Jade brings together the Dracula and Frankenstein of sleaze, as Robert Evans produces and Joe Eszterhas writes with William Friedkin there to direct — and change the script so many times that Eszterhas needed a $4 million payoff from Paramount to keep his name on the movie. Friedkin later claimed he let everyone down on this movie, including his wife, producer Sherry Lansing. As for what the actors thought, Michael Biehn noted, “I didn’t realize until the read-through that I was the bad guy in it.”

It’s also one of the last roles that Linda Fiorentino would take on, finally ending her on-screen career in 2009, a star with such promise after The Last Seduction. Was it that she was hard to work with? Did Kevin Smith sabotage her career after Dogma was challenging to make? And did people think she was Bridget, her The Last Seduction character?

When asked by Roger Ebert why she always played terrible girls, she replied, “I have this terminal condition called bitchiness, right?” She continued, “Maybe others see what I don’t necessarily see in myself. And a lot of it in Hollywood concerns what you look like. I’m dark, my eyes are dark, and my voice is deep, and how the hell could I play a Meg Ryan role, the way I look.” But then again, she also dated Hollywood fixer and private investigator Anthony Pellicano and FBI agent Mark Rossini, which was rumored to be her using favors to aid in the defense of her actual boyfriend, Pellicano. Was life imitating art imitating life? Rossini used government computers to get case info for Pellicano’s lawyers, which meant he eventually pleaded guilty to illegally accessing FBI computers and was quit/fired from the Bureau. But hey, Linda Fiorentino.

Back to that Ebert interview. It’s intriguing how she pushed for more from this movie: When we were doing Jade, the way Joe Eszterhas wrote the sex scenes was so dated and boring, and I just thought, I can’t do this. And there was a lot of nudity, and I thought, we’ve gotta come up with something a little more interesting to keep me going here. So I did a little random research, you know, and I asked a couple of women I had known who had affairs with men who were very powerful – and invariably those men in powerful positions wanted to be dominated by the woman at the end of the day. They wanted to be the submissive party in the sex act, and it correlated with the level of power. Maybe men with no power want to dominate their women. I just thought, well, this is interesting. And it’s the same for women: Women want to be the dominant party because that’s their fantasy, and the male fantasy is to be the submissive party. And so we got into that in Jade.”

As for her male counterpart in this movie, David Caruso left NYPD Blue after the show’s second season because he wanted a film career. Critics and the media were ready to attack him for that hubris, especially after his first post-TV film, Kiss of Death, also bombed.

And when it comes to Eszterhas, after making $3 million for Basic Instinct, he was due for a fall, which was either going to be this movie, Sliver, Showgirls or all three. He got $1.5 million for this (and $4 million for his next film One Night Stand).

Friedkin was also struggling, as his last two movies were the three demoness movies The Guardian and Blue Chips. In his book The Friedkin Connection, he said that this movie had “a terrific cast—a wonderful script. Great locations. How could it miss?”

Caruso is Assistant District Attorney David Corelli, who visits the murder scene of Kyle Medford, a wealthy businessman who set up several rich and powerful men like Governor Lew Edwards (Richard Crenna) with gorgeous women, including Patrice Jacinto (Angie Everhart). Corelli is told by Edwards and his henchman Bill Barret (Holt McCallany, who most people know from being on Mindhunter, but come on, he got laid and paid as Sam Whitemoon in Creepshow 2) never to let this info out, seeing as how his brakes are soon cut, that’s to be considered a warning.

The seductress who gets the most requests goes by the name of Jade. Seeing as how Anna Katrina Maxwell-Gavin’s (Fiorentino) prints show up on the ancient hatchet — yes, that kind of murder weapon points to this being a Giallo — that killed Medford, it seems like perhaps she could be Jade. She once dated Corelli before marrying his fellow DA, Matt Gavin (Chazz Palminteri). Medford’s safe is filled with sex toys, drugs, videotapes and, oh yeah, bags filled with pubes. But back to those videotapes. Anna Katrina is one of them.

It also seems like she may have killed Patrice, but her husband cuts the interrogation short. Why would she be on those tapes? Well, didn’t he have his affairs? Of course, the governor sends his men, which also includes bad cops Bob Hargrove (Michael Biehn) and Pat Callendar (David Hunt), to kill Allison, who gets saved by Corelli — who was nearly seduced by her — and Gavin — who wanted to kill Corelli for perhaps sleeping with his wife. But all along, it had been Gavin who killed Medford to keep the secrets he and his wife keep, telling her to introduce him to Jade the next time they make love.

Biehn would say of the film. “It was like a jumbled mess. And the movie came out a mess, too. It had great people on it, though. So a great cast, great director… everything but a script.”

Then again, how many giallo makes no sense at all?

But this has an incredible car chase, murder set pieces straight out of Italy, lush production values, a gorgeous heroine/antagonist/who knows in Fiorentino, and they threw a lot of money at this movie to make something that Sergio Martino did for about a tenth of the cost. Plus, there is a moment where Angie Everhardt gets run over by a car not once but twice. Plus, a scene of a naked Palminteri crawling around and begging for Jade to re-enact the movie poster on their bed. 

In his book Hollywood Animal, Eszterhas said, “In the week after he was found not guilty and got out of jail, O.J. Simpson went to see two movies. Showgirls and Jade.”

That says something, right?

Several other cuts of this movie exist, including a European cut with more explicit sex scenes—yes, it’s possible—and a director’s cut with a different ending, 12 minutes more story and, yes, lots more carnal moments.

I will never forget this movie for another, as Cal tells Andy when he talks to women to be like David Caruso in Jade. Always keep asking questions. Be calm and kind of be a dick.

Sources

Fiorentino Finds Good Ways to Be Bad | Interviews | Roger Ebert. https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/fiorentino-finds-good-ways-to-be-bad

Michael Biehn on The Victim, William Friedkin, and his favorite antagonist role. https://www.avclub.com/michael-biehn-on-the-victim-william-friedkin-and-his-1798233922

Robert Rodriguez’s 1993 debut El Mariachi was filmed for only $7,000 and has a naive young musician being caught in a deadly case of mistaken identity. It made the director’s career and allowed him to expand the universe in two sequels, which are featured on this Arrow Video box set.

El Mariachi (1992): Made for $7,225,  the original goal for this movie was a Mexico home video release. Columbia Pictures liked the film and bought the American distribution rights, putting $200,000 into the budget to transfer the print to film, remix the sound, and market the film.

El Mariachi (Carlos Gallardo) has come to a border town to be a performer like his father. His guitar case holds, well, a guitar. The problem is that it gets confused with the guitar case full of gun carried by Azul (Reinol Martínez), who is coming to kill a drug lord named Moco (Peter Marquardt).

The guitar player has fallen for the gorgeous Dominó (Consuelo Gómez), a bartender and lover of Moco, who herself is in love with Azul. The multiple twists and identity issues will bring all of them together, ending in blood and bullets.

El Mariachi has been deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry, who said that it “helped usher in the independent movie boom of the early 1990s.” I love how they describe the way that Rodriguez was able to combine genres to create his movie, saying that it merged “the narcotraficante film, a Mexican police genre, and the transnational warrior-action film, itself rooted in Hollywood Westerns.”

It was only the start of the creator’s career.

Desperado (1995): Steve Buscemi tells the story of El Mariachi in a bar, about how a musician with a guitar case filled with guns was out for revenge before waking up the person he’s been telling everyone about. He has a target for revenge, Bucho (Joaquim de Almeida), who he blames for killing his lover.

Helped by a bookstore owner named Carolina (Salma Hayek), but is nearly killed by Navajas (Danny Trejos), a hitman sent by the Columbians who is soon accidentally killed by Bucho’s men. El Mariachi, in love with Carolina and wanting to protect her, calls in his friends Campa (original El Mariachi Carlos Gallardo) and Quino (Albert Michel Jr.), who kill most of Bucho’s henchmen before discovering that the drug dealer and El Mariachi are brothers.

He gives the dark hero a choice: he can live, if he allows the bad guy to kill his lover. Of course that’s not going to happen.

With small roles for Quentin Tarantino and Cheech Marin, this movie had critic Janet Maslin writing, “Overdependence on violence also marginalizes Desperado as a gun-slinging novelty item, instead of the broader effort toward which this talented young director might have aspired.” A lot of people were upset about the violence and thought it was keeping Rodriguez from being the success that he could be.

As for fans of action movies, they had found the perfect union of modern movies and Italian Western sensibilities in Rodriguez. He still did it on a budget — a thousand times what he spent the first time, but less than Hollywood usually spends — which led Banderas to say, “It was crazy. We did a movie with practically no money. We did a movie with $3 million. For an action movie, that’s practically nothing. There was a guy in the movie, a stunt guy, that I kill, like, nine times. I killed the guy with beard, without a beard, with a mustache, with blond hair, with glasses, without glasses. I mean, I think the guy who made the most money in the movie, was the stunt guy.”

Once Upon a Time In Mexico (2003): A lot has happened since the last movie. El Mariachi (Antonio Banderas) and his wife Carolina (Salma Hayek) had a battle against General Emiliano Marquez (Gerardo Vigil) that ended up with him eventually killing her and their daughter. Now, Marquez is working for drug boss Armando Barillo (Willem Dafoe) to kill the President of Mexico.

CIA officer Sheldon Jeffrey Sands (Johnny Depp) gets El Mariachi and FBI agent Jorge Ramirez (Rubén Blades), whose partner Archuleta was killed by Barillo, along with AFN operative Ajedrez (Eva Mendez) to stop the drug kingpin.

There’s also a plan to use Billy Chambers’ (Mickey Rourke) chihuahua to record Barillo, Danny Trejo as another henchman in a Rodriguez movie, El Mariachi’s friends Lorenzo (Enrique Iglesias) and Fideo (Marco Leonardi) coming to help, Sands having his eyes drilled out but still being a killing machine and Rodriguez making his version of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, which upset some as El Mariachi becomes a minor character in a movie most figured would make him the star.

Roger Ebert understood, as he said, “Like Leone’s movie, the Rodriguez epic is more interested in the moment, in great shots, in surprises and ironic reversals and closeups of sweaty faces, than in a coherent story.”

It’s a big mess, but I mean that in the greatest of ways. It’s also the first of many movies that Rodriguez shot digitally, which allowed him to do things on budget despite the challenges of trying to get so many FX shots and even not having real guns for the first two weeks of shooting.

The Arrow Video set includes high definition blu ray presentations of all three films and a 4K UHD version of Desperado. It has an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing by Carlos Aguilar and Nicholas Clement, reversible sleeves featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Paul Shipper, double sided posters featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Paul Shipper and a collectible poster featuring Robert Rodriguez’s original poster concept for El Mariachi.

El Mariachi has commentary and a new interview with Rodriguez; an interview with Carlos Gallardo; The Music of El Mariachi, a newly produced featurette on the music in the film, featuring interviews with composers Eric Guthrie, Chris Knudson, Alvaro Rodriguez and Marc Trujillo; Ten Minute Film School; Bedhead, a short from the director; the trailer and a TV commercials.

Desperado has commentary and a new interview with Rodriguez; Rodriguez; interviews with producer Bill Borden, stunt coordinator Steve Davison and special effects coordinator Bob Shelley; Game Changer, a newly filmed appreciation by filmmaker Gareth Evans (The Raid: Redemption); Ten More Minutes: Anatomy of a Shootout, an archive featurette narrated by Rodriguez; a textless opening and trailers.

Once Upon a Time In Mexico has commentary and a new interview with Rodriguez, an interview with visual effects editor Ethan Maniquis; deleted scenes; Ten Minute Flick School, Inside Troublemaker Studios, Ten Minute Cooking School, Film is Dead: An Evening with Robert Rodriguez, a presentation by the director given in 2003; features on the Mariachi’s arc and KNB FX and trailers.

You can get this from MVD.

I’ve put off watching this for years — 28 of them! — because I knew how it would impact me.

This is it. This is the end of Godzilla, as there’s no escape from death for any of us. The only question is whether it will come at the ends of the new and unstoppable kaiju Destroyah, which has come from the Oxygen Destroyer that has stopped Godzilla before, or from the fact that inside the creature’s heart, Godzilla has a nuclear reactor that is melting down.

The twenty-second film in the series and the seventh and final in the Heisei era, this is also the last movie for actress Momoko Kōchi, producer Tomoyuki Tanaka and composer Akira Ifukube.

So much of this is a callback to the first movie, starting with hearing the roar before the title.

Miki Saegusa (Megumi Odaka, who is in six of the Heisei era films) of the United Nations Godzilla Countermeasures Center (UNGCC) has been tracking Godzilla and Little Godzilla since SpaceGodzilla was destroyed. She finds out that a volcanically triggered uranium deposit has caused Godzilla to go into meltdown and when his temperature reaches 1,200 °C, he will explode and melt the Earth with him.

The UNGCC finds a college student named Kenkichi Yamane (Yasufumi Hayashi), the grandson of Dr. Kyohei Yamane, the inventor of the Oxygen Destroyer. They use the Super X III to cool Godzilla for as long as they can. At the same time, crustaceans mutated by the Oxygen Destroyer rise and start to kill people before joining into one kaiju form known as Destroyah.

Miki uses Little Godzilla to fight the monster in the hopes that Godzilla will save him and die a valiant death in battle before blowing up. Instead, the child-like Godzilla is killed by Destroyah’s Micro-Oxygen beam as the kaiju final boss enters its perfect form.

As the scientists try to stop Godzilla, it mutates into a meltdown form, looking as if its covered with lava. It tears Destroyah apart, who is stopped by the UNGCC from flying away. Then, the various weapons fire on Godzilla, who slowly melts away, leaving Tokyo irradiated for the rest of time. Or so we would believe, until it suddenly goes away and the smaller Godzilla is reborn as the new King of the Monsters, signifying a new era.

Ifukube, when composing this, said he wrote the final song “as if he were writing the theme to his own death.”

This would have been it for Godzilla, but Hollywood started making new movies and that’s how we got to where we are. Did this movie make me cry? Oh man, you know it. You can make fun of these dumb movies with their rubber suits, but if you grew up with Godzilla and had such a worship of him in your young years, seeing him as someone who could defend you when things were dark, then even in your old age, the close of this film is beyond emotional. You are watching a best friend die.

Congo will be available as part of Vinegar Syndrome’s Lost City of Black Friday sale. It will kick off at exactly 12:01 AM EST on Friday, November 29 and end at 11:59 PM EST on Monday, December 2 on Vinegar Syndrome’s site.

Frank Marshall is more known as a producer than a director. After all, he was in that role for movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Poltergeist, The Color Purple, Back to the Future and so many more films, but he didn’t direct until 1990’s Arachnophobia. He also helmed Alive and Eight Below, as well as this film. Again — he’s much better known as a producer, as he’s since executive produced the Jason Bourne and Jurassic Park films.

Speaking of Jurassic Park, a Michael Crichton novel also inspired this film, which had a long history before it finally played cinemas.

After the success of The First Great Train Robbery, Crichton wanted to write a movie for Sean Connery, as the character of Charles Munro, who he saw as an analog to Allan Quatermain. Ironically, that’s the character that Connery would play in his final screen role in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Crichton pitched the idea to producer Frank Yablans — the same guy who brought us The Fury, Mommie Dearest and Kidco — who liked the idea so much that he — without Crichton’s authorization thank you very much — sold the film rights to Twentieth Century Fox in 1979, a year before the book was published.

Once Crichton learned that he could not use a real gorilla to portray the character of Amy, he left the project. The film was offered to Steven Spielberg and John Carpenter before years later, Marshall came on board. That all came to pass because, during the making of Jurassic Park, Crichton was impressed with Stan Winston’s work. Producer Kathleen Kennedy suggested that Winston could make the apes for Congo, talked to her husband — yep, Frank Marshall — about the project and Yablans came back on board again.

However, the final film is only loosely based on the Crichton script, with John Patrick Shanley (Moonstruck) taking over the writing duties.

While testing a communications laser in the Congo, TraviCom employees Charles Travis (Bruce Campbell!) and Jeffrey Weems discover the ruins of a lost city. However, it looks like everyone dies as the company watches the exploration via satellite by Karen Ross (Laura Linney), a former CIA operative and also the former fiancee of Travis, whose dad R.B. (Joe Don Baker!) owns the company. Man, talk about run-on sentences.

There’s also primatologist Peter Elliott (Dylan Walsh), who has a mountain gorilla named Amy, who can speak via a special glove that translates sign language to audio. She’s been drawing jungles and intricate gems, which means that Peter thinks she should go back home to Africa. He funds that trip via Karen and TraviCom, as well as Romanian philanthropist Herkermer Homolka (Tim Curry).

They’re led by the greatest hunter of all time, Captain Monroe Kelly. You know what they always say: if you can’t get Sean Connery, get Ernie Hudson. Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje — Killer Kroc from Suicide Squad — shows up as Munro’s second-in-command Kahega. And hey — there’s Joe Pantoliano as another merc! And John Hawkes (Eastbound & Down) is also here, as well as Delroy Lindo and Kevin Grevioux from the Underworld movies.

Between native tribes, gorillas being used to guard diamond mines and Tim Curry getting killed by a pack of those gorillas — not to mention a subplot that has Dr. Elliot upset when Amy ends up getting rawdogged (rawaped?) by a silverback and leaving humanity for the jungle, this movie literally looks like studio notes on film. There’s everything for somebody, I guess. Curry and Hudson are having a blast, however. Hudson is almost in a totally different movie than anyone else and has called out Congo as the best time he ever had making a movie. It shows.

1990’s kids had Kenner on hand to help them recreate the story of the Lost City of Zinj with Congo action figures. You could grab Peter, Karen, Kahega, Peter and Amy for the good guys — well, I guess protagonists, maybe, but who wants to tell kids that they are protagonists versus good guys? And then for the apes, you have Blastface, Mangler, Zinj Apes and the deluxe Bonecrusher. There were also two vehicles, the Net Trap and Trail Hacker. They fit into the Kenner aesthetic, just like their RoboCop and Jurassic Park figures. Seriously, Kenner made figures for every movie it seemed like — they made Waterworld figures, after all!

Speaking of Jurassic Park, my feeling on this movie has been that everyone wanted to will another series of films much like Crichton’s novel into existence. This whole thing was vaporware, based on a story that the author never really finished made by people who didn’t have any real concern with the source material, which never really existed in the first place. Millions were dumped into it and it actually did pretty well — $152 million worldwide on a $50 million budget — but no one really remembers it.

All they do remember is that there was a scene where one of the Zinj gorillas uses a laser. That scene doesn’t exist in the movie, but that hasn’t stopped people from remembering it in a Mandela Effect moment.

The debut movie of Anthony Waller, who would go on to make An American Werewolf In Paris, Mute Witness is the story of Billy Hughes (Marina Zudina), a make-up artist working on a slasher movie in Moscow that is directed by Andy Clark (Evan Richards). She knows him, as he’s the boyfriend of her sister Karen (Fay Ripley).

What she does not know is that there’s also an adult movie being shot on the same set at night and it’s not just a pornographic film, it’s also a snuff movie.

She’s chased by the killer, Arkadi (Igor Volkov) and the director, Lyosha (Sergei Karlenkov), forcing her to jump out a window. Her sister arrives to save her and Lyosha acts like he happened on this accident.

After the police arrive, Billy is able to communicate that she’s seen a killing. They use her special effects to tell the authorities that it was all for a movie. Meanwhile, Arkadi is disposing of the woman’s body in an incinerator and a man known only as The Reaper (referred to as a special guest, we’ll get to that soon) shows up to make sure everything has proceeded properly.

Luckily for Billy, she’s protected by Detective Aleksander Larsen (Oleg Yankovsky), a Moscow cop who has been after this snuff film crew. Not that Billy can’t protect herself, as she throws a hairdryer into a bathtub to take out the director. But can Larsen be trusted? And why does The reaper think she has a disk that has all the information the police need to stop him?

Roger Ebert compared this movie to Halloween and Blood Simple. That’s how good it is. I wish it’s director didn’t get stuck with such a bad movie to make once he got to Hollywood.

As for The Reaper, that’s Alec Guinness. His cameo was filmed nearly a decade before this movie, as Waller worked with him on a commercial. The actor asked for no money, which ended up being one of his final roles. All that he asked was that he not be credited in the film and there be no press surrounding his involvement in it. That’s why The Reaper is played by Mystery Guest Star.

The Arrow Video 4K UHD release of this movie has a 4K restoration approved by director Anthony Waller, who also has a commentary track. There’s a second commentary with production designer Matthias Kammermeier and composer Wilbert Hirsch, moderated by critic Lee Gambin. Plus, there’s visual essays by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Chris Alexander; the Snuff Movie presentation used to get investors; original location scouting footage; original footage with Alec Guinness, filmed a decade earlier than the rest of the movie; a teaser trailer; a trailer; an image gallery; a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Adam Rabalais; a double-sided fold-out poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Adam Rabalais and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Michelle Kisner.

You can order this from MVD.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Did you know that Visual Vengeance has a ton of movies on Tubi? It’s true. Check out this Letterboxd list and look for reviews as new movies get added. You can find this movie on Tubi.

Shot on Super 8, this film tells the story of how PR exec Jim Matthews (David Rommel) tries to leave his wife, genetic designer Meredith Weaver (Anna Zizzo) for his secretary Jenny Dole (Joan Dinco). His wife doses him with her latest experiment, which causes his extremities that start thinking on their own and destroying his mind. Yes, his hands, his arms, his legs, even his cock all can move away from his body to kill and feed, kind of like a demented version of the Myron Fass Captain Marvel that split. into different parts.

Directed and written by Tom Berna (his only film, however he has acted and provided special effects for several others), Colony Mutation has great acting from Rommel and the relationship between Meredith and her sister Suzanne (Susan L. Cane) feels authentic. How strange that a body horror film is mostly about the human emotions of a marriage being destroyed and a woman falling in love with a man who is already taken.

That said, it’s as dark as dark gets and the special effects are the result of the beyond microbudget. But who cares when the idea is this good? Where else would you get a movie with a killer penis and a man who no longer can control his body because he couldn’t control his body? Milwaukee, Wisconsin was far from Hollywood and films made like this are the last bastion of what regional filmmaking was, grimy and rough blasts of unreality that infect our brains.