Category Archives: Film Review

A Movie A Day #241: Distant Justice (1992, directed by Tôru Murakawa)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Inspector Rio (Bunta Sugawara) is visiting Boston for the first time.  When his wife accidentally photographs a drug deal in process, his family his attacked.  Rio’s wife is killed.  His daughter is kidnapped. When Rio goes to the local police, he gets no help.  It does not matter that Chief Bradfield (George Kenendy!) is an old friend of his.  Bradfield is on the verge of retirement and he knows that almost every cop in his precinct is corrupt.  The drug syndicate is so powerful that even the local politicians (represented by David Carradine in the role of Joe Foley) are in their back pocket.  Rio is told to go back to Japan but instead, Rio wages war on the Boston syndicate himself.  With the help of one of Boston’s only honest cops (Eric Lutes) and Bradfield, Rio sets out to rescue his daughter and get justice!  Distant justice!

Distant Justice is a typical low-budget 90s action film.  Bystanders get shot, bad guys get blown up, and there’s a shot of someone screaming as he plunges to his death.  The problem with Distant Justice is that it totally wastes David Carradine in a nothing role as a crooked politician.  If Carradine is in a movie about a cop seeking vengeance on a drug lord, Carradine either has to play the cop or he has to be play the drug lord.  If he is cast in any role other than that, the movie has to be considered a failure.  George Kennedy is his usual likable self (Kennedy built one of the longest careers in the movie on pure likability) but even that cannot make up for not taking advantage of having David Carradine as a member of the cast.  Distant Justice is a missed opportunity.

Little Tin God: SHIELD FOR MURDER (United Artists 1954)

Posted on by gary loggins

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Edmond O’Brien  is big, burly, and brutal in 1954’s SHIELD FOR MURDER, a grim film noir about a killer cop trapped in that ol’ inevitable downward spiral. It’s a good (though not great) crime drama that gave the actor a seat in the director’s chair, sharing credit with another first timer, Howard W. Koch. The film, coming at the end of the first noir cycle, strives for realism, but almost blows it in the very first scene when the shadow of a boom mike appears on an alley fence! Chalk it up to first-timer’s jitters, and a budget that probably couldn’t afford retakes.

O’Brien, noted for such noir thrillers as THE KILLERS , WHITE HEAT, and DOA, stars as crooked cop Barney Nolan, who murders a bookie in that alley I just mentioned and rips him off for 25 grand. Apartently, this isn’t the first time Nolan’s killed, with the…

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A Movie A Day #240: The Funny Farm (1983, directed by Ron Clark)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Mark Champlin (Miles Chapin) is a fresh-faced, aspiring comedian from Cleveland who drives across the country, listening to tapes of Steve Martin.  He arrives in Los Angeles, hoping to become a star.  Despite being too naive and trusting, Mark starts to find success in the cut-throat entertainment industry.  Soon, he is performing at the Funny Farm, a comedy club owned by Gail Corbin (Eileen Brennan, giving the exact same performance that Melissa Leo gave in Showtime’s I’m Dying Up Here).  Mark befriends the other comedians, finds love, and hopes for his big break.

There have been several movies and television shows about the drama that goes on behind the scenes in the world of comedy.  It’s rare that they ever turn out well.  For every successful movie about the struggle to make a living by telling jokes, there are a hundred movies like Punchline or this one.  Whereas Punchline tried to pass Sally Field off as an up-and-coming stand-up comic, The Funny Farm was full of actual comedians.  Almost everyone in the film is playing a thinly disguised versions of themselves and snippets of their acts are used throughout the movie.  (Probably the best known member of the cast is Howie Mandel.)  Unfortunately, none of their acts seem to be very funny.  Miles Chapin comes across like every forgettable comic who ever bombed on The Tonight Show.

Eileen Brennan does a good job as the club owner, even if she is underused.  There is also a good scene where the younger comedians meet a legendary, older comic who turns out to be a racist asshole.  During this scene, The Funny Farm actually has something to say about the way comedy progressed and changed over time.  Otherwise, The Funny Farm is forgettable.

A Movie A Day #239: Act of Vengeance (1986, directed by John Mackenzie)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Act of Vengeance is an uncompromising look at union corruption and how it hurts the workers while benefitting the bosses.

The year is 1969 and the United Mine Workers of America is one of the biggest and most powerful labor unions in the country.  The UMWA was founded to protect the rights of miners but the current union president, Tony Boyle (Wilford Brimley), is more concerned with enriching himself and consolidating his own power.  Despised by the workers that he represents, Boyle has managed to stay in power through fixed elections and his own fearsome reputation.  When 80 West Virginia miners are killed in an accident, Boyle defends the owners.  That is the last straw for Jock Yablonski (Charlies Bronson), a lifelong miner and proud union man.  Yablonski runs against Boyle for the UMWA presidency and, when the election is stolen from him, Yablonski challenges the results.

Boyle’s solution?  Working through one of his supporters (played by Hoyt Axton), Boyle hires three assassins (Robert Schenkkan, Maury Chaykin, and a young Keanu Reeves) and orders them to kill not only Yablonski but his entire family too.

With a name like Act of Vengeance and a star like Charles Bronson, it would be understandable to assume that this is another Cannon action film where Bronson gets vengeance by blowing away the bad guys.  That’s not the case, though.  Made for HBO, Act of Vengeance is based on a true story of union corruption and murder.  There is violence but very little of it comes from Bronson.  Instead, this is a well-made docudrama about what happens when workers are betrayed by the very people who are supposed to be looking out for them.

Bronson grew up working in the mines and he never forgot the poverty of his youth.  He knew men like the men depicted in this movie and Bronson gives one of his most naturalistic performances as Yablonski.  Brimley is at his gruffest as Boyle and the performances of the actors playing the three hapless but deadly assassins also feel authentic.  Ellen Burstyn and Ellen Barkin are also well-cast as, respectively, Yablonski’s wife and the wife of the main assassin.

Pre Code Confidential #14: THE HALF-NAKED TRUTH (RKO 1932)

Posted on by gary loggins

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Director Gregory LaCava is remembered today mainly for a pair of bona fide classics: MY MAN GODFREY and STAGE DOOR. LaCava, who started his career in early silent animation, was also responsible for THE HALF-NAKED TRUTH, a Pre-Code screwball comedy begging to be rediscovered. It’s a crazy, innovative, pedal-to-the-metal farce headlined by fast-talking Lee Tracy and “Mexican Spitfire” Lupe Velez as a pair of carny con artists who work their way up to The Great White Way in grand comic style.

Tracy does his rapid-fire spieling schtick as a carnival barker promoting hot-tempered tamale Lupe, a hootchie dancer who spends most of the movie wearing next to nothing. Together with pal Eugene Pallette , they leave the carny life behind (with the law on their tails!) and head for Broadway, where Lee promises Lupe he’ll make her a star. The trio pawn Lupe off as Turkish Princess Exotica (with Tracy pawning off an unwitting…

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A Movie A Day #238: Lawman (1971, directed by Michael Winner)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

In the 1880s, Jared Maddox (Burt Lancaster) is the marshal of the town of Bannock.  After a night of drinking and carousing leads to the accidental shooting of an old man, warrants are issued for the arrest of six ranch hands.  Maddox is determined to execute the arrest warrants but the problem is that the six men live in Sabbath, another town.  They all work for a wealthy rancher (Lee J. Cobb) and the marshal of Sabbath, Cotton Ryan (Robert Ryan), does not see the point in causing trouble when all of the men are likely to be acquitted anyway.  Maddox doesn’t care.  The law is the law and he does not intend to leave Sabbath until he has the six men.

Lawman starts out like a standard western, with a stranger riding into town, but then it quickly turns the western traditions on their head by portraying Marshal Maddox as being a rigid fanatic and the wealthy rancher as a morally conflicted man who does not want to resort to violence and who continually tries and fails to convince Maddox to leave.  In the tradition of Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah, there are no real heroes to be found in Lawman and, even when Maddox starts to reconsider his strict adherence to the law and refusal to compromise, it is too late to prevent the movie from ending in a bloody massacre.  Since Lawman was made in 1971, I initially assumed it was meant to be an allegory about the Vietnam War but then I saw that it was directed by Michael Winner, a director who specialized in tricking audiences into believing that his violent movie were deeper than they actually were.

Even if Lawman never reaches the heights of a revisionist western classic like Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, it is still pretty good, with old pros Lancaster, Ryan, Cobb, and Albert Salmi all giving excellent performances.  The cast is full of familiar faces, with everyone from Robert Duvall to Richard Jordan to Ralph Waite to Joseph Wiseman to John Beck showing up in small roles.  In America, Winner is best remembered for his frequent collaborations with Charles Bronson.  Chuck is not in Lawman, though it seems like he should have been and Lee J. Cobb’s rancher is named Vincent Bronson.  Winner would not make his first film with Charles Bronson until a year later, when he directed him in Chato’s Land.

A Movie A Day #237: Detention (2003, directed by Sidney J. Furie)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

It’s Die Hard in a school!

A group of gun-wielding drug runners have broken into Hamilton High so that they can use it as the base of operations for a huge drug deal.  With the Vice President scheduled to be traveling through town that weekend, they figure that the school will be deserted and no one will be paying attention to what’s going on.  What they failed to consider is that not every student goes home after the final bell rings.  One paraplegic student is still in the library, doing research.  Two more are in the auditorium, getting high.  There’s even a few “bad” kids in detention, including one of whom is pregnant.  Even worse, for the drug dealers, is that Sam Decker (Dolph Lundgren!) is in charge of detention.  He may teach phys ed and history but before he decided to help broaden young minds, Sam was an army ranger.

Of all of the performers who starred in direct-to-video action movies in the 90s and early aughts, Dolph Lundgren was the best actor.  When considering that his competition largely came from Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme, that may sound like damning with faint praise but the fact that Lundgren could actually memorize his lines and hit his marks actually did make a difference.  It is easy to imagine Detention with Lundgren and the results are not pretty.  Steven Seagal would have been too busy whispering his lines and waiting for his stunt double to show up.  Jean-Claude Van Damme would have gotten too caught up in doing the splits to waste his time worrying about the kids trapped in the auditorium.  Not Lundgren, though.  Dolph Lundgren’s too busy getting shit done to worry about any of that.

Though the action sequences are top notch, Detention would work better if the villains were Lundgren’s equal but they’re not.  One reason why Die Hard worked was because Alan Rickman and his men always seemed like they were capable of killing Bruce Willis.  In Detention, the main villains are three Hungarian punks and a flamboyant American, Chester Lamb (Alex Karzis), and none of them seem like they could even carry Dolph Lundgren’s shoes, much less defeat him in a combat situation.  Scenes where Chester pretends to be an innocent bystander seem like they were included to remind us of the first meeting between Alan Rickman and Bruce Willis in Die Hard but Chester Lamb is no Hans Gruber.  There is just no way that Dolph Lundgren is going to lose to someone named Chester Lamb.

Even with the underwhelming villains, Detention is a gloriously stupid action movie that is entertaining because Lundgren gives it his all.

Concrete Jungle: REPORT TO THE COMMISSIONER (United Artists 1975)

Posted on by gary loggins

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REPORT TO THE COMMISSIONER usually gets lumped in with the plethora of 70’s cop films, but I viewed it as a neo-noir. It’s structure tells the tale mainly in flashback, from the participating character’s differing perspective, and is dark as hell. I’m sure co-screenwriters Abby Mann and Ernest Tidyman were well aware of what they were doing: both men were former Oscar winners (Mann for JUDGEMENT AT NUREMBERG, Tidyman for THE FRENCH CONNECTION   ) familiar with the conventions of the genre. The solid cast features a powerhouse collection of 70’s character actors, led by Michael Moriarty’s patented over-the-edge performance as protagonist Bo Lockley.

Lockley is a young, idealistic cop caught up in circumstances beyond his control, snaring him in an inescapable downward spiral. The film opens with a pair of New York City detectives discovering the body of a young woman, who turns out to be one of their own, an undercover…

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A Movie A Day #236: Bad Blood (1994, directed by Tibor Takacs)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Though it is sometimes hard to remember, there more on late night Cinemax than just Shannon Tweed films like Scorned and Body Chemistry 3.  There were also Lorenzo Lamas action films, movies like the Snake Eater trilogy.  Though Lamas was a terrible actor, his direct-to-video efforts were always a hundred times more violent than everyone else’s and, for male viewers of a certain age, it did not hurt that his then-wife, Kathleen Kinmont, often showed up in various states of undress.

Kathleen Kinmont did not appear in Bad Blood but the movie made up for her absence by being so violent that it was originally given an NC-17 rating.  As a result, there are actually two versions of this movie floating around: the slightly cut R-rated Bad Blood and an unrated version called Viper.  (Interestingly, the violence in both Bad Blood and Viper is really no more graphic than the violence that was featured in a lot of mainstream films released in the mid-90s.)

In this one, Lorenzo Lamas is Travis Blackstone, a former cop who was kicked off the force after he destroyed evidence to protect his smarmy brother, Franklin (Hank Cheyne).  Travis was sent to prison but now that he is out, he is working in a shipping yard and coaching little league baseball.  (I do not know many parents that would be happy with an ex-con as their child’s little league coach but that is the power of Lorenzo Lamas.)  Unfortunately, Franklin has gotten in trouble again, embezzling millions from the mafia.  Not only does Travis have to find the money to repay the mob but he also has to keep Franklin safe.  Unfortunately, since Franklin is now involved with Travis’s ex, Rhonda (Frankie Thorn), Travis’s new girlfriend (Kimberly Kates) assumes that he is cheating on her and tells the mob where they can track down the Blackstone brothers.

The main bad guy, Chang, is played by Joe Son.  (The unrated version begins with Chang giving a little girl a lollipop and then shooting her dead.)  Joe Son was a UFC fighter who was later revealed to be just as bad a guy in real life as he was in the movies.  After being convicted on rape in 2011, Son was sentenced to seven years to life.  As soon as he arrived in prison, he beat his cellmate to death and received an additional sentence of 27 years for voluntary manslaughter.

As for Bad Blood, by the standards of the typical Lorenzo Lamas action movie, it’s not bad.  The action is constant and fierce, with Travis gunning down a seemingly endless number of gangsters in designer suits.  Tibor Takacs was a better filmmaker than most of the directors that Lamas worked with and it appears that he managed to keep Lorenzo Lamas’s ego under control, the result being far less shots of Lamas posing than in any of the other movies that Lamas made during this period.  The production values of Bad Blood are also consistently better than what was on display in the Snake Eater films.  There is even a scene where Lamas not only flips over a speeding car but he shoots the driver while he is doing it.  Let’s see Steven Seagal or even Dolph Lundgren do that!

A Movie A Day #235: Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977, directed by Robert Aldrich)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

In Montana, four men have infiltrated and taken over a top-secret ICBM complex.  Three of the men, Hoxey (William Smith), Garvas (Burt Young), and Powell (Paul Winfield) are considered to be common criminals but their leader is something much different.  Until he was court-martialed and sentenced to a military prison, Lawrence Dell (Burt Lancaster) was a respected Air Force general.  He even designed the complex that he has now taken over.  Dell calls the White House and makes his demands known: he wants ten million dollars and for the President (Charles Durning) to go on television and read the contents of top secret dossier, one that reveals the real reason behind the war in Vietnam.  Dell also demands that the President surrender himself so that he can be used as a human shield while Dell and his men make their escape.

Until Dell made his demands known, the President did not even know of the dossier’s existence.  His cabinet (made up of distinguished and venerable character actors like Joseph Cotten and Melvyn Douglas) did and some of them are willing to sacrifice the President to keep that information from getting out.

Robert Aldrich specialized in insightful genre films and Twilight’s Last Gleaming is a typical example: aggressive, violent, sometimes crass, and unexpectedly intelligent.  At two hours and 30 minutes, Twilight’s Last Gleaming is overlong and Aldrich’s frequent use of split screens is sometimes distracting but Twilight’s Last Gleaming is still a thought-provoking film.  The large cast does a good job, with Lancaster and Durning as clear stand-outs.  I also liked Richard Widmark as a general with his own agenda and, of course, any movie that features Joseph Cotten is good in my book!  Best of all, Twilight’s Last Gleaming‘s theory about the reason why America stayed in Vietnam is entirely credible.

The Vietnam angle may be one of the reasons why Twilight’s Last Gleaming was one of the biggest flops of Aldrich’s career.  In 1977, audiences had a choice of thrilling to Star Wars, falling in love with Annie Hall, or watching a two and a half hour history lesson about Vietnam.  Not surprisingly, a nation that yearned for escape did just that and Twilight’s Last Gleaming flopped in America but found success in Europe.  Box office success or not, Twilight’s Last Gleaming is an intelligent political thriller that is ripe for rediscovery.