"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Posts Tagged ‘Jack Palance’

City Slickers

Tuesday, June 8th, 2021

June 7, 1991. Despite the notable release of another odd Spike Lee movie, this week was won by more middle-of-the-road culture. It was the week that the original run of Twin Peaks ended. The #1 and #2 songs on the Billboard charts were “More Than Words” by Extreme and “I Wanna Sex U Up” by Color Me Badd. And the #1 movie was a nice normal comedy about wisecracking Billy Crystal birthing a cow to cope with the boredom of middle aged, middle class existence.

Like JUNGLE FEVER, CITY SLICKERS is about some lives upended and rearranged after a married man has an affair with a subordinate at his workplace. In this case the dude is Phil Berquist (Daniel Stern, C.H.U.D., FRANKENWEENIE), a wet blanket grocery store manager who is very unhappily married to a mean bully (Karla Tamburrelli, “Stewardess [Northeast Plane],” DIE HARD 2) until panicked young clerk Nancy (Yeardley Smith, then in her third season as the voice of Lisa Simpson) finds him outside of work to tell him she thinks she’s pregnant.

“Why is she telling you this?”

The scene goes down at the 39th birthday party of Mitch Robbins (43 year old Billy Crystal, ANIMALYMPICS) and inspires Phil to unleash twelve years of suppressed fury at his wife in front of the Robbins family and all their friends. If this was reality he’d for sure be the bad guy here, but we’ve already been primed to hate how this horrible wife talks to him and feel victory in him telling her off. (read the rest of this shit…)

Alice Through the Looking Glass (1966)

Wednesday, June 29th, 2016

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Maybe it doesn’t mean shit to you whippersnappers, but Alice was one of the favorite properties of many young geeks growing up in the late 19th century. And fave genre author Lewis Carroll would be happy to know that his content still exists today. Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There is Lewis Carroll’s 1871 young adult beach read sequel to the 1865 blockbuster franchise-starter Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Part 2 is a similar nonsense adventure tale where half a year later Alice decides to step through a mirror into a fantasy world on the other side for one last mission. Instead of a government and military force based on playing cards, this time they’re based on chess pieces. TOTALLY DIFFERENT. It’s just a shame Carroll gave it that cumbersome title instead of something sleek like A2: DARK REFLECTION so it would’ve caught on better.

In the tradition of the BOURNE or FRIDAY THE 13TH series, many of the elements associated with the Alice in Wonderland intellectual propertyverse are actually from part 2. The singing flowers, the weird, rotund twin manbabies Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum and the poem that they recite (“The Walrus and the Carpenter”) were all included in Disney’s 1951 animated classic ALICE IN WONDERLAND, which continues to be the best known version of the story. Alice finds the poem “Jabberwocky” in a book, but unfortunately it made no sense, audiences couldn’t relate. Luckily we got his backstory in ALICE IN WONDERLAND ORIGINS: JABBERWOCKY (1977) by Terry Gilliam. (read the rest of this shit…)

Cyborg 2

Thursday, September 3rd, 2015

tn_cyborg2“You know the rules. No fraternizing with cyborgs.”

CYBORG 2 has a totally different feel from CYBORG. Apparently it didn’t even start out as a sequel to CYBORG, it was supposed to be something called GLASS SHADOW until they realized the only way I was gonna rent it 20+ years later would be if it was connected to an existing Jean-Claude Van Damme series. It looks more expensive than Albert Pyun’s original (though still in the low budget realm) and plays much more traditional, not an art film at all.

The disease that had ravaged the world in part 1 must’ve been cured. The ROAD WARRIOR type wasteland has become a poor man’s BLADE RUNNER dystopolis with Max Headroom type boardroom villainy. There’s way more talking and stunt doubles and things that happen. And while I took part 1’s robo-lady as a traditional cyborg – human with machine add-ons – now they’re using the C3PO definition: just a robot. We see how it works in a cool opening credits sequence of liquid flesh injected into a female casing over a robo-skeleton.

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(read the rest of this shit…)

Alone in the Dark

Sunday, October 31st, 2010

tn_aloneindarkALONE IN THE DARK is the story of a bunch of people together in the dark. It’s a siege movie, but it starts out like THE NINTH CONFIGURATION or other movies where a guy comes in to take over as the new doctor at a mental hospital, and he meets all the colorful characters and what not. For example New Line Cinema’s mascot Lynn Shaye plays the receptionist who turns out to be a patient.

Dwight Schultz, aka Howling Mad Murdoch, the mentally ill member of the A-Team, gets to play the doctor in this one. It would be cool if Mr. T showed up as a vegan helicopter pilot, or George Peppard as a spacey hippie who absolutely hates it when a plan comes together. Instead they have ex-military Jack Palance and preacher/arsonist Martin Landau as two of the guys on the third floor. These are the patients one hospital employee describes as “very, very intense.” They also got a huge fat child molester (Erland van Lidth, Dynamo from THE RUNNING MAN) and a notion that Dwight Schultz killed the old doctor and they gotta get revenge. They wait for a window of opportunity, and it opens up pretty quick when there’s a power outage and they’re able to get out, Michael Meyers style. (read the rest of this shit…)

Tango & Cash

Sunday, June 21st, 2009

tn_tangoandcashI don’t know if you can sense it in the air or anything. It doesn’t really come until the end of the year, but this is the 20th anniversary of TANGO & CASH. To be honest I don’t think I ever saw this one before, but I wanted to see it and review it a little ahead of all the hoopla. As much as people like you and I are will to talk about TANGO & CASH all the time I’m sure eventually we’re gonna get a little worn out by all the retrospectives and parades and everything that I’m sure they’ve been planning.

So now I’ve seen it and I know TANGO & CASH is a fun but not all that great 1989 action movie that personifies (moviefies?) the excess of the ’80s, and not just because it has a monster truck in it. (read the rest of this shit…)