I don’t know how familiar any of you are with Payback, the 1999 Mel Gibson-starring adaptation of Richard Stark’s The Hunter. That’s the same book that inspired one of the all time canonical works of Badass Cinema, Point Blank.
Well, Mel Gibson is no Lee Marvin and writer/director Brian Helgeland (A Knight’s Tale) is no John Boorman. But I think Payback is an underrated movie. It’s a good balance of vicious and funny. It’s got a bit of a ’70s throwback feel and lots of weird touches to make it an indistinct time period. There are rotary phones, and primitive credit card technology that makes fraud more convenient, and the film is washed out with bleach making everything have a pale blue tint to it. You’re not sure when this is supposed to be taking place, which in a weird way reminds me of the experience of reading the books. Most of it reads pretty modern but obviously you are dealing with armed robbers, there is money, communication and security technology that would make some of the stories impossible today. So I sometimes have to check the copyright dates to be sure when this would’ve happened. (read the rest of this shit…)
They got a real unique advertising campaign for THE LOOKOUT, they are trying this new thing where you don’t promote the movie at all, and nobody knows it even exists. So there is this mystery around it. I don’t know why it hasn’t blown up yet but so far this playing-hard-to-get approach does not seem to be capturing the public consciousness.
Some people might say, just because Christina Ricci spends a good third of BLACK SNAKE MOAN wearing only panties and a half shirt, chained up like a dog to control her bestial urge to fuck anything with a dick, that it’s degrading to women. Well, okay, if I put it that way. But as cool as Samuel L. Jackson’s backsliding bluesman Lazarus is, it’s Ricci’s coughing town slut Rae that you sympathize with most. The weird thing is this ends up being a sweet movie, a cute movie. Like a really subdued KILL BILL, BLACK SNAKE takes ridiculous notions that don’t have to make sense in an exploitation* picture (a man chaining up a young girl to cure her nymphomania, her forgiving him for it) but then treats the characters’ emotions so seriously that I actually start to care about them.
David Fincher’s movie SEVEN (no, I’m not gonna do that cute shit where you type the number seven instead of a v, do I look like the type of dude that would try to pull that sort of typographic horseshit, I don’t think so) is the deadbeat dad of the modern serial killer thriller. Or the killer that inspired all the copycats. Ever since then, hacks have been trying to cop that thick atmosphere, that dark-as-tar nihilistic tone, that sicko mix of religion and violence, that serious treatment of the type of gimmicky murder sprees that used to be fun when Vincent Price did ’em, and especially those fonts used on the opening credits. Simply put, without SEVEN there would be none of those other movies where Morgan Freeman tries to catch a serial killer, nor would there be a GLIMMER MAN. And then where would we be as a society?
It turns out we’re all connected.
PLOT SUMMARY: When a dwarf with no hands or feet and some little kids try to stone a naked dude they found passed out, pissing himself with his face covered in flies, the naked dude and the little guy smoke a joint, hug and become fast friends. So they go into town, where tourists laugh and take pictures of the troops executing school children, and they watch the frogs and chameleons re-enact the conquest of Mexico in a model city. Also the naked dude looks like Jesus and these guys drug him and make a cast of him and he wakes up surrounded by hundreds of duplicates of himself so he screams and smashes them but takes one and carries it around for a while and later he eats its face off and ties it to a bunch of helium balloons and sets it free. He hangs out with 12 hookers in matching see-through black outfits. One of them is an old lady, one is a little girl and they also have a chimpanzee. Some people might call it 13 hookers I guess, but I’m old fashioned so I’m gonna assume the chimpanzee is just an associate and not a professional. 
In my opinion BLACK CAESAR is one of my favorite blaxploitation movies. It’s got a good story and direction (by Larry Cohen), a badass soundtrack (by James Brown) and a super badass lead (Fred Williamson). Fred plays a cruel motherfucker, sort of a Scarface type anti-hero, but makes him mostly sympathetic.
Dear Friends,
I don’t know if you ever do this, maybe this means I had a bad childhood or somethin, but every once in a while I see a weird old VHS box in the action section at the video store and I say “what the fuck is THIS?” and even though it looks like shit I have to rent it just to take a peek at some weird corner of the action cinema universe that I had not previously charted. I’m an explorer, is what I’m saying. The latest example of this is CRAZED COP starring a guy named Ivan Rogers. I will be impressed if any of you know who this guy is, because I asked around and only got blank looks.
SPOILER ALERT !!
