As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on twitter. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.
Tonight, for #ScarySocial, I will be hosting 1977’s Shock Waves!
That’s right! It’s John Carradine, Peter Cushing, and Brooke Adams in the best underwater zombie film ever made!
If you want to join us on Saturday night, just hop onto twitter, start the film at 9 pm et, and use the #ScarySocial hashtag! The film is available on Prime, YouTube, and a few other streaming sites. I’ll be there co-hosting and I imagine some other members of the TSL Crew will be there as well. It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
On Friday night, some friends and I were watching an old New Year’s special from 1983. In between a few stand-up comedians and an interview with an oddly coherent Ozzy Osbourne, this video was broadcast.
Taking a school bus to the desert, singing on top of it, and then blowing it up? Hell yeah! All hail the revolution! It’s interesting to think that, just a few years ago, everyone wanted to be rebellious. As of late, I kind of feel like society has started to lose its rebellious spirit. People now seem to prefer complacency and conformity. That’s a shame but I think that revolutionary spirit is still out there. It’s just the same people have forgotten how to embrace it. It’ll return, though. Like a school bus blowing up in the desert, the temptation of free thought cannot be ignore for too long.
Lead singer Wendy O. Williams did all of her own stunts in the video, including climbing on top of the bus and jumping off right before it exploded. On top of the danger involved in driving a bus full of explosives, Wendy also did it all with a sprained ankle. MTV was apparently so worried that the video would inspire other people to try the same thing that they insisted a warning be added to the start of the video.
(My personal opinion on warnings is that they’re counter-productive. In fact, there’s something really hypocritical about warnings like the ones that MTV used to include before their shows. If you’re that concerned that a video or television show is going to lead to people doing something stupid and destructive and potentially life-threatening, then don’t broadcast it. The minute that you decide to air something, you’ve kind of lost the right to say, “Please watch this but don’t try to duplicate it.” To be honest, whenever I see a warning telling me not to do something, it just makes me want to do it more. That said, I don’t think I would be able to find the courage necessary to fool around with explosives. Or, for that matter, drive a school bus. I’m sure the bus is probably covered with germs and wads of chewing gum. Bleh!)
This video was directed, over the course of one day, by Ron Swenson. Of course, since the bus was due to explode during filming, almost every shot had to be completed in just one take.
Enjoy!
Lyrics:
Black visions from the satellite sky
Deaf ears hear not their cries
Fat jackals howl at the moon
Flies buzzing, playing death’s tune
Night ends but the sun it don’t rise
Tombs open and the dead they will rise
Black market buys your soul real cheap
No escaping, what you sow, you will reap
Prisoners of the damned
Find another land
Planet of the lost
Land of fire and frost
Prisoners of the dead
Fear the unknown dread
Tidal waves at sea
Set the serpents free
Coup d’etat on a global scale
Opposition, locked up in jail
Domination, the goons are the boss
Human race nailed to a cross
Prisoners of the damned
Find another land
Planet of the lost
Land of fire and frost
Prisoners of the dead
Fear the unknown dread
Tidal waves at sea
Set the serpents free
Prisoners of the damned
Find another land
Planet of the lost
Land of fire and frost
Let’s just take a look at the poster for 1987’s Gold Through The Fire.
Wow, exciting poster, right? At the top of the poster, we’ve got the Kremlin and a sinister looking soldier firing a gun. One thing about Russia is that it doesn’t matter when the film was made or who was in charge of the country at the time, the Russian government always makes for a good villain.
The film’s tag line reads, “Peter’s American dream came true but the trial of his faith had just begun.” So, we now know that Peter (who we presume is the backpack wearing guy at the top of the poster) is probably going to escape Russia and come to America. And, just to make sure that there aren’t any doubts, there’s an American flag prominently displayed on the poster. There is also what appears to be a small town church and a few two-story houses. Peter’s heading to the heartland and good for him. Small town America comes under a lot of criticism but I’ve been to and lived in a few small towns and I usually had a pretty pleasant time. Despite their reputation, small towns are often more hospitable to newcomers than big cities.
Hey, so far, so good! The villains are Russian. The setting is small town America. Peter appears to be a totally decent teenager. This poster features a lot of reasons to be optimistic. Or, at least, it does until you look in the bottom left corner and you see that Peter appears to be playing soccer….
OH NO! IS THIS A SOCCER MOVIE!?
Well, fear not. Yes, the film does involve some soccer but, to be honest, the inclusion of soccer kind of makes sense. When Peter enrolls in his new American high school, he struggles to fit in. He can barely speak English. He is confused by most American customs. When someone asks him if he has any “records” from his previous school, he says that he enjoys music and this leads to the following comment from one of his classmates:
Poor Peter! As we saw at the start of the film, Peter has not had an easy life. He was born in Russia and when the communists discovered that his family was secretly Christian, Peter’s parents were shipped off to a reeducation camp and Peter was tossed into an orphanage. He eventually escaped, running all the way to Finland and then on to the American embassy. He defected and briefly became a celebrity. After being placed with a new American family, Peter enrolled at the local high school and discovered that American teenagers can be cruel.
But, we were talking about soccer, right?
Eventually, the few friends that Peter has made encourage him to try out for the team. Peter does start playing soccer and it turns out that he’s the best player in the school. And again, it makes sense as he’s the only student in the school who was born in a country where soccer is more popular than American football. (Of course, today, it seems strange that any high school would only have one student who wasn’t born in the U.S.) Unfortunately, since Peter insists on carrying his Bible around with him everywhere that he goes and trying to lead a prayer group on school ground, the school’s principal is not sure that Peter can be allowed to continue playing. The principal’s office is decorated with a print of Normal Rockwell’s Freedom of Speech, just in case you had any doubt that the school was being run by a Lefty version of Frasier Crane.
Not only does Peter have to deal with the school and its rules but the KGB is also after him. And his foster brother has lost his faith! Peter has a lot to deal with. Fortunately, his new foster family has a station wagon that he can drive around town while he’s thinking.
The best part of Gold Through The Fire is the beginning of the film, when Peter is trying to escape from Russia. That part of the film moves at a steady pace and, even more importantly, it captures the feel of living in a situation where you’re not allowed to think or speak for yourself. It perfectly captures the drabness of dictatorship. Unfortunately, once Peter gets to America, the action starts to drag, the actors are a bit less convincing in their roles, and the film gets bogged down in trying to convince us that America is just one step away from turning into Russia. There are also few too many awkward pop cultural references, as if the filmmakers were desperate to convince us that they understood what high school students were into despite not being in high school themselves. Today, the film works best as a time capsule. Everything about it, from the cars to the clothes to the hair to dialogue, simply screams 80s. Watching this film is like stepping into a time machine.
And hey, the soccer stuff isn’t actually that bad. That said, it’s hard for me to watch anything featuring soccer without being reminded of this:
Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a new feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing One World, which ran on NBC from 1998 to 2001. The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi!
The Cast of One World
This week, with the end of the series in sight, the Blakes confront the past.
Episode 3.11 “Roots”
(Directed by Mary Lou Belli, originally aired on December 2nd, 2000)
When Dave and Karen go out of town for the weekend, the Blake children decide to turn their house into a Bed & Breakfast. Like, how the Hell do you even do that on short notice? It’s like the Blakes decide to do it and then, an hour later, they’re full booked and Marci has a registration desk set up.
Meanwhile, a far more serious storyline is taking place. With the help of St. Neal, Cray tracks down his grandfather and is shocked to discover that his grandfather is black. Cray is so shocked that he runs out of the Warehouse. (Of course, their first meeting was taking place at Miami’s “hottest under 21 club.”) Cray explains to Neal that he’s not a racist. He was just shocked to discover that he wasn’t the same ethnicity as his adoptive parents. However, anyone who has been watching this show knows that Cray is not Caucasian because he’s clearly not. (In real life, Brandon Baker is half-Filipino.) So, it’s kind of hard to believe the Cray was that stunned to discover that he was a person of color. Fortunately, it turns out that Cray’s grandfather has the patience of a saint and forgives Cray for running away from him because of his skin color, which …. I mean, that’s really fucked up, isn’t it? Cray’s grandfather comes over for dinner and explains that Cray is a fourth black, a fourth Puerto Rican, and half-white. Again, his grandfather seems like a very nice man but again, Cray ran out of the Warehouse specifically because his grandfather has black skin. WHO IS THAT FORGIVING!? The grandfather tells Cray about his family and tells him that he’s always missed him. (“Awwwwww!” the audience says.) Cray accepts his black grandfather and says that he loves him. (“Awwwww!” the audience repeats itself.)
To be honest, TNBC was always at its worst whenever it tried to deal with racial subject matter. One World had the most diverse cast of any of the TNBC shows but the characters were still often just stereotypes. TNBC shows were required to wrap up their stories in 20 minutes and that’s not really something you can do when it comes to dealing with race in America.
Episode 3.12 “Say Cheese”
(Directed by Mary Lou Belli, originally aired on December 16th, 2000)
Jane’s birthday is coming up so Dave wants to get a picture of the entire family together. This leads to everyone discussing the past three years and …. you got it. It’s a clip show.
I think this was originally meant to be the final episode of the show and it would have been a nice note to wrap up on. However, because TNBC always showed episodes out-of-order, there would be one more episode of One World. We’ll review that one next week and then, it will be time to move on to another show!
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on twitter. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.
Tonight, at 10 pm et, I will be hosting the first #FridayNightFlix of 2022! The movie? 1987’s The Running Man!
If you want to join us this Friday, just hop onto twitter, start the movie at 10 pm et, and use the #FridayNightFlix hashtag! It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
The Running Man is available on Prime and Paramount! See you there!
The 1998 film, The Gathering, is about people who keep having visions.
Michael Carey (Daniel Kruse), for instance, is a successful advertising executive who suddenly sees a portal forming high in the sky and people turning into globes of light as they are transported upward.
His wife is at the playground, talking to her best friend about what a drag her husband has become ever since he got on the whole religious kick when suddenly, she has a vision in which all of the children have vanished.
Michael’s mother-in-law gets the worst of it. She’s a professor at the local college and she’s introduced explaining to a student that the only way to pass her class is to be an atheist. (The student needs to call a lawyer, to be honest.) Suddenly, the professor is having all sorts of visions, that majority of which involve her betraying people to a shadowy government organization. She betrays her best friend and colleague. She betrays her own daughter. She betrays everyone.
While his wife and his mother-in-law shrug off the visions and claim that there must be a normal explanation for why they’re all visualizing a similar future, Michael turns into an evangelist and starts telling everyone about what he’s seeing. He is especially upset when he discovers that one of his clients is going to be at the forefront of encouraging everyone to get a microchip inserted under their skin. (We already know from the professor’s visions that people who don’t have the chip will be hunted down and killed in the streets.) People start to feel a bit uncomfortable around Michael. He loses his job and his family but still, when the portal appears in the sky, he’s among those who vanish. His wife and his mother-in-law are not lucky, which sounds like the start of a really sexist joke. (“Those seven years between the rapture and the second coming were the first peace and quiet I got during my entire marriage!”)
Clocking in at 57 minutes, The Gathering was produced and released at a time when the Left Behind books were climbing the best seller charts. It pretty much follows the same formula as those books, with the emphasis less on being a Christian and more on imagining the misery that awaits everyone who isn’t. In this film, if you’re not a believer, you’re going to be stuck in a world where all of the color has been desaturated and everyone has to wear really ugly, communist-style clothes. It’s a world where the government monitors everyone’s actions and where questioning those in charge can lead to you being either executed or sent to reeducation camp. When viewed today, the film feels more like a political tract than a religious one, with the smug but bland and process-obsessed villains serving as a perfect representation of what almost everyone hates about dealing with the bureaucratic state.
Not surprisingly, the film’s budget is low. There are a few effective shots. I liked the way that the clouds would “speed up” whenever anyone was starting to have a vision but then the extremely cheap-looking portal appeared in the sky and ruined the illusion. The film is quickly paced and its portrayal of life under a dictatorship feels believable. At the same time, a lot of the acting is amateurish and the film itself seems to be more about scaring people than making a case for its beliefs. It really does seem like the intended audience for this film were people who just wanted to imagine their atheist neighbors having to dress like Trotsky. But, hey, at least it’s less than an hour long.
Through the Shattered Lens 