Cinemax Friday: Maximum Revenge (1997, directed by Fred Olen Ray)

Posted on September 4, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

When a new maximum security prison is finally ready to be opened and filled with dangerous criminals, Warden Glover (Arthur Roberts) gives a tour to reporter Tracy Quinn (Landon Hall). Unfortunately, the tour is interrupted when a group of terrorists led by Murdock (John Lazar, who is best-known for playing the homicidal record producers in Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls) infiltrate the prison and take over. Their plan is to set off a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles and trick the United States into a retaliatory strike against the Middle East.

Fortunately, the Warden is able to free the five prisoners who had already been transferred to the prison before it was taken over by terrorists. It’s now up to the prisoners to defeat the terrorists and defuse the bomb. They’ve only got an hour to prevent a war! Fortunately, the prisoners are being led by former CIA agent, Mace Richter (Paul Michael Robinson). Mace is only in prison because he was framed after a hostage rescue went wrong. (It turned out that the hostage was in on the plot so Mace killed him.) Amazingly, the terrorists from that operation are the same terrorists who have now taken over the prison. What a coincidence!

Maximum Revenge is a Fred Olen Ray movie so you know what you’re getting. The film rips off Die Hard by having Mace and the crew take out the terrorists one-by-one. Despite the fact that they’ve only got an hour to stop a nuclear bomb from going off, Mace and Tracy still drop everything so that they can have sex in one of the prison offices. It seems like that could have waited until after World War III had been prevented but then again, it’s a Fred Olen Ray film. No matter what else can be said about Fred Olen Ray, he knows what his target audience is watching for.

Paul Michael Robinson is not an extremely compelling action star and the fight scenes are pretty rudimentary. The prison is obviously an office building and the frequent inserts of the bomb very slowly counting down from 60:00 are good for a laugh or two. (Most bomb timers count down in seconds but I guess this one was meant to count down in minutes. At one point, though, the timer reads 16:86.) Even though the prison doesn’t appear to be that big and the terrorists aren’t that impressive, the timer is still somehow allowed to get all the way down to 00:01 before anyone does anything about it. That tells you all you need to know. The best thing about the movie are the end credits, which are filled with joke names. My favorite was the electrician named Sparks McGee.

Music Video of the Day: One Step Beyond by Madness (1979, directed by Dave Robinson)

Posted on September 4, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

“We used to play the Hawaii 5-0 theme as a novelty cover version to start our shows. When we got bored we did this track instead, but the original recording was only 45 seconds long. We didn’t even think it would get on the album. Our record company boss heard it and got our producers to loop it. We still start every gig with it. We’ve tried other songs but that’s the one we always come back to. Cathal’s introduction is a clarion call.”

— Graham “Suggs” McPherson on One Step Beyond

One Step Beyond is actually a cover. The original version was done by Jamaican SKa singer Prince Buster. For Madness’s version, a spoken intro was provided by Chas Smash, who was not an official member of the band at the time but who would join a few weeks after the release of One Step Beyond.

The live performance that’s featured in this video was filmed at The Hope and Anchor, a pub in North London.

Enjoy!

Rage (1972, directed by George C. Scott)

Posted on September 3, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

Wyoming sheep rancher Dan Logan (George C. Scott) and his teenage son, Chris (Nicolas Beauvy), spend a night camping out on their land. While Dan stays in the tent, Chris decides to sleep outside, underneath the stars. The next morning, Dan leaves the tent to discover that all of his sheep are dead and that Chris is having violent convulsions. Dan rushes his son to the local hospital, where he hopes that the family’s longtime physician, Dr. Caldwell (Richard Basehart), can save his son’s life.

However, at the hospital, Dan is separated from his son. Two doctors that he’s never met before — Dr. Spencer (Barnard Hughes) and Major Holliford (Martin Sheen) — take over his case. They tell him that Chris was probably just exposed to an insecticide and that both Dan and his son are going to have to stay at the hospital for a few days. Dan is confined to his room and not allowed to see his son.

What Dan doesn’t know is that both he and his son have been unwittingly exposed to a secret army nerve gas. Though the experiment was only meant to be performed on the animals that were grazing on Dan’s land, Dan and Chris were accidentally sprayed. When Dan discovers the truth about what’s been done to him and his son, he sets out to try to get revenge with what little time he has left.

Fresh from refusing an Oscar for Patton, George C. Scott made his feature film directorial debut with Rage. (He had previously directed The Andersonville Trial for television.) As a director, Scott sometimes struggles. Rage is so relentlessly grim and serious that even the most experienced director would have had a difficult time making it compelling. The scenes in the hospital are effective claustrophobic but they’re also often dramatically inert. The only humor in the film comes from Scott’s overuse of slow motion. When even simple scenes, like throwing coffee on a campfire, are shown in slow motion, it goes from being ominous to unintentionally humorous.

As a director, Scott did make a very wise decision by casting himself in the lead role. No one was better at portraying pure, incandescent anger than George C. Scott and the film picks up once Dan discovers what’s been done to himself and his son. Once Dan sets off to get revenge, Rage becomes an entirely different film, one that is about both a father’s anger and the cold calculation of a government that views him as just as a subject to be tested upon. The final scene is especially effective and suggests that Scott could have become an interesting director if he had stuck with it.

Scott would direct one more film, The Savage Is Loose, before devoting the rest of his distinguished career to performing.

Music Video Of The Day: Born to be Wild, covered by Kim Wilde (2002, directed by Phil Griffin)

Posted on September 3, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

Originally, I wanted to share the video for Kim Wilde’s cover of You Keep Me Hangin’ On but for some reason, it’s impossible to find a good upload of that video on YouTube.

So, instead, I went with the video for a less-known Kim Wilde cover, her version of Born To Be Wild. Born To Be Wild was written in 1968 by Mars Bonfire. Mars meant for it be a ballad but when Steppenwolf got their hands on it, they turned it into what has been described as being the first “heavy metal” song. Born To Be Wild was prominently featured in Easy Rider and it’s appeared in countless films since then. If someone is going to ride a motorcycle in a movie, chances are that Born To Be Wild is going to appear somewhere on the soundtrack.

I guess it was inevitable that Kim WIlde would eventually end up covering Born to be Wild. Kim Wilde was actually born Kim Smith but her father was a 1950s rock and roller who performed under the name Marty Wilde. (Marty was one of the first British rock and roll stars.) When Kim started her music career, she used her father’s stage surname so it can be argued that Kim was indeed born to be Wilde.

This video was directed by Phil Griffin, who has also done videos for Paul McCartney, Annie Lennox, Amy Winehouse, and a host of others.

Enjoy!

The Woman Hunter (1972, directed by Bernard L. Kowalksi)

Posted on September 2, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

Recovering from a traffic accident and having being recently acquitted on charges of vehicular manslaughter, wealthy socialite Diane Hunter (Barbara Eden) heads down to Acapulco with her businessman husband, Jerry (Robert Vaughn). Diane wants to get away from the publicity of her case and relax but all Jerry seems to care about is business. When she meets another American named Paul Carter (Stuart Whitman), Paul presents himself as being an artist. But as Paul seems to be growing more and more obsessed with Diane and Jerry, Diane becomes convinced that Paul may have more sinister motives. Is Diane right or is she having another breakdown?

The Woman Hunter is a quickly paced made-for-TV thriller that would probably have worked better if the two men in Diane’s life had been played by different actors. Stuart Whitman and Robert Vaughn were both good actors but they were also so often cast in villainous roles that, as soon as they appear, everyone will know better than to trust either one of them. The film’s big twist can be guessed just by the fact that Robert Vaughn is playing Diane’s husband.

Whitman seems bored with his role while Vaughn does his usual sleazy businessman routine. He’s good at it but it’s a role that he played so often that it’s impossible to be surprised when it’s revealed that he’s less than trustworthy. Barbara Eden gives a good performance and is really the main reason to watch this movie. After being typecast as a genie in a bottle, Eden goes out of her way in The Woman Hunter to show that she was capable of doing so much more and, for the most part, she succeeds. She’s sexy, sympathetic, and does just a good enough job portraying Diane’s mental instability that it does at least seem believable that she could be imagining all of the danger around her. (Or, at least, it would be believable if the men in her life weren’t all portrayed by veteran screen villains.)

The Woman Hunter is forgettable but it was shot on location in Acapulco so at least everyone involved got a nice trip out of the deal.

Music Video of The Day: The Power by Snap! (1990, directed by Jonathan Bates)

Posted on September 2, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

The Power by Snap! was the first rap-based single to hit number one in the UK, as well as being a hit in the United States. A lot of people got screwed over on the way to it achieving that honor.

First off, despite what many people undoubtedly thought when they first saw this video, neither rapper Turbo B nor singer Penny Ford were members of Snap! Instead, Snap! was the project of two German producers, Michael Münzing and Luca Anzilotti. Following the lead of the KLF, Snap! created songs by sampling other dance tracks and then hiring a singer to perform. In the case of The Power, they sampled rapper Chill Rob G’s Let The Words Flow while the famous “I’ve Got The Power” line comes from Jocelyn Brown’s Love’s Gonna Get You.

After first trying to hire Chaka Khan to perform on the track, The Snap! settled for Penny Ford, who was Chaka’s main backup singer. Ford flew out to the Germany and spent a few weeks recording her part of the song. She also improvised a few lyrics in order to get a songwriter credit and to ensure that she would get paid for her contribution.

Not getting paid for their contributions were both Chill Rob G and Jocelyn Brown. Brown wasn’t paid because, even though her vocal track was a key to the song’s success, she didn’t actually write the lyrics to Love’s Gonna Get You. Chill Rob G wasn’t paid because, unlike Snap!, he didn’t have a huge record company to back him up.

When the song became a hit in Europe, Chill Rob G recorded his own version for release in the United States. However, Snap! also recorded a version of the States but, instead of using Chill Rob G, they recruited a rapped named Turbo B. Turbo B performed not only Chill Rob G’s original rap but he also added “I will attack and you don’t want that.” Again, because Chill Rob G recorded an independent label while Snap! had Artisan backing them up, Snap’s version received considerably more promotion than Chill Rob G’s. For example, Snap! got a music video to help push their version up the charts.

Turbo B appears in the video. Penny Ford does not. Instead, a woman named Jackie Hayes was hired to lip-sync to Ford’s vocals. The video went into heavy rotation on MTV and the song became a huge hit, despite the fact that most listeners had no idea who was actually responsible for what they were hearing. Though Snap! didn’t have many hits beyond this song, The Power is still regularly heard whenever a film or a television show has to establish that it’s taking place in the 90s.

Enjoy!

Born American (1986, directed by Renny Harlin)

Posted on September 1, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

The year is 1986 and the Cold War is raging between the United States and the Soviet Union. Three American college students are on vacation in Finland. Mitch (Steve Durham) and Savoy (Mike Norris) think it would be a great idea to secretly cross the border into Russia and just hang out for a few hours. The more cautious KC (David Coburn) thinks that would be a mistake but he’s outvoted.

Of course, it turns out that KC was correct. No sooner have the three students crossed the border than they find themselves being chased by Soviet soldiers and getting accused of raping a woman in a nearby village. When the three of them attempt to flee back over the border, they instead end up accidentally destroying the village instead. Arrested by the Russians, KC is tortured by the KGB until Savoy agrees to confess to being an intelligence agent.

Sentenced to a prison camp in Siberia, Savoy and KC are forced to take part in forced labor while Mitch is used as a pawn in an underground human chess match where the pawns are all prisoners and capturing a pawn means that prisoner is then executed. (I don’t get it either.) After KC dies due to the abuse to which he’s been subjected, Savoy discovers that there’s a former American intelligence agent known as The Admiral (Thalmus Rasulala) living underneath the prison. The Admiral is willing to help Savoy escape but he wants Savoy to help him by smuggling a book that The Admiral has written to publishers in the West.

What type of name is Savoy anyways?

Despite the name and the pro-American subject matter, Born American was produced in Finland. At the time, it was the most expensive Finnish film ever made. It was also the directorial debut of Renny Harlin and the surprise box office success of Born American led to Harlin getting offers from Hollywood. If not for Born American, Renny Harlin would never have gotten the chance to direct Die Hard 2 or to marry Geena Davis. Of course, he also wouldn’t have gotten the chance to direct Cutthroat Island.

The best thing about Born American are the action scenes. They rarely make much sense in the context of the film’s plot but Renny Harlin proved that, even with his directorial debut, he knew how to film people blowing things up and shooting guns at each other. The scenes in the prison camp are believably intense, or at least they are until The Admiral shows up in his well-furnished underground lair.

The worst thing about Born American is the plot, which never makes any sense. I’m about as anti-communist as they come and even I still found it hard to have much sympathy for three obviously wealthy college students who were stupid enough to try to sneak into Russia just so they’d have a story to tell later. Savoy is not much of a hero because almost all of his troubles could have been avoided by him not acing like an idiot. Plus, what type of name is Savoy?

Originally, Savoy was to be played by Chuck Norris. When Chuck withdrew from the project, the producers instead hired his son, Mike Norris, and rewrote the script to make the three Americans college students. This was Mike Norris’s first starring role and, unfortunately, he’s not very good. He’s believable as a tourist but once he’s taken prisoner and has to emote, he starts delivering all of his lines in a high-pitched whine and it becomes difficult to listen to him. Watching Mike Norris in the role of Savoy Brown, I couldn’t help but think to myself that Chuck Norris never would have gotten captured in the first place.

Music Video of the Day: No New Tales To Tell by Love and Rockets (1987, directed by Tony van den Ende)

Posted on September 1, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

Love and Rockets is definitely one of those 80s bands that should have been bigger than they were. Basically made up of every member of Bauhaus except for Peter Murphy, Love and Rockets was responsible for some of the best songs of the decade.

No New Tales To Tell is from their third studio album, Earth, Sun, Moon. Thanks to this music video, which was put in heavy rotation on MTV, the song did manage to reach number 18 on the U.S. charts. The video was directed by the very prolific Tony van den Ende and it features a few shots of the band in their Bubblemen costumes. (The Bubblemen were a side project for several members of the band. They performed while dressed as friendly bees.)

Enjoy!

Speedtrap (1977, directed by Earl Bellamy)

Posted on August 31, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

In a southwestern metropolis, a mysterious criminal is stealing cars and outrunning the police. When the insurance company realizes that the cops are never going to be able to do their job, they decide to bring in an outside hire to solve the crimes. They turn to a paisley-shirt wearing private investigator named Pete Novick (played by Joe Don Baker). Novick’s a hard-drinking, hard-living P.I. who is going to solve the case no matter what. Authority figures like police Captain Hogan (Morgan Woodward) hate him. Women like cop Niffty Nolan (Tyne Daly) and psychic New Blossom (Lana Wood) want to have him. Men like mechanic Billy (Richard Jaeckel) want to hang out with him. You get the idea. It’s a Joe Don Baker movie.

Speedtrap is basically one car chase after another, the majority of which are excitingly filmed and continue until almost every car involved has been destroyed. Though the movie was directed by Earl Bellamy, it has the feel of a Hal Needham film as it keeps the characterization to a minimum and instead focuses on vehicular mayhem. Speaking of Hal Needham, it’s also easy to imagine Burt Reynolds, in his B-movie days, playing the role of Pete Novick but not even he would have been as perfect for the role or the movie as Joe Don Baker. Baker shambles through the movie, all the while keeping the same passive-aggressive grin on his face. There’s nothing smooth about Joe Don Baker, which is why he was fun to watch in a movie like this. Whether he’s having a one-night stand with a psychic (only in order to help for “totally relax” so that she can have her visions) or going out of his way to annoy almost every single person that he meets, he’s undeniably Joe Don Baker. During one chase scene, an annoyed Novick snaps, “Beep beep my ass!” Only Joe Don Baker could have pulled that off.

Eventually, the thief steals the wrong car. This one has a suitcase in back that’s full of the mob’s money. This gives Robert Loggia a chance to ham it up as a mafia don who wants Novick to capture the thief and then turn him over to the syndicate. Novick, however, has even less respect for the mob than he does for the police. The mafia subplot is a distraction but Timothy Carey plays Loggia’s main henchman and brings with him a few moments of genuine menace to the film.

Speedtrap has never gotten a DVD or Blu-ray release but it’s an entertaining B-movie and it deserves one. How about it, Shout Factory? A million Joe Don Baker fans are looking to you.

4 Shots From 4 Films: Special James Coburn Edition

Posted on August 31, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!

Whether he was appearing in a western, a spy film, a war film, a comedy, or a dark drama, James Coburn was one of the coolest and most underapperciated actors around. He made bad films tolerable and good films even better. Regardless of the role, Coburn brought his own unique style to each and every performance. He was born 92 years ago today in Nebraska so here are just four of the films from his legendary career.

4 Shots From 4 Films