John Carpenter’s ESCAPE FROM L.A. is a movie that I still like, but (kind of like THE FRIGHTENERS) not as much as I did at the time. Come to think of it maybe part of that was that Carpenter had been, up to that point, almost entirely a video experience for me. When I saw BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA in the theater I was too young to be aware of who the director was. ESCAPE FROM L.A. was the first time I was purposely watching a John Carpenter film on the big screen, excited to see Kurt Russell play Snake Plissken again, his theme music blasting through the then-state-of-the-art THX sound system.
But I remember people trashing it at the time. Carpenter hadn’t done a sequel before, they didn’t like seeing him rehash a previous story, they didn’t like seeing c.g. in one of his movies, at least not like this. In many cases, I have to say, they really didn’t get the joke. I was, and still am, a person that finds it funny to move the anti-hero from a classic ‘80s urban dystopia over to the west coast and make him surf with Peter Fonda. Not everyone feels that way. They’re missing out on some of life’s beauty, in my opinion.
Okay, the c.g. complaint, I still get that. There are shots that look bad for the time, and that was 30 years ago. On the other hand, I’d guess it’s around 30 seconds of screen time, and lit murkily enough that it doesn’t look as shiny and ridiculous as most of the similarly budgeted stuff from the same era. One of those shots is underwater at night. What I found interesting on this viewing was that as the movie ages it looks and feels much more like ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK than it seemed to at the time, when it felt too current. The arc of time is starting to merge them. (read the rest of this shit…)
I don’t remember ORIGINAL GANGSTAS playing in a theater near me, but it apparently opened on 474 screens, enough to make it into the top 10 (at #9, below JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH, which had been out a whole month already). I was excited for it because it was basically a Blaxploitation family reunion. It stars Fred Williamson, Jim Brown, Pam Grier, Richard Roundtree and Ron O’Neal, it was back when you actually had to have them all on set together to make that work, and director Larry Cohen (BLACK CAESAR, HELL UP IN HARLEM) did manage to get a shot of them all in a row firing guns in front of an exploding car. In the dark, though. But I think it’s them.
Unfortunately the script by Aubrey K. Rattan (HIT LIST) doesn’t do anything beyond trudging through the most basic tropes you expect, and Cohen doesn’t manage to find much energy, momentum or style in it (much less humor). Unsurprisingly, but crucially, the score by Vladimir Horunzhy (ELVES) could not hold a candle to the worst and most generic of ‘70s studio musician jams, and the modern songs we hear bits of don’t do much even though they got Ice-T, Geto Boys and MC Ren to contribute. This movie has the most famous faces of the genre, but not a single drop of the juice. (read the rest of this shit…)
BILL & TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE (1989) is one of those beloved comedies you take for granted. I hadn’t seen it in 20+ years, so I was kinda afraid it might not hold up. It’s kind of hard to put your finger on why it works so well, and it would be hard to explain why it’s funny if somebody asked. I’m not sure if you had to be there or not.
Don’t get me wrong – there’s a pretty straight forward comical premise: what if a couple of dumb guys got a hold of a time machine and recruited actual historical figures to help with their history test? But for the most part that’s not really what’s funny about it. It’s the particular personalities of the dumb guys, and the reasons they have access to time travel.
Bill S. Preston Esquire (Alex Winter, DEATH WISH 3) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves, THE NIGHT BEFORE) are a Californian version of what we used to call “rockers” and some regions called “heshers” – guys whose lives center around heavy metal and/or hard rock. In the wild you’d expect them to have longer hair and leather jackets, smoke lots of pot and drink lots of beer, but Bill and Ted mostly just idolize Van Halen, talk about “babes,” and laugh at the number 69. They have a band called Wyld Stallyns, which features only the two of them on guitar, an instrument neither of them knows how to play. Still, their worst fear os for the band to be broken up if Ted fails his history test, in which case his dad (Hal Landon Jr., ERASERHEAD), who is a police captain and wears an NRA jacket while off duty, will ship him off to Oats Military Academy in Alaska. (read the rest of this shit…)
I had heard of HIT MAN (1972) as a “Blaxploitation remake of GET CARTER,” and assumed that meant it was loose and uncredited. In fact it’s an official adaptation of the same 1970 book, Jack’s Return Home by Ted Lewis, and director George Armitage – a Roger Corman acolyte who had written GAS-S-S-S and NIGHT CALL NURSES and directed PRIVATE DUTY NURSES – didn’t even know about the other version until he’d rewritten the script and his agent recognized it. As I mentioned in my GET CARTER review, MGM didn’t do much promotion of the well-reviewed GET CARTER because they had more faith in this version to be a hit. So – although it sounds like he may have started with the same script as GET CARTER (on this point I’m unclear) – I’d still say it’s not a GET CARTER remake, but the first American version of Jack’s Return Home.
Bernie Casey (GUNS OF THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN) plays the Jack Carter character, now called Tyrone Tackett. In this version he’s from Oakland visiting L.A., and I swear they say he’s a cop? But he acts the same as the gangster in the other version. Hmm. Strange. (read the rest of this shit…)
THE PACKAGE is… kind of an action movie from director Andrew Davis. After the better-than-average Chuck Norris vehicle CODE OF SILENCE (1985) and Steven Seagal’s debut ABOVE THE LAW (1988) the director put some similar elements into a thriller with Gene Hackman in the lead. Hackman had just done MISSISSIPPI BURNING (which he got Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for) but did not have any black belts in anything, so I’m not sure why he thought he should be in movies?
He plays U.S. Army Master Sergeant Johnny Gallagher, who I assume is respected for his skills, but he seems mostly just beloved for being a great guy. He’s introduced arriving for security detail at the site of U.S.-Soviet Union disarmament talks in West Berlin and walking around smiling and saying hi to everybody. (read the rest of this shit…)
I didn’t realize this until recently, but the Pam Grier movie FRIDAY FOSTER came from a comic strip. It ran from 1970-1974 and was the first syndicated comic with an African-American woman in the lead. It was created by a journeyman writer named Jim Lawrence who also wrote for radio shows such as Green Hornet and comic strips based on James Bond and Dallas (!). The artist was a Spaniard named Jorge Longarón until the last year, when it was taken over by Gray Morrow, co-creator of MAN THING. (read the rest of this shit…)
One thing about JOHN CARPENTER’S GHOSTS OF MARS: it’s definitely John Carpenter’s GHOSTS OF MARS.
It has plenty of elements that could be perfect for one of his movies. It’s kind of a siege movie like ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, although the simplicity of that type of setup is mired in flashbacks and narration. It’s got a western motif – even though it’s in the future and on Mars there’s a train, and colonists possessed by angry Martian spirits take the place of the Natives defending their land. It’s got a ready-made anti-hero – Ice Cube as the bad-but-not-guilty-of-the-specific-crime-he’s-accused-of prisoner-in-transfer Desolation Williams. It has a pretty good soundtrack where Carpenter melds his style with a bunch of rock n roll dudes with electric guitars and drums, playing Martian tribal rock. It has Ice Cube, Jason Statham, Joanna Cassidy and Pam Grier in the cast! This shit should be great. (read the rest of this shit…)
I liked VISITING HOURS so much I figured I should follow the ol’ auteur theory with its director, Jean-Claude Lord. I know it’s a French theory, not French-Canadian, but I think it still applies. It’s 1986, only four years after VISITING HOURS, and the poor guy is already doing THE VINDICATOR.
THE VINDICATOR is the story of Carl Lehman (David McIlwraith, who played Andrew Card in the TV movie DC 9/11), genius scientist and soon-to-be-father who goes in to confront the famed rich guy Alex Whyte (Richard Cox, who played Alan Dershowitz in the TV movie AMERICAN TRAGEDY) who cut off his funding just when he knew he was on the verge of a huge fucking scientific breakthrough. What could go wrong? He’ll probly be very persuasive and the two will work out a compromise to continue the research, support each other and work together for the betterment of mankind. I’m sure everything’ll be fine. (read the rest of this shit…)
In case you’ve had your fill of straight-to-video action and shit, I’ll give you an alternative. Today we’re having a triple-feature of ’70s blaxploitation movies with scores by Johnny Pate. You know, I’m trying to find one of those real accessible topics everybody can relate to.
Johnny Pate is a Chicago-born bassist and arranger. He says his first and biggest love is jazz, but to me he’s a legend because of his comparatively brief detour into R&B in the late ’60s and early ’70s. He worked with many Chicago labels of that era but most notably alongside the one and only Curtis Mayfield – Pate was an arranger for the Impressions and for Mayfield’s label, Curtom.
I’m not as detail-oriented about music as I am about movies, so I probaly wouldn’t know about Johnny Pate except that I happened to pick up his 1970 funk instrumentals album “Outrageous” when it was reissued last year by Dusty Groove. Then I found out he scored SHAFT IN AFRICA so I finally got around to watching those sequels and loved them. At least half of my love for blaxploitation movies comes from the music, and of course SUPERFLY and SHAFT are the two most legendary blaxploitation soundtracks. Here’s a guy who kind of connects them together – he arranged Superfly for Mayfield, he scored the third SHAFT movie, and even played with the original Isaac Hayes SHAFT themes when he scored the short-lived (and not on DVD) SHAFT tv series. (read the rest of this shit…)
Yeah I know, this Iraq deal is getting even worse but let’s just take one fuckin column to talk about what I used to talk about, the movies.
This month has been hard on the wallet not just because of the economy but also because of numerous high quality dvd releases of important films of Badass Cinema. Today I will take some time to review a few of those dvds.
First of all we got my pick for the best movie of the year so far, BLADE II. I feel I have already written enough about the many fine qualities of this picture so I will focus this review only on the many fine dvd extras brought to you by one of our best directors, Mr. Guillermo del Toro. This is a part of the “New Line Platinum Series” which I have come to know and trust as a series of dvds with extra material above and beyond your “theatrical trailer” or your “chapter stops” or even your “weblinks.” (Does anybody really have a DVD-ROM drive? And if so, do they really need a dvd to figure out how to find the web site for BONES?) BLADE II is no exception, in fact it has even better extras than BLADE I. (read the rest of this shit…)
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Recent commentary and jibber-jabber
Schmoe Gunn on Escape From L.A. (30th anniversary revisit): “Perhaps LA has higher production values in its worldbuilding, but I feel like NEW YORK is better at presenting its…” Sep 4, 16:49
Amelia Thomas on Cosmopolis / Maps To the Stars: “Both Cosmopolis and Maps to the Stars have that unusual, thought-provoking style that makes you look beyond the surface of…” Sep 4, 16:27
Mr. Majestyk on Escape From L.A. (30th anniversary revisit): “I have long held the controversial-bordering-on-incendiary opinion that this is an overall more entertaining movie than ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK.…” Sep 4, 15:37
Tim Bobo on Escape From L.A. (30th anniversary revisit): “I don’t think I’ve seen this in 30 years. But I remember not liking it much. Hated the tone compared…” Sep 4, 13:48
Crudnasty on Escape From L.A. (30th anniversary revisit): “I actually remember seeing this in theaters while I was on a family trip and I tagged along with some…” Sep 4, 11:25
KayKay on Toxic: A Fairy Tale For Grown-Ups: “Also, apparently Yash bonking his way through an assembly line of nubile hotties with the awe inspiring sexual stamina of…” Sep 4, 10:16
KayKay on Toxic: A Fairy Tale For Grown-Ups: “The critical and commercial backlash against TOXIC in India was primarily owing to some colossal mis-marketing for this movie. So…” Sep 4, 10:08
daniel on Kazaam: “Actually, I am, or I was, a Sinbad Shazaam movie truther. What I remember was never watching the full movie,…” Sep 4, 08:17
CJ Holden on Toxic: A Fairy Tale For Grown-Ups: “I’m pretty sure the first completely AI generated TV show came from India too (and it looked exactly like you…” Sep 4, 07:17
Timo on Toxic: A Fairy Tale For Grown-Ups: “One notable thing from Toxic I just remembered is that it’s the first film I have seen that has an…” Sep 4, 06:52
Dreadguacamole on Toxic: A Fairy Tale For Grown-Ups: “From my experience with Indian cinema, re:”(I think it’s fair to assume a point is being made here, because the…” Sep 4, 04:43
Timo on Toxic: A Fairy Tale For Grown-Ups: “When a new Indian film is released, I lurk in the Bollywood, Tollywood, Kollywood, etc., Reddit forums to see people’s…” Sep 4, 02:10
August 9, 1996
But I remember people trashing it at the time. Carpenter hadn’t done a sequel before, they didn’t like seeing him rehash a previous story, they didn’t like seeing c.g. in one of his movies, at least not like this. In many cases, I have to say, they really didn’t get the joke. I was, and still am, a person that finds it funny to move the anti-hero from a classic ‘80s urban dystopia over to the west coast and make him surf with Peter Fonda. Not everyone feels that way. They’re missing out on some of life’s beauty, in my opinion.
May 10, 1996
BILL & TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE (1989) is one of those beloved comedies you take for granted. I hadn’t seen it in 20+ years, so I was kinda afraid it might not hold up. It’s kind of hard to put your finger on why it works so well, and it would be hard to explain why it’s funny if somebody asked. I’m not sure if you had to be there or not.
I had heard of HIT MAN (1972) as a “Blaxploitation remake of 
THE PACKAGE is… kind of an action movie from director Andrew Davis. After the better-than-average Chuck Norris vehicle 
One thing about JOHN CARPENTER’S GHOSTS OF MARS: it’s definitely John Carpenter’s GHOSTS OF MARS.
I liked VISITING HOURS so much I figured I should follow the ol’ auteur theory with its director, Jean-Claude Lord. I know it’s a French theory, not French-Canadian, but I think it still applies. It’s 1986, only four years after VISITING HOURS, and the poor guy is already doing THE VINDICATOR.
In case you’ve had your fill of straight-to-video action and shit, I’ll give you an alternative. Today we’re having a triple-feature of ’70s blaxploitation movies with scores by Johnny Pate. You know, I’m trying to find one of those real accessible topics everybody can relate to.
Yeah I know, this Iraq deal is getting even worse but let’s just take one fuckin column to talk about what I used to talk about, the movies.
