"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Krull

On July 29, 1983, the same day Luis Bunuel died, and two days after the release of Madonna’s debut album, Columbia Pictures released their entry in the “if you liked RETURN OF THE JEDI…” sweepstakes, KRULL. With the resources of a studio behind it, KRULL was able to be bigger than most of the other also-rans, having double the budget of SPACEHUNTER: ADVENTURES IN THE FORBIDDEN ZONE, for example. It even got a release in 70mm. It boasts a new score by James Horner that sounds kinda like BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS, instead of re-using the actual score from BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS like SPACE RAIDERS did. Notably it has the same cinematographer as THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, Peter Suschitzky. Editor Ray Lovejoy is the guy who did 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. So it’s quite a crew here.

The director is Peter Yates (BULLITT, THE HOT ROCK, THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE, MOTHER, JUGS & SPEED, THE DEEP), one of the many British directors George Lucas had considered for RETURN OF THE JEDI. Screenwriter Stanford Sherman was a TV guy (Man from U.N.C.L.E./Batman) but had done ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN. Unfortunately he did not include a punching orangutan in this one. Could’ve used one, to be honest. (read the rest of this shit…)

July 28th, 2023 | 27 Comments »

Mr. Mom

July 22, 1983

MR. MOM is a domestic comedy with a likable performance by Michael Keaton and a dated premise. The screenplay is credited to John Hughes, the National Lampoon magazine humorist who had started a career in movies by writing NATIONAL LAMPOON’S JAWS 3: PEOPLE 0, to be directed by Joe Dante. Steven Spielberg threatened to never work with Universal again if they really went through with that shit, and they ditched the project, making way for the hated but not parodic JAWS 3-D. So instead Hughes’ first screenplay credit ended up being NATIONAL LAMPOON’S CLASS REUNION, and this was his second (beating NATIONAL LAMPOON’S VACATION by a week). It was directed by Stan Dragoti (LOVE AT FIRST BITE).

Keaton (in his fourth movie, between NIGHT SHIFT and JOHNNY DANGEROUSLY) plays Jack Butler, an engineer at the Ford Motor Company in Detroit. But the economy isn’t good, cars aren’t selling so well, so one day after commuting to work with his friends “Jinx” Latham (Jeffrey Tambor, SATURDAY THE 14TH), Larry (Christopher Lloyd, SCHIZOID) and Humphries (Graham Jarvis, THE HOT ROCK), Jinx calls the other three in to his office to tell them they’ve been laid off. (read the rest of this shit…)

July 27th, 2023 | 9 Comments »

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE DEAD – RECKONING PART ONE is a top shelf spy action blockbuster. There’s plenty for people to quibble with about how it compares to its six predecessors, but to me it’s another strong variation on and evolution of a series that has managed to go for 27 years and still feel special each time out.

After only a few weeks of release, conversation in movie lover world has already moved on, except to note that DEAD RECKONING is unlikely to make back its huge budget in theaters. I’ll be sure to send a sympathy card to the bean counters, but I appreciate this case of a movie going overbudget to (on top of COVID delays) allow leeway for the filmmakers to tinker with it and take the time to try to meet their enormous ambitions. Director/co-writer Christopher McQuarrie has a weird, partially improvisatory way of building these that other filmmakers shouldn’t copy, but it sure seems to work better than rushing everything to meet a deadline.

Part of the magic of these movies is their mixture of simple and complicated. They’re simple enough that they can advertise this as the one with a motorcycle jump and a train crash and know we don’t need more than that. And boiled down the premise is as simple as that a nefarious A.I. known as “The Entity” has infiltrated all databases around the world, including the entire knowledge base of every intelligence agency, threatening to mix it all with bullshit to destroy our whole civilization’s understanding of reality, so various parties are fighting over two literal keys they believe lead to the only way to get at The Entity. Everyone wants to control it, except Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise, LOSIN’ IT), who wants to destroy it. (read the rest of this shit…)

July 26th, 2023 | 52 Comments »

Extraction II

disclaimer: I support the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes and I think Netflix is the primary instigator of the current problems in the movie industry. I believe they used venture capital money to run an unsustainable rent-by-mail service until most video stores were out of business, then pivoted to streaming on a model that requires not paying artists their fair share. And then all the studios jumped in after them, so it’s a bunch of business asshole CEOs trying to last as long as they can without admitting to their stockholders that they fell for a scam and have no way out except to rebuild streaming in a totally different way that doesn’t fulfill Wall Street’s insane lust for preposterous growth. They fucked themselves over, which is fine, but they also fucked movies over, which is unforgivable.

That said, the bastards occasionally spend some of their plunder on making good movies, including EXTRACTION II. Please enjoy my review!


I’m a busy man and/or a slowpoke, so I took my time finishing this review. But don’t let that give you the wrong idea: I watched EXTRACTION II (on screen title: EXTRACTIION) the first day it was on Netflix, I’ve rewatched it since, and I’m sure it will be one of my favorites of the year. I’m a fan of the first one – one of the most legit American made-for-streaming action movies – but the sequel is even better. Once again directed by former Captain America stunt double, UNLUCKY STARS villain and ATOMIC BLONDE choreographer Sam Hargrave, it’s a movie made for those of us who appreciate a good old fashioned, straight ahead movie star action vehicle, made with the impeccable craft of the best stunt geniuses, the luxury of theatrical-worthy production value, and a refreshing lack of smart assy, winky-winky bullshit. There’s a little joking around between comrades, but it takes its subject very seriously. Its subject is a guy who is awesome doing awesome shit while going through some shit. I think it would be a good one of these even if they weren’t so rare these days. (read the rest of this shit…)

July 24th, 2023 | 90 Comments »

Jaws 3-D (40th anniversary revisit)

July 22, 1983

JAWS 3-D (viewed by me in its shameful flat version) is another summer of ’83 movie that I’ve previously reviewed. But that was 13 years ago, and if I’m doing a summer movie series I can’t really skip over a sequel to the movie that kinda invented the summer blockbuster. I also thought it would be a good marker on the timeline, much like how RETURN OF THE JEDI and STAYING ALIVE indicate how much culture had changed in the six years since STAR WARS and SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER. In eight years we went from a popular beach read elevated by a knockout directorial vision to a gimmicky studio product sequel with twice the budget but a fraction of the style or substance.

It’s tempting to see sequels as emblematic of the ‘80s, but the truth is I counted almost as many released in 1975 as in 1983*. I suppose a difference is that 8 of the 10 in ’75 were part 2s, whereas 1983 gave us such part 3s as this, RETURN OF THE JEDI, SUPERMAN III, AMITYVILLE 3-D, and SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT PART 3. THE OMEN, FRIDAY THE 13TH, HALLOWEEN and ROCKY series’ had also hit part three in 1981 or 1982. So maybe it really was a different movie landscape. The era of part threes, heading into part fours. (read the rest of this shit…)

July 20th, 2023 | 18 Comments »

Kowloon Walled City

KOWLOON WALLED CITY (2021) is a diverting and pretty stylish period martial arts movie I found on Hi-YAH!. It takes place I believe in the early ’70s, mostly in the titular Imperial-Chinese-military-fort-turned-enclave-between-Kowloon-and-British-Hong-Kong. But it begins somewhere to the north with its protagonist, the gruff street fighter A’neng (Xing Yu, IP MAN, IRON PROTECTOR), storming through a gangster gambling den and into an opulent bath house to confront a fellow student he blames for the death of his master.

We don’t know who he is yet but he drags people around by their hair and fights through an army of men (and one woman) wearing only towels. Great attention is paid to knocking people through walls and doors, cracking heads on multiple sinks, crunching various ledges and tiled walls with people’s heads, sliding bodies across the wet floor, faces jiggling from the power of fists, bones banging against other bones, making loud thuds or crunching sounds. A’neng carries a small tombstone-shaped tribute to his fallen master, which his opponent kicks in half. A’neng beats him until he’s begging for his life and then stumbles out into the snow, where a drunk man’s singing inspires him to go to Hong Kong. Never underestimate the power of music. (read the rest of this shit…)

July 19th, 2023 | 2 Comments »

Space Raiders

SPACE RAIDERS is another summer of ’83 RETURN-OF-THE-JEDI-coattail-rider, and this time I had honestly never heard of it. It was a small enough release that IMDb and Wikipedia just list the date as July. No specific day, just some point within the seventh month of the calendar year. This is a Roger Corman production, the first released under the Millennium banner – a short-lived company he oversaw as part of the deal for selling New World Pictures. (Their other releases were SCREWBALLS, SUBURBIA [distribution only], DEATHSTALKER, THE WARRIOR AND THE SORCERESS, and LOVE LETTERS.)

I wasn’t surprised that SPACE RAIDERS was no RETURN OF A JEDI, or even that it was no SPACEHUNTER: ADVENTURES IN THE FORBIDDEN ZONE. I was pretty surprised when the credits started up and they were using James Horner’s theme from BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS. They just credit him with the score and recycle it all, from what I could tell. Easiest gig he ever had. I was even more surprised when I saw that the main spaceship in the movie was the same main spaceship from BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS. I probly wouldn’t have noticed with most movie vehicles, but how am I supposed to forget one shaped like a slug with boobs? I assume they reused footage, not just the model, but I don’t know for sure. I also gotta assume all the space ships are recycled from that movie, but I don’t really know that either. For what it’s worth, it’s pretty good miniature work, whichever movie it was done for. (read the rest of this shit…)

July 18th, 2023 | 9 Comments »

Replicant

REPLICANT is the second of three collaborations between director Ringo Lam (FULL CONTACT) and star Jean-Claude Van Damme. The first was the theatrically released MAXIMUM RISK (1996), then this came out in 2001, then IN HELL in 2003. I’m pretty sure I watched this when it first came out and thought it was boring, but I’m a different person now. A replicant of what I was before. Or just older, I guess. But the difference is that now I’m much more appreciative of JCVD the adventurous character actor, and this is one where that side of him really shines.

MAXIMUM RISK gave him a dual role, but not at once – he was a guy who dies at the beginning, then he plays his twin. In this one he plays both the antagonist and one of the protagonists, and they’re both fun characters for him to play. (read the rest of this shit…)

July 17th, 2023 | 9 Comments »

Staying Alive

July 15, 1983

Earlier in this series we talked about how PSYCHO II was a risky, unlikely sequel of ’83 that was so good it actually went over pretty well. There’s another one that did not go over well at all (though it made about $30 million more than PSYCHO II at the box office). Like RETURN OF THE JEDI, this one is a sequel to a huge hit and pop culture phenomenon from 1977.

How is it that there’s a sequel to SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, and it’s directed by Sylvester Stallone, but I didn’t see it until now? I was always curious, but I knew it wasn’t about disco, it looks like he’s doing aerobics on the cover, and I’d only ever heard it mentioned as a punchline, so it stayed low on my watch list until I decided to study the summer of ’83. Only after watching it did I read up on it and realize it was pretty much a universally hated movie. Wikipedia says it’s “the earliest film to hold a score of 0% on Rotten Tomatoes.” It has an average of 23 on Metacritic. World’s biggest SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER fan Gene Siskel called it “a typically weak sequel that has no legitimate artistic reason for being.” A 2006 Entertainment Weekly list called it the worst sequel of all time. I actually couldn’t find a positive review, and few that weren’t scathing, seething, disgusted.

But I’m not crazy, the world is crazy, when I tell you I genuinely enjoyed STAYING ALIVE. I’m not trying to be a show off here, I’m just coming to it with vastly different artistic values, I think. I’m not a circa-1983 critic determined to assassinate the exploiters of a sacred text of the ‘70s, or a Razzie voter avenging popular actors for being hunky, or a snarkster eager to snicker at The Worst Sequels of All Time!!! can you believe it!? How did this get made!? I come to it as a fan of Sylvester Stallone who discovered that holy shit, this is the missing link of his directorial work, not just the movie he did between ROCKY III and IV, but the stylistic bridge between them. It’s also very ROCKY-like in its content, with its ham and egger underdog chasing his dreams – a huge plus to me, but used as a criticism in every review I looked at – so it’s clearly very personal to the director. (read the rest of this shit…)

July 13th, 2023 | 32 Comments »

Saturday Night Fever

1983: SUMMER OF NUB supplement: SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977)

I was born in the ‘70s. Between you and me, it was a week after JAWS came out. So I don’t remember the release of SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, or Disco Demolition Night, I was busy with other shit. Mister Rogers, STAR WARS, Popeye cartoons, learning to tie my shoes, etc.

So growing up there was this idea of “the seventies” that was really funny. Ha ha, they had bellbottoms, they listened to disco, the movies had wah wah guitars. A big joke. The high-pitched Bee Gee vocals, white polyester suits, light up floors and dance moves of SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, as parodied in AIRPLANE!, on Sesame Street and elsewhere, were part of that impression.

But when I was a teenager, hip hop samples opened a path to P-Funk, and 99 cent records at Goodwill introduced me to Innervisions and Headhunters. Film appreciation led me to SHAFT, SUPER FLY, DOLEMITE and THE MACK (with a side order of TAXI DRIVER and all that). Suddenly “the seventies” weren’t as much of a joke in my mind, they were becoming a legendary period. But disco still seemed like some bullshit. As smooth jazz was to jazz, disco was to funk, I thought. Still kind of do, to some extent. (read the rest of this shit…)

July 12th, 2023 | 30 Comments »

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