When the wife and the daughter of John North (Brian “The Boz” Bosworth) are gunned down by a mysterious gunman (Jeff Kober), North refuses to accept that they were just the victims of a robbery gone wrong. Working with a tough street kid (DeJuan Guy) who needs a mentor to show him that violence is not the solution to all of the world’s problem, North sets out to discover the truth and get revenge in the most violent ways possible. What North discovers is that the gunman who killed his family works for a corrupt FBI agent named Karl Slavak (Bruce Payne) and that Slavak is selling guns to a drug lord named Dexter Kane (played by … wait for it … MC HAMMER!)
You would think that any movie featuring M.C. Hammer as a drug lord would be worth seeing but the man who brainwashed a generation into making “U Can’t Touch This” jokes is actually pretty forgettable as Dexter. This movie was made when Hammer had dropped the M.C. from his name and he was trying to reinvent himself as a harder-edged rapper. That reinvention didn’t work because there’s absolutely nothing edgy about M.C. Hammer (much like Will Smith, he was the rapper whose music wouldn’t cause your parents to have an aneurysm) and One Tough Bastard proves it.
Instead, One Tough Bastard is worth seeing because of the epic meeting between two action stars who epitomized everything great about straight-to-video movies in the 90s, Brian Bosworth and Bruce Payne! The Boz may have been a bust as a football player but he was a good action star, delivering one-liners and viscous beat downs with aplomb and, unlike some action stars (*cough* Seagal *cough*), he could play the dramatic scenes without embarrassing himself. With his long hair and his nosering, Bruce Payne may be an unlikely FBI agent but he’s a great villain and he has no fear of shouting almost all of his dialogue. Add in Jeff Kober and you’ve got a dumb but fun movie that’s enlivened by three actors who know how to be convincingly tough on camera.
One Tough Bastard lives up to the promise of its title.
Since today would have been Dennis Hopper’s 84th birthday, I decided to watch the 1971 documentary, The American Dreamer.
Filmed in 1970, between the success of Easy Rider and the release of Hopper’s infamous follow-up to that film, The Last Movie, The American Dreamer is a cinematic portrait of a very specific time in both Dennis Hopper’s life and American film history. Dennis Hopper was 34 years old at the time The American Dreamer was shot and he was at the top of his career. As a result of the success of Easy Rider, he was regularly touted as being the future of American film. He was a self-styled revolutionary who specialized in spacey yet compelling monologues about how American movies were about to enter into a new age. Eager to try to capture the same audience that had made Easy Rider a success, Universal Pictures gave Dennis Hopper a million dollars and allowed him to take the money to South America, where he used it to film The Last Movie, a film that was designed to show who Hopper truly was as a filmmaker. The American Dreamer was filmed while The Last Movie was in post-production and we do see a few scenes of Hopper editing the film.
That said, Hopper doesn’t really seem to be too interested in talking about the specifics of The Last Movie. He does talk a lot about how he’s leading a revolution that’s going to forever alter the American cultural scene but again, Hopper doesn’t really go into too many specifics when it comes to his artistic vision. He’s more into slogans than details. Fortunately, Hopper was a compelling speaker so he holds your attention regardless of how incoherent his frequent monologues are. The American Dreamer may not convince you that Dennis Hopper was a great director but it does prove that he was a good actor. In this film, he’s acting the role of being an outlaw and a visionary.
As vague as he is about his artistic vision, Hopper gets a bit more specific whenever he’s talking about his love of weed, sex, and guns. In between leading encounter groups with all of the women who are living with him in New Mexico, Hopper brags about being such a considerate love that he’s a “male lesbian.” In another scene, Hopper talks to three giggling girl in a bathtub. He explains that free love is a part of the revolution and that he’s helping people get over their hang-ups. It’s impossible not to cringe as Hopper comes across less like a lovable eccentric and more like one of those cult leaders who ends up living in a compound in Nevada and getting into a stand-off with the government.
Hopper’s a bit more likable when he’s filmed rolling a joint. Watching the film, you can tell that he was a man who truly loved getting stoned and he actually lets down his guard a bit and grins once he’s ready to light up. However, Hopper is probably at his most natural and likable when he’s shooting a gun in the desert. Hopper spends a good deal of the film talking about his love for guns. On the one hand, it’s a bit alarming as Hopper doesn’t exactly come across as being the most stable person on the planet. On the other hand, Hopper appears to be having such a good time that it’s hard not to be happy for him. Hopper explains that, when you’re an outlaw and you’ve living in New Mexico, you have to have guns for your own protection and he makes a pretty good argument. One of the frequent misconceptions about Hopper is that he was a hippie. (This despite the fact that Easy Rider more or less ridiculed the hippies.) The American Dreamer, with its emphasis on individual freedom and the right to protect yourself, shows that, even during the height of the Hollywood counterculture, Hopper’s outlook was essentially libertarian. Watching The American Dreamer, it’s easier to understand how Hopper went from directing Easy Rider to becoming one of the few Republicans in Hollywood. Indeed, whenever the bearded and often unwashed Hopper is seen walking through the desert or firing a gun at a cross, he comes across less like the revolutionary visionary that he’s trying to be and more like an old soul in a new world.
With its frequent use of freeze frames and its intentionally ragged editing, The American Dreamer is very much a film of its era. That’s actually the main appeal of The American Dreamer. It captures a very unique and very specific point of time. It captures an artist during the brief period between his biggest success and his greatest failure and while the film may be frustrating on a narrative level, it’s fascinating as a time capsule. The film is probably more poignant when viewed today than it would have been back in 1971 because, today, we know that The Last Movie bombed and that Hopper’s revolution ended as quickly as it began. It was not Dennis Hopper who determined the future of American film but instead Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Hopper struggled, both professionally and personally, through the rest of the 70s and the early 80s before finally kicking drugs and emerging as not just as an in-demand character actor but also something of a pop cultural icon. Watching The American Dreamer, it’s fascinating to compare the older Hopper — the one who gave witty interviews and who joked about his past excesses — with the pretentious and self-serious Hopper of the early 70s.
Still, The American Dreamer shows that Dennis Hopper was always a compelling figure. It’s impossible not to roll your eyes while watching and listening to the youngish Dennis Hopper but, nonetheless, you do continue to watch and listen.
David Secca (Carl T. Evans, who also directed) is a New York cop who has just transferred to a town in New Jersey. His wife, Jennifer (Arija Bareikis) has a new job as a teacher. One day, while they’re out antiquing, they purchase a box that contains a roll of film. Looking at the film reveals pictures of a dangerous looking man who has a gun and who appears to be standing on the infamous grassy knoll in Dallas, Texas.
Convinced that he’s uncovered new evidence in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Secca carries out his own investigation of the film. He tracks down the woman (Barbara Barrie) who actually shot the film and discovers that she is now 85 and confined to a nursing home. He talks to a skeptical conspiracy theorist (Chris Noth). As Secca investigates, his progress is monitored by people who, after all these years, still don’t want the truth about the Kennedy assassination to get out. As Secca discovers, these people are still willing to kill to protect the conspiracy.
Frame of Mind is an attempt to make a conspiracy thriller that, unfortunately, is done in by its own low budget. It’s difficult to make a conspiracy seem convincing when you don’t really have the money to hire more than a few extras. Probably the most interesting thing about the film is that, despite the low budget, there are a few established actors in the cast. Along with Barrie and Noth, Tony Lo Bianco, Don Harvey, Vincent Curatola, and even KISS’s Peter Criss all have small roles. The strangest cameo of all goes to former New York Mayor David Dinkins, who plays a senator. Being mayor of New York may be a dead end politically (just ask John Lindsay, Rudy Guiliani, Michael Bloomberg, and Bill De Blasio) but it can still serve as a launching pad for a career in the entertainment industry.
Frame of Mind might hold some interest for JFK assassination hobbyists, though it doesn’t really bring anything new to the able. It’s mostly interesting just to see who shows up in the cast.
Director Chuck Vincent wasn’t the only director who making hardcore porn in the early 80s but he was one of the few to receive critical acclaim. A director who put as much emphasis on storylines and characterizations as he did on getting the money shots, Vincent was responsible for some of the final films to come out of porn’s so-called Golden Age. His best-known adult film, Roommates, was even given a favorable review in The New York Times.
Vincent was also one of the few porn directors to regularly direct “mainstream” films as well. Of course, Vincent was never hired to direct a big studio film or anything like that. Instead, he directed B-movies, the majority of which were either neo-noirs or dumb sex comedies. Though Vincent was an above average director who had a knack for getting good performances out of unlikely actors, his mainstream films never got as much attention as his pornographic films. (It makes sense when you consider that Vincent was, at the time, the best director working in the porn industry but just one of my many competent directors making B-movies.) One place where Vincent’s B-movies were popular was on late night Cinemax.
Student Affairs is one of Chuck Vincent’s better B-films. It opens with a group of actors auditioning for a dumb teen sex comedy called Student Affairs and then it follows them as they go to a high school and shoot the movie. The film alternates between scenes of the sex comedy that they are filming and scenes of what’s going when the cameras aren’t rolling. The cast is made up of familiar types. There’s a centerfold who is worried that she is going to be washed-up at the age of 20. There’s the intellectual and classically-trained actor who has been typecast as idiot. There’s a vain male model and there’s another starlet who is convinced that she’s going to be a big star someday. The film itself is almost plotless but it’s obvious that Vincent had a lot of affection for both his cast and the characters that they play. When it comes to Student Affairs, both the film and the film-within-the-film are dumb sex comedies with predictable plots but Chuck Vincent’s direction makes this a surprisingly sincere dumb sex comedy. When Rex (Andy Nichols) complains that he’s never going to have the career that he deserves because his physical appearance has typecast him as a dumb jock, both Vincent and the movie take him seriously.
There have been many great films made about the making of movies. Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night comes to mind. So does Richard Rush’s The Stunt Man. Chuck Vincent was neither Truffaut nor Rush and Student Affairs is hardly a great film. But, for a dumb sex comedy that was made for little money, Student Affairs is better than most.
Sadly, Vincent died just five years after the release of Student Affairs. If he had lived longer and directed more films, Vincent and his oeuvre would probably be ripe for rediscovery. Unfortunately, Vincent died just before directors like Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez made B-movie cool again.
Sandra Parker (Lois Nettleton) is the world’s most dedicated parole officer. After one of her parolees is sent back to prison and then dies under mysterious circumstances, Sandra decides to investigate on her own. For Sandra, this means changing her name to Sally Porter and arranging to be sent to prison on a phony charge. For some reason, Sandra/Sally only tells one other person what she’s doing. The plan is for Sandra to spend two weeks undercover and then her friend, fellow parole officer Helen (Penny Fuller), will reveal the truth to the proper authorities and get Sandra sprung from prison. It doesn’t work out that away, as Helen is killed in the line of duty shortly after Sandra finds herself behind bars.
The prison is run by the tyrannical Claire Tyson (Ida Lupino!), a matron who is more interested in exercising power than in rehabilitation. Claire’s main enforcer is a butch prisoner named Dee Dee (Jessica Walter!!). As soon as she enters the prison, Sandra gets on Tyson’s bad side. Sandra asks too many questions and makes the mistake of demanding that her fellow prisoners be treated humanely. Sandra even demands that a prisoner be given aspirin for a migraine, which is the type insubordination that leads to a stay in solitary. (What’s strange is that, in solitary, Sandra ends up sharing a cell with another prisoner which I would think would defeat the purpose of being in solitary.) With Tyson openly plotting to kill her and the only person who knows where she is dead, Sandra has to figure out a way to escape the prison and reveal the truth about what goes on behind bars.
Compared to most women-in-prison films, Women in Chains is pretty tame. This is a women-in-prison film that you could safely watch with grandma. This one was made for early 70s television, so there’s no nudity, no strong language, and even the required prison riot is restrained. The film asks us to believe that Sandra would not only be stupid enough to only let one person know that she was going undercover but also that a parole officer could somehow walk around the prison without running into any prisoners who she previously dealt with. Obviously, the film’s plot is not its strong point but viewers with an appreciation for camp will undoubtedly enjoy the performances of Ida Lupino and Jessica Walter. They rule that cell block with an iron fist and are entertaining to watch.
Dom (Calum MacNab) is a working class teenager living in London sometime in the 80s. (The music on the soundtrack is early 80s but the clothing and the haircuts are all late 80s so who knows what the specific year is supposed to be.) A chance meeting with the charismatic Bex Bessell (Paul Anderson) leads to Dom getting involved with Bex’s football firm. A supporter of West Ham United, Bex and his group of football hooligans travel across the UK, engaging in fights with other firms. Despite the fact that their lives seem to be structured around it, nobody in these firms seems to really care much about football. Instead, it’s all about the fighting.
At first, Dom is happy to be a member of the firm. It gives him something to do in his spare time and the other members of the group all seem to like him. Bex takes him under his wing and soon, Dom is even starting to dress like Bex. However, as Bex becomes more and more violent and grows obsessed with defeating Yeti (Daniel Mays), the leader of a rival firm, Dom starts to realize that he needs to find a way out.
The Firm is a loose remake of Alan Clarke’s 1989 film of the same title, which featured Gary Oldman giving one of the best performance of his career as Bex. The original version was a character study of Bex, who was presented as being a newly minted member of the middle class and who was addicted to the rush of being a weekend hooligan. The remake focuses on Dom, who was a minor character in the original. If the original was meant to be a socio-political critique of the UK in the 80s, the remake is a coming-of-age story that almost feels nostalgic. Dom eventually realizes that being a football hooligan isn’t for him but the remake seems to suggest that he’ll always value the memories.
The remake can’t really compare to the original, mostly because the remake doesn’t have Gary Oldman’s ferocious performance or Alan Clarke’s focused and gritty direction. Taken on its own, though, the remake is not bad. Calum MacNab is likable and relatable as Dom and Paul Anderson gives a good performance as Bex. Anderson doesn’t try to imitate Oldman but instead brings his own spin to the character. At first, Anderson’s Bex seems as if he’s considerably more buffoonish than Oldman’s Bex but, in the context of the remake, it works. In the remake, it’s easy to underestimate Bex but give him a strange look or say the wrong thing and he’ll headbutt you just as quickly the Gary Oldman did to anyone who crossed him in the original. The remake doesn’t have the original’s political subtext. Instead, director Nick Love focuses more on historical nostalgia, stylized fight scenes, and the camaraderie that Dom initially finds in the firm. The fights in the original were brutal and not always easy to watch. The fights in the remake are exciting, up until it becomes obvious that Bex is losing his mind.
The remake of The Firm doesn’t do much to improve on the other but, when taken on its own terms, it’s a watchable story of football hooliganism.
William McNamara plays Jeremy, who was given up for adoption 24 years ago and has never gotten over it. After killing his adoptive parents, his birth father, someone’s mistress, and a private investigator played by Tia Carrere, Jeremy wants to celebrate his 25th birthday by killing his birth mother, Sandy (Lesley Anne Warren). However, Jeremy wants to draw out Sandy’s suffering so he comes up with a plot so complex that it’s hard to believe that anyone could actually pull it off.
After Jeremy finds out that Sandy’s new husband, Ted (Donald Sutherland, massively slumming), is the head of a small brokerage firm, Jeremy reads every book that he can find and somehow become an expert on the stock market. Even though Jeremy could have a high-paying job with any firm, he wants to work for Ted’s little firm. Ted hires Jeremy and Jeremy proceeds to worm his way into Ted and Sandy’s life. Jeremy also frames Ted for securities fraud, which leads to Ted losing his job and being blacklisted by all of Ted’s highly ethical Wall Street colleagues. (Yes, I managed to write that with a straight face.) Despite the fact that Jeremy is obviously disturbed and that Ted and Sandy’s life starts to fall apart from the exact moment that Jeremy becomes a part of it, only Ted and Sandy’s son, Chris (Christian Tessier), suspects that there’s something strange about Jeremy.
This is one of those dumb revenge thrillers that is dependent upon everyone in the movie being as dumb as possible. Even Jeremy turns out to be dumb. After killing almost everyone that he meets, Jeremy suddenly decides to keep one person alive and, of course, that decision comes back to haunt Jeremy in the end. Jeremy is smart enough that he can trick people into believing that he’s a brilliant stock broker but he’s dumb enough to make an obvious mistake. Of course, everyone else is dumb enough to to not catch on to the fact that Jeremy is a sociopath so the mass dumbness evens out in the end.
Probably the most interesting thing about this movie is that, somehow, Donald Sutherland ended up starring in it. Even great actors have to put food on the table and hopefully, Sutherland ate well as a result of starring in Natural Enemy.
If you want to see a truly great performance, watch Tim Roth in Alan Clarke’s Made In Britain.
Roth, who was 21 years old at the time, plays Trevor, a working class British teenager who is also a racist skinhead, one who has a swastika on his forehead. Trevor is sometimes clever, occasionally quick-witted, always angry, and often remarkably ignorant. He’s smart enough to know that he doesn’t have much of a future but he’s still too immature to accept that he’s largely to blame. Instead, Trevor blames the immigrants who he claims have invaded Britain and taken away all of the opportunities that should otherwise go to him.
After Trevor gets arrested for both shoplifting and for throwing a rock at a Pakistani, Trevor is taken to an assessment centre, where he’ll be expected to regularly check-in until his punishment is handed down. Despite facing the prospect of being sent to a borstal (which, for our American readers, is essentially a reformer school), Trevor continues to defiantly commit crimes. He steals a car. He vandalizes a job centre. He huffs inhalants and even pays another taunting visit to the Pakastani man. Accompanying Trevor on some of his journeys is Errol (Terry Richards), his roommate at the assessment centre. (It may seem strange, especially to viewers in the States, that the white supremacist Trevor would befriend the black Errol but, like many British skinheads in the 80s, Trevor focuses the majority of his hate on immigrants.)
It’s easy to dislike Trevor and Trevor often seems to go out of his way to alienate everyone who he meets. Trevor is angry about the lot that he’s been given in life. His parents are nowhere to be seen. He has no prospects. He has no future. He spends all day surrounded by poverty and he resents the immigrants who have somehow found success in Britain while he’s struggling to get by. Trevor has nothing to look forward to in the future and he’s pissed off about it, which has left him vulnerable to the poisonous philosophy of racism. Trevor is always angry and he’s always looking for way to act on that anger. He’s also intelligent enough to secretly realize, even if he won’t fully admit to himself, that he’s full of shit but he’s trapped himself in his role. One gets the feeling that Trevor had the potential to make something out of himself but his rage and his impulsive manner have, at only the age of 16, left him with no futre. Even if he eventually rejects racism, the swastika on his forehead is going to leave him branded for life. It’s only towards the end of the film, after a police officer explains — in painstaking details — just hopeless Trevor’s situation is, that Trevor allows his mask to slip a little. But Trevor only allows himself to appear defeated for a few minutes before his defiant smirk returns.
Tim Roth was only 21 years old when he made his acting debut in the role of Trevor and he gives a brilliant performance. If you didn’t know who Tim Roth was, you would be excused for thinking that director Alan Clarke had gone out and cast an actual skinhead in the role. Roth tears into the role with a frightening intensity. Also of note is the gritty cinematography of Chris Menges, who uses a Steadicam to follow Trevor as he walks through his daily routine and to capture why someone like Trevor feels as if there’s no future to being made in Britain.
Nick Denato (Lee Horsley) is a world-famous photographer. His wife, Ellie (Kirstie Alley!), is a renowned doctor. They have homes in San Francisco and Africa and they regularly fly from one continent to another. The Denatos used to be called “jet-setters,” back when flying back and forth was seen as a positive instead of as a crime against the environment.
Despite the fact that Ellie is pregnant, Nick leaves his wife behind in San Francisco so that he can explore Nepal with his buddy Scott (Robert Englund!!) and Scott’s young and leggy assistant, Robin (Courtney Thorne-Smith!!!!). While Nick is away, Ellie has a miscarriage. Nick flies home but it’s too late. His wife already resents him for not being there when she needed him. It doesn’t help that, a week later, Scott and Robin come to visit and Scott tells a story about how he nearly fell off a cliff. “And where were you, buddy!?” Scott says to Nick with a laugh, forgetting that Nick was back home with his hospitalized wife. An awkward silence follows.
Ellie can tell that there is an obvious attraction between Nick and Robin. Nick denies it and then, to prove Ellie wrong, he cheats on her but not with Robin. Instead, Nick cheats with Ellie’s best friend, Eileen (Laura O’Brien). Ellie divorces Nick, stops talking to Eileen, and gets involved with Etienne (Michael Carven). Nick returns to Africa, where he spends his nights listening to opera in a tent and thinking about how much he loves his his ex-wife.
Infidelity was made for television and it used to come on late night television frequently in the 90s, mostly because of its cast. Not only did the cast features Rebecca Howe but also Freddy Krueger and whoever it was that Courtney Thorne-Smith played on Melrose Place. The main problem with the film is that Kirstie Alley and Lee Horsley have zero chemistry so you don’t really care if they get divorced or if they get back together. The other problem is that Lee Horsley is a convincing cowboy but he’s not as convincing as a sophisticated Italian-American photographer who spends his spare time listening to opera. The movie also cops out by having Nick cheat with a fairly minor character rather than with Robin. On the plus side, the movie’s got Robert Englund playing the type of role that he almost always played in his pre-Nightmare on Elm Street days, the loyal friend. What’s interesting about Englund’s performance here is that he had already played Freddy Krueger three times before playing Scott in Infidelity. In fact, Infidelity aired at the same time that Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors was still playing in theaters. Englund is likable as Scott and the film shows what type of career Englund probably would have had if David Warner hadn’t turned the role of Freddy down in the first Nightmare on Elm Street.
The year is 1961 and the young and dynamic John F. Kennedy (Robert Pine) has been elected president. While the rest of the nation waits to see how Kennedy will lead, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (Jack Warden) is convinced that he will continue to do what he’s always done. As he explains it to his aide and only friend, Clyde Tolson, Hoover is a longtime friend of President Kennedy’s father, Joseph (Barry Morse). Hoover knows how the Kennedys made their money and he also knows that the Kennedys probably stole the election.
Hoover quickly discovers that John F. Kennedy isn’t going to be like the other presidents under which he has served. Kennedy appoints his self-righteous brother, Robert (Nicholas Campbell), as attorney general and Robert immediately sets out to make Hoover’s life unbearable. When Hoover brings the brothers evidence that civil rights leader Martin Luther King (Leland Gantt) is not only associating with known radicals but that he also cheats on his wife, John and Bobby just laugh at him. While John pursues an affair with Marilyn Monroe (Heather Thomas) and Bobby tries to reign in the FBI’s excesses, Hoover continues to collect information for his files and schemes to outlast both Kennedys.
Hoover vs. The Kennedys was a made-for-TV movie, one of the many films that have been made about the conflicts between the Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover. Since a good deal of the film is made up of Hoover and the Kennedy Brothers snapping at each other on the phone and then telling their closest aides about how much they dislike each other, it seems hyperbolic to call their relationship the “second civil war.” Though the film does go as far as to suggest that Hoover didn’t make much of an effort to investigate the background of Lee Harvey Oswald, it doesn’t go any further when it comes to the theories surrounding John Kennedy’s assassination. As well, the film is one of the rare ones to not speculate that Hoover and Clyde Tolson were more than just friends. Instead, Hoover vs. The Kennedys concentrates more on all of the scandalous stories surrounding the Kennedy brothers. The mob connections. The womanizing. The arrogance. It’s all recreated here. Perhaps because this was a Canadian production, Hoover vs The Kennedys doesn’t portray anyone positively.
The acting is a mixed bag. Nicholas Campbell is believably abrasive as Bobby while Robert Pine was several years too old to be a convincing JFK. Heather Thomas is an adequate Marilyn Monroe while Leland Gantt comes across as too emotional to be a believable Martin Luther King. (In Gantt’s defense, the movie does not seem to know what to do with the character of King, treating the civil rights icon like a prop to be trotted out whenever some Hoover/Kennedy conflict is needed.) The film’s best performance comes from Jack Warden, who plays Hoover as being a puritanical hypocrite who knows that, no matter who tries to push him out, he’s not going anywhere unless he wants to. Hoover outlasted several presidents and Warden portrays him as being the ultimate political survivor.
As far as Kennedy films are concerned, Hoover vs. The Kennedys is okay but it doesn’t offer up anything new. Some of the most important roles are miscast and the movie never goes into much depth, beyond repeating all of the usual rumors. Jack Warden’s a good J. Edgar Hoover, though. The movie is not easy to find but it has been uploaded on to YouTube. And, if you can’t find the movie, you can always order the novelization off of Amazon.
