Directed by Joel Schumacher and written by Peter Filardi, for some reason I never saw Flatliners. I would assume in 1990 I was somewhere between my gorehound and art film phases and a mainstream Hollywood horror movie with major stars would hold no interest for me. But as I grow older, I see the mistakes of my past and can admit: this is a well-made film with some interesting ideas.
Nelson Wright (Keifer Sutherland), Joe Hurley (William Baldwin; what is it with him playing characters that film people having sex? He does it in this and Sliver), David Labraccio (Kevin Bacon), Rachel Manus (Julia Roberts) and Randy Steckle (Oliver Platt) are medical students that want to learn what comes after death. So they use their skills in the ER to kill each other for one minute and then bring the body back to life to see what happens. Nelson has an experience where he sees his old bully and can’t describe what it was like, so everyone has to see it for themselves.
As they say, nothing good can happen from any of this. Basically, each of them has an unresolved trauma and until it is fixed, it will destroy them from beyond.
This would be a basic movie if not for the look that director of photography Jan de Bont brings to the film, as well as the incredible lighting and colors of the film. That said, what emerges is a movie that’s better than you’d think it would be and one worthy of watching several times.
There was a remake/sequel/reboot in 2017 that had a Sutherland in it as a different character, except that in a deleted scene it was shown that he really was Nelson Wright. I mean, make up your mind, Danish filmmaker Niels Arden Oplev!
The Arrow Video release of Flatliners has a brand new 4K restoration from the original negative, approved by director of photography Jan de Bont. Plus, there’s new audio commentary by critics Bryan Reesman and Max Evry, as well as new interviews with de Bont, screenwriter Peter Filardi, chief lighting technician Edward Ayer, first assistant director John Kretchmer, production designer Eugenio Zanetti, art director Larry Lundy, composer James Newton Howard, orchestrator Chris Boardman and costume designer Susan Becker. There’s also a trailer, an image gallery, a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Gary Pullin and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Amanda Reyes and Peter Tonguette. You can get the 4K Ultra HD and blu ray from MVD.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This Van Damme movie first appeared here on July 9, 2019.
Death Warrant is the first movie sold by David S. Goyer, way before he wrote Kickboxer 2, Demonic Toys, Pet Sematary 2, Dark City, the three Bladefilms (he directed Blade: Trinity), Ghost Rider, the Christopher Nolan Batman films, Man of Steel, Batman vs. Superman and Terminator: Dark Fate. It’s directed by Deran Sarafian, who directed To Die For, a 1989 vampire rental favorite, as well as episodes of House and Lost. He also directed another rental favorite, Claudio Fragasso’s (Monster Dog, Shocking Dark, Rats: Night of Terror) apoc-romp Interzone that stars Bruce Abbott (Re-Animator).
Detective Louis Burke (Jean-Claude Van Damme) of the Quebec Royal Canadian Mounted Police has come to Los Angeles to confront the man who killed his partner — Christian “The Sandman ” Naylor. After finding bodies hanging from the ceiling, he’s able to defeat his enemy, shooting him multiple times in the chest.
More than a year later, Burke joins a task force to solve a series of murders inside California’s Harrison State Prison. Burke will pose as an inmate while attorney Amanda Beckett (Cynthia Gibb, Jack’s Back) acts as his wife in the undercover sting.
Burke soon becomes friends with his cellmate Konefke (George Jenesky, who played Francis “Psycho” Soyer in Stripes before changing his name to Conrad Dunne) and an older clerk named Hawkins (Robert Guillaume!). Despite saving the two men multiple times, they refuse to speak about the murders. In fact, no one wants to talk.
Luckily, with the help of a teenage hacker (Joshua John Miller, who would later write The Final Girls), they discover that human organs are being sent out of the prison. That’s when Burke learns that the Sandman is still alive inside the prison.
While Beckett attends a party hosted by the state attorney general Tom Vogler (George Dickerson, Blue Velvet), she plans on telling him that her boss is behind everything. At the last minute, she finds out that he’s behind it all — his wife needed a liver transplant and even all his money and power couldn’t get her one. So he used the prison as a way to murder healthy prisoners and harvest their organs and kept making money from it after she got better.
Sandman has been sent to the prison to kill Burke and shut it all down. During a riot, Hawkins is injured but saved by Priest, but seconds later, Sandman kills the younger man. Finally, we get a big battle in a boiler room between Burke and Sandman that has all manner of craziness — burning against the metal door, kicking the bad guy in the flames and having him walk out and keep fighting and finally a bolt going through the Sandman’s head to kill him.
There’s also some conjugal romance between our hero cops, if you’re coming here for some tender moments. I think not. I think you’re coming for Van Damme kicking a serial killer into a furnace.
American musician Rickie (Steven Weber) has fallen for a prostitute by the name of Sara (Belinda Becker) who acts as if she is a princess. They escape from their lives together before things grow dangerous.
This was director and writer Jacob Berger first film and guess what? I can’t find it anywhere. In my OCD need to see every Cannon movie ever, I’ve listed what I do know about the film and hope someday to update this post with some better information.
I would assume that Cannon only picked this movie up for distribution, as none of their regular producers worked on it.
Have you seen this? Want to let me know more about it?
Colonel Scott McCoy (Chuck Norris) and Major Bobby Chavez (Paul Perri) have been issued a new order by General Taylor (John P. Ryan): bring in the man responsible for all of the cocaine in the U.S., drug kingpin Ramon Cota (Billy Drago), in alive for a trial. They succeed, but Cota gets out on bail and after his court case, has Chavez’s pregnant wife and his brother both killed.
Chavez heads out on his own and is captured by Cota’s forces, tortured and killed. The DEA tries to stop Cota as well and they all get captured. San Carlos’s president Alcazar and his corrupt generals all benefit from the drugs and protect Cota, so McCoy has to go in on a stealth operation.
DEA Agent John Page (Richard Jaeckel) helps McCoy get his man, who keeps goading him into killing him, which is hilarious because McCoy just lets nature take its course by the end of the movie.
Chuck said of this, “I researched drug kingpins during the three years we worked to prepare for this movie and much of what I read convinced me that you’re dealing with unconscionable, truly vicious individuals.”
Much of the film was shot at an unfinished hilltop mansion called the People’s Park in the Sky that Imelda Marcos started building in 1983 as a guest house for Ronald Reagan. Chuck said, “It had never been used. When Marcos was booted out, it was just left, an empty shell. We bought it, made $1 million worth of refurbishments, since it wasn’t in good shape, and even built a swimming pool. And then we blew it up.”
Sadly, there was a major tragedy during the making of this movie, as five crew members were killed in a helicopter accident. The film is dedicated to the memory of pilot Jojo Imperiale, stuntman Geoff Brewer, cameraman Gadi Danzig, key grip Mike Graham and gaffer Don Marshall. Chuck and Aaron gave blood at the hospital but there was no saving them. John P. Ryan and stuntman Matthew Gomez survived.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This originally ran on the site on October 27, 2021.
I mean, how could I not watch this movie? It’s got Michael Dudikoff, Mark Hamill and Robert Mitchum improbably together in a riff on The Hitcher or The Vanishing or any other number of hitchhiking maniacs on the road movies.
Dudikoff is a cop who is more married to his job than to his Russian wife Lara, who finally decides to drive off and then make the decision to pick up Justin Mckay (Hamill), who grew up with a mother who parted her sister’s hair with a butcher knife and has passed on the willingness to kill to her son.
Over one brutal evening, Lara must ride with the killer as he destroys everyone he can, ending with him trying to convince Mitchum, playing a doctor, to give her electroshock therapy against her will.
If you’re used to seeing Dudikoff be a ninja — an American Ninja — he barely fights in this. But hey — it’s a Cannon Film, which means that it has some level of strangeness, maybe because it was shot in Italy* instead of America, but has stuntman Bob Bralver directing it, who only made one other full-length movie, Rush Week, which isn’t all that bad. He’s joined by writer Russell V. Manzatt, who also wrote that aforementioned college stalk and slash.
*That’s the claim I keep reading, even if IMDB says that it was made in California. I mean, with all the neons and blue color, this could have been a late Italian direct to video movie.
Colonel Jack Knowles (Roy Scheider) is a tough soldier awarded for his bravery in Vietnam.
Colonel Valachev (Jürgen Prochnow) is the same way, but on the other side of the West German-Czechoslovakia border.
These two men are an asset at war but a liability in peacetime.
They may just drag everyone into World War 3.
Based on the Einstein quote, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones,” this movie finds Knowles butting heads with his superiors Lieutenant Colonel Clark (Tim Reid) and General Hackworth (Harry Dean Stanton) when he isn’t getting blind drunk — on J&B no less and no, this is not a giallo — when he isn’t crossing the border and sabotaging Russian bases.
By the end, the two men battle in hand-to-hand combat on a frozen lake with their countries’ armies on both sides ready to unleash mutually assured destruction. The fight was so realistic that Scheider cracked one of his ribs and Prochnow popped out his knee.
The Fourth War was directed by John Frankenheimer from a script by Kenneth Ross, both of whom were anti-war, and hated the name, as well as other titles like Game of Honor and Face Off.
A dance from Brazil would become the battleground between the two Israeli film impressarios who were once the Go-Go Boys, the men who made Cannon the studio of the future for a very short present, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus.
The so-called forbidden dance was originally called Carimbó and was a loose and sensual dance where female dancers wore rounded skirts that enabled them to make big spins. A radio station from Belém started to call this new type of music “the strong-beated rhythm” and “the rhythms of lambada” and that’s the name that took off. It means strong slap, which makes sense, as the drums that were used to create the songs were often made out of tree trunks.
That brings us to 1988, as French entrepreneur Olivier Lamotte d’Incamps watched Brazilians dancing the lambada, bought the musical rights to over 400 lambada songs and created a studio band he named Kaoma, whose cover of the Los Kjarkas song “Llorando se fue” sold five million records and even peaked at #46 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Which brings us back to Golan and Globus who had once worked together to bring another dance craze to the screen — back in better days — and made the magnificent double blast of Breakin’and Breakin’ 2 : Electric Boogaloo.
Globus had planned to made Lambada for some time and was in pre-production when Golan announced that he would make his own movie, The Forbidden Dance.
It was war.
The Forbidden Dance was written in ten days and fast-tracked all for one reason, which you would think would be to cash in on a craze, but may have just as well been to one-up a former brother in film. Golan revealed an April 6 release for his film — beating Globus by a month — who responded by rushing his movie to be first.
Then Golan used one of Cannon’s biggest weapons against Menahem: he placed an ad in Variety and said that his movie was “the one and only original lambada film.”
Greydon Clark, the director of The Forbidden Dance as well as Without Warning, Joysticks and Uninvited, spoke about the sheer insanity of these films to Vanity Fair, saying “I had no idea how quickly he wanted the picture completed. He had no script, just the idea to do a lambada picture and beat his cousin.”
The battle for first at the box office was a tie. Both movies premiere on March 16, 1990.
The ForbiddenDance: Made by Menahem Golan’s 21st Century Film Corporation — Menahem wasted no time as this was his tenth film at his new studio in a little more than a year — and released by Columbia Pictures, this would be my favorite of the two films, but the race is very close. That’s because this feels pure Cannon in its astounding weirdness, placing Miss USA Laura Harring as Nisa, a Brazilian tribal princess — who speaks Spanish and not Portuguese the actual language most people speak in Brazil — who comes to America with tribal shaman Joa (Sid Haig!) to stop the rainforest from being cut down.
Let’s review that last sentence and just wash in the joy of all that is Menahem Golan making movies.
Aftr Joa goes to jail for using black magic to break into the headquarters of an evil corporation, Nisa ends up becoming a maid for rich people Katherine and Bradley Anderson (she’s played by Shannon Farnon, the voice of Wonder Woman on Super Friends) and their son Jason (Jeff James) just wants to dance. He’s got jerk friends and worse parents, so Nisa runs away and becomes a private dancer, a dancer for money at a dance club/brother named Xtasy.
After one of Jason’s crappy friends tries to get with her — and she knees him in the dick — he tells Jason’s real girlfriend Ashley (Barbra Brighton) all about it and she’s as gross as everyone else in his life, so he mopes around and tries to Taxi Driver save her and nearly gets killed by a bouncer who then plans to assault Nisa before Joa appears and uses magic to save them both.
Now the movie moves into a dance contest story, as Nisa and Jason decide to do lambada and win a chance to appear on TV to discuss the rainforest before Richard Lynch — this movie just went up five stars — kidnaps her and busts Jason’s ankle just before they’re going to get on stage with Kid Creole.
Of course, black magic saves the day again, Nisa’s father shows up and everybody decides to save the rainforest. And do the lambada.
The Forbidden Dance was not allowed to have the world lambada in its title, while it got the rights to use the actual song “Lambada.” Sadly, the sequel Naked Lambada! The Forbidden Dance Continues was never made, despite the ad in Variety saying that it would be.
Best of all, the movie ends with this on screen: This movie is dedicated to the preservation of the rainforest.
Kevin Laird (J. Eddie Peck) is a teacher by day and a lambada dancer by night and before all that, he was in a street gang. And when he isn’t dancing by night, he’s also teaching other dancers by night how to earn their GED.
One of his students, Sandy (Melora Hardin) and yes, they took the name Sandy despite Grease seeming to own it forever for all dance craze movies, is in love with him and when she discovers his secret life, she plans to out him.
Meanwhile, Shabba Doo from the aforementioned Breakin’ films plays Kevin’s dance rival Ramone who just needs to learn math and hey — did you know you can use geometry on the pool table?
Anyways, Sandy’s antics end up getting Kevin fired except if he can get his barrio mathletes to defeat the smart kids — the snob subtractors vs. the slob square rooters? — he gets his job back in a contest which makes no sense.
Let me spell this out for you: I came here for a movie about a dance that looks like people are fucking and ended up watching a movie about math. That’s worse than realizing I’m watching a religious movie halfway through something. I don’t watch movies for math! Menahem got that and delivered Richard Lynch, Sid Haig and lots of dry humping.
Joel Silberg also made Breakin’and Rappin’ for Cannon, so he knew what they were looking for, even if it was a film about angles and fractions. Amazingly, the script came from Sheldon Renan, who made one of the darkest movies I’ve ever seen, The Killing of America. He was also one of the people behind Treasure: In Search of the GoldenHorse, which took the idea of Kit Williams’ book Masquerade and had a book and movie — which Renan directed and had Richard Lynch narrate — all about a hidden horse and $500,000 in treasure that was hidden somewhere in the U.S. Paul Hoffman, who designed the actual puzzle under the name Dr. Crypton, also made the treasure map for Romancing the Stone.
Strangely, Gene Siskel loved this movie.
Lambada made $4.2 million at the box office and The Forbidden Dance only made $1.8 million. The real losers were all of us, as think of what a united Cannon could have made out of one film.
There’s also another lambada movie from 1990. The Turkish film Lambada was directed by Samim Deger. This clip is all that I can find of it.
EDITOR’S NOTE: For another take on this one, check this out.
Directed by Robert Burge (he also made Vasectomy: A Delicate Matter) and written by Michael B. Druxman (who was an uncredited writer on She-Freak), this film creates a buddy cop dynamic — for a time — between Lee Majors as Mike Gable and Don Rickles as Jake Barber.
Ex-mobster Louis Keaton (Abe Vigoda) was living a quiet life in a retirement home before he was nearly killed by a hit. Someone is trying to kill seniors for some reason and when Barber gets killed, Gable must team with Keaton — ah, Keaton’s Cop — and find the real killer.
Somehow, Art LaFleur is playing Captain Sears from Cobra in this, but he’s called Detective Ed Hayes. Tracy Brooks Swope plays the love interest while the big bad — BIg Mama, actually — is played by June Wilkinson, whose second Playboy centerfold was shot by Russ Meyer. While never a Playmate, she appeared in the magazine seven times. She’s also in Macumba Love and Florida Connection, a movie that she made with her husband at the time, Dan Pastorini, who was an NFL quarterback for the Houston Oilers and Oakland Raiders. If you ever see Burge’s Vasectomy: A Delicate Matter, she’s in that as well. Oh yeah — she’s also in Sno-Line, so maybe she was just staying in Texas and taking whatever movies got made there, which makes me wonder how she never wandered into an Andy Sidaris film.
There’s an actor on IMDB who claims that this movie has an “orange tint to it. You see, the film used to shoot the movie was apparently old and developed improperly in spots throughout the film…that’s the inside word anyway.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: This was on the site originally on September 7, 2020.
Luca Bercovici was behind The Ghoulies and The Granny as well as this movie, where a 400-year-old vampire named Ralph Lavie (Dean Cameron). He lives alone with his mother Phoebe (Toni Basil!) and is suffering from a curse. It turns out that every time he falls for Mona, she’s killed on Halloween by a pirate with a giant hambone. Now, he plans to stay locked up in his room so that his heart doesn’t get broken again.
Our hero is somehow friends with Bo Diddley and survives getting hit by a car driven by Mona (Tawny Fere), who in this lifetime is a singer managed by her ex-boyfriend Stanley (Thomas Dolby!). Ralph starts a band, called Rockula, falls in love again and has to save his love.
Susan Tyrell shows up as a bartender, which should really be all the reason you need to see this movie. Well, that and the end, where an Elvis-dressed Ralph busts out of a mirror and performs. The song are pretty silly, the story is kind of dumb, but I still found myself enjoying this.
You can listen to The Cannon Canon episode about Rockula right here.
LAPD detective John Kimble (Arnold Schwarzenegger) has been chasing after drug kingpin Cullen Crisp (Richard Tyson) for years. He’s close, as a witness sees Crisp kill an informant after finding out where his wife Rachel (Penelope Ann Miller) and son (Christian and Joseph Cousins) are. Working with former teacher-turned-detective Phoebe O’Hara (Pamela Reed), Kimble becomes a teacher in the child’s school in an attempt to finally get his bust.
With a cast that includes Linda Hunt, Park Overall, Cathy Moriarty and Carroll Baker as Crisp’s mother, this is a fun way to get the action that you come to an Arnold movie for and mix it with comedy. That’s all due to the filmmaking skills of Ivan Reitman, who also made Twins and Junior with Schwarzenegger. He even created the Reitman Rules of Filmmaking from the child actors in this movie, which are five very simple rules: Listen, act natural, know your character, don’t look in the camera and be disciplined.
It also has a funny script by Murray Salem and the team of Herschel Weingrod and Timothy Harris, who wrote Trading Places, Brewster’s Millions, Twins and Space Jam together.
This is yet another Arnold movie where he knows his audience and still takes them to an unexpected place.
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