who went on to write Dizzy & Jimmy: My Life with James Dean: A Love Story, play next door neighbor Raquel on ALF and Jerry’s mom on Seinfeld) and strangely in the way that movies are, she was married to Stephen McHattie at the time, the actor who plays Dean.
Plus you get Jayne Meadows as Reva Randall, Katherine Helmond as Dean’s agent Claire Forger, Brooke Adams as Beverly and Julian Burton as Ray.
Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.
From 1976 to 1984, Tomas Milan starred in eleven movies in the Squadra antiscippo series. Starting with The Cop in Blue Jeans, these films include Hit Squad, Squadra antitruffa, Little Italy, Assassino sul Tevere, Delitto a Porta Romana, Crime at the Chinese Restaurant, Delitto sull’autostrada, Crime in Formula One, Cop in Drag and The Gang That Sold America.
It all starts here with Milan as an undercover cop named Marshall Nico “The Pirate” Giraldi. A former street hood gone good, he works on the anti-mugging squad which puts him on the case of Norman Shelley AKA Richard J. Russo, a criminal played by Jack Palance.
Unlike every cop on the force, Nico dresses like he’s the guitarist in a Britpop band and has an unkempt beard. He even has a mouse named Captain Spaulding, named for the Marx Brothers’ movie Animal Crackers years before Rob Zombie did that. Actually, his look is a lot like Rob Zombie, come to think of it.
Nico gets even deeper into the mugging case when his girlfriend (Maria Rosaria Omaggio, The Tough Ones, Nightmare City) loses her latest manuscript to a snatcher. He’ll have to get to Shelley or Russo or whatever his name is, but that guy is busy choking out his underlings in the back seats of cars. This is a comedy and Palance is still terrifying.
Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This weekend is the Drive-In Super Monster-Rama! Get more info at the official Drive-In Super Monster-Rama Facebook page and get your tickets at the Riverside Drive-In’s webpage.
From 1972 to 1978, William Girder directed nine feature films and would have probably never stopped, were it not for the helicopter crash that took his life while scouting the Philippines filming locations. From Asylum of Satan and Three on a Meathook to The Manitou, Sheba Baby and Project: Kill, his films may have been derivative but they made money.
Here’s the best example. Around these parts, Girder is celebrated for Abby, a movie that was removed from theaters because of its similarity (let’s say total ripoff) of The Exorcist. That brings us to Grizzly, which is essentiallyJaws on dry land. With a bear. A grizzly bear.
Grizzly found its inspiration when its producer and writer, Harvey Flaxman, came face to face with a bear during a camping trip. Co-producer and co-writer David Sheldon thought about how they could make a bear version of Jaws and they wrote a script that Girdler discovered and offered to finance, as long as he could direct.
Grizzly begins with military vet and helicopter pilot Don Stober (Andrew Prine, The Town that Dreaded Sundown, The Eliminators, Amityville II: The Possession) flying over a national park and explaining how the woods remain untouched, much like they were in when Native Americans made their homes here.
The first two attacks happen quickly — in bear POV no less — when two female hikers are dismembered by the ursus arctos horribilis villain of this story. That brings in park ranger Michael Kelly (Christopher George, Gates of Hell/City of the Living Dead, Day of the Animals,Mortuary, Pieces) and photographer Allison Corwin (Joan McCall, who besides being in Devil Times Five is also married to the film’s writer, Sheldon) in on the case.
At the hospital, a doctor tells the park ranger that a bear killed the girls, but the park’s supervisor blames the ranger and naturalist Arthur Scott (Richard Jaeckel, The Dark, Mako: The Jaws of Death and TV’s Salvage 1) for the girls’ deaths. And guess what? Just like Jaws, there’s no way the park is getting closed before tourist season.
The rangers all decide to search the mountain for the grizzly, which isn’t accounted for in their census of animals in the park. One of the rangers — of course — decides to get nude in a waterfall because that’s what you do when you’re hunting a killer bear and gets murked for her stupidity.
Kelly and Stober think they have found the bear from the air, yet it’s just naturalist Scott wearing an animal pelt and tracking the bear himself. Scott tells them that this bear is actually a prehistoric version of the grizzly that stands 15 feet tall and weighs at least 2,000 pounds.
No matter how many people the grizzly kills, no one will close the park. So when the story becomes national news, the owners of the park — a national park can have owners? — allow amateur hunters to shoot the shark (this has nothing to do with the very same thing happening in Jaws, right?). Those hunters are pretty much the worst people ever, as they use a bear cub as bait, thinking the grizzly will protect its young. Nope — it eats that baby bear and keeps on coming.
The grizzly literally shreds his way through the park and nobody closes it down until it murders a young mother and mutilates her child. And get this — the grizzly is so smart, it knows how to bury the naturalist in the ground and then waits for him to wake up so it can kill him. Can a bear be a slasher killer? Well, we already know that Bigfoot can be, thanks to Night of the Demon.
The grizzly kills every hero in this movie other than Kelly the photographer, who magically finds a bazooka in the wrecked helicopter and remembers the end of every shark movie: you must blow this beast up real good. She does and that’s the end of Grizzly.
An interesting personal note: I was telling my dad about this movie and he remembered that it has played on a bus that took he and my mother on a casino trip. That’s right — at 1 AM, pitch blackness, the TV on their bus blared this gorefest as loudly as possible. “I couldn’t wait for that movie to end,” was my mother’s review. My father’s was a bit kinder.
Warner Brothers originally wanted to finance Grizzly, but were furious that Edward L. Montoro and Film Ventures International (FVI) had taken the project. That’s because a year before, the studio sued both of these companies for copyright infringement when they released Beyond the Doorin the US.
Sadly, while Grizzly was one of 1976’s best-performing films, earning $39 million worldwide (adjusted for inflation, that’s around $177 million in 2018 dollars), its distributor Edward L. Montoro and Film Ventures International kept all the profits. Girdler and Harvey Flaxman and David Sheldon (the film’s screenwriters/producers) had to sue to get their share.
Even after all that, Girdler still directed Day of the Animals, a spiritual sequel to Grizzly, for Montoro. While this film added Leslie Nielsen and Lynda Day George to the returning cast of Christopher George and Richard Jaeckel, it wasn’t as successful.
Grizzly just seems like a movie that’s buried in legal shenanigans. A sequel, Grizzly II: The Predator (also known as Grizzly II: The Concert, a title that would assuredly guarantee that I would buy this film) was made in 1983.
Filmed in Hungary by André Szöts and written by Sheldon, the co-producer and writer of the original, it was never released. The film had Louise Fletcher, John Rhys-Davies and unknowns but about to be big stars like Charlie Sheen (who took this movie over the lead in Karate Kid), George Clooney and Laura Dern in the cast, as well as live performances (hence Grizzly II: The Concert) by musicians like Toto Coelo (who had one song I can name, “I Eat Cannibals Part 1”) and Landscape III.
The movie was such a mess that the film’s caterer ended up rewriting it. And while the main filming was completed, special effects and all of the actual bear footage wasn’t. That’s because the film’s executive producer Joseph Proctor had disappeared with the money (and may have even been already jailed when filming began). While a mechanical bear was to be used, there was still footage shot of a live bear attacking concert-goers filmed (!). There’s a bootleg workprint, but the full film has ever emerged. This New York Post article has even more amazing info about Grizzly 2. Now that film has been released, if you’d like to see it.
Finally, a trivia note for comic book fans. The amazing poster for this movie? Neal Adams did the art.
And in the universe of Tarantino, Don Stober was played by Rick Dalton, not Andrew Prine.
Here’s the recipe I’ll be bringing.
Honey Bear
1 oz. bourbon
2 oz. apple cider
1/2 oz. Cointreau
1 oz. honey, orange and sage syrup
Sliced orange
Pre-work: To make the syrup use the following ingredients:
1 cup water
1/3 cup honey
3 tbsp. sugar
1 tsp. ground sage
2 orange slices
1 tsp. orange zest
Heat a small pan on high, then heat up all ingredients to boiling.
Simmer for 3 minutes and let cool. Store in refrigerator for up to a week.
To make the drink:
Pour bourbon and honey, orange and sage syrup in an ice-filled glass.
Top with apple cider.
You can watch this on Tubi or get it from Severin.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Pom-Pom Girls was on USA Up All Night on June 30, July 1 and November 18, 1989; April 14 and December 7, 1990 and August 24, 1991.
Director Joseph Ruben has made some pretty good movies like Dreamscape, The Stepfather, Sleeping With the Enemy and The Good Son. This Crown International Pictures movie was directed by him and written by Robert J. Rosenthal, who also wrote The Vanand directed and wrote Zapped! and Malibu Beach.
Johnnie (Robert Carradine) is the hothead. He has a crush on Sally (Lisa Reeves) but he’s dating a tough guy named Duane (Bill Adler). Jesse (Michael Mullins) is the ladykiller and he’s all into Laurie (Jennifer Ashley). These teens end up hanging out, stealing fire engines, getting in chicken races and falling in and out of love.
It’s not as sexual as you think. I mean, there’s sex. But it’s more about growing up. It’s a hang out movie and so much of it doesn’t go anywhere, like the coach who doesn’t like Jesse. But look, Cheryl Rainbeaux Smith is in it and when I saw her name in the credits, I literally said a little prayer thanking whatever intelligent design created her.
For maniacs like me: There’s a scene where Ashley wears a Boy Scouts Of America shirt from the San Gabriel Valley Council. She’s wearing that same shirt again in Tintorera…Tiger Shark.
You can download this movie with USA Up All Night clips at the Internet Archive.
New Fist of Fury is the first film Lo Wei directed — of many! — that starred Jackie Chan, who used the stage name Sing Lung which he is known in China as. It means “becoming a dragon.”
Chan had previously appeared in the original Fist of Fury as a stuntman. This movie was Lo’s attempt to market Jackie Chan as the new Bruce Lee. Chan became known for it, but didn’t become a true star until he began infusing comedy with his martial arts.
Theatrical 1976 edition: A brother and sister escape from Japanese-occupied Shanghai to Japanese-occupied Taiwan. There, they work with their kung fu teacher grandfather, who is dealing with a Japanese martial arts school that is attempting to dominate all of the other schools, even using murder to get their way. Chan plays a young thief who resists learning kung fu yet finally accepts them and becomes a master who fights the Japanese to support the rights of the Chinese people.
Rerelease 1980 version: Chan plays the same thief, but who is met earlier when he steals a pair of nunchaku from Da Yang Gate, a Japanese martial arts school. They offer him a job in their casino and when he refuses, they attack him. He’s saved by the students of the Jingwu school and is invited to their master Mao Li Uhr’s 80th birthday party. Those same Japanese martial artists attack the party, causing the master to have a heart attack and strengthening the resolve of the Jingwu to reestablish their school. Chan joins them and learns that he must defend the Chinese people.
Produced three years after Bruce Lee’s death — the movie opens with his lover Li-Er mourning the death of his character Chen Zhen — this was Chan’s first big break. Sure, he had played in uncredited roles, done stunts and smaller movies, but at one point he even moved to Australia and was working in construction. Luckily, he returned and worked hard to become the star that he is today.
This movie is fine, however, but it doesn’t establish who Jackie Chan really could be. He wasn’t the next Bruce Lee. He was the first Jackie Chan and would soon have his own copycat clones. After all, he even has a genre named after him, Jackiesploitation.
The Arrow Video blu ray release of New Fist of Fury has a new 2K restoration from the original negatives by Fortune Star for both the 120-minute theatrical cut and the 82-minute 1980 re-release. It also has commentary on the theatrical cut by martial arts cinema experts Frank Djeng and Michael Worth, co-directors of Enter the Clones of Bruce Lee and a commentary on the re-release cut by action cinema expert Brandon Bentley, who also contributed a video essay that compares this film to another sequel that came out at the same time, Fist of Fury Part II. There’s also a trailer gallery, including a Chen Zhen trailer reel of sequels and reboots; an image gallery; a double-sided fold-out poster and reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Tony Stella and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing by Jonathan Clements and an archival retrospective article by Brian Bankston. You can get it from MVD.
This film begins with dancing women, native Brazilian drummers and an old man who chants over a coffin which opens to reveal…begins chanting over a closed coffin. The coffin opens and a man rises. Zé do Caixão! Coffin Joe!
At an isolated inn — “Hospedaria dos Prazeres” (Hostel of Pleasures) — the owner (Jose Mojica Marins, who is also Coffin Joe) turns away some and allows others already in the guest book to stay. Those without a place to stay are enraged, as after all, there’s a storm outside. Yet he has room for hedonistic Hell’s Angels, a couple sneaking out on their respective partners, a man ready to kill himself, gamblers out to bankrupt someone and criminals escaping their last robbery.
When they wake up in the morning, all of the clocks and their watches are set to midnight. That’s because they’re all in Hell and the absence of time is one of the many things they must deal with, as well as having to watch their deaths again and again. The owner warns them all that they don’t want to see his evil side — Coffin Joe.
One of the rich men who argued about getting to stay the night before leads the police to the hotel. In its place is a graveyard, where we eventually see the owner. As the camera zooms in, his face is replaced by a skull with bleeding eye sockets.
This is a Cinema da Boca do Lixo (Mouth of Garbage films), called that because they were made in that downtown neighborhood of São Paulo, Brazil. These films — Killed the Family and Went to the Movies, The Red Light Bandit, Awakening of the Beast — are down and dirty exploitation films that are close to American exploitation of the 70s with sex and violence often in equal measure.
This is worth watching just for the opening speech from Coffin Joe: “Live to die or die to live? Is there an answer? No! Only doubts! Only deductions… Only the conviction of emptiness… of loneliness… the desperate search for the whole and the nothing in the vastness of the dark. The unveiling of this enigma would be the end of the mystery. The end of the secret of eternity. The apogee of happiness. The mission is accomplished! Men would be facing his biggest conquest… the awakening of his own origin.”
Coffin Joe may be dead and yet he lives. How else do we have a new film that he hosts? Yes, through the fire and the flames, he comes back to us, warning us about making a joke of the unknown world. Perhaps he would also do well to warn us that if you see a witch in the countryside, there’s really no reason to take her photo.
José Mojica Marins, the human repository for the evil being known as Coffin Joe, originally filmed The Curse for his Brazilian TV show in 1967, but it was lost when a fire burned down the station two years later. In 1980, he started a second version, but production was halted due to financial issues. The existing footage went missing until 2007 when producer Eugenio Puppo rediscovered it while preparing a retrospective of the work of Marins.
Years of intensive restoration later — including shooting new scenes and recovering the lost dialogue with the assistance of a lip-reader — The Curse is making its U.S. debut along with a making of documentary The Last Curse of Mojica.
Based on a story in the graphic novel series O Estranho Mundo de Zé do Caixão, this near-hour-long story has Juvenal (Felipe Von Rhine) and his girlfriend Mariana (Silvia Gless) meeting that witch we discussed above (Wanda Kosmo) and deciding that it’s not only a good idea to take that photo but also to be rude to her. He’s soon left with a gaping and festering wound in his side that demands raw meat at all times or it will destroy him. Of course, his lover would make the perfect meal to stop that insatiable hunger, right?
How magical is it that we can find this film as part of our lives? All hail Coffin Joe. You shall never die.
In the U.S., this movie played TV. But in the UK, it was in theaters, where people could be as freaked out as I was when I was four and had to watch bees cover a VW Bug and sting people of all ages, shapes and sizes.
It was the movie that Guerdon Trueblood made after The Candy Snatchers, so obviously he’s all about punching the audience in the head, heart and gut. He also wrote Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargoand Ants, so once he realized little creepy crawlers freaked people out, he kept at it. He also was the writer for SST Death Flight and Jaws 3D. And oh yeah — the sequel to this movie, Terror Out of the Sky.
Norman Gary is the real hero here. He was an entomologist and acted as the production consultant and bee wrangler/handler for this film. All of the swarming shots were handled by him and he also plays a victim. Hundreds of thousands of bees were used for this movie, but there were few injuries.
Sheriff Donald McKew (Ben Johnson) finds his dog dead just as an abandoned freighter pulls into New Orleans, kind of like Zombi, except with bees instead of zombies. Assistant Medical Director Jeff DuRand (Michael Parks) and entomologist Jeannie Devereaux (Gretchen Corbett) learn that the bees in the dog’s stomach are violent ones that could only come from South Africa. This is all happening during Mardi Gras and yes, the parade should be canceled, but the tourists! It’s all psychological. You yell spider and everybody says, “Huh? What?” You yell killer bee, we’ve got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July. Or Mardi Gras.
But the scene where Devereaux has to drive that Volkswagen into the Super Dome hoping that it will get cold enough to kill the bees? Still horrifying. Kids covered in bees? The UK poster? It’s all bee trauma.
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