Posts Tagged ‘TV movies’
Thursday, April 23rd, 2015
STALKING DANGER is the video title for C.A.T. SQUAD, a 1986 TV movie directed by William Friedkin. You can tell it’s TV by the cheap video titles, the 4:3 composition (even though it’s shot by Wes Anderson’s Academy Award nominated cinematographer, Robert Yeoman) and the “guest starring” in the credits, but otherwise it’s very cinematic. It even has a blood-pumping score by Ennio Morricone.
This is another secret agent counter-terror thing, with badass Doc Burkholder (the Michael Douglas-esque Joe Cortese) appointed to put together his own team to catch an assassin called Carlos (Eddie Velez, THE HUNTED, BLACK DAWN). It’s not supposed to be Carlos the Jackal, by the way, just standard, human Carlos I believe.
We know who the guy is because we watch him come in disguised as a priest, see how he sets up in a tower, crosses himself after he snipes the guy, gets away. And possibly we realize that the reason he looks so familiar is because he played “Dishpan” Frankie Santana, the best special effects man in Hollywood who joined the A-Team in the last season. But if not we are excited to learn that from IMDb.
Then we switch to Doc going around recruiting each member of his group (always a favorite part of this type of story), following leads, doing surveillance, poring over the photos, comparing everything to what else they know. ZERO DARK THIRTY shit. Eventually they catch on that it’s this guy and they go look for him. They follow him on the street, he tries to lose them down alleys, goes through different apartments and out the back door, that kind of stuff. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bradley Whitford, Eddie Velez, Ennio Morricone, Gerald Petievich, Joe Cortese, Steve James, TV movies, William Friedkin
Posted in Reviews, Thriller | 4 Comments »
Monday, March 9th, 2015
If you count TV movies – and I do – JERICHO MILE is Michael Mann’s directivational debut. It’s not as cinematic as his later big, wide movies, but it’s from the days when TV movies were legit enough to play theatrically overseas. It also stood out from other TV at the time, winning Emmies for writing, lead actor (over Kurt Russell in ELVIS!) and film editing for a limited series or special, and a Director’s Guild Award for “Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Special/Movies for TV/Actuality.” (?)
It’s a prison movie, and you know Mann isn’t gonna want to soften that up. I mean, it’s TV so we don’t get any profanity, racial slurs or rape, but it’s still got a gritty feel because it was filmed in Folsom with the real inmates all around, and plenty of establishing montages that are clearly just documentary footage. You can definitely tell that some of the supporting players are real cons. I wasn’t surprised when I read that Mann had to negotiate for each of the race gangs (white, black and Latin) to have representatives on screen and vow to prevent any race wars or riots during filming so the production wouldn’t be kicked out. I mean obviously it’s an unwritten rule on pretty much all movie sets that the actors should not be involved in any race wars. But I still give them credit for not having one. Apparently there were a bunch of stabbings, one fatal, but those were allowed. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brian Dennehy, Ed Lauter, Eddie Bunker, Geoffrey Lewis, Michael Mann, Miguel Pinero, Peter Strauss, prison, Richard Lawson, Richard Moll, running, TV movies
Posted in Drama, Reviews, Sport | 41 Comments »
Monday, September 29th, 2014
All things being equal, THE EQUALIZER is Denzel Washington’s TAKEN. It’s the one where they figure out people like to watch a really commanding older actor be smarter than everybody and kill a bunch of criminals. It has some gestures of seriousness and takes a bit to get to the killing, but once it does it’s pretty straight up about being a violent, lowbrow action movie. It even has the Academy Award winner doing the ol’ slo-mo-walking-away-from-a-fiery-explosion shot. I guess he did that in MAN ON FIRE too, and shot more beautifully from what I remember. But this one is more my speed because it’s not trying to rub my nose in the shit, it’s just trying to be stupid fun.
And by the way I apologize for awkwardly shoe-horning “all things being equal” in there at the beginning. It just seemed like something you do. But let’s try to get past it.
Written by Richard Wenk (VAMP, 16 BLOCKS, THE MECHANIC REMAKE, THE EXPENDABLES 2) and sort of based on the ’80s TV show of the same name, this has Denzel (RICOCHET) playing Edward Woodward’s character Bob McCall, now a book-reading, OCD widower square who works at “Home Mart,” wears polo shirts tucked into dad jeans and cleans his New Balance sneakers with a toothbrush every morning. Then one day when an acquaintance from the diner where he hangs out (Chloe Grace Moretz, TODAY YOU DIE) gets badly beaten by her Russian pimp (David Meunier, a.k.a. Cousin Johnny from Justified) Bob decides to try to help her. And it turns out his previous job was at the CIA or something (the agency is not specified) and that he’s real good at massacring a whole bunch of armed criminals using found objects and guns he takes out of their hands. Gino Fellino would be proud. He even sticks a corkscrew in a guy’s chin and we see it poke up into his mouth. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Antoine Fuqua, Bill Pullman, Boston, Chloe Grace Moretz, David Meunier, Denzel Washington, Martin Csokas, Melissa Leo, Richard Wenk, TV movies, vigilante
Posted in Action, Reviews | 53 Comments »
Friday, January 8th, 2010
Kris Kristofferson is… THE TRACKER. He’s like Tommy Lee Jones in THE HUNTED, except this is the Old West so it’s probly both a more common skill set and a more useful one. He’s a guy who can glance at some footprints in the dirt and tell you how many people were there, their size, what kind of horses they had, how long ago it was, possibly their political beliefs and religious backgrounds. There’s a part where he points out where a horse is leaning to the right on every fourth step and that means the rider is holding his gun a certain way which means he’s left handed. (Which I don’t think turned out to be important, it was just showing off I guess.) Man, I couldn’t even tell which one was the fourth step, but this guy’s so used to knowing this shit he thinks it’s easy to explain. His name is Noble Adams and he’s famous enough that the guy he’s after is honored and almost star struck when he finds out who’s tracking him. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Kris Kristofferson, TV movies
Posted in Reviews, Western | 48 Comments »
Thursday, January 7th, 2010
Time for a little history lesson. Not about the American post-slavery period known as Reconstruction (which is what this movie is about) but about TV movies. It’s hard for young people to wrap their heads around now, but there was a time when TV movies actually could be big events, a major shared element of our culture. This was when there were only a few channels, and none of them were SyFy, and movies about giant komodo dragons or snakes were not yet common. Believe it or not there were even sometimes TV movies where the people making them actually tried to do a good job. In fact, there were honest to God movies on TV that put some theatrical films to shame, like Spielberg’s DUEL and Carpenter’s SOMEONE’S WATCHING ME. Of course, most of them weren’t as good as that, but alot of them were at least memorable. In the ’70s and ’80s there were true crime movies to creep the shit out of us, like THE HILLSIDE STRANGLERS, THE DELIBERATE STRANGER, I KNOW MY FIRST NAME IS STEVEN. Or if you want to get real frightening there was the nuclear war movie THE DAY AFTER.
1979’s 4-hour mini-series FREEDOM ROAD fits into the Important Historical Epics category like ROOTS or SHOGUN or I WILL FIGHT NO MORE FOREVER or some James A. Michener type shit. It’s about a man who goes from a slave to a soldier to a delegate to an educated black man to a senator and freedom fighter uniting former slaves with lower class whites to stand up against racist politicians and thugs and create a stable life for themselves. But the main reason to watch it is the star: Muhammad Ali. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alfre Woodard, Civil War, historical drama, Kris Kristofferson, Muhammad Ali, Reconstruction, slavery, TV movies
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 31 Comments »
Monday, November 9th, 2009
Did you know that in 1987 there was a pilot for a TV spinoff of the PSYCHO series, starring Bud Cort? It was a failure, it never turned into a series and it’s never been available on a legitimate video in the US, but you can catch it on cable occasionally, get it from the fine bootleggers at revengeismydestiny.com or download it from this incredible websight I just stumbled across while researching this review.
Cort plays Alex West, a sanitarium buddy of Norman Bates. Alex got locked up at the age of 6 for killing his stepfather (kids do the darndest things), and had a great father-son relationship with Norman. Now not only is Alex free, but Norman has just died and willed the motel and house to Alex so he can make something of his life. Or peep on women and then kill them, I guess. Hopefully the first one. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bud Cort, Gregg Henry, Lori Petty, Moses Gunn, TV movies
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 9 Comments »
Saturday, May 16th, 2009
THE GLADIATOR is another movie I found on VHS by accident while browsing the video store. It’s a car vigilante TV movie, so I was surprised to find it with the Abel Ferrara movies. Yes, the director of KING OF NEW YORK and BAD LIEUTENANT also did a TV movie starring Ken Wahl and guest starring cheeseball ’80s top 40 DJ Rick Dees as his obnoxious boss. From about ’85 until ’88 Ferrara mostly worked in TV, doing some episodes of MIAMI VICE and CRIME STORY, plus this one in ’86. Seemed like something I should investigate.
Wahl plays Rick Benton, a stoic car mechanic working for Dees’s specialty car business. The only people in his life are his kid brother who he raised (Brian Robbins, director of NORBIT), his Vietnam buddy who works at the junkyard, and a customer he’s starting to date, talk radio host Nancy Allen. He works for rich people but chugs along in the kind of lower middle class existence not usually depicted casually in a TV movie. A couple nice touches I noticed: they eat on paper plates, and they wrap gifts with the Sunday funnies. You ever notice how presents on TV and movies are usually perfectly wrapped with shiny bows and sometimes even lids that just lift off? I could never pull that off. The Sunday funnies is more relatable. Good one Ferrara. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Abel Ferrara, car chases, TV movies, vigilantes
Posted in Action, Drama, Reviews, Thriller | 24 Comments »
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009
Not too long ago it was in the nerd-news that Samuel L. Jackson had signed on to play the character “Nick Fury” in as many as nine Marvel Comics movies. Some people said, “Well, that’s not surprising. Samuel L. Jackson will sign onto anything!” But that’s not really fair, they were probaly just actors who were bitter because they didn’t get the roles in THE SPIRIT, CLEANER, RULES OF ENGAGEMENT, S.W.A.T., SOUL MEN, JUMPER, HOME OF THE BRAVE, FREEDOMLAND, FARCE OF THE PENGUINS, BASIC, CHANGING LANES, SPHERE, LOADED WEAPON 1, etc.
Where does this Nick Fury come from? Probaly some comic book, but in my opinion mainly from this TV movie starring David Hasselhoff. I actually have wanted to see this for years because it was written by David Goyer in the same year he did BLADE, but they rarely showed it on TV. One time I happened to catch part of it on cable so I checked to see when it would air again – never, it turned out. That was the one and only scheduled airing. But that was before Fury Fever swept the nation, so now it’s on DVD. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: David Hasselhoff, David S. Goyer, Marvel Comics, TV movies
Posted in Action, Comic strips/Super heroes, Reviews | 2 Comments »
Friday, October 5th, 2007
John Carpenter is on my list of top directors. HALLOWEEN, THE THING, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, THEY LIVE – all by the same guy? Not to mention DARK STAR, ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA… well, you have IMDb. Point is the guy has done a tone of what I consider classics, and most of the rest are real good or at least pretty interesting. I’ll watch any of them. I watched BODY BAGS last year. I watched MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN, and it wasn’t too bad actually. The two MASTERS OF HORROR episodes he did with my internet buds Moriarty and Scott Swan were cool as far as TV goes. Even VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, I was surprised, that was pretty good too. And CHRISTINE. The guy is good.
So a couple weeks ago I realized, shit, I’ve seen all of ’em except ELVIS: THE MOVIE. I’d been meaning to rent that one and so that day I finally decided to do it, get everything on the John Carpenter list crossed off. It was a 3 hour TV movie originally but the VHS release is a 2 hour theatrical cut. It’s slick and well made and it’s basically every musician biopic cliche all lined up in a row: the discovery of talent, the loyalty to old friends, spending money on the naive parents, the first girlfriend who leaves him, the new love, winning over her parents, the honeymoon is over (why the fuck you gonna marry Elvis and then ask him to stop doing music!?), the fall from grace, the amazing comeback. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: John Carpenter, TV movies
Posted in Horror, Mystery, Reviews, Thriller | 5 Comments »
Wednesday, February 2nd, 2000
This movie is a USA Original Picture on the USA cable network. Now you may be thinking that means its not a real movie, why is vern writing about it, it doesn’t matter. Well hear me out bud. I think it does matter. Yes, I think it does matter and I am going to tell you why. Because, my friend, this is a USA Original PIcture. And what that means, in my opinion, is that they are gonna rerun this movie forever. I mean what do you think their gonna play late at night, or early in the afternoon, or at 8:00 am or pm, when they need two hours to fill. Are they gonna play Teen Wolf? Just One of the Guys? X-Man?
No. No no and no. They are gonna play Cabin By the Lake, because it’s a USA original picture. And that is two hours where they could have been playing a chuck norris movie or what have you. Maybe even van damme. So this IS important. you want this picture to be good because, let’s face it, these are the ones that count. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Judd Nelson, Po-Chih Leong, TV movies
Posted in Horror, Reviews | No Comments »
