Posts Tagged ‘D’Urville Martin’
Wednesday, October 30th, 2024
The central theme of ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968) is right there in the title. It’s about someone having a baby, so it’s about fears surrounding a healthy pregnancy and beginning a new life as a parent. That’s part of what makes the movie so powerful, but one way I know it’s good is how effective it is even for someone like me, a non-parent, a childless cat lady. I’m sure it kicks your ass harder if you’re an expecting or aspiring parent, but it has other things going for it too.
My main association with ROSEMARY’S BABY is that it was my mom’s favorite horror movie. That might just mean it was one of the few she’d seen. But I remember when I was a teen obsessed with Freddy Krueger and Clive Barker she said “Do you want to see a real scary movie?” and we rented it. As far as I remember I thought it was pretty good, but not enough that I thought of as a favorite. It didn’t make it into the rotation.
That was more than three decades ago. For years now I’ve been wanting to revisit it and review it for the day before Halloween, my mom’s birthday. But I always get behind on all my other plans and get bogged down. I decided to make it happen this year even before I realized there was a new prequel on Paramount+, but I’ll review that soon. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Angela Dorian, Charles Grodin, D'Urville Martin, Ira Levin, John Cassavetes, Maurice Evans, Mia Farrow, Ralph Bellamy, Robert Evans, Roman Polanski, Ruth Gordon, satanic cult, Sidney Blackmer, William Castle
Posted in Reviews, Horror | 17 Comments »
Tuesday, February 14th, 2023
“My dad died fighting Nazis in Germany, but he died fightin the wrong ones, huh?”
THE FINAL COMEDOWN is a 1972 drama starring Billy Dee Williams as an angry young militant who leads some sort of small uprising. It has been categorized as blaxploitation, and that makes sense – it’s a low budget movie with a funky soundtrack, and a sex scene (maybe to please producer Roger Corman), and it co-stars that bad D’Urville Martin (director of DOLEMITE, played by Wesley Snipes in DOLEMITE IS MY NAME) and Raymond St. Jacques right after COOL BREEZE. But despite having many bullets fired and quite a few falling-off-a-building stunts, it’s not exactly an action movie or empowerment fantasy. It’s a very earnest issue movie, with the unvarnished rage and radicalism of THE SPOOK WHO SAT BY THE DOOR, plus an editing style and non-linear storytelling that seems more in the arty vein of stuff like SWEET SWEETBACK and TOP OF THE HEAP than all the ones that were trying to cash in on the success of SHAFT and SUPER FLY. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Allan Arkush, Billy Dee Williams, Celia Kaye, D'Urville Martin, Ed Cambridge, Grant Green, Maide Norman, Oscar Williams, Pamela Jones, Raymond St. Jacques, Roger Corman
Posted in Reviews, Action, Crime, Drama | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, September 14th, 2021
DISCO 9000 – or FASS BLACK as it’s called on the Xenon Entertainment VHS tape I rented – is a 1977 movie about a super big shot who runs a record label and dance club in the top of a 26 story building on the Sunset Strip. It’s the second of two movies directed by the actor D’Urville Martin (GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER, ROSEMARY’S BABY, BLACK CAESAR) – the first one was DOLEMITE. So yes, he’s the guy Wesley Snipes played in DOLEMITE IS MY NAME.
Fass Black is the name of said big shot, played with distinct swagger by John Poole, whose only other role was as “Record Executive” in the Philip Michael Thomas movie DEATH DRUG (1978). He also has story and wardrobe credits on this. And wardrobe credit is big because that’s about half of the character. One notable thing about this movie is that he wears white-framed sunglasses more often than he doesn’t. It went long enough without showing his eyes at the beginning that I was convinced it was gonna be a DREDD thing where he never takes them off. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: D'Urville Martin, disco, Harold Daniels, Jeannie Bell, Johnnie Taylor, Matthew "Stymie" Beard, Roland S. Jefferson M.D.
Posted in Crime, Music, Reviews | 6 Comments »
Friday, December 21st, 2012
Don’t worry, this is the last of the pre-DJANGO slavery-themed reviews. I don’t want to ruin Christmas or anything, but I gotta finish the trilogy.
BOSS was originally called BOSS [word white people shouldn’t say], but it was easy to change to just BOSS and therefore it’s the only one of the Charley trilogy available on a legitimate DVD. In this one it’s still Fred Williamson as Charley, but he’s just called “Boss.” (Or maybe “Bas” like Bas Rutten?) And D’Urville Martin is still his sidekick but he’s called “Amos” instead of Toby. Maybe it’s an alias. At this point they’ve left behind their town in Mexico and are traveling bounty hunters. But it definitely is meant as a sequel because Williamson says so on a title card added to the DVD where he explains why he approves of the use of the n-word in the title, dialogue and theme song. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: blaxploitation, D'Urville Martin, Fred Williamson, Jack Arnold, R.G. Armstrong, William Smith
Posted in Reviews, Western | 11 Comments »
Thursday, December 20th, 2012
The first sequel to THE LEGEND OF (cough cough) CHARLEY is the best of the series in my opinion. It takes place after the Civil War, so Charley is no longer a runaway slave, but he still has to deal with racists, including a former Confederate colonel who still leads his troop of assholes on violent rampages in black settlements.
Charley (still Fred Williamson) and Toby (still D’urville Martin) come across one of these towns right after everyone’s been massacred except for a little boy. By this time Charley is such a legend that the kid can’t believe he’s meeting him, it’s like he gets to hang out with Mohammad Ali. Or Fred Williamson.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: blaxploitation, D'Urville Martin, Fred Williamson
Posted in Reviews, Western | 11 Comments »
Wednesday, December 19th, 2012
I’ve been curious about this series of Fred Williamson slavery-era westerns, and with DJANGO UNCHAINED coming at the end of the month it seemed like a good time to finally get to them.
As the old white patriarch of a plantation is on his death bed he wants to free his favorite slave, who took good care of him. She says she’s too old to start a new life and asks him instead to free her son, Charley (Fred Williamson). Charley works as a blacksmith, which makes me think this was probly one of the inspirations for THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS. But unfortunately he never uses his ironworking skills as a free man, not even in the sequels.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: blaxploitation, D'Urville Martin, Don Pedro Colley, Fred Williamson, slavery
Posted in Reviews, Western | 33 Comments »
