Tag Archives: 1998

VISUAL VENGEANCE BLU-RAY RELEASE: Vampire Time Travelers (1998)/I Know What You Did in English Class (2000)

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I’ve never seen any of the movies that director and writer Les Sekely has made like Night of the Living Date, The Not-So-Grim Reaper and The Alien Conspiracy: Grey Skies, but I have seen this and I totally am hunting for the rest.

This movie feels less like a narrative movie and more like someone made a Dark Brothers or Rinse Dream adult movie mainstream, giving it constant blasts of words and images and a ghost man in a closet and vampires who can move through the timestream and random muscicvideo sequences where people are encouraged to “Bite Her In the Butt.”

Most of the other reviews I’ve read for this film are either beyond angry that they endured it, wondering whether or not the humor was intentional or not, or nearly shut it off but stuck with it and still aren’t sure what they have seen.

As you can imagine, these are the movies that obsess me.

Natalie is a vampire who was killed by Buffy — yes, this is intended to be a reference — which has her call to her sister Lorelei (Jillien Weisz) from beyond the grave and demand revenge by killing Buffy’s sister Sue Anne Marie (J.J. Rodgers) and her fellow pledges to the Alpha Omega sorority. One of them is a talented guitar player — she can play “Eruption” seemingly without fingertapping and sleeps with her axe — who has The Man Who Never Calls Back (the director!) on speed dial, hoping to sign to his label and escape college. Another is a nerdy girl named Jenna (Micky Levy). There’s also another who is impossibly tall.

There’s also a Hooded Man who gets some kids to go to the Old Crenshaw Place, where Lorelei has been trapped in a coffin for five years. They’re promised porn magazines and instead of looking in the woods like every other kid in the 80s and 90s did, they find a coffin and a vampire who comes back but isn’t strong enough to bite necks any longer so she must “Bite Her In the Butt.”

Like I said, some folks are going to watch this and see the budget and that it doesn’t look like movies do today — come on, people — and dismiss it. For others, they will savor moments like when a vampire goes up in flames and says the last line from Ms. 45. “Sister!”

I found an interview with Sekely online about this movie and it notes that he also composed the movie for this and considered it his baby. Of the film, he said, “Vampire Time Travelers, in one word, is … fun. A little scary, mostly campy, and even slightly sexy … fun. (We didn’t have the budget to be serious). It’s Woody Allen meets Stephen King … meets MTV. To sum it up … You know when you have a dream, it’s a bunch of strange scenes and events, one after another, that are not connected. Well, Vampire Time Travelers is a lot like that … except the events are connected. Basically … go with it!”

I Know What You Did in English Class (2000): Directed and written by Les Sekely (Vampire Time Travelers), this is similar to that film and this quote that I used to describe that one is even more accurate: “This movie feels less like a narrative movie and more like someone made a Dark Brothers or Rinse Dream adult movie mainstream, giving it constant blasts of words and images…” If I say Party Doll-A-Go-Go and you get it, you’re a pervert, and we should be friends, and you’ll know exactly what kind of strange editing and barrage of sound effects and dumb jokes that entails.

Years ago, students destroyed the life of their teacher. Most of them got over it, but only one still feels some empathy and wonders what happened to her, perhaps because his girlfriend is also a teacher. Yes, you now get that this is not a rip-off of I Know What You Did Last Summer, except for being close to the title.

I can see that as a movie that would anger many viewers, as it doesn’t even let up with being silly, even when it’s trying to be heartfelt. The sound effects, if anything, get louder and more repetitive, kind of like Max Headroom repeating himself. It was something in the way 90s and 00s movies could be edited and doesn’t seem to have survived until today. Yet here’s this film, rescued by Visual Vengeance, a little shot in Lakewood, OH effort about demons, classroom hijinks and the regret of growing up, mixed with male gaze rear-end shots and a Troma-like sensibility without nudity. I haven’t seen many movies like it, so you should try it at least.

Extras include commentary with director Les Sekely; interviews with Sekely, JJ Rodgers, Angelia Scott interview, Director of Photography Dennis Devine and Assistant Director Steve Jarvis; Not So Grim Reaper short; Visual Vengeance trailers; a “Stick Your Own” VHS sticker set;  I Know What You Did In English Class with commentary by director Les Sekely; a reversible sleeve featuring new I Know What You Did In English Class art and a folded mini-poster. You can get this from MVD.

APRIL MOVIE THON DAY 1: Ernest In the Army (1998)

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April 1: Fool Me! — Share a foolish film for the holiday.

In the ninth and final film in the Ernest series, this time, we find our hero, Ernest P. Worrell (Jim Varney), wanting to drive a big rig and somehow enlisting in the Army reserves. It’s a big leap from being the golf ball collector to being part of a UN force in the fictional Middle Eastern country of Karifistan, a place in danger of being invaded by Islamic madman Tufuti of Arisia (Ivan Lucas).

Yes, even when I try to escape the news, the war in the Middle East comes back all over again, and now, Ernest is battling infidels.

Ernest has already engaged United Nations peacekeeping commander Pierre Gullet (David Muller), so when things go bad — when Ernest gets into the shit, like they said in ‘Nam — our hero must break into a prison camp called Sector 32 and finally drive that big truck, this one with a Pluton missile. Also: Gullet is the bad guy, selling out the world to a bad guy who seems just like Dr. Klaw on Inspector Gadget.

Varney still did commercials as Ernest P. Worrell up until 1999, but he was suffering from cancer while making this. As for creator/director/writer John R. Cherry III, he had planned for Varney to star in a non-Ernest comedy film, but Varney had gotten so sick while shooting the movie that Cherry couldn’t bring himself to finish it. When Varney died two years later, he retired. Also, my Vietnam joke a paragraph or so ago? Yeah, Cherry served in Vietnam and used Ernest Productions to create a new life for himself. He felt this film was his most personal, and now I feel like a jerk for writing that.

This film and the previous movie, Ernest Goes to Africa (1997), were shot back-to-back in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa. It was called Stormin’ Ernest then, and that title shows up in the credits.

This is… look, Ernest turns out to be the long-awaited messiah foretold in a Middle Eastern prophecy. I don’t know how this happened or was filmed, but there you go.

You can watch this on Tubi.

SRS BLU RAY RELEASE: Truth or Dare? Legacy (1986, 1994, 1998, 2011)

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Originally released in 1986, Truth or Dare: A Critical Madness has become a cult horror classic. This low-budget film, shot on 16mm, still resonates with fans of 1980s horror. It gained renewed attention when Elijah Wood called it his all-time favorite horror movie.

Truth or Dare remains one of the first direct-to-video, and it’s high time someone — like SRS — put them all out in one set.

Truth or Dare: A Critical Madness (1986): In the 1985 horror anthology, Tim Ritter created a short called “Truth or Dare” in the movie Twisted Illusions. A year later, he’d expand that story into this slasher.

While most 18-year-olds were worrying about prom, Tim Ritter was in Palm Beach County orchestrating a bloodbath. Despite the SO aesthetic common to the era, shooting on 16mm gave it a slightly more cinematic, if not grimy, texture.

The drama behind the scenes was as chaotic as the film itself. The creative differences”between Ritter and producer Yale Wilson led to Ritter being locked out of the editing room and taken off the credits. Wilson’s cut was the one that hit the shelves of mom-and-pop video stores, leading to a long-standing rift that Ritter finally resolved in later “Director’s Cuts.”

Mike Strauber (John Brace) finds his wife Sharon in bed with his best friend Jerry, and poor Mike has the kind of mental breakdown that inevitably turns one into a slasher villain. 

The hitchhiker sequence is the film’s first true water-cooler moment, as if anyone works in a real office anymore or would discuss SOV murders at said water cooler. As Mike drives, he hallucinates a passenger who goads him into a self-mutilating game of Truth or Dare. The practical effects here, with Mike slicing into his own arms and chest with a razor blade, are uncomfortably tactile. When the camera reveals the passenger seat is empty, we realize we aren’t watching a standard slasher; we’re watching a breakdown.

A year later, Mike gets released from the Sunnyville Mental Institution. Blame budget cuts. Blame too many patients. Blame the fact that Mike is both crazy and smart. His good behavior is noticed, and the first thing he does when he gets out is kill Jerry and then go after his ex-wife. When he’s wounded in this murder attempt, he goes back to Sunnyville and is soon back to hallucinating disfigured patients telling him to destroy his face and wear a mask. After one of the attendants is dumb enough to taunt Mike with a photo of his ex-wife, he stabs the orderly with a pencil to the eye, Fulci-style and finds a cache of weapons, because that’s exactly what is sitting around a mental hospital.

At this point, Mike just goes wild, committing crimes such as hitting a stroller with his car — the baby launches high in the air — and then going back to roll over the mother; machine gunning an entire bench full of senior citizens; doing a drive-by chainsawing of a Little League player, and finally trying to kill his wife all over again. Oh, Mike, they’re just going to put you back in Sunnyville.

Ridiculous in all ways and therefore worth watching. I also believe that Rob Zombie completely stole the papier-mâché first mask Michael wears in his remake from this movie.

Truth or Dare: Wicked Games (1994): You can kind of sort of consider this the sequel to Tim Ritter’s Truth or Dare, even if it has none of the same characters, except that Gary (Kevin Scott Crawford) is the cousin of that first movie’s Mike. He’s having a lot of the same issues that that guy once did as he comes home to catch his wife riding another man. Now, a copper masked killer is running around and Gary’s friend Dan (Joel D. Wynkoop) starts to think that his buddy is that slasher.

We’re back to Sunnyville Mental Hospital, where Dr. Seidow (co-writer Kermit Christman) and it turns out that there may be more than one killer. Spoiler, there totally is or maybe this is all in Mike’s head and he’s been thinking of killing again. Dan is into kinky sex, Dr. Seidow is a maniac obsessed with one of his patients who likes to burn herself with cigarettes and all three — four — of them hate women.

The opening is a deliberate echo of the first film, the ultimate déjà vu of domestic betrayal. However, Gary’s reaction is less of a silent break and more of a loud, messy implosion. It sets the tone for a movie that isn’t just about a killer, but about a community of broken, predatory men.

It’s also the only film I’ve ever seen where a slasher takes a moment to take a bite of a sandwich while chasing his victim. It also has someone get killed with a sprinkler. By that, I’m saying they get a sprinkler jammed right through them.

Replacing the papier-mâché with a copper mask gives the killer a more urban legend feel. It’s cold, reflective and fits the 90s direct-to-video aesthetic while maintaining that homemade creepiness that makes these movies feel like they were found in a basement.

There’s another somewhat sequel to Truth or Dare, Writer’s Block, but that movie doesn’t have insane genius — I say that in the nicest of ways, trust me — of Tim Ritter, who imbues this with plenty of ridiculous energy. Is it central Florida giallo? Nearly.

Screaming for Sanity: Truth or Dare 3 (1998): In the years since Mike Strauber first put on the mask, a whole universe has started to swirl amongst him, like the man who treated him, Dr. Dan Hess (Joel D. Wynkoop), who also hates Mike; Clive Stanley (Ken Blanck), who was a victim of Strauber’s murder spree and lost his wife and child when they were run over in the first film; the man treating him, Dr. Reznor (Maurice Mayberry Jr.) and Ken Kregg (Franklin E. Wales), who is selling merchandise related to the killings.

In the original 1986 film, Clive was just a background casualty of Mike’s nihilism, the man who lost his wife and child in the infamous stroller/car sequence. Clive isn’t just a survivor; he’s a man whose soul was deleted by Mike Strauber. His habit of slicing himself open isn’t just a callback to Mike’s razor-blade game; it’s a physical manifestation of his Survivor’s Guilt. He is literally carving Mike’s legacy into his own skin.

Oh yeah, the copper mask is back and worn by people who dream of being Mike or want to have sex with him. Plus, Dr. Hess is also being stalked, and his wife even gets nailed to a wall. Having Joel D. Wynkoop return, this time as Dr. Dan, creates a delicious bit of casting confusion for Ritter fans. Is he the same Dan from Wicked Games? In the Ritter-verse, the faces remain the same even as the roles shift.

Hess represents the medical establishment that failed to contain Mike. His hatred for Strauber isn’t just professional; it’s visceral. Watching his life get dismantled, specifically the brutal imagery of his wife nailed, proves that in the Truth or Dare cinematic universe, being near Mike Strauber is a death sentence for your loved ones.

Directed by Ritter, who wrote it with Ron Bonk and Kevin J. Lindenmuth, this is the Truth or Dare? sequel I always wanted. This is totally for continuity nerds, where a supporting character becomes the lead.

By ending on a cliffhanger, Ritter essentially promises that the critical madness is an infinite loop. It’s not about Mike the man anymore; it’s about Mike the Idea.

And hey — footage from the first movie comes back! This then sets up the next film, which I appreciate.

Deadly Dares: Truth or Dare Part IV (2011): Tim Ritter updates the franchise’s core theme: the dangerous intersection of fragile male egos and deadly games. In 1986, Mike Strauber was driven mad by a private game; in 2011, Tuner Downing (Casey Miracle) is driven mad by a public one.

Directed by Ritter (who wrote the script) and Joel D. Wynkoop, this follows the theme of all these films: women break men when they dump them, games of truth or dare can quickly turn deadly, and lots of people will be killed. Rose (Heather Price) Tuner’s girlfriend left him because he wouldn’t get naked for a dare video. This leads Tuner to DareTube.com, which acts like the Ice Bucket Challenge, except the dares get as wacky as you’d hope.

This entry ditches the 16mm grain and the 90s camcorder fuzz for a sharp, sterile digital look. It makes the violence feel more real and less cinematic, mimicking the actual videos found on the dark corners of the internet.

Tuner’s friend Axel (Billy W. Blackwell) and his perhaps new girl, Dara (Jessica Cameron), grab a video camera and head out to record dares, while Tuner paints his face copper. As those dares get more intense, Tuner breaks into the mental hospital where Strauber has been kept, only for it to end up being Rose, who was trying to see if he’d do the ultimate dare to prove his love. She stabs him, he dies…

Turning the final girl into the villain is a sharp subversion. When Rose reveals that the breakout was a test. It reframes the entire franchise. It suggests that the women in this universe aren’t just victims; they are the architects of the games that destroy the men.

The final revelation that the entire movie — the breakout, the murders, the betrayal — has all been a dying hallucination as Tuner kills himself is the ultimate “Ritter” ending. It’s a return to the psychological roots of the original. Mike Strauber’s legacy isn’t a body count; it’s a mental illness that convinces you to destroy yourself.

I Dared You!: Truth or Dare Part V (2017): Directed by Tim Ritter and Scott Tepperman, this centers on a man named Dax (Tepperman) has gone insane after a past attack by Mike Strauber. Since then, he’s grown angry not just at his attacker, but with the man who let him go, Dr. Dan Hess (Joel D. Wynkoop), who is now a private detective.

Before we get to that. we see Dax in a video store, where he finds a copy of the original movie. A woman grows angry at him and chases him from the store, as he steals a porn magazine. As he reads it in the woods, he is attacked by Strauber, becoming one of the victims of the infamous chainsaw car attack from all the way back in 1986.

Now, Chainsaw Dax wears a half-mask, much like the man who ruined his face. He starts killing — and playing truth or dare — while Hess searches for people using the DareTube.com site, which has been up for a few years, so they must have good SEO.

The man who treated Dax, Dr. Desmond Hall (Jim O’Rear) was really setting this all up, putting Dax on the path to murder, setting him up with Sara (Trish Erickson-Martin) and putting him after Hess, all because that man stole his woman. So Dax goes and records Hess having sex with Linda (Ashley Lynn Caputo) and posts it on the internet, which in no way seems as godo of a revenge as killing someone. Linda gets kidnapped and Hess has to do a series of dares, like taking heroin which is just a bunch of video effects, to save his wife.

After cutting off his own finger, robbing a bank, hitting a cross-dressing Dr. Hall with an axe and jaming a syringe into Dax’s eyeball, Hess finds his wife and walks away.

Seeing Dax find a physical copy of the original Truth or Dare creates a movie-within-a-movie loop. It suggests that in this universe, Mike Strauber’s crimes were so infamous they were turned into the very exploitation films we are watching. By the time Hess walks away, the franchise has come full circle. It started with a man losing his mind over a cheating wife and ends with a man losing his finger (and his dignity) to save one.

Extras on this SRS blu-ray release include all new commentary tracks, short films, trailers, photo galleries, interviews, making ofs, behind the scenes footage and more. You can get this from MVD.

Planet Manson (1998)

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You know the style of Rinse Dream and the Dark Brothers? What if they did that, but there was no penetration? Well, I think it would be close to this movie. Well, there is a blowjob, so give them that much.

A note to the non-perverts: I’m referring to the neon-lit, 35 mm grindhouse-on-video adult vibe that was big at one point in the late 80s and early 90s. See Party Doll-A-Go-Go, Cafe Flesh, New Wave Hookers or Nightdreams (which is nearly too fancy to fit in).

Directed by Jacques Boyreau and filmed at the Werepad artspace in San Francisco, this features numerous characters pitching ideas for exploitation movies to a producer with skeleton hands, which I would like to think is a tribute to Death Bed: The Bed That Eats. The club has a 60s look, people do kung fu like Dolemite, and there’s just a lot of talking. There was a time when I’d have to search all over for a VHS of this. Now, I just got online.

It was probably more fun to be there than it was to watch.

You can watch this on YouTube.

MVD REWIND COLLECTION 4K UHD RELEASE: Knock Off (1998)

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For all the amazing Hong Kong movies Tsui Hark made, he only has two Western films to his credit. Both star Jean-Claude Van Damme, but only one co-stars Rob Schneider. This would be that movie. It also features fight choreography and second unit direction from Sammo Hung, but many of his longer battles were cut from the film that was finally released. This movie almost had Jet Li in it, but he decided to make Lethal Weapon 4 instead.

Marcus Ray (Van Damme) and Tommy Hendricks (Rob Schneider) own V Six Jeans and are about to be busted for selling knock offs of their own product by Karen Leigh (Lela Rochon, Waiting to Exhale) who is not only their boss, but also a CIA agent out to ferret out the spy within the company. There’s yet another CIA agent named Harry Johannson (Paul Sorvino!) who is really a double agent for terrorists and the Russian mob. And to top all that off, Tommy is CIA too.

It turns out that the knock off jeans and some baby dolls are laden with nanobombs. Go with me here: they were made by former KGB agents who now work with terrorists who are using the Russian mob to get them on the black market all so that they can extort $100 billion dollars from the world’s governments. Who you gonna call? The copy guy and Van Damme, that’s who.

Knock Off is totally ridiculous, but you kind of know what to expect going into it. Van Damme as a fashion magnate? Sure, why not? At least he doesn’t get crucified on a ship or have an old guy stretch him out in this one.

The MVD 4K UHD release of this film has extras like an archival audio commentary by action cinema experts Mike Leeder and Arne Venema; a collectible 4K LaserVision mini-poster and reversible cover art. There are also interviews with Steven E. de Souza and Moshe Diamant; a trailer and a making of. You can get it from MVD.

ARROW 4K UHD RELEASE: Lost In Space (1998)

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The lineage of this story is a rabbit hole of adaptation. While the 1965–1968 CBS series is the primary source, it was essentially a “cover version” of Gold Key Comics’ Space Family Robinson, which itself was a futuristic riff on the 1812 novel The Swiss Family Robinson. By the time director Stephen Hopkins (Predator 2) got his hands on it, the property was ready for a heavy dose of 90s techno-futurism.

By 2058 — and this movie is optimsitic — Earth is too polluted to live on. The United Global Space Force sends Professor John Robinson (William Hurt), wife Maureen (Mimi Rogers) and children Judy (Heather Graham), Penny (Lacey Chabert) and Will (Jack Johnson) on the spaceship Jupiter II with the mission of completing the hypergate launch to Alpha Prime, a planet that humans can live on. Flying them there will be Major Don West (Matt LeBlanc).

Unknown to them, the mutant terrorist group Global Sedition has already killed their original pilot and co-opted their ship’s doctor, Doctor Zachary Smith (Gary Oldman). Before long, they get trapped in a time vortex with future versions of everyone, including a spider version of Smith. Maybe Professor Robinson shouldn’t have ignroed all of Will’s time travel theories.

Original cast members Mark Goddard, June Lockhart, Marta Kristen and Angela Cartwright are welcome visions. And, of course, Dick Tufeld is the voice of the Robot. Bill Mumy (the original Will Robinson) actually had a script for a sequel movie ready to go, but when he was offered a cameo as an older Will, the production felt it would be “too distracting.” Meanwhile, Jonathan Harris gave the ultimate legendary response to a bit-part offer. As he told TV Guide, “I will have you know I have never done a walk-on or bit part in my life! And I do not intend to start. Either I play Doctor Smith or I do not play.”

Despite bad reviews, this was the movie that took Titanic out of the #1 spot.

The Arrow Video release of this film has a 4K restoration of the film from the original camera negative by Arrow Films approved by director Stephen Hopkins, two archival commentaries (director Stephen Hopkins and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman; visual effects supervisors Angus Bickerton and Lauren Ritchie, director of photography Peter Levy, editor Ray Lovejoy and producer Carla Fry); new interviews with Hopkins, Levy, Goldsman, supervising art director Keith Pai, Kenny Wilson, sound mixer Simon Kaye and re-recording mixer Robin O’Donohue; a new video essay by film critic Matt Donato; deleted scenes; archival features; a Q&A with the original cast of the TV series and bloopers. It has a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Pye Parr and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing by critic Neil Sinyard, articles from American Cinematographer and an excerpt from the original production notes. You can get it from MVD.

ARROW VIDEO BLU-RAY AND 4K UHD RELEASE: Dark City (1998)

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Directed, co-written, and co-produced by Alex Proyas, Dark City was a bomb, but one that has found its audience. It followed Proyas’ first two films, Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds and The Crow. Maybe the movies that followed — Garage Days, I, Robot, Knowing and Gods of Egypt — didn’t live up to the promise he was showing here, but at least we still have some great stuff to look back on. Perhaps his adaptation of R.U.R. will be excellent.

According to Wikipedia, “Concerned that audiences would not understand the film, New Line asked Proyas to add an explanatory voice-over to the introduction, and he complied.” Nothing good ever comes of that. But perhaps Dark City paved the way for The Matrix to run.

John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) wakes up in a hotel with a ritualistically murdered woman in the next room. A phone call from Dr. Daniel P. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland) urges him to run, as The Strangers are on their way. Inspector Frank Bumstead (William Hurt) is looking for whoever is killing sex workers, which makes Murdoch a suspect.

It’s always night here, and soon, both Murdoch and Bumstead learn that The Strangers are aliens who can use “tuning” to distort reality. As a group of humans sleep, they are mining them for the data that may save their world. Tracked by a Stranger with his memories, Mr. Hand (Richard O’Brien, Riff Raff in another iconic role), he must find and rescue his wife Emma (Jennifer Connelly) and stop the aliens from taking over the entire human race, while also getting back to his hometown, Shell Beach, a place everyone knows about. Still, no one knows how to get there.

I love movies shot all on a soundstage, and that’s what makes Dark City feel so unique. It’s a world that could be the 1940s but is also nowhere, filled with spirals, clocks and near-unending darkness. I can and can’t believe that this was released against Titanic but I have also learned that the right films always find their audience.

In 2021, Proyas made a short film in the same universe as Dark City, Mask of the Evil Apparition. 

The Arrow Video release of Dark City has a brand new 4K restoration from the original 35mm camera negatives approved by director of photography Dariusz Wolski, plus a 60-page perfect bound collectors’ book featuring new writing by author Richard Kadrey, and film critics Sabina Stent, Virat Nehru and Martyn Pedler. It’s inside limited edition packaging featuring newly commissioned artwork by Doug John Miller with a double-sided fold-out poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Doug John Miller, three postcard-sized reproduction art cards, a postcard from Shell Beach and a business card for Dr. Schreber.

The Director’s City disk has five commentaries: a new commentary by director Alex Proyas, another by Craig Anderson, Bruce Isaacs and Herschel Isaacs, co-hosts of the Film Versus Film podcast and an archival audio commentary by director Proyas; an archival commentary by Roger Ebert; and an archival commentary by writers Lem Dobbs and David S. Goyer. There’s also an archival introduction by Alex Proyas; Return to Dark City, a new hour-long documentary featuring interviews with director Alex Proyas, producer Andrew Mason, production designers Patrick Tatopoulos and George Liddle, costume designer Liz Keough, storyboard artist Peter Pound, director of photography Dariusz Wolski, actor Rufus Sewell, hair & makeup artist Leslie Vanderwalt and VFX creative director Peter Doyle; Rats in a Maze, a new visual essay by film scholar Alexandra West; I’m as Much in the Dark as You Are, a new visual essay by film scholar Josh Nelson on film noir and identity in Dark City and a design and storyboard gallery.

The theatrical cut has two archival commentaries, one by Proyas, writers Lem Dobbs & David S. Goyer, director of photography Dariusz Wolski and production designer Patrick Tatopoulos and the other by Roger Ebert. There’s also Memories of Shell Beach, a 2008 featurette in which cast and crew look back at the making of the film from concept to reception; Architecture of Dreams, a 2008 featurette presenting five perspectives on the themes and meanings of the film; a theatrical trailer and an image gallery.

While this is currently sold out, keep your eye on Arrow Video and MVD Shop.

CHATTANOOGA FILM FESTIVAL 2025: Inertia: Re-Making The Crow (2001)/James O’Barr’s The Crow (1998)

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Inertia: Re-Making The Crow (2001): Directed by David Ullman along with Matt Jackson, who in their teen years decided to take an obsession over the film The Crow and recreate it with a version closer to James O’Barr’s original graphic novel. Shot on video and in black and white, this took four years and drove Ullman’s family insane.

The original pitch for this doc was wide in its scope: “I’d like Inertia to be both an examination of how we created our movie and an exploration of the comic from which it came. Using behind-the-scenes footage, photographs, and interviews, the documentary will illustrate the process by which two 14-year-olds successfully adapted a comic of such breadth, texture, and intensity; the challenges their limited resources presented; and the creativity used to overcome them, ultimately showing how passion can overcome adversity.

Additionally, an underlying study of O’Barr’s piece and a character study of the young filmmaker for whom this project became an obsession should be included. The picture should play like Hearts of Darkness meets Looking For Richard.”

The original documentary was attacked for copyright reasons, but over the years, it has played several film festivals and is more than just about the comic book or the movie. It’s about how two young men from Ohio matured as artists and made something together that would inform the rest of their lives.

You can get this movie on VHS from Lunchmeat VHS.

James O’Barr’s The Crow (1998): Created by David Ullman and Matt Jackson over four years, throughout their high school years, this is what SOV is all about: obsessive devotion. When their friends didn’t show up, when their family didn’t understand, they kept making this movie.

On Ullman’s site, he has this quote: “There’s this aura to the book. When you look at it, you feel something. There is blood on the page, and you can sense that. It’s very affecting. I think they captured that beautifully in the Miramax film, and it was our intention at first to make a hybrid of the existing movie and the comic book. But the more serious we became about the project in general, the more we wanted to really delve into the book, explore its themes and characters, create something more of our own.”

Both star in the film, with Ullman as Eric Draven and Jackson as Top Dollar. The sets were in the family bedroom. Over four years, they learned how to take a comic book, transform it into a script and storyboard, and then create art from it.

I get it. I saw The Crow so many times in the theater, I listened to the soundtrack over and over, and there are even Halloween party photos somewhere of me as a chubby Crow, carrying my guitar and a gun. 1994 was a big time for this movie. Here’s to two filmmakers who pushed for this and made it a reality on a budget that’s so much less than Hollywood would ever attempt.

You can watch this on YouTube thanks to Lunchmeat VHS.

You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles, and updating my Letterboxd list of watched films.

Sizzlin’ Summer of Side-Splitters 2025: Blues Brothers 2000 (1998)

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June 16-22 SNL Week: Saturday Night Live is celebrating 50 years on the air, can NBC last for another 50 years??

I have a love/hate relationship with Saturday Night Live. Maybe because it’s me coming from Pittsburgh, because that’s one of the few places where it didn’t air live, because Chiller Theater was such a big deal. Or maybe it’s because I would switch back and forth to the Youngstown affiliate — WMFJ 21 — and watch some of the original cast. I was so into comedy as a kid that while Steve Martin, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, John Belushi (I mean, he dressed as Godzilla!) and others made me laugh, I was raised on Monty Python, SCTV, Benny Hill and Dave Allen At Large, so SNL gradually impressed me less and less while also obsessing me. I couldn’t stay away from its pull for long. Soon, I was watching it every week, finding every movie its cast found their way into and deifying several of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players (and then hating them when they weren’t who I wanted them to really be).

Over the years, I’ve read just about every book and seen every documentary, and I am frankly at odds with how the show is made. Does it have to be live? Why do they write it in such an insane way, staying up all night? Why does it keep getting worse as comedy gets better? Why is there a messiah cult around Lorne Michaels and the casts of this show that is not shared by other groups he worked with, like the Kids in the Hall?

I also love Dan Aykroyd without reservation, despite his white man appreciation for Chicago blues — I get it, I love Willie Dixon and Howlin’ Wolf too — going out of control and getting commodified into the House of Blues and in movies like this, which I blame for scenes where Anthony Michael Hall acts black and an entire club doesn’t stimp him but instead accepts him. But hey, he was Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute, so I will forever love him. Plus, he believes everything in Ghostbusters and initially wrote it under the name Ghost Smashers and Ivan Reitman said,  “It was set in the future…and it took place on a number of different planets or dimensional planes. And it was all action. There was very little character work in it. The Ghostbusters were catching ghosts on the very first page — and doing it on every single page after that — without respite, just one sort of supernatural phenomenon after another. By the 10th page, I was exhausted. By the 40th or 50th page — however many there were — I was counting the budget in hundreds of millions of dollars.” So fuck yeah, Dan Aykroyd, despite this movie.

I’m getting to it.

I also love the myth of The Blues Brothers, a movie made in chaos, fueled by cocaine, that movie theater owners didn’t want to run because it was too black. According to All the Right Moves, “…Mann Theatres (a major cinema chain at the time) then announced they wouldn’t be showing The Blues Brothers in all of their theatres. Owner Ted Mann believed that white people wouldn’t be interested in such a film, explaining his reasons to Landis: “It’s mainly because of the musical artists you have. Not only are they black. They are out of fashion.” This led to The Blues Brothers opening in less than 600 theatres across the U.S., less than half the amount a big-budget movie could usually expect.”

But don’t feel bad. “Despite this setback, it still managed to make $57 million at the domestic box office, and proved even more successful overseas, grossing $58 million.”

It was the kind of movie that my grandfather would watch over and over on HBO, gleeful at the scenes where the Nazis died, joyous at the cars exploding all over the screen, a movie totally not made for him but one that entertained him just the same, he telling all of us in the room to get ready for another part, giving us play by play of what was happening in his raptuous love of a film that was probably only equalled by The Bad Lieutenant and Terminator 2, the only movie — and thing — I ever saw that made that tough old steelworking man cry.

Seriously, a car blew up on him once, and his back had no skin. He barely registered it. I also once saw him get stabbed in the arm, and he took the steak knife out and kept eating breakfast.

I tell you all this to say that I want the sequel to succeed, but it falls victim to all the problems of the first movie, almost karmically being the recipient of that movie’s excesses.

There’s no Belushi, to start. Not even Jim, who couldn’t fit this into his schedule. Instead, we get John Goodman, who I also like very much, as the new member of the band. This is not an even trade.

It’s dedicated to the cast members who died: Belushi, Cab Calloway, John Candy and Junior Wells. While nice to mention, this is what we call a downer.

Anyways, Elwood (Aykroyd) is finally let out of jail, 18 years later, only to learn his brother is dead and no one is there to pick him up. He’s finally given a ride by Matara, who works for his old drummer, Willie Hall. This starts the movie’s idea of getting the band back together, as well as Elwood mentoring a kid named Buster (J. Evan Bonifant) at the suggestion of Mother Mary Stigmata. By the end, we have The Blues Brothers Band, which includes Joe Morton as Curtis’ son Commander Cabel Chamberlain,  Steve “The Colonel” Cropper, Donald “Duck” Dunn, Willie “Too Big” Hall, Tom “Bones” Malone, Lou “Blue Lou” Marini, Matt “Guitar” Murphy and Alan “Mr. Fabulous” Rubin in a battle of the bands against Queen Moussette’s (Erykah Badu) The Louisiana Gator Boys, who are Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, Gary U.S. Bonds, Eric Clapton, Clarence Clemons, Jack DeJohnette, Bo Diddley, Jon Faddis, Isaac Hayes, Dr. John, B. B. King, Tommy “Pipes” McDonnell, Charlie Musselwhite, Billy Preston, Lou Rawls, Joshua Redman, Paul Shaffer, Koko Taylor, Travis Tritt, Jimmie Vaughan, Grover Washington Jr., Willie Weeks and Steve Winwood.

So yeah, it’s a 63-car pileup—more than the first movie and everything else—but it also has Blues Traveler in it.

Anyways, director John Landis said to the A.V. Club, “We’d always intended for a sequel with John, but of course when he passed away, it was obvious we weren’t going to do it. But Danny had been performing with John Goodman and Jimmy Belushi and the band, and he said, “You know, this is great, because this music is recognized now—let’s do a movie.” I said, “Great, sure, okay,” and we wrote what I thought was a terrific script. Then Universal Studios eviscerated it. That was a strange experience, because the first thing they said was that it had to be PG, which meant they couldn’t use profanity, which is basically cutting the Blues Brothers’ nuts off. The first movie is an R-rated film, but there’s no nudity or violence in it. It’s just the language. Then they said, “You have to have a child, you have to have…” The bottom line was that the only way that movie was going to get made was to agree with everything they said. You know the difference between a brown-nose and a shithead? Depth perception. That’s the only time I never really fought with the studio, because they didn’t really want to make it. So we did every single thing they said. By the time we’d done that, the script was kind of homogenized and uninteresting. Danny said, “It’s about the music. It’s just about the music, John, so don’t worry about it. We’ll get the best people, and we’ll make a great album, and get these people on film. We have to document these people.” It’s interesting because, as much as I make fun of Danny, three or four of those guys have passed away since we made that movie. People say, “Okay, you’ve got Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, James Brown, Cab Calloway, and John Lee Hooker in The Blues Brothers—who’s in Blues Brothers 2000?” The answer? Everyone else. The first movie has five musical numbers, and the second movie has 18.”

He also killed Vic Morrow and made Max Landis, so what the fuck does he know?

A few years ago, Jim Belushi told Cinema Blend that Aykroyd — who makes a marijuana blend with him called Blues Brothers — is constantly pitching new sequel ideas: “Actually, you know, he’s always got ideas. I mean, he’s got this whole thing about, you know, ‘I find Jake’s brother in Albania, you know. I found out there was another brother, a Blues Brother. And I go to Albania and I find him and I bring him out. He doesn’t speak English.’ I mean, he’s got all kinds of ideas. The Blues Sisters, he wants to do one with the Blues Brothers but Blues Sisters. You know, he’s a creative son of a gun.”

There was also a Nintendo 64 game made. It didn’t come out until two years after this, and it made $32 million on a $30 million budget.

At least Paul Schaffer, the guy who got the original band together, finally got to play with them.

APRIL MOVIE 4: Phantom of the Opera (1998)

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April 14: Viva Italian Horror—Pick an Italian horror movie and enjoy the pasta sauce and gore.

Dario Argento did Opera and now, Phantom of the Opera, starring Julian Sands as the Phantom, perhaps the best-looking person to play the role. John Malkovich was the original actor for the part, but Sands ended up being in this, and unlike every other movie adaption, he wears no mask.

This is in the period of films where Argento is perhaps thought to have lost it. It’s in-between The Stendhal Syndrome and Sleepless and sadly, starts to look more like a made-for-TV movie (not always a bad thing) instead of the visually rich films that we expect from the director. Then again, it does have a score by Ennio Morricone and the acting isn’t bad. And if you like rats…

The Phantom (Sands) in this one is a telepathic man raised by said vermin, his baby basket plucked from a river and brought to the basement of the Paris Opera where he eventually finds Christine Daaé (Asia Argento), whom he seeks to gain the part of Juliet in a play. She’s also in love with Baron Raoul De Chagny (Andrea Di Stefano), yet she first succumbs to the lovemaking of the man with rat parents. Before you know it, he’s bringing chandeliers down on people and doing all he can for her, even if she winds up choosing the Baron; being flighty, she goes back to the Phantom by the end, but the police end up taking care of that, beating and stabbing him after he shrugs off a gunshot to the stomach by the Baron.

There are some cool dream sequences in this, no small amount of gore, and a sadly muted color pallette that doesn’t seem to even hunt at the rainbow excesses of the past. But you know, directors need to work, and Argento kept trying throughout the 90s, and fans of his- hey, that’s me- kept on hoping for more. I have this in a 4-pack, and that’s how it is available in the U.S., which is kind of sad, but I don’t think anyone is begging for a 4K of this or Dracula 3D. Actually, I am. Throw in Do You Like Hitchcock? and The Card Player, too.

Cinematographer Ronnie Taylor also worked on Opera, Argento’s other Phantom-inspired movie, and Popcorn, which has similar themes. He was also a cameraman on Phantom of the Paradise, so he really got a lot of work out of this story.

Also: I only have Pelts and The Five Days left of his movies to watch.