Michael Apted directed Coal Miner’s Daughter, Gorillas In the Mist and The World Is Not Enough but before all that, he made this movie that he called an “informed look at the British underworld.” That may be because he enlisted ex-gangster Bob Ramsey to act as a contact between the film unit and the local underworld. This kept harassment down and let them shoot in high crime areas.
Jim Naboth (Stacy Keach) has lost his job and his wife Jill (Carol White) and children thanks to his drinking problem. Now a private detective, he’s still drinking and she’s moved on to a new husband, Foreman (Edward Fox) and taking care of his daughter Christine (Alison Portes).
A gang of kidnappers — Keith (David Hemmings), Vic (Stephen Boyd), Barry (Roy Marsden), Des (Barry Stewart Harwood) and Taff (Alan Ford) — take Jill and Christine to force Foreman to help them with a crime. He’s an important businessman, so he hires Jim to get his wife and child back.
The story itself is simple but the real issues are whether Foreman was part of the crime, the past relationship between Jim and Christine, and how Jim and Keith knew each other when Jim was a cop. There’s a lot of humiliation of Jim — and Christine — which also seems like Foreman’s doing. This may be too British for American audiences — Warner Bros. said it was “too indigenous” — but I found it interesting.
Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on YouTube.
This was Bob Shaye’s — and New Line Cinema’s — first full-length production after a decade as a pure distribution company. Director Mark Lester would tell The Pink Smoke, “They were distributing Truck Stop Women to college campuses and they already had a script, so I was hired to direct it. We hired Robert Forster because he had done Medium Cool. Don Stroud was supposed to star in it but he got into a motorcycle accident the night before shooting.”
The film starts with the death of one of Greg Wilson, one of its stuntmen, who was set up. His brother Glen (Forster) arrives on the set, along with B.J. Parswell (Fiona Lewis!), a reporter who wants to write about the danger of the stunt game. The minute Glen gets there he gets hit on by the producer’s wife (Candice Rialson, in one of her last roles; she’s also great in pretty much everything she ever did, like Chatterbox, Hollywood Boulevard and Moonshine County Express).
Glen joins the stunt team of the film, who all promise one another that if anyone gets hurt, they’ll always pull the plug for one another, predating Dr. Kevorkian by several years. Screw the law. We’re stuntmen!
One of the people who have to get the plug pulled on them is Chuck, played by Bruce Glover, always a welcome sight. He’s married to Joanna Cassidy, who is — again, you’re going to get this a lot with this cast — astounding in everything I’ve ever seen her in. In this one, more than aardvarking with Crispin’s dad in a waterbed in the back of a custom van, she’s punching the faces of an entire bar of rednecks.
The death keeps coming, as Paul (Ray Sharkey? This is like a B&S About Movies dream cast and it gets even better) gets trapped in a burning building. That means that our hero has to finish the film, figure out who the killer is and get some revenge.
Former pro wrestler Hard Boiled Haggerty shows up, as does Richard Lynch. And you know how I feel about Mr. Lynch and the fact that he can make any movie better just by walking on set. Suffice to say he does way more than saunter on here.
This is why we’re doing an entire week of Mark Lester’s films. He knows how to get a story told, gather the right people to help tell it and get out of the way. He’s never let me down yet.
Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.
I was really excited about the potential of this one, which promises from its Amazon listing that writer Andy Stuart (Dack Rambo) teams up with an exorcist named Father Kemschler (Dan O’Herlihy!) to battle Satan and a group of devil worshipers led by Mr. Rimmin (Richard Lynch!).
Seems like Rimmin has been after a girl named Jessica from the moment she was born, as her mother was drugged and attended to by nuns who took her baby away the moment it was born. Her mom was then killed by a black cat and Jessica is raised by his people, with her origins kept a secret.
When Andy and Jessica hook up and decide to get married, she’s unable to even get near the altar. That’s because she’s been promised to the demon Astaroth and must be kept a virgin until the beast comes back and puts a devil baby in her womb. Now, the cult that has been behind every moment of her life must keep her a virgin by cockblocking Andy at every turn.
I was totally prepared for pure 1970’s Satanic bliss, only to find myself in the midst of a relationship drama for much of the films first half. Sure, there was a flashback where a woman imagined a nearly nude and totally burned up Lynch — he came by those scars the hard way — attacking her. I was thinking — is this the TV movie version of Enter the Devil — only for cruel reality to make me learn differently.
That said, there are some good moments here, like a woman being killed by her own housecats under Rimmin’s command. And Elyssa Davalos as Jessica has plenty of great qualities that make her a wonderful horror heroine in distress. And while she’s top billed when you look this film up, Kim Cattrall makes a short appearance.
I wanted to love this. It has all the elements that you would think would lead to magic. Yet it can’t put them all together. Sometimes when you deal with the devil, you don’t get what you wanted.
Thomas Thompson wrote Richie, all about the death of George Richard “Richie” Diener Jr. at the hands of his father, who was not charged with the shooting death of his son. The TV movie is directed by Paul Wendkos, who also made another great drug movie, Cocaine: One Man’s Seduction. He also directed the remake of The Bad Seed and The Mephisto Waltz, among many more movies.
Richie Werner (Robby Benson) and his friends only care about getting high, which means more than school, work or anything else. That’s something his father George (Ben Gazzara) can’t understand, that his mother Carol (Eileen Brennan) attempts to and that he himself tries to shield his brother Russell (Lance Kerwin) from.
Richie and his dad do at times get along, like when he gets a job working at a fast food place and when he’s trying to win the heart of Sheila (Cynthia Eilbacher). Yet their relationship is often one of near violence and constant arguments. By the end, Richie is taking handfuls of Secobarbital and threatening his dad with a pair of scissors, telling him he doesn’t have it in him to shoot him. He does, cut to a funeral.
I’m maddest at Sheila, who went from a cute date to telling Richie she already had a guy to finally reading Psalm 23 at his gravesite. You know when he needed you, Sheila? When he was taking handfuls of pills and smoking that reefer.
The sound of Richie yelling and the loud gun blast upset so many people that it was edited from future showings of this on TV. Speaking of being out of control, Richie’s thug friend Brick grew up to be Roger Rabbit. Yeah, Charles Fleischer. And his friend Peanuts? Clint Howard. No wonder his dad was worried, those are some insane friends.
Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Bill Van Ryn is the master of all things Groovy Doom and Drive-In Asylum. This is a movie that he loves and it’s so awesome to read what he has to say about why he feels the way that he does.
A popular vacation spot, desperate for tourist dollars, is suddenly beset by a beast that kills people. This coincides with the big breadwinning season of the vacation spot, leading the people in charge to hush up the deaths and avoid spooking the tourists into bolting. In the post-Jaws 1970s, there was no limit to the number of movies that came along with this exact same plot. One of the most successful imitators was William Girdler’s 1976 flick Grizzly, which placed the action in a park and substituted a bear for a shark. 1977 TV movie Snowbeast distills this formula even further, making the park a Colorado ski resort and changing the grizzly to a bigfoot monster.
Robert Logan and Sylvia Sidney play a grandson and grandmother who find their winter carnival interrupted by a monster that starts attacking and eating isolated people on the slopes — at one point, Logan says he can identify a victim’s body by looking at her face, and another character says “She doesn’t have it anymore.”Sidney, of course, doesn’t want to admit that there is a problem at all, and advises Logan to keep it a secret. Bo Svenson is a former Olympic ski champion who has fallen on hard times and picks the wrong time to come to his old friend Logan for a job; I’m pretty sure entering into combat with a murderous bigfoot was not what he signed on for. Svenson’s wife, played by Yvette Mimieux, happens to be a former flame of Logan’s adding a love triangle to the story. Anyone who read the novel Jaws knows there was a love triangle in that story too, although it was not retained for the film version, so maybe nobody realized at the time just how deeply the screenwriter Joseph Stefano plunder the depths of Peter Benchley’s story.
Although the violence is subdued enough for a TV movie, there are some moments of dread to be found here, like when one character is trapped in a wrecked RV and can’t escape the oncoming monster, which just comes right for him and slaughters him immediately. There’s also a very silly moment when the creature shows up to interrupt a rehearsal for a pageant. It smashes a window, causes a little hysterical panic (including a hilarious reaction shot from Sylvia Sidney), and then proceeds back to where it came, stopping along the way to kill a helpless parent who was just waiting to pick up her daughter from the rehearsal.
Ultimately, camp is king in Snowbeast, and there is enough of that on hand to entertain this jaded viewer. Also, I enjoyed the outdoor photography, including some impressive tracking shots of characters skiing.
BONUS: Here’s the drink to go with it!
Snowballbeast
.25 oz. blue curaçao
2 oz. vodka
2 oz. vanilla rum
2 oz. cream of coconut
Shake with ice in your shaker, then pour into a chilled glass. Enjoy!
The first movie directed by Sammo Hung, The Iron-Fisted Monk begins when the title character (Chan Sing) sends Hawker (Sammo Hung) to the Shaolin temple. He tries to run away, as the master (James Tien) is too rough, but is found and undergoes four tests. While he’s continuing to train, he’s wrongly accused of assaulting the sister of Llang (Lo Hoi-pang) when, in truth, it’s really a Manchurian official (Fung Hak-on) who believes that he is above the law.
By the end, Hawker has redeemed himself by teaching the dye factory workers kung fu, even if they all die at the hands of the Manchu. Man, those guys are horrifying, because they also assault and kill Llang’s wife, murder his mother and end up killing him. Can Hawker and the Iron-Fisted Monk get revenge for, well, just about everyone else in this movie?
Sammo Hung always inspires me. Not just because he’s a larger individual who is still so graceful, but because his movies always have so much well-filmed and planned action, as well as an actual plot that keeps me watching.
The Arrow Video blu ray of The Iron-Fisted Monk has a 2K restoration from original film elements by Fortune Star. It has commentary by martial arts cinema expert Frank Djeng, interviews with Hung and Wong, a trailer, new art by Gary Mills on the sleeve and poster, and a collector’s book. You can get it from MVD.
For an entire article on the space films of Alfonso Brescia, visit this link.
Space is all about computers, at least in Italy in 1977. It’s also very close to when Star Wars was a big deal, so if there could be some cheaply made versions of an already big movie, Italy knew how to do exactly that.
A spaceship’s computer — The Wiz — seemingly saves everyone on-board from a space storm as they are only seeing refractions of the past. Meanwhile, Captain Mike Hamilton (John Richardson, Black Sunday) is being dealt with for slapping around an officer. He’s given the penalty of flying his ship — the MK-31 — to repair a satellite. When he gets there, he sees that they have no idea how to properly fix things and have moved past human sex and now lie on beds and watch light shows instead of messily putting the banana in the ham salad.
He investigates an unstable planet where two flying saucers — disintegrators — are protecting it from being explored. Narrowly avoiding a crash, Hamilton lands on the desert planet and learns that everyone is under the command of a computer. Only one of the people on this sphere survive, coming on board the M-31 while the computer possesses one of the crew who goes on a killing spree. The alien stops them at the cost of his own life and as everyone celebrates, only our hero realizes that the alien machine has now taken over The Wiz.
The cast includes Yanti Somer as Meela. She’s in all of Brescia’s space movies — Star Odyssey, War of the Robots,Battle of the Stars and this movie — as well as Man of the East. There’s also Katia Christine (Spirits of the Dead) as Greta, Maliso Longo (who was also in all of the space movies made by the director) as Halla, Massimo Bonetti as Vassilov, Giuseppe Fortis as Marseille and Italian western actor Vassili Karis as Peter Segura.
Director Alfonso Brescia has all sorts of movies on his list of films, including Naked Girl Killed in the Park, the wonderful Iron Warrior and the demented The Beast In Space. He wrote the story with Aldo Crudo (who made two possession movies in a row, Return of the Exorcist and Beyond the Door) and Maxim Lo Jacano.
In no way is this Star Wars. It’s closer to Planet of the Vampires with a little 2001. That said, I kind of adore it for being that.
Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Dynasty was on a special Chiller Theater on Friday, July 16, 1982. It was on the Money Movie set instead of inside the castle.
Qian Dao Wan li Zhu AKA Super Dragon AKA Dynasty was the first Hong Kong/Taiwan 3D film, as well as using the Sensurround 8-track stereophonic sound system. That way, the things you’ve come to expect from martial arts films — punches, kicks, swords and flying guillotines — mix up with things you will in no way expect — flying heads, crushed skulls, metal umbrellas as weapons and even a man battling with his amputated knubs — while flying directly at your face.
The prince of the Emperor is accused of treason against the throne by an evil eunuch and his sword-wielding henchman and must fight for his life, which is all the set-up you need for 94 non-stop minutes of fighting. It’s not the best martial arts you’ve ever seen, but it is one of the few that made it into the third dimension.
Director Mei-Chun Chang*also made Young Dragons: Kung Fu Kids and understood that we want to see 3D bust our eyeballs. And serving as the 3D advisor on this? Michael Findlay. Yeah, the very same.
Kino Lorber has released a special edition blu ray of this film, working alongside the 3-D Film Archive to create something that be viewed with either BD3D polarized or traditional red and blue glasses (it comes with one pair). That’s because this blu ray was made with Adaptive Multi-Band Anaglyphic Encoding, which they claim is a vast improvement over any previously used process for red/cyan 3D imaging. I’ll be honest, in my trial of this, it worked perfectly. The disk also features a restored comic book, some 3D slideshows and a 3D music video.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Invincible Superguy was on USA Up All Night on July 27, 1990.
This movie was meant to be played in the middle of the night.
A pair of rapist thieves get hired to steal gold from a palace which brings in a girl dressed as a man who wants to stop them and Devil Man, a metal masked man with a zombie army and oh yeah, there’s someone named Superguy, as the title promised there would be.
Devil Man has a giant birthmark and you will be pleased that he knows that he needs to wear a mask. For some reason, Super Guy is in this for literally a few minutes. That’s it. He gets the title and shows up for basically a cameo, but it’s good work if you can get it.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Orca was on USA Up All Night on December 16, 1995.
If you read comic books in the summer of 1977, there’s no way you didn’t know about Orca. Despite everything that nature — and SeaWorld — could teach us, it was time to meet a predator even more deadly to man than the great white shark. To quote Neko Case: “You know they call them killer whales.”
Orca raises the Jawsrip-off stakes: if the name Orca can be Quint’s boat, here, it can be an entire movie. Dino De Laurentiis called writer Luciano Vincenzoni (he also wrote The Good, The Bad and the Ugly) in the middle of the night and told to find a fish tougher and more terrible than the great white to make a movie that could go up against Spielberg’s. Vincenzoni’s brother told him all about the killer whales and the rest is scumtastic movie history.
Directed by Michael Anderson (Logan’s Run, Doc Savage), Orca is the kind of movie that critics have assaulted for years. I’m here to tell you that every single one of them is wrong. It’s a completely ridiculous film, a shameless reboot of both Jaws and Moby Dick, but by no means is it not entertaining as hell. And it has an incredible Ennio Morricone score, something that so many fish films could only wish they aspired to.
Captain Nolan (Richard Harris, who nearly died doing his own stunts and also would grow enraged if anyone dared compare this movie to any other film) catches fish and marine animals so that he can pay off his boat. His crew is looking for a great white, which comes after crewmember Ken (Robert Carradine, Lewis from Revenge of the Nerds). An orca saves Ken and Nolan decides to repay its kindness by capturing it. After he harpoons the whale, he learns that he’s killed its mate, which miscarries and drops a fetus onto the deck of the ship that the callous captain hoses off into the ocean while our titular hero/villain/sea mammal screams in anguish. This is when you wonder: how did this movie get a PG rating?
Novak (Keenan Wynn, The Dark, Piranha), another crew member, cuts the female loose and its mate drags her dead body to shore. The villagers all rise up against the crew, who demand that Nolan kill the orca, who has gone wild and is ruining local fishing. When Nolan refuses to put the fish out of its misery, it retaliates by sinking all of the fishing boats and breaking all of the town’s fuel lines, because of course killer whales can hold grudges.
That’s what brings Dr. Rachel Bedford (Charlotte Rampling), a whale expert, into the movie. She believes that orcas are like humans, a fact that Nolan can understand. He sees himself as one of the whales, as his wife and unborn child were killed by a drunk driver. He promises not to fight the whale, but it kills Novak, attacks Nolan’s house and then bites off the leg of his injured worker, Annie (Bo Derek in her film debut).
Nolan and his crew, including Paul (Peter Hooten, who was also in Derek’s first actual filmed movie, Fantasies, as well as the 1970’s Dr. Strange TV movie and Just a Damned Soldierwith Mark Gregory), all take off after the orca, along with Native American Jacob Umilak (Will Sampson, the magical Native American in films like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Poltergeist II). That’s when the orca goes buckfutter and wipes out nearly everyone by either grabbing them, biting them, crushing them and tossing icebergs at the boat.
The orca throws Nolan all the lace like a ragdoll, killing him, but leaving Bedford alive. We watch as Nolan sinks into the water in a crucified pose and the killer whale decides to swim under the ice. Now, there’s some conjecture here: is the killer whale trapped or has it decided that with its revenge complete, all it can do is die when faced with the path or revenge that it has wrought? I can see the poetry of this thought, but then I realize that I’ve just watched a film filled with no subtlety whatsoever, so perhaps the orca swam on, discovered a new mate and remains ready to wipe out all of humanity at a moment’s notice.
Orca is everything I love about movies: it’s big and dumb and bloody. It’s the kind of movie a fine actor like Richard Harris chews the scenery with just as much viciousness as a killer whale devours one of Bo Derek’s shapely gams. It also takes shark films to the next level. Every single one of the humans in this movie are amongst the dumbest people ever, doomed by the fact that they even know Captain Nolan. The moment he hoses Orca’s son into the icy waters, he’s sealed his fate. This is one of the few films where you root for the beast and savor its revenge.
You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll be amazed at Bo’s bloody stump. I want more people to love this movie even a fourth as much as I do.
You can download the host segments from this episode on the Internet Archive.
B&S About Movies 
You must be logged in to post a comment.