Monthly Archives: August 2020

Film Review: Massive Retaliation (dir by Thomas A. Cohen)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1984 film, Massive Retaliation, was made before I was even born but I still feel as if it was specifically designed to annoy me.

Consider this:

The movie begins with an endless folk song playing over the opening credits.  It’s one of those peace and love folks songs that goes on forever.  I recently did some research on the folk music of the 50s, 60s, and 70s and what I discovered is that folk singers were (and are) essentially the most self-important people on the planet.  (Pete Seeger apparently went to his grave convinced that he was single-handedly responsible for getting Lyndon B. Johnson to withdraw from the 1968 presidential election.)  When a film about nuclear war opens with a folk song, it’s never a good sign.

The film then cuts from the folk singers to a bunch of screaming kids in a van.   I mean, seriously …. AGCK!  The kids are on a road trip and the van is being driven by their older brother, Eric (Jason Gedrick).  Eric tries to keep the kids quiet but it doesn’t work, mostly because Eric is kind of a wimp.  Unfortunately, Eric picked the wrong time to go on a road trip because it looks like a nuclear war is about to break out and his parents and their friends are all heading up to a compound that they built up in the hills.

(It’s supposed to be a secret compound but it’s sitting right out in the open and there’s a paved road leading up to it so ….. yeah.  Good job.)

Anyway, the first half of the movie is divided between scenes of the adults and the kids heading to the compound.  This leads to the two groups encountering a lot of other people who are reacting to the threat of war.  This also leads to a lot of half-baked monologues about war and human nature.  The rednecks are excited about the prospect of the world ending.  Eric’s dad (Peter Donat) is looking forward to restarting civilization in the compound.  Every old person who shows up in the movie says something like, “There’s always been a war.”  The film tries way too hard to be profound, which is always an annoying trait.

Eventually, Bobcat Goldthwait shows up as a member of an evil redneck crew who wants to steal some gasoline.  Despite the fact that this is meant to be a serious film, Goldthwait uses a variation of his Bobcat voice in the role and it creates a weird effect.  Perhaps that’s the message of the film.  When society collapses, comedians will become warlords….

Anyway, Massive Retaliation is one of those self-righteously liberal and largely humorless films has a lot that it wants to say about war and humanity and society but …. eh.  Who cares?  I mean, I guess if I wanted to, I could make the argument that there are parallels to the film’s depiction of society collapsing over the possibility of war to the way some people are reacting to the COVID-19 pandemic but that would just be me trying to make this film sound more interesting than it actually is.  To be honest, the best thing about the film is the poster below, which looks like it was made for a different, better movie:

Massive Retaliation is nowhere as fun as this poster.  Instead, it’s a film that begins with folk music and ends with children forming a circle of peace.  Seriously, was this film just made to give me a migraine?

The Strangers in 7A (1972, directed by Paul Wendkos)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Artie Sawyer (Andy Griffith) is a man who no one respects.  Having recently been fired from his long-time job, he’s forced to take a job as a superintendent for an apartment building in New York.  The tenants don’t think much of him.  His wife, Iris (Ida Lupino), is getting tired of his self-pity.  The only person who seems to like Artie is Claudine (Susanne Benton).  The young and beautiful Claudine approaches Artie in a bar and, after flirting with him, reveals that she needs a place to stay.  Artie agrees to let Claudine check out Apartment 7A.  At the apartment, Claudine rolls around in the bed, dances seductively, and then reveals that she has three male friends who are going to be staying in the apartment with her.  Billy (Michael Brandon), Virgil (Tim McIntire), and Riff (James A. Watson, Jr.) all served in Vietnam together and now they need to crash at the apartment for a while.  Artie can either let them stay or they can reveal to his wife that he was at a bar, trying to pick up young women.

Led by the psychotic Billy, the three men are planning on robbing the bank next door.  When Artie, who is having doubts about whether or not it was a good idea to let four obviously unstable people live rent-free in his building, discovers their plans, he and Ida are taken hostage.  When the bank robbery goes wrong, Billy tries to use the hostages and a bomb as leverage for his escape from the police.

As far as films about bank robberies goes, The Strangers in 7A is no Dog Day Afternoon.  While it’s interesting to see the usually confident Andy Griffith play a loser, he never seems like enough of a loser that he would actually risk a job that he clearly needs just because Claudine flashed a little leg at him.  Even when he’s playing a character who is down on his luck, he’s still Andy Griffith.  Along with the lead role being miscast, the bank robbers are too generic to really be credible or threatening.  Susanne Benton is sexy as the femme fatale and Ida Lupino is sympathetic as Artie’s wife but otherwise, The Strangers in 7A is forgettable.

The Strangers in 7A was made for television.  At the time, Andy Griffith was still trying to escape being typecast as Mayberry’s amiable Sheriff Taylor.  Griffith was a convincing villain in movies like Pray For The Wildcats and Savages but he’s just not believable as a loser in this film.

Music Video of the Day: Born to Die by Lana del Rey (2011, dir by Yoann Lemoine)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

When I think about the previous decade, this is one of the songs the defines it and the music video fits along with it perfectly.  Of course, it’s a bit of a morbid video, seeing as how almost every image is connected to the impending death of Lana’s character.  Then again, I was in a rather morbid mindset back in 2011.  I guess I still am.

Lana’s boyfriend is played by Bradley Soileau.  That image of them standing in front of the American flag is iconic.

Enjoy!

Film Review: Countdown to Looking Glass (dir by Fred Barzyk)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

“The world’s ending!  Let’s watch the news!”

That, in a nutshell, is the main theme of the 1984 film, Countdown to Looking Glass.  It’s a film that imagines the events leading up to an atomic war between the United States and Russia.  It’s designed to look like a newscast.  A distinguished anchorman named Dan Tobin (played by a real-life anchorman named Patrick Watson) gravely discusses the conflict between the two countries.  Another reporter (played, somewhat jarringly given the film’s attempt to come across as authentic, by Scott Glenn) reports from an aircraft carrier.  We see a lot of stock footage of planes taking off and world leaders meeting and people fleeing from cities.

There are a few scenes that take place outside of the newscast.  They involve a reporter named Dorian Waldorf (Helen Shaver) and her boyfriend Bob Calhoun (Michael Muprhy).  (If your name was Dorian Waldorf, you would kind of have to become a television news reporter, wouldn’t you?)  Bob works for the government and has evidence that the world is a lot closer to ending than anyone realizes.  Dorian tries to put the evidence on air but Dan tells her that they can’t run a story like that with just one source.  It would be irresponsible…. when was this film made?  I guess 1984 was a lot different from 2020 because I can guarantee you that CNN, Fox, and MSNBC would have had no problem running Dorian’s story and creating a mass panic.

(If Dan Tobin’s ethics didn’t already make this film seem dated, just watch the scene where Tobin announces that, because of the growing crisis, the networks will now be airing the news for 24 hours a day.  From the way its announced, it’s obvious that this must have been a radical and new idea in 1984.)

Still, despite those dramatic asides, Countdown to Looking Glass is largely set up to look like a real newscast.  We get stories about people naively singing up to serve in the army because they think war will be fun.  We get interviews with a group of experts playing themselves.  (The only one who I recognized was Newt Gingrich.)  Everyone discusses the dangers of nuclear war and also whether or not humanity could survive an exchange of nuclear weapons.  No one sounds particularly hopeful.  Dan Tobin says that he always believed that nuclear war was inevitable but that the sight of all of the destruction would cause the combatants to come to their senses.  That sounds a bit optimistic to me and the film suggests that Dan has no idea what he’s talking about.

In the end, Countdown to Looking Glass is a victim of its format.  The newscast itself is rather dull, as most newscasts tend to be.  Even the scenes that take place outside of the newscast tend to feel rather awkward, as if Murphy and Shaver were recruited for their roles at the last minute.  In the end, Countdown to Looking Glass works best as a historical artifact.  This is what a news report about the end of the world would have looked like in 1984.  Watch it and compare it to how the news is covered in 2020.

Speaking of watching it …. well, it’s not easy.  It’s never been released on video but you can watch it on YouTube.  The upload’s not great but that’s pretty much your only option.

Cinemax Friday: Not Of This Earth (1988, directed by Jim Wynorski)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Since today is director Jim Wynorski’s birthday, I want to review one of his early films.

A remake of the Roger Corman classic, Wynorksi’s Not Of This Earth stars Traci Lords as Nadine Story, a nurse who works in the office of Dr. Rochelle (Ace Mask) and who has a boyfriend named Harry (Roger Lodge) who is also a cop.  (The leads to jokes like, “Harry called.  He said he left his nightstick with you last night.”)  Dr. Rochelle’s main patient is the mysterious Mr. Johnson (Arthur Roberts), who dresses in all black, always wears sunglasses, and who needs frequent blood transfusions.  When Dr. Rochelle takes a look at Mr. Johnson’s blood, he sees that Mr. Johnson has a strange blood disease that has apparently never been discovered before.  Dr. Rochelle sends Nadine over to work at Mr. Johnson’s home as his private nurse.  Of course, Mr. Johnson is not of this Earth.  His planet is dying and, as Nadine discovers, he is on Earth to search for a new supply of blood.

Wynorski’s version of Not Of This Earth follows the exact same plot of the Corman original, right down to having a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman fall victim to the alien’s bloodlust.  (In the original, the salesman was played by Dick Miller.  In the remake, he’s played by Michael Delano.  Miller does not even get a cameo in the remake of Not of this Earth, which is surprising considering it was still a Corman production and Wynorski previously cast Miller in Chopping Mall.)  They’re both enjoyable movies, especially if you’re in the mood for something that won’t require much thought.  The main difference between the the two versions of Not of this Earth is that the Wynorski version features a lot more nudity and that it makes no pretense towards being anything other than a comedy.

This was Traci Lords’s first role in a non-adult film and she knocks it out of the park.  The scandal surrounding her adult film career has always overshadowed the fact that, for all of her notoriety, Traci Lords was actually a pretty good actress who could handle comedy.  While the deliberately campy humor in Not of this Earth is no one’s definition of subtle, Lords shows good comedic timing and, most importantly, she delivers her lines with a straight face and without winking at the audience.

Wynorski later said that the movie was so popular on video that he was able to buy a house with his share of the profits.  Not of this Earth is a classic Wynorski production, featuring everything that made Jim Wynorski a late-night cable and direct-to-video favorite in the 90s.

Music Video Of The Day: Love Ain’t No Stranger by Whitesnake (1984, directed by ????)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

After you watch enough Whitesnake videos, you can be excused for wondering if David Coverdale spent the entire 80s walking in the rain.  In this one, he’s searching for the woman that he loves.  He finds her but she pulls a fast one and manages to get away from him while he’s being driven away.

The woman in this video is NOT played by Tawny Kitaen so I’m not sure if it even qualifies as a real Whitesnake video.  The song, however, is definitely a Whitesnake song and it’s still one of their most popular.

Enjoy!