Wow! Monte Hellman's engrossing tale of two cars racing across America is totally entertaining and totally interesting. This is surprising considering the lack of plot and the lack of dialogue but the way that these characters are portrayed completely draw you in from the first minute right through to the hopeless finish. The characters are not even credited with real names but you go on a very deep "journey" with them. James Taylor stars as "The Driver", a man who drives around a '55 Chevy and races it in street races to raise money to get to the next race. His constant companion is Beach Boy Dennis Wilson playing "The Mechanic" who is on hand to fix and maintain the Chevy. These two do not talk much but seem to understand each other. Early in the movie they hook up with Laurie Bird playing "The Girl", essentially another drifter looking for some company. It does not take long for the three to meet up with Warren Oates ("The Wild Bunch") playing GTO who, you guessed it, drives a GTO. The two cars decide to race across the country to Washington, DC where the winner wins the other driver's car. Now, this is not your run of the mill action car chase movie. It has many more levels to it in the same type way as (forgive me) "Easy Rider". The driver's appear to be having many other issues as they are racing each other that will take me many viewings to completely understand. I love movies like this though. Movies that make you think and feel with performances that are so natural and engaging that you are constantly trying to figure out what is up with these people. This could be in part due to the fact that Hellman cast 3 out of the 4 leads as non-actors and Warren Oates being such a great actor that he can give you a performance like this. People used to the easy way out of recent movies telling you every detail like you are an idiot will hate this movie because it really makes you think (for many days after watching it). I loved it and am now on a search for the rest of Monte Hellman's films so I can see more of his work. Laurie Bird died of a heroin overdose in 1979. Harry Dean Stanton has a small role as a homosexual hitchhiker. "Two Lane Blacktop" is highly recommended if you are willing to just sit back and let the movie work for you. Perhaps better if watched alone.
If there was an Evel Knievel TV series in the 70's, this should have been the pilot. This flick played out exactly like a 2 hour television episode but was a lot of fun anyways. Superstar Evel Knievel stars as himself in this tale about how he is going around doing his thing (jumping his motorbike over tigers and fire) until an evil drug dealer (Leslie Nielsen) devises a plot to smuggle drugs across the Mexican border using Evel's death as cover. There are also a few subplots one of which involves Evel's mechanic and mentor (Gene Kelly!) trying to rebuild a relationship with his son and another with Lauren Hutton as a love interest. Yes, this flick was like a really cheesy 70's TV show but it held my interest and kept me entertained. There was some decent motorcycle stuntwork including the aforementioned jumps, a few crashes, and a couple of decent chase scenes. I would not give this movie top marks for acting but for a nice innocent piece of 70's nostalgic fun, it certainly does the trick. Some other co-stars include Fred Olen Ray regular Cameron Mitchell as an evil mechanic, Dabney Coleman as a psychiatrist, Red Buttons as a promoter, Frank Gifford as Frank Gifford, and the always interesting Marjoe Gortner as Evel's old friend now nemesis. Marjoe reminded me a lot of Matthew McConaughey in this flick for some reason. Oh yeah, this flick is also worth it for Evel's drug speech alone comparing drug addicts to Indy cars. Check it out!
I love monster movies about nature on the rampage and that is why I decided to check this one out. It looked like a bad b-movie, it had the cast of a bad b-movie and it had a giant cobra/rattlesnake hybrid so I figured I would enjoy it. I cannot possibly say that this was a good flick, in fact it was really really bad but it also held my interest and I enjoyed it as a bad movie. One of the directors, Scott Hillenbrand stars as Brad, a doctor in a small California town. Brad has a tendency to deliver all of his lines like he is promoting something. You know, that tone that the housewife uses when she is saying to her neighbor something like "I don't have that problem getting the stains out of my linens because I use Tide." He is such a cheeseball. Brad is involved with a cop in the small-town named Jo (Casey Fallo) who is upset because he wants to move to the big city to further his medical career. A problem arises when a scientist (Joseph Ruskin) loses sight of the giant snake he is developing and it runs amuck in the small town. Of course we have to follow the "Jaws" plotline with the stubborn mayor (Hoyt Axton) refusing to cancel the upcoming beer festival in spite of the impending danger. The snake goes around fanging people to death and there is a relatively high body count but unfortunately there is no gore. This would have probably made me give the movie a better review (the sick bastard that I am) but I was expecting to see some good effects at least. One thing I can say about the effects though is that I was quite happy that the snake was animatronic as opposed to that horrible CGI beast from "Anaconda" but it still was not very scary. Soon, the townsfolk are at a loss so they call in snake wrangler Pat Morita ("The Karate Kid") to kill the snake. After going on about "snake shit" in a memorable scene, Pat has a final showdown in one of the oddest climaxes I have even seen in a movie like this. To illustrate, at one point, one of the characters has to drop kick the snake to disable it. I'll bet you have never seen that before. Also on hand in Erik Estrada ("CHiPs") as the very gay brewery owner and probably the unsexiest foreplay scene in the woods that I have ever seen. It's up to you...
Femme Fontaine: Killer Babe For The C.I.A. (1994)
Oh, how Troma always provides such an entertaining movie experience. This flick stars writer, producer, director Margot Hope, as a C.I.A. assassin who is also searching for her missing father. She is soon involved in a conspiracy involving monks, neo-nazis, crooked agents, nazi war criminals, casting couches, hot tub parties, Chinese gangsters, skin melting chemicals, and lesbian nazis. Needless to say, I was not disappointed. James Hong ("Blade Runner") has a small role as Fontaine's monk friend. If you are a fan of Troma films, this is a good one.
Here we have Rose McGowan in a psycho-girl obsession flick. I can't say there was anything too original happening here and I was disappointed with the ho-hum standard ending but the movie was nevertheless quite entertaining and Rose plays a really good nutjob. Rose plays Debbie Strand, a teenager who's mother dies in a fire and is sent to live with her bitchy Bible-thumper grandma. Life is not fun for poor Rose who has to resort to changing into her bad girl clothes in the bushes on the way to school. She soon makes friends with cool girl Janie (J.C. Brandy) and they drink and shoplift together. Rose also develops a psycho-obsession crush on one of her teachers (Alex McArthur) and proceeds to do a variety of psycho-obsessive things that we have seen before. Like I said, although the plot was fairly predictable and unoriginal, I still had a good time watching it in the same way that I turned on the new show "Titans" the other day and found it quite entertaining. This is a great flick to watch if you are not expecting much and just want to be entertained for a while. And no, Rose does not get naked but co-star Sherrie Rose spends a fair bit of her screen time having sex. This is a remake of the 1989 Australian film entitled "Devil In The Flesh".
I picked this up on DVD the other day because I heard that it was a pretty effective horror flick and the cover is really cool. As I am sitting here writing this I am not sure if my purchase was that good of one. Overall, it was quite enjoyable and had some really cool and original uses of lighting and of camera angles and some of the characters and their motives made for an interesting time. The problem I had with the film was the creatures. I've said it before and I'll say it again: computer generated monsters do not scare me. The CGI worked great for the POV shots and some of the landscapes were stunning but the creatures looked like they were computer generated to me. They just don't look real to me and this tends to ruin movies like this for me. I know a lot of people don't seem to have this bother them too much but fake monsters really piss me off and detract from the whole movie-watching experience for me. One of the only times that I remember that I was ok with it was in "Starship Troopers" but the monsters were believable in that one. In this film, however, I just did not feel like they pulled it off. Other than that, I really like the movie and it had great characters and a great concept. It is just too bad that the "scary" monsters took so much away from it for me. It will remain in my collection for years to come but it is just one of those movies that I do not think is going to be watched very much. The cast includes Vin Diesel ("Boiler Room"), Keith David ("The Thing"), Radha Mitchell ("High Art"), and Cole Hauser.
The great Pam Grier delivers again in another blaxploitation classic! This time around Pam stars as Friday Foster, a magazine photographer who stumbles across a political conspiracy that involves assassinations, sex, violence, and funky music. It all begins when Friday witnesses an assassination attempt on the richest black man in the world by the name of Blake Tarr at the L.A. airport. She gets photos of the would be killers and pursues the story with a vengeance after she attends a fashion show where her model friend is murdered. Her adventures include a car chase involving a hearse, a rooftop foot chase, and a final shootout at a religious retreat. I really liked this film even through the plot outline on the box made it sound really stupid. I must say that for this genre, this is definitely one of the best (I love this stuff)! Many of the usual actors appear again in this film including Yaphet Kotto ("Across 110th Street") as Friday's P.I. friend, Scatman Crothers ("The Shining") as a reverend, Paul Benjamin ("Across 110th Street") as a senator, and Carl Weathers ("Rocky") being not very Apollo Creed like as one of the assassins. We also have an appearance from Jim Backus (Mr. Howell for "Gilligan's Island") as a corrupt millionaire. This film was based on a comic book and was directed by Arthur Marks who also did "Detroit 9000". Enjoy!
This is one of those rare times (especially in today's Hollywood) that a horror remake is actually enjoyable. Instead of trying to outdo the original or "perfect" the original, this film takes the great idea from the original and puts a new spin on it. The result is a gory, suspenseful, shocking, and very fun horror film that pays homage the way that a remake should. The story is simple, a rich amusement park mogul (Geoffrey Rush) decides to have a party for his wife in an abandoned former mental asylum. This is not your average asylum though, this is one where the head doctor liked to perform Nazi like experiments on the patients and one day the patients revolted by killing the doctor and his nurses and setting the place on fire. The place has a security system where all doors and windows lock down if a button in pressed so naturally this happens and all the inmates burn to death in the fire. If all of this death doesn't make a place haunted, I don't know what will! Anyways, back to the party. The guests are all told that if they survive one night in the asylum, they will be given one million dollars. Now, our host does not think the house is really haunted but once the lockdown mysteriously happens and everyone finds themselves unable to leave the house for the night, it doesn't take long to see that there are in fact evil spirits running amuck. The incredibly good cast (who seemed to all take the film seriously with a needed dash of humour) includes Famke Janssen ("Lord Of Illusions") as the wife, Taye Diggs ("Go") as an ex-baseball player, Peter Gallagher as a doctor, Chris Kattan ("Saturday Night Live") as the house's owner Watson Pritchett, Ali Larter ("Final Destination") as the heroine, and Bridgette Wilson ("Mortal Kombat") as a reporter. We also have Jeffrey Combs ("Re-Animator") in by far his creepiest role ever.
I saw this at the Vancouver International film festival the year it was released and I remember I was very angry because it was such a blatant Tarantino ripoff. For some reason now it is a lot more enjoyable (maybe because I have since seen many Tarantino ripoffs that are a lot worse than this movie). The thing that sets this one apart from the others is the actors. There is a great cast of people who all bring the vast array of characters to life and give them each a true personality. Gil Bellows ("Ally McBeal") stars as Watty Watts, a convenience store robber who is actually a pretty nice guy. He lives with the love of his life Starlene (Renee Zellweger) and together they get in a heap of trouble when a former partner of Watty's shows up and murders someone resulting in the blame being put on Watty and Starlene. This ex-partner is named Billy Mack and is amazingly played by Rory Cochrane (Slater from "Dazed And Confused") as one of the greatest screen psychos that I have ever seen. I mean this guy is really over the top and looks like he is constantly having a caffeine fit while strapped to a paint mixer. We also have the always entertaining Jeffrey Combs, "Eraserhead"'s Jack Nance, Charlotte Ross from "Beggars And Choosers" in a small role, Ann Wedgeworth (Lana from "Three's Company") as Starlene's mom, and an unforgettable (you have to see it to believe it) Peter Fonda as Starlene's dad. This movie is very violent, there is mucho swearing, and it is a total "Natural Born Killers/True Romance" ripoff but it is still quite the ride and well worth renting. Look for the "Free Tex Watson" graffiti and check out the great soundtrack featuring Mazzy Star, Reverend Horton Heat, and two of my favorites Kim Deal and Robert Pollard doing a duet!
As far as the genre of animation goes, I am not too educated so for me, I thought this film was pretty cool. I saw the original "Heavy Metal" a few times and really dug it and although this is nothing like the original, I dug it as well. I have heard that this movie was a disappointment but I think it may suffer from "Phantom Menace" syndrome with the fans of the original expecting something and not getting what they wanted. From someone who was not really expecting anything, however, I had nothing to be disappointed about. Anyways, the voice of B-movie goddess Julie Strain stars as Julie (or FAKK 2) who is out for revenge after an insane freak with too much testosterone named Tyler (the voice of Michael Ironside) kills her people in his quest for eternal life. Assisting Julie on her journey is a dude named Odin (the voice of Billy Idol), a defector from Tyler's gang, and a funny little rock creature. I thought the story was pretty good and there was a lot of action, blood, and nudity to keep things interesting. I don't know what people were complaining about but I guess if you are expecting it to have the same vibe as the original or if you are an anime freak, you will probably be disappointed. If you are just a casual viewer of animation like myself, you will probably have fun watching this.
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