Arlene Sanford, who would go on to win two Emmys for directing Ally McBeal and Boston Legal, takes over directing chores from Betty Thomas but everything else is pretty much the same in the second Brady film. And that’s absolutely fine — this one is more of the same humor as the first with even more meta content.
This time around, Carol’s first husband Roy Martin (Tim Matheson) shows up and totally flips the family all around. It’s all because of the Brady’s horse statue, which ends up being worth $20 million dollars to a famous art collector (played by John Hillerman from Magnum P.I.). That same horse shows up in the movie Bell, Book and Candle.
The George Glass plot from the show is used but a whole new romance rears its head: Marcia and Greg realize that since they’re not blood relations that these strange feelings they’re feeling may mean something.
The best part of this entire film is the reveal that Hillerman’s character’s son was Gilligan and that Carol’s first husband was the Professor. The even bigger reveal that Mike’s first wife was Genie ends the film.
Florence Henderson wasn’t pleased that no cameos where allowed in this film and found it mean-spirited. I personally laughed throughout the film and found it a pleasant tribute to the show.
If you had HBO (Hey, Beastmaster’s On) or TBS (The Beastmaster Station) in the 1990’s, then you’re probably excited to read this. The Beastmaster series of three films ran pretty much non-stop on those channels, even if the first movie wasn’t a success.
Just like Phantasm, Beastmaster came from the mind of Don Coscarelli. While he was only involved with the first movie, he set up the character of Dar (Marc Singer). Well, when I say came from the mind, Coscarelli loosely based his original story off of the novel The Beast Master by Andre Norton. In her book, the hero is a Navajo named Hosteen Storm and the story takes place in the future. Unhappy with the changes from page to screen, Norton asked for her name to be removed from the film’s credits.
The Beastmaster (1982)
Welcome to Aruk, where the prophecy of a witch reveals that the evil priest Maax (Rip Torn!) reveals that the son of King Zed (Rod Loomis, who was Freud in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure) will eventually kill him. Although Zed exiles the villain, one of Maax’s witches transfers the baby who will become Dar the Beastmaster from his mother’s womb into a cow’s. Yes, I just wrote that. I’m still amazed that this happens.
Dar is rescued by a villager who raises him as her own son inthe village of Emur. This being a sword and sorcery movie, that whole town is destroyed by the Juns, barbarians under Maax’s command. Of course, Dar has been taught since childhood to fight and telepathically communicate with animals. As you do, you know?
Dar eventually puts together his animal familiar army of Sharak the eagle, Kodo and Podo the ferrets and a black tiger named Ruh. He also teams up with Kiri (Tanya Roberts), a slave girl, and even spends time wander amongst a half-bird, half-human race who let him go when they realize that he can speak to an eagle.
What follows are battles with Maax, an appearance by Good Times star John Amos, ferrets bravely sacrificing themselves, baby ferrets being born, Dar learning of his royal blood and birdmen battling barbarians.
Coscarelli didn’t have a good time making this, as he fought with the producers over editing and casting, such as his choice of Demi Moore over Tanya Roberts. Even sadder, Klaus Kinski was the original choice to play Maax!
Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time (1991)
Sylvio Tabet produced the original Beastmaster film, as well as Evilspeakand Fade to Black. This is the one and only film that he ever directed.
This time around, Dar learns that he has a half-brother named Arkon (the amazing Wings Hauser) who is working alongside Lyranna (Sarah Douglas, who was Queen Taramis in Conan the Destroyer and Ursa in the Superman movies) to take over, well, everything. They are almost captured by our hero until they create a portal that brings them to modern day Los Angeles.
Dar, Ruh, Kodo and Sharak follow and battle them over a neutron bomb. Obviouslt, Arklon has seen Ator 2: The Blade Master. Luckily, our hero gets to work alongside rich girl Jackie Trent (Kari Wuhrer) and Lieutenant Coberly (James Avery from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, continuing the lineage of black friends of the Beastmaster coming from sitcoms). Robert Z’Dar also shows up, which is always nice.
Jim Wynorski (Sorceress, Chopping Mall) was originally going to direct and wrote a screenplay before Tabet decided to direct. Luckily for Wynorski, he lawyered up and got to keep his name on the movie and make some money.
This movie completely ignores that Kodo died. And Dar’s mark of the beast switches hands from the last movie. Basically, if you’re into continuity, perhaps the Beastmaster movies aren’t for you.
Beastmaster III: The Eye of Braxus (1996)
Dar is back one more time, this time trying to rescue his brother, King Tal (finally grown up but now played by Casper Van Dien from Starship Troopers). He’s joined by Tal’s bodyguard Seth (no longer John Amos, but now Tony Todd, which make me audibly shout at 3 AM and wake up my entire house), a warrior woman named Shada (Sandra Hess, Mortal Kombat Annihilation), an acrobat named Bey and Seth’s ex-girlfriend, a sorceress named Morgana (Lesley Anne-Down of all people!).
They’re battling the slumming David Warner as Lord Agon, who has been sacrificing youngsters to shave years off his life. You know, the older I get, the more this seems like a great idea, because most kids I meet today are clueless. He’s also trying to release the dark god Braxus, who looks like a human dinosaur.
This one’s directed by Gabrielle Beaumont, whose was also behind the movie The Godsend and the Jamie Lee Curtis-starring TV movie about Dorothy Stratten, Death of a Centerfold. It was written David Wise, who was one of the main writers on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, so that may account for this one being the most family-friendly of the three films.
Three years after this movie, a syndicated series called Beastmaster lasted for three seasons and 66 episodes. It changes Dar’s story a bit and features Daniel Goddard instead of Marc Singer.
Amazingly, none of the Beastmaster films are available on blu ray in the U.S., although the Australian based Umbrella did release the first film in June of 2018. The disk claims it’s region B, but I’ve heard that it works on American blu ray players.
If you’re looking for allthreefilms, VHSPS has them available on their site, transferred directly from video store copies.
BONUS: Listen to Becca and I discuss the second Beastmaster movie, one of her favorites ever, on our podcast:
Adapting Stephen King isn’t always easy. There are folks that have done it well and others that have really done a horrible job. Few folks get multiple chances, but one of them is Tom Holland (Fright Night, Child’s Play, Psycho 2), who made this and The Langoliers.
Unlike most movies, there is not a single person that you’ll truly like or get behind here. It’s a mean-spirited tale about some mean-spirited people. It’s a lot like life, I guess. And yes, I realize that this is a Richard Bachman book, but just about everyone knows that that is really King by now (see our review of The Running Man for more).
Billy Halleck (Robert John Burke, who took over the role of RoboCop in the third installment) plays a corpulent lawyer who defends just about anyone, including Richie “The Hammer” Ginelli (Joe Mantegna, Joey Zaza himself). There’s a ton of practical appliance makeup here to transform Burke into the various stages of Halleck’s weight loss.
After celebrating getting the mobster acquitted in his case, he rides home with his wife Heidi (Lucinda Jenney, The Mothman Prophecies). She chides him for eating so much and says that he should be obsessed with better things, like sex. As she goes down on him while he drives, he slams directly into an elderly gypsy woman.
Billy knows how to play the system, with the police lying on the stand for him and Judge Rossington taking care of his case. Long story short, he isn’t punished.
As he leaves the courtroom, the 106-year-old gypsy patriarch, Tadzu Lempke (Michael Constantine, who also played Windex-loving Kostas “Gus” Portokalos in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which is kind of ironic) touches his face and says, “Thinner.” Soon, he’s losing so much weight that he needs all new clothes.
Fearing he has cancer, his wife sends him to Dr. Houston. Billy hates Houston, as he’s convinced his wife is having an affair with him. They — and a later clinic — can find no scientific reason why he’s losing the weight.
He’s not the only one dealing with a curse. Judge Cary was cursed with the word “lizard” and he’s now turning into one. And the police chief who lied on the stand is becoming a leper.
Billy tries to get the gypsies to remove his curse, but they only increase it. And Galina (Kari Wuhrer from TV’s Remote Control), Lempke’s great-granddaughter, shoots him through the hand with a slingshot. He vows that he will bring the white man’s curse down on all of them.
This instigates a war between the mob forces that Billy has defended and the gypsies, with dogs poisoned, men killed, fake acid thrown in faces, kidnappings and more.
Yet Billy can barely even walk, as the curse has reached its final stages. In an attempt to end the violence, Lempke agrees to remove it and mixes Billy’s blood into a strawberry pie that he must get someone else to eat, as the curse must be transferred. Billy takes the pie to his wife, who eats a slice and dies a husk of a person. But he ignored the old man’s warnings, as he wanted Billy to just eat it himself so he could die clean. Now, Billy’s daughter has also had some, so he’s doomed her. But at least he gets to take out the doctor he hates by offering him a slice.
The producers must have really been hell for writer-director Holland, as they made him do ten rewriters of the script before they agreed to let him start filming. They also convinced him to change the original ending from the book, where Billy just eats a slice himself once he realizes he doomed his daughter.
But that’s not all. Amazingly, Holland was stricken with Bells-Palsy during the filming of this movie. The effects would have been minimized if he’d gotten a steroid immediately, but the producers made him keep working. It took a year and a half for him to recover and his career suffered as a result.
This is a quick moving, down and dirty film. It’s a perfect Sunday afternoon cable film — do people still do that? I do.
If you have the CBS All Access app, you can watch Thinner online. Otherwise, it’s available on nearly every platform and is an easy DVD to find.
How does Jason discover his hockey mask? When does Freddy find his glove? And how soon can we get a cadaver dressed up as the personification of the American government? He stole it from Shelly Finkelstein. He made it himself in his boiler room. And around 39 minutes of so, give or take, in 1996’s Uncle Sam.
Directed by William Lustig (Maniac and the three Maniac Cop films) from a Larry Cohen script (It’s Alive, The Stuff, God Told Me To and around ten more movies on our shelves), this slasher film concerns itself with a soldier killed by friendly fire in Kuwait. Upon inspecting the damage, a commanding officer concludes that they should hush it up, at which point Master Sergeant Sam Harper rises from the dead to kill everyone.
Sam’s body is finally shipped home to his family — wife Louise, sister Sally and her son Jody, who worships the fallen soldier. He also has a great GI Joe collection which has stayed in great shape for 12 years or so, a testament to teenagers. My thought — he is actually playing with Sam’s old war toys as he dreams of joining him in the army one day. Sam’s commanding officer, Sergeant Twining even gives him Sam’s old medals.
During the funeral, Jody meets Sergeant Jed Crowley (Isaac Hayes, the singer of the Shaft theme, Chef from South Park and now dead Scientologist), who informs him that war is bad and that he should have never given Sam the idea to join the Army. Jody makes a big scene at the funeral and gets grounded from the fireworks the next day. Guess what? Fireworks suck. They’ve been the exact same since I was a child and fireworks technology has not advanced in forty years. You are missing nothing, Jody. Stay in your room and play with GI Joe’s like I still do at 44 years of age.
To celebrate the birth of our nation, Sam of course rises from the dead. First stop? Take his old commendations back. In a scene that makes little to no sense, the undead vet pins all of his medals to his zombie-like chest. Why wouldn’t he wear them on the front of his uniform? Why hide them? It’s gross, sure, and we like gross, but it also just seems thrown in there. Take note — this won’t be the last time that something ridiculous happens.
He then goes on a spree of patriotic butchery, including killing a stilt walking peeper pervert Uncle Sam (yes, this actually happens), burying alive two juvenile delinquents who burn a flag and desecrate the graves of veterans, cutting the head off the third of their gang who dares to scream the National Anthem, hacks a teacher’s face (Timothy Bottoms, who deserves better, because he was so awesome in Johnny Got His Gun and he’s the only actor to portray George W. Bush in three different movies or TV shows — That’s My Bush!, Crocodile Hunter the Movie and DC 9/11 and oh, while I have this run on sentence running, how about The Last Picture Show), shoots Sally’s lawyer boyfriend in the head and befriends a scarred up teen in a wheelchair who was hurt by fireworks.
Hold on — where the fuck did this subplot come from? Yep, everything that the Barry character does could have been Jody, but you know, how else would we be able to shoehorn P.J. Soles (Halloween, Rock & Roll High School, Carrie) into this film? Anyways, the party for the Fourth keeps going as Sam keeps right on killing, like blowing up a congressman with fireworks (Robert Forster from Jackie Brown) and impaling Louise’s boyfriend.
Here comes the big reveal — Sam wasn’t a hero, but an alcoholic maniac who physically and sexually abused his sister and wife, only joining the military to get a “free pass” as he loved hurting people — like the sergeant who dropped off his body, which is now in his coffin.
Jody and Barry join forces with Jed to take on Sam, who can’t be hurt by gunfire. That said — a cannon surely does the job. Cut to the next day and Jody burns all of his war toys and the screen shatters like glass in tribute to Lucio Fulci’s City of the Living Dead (a “For Lucio” title follows directly after).
Let’s face facts. Uncle Sam isn’t very good. And unlike two of the examples I listed at the start, this film does nothing to set up why Sam has risen from the dead, what keeps him alive and what his motivations are. I’m not expecting to need to know everything, but this film just barrels along from set piece to set piece without ever giving us a real reason to care. It also feels like a movie from 1985, yet it was made over a decade later.
That’s infuriating because the concept of a soldier returning from his grave to destroy unpatriotic folks and people who are taking advantage of our country is ripe for reinvention. This could be the perfect film for the era of stolen valor and Trump. It’s also mind-blowing that Blue Underground put out a blu ray of this complete with all the expected bells and whistles!
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