This year’s ActionFest featured a tribute to the legendary stuntman Buddy Joe Hooker, and as part of the celebration they showed this light-hearted dramedy about Burt Reynolds as a stuntman who starts to see he might be getting too old for this shit. Hooker did some of the stunts for both the Hooper character and his younger rival/partner “Ski” Shidski (Jan Michael Vincent). (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘Jan-Michael Vincent’
Hooper
Thursday, April 14th, 2011
Hit List
Monday, July 14th, 2008Here’s a VHS only action piece from director William Lustig, who I got some respect for due to the sleazy horror movie MANIAC and the badass Robert Forster revenge thriller VIGILANTE. (whoah, I never realized how similar those two titles are.) This one is closer to VIGILANTE although it was a work-for-hire deal for Lustig and not his usual New York-based independent filmmaking.
Basically this is the story of a regular guy whose kid is mistakenly kidnapped and he tries to get him back. I thought because of the title that he would have a list of people to get revenge on, but really he’s just going after this one guy who has his kid.
Like VIGILANTE alot of the fun is in the ridiculous way the story unfolds. There’s this mobster (Leo Rossi) who gets busted and the feds are trying to get him to turn over on his mentor (Rip Torn!). Torn has a badass hired killer to take care of any potential prosecution witnesses, so the feds have Rossi and his son cooped up in a suburban house. But the phone is tapped so the killer is dispatched to this address.
Meanwhile, our hero’s son is having trouble being picked on by bullies. His “Uncle Brian” (Harold Sylvester in a Steve James-style thankless role as the badass African-American friend who gets killed immediately) teaches him a few karate moves. Then he shuts the door too hard and the 9 on their address flips over to look like a 6. So the killer comes to the wrong house, shoots Uncle Brian and mom and kidnaps who he thinks is Rossi’s son. (more…)
The Mechanic
Saturday, January 1st, 2005First off, I just want to say, I thought Charles Bronson was gonna play a mechanic in this movie. I’m not sure why. Maybe because THE FUCKING MOVIE IS CALLED THE MECHANIC. I don’t know, that may or may not be the reason.
Charles Bronson plays a mob enforcer, or a hitman, or an assassin, or a killer, or a mechanic, or a dentist, or whatever you think sounds coolest. Point is, he’s a guy who makes a living murdering people in fancy ways. And he’s real good at his job, by the looks of it.
The opening scene is one of them tours of force that you gotta be impressed by. For a good ten minutes or more, there is no dialogue, no narration, no explanation. Just my man Charles the Mechanic, spying on a guy, then going into the guy’s apartment, fucking with his teabags, putting explosives in his books, etc. Setting things up. Then blowing things up. All in a day’s work when you are a mechanic who doesn’t fix cars.
Then we follow Charles back to his home. Not the ratty apartment he spied from, but a nice place with lots of fancy crap including Hieronymous Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights hanging on the wall. They never say it’s the original, but why would this guy have a reprint? I’m guessing he stole the original and replaced it with a fake. Good job, Charles.
As the story unfolds, Charles gets more jobs, and we get to watch him do his thing. This is not a guy who settles for just shooting a guy or poisoning him or something. If he takes the job, you bet it’s gonna be fun to watch. He nearly gives an old man a heart attack, shooting at him but pretending he’s shooting at somebody behind him who’s also shooting at him. This is all fine and dandy but after he kills the guy, he makes the mistake of hanging around his spoiled blond bitch of a son, Jan Michael Vincent. And it seems like he actually likes the kid. He starts bringing him along on jobs, showing him the tricks of the trade. (more…)
