Aug 13
Perhaps Gene Wilder deciding to take on the herculean task of commanding four big roles with The World’s Greatest Lover – actor, writer, director, and producer – may explain why the end results are kind of messy and without that many laughs.
Religious supposed do-gooders doing no good when it comes to movies is the focus of Cleanflix, an occasionally uneven but never boring documentary.
What if you suddenly found yourself the last person on Earth, except for your arch rival? The French movie 2 Alone In Paris (a.k.a. SEULS TWO) takes this premise, and gives it an amusing comic spin.
Hooooboy, this hasn’t aged well, to put it mildly… Popi may be the most offensive G-rated movie of all time, more offensive than when five years later, its star (R.I.P., Alan Arkin) became an R-rated Bean.
If you can look past some dopey scripting and less than stellar acting, Recoil delivers everything you want from a PM Entertainment actioner.Jun 24
The real-life tale told in Money For Nothing proves that sometimes truth can be made to be dumber than fiction.
Just what the doctor ordered – Across 110th Street is a tough, gritty, and mean crime drama from the 1970s that puts most modern efforts of the same genre to shame.May 31
I didn’t plan this, but this update turns out to be heavily freighted with movies depicting real (or at least “real”) people in fairly fanciful ways, including a variety of kung fu founding fathers and a Catholic priest who isn’t nearly as crazy in the filmmakers’ telling as he was in actuality:
The Boxer from Shantung (1972), in which the 1930’s Warner Brothers gangster formula gets the Shaw Brothers chopsocky treatment…
Crash and Burn (1990), in which a post-apocalyptic slasher runs afoul of a Final Couple with a weapon that Laurie Strode sure would have found handy against Michael Myers…
The Day Time Ended (1979), in which that phrase doesn’t mean at all what you’d naturally expect it to…
Flesh and Fantasy (1943), in which there may or may not be such a thing as Destiny, and you may find it challenging to give a damn one way or the other…
Heroes Two (1974), which inaugurates a long-running cycle of Shaw Brothers kung fu movies concerning the Shaolin Temple and its disciples…
Kingdom of the Spiders (1977), in which William Shatner plays a cowboy veterinarian facing an enemy even more terrifying than his toupe…
and…
The Pope’s Exorcist (2023), in which I learn to my astonished delight that they occasionally do make them like they used to after all!
El Santo rules the wasteland-- and also 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting.
May 25
You can’t judge a book by its cover, but this image from the DVD of The Water Babies shows you can judge a movie by its box art. Still, I watched the whole bland enterprise.
If you remember how technology, the fantastic, and science fiction were, for the most part, depicted on American television in the mid-1970s, the feature length pilot movie for the short lived TV series Future Cop will be pretty much free of surprise and interest for you.