SHOWDOWN AT THE GRAND is a little indie movie with a premise and setting that are right up my alley. It’s sort of like MATINEE for people fixated on the movies of the ‘70s and ‘80s instead of ’50s and ‘60s. To me it doesn’t really build much from there, but it uses two top shelf actors in novel ways, applies elbow grease to areas where I didn’t expect it to, and has an overall enthusiasm that makes it worth recommending.
Dolph Lundgren (JOHNNY MNEMONIC) is in this movie, and that’s obviously what brought my eye to it, but the star is Terrence Howard (HUSTLE & FLOW), who plays George Fuller, owner of an old time one screen theater called the Warner Grand. He’s a larger-than-life figure who dresses like a cowboy and lovingly lectures everyone he sees about the supposed greats of forgotten exploitation movie history, making it sound like a religious sermon. Showing movies is his life, and maybe his home – if he has a house or apartment outside of the Grand we never see it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Having wrapped up my series on the action movies of summer ’89, I’ve been enjoying the freedom to dart around to different topics that catch my interest. But I realize there’s a little bit of unfinished business to get out of the way. There were two movies I reviewed in The Last Summer of ’80s Action that spawned not-even-on-DVD-in-the-U.S. sequels five years later. There’s nothing hugely special about either of these part 2s, but you know how I am. I had to see them. And the one that follows series-opener 
In BULLET, Danny Trejo plays Frank “Bullet” Marasco, who’s in the drug industry with Max Perlich and gets caught and kills two cops. Or the opening scene says so anyway, but I read the box and it said he was playing a cop. Weird.
