Category Archives: Film Review

Review: Zulu (dir. by Cy Endfield)

Posted on by Arleigh

“Because we’re here, lad. Nobody else. Just us. — Color Sergeant Frank Bourne

Cy Endfield’s Zulu is one of those old-fashioned war films that earns its epic reputation less through grand speeches or sentimental manipulation than through patience, physical detail, and an almost brutally simple premise: a small British force at Rorke’s Drift must hold its position against a vastly larger Zulu army. Released in 1964 and set during the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, the film takes a historical event that could easily have become a stiff patriotic pageant and turns it into something tense, visually overwhelming, and surprisingly measured for its era. It is certainly built around British soldiers as its main point of identification, and it cannot fully escape the colonial framing of its story, but it gives the Zulu fighters a degree of discipline, courage, and humanity that many comparable films of the period would have denied them.

The opening has a deliberately sober quality. Before the siege gets underway, Endfield establishes the aftermath of the British disaster at Isandlwana, an event that hangs heavily over every decision made at the isolated mission station. Lieutenant John Chard, played by Stanley Baker, is not introduced as an obvious hero. He is an engineer officer who finds himself unexpectedly in command, unsure of what authority he truly has and visibly aware that the situation may be hopeless. Michael Caine, in one of his early major roles, plays Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead as the more aristocratic and initially dismissive counterpart. Their relationship is a familiar clash of temperaments, but the actors keep it from becoming too cartoonish. Baker gives Chard a practical, weary steadiness, while Caine makes Bromhead’s pride feel like both a weakness and a defense mechanism.

What makes Zulu work so well is how clearly it understands the mechanics of a siege. The film takes time to show men sorting supplies, moving mealie bags, organizing firing lines, reinforcing walls, and deciding which buildings can or cannot be held. That attention to logistics gives the action real weight. When the Zulu army finally appears along the hillsides, it is not just a cue for spectacle. It is the moment when every earlier decision becomes frighteningly important. The defenders are not winning through superhuman skill; they are surviving because they build, adapt, reload, retreat, and improvise faster than the situation can collapse around them.

Endfield’s command of scale is still impressive. The broad South African landscapes make the station seem tiny and exposed, while the formations of Zulu warriors moving across the terrain have a force that CGI-heavy battle scenes often struggle to recreate. The action is not especially graphic by contemporary standards, but it is physically convincing. Bodies fall, rifles jam, ammunition runs low, and the walls that seemed secure a few minutes earlier suddenly look inadequate. The battles have a clean visual geography as well. You can generally understand where the soldiers are positioned, where the attacks are coming from, and why a breach in one area threatens everyone else. That clarity is a major reason the film remains so watchable.

The Zulu warriors are filmed with genuine awe. They are the opposition in a military sense, but the movie rarely treats them as faceless monsters. Their attacks are coordinated, their persistence is formidable, and the British soldiers repeatedly acknowledge their courage. One of the film’s strongest ideas is that the men on both sides are forced to recognize the ability of the other. The final exchange of salutes is still powerful because it does not feel like a cheap declaration that war is noble. Instead, it feels like exhausted recognition after a catastrophe that has demanded terrible losses from everyone involved.

The film deserves credit for this, particularly considering the era in which it was made, although it still gives the Zulu perspective far less interiority than the British one. Individual British soldiers receive backstories, doubts, comic beats, and personal arcs; the Zulu fighters are mainly presented as a collective force. That limitation matters because the actual Anglo-Zulu War was not simply a neutral contest between two equally situated military forces. It occurred within the larger reality of British colonial expansion, and the film only lightly touches the political forces that made the battle possible. Zulu is more respectful than many older war movies, but it is not free of the assumptions of its time.

The historical side of Zulu is one of its most interesting qualities. The film does a very good job at historical accuracy, which is a rarity for films depicting real-life historical events, especially in the way it presents the basic structure of the defense at Rorke’s Drift: a badly outnumbered British garrison fortifying the station and enduring repeated Zulu assaults. Its investment in terrain, formations, material conditions, and the general progression of the battle makes the event feel researched rather than casually invented. The staging has a sense of military procedure that helps sell the defense as something grounded in a real crisis rather than merely a legend inflated for the screen.

That said, the characterization of the historical people involved was not as accurate, which is where the dramatic license comes in. The most famous example is Private Henry Hook, played with rough comic energy by James Booth. In the film, Hook begins as an unruly alcoholic and apparent coward before proving himself under fire. The real Henry Hook was a disciplined soldier and a teetotaler, making the movie version an almost total reinvention built around the satisfying “unlikely hero” arc. Bromhead is also simplified into a more inexperienced upper-class officer than the historical man appears to have been, while Colour Sergeant Bourne is made into a weathered older veteran despite having been only 24 at the time. These choices make sense as storytelling devices, but they are worth recognizing because they shape the viewer’s emotional understanding of the people involved.

There are other liberties that are harder to overlook once you know the history. The film presents the 24th Regiment as strongly Welsh and builds toward the memorable use of “Men of Harlech,” even though the regiment was not formally the South Wales Borderers at the time and the song was not its regimental song during the battle. The famous singing exchange between the defenders and the Zulus is also pure cinema rather than a recorded historical occurrence. It is a great scene on its own terms—moving, tense, and an effective pause before the final strain of the battle—but it also shows how Zulu turns history into myth. The movie is at its best when its embellishments intensify the human stakes without pretending that they are literal fact.

The performances throughout are solid, even when the writing leans into broad types. Stanley Baker holds the center with quiet authority, avoiding the temptation to make Chard a conventionally inspirational leader. Michael Caine is more visibly theatrical, but that suits Bromhead’s gradual shift from aloofness to responsibility. Jack Hawkins brings warmth and moral conviction to Reverend Witt, while Nigel Green’s Colour Sergeant Bourne provides the hard military backbone of the defense. James Booth is entertaining as Hook, even if the character’s historical distortion is unfortunate. The ensemble works because the film makes room for fear, resentment, class tension, and stubborn professionalism. These men do not suddenly become perfect comrades; they simply realize they have no choice but to depend on one another.

John Barry’s score deserves mention too. The music has the grandeur expected from a film of this size, but it does not overwhelm every scene with triumph. It often emphasizes rhythm and mounting pressure instead, helping the battle feel like a sustained ordeal. The sound of rifle fire, shouted commands, and the Zulu war chants combines with the score to create an atmosphere that is both stirring and unnerving. Even viewers who know the outcome can feel the uncertainty of each new attack because the film never lets the defense seem comfortably under control.

Ultimately, Zulu is a compelling and visually magnificent war film that remains worth watching precisely because it is not as simple as its reputation might suggest. It can be thrilling without being entirely celebratory, respectful without being fully equitable, and historically attentive without being historically pure. Its battle reconstruction is unusually convincing, while its treatment of real individuals often bends the truth to create clearer dramatic roles. That tension is part of what makes the film so fascinating. It is a classic piece of large-scale filmmaking, anchored by memorable performances and superb action staging, but it is also a reminder that even a relatively careful historical movie can turn real people and complex colonial history into a more streamlined story. Zulu does not offer the final word on Rorke’s Drift, but as cinema, it remains tough, exciting, and far more thoughtful than a standard war spectacle.

Review: Scarface (dir. by Brian De Palma)

Posted on by Arleigh

“All I have in this world is my balls and my word.” — Tony Montana

Brian De Palma’s Scarface is one of those movies that seems almost impossible to discuss at a normal volume. Everything about it is loud, excessive, sweaty, violent, vulgar, and deliberately too much. The movie does not simply tell the story of Tony Montana, a Cuban immigrant who rises through Miami’s cocaine trade before destroying himself. It turns that rise and fall into a neon-lit, operatic explosion of greed, paranoia, sex, money, and violence. At first, Scarface can feel like an overlong, incredibly entertaining gangster fantasy. But underneath all the cocaine mountains and machine guns, it is also a deeply cynical story about the American dream and what happens when ambition is allowed to become a substitute for an actual soul.

Tony arrives in Miami during the Mariel boatlift, immediately presenting himself as someone who refuses to be intimidated. He is not interested in being grateful, polite, or patient. Tony wants power, and he wants it quickly. That impatience is both his greatest strength and the obvious source of his downfall. He is willing to do things that other people are too afraid to do, which helps him climb the criminal ladder. At the same time, he cannot understand the idea of limits. Every success only makes him want something bigger: more money, more cocaine, more influence, a bigger house, a more beautiful wife, and absolute control over everyone around him.

The screenplay by Oliver Stone gives Tony a kind of blunt, almost cartoonishly direct philosophy. He believes that the world belongs to people who take it. In Tony’s mind, morality is mostly an excuse invented by people who lack the courage to seize what they want. That attitude makes him magnetic, but the film never truly presents his worldview as admirable. Tony may have the confidence of a king, but he behaves more like a man who is constantly terrified that someone will discover he is not really in control. His bravado is a shield against humiliation, poverty, and powerlessness. The more successful he becomes, the more obvious it is that he is still fighting the same emotional battle he was fighting when he first arrived.

Al Pacino’s performance is the central reason Scarface remains so watchable. He plays Tony as a human grenade, a character who seems to be vibrating with anger even when he is sitting still. The accent, the posture, the rapid shifts in mood, and the exaggerated physical gestures could easily have turned Tony into a parody. In fact, there are moments when Pacino absolutely does push the character into parody. Yet that is also part of the performance’s strange power. Tony is a man who has constructed himself as a larger-than-life personality, so Pacino makes him seem like someone performing Tony Montana even while he is alone.

Pacino understands that Tony’s violence is not simply about cruelty. It is about insecurity, pride, and the panic of losing status. Tony cannot tolerate being laughed at, challenged, ignored, or treated as inferior. A casual insult can become a life-or-death confrontation because he experiences disrespect as an existential threat. Pacino makes those reactions frightening, but he also gives them a pathetic quality. Tony is powerful enough to terrify an entire room, yet emotionally he often behaves like a wounded child demanding recognition.

That contradiction is what keeps the performance from becoming empty scenery chewing. Tony is ridiculous, but he is also tragic. He is disgusting, but he has flashes of genuine feeling, especially in his relationship with his sister Gina. Unfortunately, even his love for her becomes possessive and destructive. Tony wants to protect Gina, but he also wants to own her choices, her sexuality, and her future. He cannot separate love from control. The same problem affects his relationship with Elvira, played by Michelle Pfeiffer, and eventually his entire empire. Tony does not know how to care for people without turning them into extensions of himself.

De Palma’s direction matches Tony’s personality. The film is staged like a gangster epic filtered through a fever dream. Miami becomes a place of bright colors, glass surfaces, giant mansions, tropical heat, and constant artificial light. The city feels less like a real environment than a hallucination of wealth. Tony’s home is especially important because it looks like a monument to success but gradually becomes a prison. The famous final shootout transforms that mansion into a battlefield, with Tony defending his kingdom even after it has already collapsed around him.

The violence in Scarface is often shocking, but it is also theatrical. De Palma uses suspense, wide compositions, sudden bursts of brutality, and moments of grotesque visual humor to make the violence feel both horrifying and unreal. The movie’s excess can be exhausting, particularly in the middle section, where Tony’s rise begins to blur into an endless parade of deals, parties, arguments, and drug use. The length is part of the point: we are meant to feel Tony’s world becoming bloated and unstable. Still, some of the film’s scenes repeat ideas that it has already established. Tony is ambitious, Tony is paranoid, Tony is violent, and eventually Tony is high. The movie sometimes keeps shouting after the audience has already heard it.

That criticism matters because Scarface is not a flawless film. Its dialogue can be clumsy, its supporting characters are sometimes more functional than fully developed, and its treatment of women is frequently limited by Tony’s perspective. The film wants to condemn male domination and criminal capitalism, but it is also fascinated by the same things it condemns. It shows us the luxury, the clothes, the cars, the glamorous parties, and the apparent freedom of Tony’s lifestyle. Even while warning that this life ends in misery, it makes the fantasy visually seductive.

That tension helps explain the movie’s complicated legacy. When Scarface was first released in 1983, many critics found it excessive, ugly, and morally confused. Over time, however, its reach expanded dramatically through home video and popular culture. The movie became especially important to hip-hop, where artists recognized Tony’s language of survival, hustle, ambition, and self-invention. Al Pacino has credited hip-hop with helping the film find its audience, saying that rappers understood and embraced it. That relationship became one of the most important parts of Scarface’s afterlife.

Hip-hop did not simply treat Tony as a cool gangster. It also turned him into a symbol. The character could represent ruthless ambition, immigrant struggle, street credibility, material success, or the danger of becoming trapped by one’s own myth. Lines from the movie entered rap lyrics, album skits, music videos, and stage names. The film’s imagery became a shorthand for a certain kind of rise-from-nothing fantasy, even when the original movie was trying to show how poisonous that fantasy could be. In this sense, Scarface became bigger than its initial critical reputation. It stopped being only a crime film and became a cultural text that people could quote, remix, parody, and reinterpret.

Its influence on video games is just as obvious, especially in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. That game’s 1980s Miami setting, neon colors, criminal empire structure, radio culture, and flamboyant protagonist clearly operate in the same general territory as Scarface. The film has also been connected directly to other games, including Scarface: The World Is Yours, which imagines an alternate continuation after the movie’s ending. The game allows players to rebuild Tony’s empire, purchase businesses, intimidate rivals, and expand across Miami. It turns the movie’s rise-and-fall structure into an interactive fantasy in which the player gets to ignore the ending and keep climbing.

That difference between film and game is revealing. Scarface ultimately insists that Tony’s dream cannot survive because Tony himself is incapable of moderation, trust, or self-knowledge. Video games can take the same world and make the player feel rewarded for doing exactly what Tony does: acquiring territory, collecting money, buying weapons, and becoming more powerful. In that format, the critique of excess can easily become a celebration of excess. Yet that is also why the film remains so influential to games. It provides an instantly understandable fantasy of criminal ascent, complete with a distinctive visual style and a protagonist whose personality is impossible to ignore.

In the end, Scarface is both a warning and a temptation. It tells us that Tony Montana is doomed, but it makes his climb so entertaining that we understand why generations of viewers, rappers, and game designers kept returning to him. Al Pacino’s performance is the movie’s beating heart: outrageous, funny, frightening, and occasionally heartbreaking. De Palma’s film may be messy and overstuffed, but its messiness is part of its identity. Scarface does not want to be tasteful or balanced. It wants to overwhelm you, seduce you, and then leave you staring at the wreckage of a man who mistook having everything for being somebody.

Review: A Fistful of Dollars (dir. by Sergio Leone)

Posted on by Arleigh

“When a man with a .45 meets a man with a rifle, you said, the man with a pistol’s a dead man. Let’s see if that’s true.” — Joe

When examining the films that fundamentally reshaped a genre, 1964’s A Fistful of Dollars stands as an undeniable cornerstone. Directed by Sergio Leone, this movie didn’t just accidentally stumble into creating a new genre; it grabbed the classic American western by the collar, dragged it into the mud, and spat on its shiny boots. This was the first leg of Leone’s “Dollar’s Trilogy,” and honestly, looking back at it now, it’s kind of crazy to think about how much of an underdog this production was. It was made on a shoestring budget, shot in Spain with a bunch of Italian and Spanish actors speaking different languages and then dubbed over, and it featured a lead actor who was mostly known for playing a lovable cowboy on a little American TV show called Rawhide. Nobody expected A Fistful of Dollars to become a massive international hit, but it did, and it permanently altered the cinematic landscape.

The story itself feels incredibly familiar today, but that’s only because it has been copied and homaged about a million times since. Unapologetically lifting the plot from Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, the film follows a gritty, chain-smoking drifter who rides into a dusty, miserable border town called San Miguel. But the fun part about this cinematic lineage is that Yojimbo wasn’t entirely original either. Kurosawa openly borrowed the core concept from Dashiell Hammett’s hardboiled detective novels, specifically Red Harvest and The Glass Key. Both of those books featured a lone, cynical protagonist who manipulates warring criminal factions fighting it out for control of a corrupt town. So Leone was essentially taking a Japanese interpretation of an American noir trope, stripping it down, and repackaging it as a western. Once our drifter arrives in San Miguel, he quickly realizes the town is torn apart by two rival gangs: the Baxters, a family of American gun-runners, and the Rojos, a ruthless group of Mexican smugglers. Instead of playing the traditional white-hat hero who immediately picks a side and saves the day, our guy does the exact opposite. He decides to play both sides against each other, hiring himself out to the highest bidder, switching loyalties at the drop of a hat, and essentially bleeding the town dry for his own profit. It is a brilliantly cynical setup that completely subverted what western audiences were used to seeing at the time.

And then there is Clint Eastwood. Now, pop culture famously knows him as the Man with No Name, but that is actually the result of a very clever piece of US marketing. In A Fistful of Dollars, his character absolutely has a name: Joe. The American distributors thought the mysterious, anonymous angle sounded cooler for the posters, and the moniker stuck so hard over the decades that most people forget he literally introduces himself as Joe to the locals early on in the movie. Regardless of what you call him, when Leone cast Eastwood, American studios were apparently confused, wondering why an Italian director would want a TV actor to lead a movie. But Leone saw something in Eastwood’s squint, a kind of rugged, lazy menace that was perfect for this new brand of anti-hero. Joe isn’t a knight in shining armor. He’s greedy, he’s manipulative, and he kills people without losing a wink of sleep. But he has an undeniable coolness to him that is just magnetic. The costume design plays a massive part here too. The weathered brown poncho, the stubble, the short cigar clamped in his jaw, and that iconic hat all combined to create a look that felt lived-in and dangerous. Compared to the impeccably groomed, brightly dressed cowboys of the 1950s, Eastwood looked like he actually smelled like sweat, horse hair, and gunpowder.

Of course, a conversation about A Fistful of Dollars is totally incomplete without talking about the villains, because Leone knew how to cast bad guys who were genuinely terrifying. Gian Maria Volonté plays Ramón Rojo, the main antagonist, and he is absolutely phenomenal. Ramón isn’t just a cartoonish thug; he is smart, cold-blooded, and utterly devoid of mercy. There is a famous scene where Ramón is demonstrating the accuracy of his rifle by shooting at the heart of a man he has just murdered at long range, and Volonté plays it with such a creepy, casual indifference that it makes your skin crawl. The Baxters are mostly just pathetic pawns, but the Rojos feel like a legitimate, organized threat, which makes the stakes feel incredibly real. You genuinely believe that if Joe slips up even once, these guys will brutally torture and kill him without a second thought.

Visually, A Fistful of Dollars is an absolute masterclass in atmosphere. Leone was working with a limited budget, but he used what he had to create a style that felt massive. He employed these extreme, lingering close-ups of people’s eyes, sweaty faces, and flies buzzing around, which gave the film an almost unbearable tension. Then he would suddenly cut to these massive, sweeping wide shots of the barren Spanish desert, making the characters look like tiny, insignificant specks in a cruel, uncaring world. The violence was also shockingly graphic for the time. People didn’t just clutch their chests and fall over gracefully like they did in older westerns. They bled, they grimaced in agony, and the gunfights felt loud, chaotic, and messy. Leone stripped away the romanticism of the Wild West and replaced it with a gritty, dirty reality that felt much more authentic, even if it was entirely a fabricated Italian fantasy of America.

You also absolutely have to talk about Ennio Morricone’s legendary musical score. It is basically a character in the film itself. Before A Fistful of Dollars, western soundtracks were mostly made up of traditional orchestral arrangements and folksy songs. Morricone threw that playbook out the window. He used electric guitars, twanging banjos, screaming trumpets, whip cracks, choral chants, and even a bizarre, wailing coyote sound that sounds like a human having a mental breakdown. The main theme is so incredibly catchy and weird that it burrows into your brain and stays there for days. The music didn’t just support the action on screen; it told the audience exactly how to feel, ramping up the tension during the standoffs and giving Eastwood’s character a larger-than-life aura. Without Morricone’s score, the Spaghetti Western genre simply would not exist as we know it.

The pacing of the movie is something that modern audiences might need a minute to adjust to, but it is completely intentional. Leone was in absolutely no rush to get from point A to point B. He wanted to linger on the tension, letting scenes breathe and stretch out to almost uncomfortable lengths. When Eastwood is staring down a group of thugs in the street, Leone holds the camera on their faces for what feels like an eternity. You can see the sweat dripping, you can see the fear building, and by the time the first shot is finally fired, the release of tension is almost physical. It is a slow burn that requires a bit of patience, but it makes the eventual bursts of violence so much more impactful and satisfying. It is the exact opposite of the fast-paced, action-packed blockbusters we get today, and that deliberate slowness is a huge part of its strange, hypnotic charm.

Despite all of Joe’s outward greed and manipulation, there is a subtle emotional core to the film that keeps you totally invested. It comes in the form of Marisol, a woman who is being held captive by Ramón Rojo and used as leverage against her husband. When Eastwood sees the absolute misery of this family, his cold exterior cracks just a little bit. He risks his entire scheme, and his own life, to sneak Marisol and her son out of town in the middle of the night, giving them money to start over. It is a beautifully quiet, understated scene that proves there is still a shred of humanity left underneath all that grit and cynicism. He doesn’t make a big speech about it or ask for thanks; he just does it because it is the right thing to do. It gives the character a moral center without turning him into a traditional good guy, which is a really difficult balancing act that the film pulls off perfectly.

The climax of the film is where everything comes together in a spectacular display of style and sheer badassery. After getting brutally beaten by the Rojos, Eastwood escapes and returns for revenge, utilizing a makeshift iron chest plate hidden under his poncho. Watching him walk slowly down the empty street, taking bullet after bullet to the chest without flinching, while the electric guitar wails in the background is just pure, unadulterated cinema magic. He outdraws Ramón in a final, agonizingly tense standoff, proving that his wits and his nerve are just as deadly as his revolver. It is the perfect payoff to the slow build-up of the entire movie, cementing Joe as an absolute icon of pop culture.

And this endless game of cinematic telephone didn’t stop with Leone. Just as A Fistful of Dollars was heavily “inspired by Yojimbo“—which itself transplanted the 1920s pulp noir concept into the 1860 Edo period—it went on to inspire a whole new wave of imitators looking to put their own spin on the formula. The most obvious example is the 1996 action flick Last Man Standing starring Bruce Willis, which takes the exact same plot of warring factions and a lone drifter playing them against each other, but moves the action to a Prohibition-era Texas border town. It is wild to trace that DNA from a 1920s pulp novel to the 1860 Edo period, to a 1960s Italian western, and all the way to a 1990s Bruce Willis shoot-em-up, proving just how durable and universally cool this basic storyline really is.

Looking at A Fistful of Dollars today, it is easy to see the cracks in its foundation. The dubbing is notoriously clunky, some of the supporting performances are a bit wooden, and the fact that it is a direct rip-off of a Japanese masterpiece is impossible to ignore. But honestly, none of that really matters in the grand scheme of things. Leone took a great story and injected it with so much style, so much attitude, and so much raw energy that it became its own completely distinct entity. As the first leg of Leone’s “Dollar’s Trilogy,” it laid the foundational blueprint that he would later perfect with For a Few Dollars More and absolutely master with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. But there is something special about this first outing. It has a rougher, scrappier, and more experimental vibe that is incredibly fun to watch. It is the movie that killed the old western and birthed the new one, and for that alone, it deserves every bit of its legendary status.

Brad reviews THE BADGE (2002), starring Billy Bob Thornton!

Posted on by Bradley Crain

Being an Arkansan, and living in the same county where SLING BLADE was filmed, I’ve always been a big fan of Billy Bob Thornton. One of the things I like about him is his ability to somehow make the most miserable human beings just a little bit sympathetic. So many of his characters seem like they have no redeeming characteristics on the surface, but way down deep, in places they may have forgotten about, there’s a decent man trying to get out. That’s certainly the case with his Sheriff Darl Hardwick in THE BADGE.

Darl is a small-town Louisiana sheriff who spends most of his time dealing with the drunks, unruly youth and other assorted troublemakers. He’s not a model law enforcement officer, either. He drinks too much, womanizes, has a short temper and seems to take his marching orders from the politically powerful and corrupt Judge (William Devane). When the dead body of a transgender woman is discovered, Darl initially treats the investigation like any other. But it soon becomes clear that certain powerful people in the community want the situation to quietly disappear. Things get more interesting when the deceased woman’s spouse Scarlett (Patricia Arquette) shows up from New Orleans, with Darl ultimately deciding to confront some ugly things about his past and the community he serves.

THE BADGE is a movie that’s not afraid to get dirty and uncomfortable. Everything here feels sweaty, rundown and a little bit rotten. And that’s whether we’re in the porn shops and strip clubs of New Orleans or a majestic mansion near Shreveport. On multiple occasions, Darl comments on the bad smells that are around him. When you consider the ever present political corruption that we witness throughout the movie, it seems clear that the filmmakers are pounding that stench into our heads. It’s a heavy handed approach, but it gives the movie an atmosphere that fits its story of small town power and prejudice versus the LGBTQ+ community. 

As I mentioned earlier, Sheriff Darl Hardwick fits Billy Bob Thornton like a glove. He’s a deeply flawed man, but he still has a sense of right and wrong, and when he’s up against the wall, he decides to do what he thinks is right. The supporting cast is very good, with Patricia Arquette, William Devane, Ray McKinnon, Thomas Haden Church, and Sela Ward all giving strong performances. I thought Patricia Arquette is especially good as Scarlett, and she has one line that made me laugh out loud. If you know anything about Arquette’s politics, her line, “I can’t believe I’m depending on Republicans to save me,” can’t help but make you smile.

THE BADGE isn’t a perfect movie, and there are times when it sacrifices some reality in order to make its points. But thanks primarily to Thornton’s strong work, I did appreciate it as a dark crime drama about an extremely troubled man who finds enough decency to do the right thing and fight for justice when everyone else just wants him to go away.

Scenes That I Love: Billy Jack Learns About The Three Levels In The Trial of Billy Jack

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Seeing as how he was born in the month of August, this seems like a good time to pay tribute to Tom Laughlin, the actor who revolutionized independent American cinema through his Billy Jack films.

In four films, Laughlin played Billy Jack, an American Navajo, a former Green Beret, a veteran of the Vietnam War, a hapkido master, and a man who just protects children and other living things.  When he first appeared in 1967’s The Born Losers, he was protecting a woman from bikers.  In 1971’s Billy Jack, he was protecting the Freedom School from ignorant townspeople.  In 1974’s The Trial of Billy Jack, he was …. well, in that film, Billy Jack did a little bit of everything but the National Guard still ended up destroying the Freedom School.  Finally, in 1977’s Billy Jack Goes To Washington, Billy was appointed to the United Stated Senate because what else are you going to do with someone who has killed a tremendous amount of people over the course of three films?

(Of course, in Senator Jack’s defense, they were all bad people.)

Laughlin not only starred as Billy Jack but he also directed all four of the films and, starting with Billy Jack, he also handled the distribution of them.  A huge box office hit, Billy Jack is considered to be a seminal counter culture film.  The other three films are a bit less acclaimed and Trial of Billy Jack is often cited as one of the most pretentious and self-indulgent films ever made.  But, regardless of their individual artistic merits, all of the Billy Jack films share an appealing mix of sincerity and silliness.  Laughlin was a good actor and, visually, he was a stronger director than he was often given credit for. Some of the shots in the original Billy Jack are breath-taking.  At a time when even self-styled progressive films still portrayed women in the most condescending and demeaning way possible (check out Getting Straight or R.P.M., if you dare), the Billy Jack films were as much about Jean (played by Delores Taylor, Laughlin’s wife and creative partner), the founder of the Freedom School, and her beliefs, as they were about Billy Jack and his struggles to accept pacifism.  If nothing else, the Billy Jack films featured actual conversations and debates about actual ideologies and philosophies, as opposed to the usual shallow Hollywood politics.  Unfortunately, Laughlin was also a heavy-handed storyteller and a terrible editor.  The Trial of Billy Jack goes on for three hours.

And yet, of all the Billy Jack films, The Trial of Billy Jack is my favorite.  It’s just so weird that it’s hard not to like it.  It’s a film that doesn’t really work but, at the same time, you can’t help but appreciate all the effort that was put into it.  Whatever else you might be able to say about him and his films, it’s obvious that Tom Laughlin truly did think that the movies could make a difference.  There’s an aching sincerity to Laughlin’s work that pretty much cannot be found in the majority of today’s films.

In honor of Laughlin’s birthday and his legacy, here’s a scene that I love from The Trial of Billy Jack.  In this scene, Billy goes on a vision quest and experiences the Three Levels.  I would be lying if I said I really followed much of the logic in the scene but at least we get to see Billy hit a hippie professor.  Billy also smacks Jesus, which isn’t cool but Jesus shows exactly how to handle that type of belligerence and hopefully, he provides a lesson for us all.

Learn about the Three Levels, with Billy Jack.  And be sure to spare a thought for the hard work of Tom Laughlin.

Brad reviews 90210 SHARK ATTACK (2014)!

Posted on by Bradley Crain

There are bad movies, there are worse movies, and then there are the worst possible movies. 90210 SHARK ATTACK just may be the worst of the worst.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on the plot, but it revolves around a group of horny college students who are spending the weekend in a beautiful mansion in Beverly Hills. They’re there for an Oceanic Anthropology class, where they’ll be working on special projects under the supervision of their scheming professor, Pamela Vantzen (Donna Wilkes). Unknown to the rest of the students, Alyssa (Stephanie Shemanski) is in possession of a cursed shark tooth necklace, and when she gets excited, bad things tend to happen.  

I knew I was in trouble when the movie opened on a Beverly Hills trolley car with Christmas decorations on it, signs like “Deck the Hills” and various artwork of Christmas presents. The movie is set during the summer. I also kept wondering how they would encounter sharks since the mansion they’re staying in is “miles away from the ocean,” but it turns out that the filmmakers didn’t care about this issue, so I soon stopped worrying about it myself. What this movie does have is a loop of stock footage that includes Beverly Hills, CGI sharks, a beach, and an aquarium that it cuts back to time after time. Between the extensive credit sequences and the stock footage, I would guess the actual actors are not on the screen more than 45 minutes of the entire 75-minute runtime.   

It doesn’t get much better when the actors are on the screen. I watched this because Donna Wilkes is in it. I had recently watched her in JAWS 2, and I remember her back in the ‘80’s in the enjoyable, low-budget exploitation film ANGEL (“High School Honor Student by Day. Hollywood Hooker by Night”). She doesn’t have anything to work with here, and neither do the other actors. The characters and dialogue are as ridiculous as you would expect, but in a boring way, not a fun way. So much time is spent watching them walk from room to room, or across the yard, or taking a shower, or gallivanting in the pool. I couldn’t even enjoy the shower scenes, because they only focused on the men!

When it’s all said and done, there’s very little time left for the sharks. And based on our movie, that’s not a big issue. Our CGI shark gets less than 30 seconds for the entire film. This part is sad, because the one thing that I did find ridiculously fun in a “wtf” kind of way is when the demonic ghost-shark first appears at about the 47-minute mark.

At the end of the day, I blame director David DeCoteau for this mess. I’ve been watching some of his “Wrong” series of Lifetime TV movies with the #MondayMania live tweet group. Those movies aren’t high art, but they are fun, campy thrillers, so I know he can make an enjoyable film. At the end of the day, I didn’t expect something great, but I did expect him to try to entertain us. Apparently, that was too much to ask!  

Retro Television Review: Alexander The Great (dir by Phil Karlson)

Posted on 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!  This Thursdays, I will be reviewing Alexander The Great, which was filmed in 1963 but didn’t air on CBS until 1968.  The show can be found on YouTube!

This week, we take a look at William Shatner and Adam West in Alexander The Great, a pilot that never became a series.

Episode 1.1 “Alexander The Great”

(Dir by Phil Karlson, originally aired on January 26th, 1968)

Greek leader Alexander the Great (a very blonde William Shatner) is determined to defeat the forces of King Darius and conquer all of Persia.  But, before he can fight his latest battle, he has to rescue his kidnapped best friend Cleander (Adam West), calm the nerves of his mentor Antigonus (Joseph Cotten), and deal with two insubordinate generals (John Cassavetes and Simon Oakland).  Only then will Alexander be ready to defeat the fearsome, beheading-obsessed Persian general, Memmon (Cliff Osmond, wearing a truly horrifying wig and fake beard).

This hour-long episode features a lot of talking, a lot of scheming, and one good battle scene.  Unfortunately, that good battle scenes becomes a lot less impressive once you discover that it was lifted from the 1959 film, The Giant of Marathon.  As for the scheming, it’s not really a surprise when the generals plays by Cassavetes and Oakland reveal that they’re planning on assassinating Alexander during the battle.  Both characters are so obviously villainous that their very presence amongst the ranks will lead most viewers to doubt whether Alexander is truly the tactical genius that everyone seems to think he is.

For most viewers, the main appeal of Alexander the Great will be the chance to see William Shatner and Adam West playing best friends.  This pilot was made before Shatner was cast as Captain Kirk and West as Batman.  While West gives a relatively sober performance as Cleander, Shatner shows that he had all of his famous acting tics long before he boarded the Enterprise.  Shatner delivers every line as if he’s expecting to be handed an Emmy at any moment.  The halting cadence is present.  The overly dramatic punctuation is present.  The habit of telegraphing every line and emotion by moving his head is present.  This is the type of performance that feels more like William Shatner imitating himself than actually trying to play a character.  Today, we’re all used to William Shatner poking fun at his reputation so it’s always a bit jarring to watch something like Alexander the Great and see just how seriously Shatner used to take himself.

Alexander the Great ends with Alexander achieving victory over both Memmon and his own duplicitous generals.  He buries Antigonous, who was earlier murdered by the mutineers.  And then, with a big smile on his face, Alexander hopes on his horse and rides off with Cleander and his surviving generals.  Watching Shatner riding his horse, it becomes obvious that, had this pilot become a show, it would have been a western that just happened to take place in ancient Greece and which featured togas and mini-skirts instead of chaps and hats.

This pilot was shot in 1963 but it was rejected by the network and shelved.  In 1968, when West was Batman and Shatner was Kirk, the pilot was taken out of storage and aired as an episode of an anthology show.  Needless to say, it didn’t lead to a series.  Adam West later poked fun at the pilot in his autobiography, saying that it was the greatest waste of an hour ever made.  I think West was a bit too hard on the pilot.  It’s not terrible as much as it’s just bland.  No production featuring not only Shatner and West but also Joseph Cotten, Simon Oakland, and John Cassavetes has a right to be this mild.

One does wonder how, if the pilot had become a series, it would have deal with Alexander eventually drinking himself to death.  Imagine what Shatner and West could have done with that!

Shark Week Review: Avalanche Sharks (dir by Scott D. Wheeler)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

2012’s Avalanche Sharks takes place during Spring Break.

Woo hoo!  SPRIIIIIIIIING BREAAAAAAAK!  If there’s anything that I truly miss about college, it’s Spring Break!  What do you think about when you think about Spring Break?  You think about the sun,  You think about the days and the nights spent lazily lounging in a bikini.  You think about the binge-drinking and the drug-taking and one night stands that you regret the next morning and the realization that you’re only young once.

Avalanche Sharks has all of that.  It also has a lot of snow and also sharks.

SHARK BREAK!  Woo hoo!

These aren’t any old sharks.  These are ghost sharks that swim around in the snow and which pop out to eat the employees and guests of a ski resort.  You may be asking yourself how a shark can swim in the snow and I’m not totally sure myself.  It probably helps that they’re ghost sharks and not living sharks.  Still, it seems like even a ghost shark would prefer the ocean.  The film suggests that the sharks are the result of an ancient curse.  It also suggests that the sharks are the result of global warming.  I’m going to guess that it’s a combination.  The ancient curse was reactivated by global warming.  Either that or the ghost sharks escaped from a lab and there’s been a massive cover-up to try to keep people from discovering the truth.  But, seriously, when has that ever happened?

The movie features the usual collection of characters whose names you will struggle to remember after the movie ends.  (I struggled to remember them even before the movie ended.)  It’s Spring Break, after all!  Why go to the beach when you can just go to a ski resort and apparently spend several days sitting in a jacuzzi?  The jacuzzi is a major location in this film and it’s also the film’s excuse to feature bikinis.  Myself, I couldn’t help but notice that the characters who got in the jacuzzi apparently never got out, even to sleep.  72 hours in a jacuzzi is something you might do to win a car but it’s not necessarily a good idea when there are ghost sharks around.

“You are the sexiest Marine biologist I know,” one guy says at one point and that’s pretty much sets the standard for the film’s dialogue.  The movie is quickly divided between those who know about the avalanche sharks and those who don’t but, to the film’s credit, knowledge does not equal safety.  Just about anyone can and will get eaten by the sharks.  Some of the gore is a bit icky.  The start of the film features a skier suffering a rather serious injury and I briefly had to hide my eyes.  That said, it also appears that the gore budget was used up early because the later effects aren’t quite as impressive.  What is impressive is the performance of James Ouimet as crazy old Duffy.  Duffy is the one who tells everyone that they’re doomed.  He seeks revenge after losing his dog to the sharks.  “LUNA!” he yells and you totally buy it.

As my friend Jim put it, this is a film the defies a traditional rating.  Yes, it would be easy to dismiss it as being another shark movie but, at the same time, it’s so stupidly entertaining that you can’t help but watch.  Someone somewhere once said, “Give them snow sharks!” and this film delivered.  And for that, I say thank you.

 

Brad reviews FALL (2022)!

Posted on by Bradley Crain

I’ve never been that afraid of heights, but you’ll never catch me climbing up the side of a mountain or jumping out of a plane. I don’t have that daredevil gene that makes me want to do stuff like that. Back in 2023, our family visited Yellowstone, so we took a ride on the Beartooth Highway that runs through the Rocky Mountains in parts of Wyoming and Montana. As I was driving that gorgeous roadway, I will admit that I became quite “weak in the knees” a few times as I drove near some very steep edges. The more I think about it, I don’t really like heights that much, but I’m willing to deal with them as long as the payoff is awesome and the risk isn’t too crazy.

FALL is one of those movies that takes whatever fear of heights may be lurking beneath our surfaces and forces us to deal with them from the comforts of our own living rooms! I kept looking at my wife because it was hard for me to look at the screen, and my wife kept telling me her palms were sweating. This lady spent a decade as a flight medic, but she was still struggling.

The premise is about as simple as it gets. A year after a devastating mountain climbing tragedy, Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) reluctantly agrees to climb an abandoned 2,000-foot television tower with her thrill-seeking, social-media obsessed best friend Hunter (Virginia Gardner). Once they reach the top, the ladder collapses, leaving them stranded 200 stories above the desert with almost no supplies, no way to call for help, and only some vultures for company. This all happens in the first 30 minutes. For the remainder of the film’s 107-minute running time, the ladies will have to do whatever they can to survive.

The film succeeds because it understands exactly what it wants to be. This isn’t some deep character study about a person’s quest for the rediscovery of peace and happiness after unimaginable pain and suffering. No, this is all about creating tension, and sometimes nauseating tension at that. Every rusty rung and loose screw on the way up foreshadows the characters’ fate. Once they’re stuck at the tiny platform at the top, the camera constantly looks over the edge, forcing us to experience the mind-blowing heights and the growing desperation right alongside the characters. These are the scenes where I had to keep looking away to maintain my own sanity!

As you might imagine, this isn’t the most realistic movie in the world. It’s one of those movies that keeps setting you up to think something good is just about to happen only for things to continue to get worse. Then again, as an audience we know when watching these types of movies that things have to keep going wrong or the movie would be over way too soon. FALL definitely works best if you just go along for the tense ride, without thinking too much about some of the finer points. From that standpoint, I was able to really enjoy the film, even when some of the twists and turns along the way threatened to go too far.

I wasn’t really familiar with their prior work, but Grace Caroline Currey and Virginia Gardner do fine jobs in the lead roles. As the grief-stricken Becky, Currey does the heavy lifting as we see her go from being completely broken, to almost giving up hope, before finally finding the courage and resilience to battle for survival. As the free-spirited, certifiably insane Hunter, Gardner has plenty of enthusiasm and charisma. Once they’re stuck at the top, she also shows a lot of bravery as well. The movie spends almost its entire runtime with these two actresses, so their chemistry has to work, and it does. I’ve always liked Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and it was nice seeing him as Becky’s dad, even though it’s a small role.

One of the best things about movies is that they have the ability to take us places we would never go on our own. Not in a million years would I ever climb the rock cliff of a mountain or a 2000-foot TV tower. But FALL took me up that tower and made me feel something. It made me uncomfortable, it made me a little sick, and it made my hands sweat… and I liked it. And all from the comfort of my own living room.