In the opening hours of June 11, 1979, I was listening to KDKA AM radio with my dad. In the middle of a show, the national news broke in to say that John Wayne had died.

I started crying because I always thought my grandfather was John Wayne. If the Duke could die, my grandfather could.

It was too much for a six year old child.

I’m glad the young version of me never saw The Shootist.

The last movie that Wayne would be in, this is the tale of sheriff-turned-gunfighter John Bernard “J.B.” Books, a man who has killed more than thirty men and become a legend. The kind of man that people run from rather than even look at, someone who Marshal Walter Thibido (Harry Morgan) hopes he doesn’t have to arrest.

He’s in Carson City to visit one of the only people he trusts, Dr. E.W. “Doc” Hostetler (Jimmy Stewart), the man who once saved his life after a gunfight gone wrong. He doesn’t have the energy he once did and he soon finds out that he has cancer. He has days, maybe weeks left. All he can do is take liquid painkillers and hope for the best.

Until he’s taken, he plans on just living a quiet unknown existence in the home of widow Bond Rogers (Lauren Bacall), a woman who instantly dislikes him and grows to feel differently. He also ends up being a father of sorts to her son Gillom (Ron Howard) who is close to being a criminal.

Once others learn he is in town, killers come to make their names off shooting him but even in the throes of death, Books is too tough to die. He also has no interest in telling his story to reporter Dan Dobkins (Rick Lenz), even if it makes money for one of the only women he ever loved, Serepta (Sheree North).

Realizing the end is near, Books tells Gillom to bring three men to the bar. They are dairy owner Jay Cobb (Bill McKinney), a man who insulted him when he first arrived; Jack Pulford (Hugh O’Brian), a Faro dealer who was once a killing machine who needs to destroy Books to get his name back and Mike Sweeney (Richard Boone), who wants to kill Books in revenge for the death of his brother. Despite being critically wounded, Books kills all three before being shot in the back by a bartender, someone he never even figured on. Gillom takes his gun and shoots the man before throwing the revolver down. As he dies, Books smiles and nods.

Gillom walks away without a sound.

Books lived by the words “I won’t be wronged, I won’t be insulted, and I won’t be laid a hand on. I don’t do these things to other people, and I require the same from them.”

Paul Newman, George C. Scott, Charles Bronson, Gene Hackman and Clint Eastwood all passed on this movie and it was thought that Wayne — who had his left lung and several ribs removed when he first had cancer — couldn’t handle the role. His breathing and mobility, as well as the altitude of Carson City were challenges he had to fight. When he made Rooster Cogburn a year before, he had pneumonia so bad that he damaged his heart from how much he coughed. A lot of people thought he couldn’t make this movie and his doctors almost stopped filming after he caught the flu.

He changed the ending of the book and the script. Books was supposed to kill his last opponent by shooting him in the back and would be put out of his misery by Gillom after he was shot in by the bartender. Wayne felt that he had never shot a man in the back and would not in this movie either. He also objected to his character being killed by Gillom and added the bartender shooting him in the back because “no one could ever take John Wayne in a fair fight.”

Director Don Siegel told Wayne. “That’s what Clint Eastwood would do.”

Wayne apocryphically replied, “Well I don’t like that, and I didn’t like High Plains Drifter!”

There are also some great moments with Scatman Crothers as a blacksmith and a short role for John Carradine (Wayne, figuring this was his last movie, got several of his friends to act in the film) as an undertaker. Even the horse, Dollar, is Wayne’s horse.

This is also one of only seven movies in which Wayne dies, along with Reap the Wild Wind, The Fighting Seabees, Wake of the Red Witch, Sands of Iwo Jima, The Alamo and The Cowboys.

The father and son relationship between Books and Gillom reminds me of the way that Tin Star takes a man ruined by a hard life and shows how he can be redeemed by how he treats a younger one.

The Arrow blu ray of The Shootist has a new 2K remaster by Arrow Films from the original 35mm camera negative and extras such as a new audio commentary by filmmaker and critic Howard S. Berger, a visual essay by film critic David Cairns, an interview with Western author C. Courtney Joyner, an appreciation of Elmer Bernstein’s score by film historian and composer Neil Brand, a visual essay on Wayne by filmmaker and critic Scout Tafoya and The Shootist: The Legend Lives On, an archival featurette, There is also a trailer and image gallery.

It all comes inside a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Juan Esteban Rodríguez, as well as even more like a double-sided fold-out poster, six postcard-sized lobby card reproductions and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing by film critic Philip Kemp.

You can get this movie from MVD.

American-International Pictures’ Blacula was a big success. Its director, William Crain, and AIP wanted to make more black films that were classic stories retold for a new audience. What’s interesting here that while adapting Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, the evil side of Dr. Henry Pride (Bernie Casey) appears to be a mix of King Kong, Frankenstein’s Monster and an evil white man.

Pride may be a celebrated and wealthy African American medical doctor, but as he fails to discover a cure for cirrhosis of the liver — along with his colleague Dr. Billie Worth (Rosalind Cash) — he begins to experiment on himself and others. Coming just a few years after the way our government treated the Tuskegee airmen with their syphilis experiments, this feels like not only a crime against nature, but a black man attacking his very race.

By the end, he’s killing sex workers and their pimps, leading the police to Watts Towers, where he climbs upward — again, like King Kong — before being shot and falling to his death.

This also had the working titles The Watts Monster, Hyde, Serum and Decision for Doom. Along with the aforementioned Blacula, Scream Blacula Scream, Sugar Hill, Blackenstein, JD’s Revenge, Abby, Ganja and Hess and Petey Wheatstraw, there are some other black-themed horror films from this era but not enough. Later films in the genre that I would recommend are Bones, Def by Temptation and Tales from the Hood.

How incredible is it that the South Korean VHS release of this had the Iron Maiden artwork from Killers on its back cover?

You can watch this on Tubi.

Director and writer Greydon Clark had $50,000 and the idea to take Shampoo and make a black version, subverting blacksploitation by having its hero — Jonathan (John Daniels) — be a business owner instead of the expected criminal. The director of photography had a car accident and still said he would show up. He didn’t and the film’s gaffer, Dean Cundey, took over.

Mr. Jonathan’s is the most successful hair salon for women on the Sunset Strip and that’s because, well, every old and rich white woman in town is coming to get dicked down by Mr. Jonathan. There’s no other polite way to say it. Backed up by hairdressers Artie (Skip E. Lowe, the inspiration for Jiminy Glick) and Richard (Gary Allen), he lives the kind of life that Machete would later imitate.

He soon falls in love with his receptionist, Brenda (Tanya Boyd), who breaks his heart when she disappears. That’s because she’s been kidnapped by her ex, a white mobster, and Jonathan loses his mind after they tear up his shop and even sexually abuse his hairdressers. So he does what any of us would. He gets a chainsaw and kills everyone.

This is the kind of movie where a white woman looks at a nude black man and says, “Oh my God! Mr. Jonathan, it IS bigger and better!” Perhaps you will not be surprised by just how bad the depiction of its gay characters is. This was made in 1976 and that’s in my lifetime. Also: nearly everyone used stage names as it was non-union, so William Bonner is billed as Jack Meoff. That’s kind of the name you’d expect from a porn, but this feels like an adult movie for the first section — there’s a scene in which two young women in a pool seduce Mr. Johnathan before their mother mounts him and makes them watch — and then it becomes a romance before someone is sodomized with a curling iron and revenge comes with a pool cue, an axe and finally, that chainsaw in a gory climax no one saw coming.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Yes, Ilsa died at the end of the first movie but when has that ever stopped a sequel?

Directed again by Don Edmonds, written by Langston Stafford and again featuring Dyanne Thorne as Ilsa, this film starts with three crates arriving for Ilsa to process. They three chastity belt-confined women. They are the sole heiress of a chain store king of the United States, an actress who is a Scandinavian love goddess and an Asian-European equestrian champion. Working for Sheikh El-Sharif (Jerry Delony), she is to prepare them for sale, which means forcing them to make love to her lesbian bodyguards and crush the body parts of spies who are working for the American commander (Max Thayer) who is spying on her.

This is a movie that has exploding diaphragms and belly button cameras, so it is much more Eurospy than the original. It is just as ridiculous. It also steals the theme from Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb.

It also has a formidable cast, including Russ Meyer supervixens Uschi Digard  and Haji, Tanya Boyd, Colleen Brennan, Marilyn Joi, Su Ling and the returning George Buck Flower. There’s also a plot where the commander and Ilsa save the prince and she still gets condemned to starvation. Don’t worry. She’ll be back.

This is a much slicker looking movie with cardboard sets but somehow, it has more of a spirit of fun, even if it has dialogue like “Let’s see how she dances with no feet.”

Also known as He’s a Legend, He’s a Hero, this Hong Kong film stars Bruce Li — note, this is not Bruce Lee: The Man, The Myth, which also stars Bruce Li AKA Ho Tsung-Tao — in a somewhat made-up story of the life of the recently deceased Bruce Lee.

Directed by Singloy Wan and written by Yi Kwan and Song Hsiang-yu, this starts as all martial arts movies should, with the star doing his moves while a disco song plays. More of this, people.

Bruce goes to Hollywood to become a star and finds racism waiting. He goes to Hong Kong and becomes a huge star, then gets married to Linda (Caryn White), fights with an American boxer — who even comes the whole way to Hong Kong to fight him in the set of Enter the Dragon — and then has sex with Betty Ting Pei (Su-Chen Chen) which has a lightning storm, a filling up coffee pot and ends with an earthquake and his death, but not before Bruce says, “Life is just so damn short. I always feel like I’m running behind – like time is running out on me.”

That said, nearly everyone says stuff like, “Life is short” and “It seems like Bruce isn’t going to live for long,” like all foreshadowing but is it foreshadowing if we already know the ending?

That said, I could watch every single Bruce Lee fake life story movie. And I feel like I have and then I find another.

You can watch this on Tubi.

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 essentially Jaws 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 Door in 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.

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 you can drink while you watch this movie.

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

1. Heat a small pan on high, then heat up all ingredients to boiling.
2. Simmer for 3 minutes and let cool. Store in refrigerator for up to a week.

To make the drink:

1. Pour bourbon and honey, orange and sage syrup in an ice-filled glass.
2. Top with apple cider.

You can watch this on Tubi or get it from Severin.

Heat of the Flame follows Gabriela (Christine McClure) who probably shouldn’t have married bank manager and mayoral hopeful Javier (Antonio Ferrandis). He’s kind of like Neil Wardh, an older man than his wife and someone who only cares about work. She has time on her hands, so she day drinks with a writer who goes by Carlos (Francsico Nieto) and remembering the affair that she had with Father Luis (Jess Franco regular Antonio Mayans).

As the marriage starts to fail, there’s also a giallo killer who uses a whistle while he stalks his prey. Gabriela is kidnapped and sexually assaulted by the killer, but lives to tell the tale. Also, as this is a Spanish exploitation movie, she also finds herself not afraid but actually turned on by the experience and wants more.

How bad is your marriage when you willingly walk back into the arms of someone who has been killing woman in your small village? I know that this comes shortly after the end of Franco ruling Spain and that divorce was probably not discussed, but what kind of a life does Gabriela want?

Director Rafael Romero Marchent also wrote A Quiet Place to Kill and directed Santo vs. Dr. Death. The script was written by Santiago Moncada, who wrote the great A Bell from Hell, The Swamp of the Ravens, and The Corruption of Chris Miller.