Two Halloweens ago we discussed Tobe Hooper’s first masterpiece. This is his second. He didn’t even want to direct it at first, sort of got pushed into it, but damn did he rally. In many ways THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 is the Tobe Hooperest movie ever made.
I don’t blame you if you’re skeptical during the opening scene where two obnoxious “senior boys at Wheeler High” calling themselves “Buzz and Rick the Prick” drunkenly drive a Porsche, fire guns, and harass the K-OKLA request line until they receive a drive-by chainsawing on a bridge that must’ve been built by the same people who made that endless runway from the climactic chase in FURIOUS 6. (read the rest of this shit…)
When Stuart Gordon died at the end of March I decided it was finally time to watch SPACE TRUCKERS, a movie I had been meaning to see for literally 23 years. You know how it is. You get busy sometimes.
Obviously I dig Gordon as a Master of Horror, director of RE-ANIMATOR and FROM BEYOND, as one should. And in recent years I’ve really come to love THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM and CASTLE FREAK. But I also think he’s under-appreciated for his sci-fi movies ROBOT JOX and FORTRESS. And ever since I first saw ALIEN I’ve loved those stories that are about space but the heroes are just working class people doing their job, not some royalty or chosen one or member of any federation or academy. As the title makes clear, this is about characters like that. Truckers. In space. (read the rest of this shit…)
a survey of summer movies that just didn’t catch on
“Are you tellin us that you’re gonna arrest a guy for bein a plumber? Get outta here!”
May 28, 1993
Okay, look. I’m not claiming to know a better way to make a live action movie based on a video game about an Italian plumber eating mushrooms, punching bricks and murdering hundreds and hundreds of turtles but also collecting coins while trying to rescue a princess. And seeing how directors Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel reimagine the world of the famous Nintendo game as a dystopic Manhattan in an alternate dimension where people evolved out of dinosaurs is the closest thing to fun this movie has to offer.
RED ROCK WEST is one of my favorite neo-noirs, an ingeniously concocted tale with a simple, appealing hero who makes one wrong choice that snags him and he has to spend the rest of the movie trying to crawl his way out of an ever-tightening trap. He’s driving through the town of Red Rock, Wyoming when it goes down, so every time he gets out and then something else goes wrong we share his dismay at passing that god damn “Welcome to Red Rock” sign once more.
Well before all the thrilling twists and tense (but down to earth) set pieces, director John Dahl (THE LAST SEDUCTION, ROUNDERS, JOY RIDE) wins me over with an A+ overture of visual storytelling that establishes Michael (Nic Cage)’s hard times and integrity. We meet him waking up in his car on the side of a farm road, shaving, smelling the shirt he takes out of the trunk to make sure it’s not too bad, looking in the window reflection as he tucks it in, preparing to try to make a good impression. We also see his USMC tattoo, even before he starts doing shirtless one-arm push-ups. This will be relevant.
He’s broke and having trouble finding a job and has a bum knee brought back as a souvenir from Lebanon but he’s an honest man, not looking for any shortcuts. Not until he stops at a bar and his timing and Texas plates cause the owner, Wayne (the great J.T. Walsh, BREAKDOWN, EXECUTIVE DECISION) to mistake him for “Lyle from Dallas” who was supposed to be here last week for a job. Michael plays along, which seems like a promising trick for the few minutes before he realizes the job is to murder Wayne’s wife Suzanne (Lara Flynn Boyle, POLTERGEIST III). So it’s neither a line of work he’s interested in or the type where you can just put in your two weeks notice and be on your way. (read the rest of this shit…)
After watching FIRESTARTER for the first time since the ’80s I sorta remembered there being some kind of a FIRESTARTER 2 made during this century. I am a completist by nature (see my week of CARRIE movies for evidence) and I thought that might be good for a laugh, so I settled in to watch it real quick. Imagine my surprise when, early in the movie, I checked the running time and saw that it was 2 hours and 48 minutes! What I thought was just a DTV sequel was actually a Sci-Fi Channel mini-series (this is in the old, spelling accurate days before SyFy).
I guess technically this is a sequel to the book, not to the movie, because they have flashbacks to scenes from the movie and they’re reshot with Skye McCole Bartusiak (24) as Charlie, Aaron Radl as her dad and Karrie Combs (BRIDE OF KILLER NERD) as her mom. But mainly we have Charlie played by Marguerite Moreau (the MIGHTY DUCKS trilogy, FREE WILLY 2, WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER). She’s all grown up and keeps a fire extinguisher under her bed for those nights when bad dreams set her bed ablaze. Living under a fake identity, she works at the Millington College academic archive, where she’s trying to uncover information about her dead parents and the experiment that started her firestarting. (read the rest of this shit…)
Oh, WATERWORLD, how I’ve been meaning to rewatch you. Maybe I should’ve done it before FURY ROAD, though.
Let’s get the “flop” shit out of the way first. This is still most famous as a big expensive movie that pretty much just broke even. I don’t care. That’s none of my business. I’m old fashioned.
I always thought it was treated unfairly at the time. It was in the news for going over budget and the popularity pendulum was swinging back on Kevin Costner after a bunch of Oscars and hit movies. It became everybody’s target and they were excited for how terrible it was supposedly gonna be. (This article from The Independent at the time examines the reasons for the backlash against Costner.)
Here, let me check if it was nominated for Razzies. Yep, Dennis Hopper won worst supporting actor and it was nominated for worst picture, actor and director. (SHOWGIRLS was the big winner that year.) So that speaks well of the movie if those assholes were against it.
We’ve been looking at the other movies of that summer, so we can see in context that it’s somewhere in the upper range of quality for what was in theaters at the time. It’s for sure less embarrassing than BATMAN FOREVER or MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS: THE MOVIE, more impressive than CONGO, arguably better than JOHNNY MNEMONIC or JUDGE DREDD. It didn’t deserve all the hate that it got.
Do you guys know about SPEED? It’s like GRAND PIANO with a bus! An L.A. public bus that requires the very precise driving of not going below 50 mph or it will blow up. Even if it went through a school zone it could not slow down to avoid crunching the little ones under its wheels. That’s fucked up! I mean they don’t run into that problem in the movie but jesus, bad guy mastermind, think of the children.
It’s no mystery to us, this is the work of bomber-for-ransom Dennis Hopper (TICKER), who in a pre-bus sequence tries a similar job on an elevator full of Patrick Bateman types, but is foiled by Jeff Daniels (BLOOD WORK) and his young gum-chewing sidekick Keanu Reeves (MAN OF TAI CHI). This was after POINT BREAK but before THE MATRIX, so Keanu as the lead in a big action movie was still a new notion to the world. But what are you gonna do, the Jeff Daniels character gets shot and taken off the streets, it’s just not in the cards for it to be a kickass Jeff Daniels vehicle. I’m sorry. (read the rest of this shit…)
TRUE ROMANCE is an entertaining, uniquely textured crime movie, a celebration of youthful love, kitsch, Asian exploitation cinema, and great character actors. At the time it seemed like a new feel, especially coming from Tony Scott. Now it’s more notable as a record of young, undisciplined Quentin Tarantino manning the word processor. (Roger Avary was hired to restructure the original non-linear story and write an ending where the hero doesn’t die – yeah, that sounds like young QT all right.) (read the rest of this shit…)
WELL, WE can’t say we didn’t see this one coming, but it’s still sad. I first heard several months ago from some of you right here in the comments that Dennis Hopper’s cancer had gotten real bad and he was on his last legs. I think he managed to tough it out at least a couple months longer than anybody thought he would.
I never feel qualified to write eulogies, but Mr. Hopper’s contribution to movies in general and to the kind of shit I like specifically is pretty fuckin huge, so I feel like something should be said. (read the rest of this shit…)
Recently I made a list of all Clint Eastwood’s movies (as an actor) that I haven’t seen or don’t remember. The list is surprisingly long, and I carry it in my wallet now in case I’m at the video store and don’t know what to rent. So hopefully this will be the first of many upcoming doses of Eastwood medicine. (pun)
(you get it, it’s a play on Eastern medicine, that’s why it’s a pun. Needs work I guess.)
HANG ‘EM HIGH opens with Clint by himself moving some cattle across the plains. Soon he runs into some deputies who question him and don’t believe anything he says. You know how cops can be. He got pulled over for cattledriving-while-Clint. What we don’t know yet is that the cattle really are stolen property. The guy he bought them from was not who he said he was. The real owner was murdered, and that’s why the lawmen are hassling Clint. (read the rest of this shit…)
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Recent commentary and jibber-jabber
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VERN’S “I RECOMMEND THE SHIT OUT OF THIS PRODUCT” CORNER:
Two Halloweens ago we discussed Tobe Hooper’s first masterpiece. This is his second. He didn’t even want to direct it at first, sort of got pushed into it, but damn did he rally. In many ways THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 is the Tobe Hooperest movie ever made.
When Stuart Gordon died at the end of March I decided it was finally time to watch SPACE TRUCKERS, a movie I had been meaning to see for literally 23 years. You know how it is. You get busy sometimes.
RED ROCK WEST is one of my favorite neo-noirs, an ingeniously concocted tale with a simple, appealing hero who makes one wrong choice that snags him and he has to spend the rest of the movie trying to crawl his way out of an ever-tightening trap. He’s driving through the town of Red Rock, Wyoming when it goes down, so every time he gets out and then something else goes wrong we share his dismay at passing that god damn “Welcome to Red Rock” sign once more.
aka FIRESTARTER 2: REKINDLED
Do you guys know about SPEED? It’s like 
Recently I made a list of all Clint Eastwood’s movies (as an actor) that I haven’t seen or don’t remember. The list is surprisingly long, and I carry it in my wallet now in case I’m at the video store and don’t know what to rent. So hopefully this will be the first of many upcoming doses of Eastwood medicine. (pun)
