Author Archives: Jedadiah Leland

A Movie A Day #73: Bitter Harvest (1993, directed by Duane Clark)

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Travis Graham (Stephen Baldwin, before he found God) is a doofus who owns a farm.  His late father sent all of the family’s money to a crooked televangelist but he did leave Travis a valuable coin collection.  But then two blondes enter his life.  Kelly Ann (Jennifer Rubin) is a penniless hitchhiker who needs a place to stay and a bed to sleep in.  Jolene (Patsy Kensit) is a British realtor who says she wants to help Travis sell his farm.  Faster than you can say “I don’t know the exact pronunciation but I believe it’s ménage à trois,” that’s exactly what happens.  Travis can’t believe his luck but it turns out that Kelly Ann and Jolene have plans of their own.  Then, in a strangely unrelated subplot, a banker robber who shot the local sheriff (M. Emmett Walsh) shows up at the farm.  Travis kills the bank robber but then Kelly Ann and Jolene start pressuring him to use the robber’s plan to rob a bank himself.

This is one of the many strange movies from the increasingly strange career of Stephen Baldwin.  Now that he’s best known for evangelizing and appearing in celebrity-themed reality shows (including, most infamously, two seasons of The Celebrity Apprentice), it is easy to forget that Stephen Baldwin was once a good character actor who, with the exception of The Usual Suspects, apparently could not pick a good script if his life depended upon it.  His performance as the socially backward Travis is often strange (at times, he seems to be channeling Lenny from Of Mice and Men) but always interesting.  Fans of 90s neo-noir will also be happy to see Delusion’s Jennifer Rubin, playing yet another mysterious and dangerous temptress.  Unfortunately, Bitter Harvest falls apart because of an implausible script and too many loose ends but, until it does, the sultry combination of Jennifer Rubin and Patsky Kensit keeps things watchable.

One final note: The sheriff’s son is played by Adam Baldwin.  Even though the two are not actually related, everyone in the 90s assumed that they were and this makes Bitter Harvest a double Baldwin film.

A Movie A Day #72: Delusion (1991, directed by Carl Colpaert)

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George O’Brien (Jim Metzler) is a former executive at a San Diego computer company who is driving across Nevada.  He is heading to Reno, where he plans to set up a company with the embezzled millions that he has hidden in his trunk.  When he spots former Vegas showgirl Patti (Jennifer Rubin) standing on the side of the road, he stops to pick her up.  She explains that her car broke down and she needs a lift.  George is happy to give her a ride.  The only problem is that Patti is traveling with her boyfriend, Chevy (Kyle Secor).  At first, Chevy just seems to be a goofy guy who talks too much.  However, Chevy is actually a hitman, traveling to Vegas to kill a gangster (Jerry Orbach).  After the hit, Chevy abandons George in the desert and steals his car.  Determined to get his money, George pursues Chevy and Patty across the desert.

Starting like a caper film and ending like a spaghetti western, Delusion was one of the best (and most overlooked) of the many low-budget neo-noirs that came out during the first half of the 1990s.  While the underrated Metzler and Secor both give good performances, Delusion is stolen by Jennifer Rubin, who is sexy, funny, and unpredictable as Patti.  The scene where she performs These Boots Are For Walking is one of the best of the 90s.  Whatever happened to her?

And why hasn’t this excellent retro thriller been given a proper release on DVD or Blu-ray?  If any movie is deserves to be rediscovered via a special edition, it’s Delusion.

A Movie A Day #71: Side Out (1990, directed by Peter Israelson)

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Monroe (C. Thomas Howell) is a young lawyer who moves to California and gets a job working for his Uncle Max (Terry Kiser).  Max wants Monroe to concentrate on evicting beach bums.  Monroe wants to play beach volleyball.  Together, they solve crimes.  No, actually, Max orders Monroe to evict Zack (Peter Horton), a former volleyball champion who was once “king of the beach.”  Zack agrees to coach Monroe and his goofball friend, Wiley (Christopher Rydell) in a volleyball tournament.  But when Zack misses a match because he is having underlit, PG-13 sex with his ex-wife (Harley Jane Kozak), uncoached Monroe accidentally breaks Wiley’s arm.  Now, Zack has to step in as Monroe’s partner and reclaim his status as king of the beach!

When I was a kid, Side Out was a HBO perennial, which is not the same thing as being a good movie.  There have not been many movies made about beach volleyball and Side Out shows us why.  Beach volley ball is just not that exciting to watch, especially when the main competitors are two out of shape actors.  All the jump cuts and close-ups in the world can’t disguise the fact that neither actor looks like he could get the ball over the net, never mind playing for over ten minutes without getting out of breath.  In Side Out, beach volleyball teamwork comes down to a lot of yelling and whenever Monroe yells at either Wiley or Zack, he sounds just like the “Put him in a body bag, Johnny!” guy from The Karate Kid.

At least Kathy Ireland has a small role.  Also, in the role of Zack’s friend, keep an eye out for Duke himself, the great Tony Burton!

What are you doing here, Duke!?

A Movie A Day #70: Wired (1989, directed by Larry Peerce)

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Sometimes, you watch a movie and all you cay say, at the end, is “What the Hell were they thinking?”

Wired is one such movie.  Based on a widely discredited biography by Bob Woodward, Wired tells two stories.  In the first story, John Belushi (Michael Chiklis, making an unfortunate film debut) wakes up in a morgue and is told by his guardian angel that he has died of a drug overdose.  Did I mention that his guardian angel is Puerto Rican cabbie named Angel Vasquez (Ray Sharkey) and Angel drives Belushi through a series of flashbacks?  Belushi meets Dan Aykroyd (Gary Groomes, who looks nothing like Dan Aykroyd).  Belushi gets cast on Saturday Night Live.  Belushi marries Judy (Lucinda Jenney).  Belushi uses drugs, costars in The Blues Brothers, dies of a drug overdose in a sleazy motel, and plays a pinball game to determine whether he’ll go to Heaven or Hell.  While this is going on, Bob Woodward (J.T. Walsh) is interviewing everyone who knew Belushi while he was alive.

There are so many things wrong with Wired that it is hard to know where to even begin.  I haven’t even mentioned the scene where Bob Woodward travels back in time and has a conversation with Belushi while he’s dying on the motel room floor.  Wired tries to be a cautionary tale about getting seduced by fame and drugs but how seriously can anyone take the message of any movie that features Ray Sharkey as a guardian angel?  The scenes with Woodward are strange, mostly because the hero of Watergate is being played by an actor best known for playing sinister villains.  (Seven years after playing Bob Woodward, J.T. Walsh was actually cast as Watergate figure John Ehrlichman in Nixon.)  Considering that this was his first movie, Michael Chiklis is not bad when it comes to playing a drug addict named John but he’s never convincing as John Belushi.  He never captures the mix of charisma and danger that made John Belushi a superstar.  Wired wants to tell the story of Belushi’s downfall but never understands what made him special to begin with.

Wired tries to be edgy but it only succeeds for one split second.  During the filming of The Blues Brothers, a director who is clearly meant to be John Landis walks over to Belushi’s trailer.  Listen carefully, and a helicopter can be heard in the background.

As for the rest of Wired, what the Hell were they thinking?

A Movie A Day #69: Intersection (1994, directed by Mark Rydell)

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This one is just dumb.

Vincent Eastman (Richard Gere) and his wife, Sally (Sharon Stone), own an architectural firm.  Vincent is supposed to be creative and passionate but mostly he’s just Richard Gere in mom jeans.  Sally is a brilliant businesswoman but she is also emotionally repressed to the point of being frigid.  Vincent eventually starts having an affair with a travel writer named Olivia (Lolita Davidovich), who is everything that Sally is not.  Despite Martin Landau telling him that he has to make a decision because, and I quote, “Keep everything under one roof. That’s a basic rule of architecture,” Vincent cannot choose between his hateful wife and his loving mistress.  First he writes a letter to Olivia, telling her that he can not leave his wife.  Then, he sees a little girl who, like Olivia, has curly red hair and he takes that as a sign that he should leave his wife.  He calls Olivia and leaves a gushing message on her machine, telling her that he’s leaving Sally.  But before the letter is sent or the message is heard, Vincent is in a car crash that leaves him in a coma.  As both his wife and his mistress wait outside his hotel room, Vincent has visions of his two lovers swimming by him and struggles to decide who to follow.  Even in a coma, Vincent is an indecisive prick.

Intersection was on HBO while I was sick.  I watched it and it just made me feel worse.  Intersection was made during a weird period of time when Richard Gere was a romantic star and Sharon Stone was trying to prove that she was a serious actress.  Stone lobbied to be cast against type as Sally but she plays the role as so hard and bitchy that there’s never any question as to whether or not Vincent should leave her for Olivia.  Lolitia Davidovich (whatever happened to her?) does what she can with Olivia but the character never has any existence beyond her relationship with Vincent.  As for Richard Gere, when he starts hyperventilating about seeing a little girl who looks like his mistress, you’ll want to report him to social services.

Sadly, Intersection was directed by Mark Rydell and written by Marshall Brickman, two people who did great work before Intersection and have done very little since.

A Movie A Day #68: Hoosiers (1986, directed by David Anspaugh)

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I’m back!

Even though it has only been a week since I last did a movie a day, I feel like I’ve been gone forever.  Thank you to everyone who commented or messaged me while I was gone.  It turned out that I just had a bad sinus infection.  It was painful as Hell but, with the help of antibiotics and the greatest care in the world, I’m recovering.

Last week, I asked if anyone had any suggestions for what the 68th movie a day should be.  Case suggested Hoosiers and so it shall be.

In 1951, Norman Dale (Gene Hackman) arrives in the small Indiana town of Hickory.  He is a former college basketball coach who has been hired to coach the high school’s perennially struggling basketball team.  Emphasizing the fundamentals and demanding discipline from his players, Dale struggles at first with both the team and the townspeople.  When he makes an alcoholic former basketball star named Shooter (Dennis Hopper) an assistant coach, he nearly loses his job.  Eventually, though, the Hickory team starts winning and soon, this small town high school is playing for the state championship against highly favored South Bend High School.

For many people, Hoosiers is not just “a basketball movie.”  Instead, it is the basketball movie, the movie by which all other sport films are judged.  Hoosiers is inspired by a true story.  In 1954, small town Milan High School did defeat Muncie for the Indiana State Championship and they did it by two points.  Otherwise, Hoosiers is heavily fictionalized and manages to include almost every sports film cliché that has ever existed.  How good a coach is Norman Dale, really?  Almost every game that Hickory wins is won by only one basket.

Why, then, is Hoosiers a classic?  Much of it is due to director David Anspaugh’s attention to period and detail.  Some of it is due to Gene Hackman, who gives a tough and unsentimental performance.  Whenever Hoosiers starts to cross the line from sentimental to maudlin, Hackman is there to pull it back to reality with a gruff line delivery.  Even his romance with the one-note anti-basketball teacher (Barbara Hershey) works.  Hickory feels like a real place, with a real history and inhabited by real people.

And then there’s Dennis Hopper.  Along with Blue Velvet, Hoosiers was Hopper’s comeback film.  After spending twenty years lost in the Hollywood wilderness, better known for abusing drugs and shooting guns than acting, Hopper had just come out of rehab when he was offered the role of Shooter.  Amazingly, he turned the role down and told the producers to offer it to his friend, Harry Dean Stanton.

According to Peter L. Winkler’s Dennis Hopper: Portrait of an American Rebel, this is what happened next:

Stanton (who, ironically, was also considered for Hopper’s role in Blue Velvet) called Hopper up and asked, “Aren’t you from Kansas?”

“Yeah.”

“Didn’t you have a hoop on your barn?”

“Yeah.”

“I think you may be the guy that David Anspaugh’s looking for.”

Harry Dean Stanton was right.  Dennis Hopper, still very much in recovery, totally inhabited the role of the alcoholic Shooter and gave one of the best performances of his often underrated career.  Both Shooter and the actor playing him surprised everyone by doing a good job and Hopper received his only Oscar nomination for acting for his performance in Hoosiers.  (He had previously been nominated for co-writing Easy Rider.)

You don’t have to like basketball to enjoy the Hell out of Hoosiers.

A Movie A Day #67: Animal Factory (2000, directed by Steve Buscemi)

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Edward Furlong is Ron Decker, a spoiled 18 year-old from a rich family who is arrested and sent to prison when he’s caught with a small amount of marijuana.  Being younger and smaller than the other prisoners, Ron is soon being targeted by everyone from the prison’s Puerto Rican gang to the sadistic Buck Rowan (Tom Arnold).  Fortunately, for Ron, prison veteran Earl Copen (Williem DaFoe) takes him under his wing and provides him with protection.  Earl is the philosopher-king of the prison.  As he likes to put it, “This is my prison, after all.”  If he can stay out of trouble, Ron has a chance to get out early but, with Buck stalking him, that’s not going to be easy.

Based on a novel by ex-con Edward Bunker, Animal Factory was the second film to be directed by Bunker’s Reservoir Dogs co-stars, Steve Buscemi.  Though it was overlooked at the time, Animal Factory is a minor masterpiece.  Taking a low key approach, Buscemi emphasizes the monotony of prison life just as much as the sudden bursts of violence and shows why someone like Ron Decker can go into prison as an innocent and come out as an animal.  DaFoe and Furlong give two of their best performances as Earl and Ron while a cast of familiar faces — Danny Trejo, Mickey Rourke, Chris Bauer, Mark Boone Junior — make up the prison’s population.  Most surprising of all is Tom Arnold, giving Animal Factory‘s best performance as the prison’s most dangerous predator.

A Movie A Day #66: Deadly Game (1991, directed by Thomas J. Wright)

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Seven strangers are invited to a remote island by a mysterious billionaire named Osiris.  There is a doctor, a dancer, an auto mechanic, a mercenary, a football player and his agent, and a member of the Yakuza.  The auto mechanic points out that, in Egyptian mythology, Osiris judged mankind’s sins.  For some reason, none of the seven think twice about going to the island but, once they arrive, they soon discover that they should have.  Osiris is willing to give them seven million dollars but to get it, they have to reach the other end of the island without being killed by Osiris or his men.

Of the many movie adaptations of The Most Dangerous Game, this is probably the worst.  The cast, which includes Michael Beck, Marc Singer, Jenny Seagrove, Mitch Ryan, John Pleshette, Soon-Tek Oh, and Roddy McDowall, isn’t bad but the script is terrible, full of overwrought dialogue and plot holes.  Across the island, Osiris has left clues that are designed to trigger flashbacks and lead to each member of the seven explaining what it is that they did in the past.  But for that to work, Osiris would have to know exactly what route the seven of them were going to use to cross the island and he would also have to know who would still be alive by the time that they came across each clue.  Also, whenever they come across the clue, everyone stands around and wastes valuable time arguing about it.  Considering that there are armed men trying to kill them, no one seems to be in that much of a hurry to make it to the other side of the island.  The flashbacks themselves are interesting in how clumsily they are put together.  40ish Marc Singer plays himself as a senior in high school.

Like Hitler’s Daughter, Deadly Game was originally made for the USA network.  The first time I saw it was in the UK where, for some reason, it seemed to air frequently during the mid-1990s.  (Possibly this was because it starred quintessential Hollywood Brit Roddy McDowall.  That’s the only reason I can think of.)  It’s now on YouTube, for anyone who wants to sit through it.