Tom Horn (1980, directed by William Wiard)

Posted on March 24, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

Today would have been Steve McQueen’s 90th birthday.

Sadly, McQueen died in 1980 at the absurdly young age of 50. In life, McQueen never got as much respect as he deserved as an actor but in death, he’s been rediscovered as not just an icon of cool but also as an underrated actor who, much like Clint Eastwood, could say a lot without uttering a word. (Be sure to read Marshall Terrill’s biography of McQueen.) When Steve McQueen (as played by Damian Lewis) showed up in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, it seemed appropriate. McQueen and Tarantino both seem made for each other, even if McQueen died long before Tarantino even wrote his first screenplay.

McQueen made two films shortly before he died, The Hunter and Tom Horn. Unfortunately, neither one of them was a hit with audiences or critics. The Hunter, which was McQueen’s last film, is a forgettable movie that features McQueen as a bounty hunter who can’t drive. Tom Horn, however, was an underrated western that features one of McQueen’s best performances.

In Tom Horn, McQueen plays the title character, a legendary frontier scout who is known for the role he played in the capture of Geronimo. When the film opens, Tom Horn has seen better days. With the frontier changing and the old west being replaced by the modern age, Horn has been reduced to being almost a vagrant, wandering from town to town in search of work. When the film begins, Horn has found employment as a “stock detective.” He’s employed by the local cattlemen to keep rustlers from stealing their stock. Horn uses the same violent methods that he’s always used, gunning down rustlers and often doing so in public. What Horn doesn’t realize is that times have changed and the methods that previously made him a legend are now making him a pariah. When the cattlemen realize that the townspeople are turning against them because of Horn’s activities, they conspire to take out Horn themselves.

Tom Horn is based on a true story. In 1903, Tom Horn was hung for shooting a 15 year-old boy. While it is agreed that Horn killed many men over the course of his life, he was undoubtedly framed for the murder for which he was executed. While sitting in his jail cell, waiting to be executed, Horn wrote the autobiography upon which this movie is based. The movie makes the argument that Horn was executed because he was a reminder of what the West used to be like. In order to prove that they were now ready to be members of civilized society, the cattleman had to sacrifice Horn in the most public way possible.

The film does a good job of capturing the final days of the old west and Steve McQueen does an even better job of playing a man who doesn’t realize that his time has come to a close. Horn often seems to be the only man who doesn’t understand that the time of outlaws and the gunslingers is coming to a close and that leaves him defenseless when he’s put on trial. Even after found guilty, Horn remains confident that he will somehow escape the hangman’s noose. Tragically, it’s not until time is up that Horn truly comes to understand that the world has changed and civilization no longer has place for men like him. The same people who used to depend on men like Tom Horn now just want to forget that he ever existed. McQueen took a long break between making The Towering Inferno and Tom Horn and dropped out of the public eye. The only film he made during that period was a barely released version of Enemy of the People. When McQueen made Tom Horn, he was also a man out of time and he brings a sense of resignation and loss to the role that he might not have been capable of doing earlier in his career.

Sadly, it was while filming Tom Horn that McQueen first started to show symptoms of the cancer that would eventually kill him. Tom Horn was released in 1980 and never got the attention that it deserved. It’s a minor western classic and features Steve McQueen at his best.

18 Days of Paranoia #11: Betrayed (dir by Costa-Gavras)

Posted on March 24, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1988 film, Betrayed, starts out on a strong note but then quickly becomes annoying as Hell.

It opens with shots of a radio talk show host, an outspoken liberal named Sam Kraus (Richard Libertini). Kraus berates his callers. Kraus ridicules anyone who is to the left of Bernie Sanders. When a man with a rural-accent calls in and attacks Karus for being Jewish, Kraus calls the man an idiot. After he gets off the air, Kraus walks through a parking garage and stops in front of his car. Another car pulls up beside Kraus and suddenly, a masked man with a gun opens fire on Kraus, killing him. The gunman gets out of the car and spray paints, “ZOG” on Kraus’s car before then fleeing the garage.

(ZOG stands for Zionist Occupational Government. It’s a term used by the type of anti-Semitic dipshits who thinks that the Protocols of Elder Zion are real.)

From this shockingly brutal opening, we cut to panoramic shots of beautiful farmland and crops being harvested in the American midwest, the heartland. Gary Simmons (Tom Berenger) owns a farm. He’s a Vietnam vet who nearly received the medal of honor. He lives with his mother and he has two children. (He’s divorced and his ex-wife died as the result of a mysterious hit-and-run in California.) Almost everyone in his small hometown seems to worship Gary. They’re certainly curious about his new girlfriend, Katie Phillips (Debra Winger).

And really, they probably should be. Katie Phillips isn’t Katie Phillips at all. She’s actually an FBI agent named Cathy Weaver and she’s been sent undercover to investigate whether or not Gary was involved in the murder of Kraus. Cathy, who comes from a broken family and who we’re told has always been seeking some sort of deeper meaning in her life, is charmed by both Gary and his family. In fact, she falls in love with Gary. She tells her superior, Mike Carnes (John Heard), that there’s no way Gary is dangerous. Mike doesn’t believe her but, of course, Mike has a personal stake in this because he and Cathy used to be romantically involved.

(That’s right, everyone. Betrayed is so narratively lazy that it resorts to making Mike a scorned lover, even though the film’s plot would have worked just as well if he wasn’t.)

As I said, the first part of the movie works. Debra Wingers gives a strong performance and Tom Berenger is a charming roughneck. For the first half-hour or so, the film does a good job of showing why men like Gary and his friends are susceptible to conspiracy theories and why they feel that the entire world is stacked against them. You can understand why Cathy is so troubled by her assignment because Gary’s friends are hardly master criminals. For the most part, they’re farmers who feel like their entire way of life has been taken away from them.

Unfortunately, almost immediately after Mike refuses to allow her to end her investigation, Cathy returns to the farm and sleeps with Gary. Not only is this a plot development a disservice to everything that has previously been established about Cathy as a character but it also marks the point where the movie entirely falls apart. Immediately after sleeping with Cathy, Gary suddenly goes from being a complex but troubled character to being a cartoonish super villain. And listen — we’ve all been there. You meet a guy. He’s handsome. He says all the right things. He seems like he’s sensitive. He makes you feel safe. You let down your defenses for one night and the next morning, he’s yelling at you for wearing a short skirt in public. It happens. Of course, in Gary’s case, it means that he’s not only criticizing the way that Cathy dresses but he’s also taking her on a hunt where the prey is terrified person of color who Gary and his friends have kidnapped. It also means that Gary drags Cathy along on a bank robbery and then expects her to join him when he wants to assassinate a presidential candidate. Even after all that, Cathy remains conflicted about what to do with Gary. The problem is that it’s not like Gary’s a guy who needs sensitivity training or who spends too much time watching ESPN. Gary is a guy who is carting around weapons and talking about how he wants to kill “mud people.” That Cathy still has mixed emotions after all of that goes against everything that the film previously asked us to believe about her. Gary becomes too cartoonish to be plausible and, as a result, he drags down Cathy’s character as well.

Unfortunately, as the film’s narrative falls apart, so do the majority of the performances. While Debra Winger struggles to make her character’s motivations plausible, Tom Berenger is reduced to doing a lot of glaring. (Poor John Heard spends most of the movie shouting and bugging his eyes.) About the only actor who comes out Betrayed unscathed is John Mahoney, who plays Shorty. Shorty is one of Gary’s friends. He’s a friendly and personable guy who seems to sincerely care about everyone and who has a charmingly gentle smile. He’s also a total racist and the contrast between Shorty’s amiable nature and his hateful thoughts provide the latter half of Betrayed with its only powerful moments. Mahoney gets one big scene, where he talks to Cathy about how much he hates violence but, at the same time, he feels that the world has left him no other choice. Mahoney does a great job with his small role. It’s unfortunate that the rest of Betrayed couldn’t live up to his performance.

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The Seniors (1978, directed by Rod Amateau)

Posted on March 23, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

Four college seniors (including one played by Dennis Quaid) are upset at the prospect of graduating, having to get real job, and losing Sylvia (Priscilla Barnes), the mute nymphomaniac who lives in their house with them and does all the cleaning and cooking. They decide that the best way to avoid getting a real job is by setting up a fake company called Phantom Research. They apply for and get a grant to study female sexuality, which essentially means that they pay the girls on campus to have sex with them. Before you can say Risky Business (which was actually released years after this film), they expand their operations, get involved with some crooked businessmen, and nearly lose their lives. It’s a comedy.

The Seniors is one of those films that used to come on television frequently when I was a kid. I remember watching it when I was 12 and enjoying it, mostly because I was a stupid kid and I was at that age where any film about sex seemed clever and hilarious. I recently rewatched it and discovered that there was only one funny bit and that was about a nerdy research assistant named Arnold (Rocky Flintermann) who helps out the seniors in return for them setting him up with Sylvia. Throughout the film, the formerly virginal Arnold gets laid so often that he loses the ability to walk and then he dies. Ha ha. The rest of the film is just dumb. The problem is that the film wants to be a raunchy, Animal House-style comedy but it was written by Stanley Shapiro (who previously wrote Doris Day comedies) and directed by Rod Amateau, who had previously directed several episodes of Gilligan’s Island. Their style is all wrong for the material.

The film’s opening credits announce that it stars, among others, Ryan O’Neal, Clint Eastwood, and Charles Bronson. A cartoon professor then walks out and announces that, “All of these big stars! None of them are in this film!” That’s too bad. I would have liked to have seen some of those stars in this movie. I think Eastwood would have told the seniors to get jobs and stop exploiting Sylvia. Bronson would have blown away the entire operation but Ryan O’Neal probably would have been cool with it all.

O’Neal, Eastwood, and Bronson are not in the film. Dennis Quaid is, though he probably doesn’t brag about. Edward Andrews and Ian Wolfe both have minor roles as corrupt businessmen who help fund Phantom Research. Alan Reed, the voice of Fred Flinstone, plays a professor. This was his last performance before his death.

18 Days of Paranoia #10: The Quiller Memorandum (dir by Michael Anderson)

Posted on March 23, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1966 film, The Quiller Memorandum, is a diabolically clever little spy thriller.

The film opens with a British secret agent getting gunned down while trying to make a call from a phone booth in Berlin. While we never learn the exact name of the agency that the man was working for, we do discover that they don’t take kindly to their agents getting gunned down in phone booths. They send in another agent, an American named Quiller (George Segal), to take his place.

In Berlin, Quiller’s boss is a man named Pol (Alec Guinness). Pol explains that the man in the phone booth was actually the second of his agents to be assassinated in Berlin. All of the agents were looking for information about a Neo-Nazi group called Phoenix. Pol tells Quiller that it is vitally important they discover just where, in Berlin, Phoenix is headquartered. Quiller is given a few items that were found on the dead man in the phone booth: a bowling alley ticket, a swimming pool ticket, and a newspaper article about a school where it was discovered that one of the teachers had Nazi sympathies.

Though The Quiller Memorandum was undoubtedly produced with the hopes of capitalizing on the popularity of the Bond films, Quiller is no James Bond. We know that as soon as we see him. It’s not just that Quiller’s an American while Bond was British. It’s also that James Bond was played by the cool and calculating Sean Connery while Quiller is played by George Segal. Whereas Connery’s Bond never loses his confidence, Segal’s Quiller comes across as being, at first, a bit cocky and, as a result, we worry about him. Whereas Connery’s Bond rarely gave his actions a second thought, Segal brings a slightly neurotic edge to Quiller. You take one look at Connery’s Bond and you know that he’s going to survive no matter what. Quiller, however, you never get that feeling. When he’s in danger, you worry about him because it’s easy to imagine him turning up like the man in the phone booth.

And, indeed, it doesn’t take long for Quiller to get captured by the members of Phoenix. A man bumps him with a suitcase, injecting a drug into his system that makes Quiller become drowsy. When Quiller awakens, he’s being interrogated by an erudite man named Oktober (Max von Sydow). Oktober’s an aristocrat. He speaks in a very calm tone, rarely showing any hint of anger. The only thing that betrays his evil nature are his eyes, which are cold and soulless.

Even though Quiller survives the interrogation, it’s tempting to give up on him. After all, Quiller got captured so easily and Oktober seems so clever that you kind of find yourself wondering if maybe the agency made a mistake when they gave this mission to Quiller. That’s where The Quiller Memorandum surprises you, though. Quiller turns out to be a lot more clever and resourceful than anyone gave him credit for being and, for that matter, the film itself turn out to have a few more twists and turns in store for the viewer.

It’s a clever and enjoyable spy film, featuring wonderful performances from Segal, Guinness, von Sydow, and Senta Berger as the teacher who may be in love with Quiller or who may have an agenda of her own. The film may be a spy thriller but Michael Anderson directs it as if its a film noir, full of shadowy streets and morally ambiguous characters. The script, by Harold Pinter, encourages us to trust no one and Anderson’s direction reminds us that we made the right decision. On the dark streets of Cold War Berlin, no one is who they seem.

The Quiller Memorandum is a must-see for fans of 60 spy films. Watch it with someone who you think you can trust.

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Criminal Law (1988, directed by Matin Campbell)

Posted on March 22, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

Gary Oldman is Ben Chase, a hotshot defense attorney who graduated from Harvard and now practices law in Boston. That means that he gets to have a Boston accent and you know how much Gary Oldman loves playing a role with an accent. Ben also has a pompadour because Gary Oldman always has something weird going on with his hair in almost every film he appears in.

Ben’s latest client is Martin Thiel (Kevin Bacon), a sociopathic rich kid who has been accused of murder. Even though Ben thinks that Martin is probably guilty, he still gets Martin off the hook. As soon as Martin get his acquittal, he starts murdering again. Ben feels responsible so he decides that what he needs to do is trick Martin into implicating himself. However, Martin knows what Ben is planning so, instead, he decides to frame Ben for the murders. Somehow, it all links back to Martin’s feelings about abortion. I guess Martin is against abortion or maybe he’s for it. It was hard to keep track. I watched the movie and I’m still not sure I followed everything that I saw. It’s not that the plot is diabolically clever. It’s just that it’s so incoherent that not a single plot point logically follows from another.

The film experiments with suggesting that there’s some sort of deeper connection between Martin and Ben. Martin is obsessed with Ben and when Ben is in bed with his girlfriend, he briefly imagines that she’s turned into Martin and has a good old-fashioned freak out as a result. It doesn’t make any sense. First off, you have to believe that Ben can’t tell the difference between Kevin Bacon and his girlfriend. Secondly, you have to then accept that Ben — a HARVARD GRADUATE — is so stupid that he would actually believe that his girlfriend had suddenly transformed into Kevin Bacon and must now be strangled.

Criminal Law is a film that you may be tempted to watch because of the pairing of Kevin Bacon and Gary Oldman but you’d be better off just watching JFK again. They’re both great actors and and it’s always interesting to see them cast against type but neither one of them is particularly good in Criminal Law. They’re let down by a script that doesn’t allow either one to create a consistent character. Sometimes, Martin is a soulless attorney and other times, he’s a panicky social justice crusader. Sometimes, Kevin Bacon is a clever sociopath and, other times, he’s just your typical mindless movie slasher.

On the plus side, Joe Don Baker is in this mess, playing a cop. Joe Don Baker has played so many cops in so many bad movies that I wonder if he’s ever been tempted to try to arrest someone in real life. In Criminal Law, he’s not given much to do but it doesn’t matter. He’s Joe Don Baker!

18 Days of Paranoia #9: Blunt, The Fourth Man (dir by John Glenister)

Posted on March 22, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Based on a true story and taking place in 1951, the 1985 film, Blunt: The Fourth Man, tells the story of Anthony Blunt (played by Ian Richardson).

A graduate of Cambridge, Anthony Blunt appears to be a proud member of the British establishment. He’s upper class with impeccable manners. He’s the King’s art surveyor, which he says makes him literally a member of the Royal Family. He belongs to all the right clubs and he expresses all of the right opinions and he has all of the right friends.

However, Anthony Blunt leads a secret life. First off, he’s gay at a time when that was still illegal in the United Kingdom. Unlike his flamboyant lover, Guy Burgess (Anthony Hopkins), Blunt is discreet and always keeping an eye out for the vice cops. Blunt is also a socialist and has been one since his days at Cambridge. However, he’s not just a socialist. He’s also spying for the Russians. It’s not that Anthony thinks much of Russia as much as it’s just that he thinks even less of the U.S. and the U.K. He feels that the U.S. is pushing the world towards nuclear war. When his driver says that the UK needs a Joe McCarthy of their own, Blunt can barely hide his distaste.

Even though it was Guy who originally recruited Anthony to spy for the Russians, Anthony now appears to be in charge of the so-called Cambridge Spy Ring. He’s the one who regularly meets with the group’s Russian contact and he’s also the one who is put in charge of arranging for one of the spies to flee the UK. The Russians don’t seem to have much faith in Guy Burgess, largely because Guy is an alcoholic and a drug addict. (Upon returning to London from America, Guy declares that he’s no longer drinks whiskey and that he’s given up Benzedrine. He then proceeds to get very drunk.) In fact, the only person who seems to really care about Guy is Anthony but how much does Guy actually care about Anthony?

Almost everyone in Blunt, the Fourth Man is either a spy or a former spy. And yet, we really don’t see anyone doing much spying. Guy has a closet that’s full of undeveloped film, official files, and a picture of Lenin and that’s about it. Throughout the film, Guy brags about how powerful he and his fellow spies are but we’re left to wonder whether Guy’s telling the truth or if he’s just drunk. For his part, Anthony is more concerned with getting caught and losing his place in society. He knows that one member of the group is on the verge of getting unmasked and has made arrangements for him to escape to Russia while visiting France. The problem is that the plan involves Guy and Anthony is not sure if he can trust Guy to play his part. If Guy’s willing to betray his country, why not his friends and lover?

For the most part, the entire film is Anthony and Guy having cryptic discussion with themselves and with others. There’s a threatening subtext to almost every conversation in this film. There’s also a pervasive atmosphere of regret. Anthony, Guy, and their friends are no longer the idealists that they were back in Cambridge. They’re now middle-aged men who know that they’ve devoted their lives to a lost cause. Each deals with it in their own way. Guy drinks. Anthony insists that his spying has less to do with betraying a country and more with staying loyal to his friends. What’s perhaps most interesting is that almost all of these upper class socialists are most worried about losing their place in society.

This is a very talky film. Fortunately, it stars two great talkers, Ian Richardson and Anthony Hopkins. The two of them play off each other very well and create two fascinating, if not necessarily likable, characters. Admittedly, there are a few scenes where Hopkins comes dangerous close to going a bit overboard with Guy’s drunken ramblings but Ian Richardson’s performance is close to perfect. Somehow, he makes Anthony both smug and vulnerable at the same time.

Obviously, this isn’t a film for everyone. It requires a bit of patience. But, for history nerds like me, it’s an interesting historical document, a recreation of one of biggest spy scandals of the previous century.

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Time Chasers (1994, directed by David Giancola)

Posted on March 21, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

People, I know what you’ve heard but Time Chasers is not that bad.

I know that Time Chasers has got a reputation. It was featured on one of the most brutal (and funniest) episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000. That, in fact, is probably how most people know about this film. (Some members of the MST 3K crew subsequently revisited Time Chasers for Rifftrax.) It’s true that MST 3K was known for taking apart bad films and it probably hasn’t helped the film’s reputation that it’s been reported that some members of the production were not amused about being mocked by Mike Nelson and the bots.

But that’s all in the past and I think that today, we can finally admit that Time Chasers is not that bad.

It’s certainly one of the few films to suggest that time travel can be achieved by an airplane, five oversized floppy disks, and a Commodore 64. Nick Miller (Matthew Bruch) is a scientist and amateur airplane pilot who has discovered how to travel through time. He hopes that we can use time travel so that we can figure out a way to “stop killing ourselves.” Lisa (Bonnie Pritchard), the local journalist who went to high school with Nick, is impressed, especially when Nick takes her on a trip to the future (which does indeed look much like a mall food court). Lisa is less impressed when Nick decides to sell the idea to J.K. Robertson (George Woodard). J.K.’s a rich businessman and that automatically makes him evil. Lisa understands this. Nick does not.

J.K. promises that he won’t use time travel to develop weaponry but, when Lisa and Nick take another romantic trip to the future, they discover that the world is in ruins and it no longer looks like a food court. Instead, people are shooting at each other. J.K. lied! Nick and Lisa go back to the present to confront J.K. but J.K.’s not willing to give up time travel that easily. Soon, as a result of all the time travel, there are multiple Nicks and Lisas and J.K. Robertsons all over the place. It all ends with a trip back to the American Revolution, where many of the colonists wear wrist watches and modern-style eyeglasses.

It is easy to poke fun at something like Time Chasers but I’m going to defend it. The plot is actually more ambitious than you would expect from a low-budget sci-fi film and there are some clever touches that indicate that the director actually did give some serious thought to what would happen if you had multiple people jumping from one time to another. (I like the fact that, when Nick meets his past self, Past Nick can’t understand why Present Nick won’t stop talking about Lisa.) For all the ribbing that they took on MST 3K, both Matthew Bruch and Bonnie Pritchard are likable as Nick and Lisa. Bruch may not look like a conventional hero and, in this film, he’s got a mullet that’s goofy as hell but there’s a lot of sincerity to his performance.

I love MST 3K. When I first saw the Time Chasers episode, I laughed so much that it hurt and it’s still a favorite of mine. (I cannot see an empty field without saying, “Hey, Children of the Corn.” Lisa — our Lisa, not the film’s Lisa — is usually kind enough to reply, “Hey,” so my joke isn’t just left hanging in the air.) But taken on its own, without Mike and the bots riffing on it, Time Chasers is not that bad. It’s goofy take on time travel and, dammit, I like it.

18 Days of Paranoia #8: The French Connection II (dir by John Frankenheimer)

Posted on March 21, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1975 film, The French Connection II, opens up three years after the downbeat conclusion of the first French Connection.

Having escaped from the police at the end of the first film, the wealthy and suave Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey) is still smuggling drugs and living his best life. He goes to parties with wealthy people. He has lunch dates with important businessman. Even though the French police are keeping an eye on him, Charnier seems to be virtually untouchable and he knows it. If Charnier seemed impossibly smug in the first French Connection, he’s even worse in the second one.

Charnier may be enjoying himself in Marseille but what he doesn’t know is that there’s an American tourist in town. He’s a very loud American, one who insists on trying to speak to everyone in English and is shocked to discover that most of the French natives don’t have the slightest clue as to what he’s talking about. He’s shocked when he goes into a bar and fails to impress two young French women. He also doesn’t seem to understand that even French people who speak English are not going to appreciate being called a “frogs.” He wanders around town in loud shirts and with a fedora sitting rakishly on his balding head.

Yep, it’s Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman). The anti-hero from the first French Connection is still on the case and he’s now come all the way to France to help track down Charnier. The last time we saw Doyle, he had just accidentally killed a cop and was running through a dark warehouse, firing his gun. In fact, the first film ended with the suggestion that Doyle was such a loose cannon that his career as a narcotics detective was probably over. Instead, in the sequel, we learn that Popeye is still working in narcotics and he’s still just as much of a loose cannon as he ever was. If you thought people in New York found Popeye to be obnoxious, just you wait to see how the French react to him!

What Popeye doesn’t know is that his superiors in New York have only sent him to Marsielle so that he can be a target. They know that Popeye will never be able to blend in. Charnier will spot him and, hopefully, Charnier will panic and make some sort of mistake that will finally allow the police to capture him. French detective Henri (Bernard Fresson) goes along with the plan, despite his own moral objections. Henri can’t stand Popeye but he doesn’t want to see him killed either.

It doesn’t take long for Charnier to notice Popeye. After Popeye is captured by Charnier’s man, they inject him with heroin until soon, Popeye is an addict. Before Popeye can finally get his shot at Charnier, he’s going to have to overcome his own drug addiction….

The French Connection II starts out well, with Gene Hackman wandering around Marsielle and acting like a stereotypical ugly American. Director John Frankenheimer does a good job of keeping the action moving at a steady pace during the first half of the film and there’s a lot of great scenes involving Popeye being followed around town by not just the police but also Charnier’s men. The first half of the film does a great job of establishing an atmosphere of paranoia, which is not surprising when you consider that Frankenheimer’s other credits included The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days In May, and Seconds.

Unfortunately, once Popeye is captured and gets hooked on heroin, the action not only comes to a halt but the normally reliable Gene Hackman starts to act up a storm. When Popeye, while going through withdrawal, starts talking about how he used to play baseball and how he once has a try-out with the New York Yankees, the scene seems to go on forever and Hackman’s performance becomes so histrionic that you basically just end up feeling like you’re watching someone auditioning his heart out for a spot in the Actor’s Studio. Gene Hackman was one of the world’s great actors and Popeye Doyle was a great role but, in The French Connection II, we’re reminded that even a great actor occasionally needs to have his performance reined in.

Eventually, after Hackman’s had his big Oscar moment, the action kicks back in and the film kind of regains its momentum. There’s a big action scene towards the end of the film. (Ironically, it’s the type of big, good guys vs. bad guys shoot out that the first film deliberately avoided.) The film ends with a literal bang that’s abrupt yet undeniably effective.

As far as sequels go, The French Connection II is good. It’s not great and, not surprisingly, it doesn’t come anywhere close to matching the power of the first film. But it still has enough effective scenes to make it worth watching. You just might want to hit fast forward whenever Popeye starts talking about baseball…..

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Cinemax Friday: Sworn to Justice (1997, directed by Paul Maslak)

Posted on March 20, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

Janna (Cynthia Rothrock) is a psychologist who is also a martial arts expert. One night, she comes home to discover that her sister and her nephew have been murdered and that the killers are still in the house! Though Janna manages to fight off the attackers, she also gets a nasty bump to the head. Weeks later, after she’s gotten out of the hospital and she’s ready to get back to work, she discovers that she now has ESP!

All Janna has to do is touch someone or hold something in her hand and she has visions of the past and sometimes the present. (She has those special ESP powers that do whatever needs to be done at the moment.) When she finds her sister’s brooch, she flashes back to the night of the attack and sees the faces of the men who attacked her sister. Using her newfound power, Janna sets out to get revenge.

But even as she tracks down the thugs who killed her sister, Janna still does not know the identity of the person who ordered the hit. She just knows that he’s known as “The Man.” Could he have something to do with the arrogant cop killer (Brad Dourif!) for whom Janna is serving as an expert defense witness? Or could The Man by the publisher (Kurt McKinny) with whom Janna is having a steamy affair? (This was a late night Cinemax film, after all.) Or could it be the detective (Tony Lo Bianco) who is supposed to be investigating her sister’s death?

As far as Cynthia Rothrock martial arts films are concerned, Sworn to Justice is pretty good. Rothrock was not only a force to be reckoned with in fight scenes but, as this film shows, she was a likable actress, too. For the most part, she’s able to hold her own even when acting opposite seasoned scene stealers like Brad Dourif, Tony Lo Bianco, Mako, and even Walter Koenig, who plays Janna’s mentor with an outrageous German accent. While the film’s fight scenes are just as good as you would expect from a Cynthia Rothrock fick, the ESP twist adds just the right amount of weirdness to keep Sworn to Justice from coming across as just another low-budget martial arts film. The film doesn’t take itself too seriously. Even while she’s getting revenge for their deaths, Janna never seems to be that broken up over the deaths of her sister and her nephew. At worse, she’s seems to be annoyed by the inconvenience of it all. It’s just something else that she has to find the time to deal with.

There are a few scenes that are so darkly lit that it’s almost impossible to see what’s happening but then there are other scenes, like the one where Janna shows off her favorite martial arts moves to her new boyfriend, that work surprisingly well. This is a 90s production all the way, which means a saxophone-scored sex scenes and synthesizer-scored action scenes. Sworn to Justice is a good Cynthia Rothrock film, even if most audiences will end up figuring out the identity of The Man long before she does.

18 Days of Paranoia #7: Cuban Rebel Girls (dir by Barry Mahon)

Posted on March 20, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In the 1959 film, Cuban Rebel Girls, Errol Flynn (playing himself) flies down to Cuba. The time is shortly before the Cuban Revolution. (From a cinematic point of view, Flynn is in Havana at the same time as Hyman Roth and Michael and Fredo Corleone in The Godfather, Part II.) Flynn has been hired by the Hearst newspaper syndicate to go down to Cuba and do a report on Fidel Castro. Flynn narrates the film and tells us that he was very sympathetic to Castro and his cause….

OH MY GOD, ERROL FLYNN WAS A COMMUNIST!

Well, maybe not. If you actually go back and read contemporary reports about the Cuban Revolution, you’ll see that a lot of Americans had a romanticized view of Fidel Castro and his revolutionaries. Everyone seemed to agree that the president of Cuba, Batista, was a dictator and he needed to be forced out of power. Castro, himself, didn’t fully and openly declare himself to be a hardline communist until after he had already taken over Cuba. In Cuban Rebel Girls, someone mentions that Fidel was “always looking out for the little guy” and that’s the attitude that this film takes. At the time the film was made, it can legitimately be said that Flynn had no way of knowing that Fidel Castro would eventually reveal himself to be despotic dictator. (For more infuriating, to me, are the people who have continued to defend the Castros up until this day.)

Fidel Castro, himself, doesn’t actually appear until the very end of Cuban Rebel Girls and, even then, it’s just newsreel footage of him riding a tank through Havana. (Che Guevara does not show up at all. He may have been busy shopping for berets, I don’t know.) That said, the film was actually shot in Cuba and it does feature footage of Errol Flynn meeting actual Cuban rebels. This was also Errol Flynn’s last film and, for the most part, he looks terrible. Though the film’s poster may feature a suave-looking Errol Flynn holding a gun, the film actually features a noticeably overweight and often out-of-breath Errol Flynn who really doesn’t do much other than sit around and listen to other people talk.

(That said, Flynn’s voice over narration does have the occasional moment of charm. When he meets one of the rebel girls of the title and he kisses her hand, he jokes that he was relieved to see that he hadn’t totally lost “the Flynn touch.” Flynn delivers the line with just enough self-depreciation that it’s charming rather than creepy.)

The majority of the film doesn’t actually involve Flynn. Instead, it involves two girls from New York — Beverly (Beverly Aadland) and Jacqueline Dominguez (Jackie Jackler) — who want to help out the revolution. Jacqueline is from Cuba, went to high school with Fidel, and her brother is currently a part of the revolution. Beverly, meanwhile, is convinced that she’ll find the man that she loves in jungles of Cuba. Beverly explains that she doesn’t know much about Castro or Batista. That’s for others to worry about! Jacqueline assures her that, even in high school, “the big jerk” was always looking out for people.

Anyway, Beverly and Jacqueline raise some money from their friends and then decide to smuggle it into Cuba so that the guerrillas can use it to buy weapons. What follows is a lot of intrigue and sneaking around as Beverly and Jackie try to avoid Batista’s secret police and help out the guerrillas. And, of course, when I say “a lot,” what I actually mean is “next to none.” For two people who don’t really come across as being particularly smart, Jacqueline and Beverly certainly don’t have much trouble sneaking around Cuba.

(That said, there are enough references to Batista’s secret police to justify reviewing the film as a part of the 18 Days of Paranoia. Take my word for it. Or watch the movie on YouTube, where it’s available under the name Assault of the Rebel Girls.)

Anyway, this is a weird movie, along with also being a really cheap movie. Beverly Aadland was apparently Errol Flynn’s protegee. She also wasn’t a very good actress. (Jackie Jackler does a little bit better in the acting department, though not by much.) That said, as a film partially shot in Cuba during the days leading up to the revolution, this is an interesting historical document. And, for some people, just the fact that it’s a pro-Castro film from Errol Flynn (!) will be enough to justify sitting through it.

(Seriously, a celebrity defending a communist? That’s like a major news outlet or a bunch of basketball players going out of their way to defend the Chinese government. It just doesn’t make sense….)