Back in 1959, Penny (Alfre Woodard) a hardworking single mother, a singer with stage fright named Harrison (Charles Grodin), the lovelorn Julia (Kyra Sedgwick) and a small-time con named Milo (Tom Sizemore) all die when their driver Hal (David Paymer) drives off an overpass. Meanwhile, Thomas Reilly (Robert Downey Jr.) is born at the same time as the four passengers’ souls must stay on Earth and take on Thomas as their friend, which eventually makes him think that he’s insane.
Thirty-four years later, Hal returns to use his bus to take the four souls to heaven, as long as they finally achieve their goals. Penny must find out what happened to her kids, Harrison must sing in public, Julia must find her ex-boyfriend John and confess her feelings, and Milo must return the stamp book he stole. They need Thomas’ help but now he’s a driven banker who doesn’t care about people and keeps himself closed off from his girlfriend Anne (Elisabeth Shue).
Of course it all works out, but the real surprise is that director Ron Underwood was the first assistant director on Tourist Trap and would go on to make Tremors. This had four people working on the story — Gregory and Erik Hansen (whose short film was adapted to make this full-length version) and S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock, the team who wrote Tremors.
I love that Julia is a waitress at The Purple Onion, a real San Francisco club where so many comedians performed. When Bob Newhart is seen on stage, that’s his son Robert William Newhart.
This is one of Becca’s favorite movies and we’ve watched it so many times on bad quality VHS rips and on DVD. It’s so great to have the Mill Creek blu ray of this with really fun retro VHS packaging. You can get it from Deep Discount.
You can listen to Becca and me discuss this on our old podcast.
As we all know. “Magnificent” Mimi Lesseos went from wrestling fame to her own self-made movies. She’s Tipper Taylor this time, a former martial arts champion who quit fighting after accidentally paralyzing her best friend. Now, she works with Sammy (Verrel Reed, who was in Pushed to the Limit with Mimi) and tries to keep her father’s business T.T. Hiking Tours & Excursions in business.
So how do we get from nature walks to ass kicking vengeance? Well, one of Mimi’s clients, Vince Paige (Robert Axelrod, Death Wish 4) films a prostitute being killed by two maniacs named Boar and Jack when they can’t decide who gets to climb up on her first. Also — why do Tipper and Sammy have their clients staying at the Pike View Motel instead of glamping in the woods?
Of course, these two bother all of the rest of Tipper’s party yet there’s never any real danger because she repeatedly kicks their asses. As the trailer says, “Mimi believes in women’s rights… lefts and uppercuts” so expect her to dominate these two oafs and keep everyone on the hiking trail. The last fight lasts nearly the entire last quarter of the movie and it’s worth all the soap opera it takes to get there.
I like Mimi’s movies, even if she would have been better served by being in more films in a supporting role or having someone else in charge. If that happened maybe thigs wouldn’t feel quite so weird in a great way and I wouldn’t care so much, so I just talked myself out of my advice for her.
Richard Elfman made Forbidden Zone and Shrunken Heads and…a Mimi Lesseos street fighting movie? OK, sure. Elfman can’t hide when he uses a name like Aristide Sumatra to direct this.
This time, Mimi is Melody Sails, a former Special Forces operative turned hardboiled Los Angeles fact checker who wants to become a full reporter. To impress her editor Harrison (Tony Gibson), she starts working on a story about child prostitution and befriends two kids named Steven (Ita Gold) and Candy (Juli James), who end up staying at her house, all while three men try and woo her and one of them just might be the final boss!
I kind of like that Mimi made her own movies after being a wrestler, kind of becoming the female Ron Marchini. None of her films are good, but they’re all great if that makes sense. They come from a dimension like our own but slightly different enough to feel completely oddball at every turn. They also feel innocent and authentic, even when there’s a shower scene.
There’s also a crime lord named Lunar, which makes me realize that yes, this is a Richard Elfman movie.
Somehow, I’ve never seen this movie before. Sure, it was featured by other writers on the site before and I’ve owned it for some time, but somehow I’ve never found the reason to watch it. Luckily, Arrow Video released several new versions of the film on blu ray and 4K UHD, which gave me the opportunity.
What was I waiting for?
True Romance was a script Quentin Tarantino sold after Reservoir Dogs and unlike so many of his written work, it was directed by someone else: Tony Scott (ironic, as Tarantino went off on Scott’s best-known film Top Gun in the 1994 movie Sleep With Me).
I kind of love that this started with Roger Avery unable to finish a script, so he turned it over to Tarantino, who gave him a stack of pages back which were Natural Born Killers and this movie, which starts after the prison riot and features Mickey and Mallory Knox tracking down the writer who made the cash-in film about their lives. As that writer hides out, he writes True Romance.
Tarantino has said that it’s his most autobiographical film and by and large, he was happy with the way it turned out. It’s pretty faithful to his screenplay, other than changing the story to a linear structure and not the all-over-the-place narrative that Tarantino would use for Pulp Fiction. He also took much of the film’s first act from his 1987 effort My Best Friend’s Birthday.
I have to say, as a man obsessed with movies that married a short-haired blonde from Detroit, this movie has a lot to say to me.
As Clarence Worley (Christian Slater) sits alone in a theater watching a Sonny Chiba triple feature, Alabama Whitman (Patricia Arquette) — named from Pam Grier’s character in The Big Bird Cage — spills her popcorn all over him, leading to an evening where the two bond over cinema, Elvis, diner food and sex.
The next day, she tells him that she was hired to give him a good time by his boss. He doesn’t care; they’re both in love. They get married and moments later, Elvis (Val Kilmer) himself appears to Clarence and tells him that he has to set Alabama free from her pimp Drexl (Gary Oldman, perfect for the too-brief time he’s on-screen). All Clarence wants is her to be free, Drexl attempts to kill him, but misjudges just how strong Alabama’s love makes the young man. Running into the night with two dead bodies left behind, the young couple learns that they have a briefcase packed with cocaine.
As we follow the couple to Hollywood, where Dick Ritchie (Michael Rappaport) and Elliot Blitzer (Bronson Pinchot) broker a deal with movie producer Lee Donowitz (Elliot Blitzer; this character produced Bounty Law in Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood, is the son of Donny Donowitz from Inglorious Bastards; the movie that he produced that Clarence speaks so highly of, Coming Home In a Body Bag stars Rick Dalton, who is the hero of Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood; he’s also pretty much Joel Silver).
This drug deal is complicated by the fact that Drexl had stolen the cocaine from Blue Lou Boyle, which sends Vincenzo Coccotti (Christopher Walken) and an army of killers on the trail of Clarence and Alabama. Meanwhile, a cocaine and oral sex aided and abetted arrest leads to the cops wiring Elliot for the big drug deal, an event that leads to a Mexican standoff between our happy couple, the Hollywood elite, organized crime and the police, led by detectives Nicky Dimes (Chris Penn) and Cody Nicholson (Tom Sizemore).
There’s so much that happens in this movie and so much to discuss, but I think it’s perhaps best experienced by the viewer. That said, there’s an astounding scene between Clarence’s father (Dennis Hopper) and Coccotti, as well as Alabama remaining resilient in the face and fists of a hired killer (James Gandolfini). Oh — and Brad Pitt pretty much inventing the movie Pineapple Express with his scene with the mob interrogating him.
The original ending had Clarence dying and the widowed Alabama eventually turning to crime. Evidence of that is in Reservoir Dogs and Mr. White (Harvey Keitel) talking about working with Alabama.
The Arrow Video release of True Romance has 4K restorations of both the Theatrical Cut and the Director’s Cut from the original camera negatives, as well as limited edition packaging with a reversible sleeve featuring newly commissioned artwork by Sara Deck (which also is featured as a poster in this impressive set).
There’s so much in this package, including a 60-page perfect-bound collectors’ booklet featuring new writing on the film by Kim Morgan and Nicholas Clement, a 2008 Maxim oral history featuring interviews with cast and crew and Edgar Wright’s 2012 eulogy for Tony Scott, as well as six double-sided, postcard-sized lobby card reproductions
There are multiple audio commentaries, with options from director Tony Scott, writer Quentin Tarantino, stars Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette, and critic Tim Lucas, Plus, you also get select scene commentaries by stars Dennis Hopper, Val Kilmer, Brad Pitt, Michael Rapaport, Bronson Pinchot and Saul Rubinek.
As if that wasn’t enough, there are interviews with costume designer Susan Becker, co-editor Michael Tronick, co-composers Mark Mancina and John Van Tongeren, and Larry Taylor, author of Tony Scott: A Filmmaker on Fire.
Most interesting to me were the deleted scenes with optional commentary by Scott and the two different endings of the movie with commentaries by Scott and Tarantino that really add so much to this movie, as Tarantino discusses how the ending in the film is the right ending for the movie Scott made.
There’s also an electronic press kit featurettes, behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with Tony Scott, Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette, Dennis Hopper and Gary Oldman, trailers and TV spots, and an image gallery.
June 27: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Albert Pyun! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.
Who are we to say that Andrew “Dice” Clay and Teri Hatcher could not be a couple?
Anyways, the Diceman was not on the top of the world in 1993 — a proposed network series was canceled and he started honing down the edge in his stand-up routine. But somehow, he played a near superheroic bouncer that battles martial artists over a rare lotus flower and when I say, “Yeah, Albert Pyun directed and wrote this,” that pretty much explains it all.
The bad guys are not ninjas — they will say this often — but Chinese Shaolin monks who believe that eating the lotus flower will give them infinite life. It’s in the orbit of the Brain Smasher (Clay) because Cammy Crain (Deborah Van Valkenburgh, Jackie on Too Close for Comfort and, of course, The Warriors) has sent the flower to her supermodel sister (Hatcher).
Wu, the leader of The Shaolin Monks, is played by Yuji Okumoto. As Chozen in The Karate Kid Part II, he is the best bad guy ever as even in the face of a hurricane, he will not redeem himself.
This film also packs on the character actors, with Brion James, Charles Rocket, Nicholas Guest and Tim Thomerson as detectives, Liz Sheridan as Brain Smasher’s mother (meaning that Sheridan played mother to Jerry Seinfeld and Andrew “Dice” Clay in the very same year), Dee “Matilda the Hun” Booher and Liz Shaye.
This only came out on VHS in the U.S. and never even made it to DVD. I mean, who doesn’t want to see Dice punch a man into his brain? The title does not lie. This does happen.
Three couples — Silvia (Alejandra Espejo, who was 43 when she made this and supposedly playing a teenager) and Cesar (Andrés Bonfigliom, Grave Robbers), Tamara and Raul, and Laura and Adolfo (Andrés García Jr., Cemetery of Terror) — head to a secluded cabin in the woods — this movie’s title translates to Forest of Death — a place where one of them, Sylvia, grew up. It’s also where her mother drowned and her father siappeared. So if her friends start getting killed by someone in a raincoat, are we to even be surprised?
She also met Forest Ranger Jaguar (Jorge Reyonoso) back then and he’s been in love with her ever since, even if she was ten and he was probably in his teens back before but let’s just move on. He wants to protect his woods — he shoots a poacher with ammunition so powerful it blows his leg completely off — and her with equal fervor.
It takes an hour and with the last twenty minutes of the movie, this finally becomes a slasher. That said, it has an amazing moment where the killer throws a severed head through a window at two of the girls.
This take a bit long to get going and maybe stays too close to the American slasher formula but it is pretty competent. I just demand that Mexican films get completely out of control and blow my mind, like how Trampa Infernal has a killer who combines Rambo, Michael Myers and Freddy’s glove into one ruthless murder machine.
Carlos and Adriana have an arguement and as they yell at one another in the middle of a highway, they both get killed by a truck.
That’s it, roll the credits and turn on the lights.
No, but really, Adriana dies instantly and goes to Heaven because for the most part she was a good person. But Carlos, well, he was a horrible person as we soon see and he’s trapped on Earth in a Jacob’s Escalera situation. Oh yeah — he’s also chased by demons.
By the end of this movie, you’ll want Carlos to burn. I mean, he steals from grocery stores, assaults a girl who is shopping there, uses Adriana to play a prank on the bisexual Pablo that goes so badly that the victim throws himself out a window,
We soon learn that Adriana has become a good Christian woman thanks to a man named Esteben — no, not the one from Evilspeak — who helps her find the right way to live. She tries to save Carlos and that’s what leads the story back to the beginning with him denying God, her getting out of the truck, him following her and them both getting flattened into bloody tortilas.
So yeah — while Adriana goes through the Pearly Gates, Carlos is in Hell, tormented by Pablo who is in Hell because of his life choices and suicidal nature — so yeah, this movie is completely unconcerned with being as offensive as it gets — and the woman that he raped. Because you know, she deserves to be in Hell too.
Director Paco del Toro made a few other Christian movies and also the movie Pink which is about a gay couple adopting a child. The first IMDB review that I read said that it was “an absolute disgrace to humanity.”
According to Toro, he wanted to defend the right of adopted children to grow up with a father and a mother, yet so many people saw that as promoting homophobia, which got that movie banned from Cinemex and Netflix.
June 15: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is bugs! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.
Tony Randel made Hellbound: Hellraiser II and I always hunted down his direct to video movies as a result. Like Amityville 1992: It’s About Time and Fist of the North Star. Ticks is another example, a movie with a cast packed with genre favorites — Seth Green, Clint Howard — and recognizable faces — Alfonso Ribeiro, Peter Scolari, Ami Dolenz — in a movie about exactly what you think it’s about. Ticks.
Jarvis Tanner (Howard) has been growing a super strain of marijuana that has mutated the local population of ticks, just in time for a camp for bad teens starts up, which includes Tyler Burns (Green), Darrel “Panic” Lumley (Ribeiro), Dee Dee Davenport (Dolenz), Rome Hernandez (Ray Oriel) and Kelly Mishimoto (Dina Dayrit) who are guided by Holly Lambert (Rosalind Allen) and Charles Danson (Scolari), who has brought along his daughter Melissa (Virginya Keehne).
If you’re an animal fan, well…perhaps this is not the movie for you, as a hamster and a dog get infected by the ticks and immediately die, which leads to Riberio getting a dramatic speech about just what his dog meant. The rest of the film has ticks burrow deep into human beings and cause no small level of calamity.
Personally, I hate ticks. Remember that lyme disease comes from them. Darryl Hall, of Hall and Oates, nearly died from the lyme disease he got from a tick that he claims came from a deer and as a result, he hates deer. Like, the dude violently hates deer.
This was written by Brent V. Friedman, who created the TV show Dark Skies and wrote Hollywood Hot Tubs 2: Educating Crystal, Syngenor, American Cyborg: Steel Warrior, Pet Store and has worked on a few of the Halo and Call of Duty games. Speaking of video games, he also wrote Mortal Kombat: Annihilation.
Also, this day is supposed to be about bugs and ticks are actually arachnids like spiders and scorpions. So I apologize that this is not truly a bug movie. I should have watched those ants brutalize Joan Collins.
Policewoman Gina Pulasky (Helen Hunt) gets accepted like you’d expect a rookie female cop to be accepted by a group of older and gruffer male officers, but then she proves that she can do more than get coffee and be harassed when she handles a domestic disturbance well and shows an affinity for undercover work. She’s also in a romance of sorts with already married cop Will McCaid (Jeff Fahey) and finds herself strangely attracted to the child killer suspect she’s interacting with, Kyle Timler (Steven Weber). A fry cook who is smarter than that job would indicate, she starts working as a waitress and uses her abusive past to connect with him. But soon, she finds herself losing her own identity and perhaps her morals as she gives in and becomes McCaid’s lover.
Directed by David Anspaugh (Hoosiers, Rudy) and written by John Leekley (the creator of Kindred: The Embraced and Wolf Lake, as well as The Omen TV movie), this film gives Hunt a great opportunity to play multiple characters within one role. It’s a solid TV movie and a reminder of a time when films of this quality would be on regular TV every week.
A ruthless serial killer is murdering male prostitutes and Marco (Tomas Arana, Body Puzzle) is the journalist trying to figure out the case, investigating — some may say Cruising as this movie is the giallo remake remix ripoff of that film — the gay bars and dealing with his worries about all the male attention he’s getting. Luckily he’s married to a stewardess named Adria (Gioia Scola, who is in another late 80s/early 90s giallo that needs more people talking about it, Obsession: A Taste for Fear) just in case you think he’s going to get converted, which would make this a much more interesting movie — even if one of the suspects, Andrea (Lorenzo Flaherty) makes him feel rather funny.
You have to admit that a 1993 movie that uses an internet chat room for men to find men is years ahead of the curve, much less a film in which there’s no judgment for the male characters finding the sex they dare not speak in the straight world. That’s a big leap for the giallo genre, which in the past has only had gay characters appear as red herrings or used as comedy.
Plus, I’m always happy to see Natasha Hovey (Cheryl from Demons) in a movie, as well as Alida Valli (Suspiria, Eyes Without a Face, The Killer Nun, Fatal Frames). Directed and written by Pierfrancesco Campanella, who also made the 2003 giallo Bad Inclination and the shorts La goccia maledetta, L’idea malvagia and L’amante perfetta.
The end of this movie — spoiler mode — is incredible because Gioia Scola dresses up like a boy and allows her husband to pick her up.
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