Late Night Retro Television Review: Highway to Heaven 3.9 “Code Name: FREAK”

Posted on January 16, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Thursdays, I will be reviewing Highway to Heaven, which aired on NBC from 1984 to 1989. The entire show is currently streaming on Freevee and several other services!

This week, the highway leads to college and R-rated movies!

Episode 3.9 “Code Name: FREAK”

(Dir by Michael Landon, originally aired on November 19th, 1986)

Jonathan and Mark have been assigned to work on a college campus. While Jonathan gets to teach a computer class, Mark is assigned to be the resident assistant of a rowdy bunch of jocks who all live in the same dorm. This episode continues the Highway to Heaven tradition of Mark always being humiliated by the assignment. If I was Mark, I would be wondering why “the boss” always gives me the worst possible jobs.

Chris Gunn (Jeff Bryan Davis) is starting his first semester at the college. He’s smart, he’s well-read, and he’s desperate to make friends with everyone. Unfortunately, Chris is also only 13 years old and, even if he did graduate from high school, there’s no way he should be away from home at the college. He has no friends. No one invites him to any parties. Chris is refused entry to an R-rated movie because he is not accompanied by an adult.

Chris’s roommate is Danny (Gary Hershberger), a football player who is not quite as shallow as his fellow jocks. When it looks like Danny might flunk his computer class, Danny’s frat brothers offer to accept Chris into the frat if Chris agrees to hack into Jonathan’s commercial and get the answers for the next big test. Chris does so but then double-crosses Danny by giving him all the wrong answers. Chris’s not as naive as everyone thought!

Danny flunks the test and loses his spot on the football team. When its learned that he cheated, Danny loses his scholarship and is expelled for refusing to reveal how he got the answers for the test. Danny, knowing what happens to narcs, refuses to sell out and lit appears that he’s going to lose his scholarship as a result. Stunned that Danny didn’t want to get him in trouble, Chris tells the truth to the school’s dean. Danny is allowed to stay and after some prodding from Jonathan, the dean decides to allow Chris to stay as well.

Chris and Danny are both super-excited and have a new found respect for each other. They celebrate by….

GOING TO AN R-RATED MOVIE! Danny accompanies Chris so Chris gets to see a movie that’s he’s probably too young for! Yay!

This is a prototypical episode of Highway to Heaven. It’s unapologetically sentimental and rather predictable but it’s also so incredibly earnest and sincere that it doesn’t really matter. We want to see everything work out for everyone and fortunately, it does.

Myself, it will never not amuse me that, after learning that he won’t be expelled and neither will Danny, Chris’s firth thought is that they should go catch an R-rated picture while they still have time. And Danny agrees! I always want to know what type of film are they watching. Is it a slasher film or a mindless high school comedy or maybe something featuring a bunch of fast cars and occasionally juvenile behavior?

This was a classic episode. I assume Danny and Chris are still best friends.

Film Review: Starman (dir by John Carpenter)

Posted on January 16, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

John Carpenter has directed 18 features film, from 1974’s Dark Star to 2010’s The Ward. Some of his films have been huge box office successes. Some of his films, like The Thing, were box office flops that were later retroactive recognized as being classics. Carpenter has made mainstream films and he’s made cult favorites and, as he’s always the first to admit, he’s made a few films that just didn’t work. When it comes to evaluating his own work, Carpenter has always been one of the most honest directors around.

Amazingly, Carpenter has only directed one film that received an Oscar nomination.

That film was 1984’s Starman and the nomination was for Jeff Bridges, who was one of the five contenders for Best Actor. (The Oscar went to F. Murray Abraham for Amadeus.) Bridges played the title character, an alien who is sent to Earth to investigate the population and who takes on the form of the late husband of Jenny Hayden (Karen Allen). The Starman takes Jenny hostage, though its debatable whether or not he really understands what it means when he picks up her husband’s gun and points it at her. He and Jenny drive across the country, heading to Arizona so that he can return to his ship. Pursued by the government (represented by the sympathetic Charles Martin Smith and the far less sympathetic Richard Jaeckel), the Starman learns about emotions, eating, love, and more from Jenny. Jenny goes from being fearful of the Starman to loving him. Carpenter described the film as being It Happened One Night with an alien and it’s not a bad description.

After Jenny and the alien visitor make love in a boxcar, the Starman says, “I gave you a baby tonight,” and that would be an incredibly creepy line coming from a human but it’s oddly charming when uttered by an alien who looks like a youngish Jeff Bridges. Bridges definitely deserved his Oscar nomination for his role here. Speaking with an odd accent and moving like a bird who is searching for food, Bridges convincingly plays a being who is quickly learning how to be human. The Starman is constantly asking Jenny why she says, does, and feels certain things and it’s the sort of thing that would be annoying if not for the way that Bridges captures the Starman’s total innocence. He doesn’t mean to be a pest. He’s simply curious about everything.

Bridges deserved his nomination and I would say that Karen Allen deserved a nomination as well. In fact, it could be argued that Allen deserved a nomination even more than Bridges. It’s through Allen’s eyes that we see and eventually come to trust and then to love the Starman. Almost her entire performance is reactive but she makes those reactions compelling. I would say that Bridges and Allen deserved an Oscar for the “Yellow light …. go much faster” scene alone.

Carpenter agreed to make Starman because, believe it or not, The Thing had been such a critical and commercial flop that it had actually damaged his career. (If ever you need proof that its best to revisit even the films that don’t seem to work on first viewing, just consider Carpenter’s history of making films that were initially dismissed but later positively reevaluated. Today, The Thing, They Live, Prince of Darkness, and In The Mouth of Madness are all recognized as being brilliant films. When they were first released, they all got mixed reviews.) Carpenter did Starman because he wanted to show that he could do something other than grisly horror. Starman is one of Carpenter’s most heartfelt and heartwarming films. That said, it also features Carpenter’s trademark independent streak. Starman not only learns how to be human but, as a result of the government’s heavy-handed response to his arrival, one can only assume that he learns to be an anti-authoritarian as well.

Starman is one of Carpenter’s best films and also a wonderful showcase for both Karen Allen and Jeff Bridges.

Film Review: Dark Star (dir by John Carpenter)

Posted on January 16, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Dark Star (1974, dir by John Carpenter, DP: Douglas Knapp)

What’s it like to live in outer space?

That’s the question posed by 1974’s Dark Star and the answer seems to be that it’s boring as Hell. Lt. Doolittle (Brian Narelle), Sgt. Pinback (future director and screenwriter Dan O’Bannon), Boiler (Cal Kuniholm), and Talby (Andreijah “Dre” Pahich) have been floating in their spaceship for over twenty years. (Because of the vagaries of the space-time continuum, they’ve only aged three years in all that time.) The leader of their mission, Commander Powell (Joe Saunders) was killed when he was accidentally electrocuted at the start of the mission. The crew put his body in suspended animation so that they could still ask him question despite the fact that he’s not quite alive. (When they do talk to Powell, Powell is very resentful about the whole situation.) Doolittle, a former surfer, has taken over as commander of the ship though no one seems to be quite sure what their mission is.

The men struggle to find ways to pass the time as they float endlessly through space. Some of them watch the asteroids in the distance. Doolittle fantasizes about surfing. Pinback plays jokes on people and claims to be an imposter who killed the real Pinback before the start of the mission. The spaceship is a cluttered mess and the crew looks more like a collection of long-haired hippies than a group of rigorously trained astronauts. They spend their time getting on each other’s nerves.

They do have a few things that they have to deal with over the course of the film. The men aren’t particularly smart and whatever discipline they had was abandoned long ago. As a result, their ship constantly seems to be on the verge of literally falling apart. A dangerous alien that looks like a beach ball gets loose on the ship. Even worse, one of the ship’s talking bomb is having an existential crisis. It’s been over 20 years and it has yet to be used to blow anything up. What, the bomb wonders, is the purpose of being a bomb if you can’t blow anything up? Then again, what is the purpose of being in space if there’s nothing left to explore or to discover?

Dark Star is a film that requires a bit of patience. It moves at its own deliberate pace and a lot of the humor comes from the contrast between the shabbiness of the film’s crew and Stanley Kubrick’s far sleeker vision of space travel in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both Dark Star and 2001 are existential films about man’s search for meaning in the stars. In 2001, Dave Bowman finds that meaning, even if he doesn’t realize it. The crew of the Dark Star however have to deal with very real possibility that there is no meaning. Dark Star‘s comedy comes from poking fun at the concept that going into space would make people any less frustrated than they already are on Earth.

Essentially a stoner comedy set in space, Dark Star was John Carpenter’s feature debut. It started out as a student film but Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon were able to raise an extra $10,ooo to extend it to feature length. Largely overlooked when it was first released, it was re-released in 1979. By that point, Carpenter had directed Halloween and O’Bannon had written Alien, a film that had more than a little in common with Dark Star’s shabby future and its dangerous alien. While Dark Star definitely shows its origins as a student film, I’ve always enjoyed it. It’s hard not appreciate the film’s ambition. And, in its way, it’s probably one of the most realistic vision of life in space ever captured on film. Humans, the film says, will always be humans. They’ll always screw things up but occasionally, if they’re lucky, they’ll also get to surf amongst the stars.

Lisa Marie Reviews An Oscar Nominee: The Elephant Man (dir by David Lynch)

Posted on January 16, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The Elephant Man (1980, dir by David Lynch, DP: Freddie Francis)

David Lynch never won a competitive Oscar.

He received an honorary award from the Academy in 2019. He generated some minor but hopeful buzz as a possible nominee for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans. He was nominated for Best Director three times and once for Best Adapted Screenplay. But he never won an Oscar and indeed, even his nominations felt like they were given almost begrudgingly on the part of the Academy. In an industry that celebrated conformity and put the box office before all other concerns, David Lynch was an iconoclastic contrarian and the Academy often didn’t do know what to make of him. Of the many worthy films that he directed, only one David Lynch film was nominated for Best Picture and, in my opinion, it should have won.

1980’s The Elephant Man is based on the true story of Joseph Merrick (renamed John for the film), a man who was horribly deformed and terribly abused until he was saved from a freak show by a surgeon named Dr. Frederick Treves. The sensitive and intelligent Merrick went on to become a celebrity in Victorian London, visited by members of high society and allowed to live at London Hospital. (Even members of the royal family dropped in to visit the man who had once been forced to live in a cage.) Merrick lived to be 27 years old, ultimately dying of asphyxiation when he attempted to lie down and, in Treves’s opinion, sleep like a “normal person” despite his oversized and heavy head. In the film, Merrick is played by John Hurt (who gives a wonderful performance that, despite Hurt acting under a ton on makeup, still perfectly communicates Merrick’s humanity) while Treves is played by Anthony Hopkins, who is equally as good as Hurt. (Hurt was nominated for Best Actor but Hopkins was not. Personally, I prefer Hopkins’s performance as the genuinely kind Dr. Treves to any of his more-rewarded work as Dr. Lecter.) The rest of the cast is made up of veteran British stars, including John Gielgud, Wendy Hiller, Freddie Jones, and Kenny Baker.

Lynch’s version of The Elephant Man is only loosely based on the facts of Merrick’s life. It opens with a disturbing fantasy sequence (one which I assume is meant to be from Merrick’s point of view) in which a herd of elephants strike down Merrick’s mother and then appear to assault her. Shot in stark black-and-white and often featuring the sounds of droning machinery in the background (in many ways, The Elephant Man feels like it takes place in the same world as Eraserhead), the first half of The Elephant Man feels like a particularly surreal Hammer film. (Veteran Hammer director Freddie Francis served as The Elephant Man‘s cinematographer.) Merrick is kept off-camera and, when we finally do see his face, it’s in a split-second scene in which Merrick is as terrified as the person who sees him. Before we really meet Merrick, we’ve already heard Treves and the hospital administrator (John Gielgud) discuss all of the clinical details of his condition. We know why he’s deformed. After we see him, we know how he’s deformed. After all of that, the audience is finally ready to know Merrick the human being. Without engaging in too much obvious sentimentality, Lynch shows us that Merrick is a kind soul, one who has been tragically mistreated by the world. Just as with the real Merrick, almost everyone who meets the film’s John Merrick is ultimately charmed by him. In the film, Merrick is kidnapped by his former owner, the alcoholic Bytes (Freddie Jones), who wants again puts Merrick on display in a cage. In the end, it’s Merrick’s fellow so-called “freaks” who set him free and allow him to return to the hospital, where he has one final vision of his mother. This vision is a much less disturbing than the one that opened the film. The film celebrates the humanity of John Merrick but is also reveals the genius of David Lynch. There’s so many moments when the film could have gone off the rails or become too obvious for its own good. But Lynch’s unique style so draws you into the film’s world that even the mysterious visions of his mother somehow feel completely necessary and natural. The Elephant Man is the David Lynch film that makes me cry. Lynch was a surrealist with a heart.

The Elephant Man was only David Lynch’s second film. He was hired to direct by none other than Mel Brooks, who produced the film but went uncredited to prevent people from thinking it would be a comedy. (Lynch, however, did cast Brooks’s wife, Anne Bancroft, as an actress who visits Merrick.) Brooks hired Lynch after seeing Eraserhead and recognizing a talent that many in Hollywood would never have had the guts to take a chance on. (Despite the success of Eraserhead on the midnight circuit, David Lynch was working as a roofer when he was offered The Elephant Man and had nearly given up on the idea of ever making another film.) Reportedly, Brooks stayed out of Lynch’s way and protected him from other executives who fears Lynch’s version of the story would be too strange to be a success. Lynch and Brooks proved those doubters wrong. Acclaimed by critics and popular with audiences, The Elephant Man was nominated for Best Picture and David Lynch was nominated for Best Director. I like Ordinary People. I like Raging Bull. But The Elephant Man was the film that should have won in 1980.

The Elephant Man remains a powerful movie and an example of how an independent artist can make a mainstream movie without compromising his vision. (Of course, I imagine it helps to have a producer who has the intelligence and faith necessary to stay out of your way.) David Lynch may be gone but his art will live forever. The Elephant Man will continue to make me cry for the rest of my life and for that, I’m thankful.

The Elephant Man (1980, dir by David Lynch, DP: Freddie Francis)

RIP David Lynch (1946-2025) 🙏 – A personal reflection…

Posted on January 16, 2025 by Bradley Crain

It was around 1986 or 1987, and I was around 13 years old. I had never heard of David Lynch, but I was at this video store at the Park Plaza mall in Little Rock when I came across a VHS tape of BLUE VELVET on sale for $1.99. The description looked very interesting, and it had Dennis Hopper in it. I recognized Hopper because he was in one of my favorite movies at the time, HOOSIERS. My dad was a high school basketball coach, so basketball was my life up until I graduated high school. Somehow, I was able to talk my mom into buying it for me. BLUE VELVET was probably the strangest film I had seen up to that point in my life, and there was no doubt that I didn’t understand what was going on in some parts of the film, but I was still mesmerized by it. I became an immediate fan of Lynch.

For the next decade or so, I was on the lookout for anything new from David Lynch, whether it be the TWIN PEAKS T.V. series, or even more importantly to me, WILD AT HEART, with Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern and Willem Dafoe. I’d watch the man’s work all by myself in my home in Toad Suck, Arkansas. It felt like I was in a gang of 1, as I’m not sure there was another person in my community who had any clue who David Lynch was, or who appreciated his work. But that was okay. I enjoyed his films and that’s all that matters.

I haven’t kept up with David Lynch that much over the last few years, but I’ve always recognized what a unique talent he was. Rest in peace, sir, and congratulations on a life well lived!

Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992, directed by John Carpenter)

Posted on January 16, 2025 by Jedadiah Leland

An accident at a laboratory renders stock analyst Nick Holloway (Chevy Chase) invisible. CIA agent David Jenkins (Sam Neill) wants to recruit Nick to be an assassin but Nick doesn’t want to kill people. He just wants to make his date with Alice (Daryl Hannah). With Jenkins and his agents in pursuit, Nick flees to a beach house belonging to his friend George (Michael McKean) and tries to figure out what to do with his life now that no one can see him. Fortunately, Alice is staying at the beach house too. Nick and Alice fall in love but Jenkins is close behind.

Based on a science fiction novel by H.F. Saint, Memoirs of an Invisible Man started out as a vanity project for Chevy Chase, who felt that the film’s mix of comedy and drama would establish him as a serious actor. The project went through a series of directors, including Ivan Reitman and Richard Donner, but in the end no one wanted to work with the special effects necessary to create the impression of invisibility and, even more importantly, no one wanted to work with Chase. When the film was finally offered to John Carpenter, he was reluctant to do another studio film because of his bad experience with They Live. He finally agreed because it had been four years since his last film.

The special effects in Memoirs of an Invisible Man are still impressive and the chase scenes show off Carpenter’s abilities as an action director. The movie flopped with critics and audiences but that was not Carpenter’s fault. Carpenter keeps the story moving and gets good performances out of Sam Neill and even Daryl Hannah. The problem with the movie is that Chevy Chase is miscast as an action hero and he tries too hard to give a serious performance. Carpenter later said he wanted to add more comedy to the film and to emphasize Chase’s talent for physical comedy but Chase refused to do so. Chase also resented wearing the blue bodysuit that would be used to render him invisible onscreen and often removed the suit early, ruining whatever else Carpenter had planned to shoot during the day. You can add John Carpenter to the long list of directors who have said they will never work with Chevy Chase again.

One good thing did come out of Memoirs of an Invisible Man. Carpenter met and enjoyed working with Sam Neill. (Memoirs of an Invisible Man probably would have worked better in Neill and Chase had switched roles.) Neill would go on to star in Carpenter’s next film, In The Mouth of Madness.

Retro Television Review: Malibu, CA 1.24 “Uncle Charlie”

Posted on January 16, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Thursdays, I will be reviewing Malibu CA, which aired in Syndication in 1998 and 1999. The entire show is currently streaming on YouTube!

This week, a special guest star is forced to appear on the show.

Episode 1.24 “Uncle Charlie”

(Dir by Gary Shimokawa, originally aired on May 9th, 1999)

Jason and Scott are totally excited because their Uncle Charlie is coming to visit. As they explain to Murray, Uncle Charlie has been in the Marines for 30 years and is a total badass. Murray says that he tried to join the Marines but was classified as being “FW.” “Freaking weirdo,” Murray says. Peter then says that he doesn’t like it when Charlie comes to visit because Charlie always make fun of him for being too thin. Really when this show started and Peter was supposed to be like a seriously cool surfer dude?

Anyway, Charlie shows up and he’s played by Dick Butkus. After finishing up both Hang Time and Half-Nelson, I thought I was done with reviewing anything to do with Dick Butkus but nope, here he is in yet another Peter Engel-produced show! I imagine that Butkus did this show as a favor to Peter Engel or maybe Butkus was just under a contract that he couldn’t get out of. Still, it’s hard not to notice that Butkus does not appear to be particularly enthusiastic about appearing on Malibu CA. While it’s true that Butkus always came across as being more of an ex-athlete than an actor (because, of course, that’s exactly what he was), Butkus still at least made an effort on Hang Time. In Malibu, CA, Butkus seems to be struggling to stay awake.

Uncle Charlie is upset because the Marines want him to consider retirement. Charlie works out his frustration by having Jason and Scott do calisthenics. (He’s not their favorite uncle anymore!) But then Charlie starts hanging out with Murray and Murray encourages Charlie to be a beach bum. That sounds good to Charlie and I have to admit that I think Dick Butkus hanging out on the beach in a Hawaiian shirt with Murray actually had a lot of potential. I’m as surprised as anyone that Murray has turned out to be this show’s saving grace but he has. I guess we should be glad the Marines didn’t take him.

Charlie’s new beach-centric philosophy becomes a problem when Charlie finds himself being considered for a job at a military school. The school doesn’t want beach bums! Can Jason and Scott straighten Charlie out? Will Jason ever manage to get through a scene without looking straight at the camera for his cue? Who cares?

As for the B-plot, Traycee has tickets to the Beastie Boys. She invites Stads and Sam to come to the concert with her. Awwww, how nice! “You’ve only got two tickets!” Stads snaps because, for some reason, the show has decided that Stads should always be in a bitchy mood. (Remember when the show started and Stads was vaguely likable?) Sam and Stads compete for the title of Traycee’s best friend. Years later, Paris Hilton had a reality competition show based around the same concept.

This episode was dull. When not even Dick Butkus can make your actors look good by comparison, you’ve got a problem.

VAMPIRES (1998) – Happy Birthday, John Carpenter!

Posted on January 16, 2025 by Bradley Crain

In celebration of the 77^th birthday of the great Director John Carpenter, I decided to watch his 1998 film VAMPIRES, starring one of my favorite actors in James Woods. I specifically remember the first time I ever read that this movie was being made and that it would star Woods. It was 1996, and I had just been hired to work for a company called Acxiom Corporation in Conway, Arkansas. It was at this job that I first had access to this new thing called the Worldwide Web. As far as I know, it was the first time I had ever looked at the internet. Of course, I immediately started completing searches on some of my favorite actors, including James Woods, when I came across VAMPIRES as a movie currently in production. These were the first times in my life that I was able to find out about new film projects without looking in a magazine or watching shows like Entertainment Tonight.

In VAMPIRES, James Woods stars as Jack Crow, the leader of team of vampire hunters who get their funding from the Vatican. We’re introduced to the team when they go into a house in New Mexico and proceed to impale and burn a nest of vampires. While the rest of the team celebrates the mission that night in a hotel filled alcohol, drugs, and whores, Jack can’t escape the feeling that something isn’t right, as he doesn’t believe they got the “master vampire” of the group. Unfortunately, Jack is right to worry. As they’re partying, the master vampire Valek (Thomas Ian Griffith) interrupts the fun and proceeds to kill everyone there, with the exception of Jack, his partner Tony (Daniel Baldwin), and Katrina (Sheryl Lee), a prostitute he decided to just bite on. Valek isn’t just a regular old master vampire, either. As it turns out, he’s the original vampire, and he’s on a quest to find the Berziers Cross, an ancient Catholic relic, that will allow him and other vampires to walk in the daylight. Against this backdrop, Jack, Tony, and a priest named Adam (Tim Guinee) use Katrina, who now has a psychic link with Valek, to try to kill the ultimate master vampire Valek, his cleric accomplice Cardinal Alba (Maximillian Schell), and just hopefully, save mankind in the process!

I know that VAMPIRES is not the most well-known or beloved John Carpenter film. He’s done so many great movies, but VAMPIRES is special to me as it was the first of his films that I ever saw in the movie theater. And the opening 30 minutes of the film is as badass as it gets. Carpenter is a master of the set-up. There’s lots of slow motion as Carpenter’s guitar riffs rock the soundtrack and the camera moves in on James Woods, with his cool sunglasses and black leather jacket, just before his team goes in and destroys a vampire nest at the beginning of the film. I also think the set-up of Thomas Ian Griffith as Valek is awesome, as he strolls up to the hotel room while the vampire hunters celebrate, completely unaware of the carnage about to befall them. Griffith has never looked cooler than he did in his long black coat and long hair, both blowing in the wind. These were awesome moments that illustrated Carpenter’s ability to project a sense of visual cool and power that I was mesmerized with. I wanted to see what happens next. And as a 25-year-old man at the time of VAMPIRE’s Halloween release in 1998, I also gladly admit that I really enjoyed the beauty of a 31-year-old Sheryl Lee. I would have definitely done everything I could do to save and protect her. The remainder of the film may have not been able to keep the same momentum as those first 30 minutes, but it’s a solid, enjoyable film, buoyed by the intense performance of Woods!

Vampires (1998) Directed by John Carpenter Shown: Thomas Ian Griffith, Sheryl Lee

There are several items of trivia that interest me about VAMPIRES:

John Carpenter had a good working relationship with James Woods on the set, but they had a deal: Carpenter could film one scene as it is written, and he would film another scene in which Woods was allowed to improvise. The deal worked great, and Carpenter found that many of Woods’ improvised scenes were brilliant.
VAMPIRES was John Carpenter’s only successful film of the 1990’s. Its opening weekend box office of $9.1 million is the highest of any John Carpenter film.
The screenplay for VAMPIRES is credited to Don Jakoby. Jakoby has some good writing credits, including the Roy Scheider film BLUE THUNDER (1983), the Cannon Films “classic” LIFEFORCE (1985), and the Spielberg produced ARACHNAPHOBIA (1990). The reason Don Jakoby interests me, however, is the fact that he had his name removed from the film I’ve seen more than any other, that being DEATH WISH 3 (1985), starring Charles Bronson. Even though Jakoby provided the script for DEATH WISH 3, due to the drastic number of changes, Jakoby insisted his name be removed. The script is credited to the fake “Michael Edmonds” instead.
As I was typing up my thoughts on VAMPIRES today, I learned of the death of the director David Lynch. This brings special poignancy to the fact that John Carpenter cast Sheryl Lee after seeing her on Lynch’s T.V. series TWIN PEAKS (1990).
Frank Darabont, who directed one of the great films of all time, THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (1994), has a cameo as “Man with Buick.” Fairly early in the film, after Crow, Montoya, and Katrina crash their truck escaping the hotel massacre, they encounter the man at a gas station and forcefully take the Buick. This is a strong sign of just how respected John Carpenter was by other great filmmakers at the time.

John Carpenter has directed some absolute classics like ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (1976), HALLOWEEN (1978), ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981), THE THING (1982), and BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA (1986). There’s no wrong way to celebrate a man who has brought such joy into our lives through his work. Today, I’m just thankful that he has been given the opportunity to share his talents with us!

Daredevil: Born Again – Official Trailer (Disney+)

Posted on January 16, 2025 by Arleigh

The first official trailer for the return of Daredevil to the small screen has finally been released by Marvel Television (a part of Marvel Studios). Daredevil: Born Again will finally and officially be the homecoming of the live-action Daredevil character that many fans have been clamoring for. Disney is finally embracing the Netflix Marvel shows as part of the MCU (they ignored the ABC/Netflix Marvel shows like they were something one found under their shoes).

Charlie Cox is back as Matt Murdock aka Daredevil, The Man With No Fear. Vincent D’Onofrio is also back as his arch nemesis Wilson Fisk aka The Kingpin. Pretty much the rest of the cast of the Netflix Daredevil show and its many spin-offs are back, as well.

There was some major fears and trepidations from fans of those shows that Disney will water down the mature-aspect of those shows in order to have them on Disney+. The fact that Kevin Feige and his braintrust at Marvel Studios made a major overhaul of the shows creative team six-episodes in of the shows production to start anew tells me that the initial plan to make the show more lighthearted didn’t so well when reviewed by the powers-that-be. So, after some many months of major reshoots, change in showrunner and directors, we now see a taste of that pivot away from the studio’s original plan.

Daredevil: Born Again trailer channels the original Netflix series’ serious and mature tone. Even the fear that the violence of the original series would be water-downed could be put to rest. Daredevil: Born Again definitely is for mature-audiences only.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe hasn’t has many hits since the end of Avengers: End Game, but this trailer (hopefully just a hint of what to expect when the show comes out) is a right step in the direction of righting the MCU ship, because the pop-culture landscape is much better when its tentpole franchises are working perfectly on all cylinders rather than not.