Author Archives: Jedadiah Leland

Rocky Mountain Mystery (1935, directed by Charles Barton)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Larry Sutton (Randolph Scott) is an engineer who has been sent to take over operations at a radium mine that is owned by the Ballard family.  Previously, Larry’s bother-in-law was in charge of the mine but he has disappeared and is suspected of having murdered the foreman at the Ballard Ranch.  With Jim Ballard (George F. Marion) on his deathbed and being cared for by the foreman’s wife (Caroline Dudley, credited as Mrs. Leslie Carter), Ballard’s nieces (Ann Sheridan and Kathleen Burke) and nephew (Howard Wilson) have come to the ranch to find out about their inheritance.

Soon, a cloaked figure starts to murder Ballard’s heirs, one-by-one.  Working with eccentric Deputy Sheriff Tex Murdock (Chic Sale), Larry tries to discover the identity of the killer and keep the mine from falling into the wrong hands.

Rocky Mountain Mystery is unique in that it is a Randolph Scott western that takes place in what was then modern times.  Even though both Larry and Tex prefer to ride horses, the murderer tries to escape in a car, people use phones, and the entire plot revolves around a radium mine.  The film mixes the usual western tropes of grim heroes, eccentric lawmen, and valley shoot-outs with a dark mystery that actually holds your attention while you’re watching the film.  Always ideally cast in these type of films, Randolph Scott is both tough and intelligent as Larry Sutton.  He may be a cowboy but he’s a detective too.  Scott gets good support from a cast of familiar faces.  Ann Sheridan is especially good as the niece who knows how to handle a rifle.

These B-westerns can be a mixed bag but Rocky Mountain Mystery held my attention with a plot that was actually interesting and a strong performance from Randolph Scott.  Watch it and see if you can guess who the identity of the Ballard Ranch murderer.

Electric Dreams (1984, directed by Steve Barron)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Electric Dreams is a film about a love triangle between a man, his neighbor, and his personal computer.

Miles (Lenny Von Dohlen) is an architect who wants to develop a special brick that can withstand earthquakes.  One of his colleagues suggests that he buy something called a — let me check my notes to make sure I got it right — com-put-er.  Apparently, computers can do anything!  Miles is skeptical but he decides to give it a try.

(In all fairness, this movie came out at a time when there were no iPhones or even laptops and personal computers were viewed as being strange and exotic. )

Miles get his computer and it’s basically one of those boxy computers that used to populate computer labs in high schools across the country.  As soon as I saw the computer, I wanted to play Oregon Trail.  After the computer overheats and Miles tries to cool it down by pouring champagne on it (!), the computer comes to life.  Now voiced by Burt Cort, the computer develops a crush on Mile’s neighbor, a cellist named Madeleine (Virginia Madsen).  The computer hears Madeleine playing her cello and composes its own music to play with her.  Madeleine hears the music and assumes that Miles must be a great composer.  Soon, Miles and Madeleine are falling in love and the computer is getting jealous.  The computer composes more more music for Miles but grows angry when Miles doesn’t give the computer any credit.  Even though the computer can’t move from the desk and has to be plugged in to work, it still manages to wreck havoc with Miles’s life.  When this movie came out, the idea of someone’s entire life being electronically monitored and recorded probably seemed like an out-there idea.  Today, that’s just a normal Tuesday for most people.

Electric Dreams is a mix of romance, comedy, and science fiction.  The scenes of Miles and Madeleine falling in love are mixed with scenes of the computer basically having a nervous breakdown and conspiring to ruin Miles’s credit and even trap him in his apartment.  Electric Dreams is probably the most good-natured film ever made about a computer run amuck.  The computer doesn’t mean to hurt anyone, it’s just jealous and feeling neglected.  It’s a weird mix but the movie is so dedicated to its premise and Lenny Von Dohlen and Virginia Madsen are so appealing as the romantic leads that it works.  Electric Dreams proves that true love can conquer all, even in the Computer Age.

Music Video of the Day: When Loves To Town by U2, featuring B.B. King (1987, directed by Phil Joanou)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Back in the day and before they became synonymous with failed product promotions, U2 was actually a pretty cool band.  In this video for When Love Comes To Town, they team up with the great BB King.  The performance was recorded for the 1987 documentary film, Rattle and Hum, and the video features scenes and outtakes from that film.  The video won the MTV Movie Award for Best Music Video From A Film.

Today, it’s easy to see some warning signs of U2’s high self-regard while watching a documentary like Rattle and Hum.  Even back then, Bono was of the opinion that he was the lead singer of the most important band in the history of the world and he wasn’t going to let you forget it.  But this was Joshua Tree-era U2 and they were so good that no one cared that Bono could be self-important.  He had earned the right.  It’s a shame that the band will forever be associated with the Songs of Innocence fiasco because back in the day, they rocked.

As for this song, it was a success for both U2 and BB King.  Even after U2 stopped regularly performing it, When Love Comes To Town remained a part of BB King’s setlist.

Enjoy!

Top Of the World (1997, directed by Sidney J. Furie)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Ray Mercer (Peter Weller) has just gotten out of prison and already, he and his wife Rebecca (Tia Carrere) are heading to Nevada for a quicky divorce.  However, a stopover in Las Vegas leads to Ray having a run of luck in a casino owned by Charles Atlas (Dennis Hopper).  Ray and Rebecca start to reconsider their divorce but their reconciliation is temporarily put on hold when the casino is robbed by a bunch of thieves led by Martin Kove.  Because of Ray’s criminal history, the police (led by David Alan Grier) consider Ray to be the number one suspect.  Ray and Rebecca try to escape from the casino and clear Ray’s name, leading to a night on nonstop action and an explosive climax at the Hoover dam.

One thing that you can say about Top of the World is that it certainly isn’t boring.  The action starts earlier and lasts nonstop until the end of the movie.  No sooner has Ray escaped from one scrape than he finds himself in another.  Despite the low-budget, the action scenes are often spectacularly staged and exciting to watch.  Another thing that you can say about Top of the World is that, for a B-movie, it certainly has a packed cast.  Along with Weller, Carrere, Hopper, Grier, and Kove, the movie also finds room for Peter Coyote, Joe Pantoliano, Ed Lauter, Gavan O’Herlihy, Eddie Mekka, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, and even Larry Manetti of Magnum P.I. fame.  This movie paid off a lot of mortgages and probably funded more than a few vacations.

One thing you can’t say about Top of the World is that it makes any sense.  It doesn’t.  There are so many holes in the plot that you could fly a helicopter through them and that’s exactly what this film does.  But with the nonstop action and the entertaining cast, most people won’t mind.  I certainly didn’t!

Welcome Home, Soldier Boys (1971, directed by Richard Compton)

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Talk about embarrassing!  When Lisa told me that today was Joe Don Baker’s birthday, I decided that I would review Speedtrap, as 1977 car theft movie that Lisa and I watched last week.  But, when I took a look at the imdb to double check the name of the character that Baker played in Speedtrap, I discovered that I had already reviewed it!

Instead of talking about Speedtrap a second time, I’m going to recommend one of Joe Don Baker’s early films.  In Welcome Home, Soldier Boys, Baker stars as Danny, the leader of a group of Green Berets who have just returned from Vietnam and can no longer find a place in society.  Danny, Kid (Alan Vint), Shooter (Paul Koslo), and Fatback (Elliott Street) go on a cross-country road trip.  After they kill a prostitute (Jennifer Billingsley) who demanded more money than they were willing to pay, they visit many sites from their youth.  They go to a high school basketball team.  They spend some time in a sleazy motel.  (Geoffrey Lewis plays the desk clerk.)  They get into a fight with a mechanic (Timothy Scott) over the price of some auto repairs.  After being cheated by one too many people and realizing that no one cares about the sacrifices that they made for their country, they put on their uniforms and violently take over a small town, leading the National Guard to show up to take them all out.

Welcome Home, Soldier Boys is a pretty ham-fisted anti-war allegory and the plot sometimes meanders too much for its own good.  With its road trip violence, its a dry run for director Richard Compton’s far more cohesive Macon County Line.  The movie still packs a punch, due to the efforts of the cast and the violent ending.  The movie is full of familiar characters actors, who are all convincing in their roles but it really is dominated by Joe Don Baker’s hulking intensity.  Danny is the dark side of the amiable country boys that Joe Don Baker would play in so many other movies.  Danny is angry but, as a stranger in a strange land, he’s sometimes sympathetic.  Ultimately, Danny wants the respect that was given to the returning soldiers of the previous generation.  Instead, he comes back to country that doesn’t want much to do with him or his friends.  Returning from serving overseas and still trying to deal with the things that he saw in overseas, Danny feels lost in and rejected by his home country.  It’s one of Baker’s best performances.

Behind The Camera: The Unauthorized Story of Charlie’s Angel (2004, directed by Francine McDougall)

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Looking for a new hit, television producer Aaron Spelling (Dan Castellanata) comes up with the story of “three little girls who went to the police academy and who were assigned very hazardous duties” but who were taken away from all that by the mysterious Charlie.  The show is conceived as a star vehicle for Kate Jackson (Lauren Stamile), with fashion model Jaclyn Smith (Christina Chambers) and actress Farrah Fawcett-Majors (Tricia Helfer) playing her partners in investigating and solving crimes.  Kate wants to make a feminist statement.  Jaclyn wants to be a good role model to the little girls who sneak out of their room to watch the show.  Farrah wants to be a star without losing her possessive husband, Lee Majors (Ben Browder).  The critics hate the show.  Studio president Fred Silverman (Dan Lauria) and showrunner Barney Rozenweig (Michael Tomlinson) are embarrassed by it.  But Spelling has a hit and the actresses become stars.  But when Farrah decides she wants to leave after one season, the show’s future is put in doubt.

This was one of NBC’s Behind The Camera films and the only one to take us behind the scenes of a “drama” program.  (The other films looked at Diff’Rent Strokes, Mork and Mindy, and Three’s Company.)  This is probably the best of them, though “good” and “best” are both relative terms when it comes to these movies.  As with all of the films, there’s too many inside jokes about the network execs, with Dan Lauria stepping into the shoes of Brian Dennehy and Saul Rubinek as Fred Silverman.  But Dan Castellanata did a surprisingly good job as Aaron Spelling and the three actresses playing the Angels were all convincing, especially Christina Chambers.  The film’s main villain is Lee Majors, who is blamed for forcing Farrah to leave the show and who is portrayed as yelling, “Her name is Farrah Fawcett-Majors!”  It’s low-budget and doesn’t offer much that isn’t already known but at the cast keeps the story interesting.

MacGruber (2010, directed by Jorma Taccone)

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A nuclear warhead has been stolen and Captain Jim Faith (Powers Boothe) knows just who to recruit to track it down.  Former CIA agent MacGruber (Will Forte) agrees to come out of retirement, so he can save the world from Dieter Von Cunth (Val Kilmer), the man who blew up MacGruber’s fiancée (Maya Rudolph) on the day of their wedding.

MacGruber re-assembles his old team.  Sure, Vicki St. Elmo (Kristen Wiig) no longer wants to be a part of the adventure and MacGruber refuses work with Lt. Dixon Piper (Ryan Phillippe) but he still brings together a collection of men who look like they eat carburetors for breakfast.  And then he accidentally blows them up.  MacGruber’s assembling a new team!  While mentoring Dixon and falling in love with Vicki, MacGruber seeks his revenge on Cunth.  He also makes peace with his past by having sex with his fiancée’s ghost on her tombstone.

Based on the SNL skit that was itself based on a one-joke premise, MacGruber is a surprisingly entertaining action comedy, mixing frequently crude humor with heartfelt pathos.  MacGruber works because, even while it makes fun of action movies, it still respects the rules of the genre.  The jokes and the bullets fly with equal power.  MacGruber is an idiot but he’s also the only man who can save Washington from Cunth’s plot and Will Forte does an admirable job of delivering every bizarre line of dialogue with a fully committed straight face..  Val Kilmer plays Cunth as being a classic action villain, right down to his dismissive attitude and his long-winded speeches.  Kristen Wiig is both sexy and adorably awkward as the love interest.  And Ryan Phillippe does a surprisingly good job as the the one person who seems to understand how crazy MacGruber really is.  Every good comedy needs a good straight man and Ryan Phillippe proves himself to be more than up to the task.

MacGruber is full of quotable lines and scenes that are so out-there that you might need to rewind and confirm that you actually saw what you just did.  There have been a lot of bad Saturday Night Live movies.  MacGruber is one of the good ones.

The Eagles Soar Over The Chiefs

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I am stunned!  I thought there was no way they were going to win that thing but the Eagles not only won by they won easily.  Normally, I don’t like the Eagles and I’ve had enough bad Philadelphia experiences to not like the city too but I have to respect the game the team played tonight.  They were never behind.  They never struggled.  And from their first touchdown, I think we all knew who was going to win.

Final score:

Eagles — 40

Chiefs — 22

And it wasn’t even close!

Smoky Canyon (1952, directed by Fred Sears)

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There’s a $2500 dollar reward out for the masked bandit known as the Durango Kid but little do the residents of Timber Rock know that the Kid is actually Steve Brent (Charles Starrett), a Treasury agent who puts on a mask whenever he needs to go undercover and discover what the bad guys are doing.

A range war has broken out between the sheep farmers led by Jack Mahoney (Jock Mahoney) and the cattlemen led by Carl Buckley (Tristram Coffin).  To broker a peace and discover which side is the most to blame, Brent works for the cattlemen while the Durango Kid sides with the sheepmen.  It turns out that Buckley’s to blame here.  He’s using the war to thin out his cattle so that an Eastern beef syndicate can keep prices high.  When Mahoney gets too close to the truth, he is framed for the murder of Mr. Woodstock and it’s up to the Durango Kid to prove that Mahoney is innocent.  Meanwhile, Carl wants to blow up an entire mountain so that it will really thin out his cattle herd.

This is a typical Durango Kid movie, entertaining if you like B-westerns and probably boring if they’re not your thing.  It has all the usual gunfights, horse chases, and dynamite explosions that are promised by every Durango Kid film.  Starrett was always one of the most convincing cowboys on screen, even if his use of the Durango Kid alter ego didn’t always make sense.  All the usual members of the Durango stock company show up, all playing different characters than they did in the previous Durango Kid film.  Mahoney gets to play one of the good guys for once and his spirited girlfriend is played by the lovely Dani Sue Nolan.  Smiley Burnett shows up to provide comic relief.  This time, he’s a singing tour guide.  He sings a song called It’s Got To Get Better.  Let’s hope so.

My 2025 Super Bowl Predictions

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

I’m torn.  I don’t want either team to win.

I don’t want the Chiefs to win because they’ve had the referees on their side for the entire season and I think its debatable whether the Chiefs would have even made it to the Super Bowl if the refs hadn’t rigged things for them.  The NFL views Taylor Swift as being good for their ratings.  When people talk about Taylor Swift cheering for Travis Kelce, they aren’t talking about concussions, the off-field behavior of the players, or anything else that could reflect negatively on the league.  I feel like a Chiefs victory would be a victory for the rigging of a once great sport and, in future years, it will be seen as a significant moment in the downfall of the NFL.

I don’t want the Eagles to win because they’re the Eagles.

I’m going to predict a score that’s not as close as many are expecting.

Kansas City Chiefs 41

Philadelphia Eagles 21

I won’t be happy that Chiefs won but I will be happy that Philadelphia did not.