My Brian Trenchard-Smith studies continue with this 1979 picture, not an Australian one but a USA-Spain-Mexico co-production. And you know with that many countries cooperating that it’s gotta be amazing. It stars Chuck Connors as a jovial freelance agent hired to retrieve a mysterious document from a South American dictator’s blown up yacht. There also might’ve been some money on that thing so the world’s best agents and assassins, including Richard Roundtree, are all in the area competing with him. Also Henry Silva is the head of police who has jurisdiction over the area, but he’s just in a couple scenes doing press conferences. He doesn’t reveal himself to be evil, but I don’t buy it.
It seems like everybody involved in this movie is just doing it for a quick paycheck, but that’s okay. It’s still cool to see them all together in this weird little movie. Glenn Ford plays the guy who hires Connors, and he looks like he’s either retired or on vacation. He’s wearing shades and a white Adidas track jacket, and he’s only in a few scenes, sitting next to the swimming pool. I bet whenever Trenchard-Smith called “cut” he jumped in. (read the rest of this shit…)
Usually I prefer to wait to see a movie on the big screen, but when I saw an import DVD of ONG BAK 2 I just couldn’t resist. What on earth is that guy gonna jump off of or over in this one? Who or what will find their bones crushed by his bones? And the thought of that little guy running around on top of elephants… I don’t know man. I wasn’t gonna sit around waiting if I didn’t have to.
MARTYRS is one seriously fucked up horror movie. It hails from France circa last year, but comes to region 1 DVD today. I went in knowing zero about the plot, just that it had a reputation as a good but brutal horror movie. This DVD actually has an introduction where the director, Pascal Laugier, introduces himself as “the director of the movie you’ve decided to watch tonight” and then says, “I’m not sure you’ve made the right decision.” Then he proceeds to apologize in advance.
FROST/NIXON also came out on DVD yesterday, so I figured I would dig out my unfinished review from when I saw it on the big screen and polish that up.
Well this new “blog” format is working out real good. I don’t think I’m gonna start catching up with all the 21st century technologies, for example I still don’t have a cellular phone device or those shoes with the wheels in them. But everywhere I go I hear about this “twitter” they got now. Moriarty writes in his column about how Harry Twittered him something or other, Harry writes in his column about what he was Twittering during the movie because it was so scary, Devin Feraci on Chud is mad because some other douchebag used his twittering during Crank 2 and also he had to cancel his tweeter for Even Rachel Wood because he was disappointed in the quality of her twitterings, or whatever.
NOTORIOUS, the biopic of the late rapper Christopher “Notorious (Biggie Smalls) B.I.G.” Wallace comes out on DVD today.
There are two Richard Stark based movies left that have never been released for the home video in the U.S. One is MISE A SAC, a French one based on The Score, where Parker and a crew try to rob an entire mining town. The other is THE SPLIT, based on The Seventh, where Jim Brown as the Parker character robs a football stadium and then has some trouble afterwords. My man David M. in France has seen both – he saw a restored print of MISE A SAC and told me it was great. As for THE SPLIT he did me one better than telling me about it, he sent me a recording from when it played letterboxed on the French Turner Classic Movies channel. (I don’t know who the French Ted Turner is, but it sounds like he plays better shit than the American one.)
Yesterday was Roddy Piper’s birthday. I’m celebrating late with the Piper/Billy Blanks picture from 1993, BACK IN ACTION.
Looking into the early works of Brian Trenchard-Smith I found a genre I never knew existed: stuntsploitation. Here are two movies about the world of stuntmen, with flimsy plots (if any) to string together a bunch of cool stunt sequences.
