Category Archives: Film Review

Kingdom of the Spiders (dir by John “Bud” Carlos)

Posted on by Leonard Wilson

While many celebrated International Cat Day on August 8th, it also happened to be National Tarantula Appreciation Day. As a result, I decided to return to a film that terrified me when I was little (and watched when I was far too young), 1977’s Kingdom of the Spiders.

As a kid growing up near the beginning of cable, movies were regularly during the weekends shown on prime time TV. This consisted of about 5 main channels in New York City: CBS (Channel 2), NBC (Channel 4), ABC (Channel 7), WNYW (Channel 5, which would become Fox in the Mid80s), WWOR (Channel 9), and WPIX (Channel 11). In addition to this, Channel 5, 9, and 11 would have movies playing on weekday afternoons just before the nightly news. I ended up watching Kingdom of the Spiders at my grandmother’s house, from under her bed. I didn’t sleep well for a while after this movie.

I don’t know why she ever owned it, but my Grandmother had this near clear shower curtain with a giant red and black spider on it. The web started from the center and spread out to the edges of the curtain. The image below is the closest approximation I could find to the one she owned. This was the source of my arachnophobia, which caused me to either enter the bathroom with my eyes closed, or use the basement bathroom (which had the rare added chance of seeing actual spiders). She tried to make me see the reality of it once, scooping me up and lifting me in front of the curtain to realize it was just a plastic sheet. My imagination was a little too much, however, and all I saw was something that wanted to cocoon and drink me dry. I screamed and flailed in her arms, and that was the end of that.

The premise for Kingdom of the Spiders is incredibly simple. At first, life is pretty comfortable in Verde Valley, Arizona. You’ve a family of cattle ranchers in the Colby’s (played by Spartacus‘ Woody Strode and Can’t Stop the Music‘s Altovise Davis). However, when a farmer’s cattle begin to fall ill and eventually dies, Dr. Rack Hansen (William Shatner, Miss Congeniality) is brought in to figure out what’s happening. Between heavily flirting with this brother’s widow Terry (Marcy Lafferty, Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Shatner’s wife at the time) and taking care of her daughter, Laura (Natasha Ryan, The Amityville Horror), it’s a surprise Rack has the time to help the Colby’s out.

When he sends in the blood samples to a lab for more research, the diagnosis is spider venom on a highly toxic scale. It’s so toxic that a spider specialist, Diane Ashley (Tiffany Bolling, Open House) is brought in to help. Of course, this springs Rack into action. After they meet, he cuts her off on the road, gives her his best one liner and then picks her up and takes her to his favorite restaurant (in her car, mind you). Rack’em, indeed.

Over lunch, they come to an understanding that DDT might be the cause of their tarantula menace. Having killed off their regular food sources of insects, the spiders have moved on to larger game. A quick visit back to the Colby Ranch confirms their fears. A spider mound is on their farm and the decision is eventually made to burn it down. Burning helps, but little do the humans realize that the spiders had exit strategies of their own. They also had additional mounds that the humans never even noticed.

With time running around out, Rack and Diane eventually decide the answer is more DDT, but the spiders thwart the attempt and decide from that point on, it’s all out war. Can the town survive the assault?

So, the spiders in Kingdom of the Spiders are just tarantulas. While all tarantulas are spiders, not all spiders are tarantulas. We’re not talking about the small house spiders from Frank Marshall’s Arachnophobia. They can be dangerous too, depending on the type. The Brown Recluse in particular has venom that is necrotic and will eat away the flesh around a bite. This movie focuses on the large hairy ones.

From what I’ve read, while most tarantulas have venom, it’s not particularly dangerous to humans. The only real exception to this are the Funnel Web spiders of Australia. They’re super aggressive and their venom can kill. Thankfully, according to a USA Today article, no one on that continent’s been killed by one since 1980. Additionally, some tarantulas only really use their fangs as a last resort. They will usually choose to flick the hairs off their back, which sting the eyes and noses of most predators.

There were about 5000 tarantulas used in the movie, with a mix of real ones for the early close ups and fake models for some of the wider shots. I’ve always wondered if the American Humane Society supervised the film, because it looks looks like a number of them were killed (at least in the last third).

Shatner is pretty much himself here, bringing that style he always does to a role. It’s not the over the top levels of Captain Kirk or Denny Crane, but it’s still fun to watch. Though I haven’t been able to confirm it, I’m told that Tiffany Bolling was one of the few people that wasn’t scared to work with the arachnids and that helped to get her the role. Most of the cast are okay, thought their reactions to spiders might cause one to laugh more than to share in their fear. Granted, I’d probably react the same way as most of them.

There’s one part involving Mrs. Colby with a gun that shares the same musical piece used in David Cronenberg’s Rabid and Scott Sanders’ Black Dynamite. Much like the classic Wilhelm scream, this musical piece seems to pop up in older movies now and then.

Overall, Kingdom of the Spiders is a decent film to unleash upon your Arachnophobic friends to watch them squirm. The spiders may spend more time running away from their prey, but some low to the ground camera shots help to make things more interesting.

The Cops Are Robbers (1990, directed by Paul Wendkos)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

When Kirkland (George Kennedy) appoints veteran cop Jake Quinn (Ed Asner) to command a division of the Massachusetts Metropolitan Police, one of Quinn’s main duties is to root out corruption.  Everyone knows that Captain Jerry Clemente (Ray Sharkey) is crooked but no one’s been able to prove anything.  This has led to Clemente getting so cocky that he tries to pull off the biggest bank robbery of all time.  Working with two other corrupt cops (played by Steve Railsback and James Keach) and some ex-cons who owe him a favor, Clemente masterminds the theft of $25,000,000 worth of jewelry.

Unfortunately, stealing that much brings in not only the FBI but it also makes Quinn even more determined to expose Clemente and all of his crooked associates.  As well, the Mafia wants their part of the action and the members of Celemente’s gang aren’t as smart as their leader.  Soon the walls are closing in.  Will Clemente get away with his crime or will he end up getting arrested and eventually writing a book about the theft that will eventually be turned into a television movie?

Though the title seems more appropriate for a comedy, The Cops Are Robbers is a drama based on a true story.  It actually could have used some comedy because the movie itself is pretty dry and straight forward.  Ed Asner and George Kennedy give their usual competent performances, cast as the type of characters that they could have played in their sleep.  Unfortunately, Ray Sharkey is nowhere near as effective as the man they’re trying to put behind bars.  When he first started out, Sharkey made a name for himself by giving convincing performances as characters who were tough and streetwise but also sometimes neurotic.  He received Emmy and Golden Globe nominations before he became better known for his trips to rehab than his acting ability.  I think that. as an actor, Sharkey’s downfall was that he saw himself compared to Al Pacino so many times that he started to buy it and he eventyally started to attack every role with the same method-style intensity.  Sometimes, like when he played Sonny Steelgrave during the first season of Wiseguy, it worked.  Most of the time, though, it just led to him overacting and bellowing all of his lines.  That’s the case with The Cops Are Robbers.  Sharkey is so loud and perpetually angry that it’s hard to believe that he’s managed to get away with his crimes for as long as he has.

For those of us who don’t live in Massachusetts, the most interesting thing about watching The Cops Are Robbers is trying to keep track of who works for what agency.  When it was mentioned that Clemente works for the Metropolitan Police, I immediately assumed that meant he was a Boston police officer.  Only later did I learn, via a review on the imdb, that the Metropolitan Police were actually a state agency.  That Clemente was a state official and not just a city cop does make his crimes slightly more interesting, though not enough to really liven up The Cops Are Robbers.

In The Line of Duty: The FBI Murders (1988, directed by Dick Lowry)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Last night, after I wrote up my review of the last In The Line of Duty movie, I checked and discovered that the first In The Line of Duty movie is now available on YouTube.

In The Line of Duty: The FBI Murders is the one that started it all.  This was the first installment and it set the general format of all the In The Line of Duty films to follow.  It was based on a true story.  The movie was evenly split between the criminals and the members of the law enforcement trying to catch them.  Here, the criminals were two bank robbers played by David Soul and, in an effective turn against type, Michael Gross.  (When this film was released, Gross was best known as the wimpy father on Family Ties.  Today, he’s better known as the survivalist from the Tremors films.  He went on to play cops in two subsequent In The Line of Duty films.)  The FBI agents pursuing them were played by Ronny Cox, Bruce Greenwood, and several other recognizable TV actors.

The FBI Murders was not only the first In The Line of Duty film but it was also the best.  All of the subsequent installments, both good and bad, pale in comparison.  Though the story is familiar and the foreshadowing is sometimes obvious (“Try not to get shot,” one FBI agent’s wife tells him), The FBI Murders still holds up today because of the strong cast and Dick Lowry’s direction of the final shootout between the cops and the criminals.  No matter how many times David Soul gets shot, he keeps getting up and firing more rounds.  Making this part of the film all the more effective is that it’s based on fact.  During the actual incident, the real-life criminals played by Soul and Gross continued firing and killing even though they had been shot a tremendous number of times.  Remarkably, it was discovered that neither had been on any type of pain-killing drug at the time.  Instead, they were determined to just keep shooting until the end.  Though the two men were outnumbered by the FBI, the agents were not prepared to go up against the military-grade weapons that the men were carrying with them.

The actors who play the FBI agents are all effective, especially Ronny Cox as the veteran who has seen it all.  As with the other In The Line of Duty films, a lot of time is spend showing the comradery between the agents and how, even when they’re not at work, they’re all still together.  In other In The Line of Duty films, the comradery could sometimes feel forced but, in The FBI Murders, it feels natural and scenes like Bruce Greenwood’s character finally getting a nickname and one of the older agents deciding to go on a stakeout just for old times sake carry a lot more emotional weight than you might expect.  It makes the final shootout all the more powerful.

Eleven more In The Line of Duty films would follow but none of them would top The FBI Murders.

Film Review: In The Line of Fire (dir by Wolfgang Petersen)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Earlier today, it was announced that director Wolfgang Petersen had passed away.  He was 81 years old and had been suffering from pancreatic cancer.  Though Petersen started his career making films in his native Germany (and his 1981 film, Das Boot, remains the most Oscar-nominated German film of all time), Petersen eventually relocated to Los Angeles and established himself as a very successful director of thrillers and star-filled action films.

Last month, I watched one of Petersen’s films.  First released in 1993, In The Line of Fire stars Clint Eastwood as Frank Horrigan.  Frank is a veteran member of the Secret Service, still serving at a time when almost all of his colleagues have either retired or died.  When we first meet Frank, he and his new partner, Al (Dylan McDermott), are arresting a gang of counterfeiters and Frank (and the then 63 year-old Eastwood) is proving that he can still take down the bad guys.

But is Frank still up to protecting the President?  Of the agents that were with President Kennedy when he was assassinated in 1963, Frank Horrigan is the last one standing.  He’s the only active secret service agent to have lost a president and he’s haunted by what he sees as being his failure to do his job and the feeling that America has never recovered from Kennedy’s death.  Also obsessed with Frank’s history is a mysterious man who calls himself Booth.  Booth (played by John Malkovich, who received an Oscar nomination for his performance) starts to call Frank.  He informs Frank that he’s planning on assassinating the president, who is currently traveling the country as a part of his reelection bid.  Booth views Frank as being a worthy adversary and Frank, looking for redemption, requests to be returned to the Presidential Protective Division.

While Frank struggles to keep up with both the President and the younger agents, Booth slowly and methodically puts his plan in motion.  He builds his own wooden gun and tries it out on two hunters who are unfortunate enough to stumble across him.  Making a heart-breaking impression in a small role, Patrika Darbo plays the bank teller who, unfortunately, comes a bit too close to uncovering Booth’s secret identity.  Booth is friendly and sometimes apologetic and he quickly shows that he’s willing to kill anyone.  It’s a testament to both the skill of Malkovich’s performance and Petersen’s direction that the audience comes to believe that there’s a better than average chance that Booth will succeed.  He just seems to have such a strong belief in himself that the audience knows that he’s either going to kill the President or that he’s going to willingly die trying.

Meanwhile, no one believes in Frank.  The White House Chief of Staff (Fred Dalton Thompson, later to serve in the Senate and run for President himself) views Frank as being a nuisance.  The head of the detail (Gary Cole) thinks that Frank should be put out to pasture.  Only Lilly Raines (Rene Russo), another agent, seems to have much faith in Frank.  While Frank is hunting Booth, he falls in love with Lilly and she with him.  (Fortunately, even at the age of 63, Eastwood still had enough of his old Dirty Harry charisma that the film’s love story is credible, despite the age difference between him and Russo.)  The hunt for Booth reawakens something in Frank.  Just as Booth has a psychological need to be pursued and challenged, Frank needs an enemy to which he can re-direct all of his guilt and self-loathing.  Frank becomes a stand-in for everyone who fears that, because of one particular incident or tragedy, America will never regain the strength and promise that it once had.  (In Frank’s case, that strength is symbolized by his idealized memories of JFK.)  Defeating Booth is about more than just saving America.  It’s about redeeming history.

It all makes for an very exciting thriller, one in which Eastwood’s taciturn style of acting is perfectly matched with Malkovich’s more cerebral approach.  Just as the two characters are challenging each other, Eastwood and Malkovich also seem to challenge each other as actors and it leads to both men giving wonderful performances.  Wolfgang Petersen not only does a good job with the action scenes but also with generating some very real suspense.  The scene in which Malkovich attempts to assemble his gun under a table is a masterclass in directing and evidence that Petersen had not only watched Hitchcock’s films but learned from them as well.

As directed by Petersen and performed by Malkovich and Eastwood, In The Line of Fire emerges as a film that was more than just an exciting thriller.  It was also a mediation on aging, guilt, love, redemption, and the national traumas of the past.  It’s a film that stands up to multiple rewatches and as a testament to the talent of the man who directed it.

In The Line of Duty: Blaze Of Glory (1997, directed by Dick Lowry)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

In 1997, NBC’s series of In The Line of Duty movie went out in a blaze of glory with Lori Loughlin and Bruce Campbell!

Lori and Bruce play Jill and Jeff Erickson, an attractive couple who finance their perfect life by robbing banks.  Jeff wears an obvious fake beard and, because he’s played by Bruce Campbell, it is easy to initially treat his crime spree as being a big joke.  Jeff and Jill use their money to buy a big house and to open up their own used bookstore.  Their robberies start to get bigger and more elaborate and Jill goes from being a passive observer to an active participant.  Jill gets such a rush from the robberies that she can’t stop.  While the press treats the two of them like a modern day Bonnie and Clyde, FBI agent Tom LaSalle (Bradley Whitford) tries to bring them to justice before someone gets killed.

Blaze of Glory is based on a true story.  The crime spree of Jill and Jeff Erickson also inspired another film, John McNaughton’s Normal Life, which starred Luke Perry as Jeff and Ashley Judd as Jill.  Normal Life is told almost entirely from the point of view of the bank robbers while Blaze of Glory, like all of the In The Line of Duty movies, is firmly on the side of law enforcement.  Both films tell the same story and stay fairly close to the facts of the case but it’s interesting to see how behavior that was presented as being romantic and tragic in Normal Life is portrayed as being dangerous and arrogant in Blaze of Glory.

Bruce Campbell and Lori Loughlin are the two main reasons to watch Blaze of Glory.  Campbell plays Jeff Erickson as being a slightly smarter version of Ash.  Jeff may enjoy running his used bookstore and talking to people about literature but he simply cannot stay out of trouble.  He has the confidence necessary to rob a bank but he’s also so reckless that he doesn’t think much about what he’s going to do after he puts on his fake beard and fires his gun at the ceiling.  Lori Loughlin, having finally escaped from Full House, gives an uninhibited and sexy performance as Jill, who is never happier than when she’s helping her husband to rob a bank.  Eventually, she turns out to be just as reckless as her husband and even more willing to fight her way out of a police chase.  Campbell and Louglin are so good that it’s too bad that half of the movie is Bradley Whitford as the lead FBI agent and Brad Sullivan as his father.

After sitting out Kidnapped, Dick Lowry returns to the director’s chair for the final In The Line of Duty and it’s one of the best of the series.  The action scenes are exciting and Campbell and Loughlin burn up the screen.  Blaze of Glory was the finale of In The Line of Duty but what a way to go!

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

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

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

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

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

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

So, I Watched Girls of Summer (2008, dir. by Max Tash)

Posted on by Dazzling Erin

I was looking for a baseball movie to help me get over the Losing Season Rangers Blues.

I settled for a softball movie.

I won’t make that mistake again.

Jake McBride (Tom Pilleri) makes a bet that he can turn a group of models into a championship softball team.  The only problem is that none of the models know how to play softball, except for Christine (Sasha Formoso) and Jake’s cousin, Holly (Tarah DeSpain).

Christine and Holly, I liked.  Everyone underestimated them because they were girls and they proved all of the boys wrong.  Plus, Tarah DeSpain was believable as an athlete.  Those were the only characters that I liked.  None of the other models had any personality and Jake was a jerk even when he was doing the right thing.  Who is dumb enough to bet that much money on a softball game?  The humor was frat boy humor and the movie looked like it was filmed on someone’s phone.  A League of their Own, this was not.

Girls of Summer did not make me feel better about the Rangers currently being 50-63 for the season.  In fact, it made me feel even worse because, as bad as the model were, they at least had a winning season.  But then I remembered that the Athletics were 41-73 and I felt better.  One good thing about the AL West is that, even when the Rangers aren’t having their best season, there’s usually at least one other team doing worse.  Go Rangers!

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

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

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

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

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

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

Film Review: The Fallout (dir by Megan Park)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The Fallout, which premiered on HBOMax way back in January, opens with a scene of a sandwich being made.  It’s a peanut butter sandwich but the person making it is putting way too much peanut butter on the bread.  The kitchen counter is a mess.  The knife looks dirty.  To be honest, it’s kind of sickening to watch.

No, the film is not about the sandwich.  In fact, the sandwich never appears again.  But I have to admit that sandwich represents the entire film to me.  That scene, I think, is meant to tell us that we’re watching a film about real people and sometimes, real people prepare disgusting food in a cluttered kitchen.  And that’s true.  Then again, sometimes they don’t and that’s something that some filmmakers don’t want to acknowledge.  Indeed, there’s something rather condescending about the cinematic belief that being authentic is the equivalent of being a slob.  It’s an interesting phenomena how a film can try so hard to be “real” that it instead becomes the opposite.

The Fallout certainly deals with an important subject.  Vada Cavell (Jenna Ortega) goes to high school on a day like any other day and, without warning, finds herself in the middle of a school shooting.  The shooting itself is handled well.  We don’t see the shooter nor do we learn anything about him.  We just hear the gunshots while Vada, Mia Reed (Maddie Ziegler — yes, of Dance Moms fame), and Quinton (Niles Fitch) hide in a bathroom stall.  It’s a terrifying scene and it immediately reminded me of what it was like when I was in high school and I would see stories about school shootings and wonder if my school was going to be next.

The rest of the film deals with the emotional, political, and mental fallout of the shooting.  Quinton struggles with the death of his brother.  Vada’s best friend, Nick (Will Ropp), becomes a self-righteous David Hogg type.  And Vada starts spending all of her time with Mia, a dancer and influencer whose Dads are in Europe and apparently can’t even be bothered to come back to the States even after their daughter is involved in a school shooting.  Vada, who has a total crush on Mia, starts hanging out at Mia’s mansion.  Mia is happy to finally have a friend that she can talk to, even if Vada is kind of annoying.

(The whole thing with the Dads being in Europe and Mia living alone in her mansion feels a bit too convenient, to be honest.)

The film is dealing with important issues, which is one reason why it’s gotten so many good reviews.  This is one of those films that many people feel obligated to like because otherwise, they might run the risk of being told that they don’t care about school shootings.  But, honestly, the film doesn’t really have that much to say.  It hits all of the expected beats and, as much as the film tries to make everything messy and real, it often seems like it’s trying too hard.  Of course, Vada is going to use drugs to get through her first day back at school.  Of course, Vada’s father is going to encourage her to shout out her frustrations at the top of her lungs.  Of course, Vada’s mother is going to be remote and controlling.  Of course, her little sister is going to have a breakdown.  Of course, her best friend is going to get mad at her for not wanting to get involved with his nascent political career.  Of course, there’s going to be an absolutely cringey moment where Vada starts talking a mile a minute just because she smoked one joint.  To be honest, I’ve never seen anyone react to weed quite the way that Vada does.  She’s like the person who gets drunk off half a beer and then won’t stop talking.  It’s freaking annoying.  Throughout the film, there are occasional moments that work but, ultimately, it’s never quite as insightful as it obviously believes itself to be.

Jenna Ortega does give a good performance as Vada.  As written, the character is often annoying but, then again, the same can be said of most people and one can only imagine what Vada would have been like without Ortega’s likable screen presence.  The film is pretty much stolen, though, by Maddie Ziegler.  Ziegler reveals the lonely reality behind the influencer façade.  Since Ziegler is herself a dancer and an influencer, she brings a lot of her own persona to Mia but, at the same time, she also makes Mia into a believable character who has a life and an existence that’s separate from the actress playing her.  After The Book of Henry and Music, The Fallout actually gives Ziegler a chance to prove that she can act as well as she can dance.

As opposed to Gus Van Sant’s Elephant or Fran Kranz’s Mass, which both that the courage to acknowledge that violence and its consequences can never be truly understood or easily defined, The Fallout tries too hard to find definitive meaning in an incomprehensible tragedy.  For all of its good intentions and its attempts to be realistic, there’s a shallowness at the heart of The Fallout that keeps it from working.

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

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

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

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

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

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