Music Video of the Day: Wake Up Dead by Megadeth (1987, directed by Penelope Spheeris)

Posted on August 15, 2022 by Jedadiah Leland

In this video, Megadeth performs behind a wire fence while their fans attempt to get to the band. It doesn’t have much to do about the song, which is about a man sneaking back into his house after cheating on his girlfriend. But it probably is a fair representation of what it was like to be in a popular thrash metal band in the 80s.

Directing this video was Penelope Spheeris, who has previously celebrated metal in the documentary, The Decline of Wester Civilization Part II. Spheeris would later direct the film for which she is best remembered, Wayne’s World.

Enjoy!

Great Moments In Comic Book History #26: Spider-Man Teams Up With Batman For The Last Time

Posted on August 14, 2022 by Jedadiah Leland

It’s easy to forget now but there was once a time when Marvel and DC would set aside their differences and their heroes (and sometimes, their villains) would team up. Spider-Man met Superman. The X-Men met the New Teen Titans. Darkseid met Galactus. Green Lantern met the Silver Surfer. Silver Surfer met Batman. Actually, a lot of Marvel heroes met Batman, everyone from the Hulk to Punisher to Daredevil to, again, Spider-Man. It makes sense. Batman, with his antisocial tendencies and his tragic backstory, had more in common with the typical Marvel hero than with Superman.

These events were never an official part of the Marvel or DC universe. Both companies eventually developed their own version of the multiverse and it was accepted that the Marvel/DC crossovers all took place in an alternate universe where Gotham City and Metropolis existed alongside Marvel’s version of New York City. Though these crossovers were not canonical, they always felt like a big deal. They were a chance to answer the age-old question of who would win in a fight, Batman or Spider-Man. It didn’t matter that the crossovers usually copped out on giving a definitive answer. Usually, the heroes would fight to a draw and then team up to battle the real enemy. That way both fandoms could be happy and there was still a reason to buy the next crossover.

The crossovers are something that will probably never happen again, not with the rivalry between the MCU and DCEU. It’s too bad because the crossovers were always enjoyable. The final Batman/Spider-Man crossover was called New Age Dawning and it was published twenty-five years ago, this month. Batman’s villain, Ra’s al Ghul, poisoned the wife of Spider-Man’s villain, Kingpin. Ra’s al Ghul thought he could blackmail the Kingpin into helping him sink the island of Manhattan. Instead, the Kingpin teams up with Spider-Man and Batman to defeat Ra’s plan. It’s a simple story but it ends on a note of grace, with Batman giving Spider-Man the cure for the poison and then Spider-Man taking it to the Kingpin. If the Batman/Spider-Man crossovers had to end, that was the way to end them, with two heroes coming together to do the right thing.

Previous Great Moments In Comic Book History:

Great Moments In Television History #22: Steve Martin’s Saturday Night Live Holiday Wish

Posted on August 14, 2022 by Jedadiah Leland

As Lisa already posted, today is Steve Martin’s birthday.

I think everyone who loves comedy has a favorite Steve Martin moment. A lot of people would cite his performance of King Tut on Saturday Night Live or maybe one of the many skits where he played a wild and crazy guy with Dan Aykroyd. Other remember him as The Jerk or playing Cyrano in Roxanne. I’ve always liked his performance in Bowfinger, in which both he and Eddie Murphy were in top form.

However, if I had to pick my favorite Steve Martin moment, it would be his holiday wish from SNL‘s Christmas ’86 episode. Even though it’s rare that anyone has anything nice to say about Saturday Night Live’s 1986 season, Steve Martin’s Holiday Wish is such a classic that it’s been included in almost every SNL holiday special since it originally aired. Is it too early to share a Christmas wish list? Not when Steve Martin is the one doing the wishing and it’s a great moment in television history!

Previous Moments In Television History:

Game Review: Crafty’s Escape Room (2022, dkmGames)

Posted on August 14, 2022 by Jedadiah Leland

In this text adventure game, you find yourself in a room that you have never seen before. You do not know how you got there or why you are there. Other than you, the only things in the room are a bed, a trashcan, a desk, and a locked door. Can you escape?

First things first, search the room and find the phone. Then find the simple puzzle that will give you the password to unlock the phone. (Neither task is difficult.) In the phone, you’ll find a number. Call that number and you’ll talk to Crafty. Crafty is a joker and a know-it-all who likes to tell stories and answer questions. Crafty says that he heard you like puzzles so he put you in the basement and gave you some puzzles that, when solved, will allow you to leave.

Thanks, Crafty! I suck at puzzles so I’m probably going to die in your basement!

Crafty’s not really that bad, though. He just thinks you’ll have fun trying to solve his escape room. You can even call him up and ask him for hints and he’ll helpfully explain what to do next. There are four puzzles to solve and none of them are that difficult. I did get Lisa to help me out with the sudoku puzzle so, if you’re going to attempt this game, I guess you should make sure that either you or someone close to you knows how to play sudoku.

(As autocorrect just reminded me, I can’t even spell sudoku.)

I liked Crafty’s Escape Room. It’s a well-written throwback to the good natured text adventures of old. It’s a very good-natured game. Despite my initial fears, you don’t die if you fail to solve a puzzle. I appreciated that because, again, puzzles are almost always my downfall when it comes to Interactive Fiction. As an added bonus, Crafty likes to talk so if you need a break from puzzle solving, you can call him up and just type “Speak” or “Chat” to see what he has to say.

Play Crafty’s Escape Room!

Kidnapped: In The Line of Duty (1995, directed by Bobby Roth)

Posted on August 14, 2022 by Jedadiah Leland

Arthur Milo (Dabney Coleman) is an IRS agent who uses his government position and the powers that with it to commit heinous crimes. (A corrupt IRS agent? What a shock!) Milo kidnaps the children of the wealthy, using legally-filed tax returns to select his target. Most of his accomplices all have the perfect alibi because they’re all in prison! As an agent of law enforcement, Milo is able to check them out of prison for hours at a time. Milo claims that they’re helping him out with an investigation but actually, they’re kidnapping children and digging graves in return for Milo’s help with their tax problems. Once the crime has been committed, Milo returns them to jail. It seems like the perfect plan but Milo may have met his match in hard charging FBI agent Pete Honeycutt (Timothy Busfield).

Loosely based on a true story, Kidnapped was the tenth of NBC’s In The Line of Duty films and it was one of the few not to be directed by Dick Lowry. It’s also the only one of the In The Line of Duty films to not feature a member of law enforcement getting gunned down nor does it end with a title card of statistics about the number of cops who are killed on the job each year. All of this leads me to suspect that Kidnapped was not originally meant to be an In The Line of Duty movie and that it was added to the series at the last minute. NBC was obviously hoping that the rating success of Ambush in Waco would rub off on Kidnapped.

Kidnapped is a pretty typical eccentric criminal vs eccentric investigator movie. Pete is obsessed with taking down Milo and Milo is obsessed with showing up Pete. It’s not a surprise when Milo starts to personally taunt Pete and it’s also not a surprise that Pete’s family is put at risk. There are a few strange moments of humor, most of them supplied by Tracey Walter as Milo’s spacey accomplice. The humor, though, doesn’t always seem to go along with a fact-based story about an IRS agent who abducted children and held them for ransom.

The best thing about the film is Dabney Coleman as Arthur Milo. Coleman has always been an underrated actor. Nobody did as good at a job at playing a curmudgeon as Dabney Coleman. In Kidnapped, Coleman takes his usual persona up a notch by playing Milo as someone who is not just annoyed by people but who is willing to kill them too. While Arthur Milo’s schemes are usually clever, he’s so arrogant and determined to show off how much smarter he is than everyone else that he’s usually his own worst enemy. He’s the type of criminal who wears a white suit and a panama hat, despite the fact that his outfit will make him instantly recognizable to anyone who witnesses his crimes. The character is a strange one but Coleman brings him to life and makes him believable. Kidnapped is a pretty standard police procedural but worth seeing for Coleman’s villainous turn.

Music Video of the Day: Superstitious by Europe (1988, directed by Nick Morris)

Posted on August 14, 2022 by Jedadiah Leland

Superstitious was the first single to be released from Europe’s fourth studio album, Out of this World. Out of this World was released in 1990. One album later, Europe would go on a temporary hiatus as grunge and then generic pop replaced Europe’s style of metal as MTV’s favorite style of music. The band reunited in 2003 and has since released six more albums. Europe rocks!

This video for Superstitious was filmed in Long Island, New York. The video was directed by Nick Morris, who was a very busy video director in the 80s and the 90s. He also did the video for Europe’s best-known song, The Final Countdown.

Enjoy!

In the Line of Duty: Hunt For Justice (1994, directed by Dick Lowry)

Posted on August 13, 2022 by Jedadiah Leland

When New Jersey State Trooper Philip Lomonaco (Dan Lauria) pulls over a car for having mud on its license plate, he doesn’t know that the car is being driven by two members of the United Freedom Front, a group of left-wing revolutionaries. While Lomonaco talks to Tom Manning (Miguel Ferrer), Dickie Williams (Dell Yount) opens fire. Lomanaco is killed and Tom and Dickie flee to their safehouse in New England. While the United Freedom Front plots their next series of bombings and bank robberies, Lomonaco’s ex-partner (Nicholas Turturro) teams up with an FBI agent (Adam Arkin) to track down the terrorists and get justice for his fallen friend.

Hunt For Justice was the ninth of NBC’s In The Line of Duty films. The previous films featured religious cults, anti-tax protestors, drug lords, and mobsters. In this one, the antagonists are all former 60s radicals who are still trying to overthrow the system. The FBI views the United Freedom Front as being a threat to national security while Lomonaco’s partner just wants to make sure that Lomonaco’s death won’t go unpunished. Dan Lauria was actually a mainstay of the In The Line of Duty films, appearing previously in A Cop for the Killing and and Ambush in Waco. (Nicholas Turturro was previously featured, on the other side of the law, in Mob Justice.) Since most people who watch this film will probably remember Lauria as being Kevin Arnold’s father in The Wonder Years, everyone will want his killers to be brought to justice.

As with the previous In The Line of Duty movies, the action is evenly divided between law enforcement and the criminals that they’re pursuing. At first, Miguel Ferrer seems like odd-casting as a leftist who admires Che Guevara but he gives a good performance as someone who regrets some of the decisions that he made in the past but who knows that he can’t change them now. Melissa Leo is also very good as his wife. Stephen Root and Dean Norris, two other actors who you would not necessarily expect to see playing left-wing revolutionaries, are cast as the other members of the United Freedom Front and Hunt For Justice does a good job of contrasting their middle class lifestyles with their revolutionary rhetoric. One of the ironies of the film is that the revolutionaries are leading much more comfortable and financially-stable lives than the men who are trying to hunt them down. In fact, the main problem with the movie is that the revolutionaries are so interesting that it’s always a letdown when the action shifts over to Turturro and Arkin, whose characters are far less interesting. Arkin and Turturro go through the expected paces. The FBI doesn’t like it when local cops try to interfere with their investigations. Who knew?

Hunt for Justice is a pretty standard In The Line of Duty movie but no movie featuring Miguel Ferrer, Melissa Leo, and Stephen Root is ever going to be a total loss. The cast is the best thing that Hunt For Justice has going for it.

Music Video of the Day: Don’t Know What You Got Till It’s Gone by Cinderella (1988, directed by Nick Morris)

Posted on August 13, 2022 by Jedadiah Leland

Watch out! Cinderella’s in a sensitive mood.

Best known for being discovered and initially promoted by Bon Jovi, Cinderella had their biggest hit with Don’t Know What You Got Till It’s Gone. This song made it up to number 12 on the charts in 1986, proving that there was a market of listeners who were eager for overly sensitive hair metal.

The video was shot at Mono Lake, a California lake that is well-known for the large amount of salt that has accumulated in the water. (It has to be known for something, I guess.) This video was directed by Nick Morris, who also directed the video for Europe’s The Final Countdown.

Enjoy!

In the Line of Duty: The Price of Vengeance (1994, directed by Dick Lowry)

Posted on August 12, 2022 by Jedadiah Leland

Johnnie Moore (Brent Jennings) is a former limo driver turned criminal mastermind. The members of his gang look up to him with cult-like admiration. On his orders, they have been robbing businesses all over town. Johnnie says that he is a man of God but he has no hesitation when it comes to ordering his men to threaten and sometimes kill any witnesses. When Detective Tom Williams (Michael Gross) comes to close to finally convincing someone to testify against the gang, Moore orders his assassination. When the members of his gang fail to get the job done because none of them want to shoot Tom when his family is around, Johnnie does it himself by dressing up as a clown and gunning Tom down in front of Tom’s son. That was Johnnie’s biggest mistake because now, he’s got Tom’s best friend, Detective Jack Lowe (Dean Stockwell), after him.

After Street Wars, NBC’s next two In The Line of Duty films both focused on FBI sieges. Both The Siege at Marion and Ambush in Waco featured true stories of the FBI trying to arrest religious fanatics and having to wait out a stand-off. Ambush in Waco was controversial because it was not only based on the Branch Davidian stand-off but it was actually filmed while the stand-off was still going on. Perhaps because of the controversy, The Price of Vengeance tells a much simpler and less exploitive story. Johnnie Moore is a criminal who kills a cop. Jack Lowe makes it his mission to put him away. There’s no risk of anyone watching siding with Johnnie Moore like they may have done with David Koresh while watching Ambush in Waco. Moore kills a man in front of his son and then laughs about it. Everyone watching is going to want to see him get punished and they are going to cheer on the efforts of law enforcement to make sure the punishment fits the crime.

The Price of Vengeance is a typical police procedural but it has a good cast. After playing a killer in the first In The Line of Duty movie and the lead FBI man in the third one, Michael Gross is cast as the victim here and he’s so likable that you’ll be angered when he gets gunned down. Dean Stockwell brings his no-nonsense, down-to-Earth style to the role of Gross’s best friend and Brent Jennings is smug and evil as Johnnie Moore. Mary Kay Place, Kathleen Robertson, and Justin Garms play the members of Gross’s family and they all do a good job of showing the trauma that they’ve suffered as a result of his murder. Keep an eye out for Courtney Gains, playing a member of Moore’s criminal crew. Gains played this same character in a dozen different films. If you see Courtney Gains in a movie, look out because he’s up to no good!

The Price of Vengeance is a standard 90s cop show. Nothing about it will take you by surprise but it’s partially redeemed by its cast.

Music Video of the Day: You Think You’re Tough by Ratt (1983, directed by ????)

Posted on August 12, 2022 by Jedadiah Leland

Before Tawny Kitaen became famous for appearing in Whitesnake videos, she dated Robbin Crosby, the lead guitarist of Ratt. Those are Kitaen’s legs on the cover of Ratt’s first self-titled album. Decorating those amazing legs with high heels and rats results in a classic 80s music image.

The video below is for one of the songs from that album, You Think You’re Tough. You Think You’re Tough was Ratt’s first single and was released with a cover version of Rufus Thomas’s Walking The Dog. The video keeps things simple, highlighting the band’s musicianship and saying, “These guys can really play!”

Enjoy!