May 23
When the blaxploitation craze dried up at the major Hollywood studios, Fred Williamson kept chugging along by making his own star vehicles, Death Journey being one of them. It’s more often than not silly and inept, but it’s all the same a lot of fun to watch.
May 19
Teleport City’s roundtable contribution is in effect:
Amid the ruin and confusion of 1970s New York, a group of (primarily white) young artists, freaks, punks, and weirdos decided they were going to become movie makers, the cinematic branch of No Wave, new wave’s slightly stranger, more chaotic sibling. At the same time, uptown and in The Bronx, a group of (primarily black and Hispanic) young artists, freaks, dancers, and weirdos were pioneering a creative lifestyle that would become known as Hip Hop. The two scenes intersected frequently, and when no wave film maker Charlie Ahearn was stopped by a group of black kungfu students who wanted to know what he was doing with a movie camera, DEADLY ART OF SURVIVAL was born. It’s more interesting as a historic piece than an actual film, a fascinating (to me) cocktail of punk, New York, black culture, martial arts and the role kungfu films played in black urban life, and a celebration of a dude who was being paid in pizza but was still willing to get kungfu kicked into the 1978 East River.
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Keith Allison is the chief Bacchanologist at Teleport City.
May 14
The documentary UFO’s Are Real attempts to convince viewers that we are not alone in this universe. And no, I didn’t make a typo with the title – there’s an apostrophe in the title both on the video box and in the opening credits, and it’s just the start of many problems to be found with this documentary.
May 4
Just before hitting it big with Labyrinth, future Oscar winner Jennifer Connelly starred in the teen movie Seven Minutes In Heaven. Despite the suggestive title, it’s actually a sensitive and thoughtful drama that both teenagers and older viewers will enjoy.
Apr 24
Dan Aykroyd probably wishes that no one sees the Canadian movie Love At First Sight, which happens to be his motion picture debut.
A bunch of reviews that refused to get written combined with the emergence of an obsessional new project to render my usual B-Fest roundup both irrelevant and impracticable. Still, a couple of the projected B-Fest reviews were sufficiently well advanced to be worth resurrecting once I got back into the swing of things:
Attack of the Puppet People (1958), in which a startlingly good Bert I. Gordon movie is undercut somewhat by insisting upon sci-fi when it ought to be straight-up fantasy instead…
Drunken Tai Chi (1984), which is a charming light comedy about assassination and post-traumatic stress disorder…
Journey to the Seventh Planet (1962), in which the makers of Reptilicus return to Denmark to rework The Angry Red Planet…
The Lair of the White Worm (1988), in which Ken Russell decides that an obscure Bram Stoker novel could use a little extra sex and blasphemy…
The Lost Missile (1958), in which an unconscionable orgy of stock footage gives way to an unexpectedly bleak and sober meditation on the end of the world…
RoboCop (2014), which didn’t suck anywhere near as much as I thought it was going to…
and…
Thomasine and Bushrod (1973), which wasn’t supposed to be the blaxploitation Bonnie and Clyde, but inevitably gets passed off as that anyway.
Apr 14
You have not been getting enough pasta in your cinematic diet! To remedy that, track down Bandidos, a spaghetti western that has real spice in the sauce.
Ahem.
This was actually supposed to be my second entry in the last Roundtable, but when I lose a DVD somewhere in the house, it stays lost…
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In which John Carradine is sent to Mapleton, Massachusetts, to clean up the mess made by Turhan Bey, and ends up fouling the nest even more thoroughly.
Meanwhile, Kharis decides that he’s had enough of High Priests interfering in his love-life…
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Liz Kingsley is the insane genius behind And You Call Yourself a Scientist!
Apr 4
The movie Lifepod takes Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat and gives it a sci-fi twist. It’s an interesting idea, but director Ron Silver is no Hitchcock.
Yahrzeit? OK, OK, so Jess Franco wasn’t Jewish. That’s OK: neither am I. Still, this is the one-year anniversary of his death, so in his honor I’m posting reviews from two of the last — how shall I put it? — unambiguously good years of his film-making life.
1965
Miss Muerte/The Diabolical Dr. Z — often called Franco’s best film.
1966
Cartes sur table/Attack of the Robots — Franco’s first movie with Eddie Constantine.
Residencia para Espías/Golden Horn — Franco’s last movie with Eddie Constantine, who really looks better in black & white.
