Film Review: Fatal Defense (dir by John Murlowski)

Posted on April 2, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Last night’s Lifetime premiere, Fatal Defense, opens with a nightmare scenario. Arden Walsh (Ashley Scott) is attacked in her home by a masked intruder. While her daughter, Emma (Sophie Guest), sleeps upstairs, Arden is bound and gagged in the living room. Fortunately, the intruder is scared off before he can do anything else but both Arden and her daughter are haunted by nightmares afterward.

What can Arden do to reclaim her safety?

Get a gun.

That was my immediate reaction. Just go out and buy a gun. The next time you think that you see someone wandering around in the back yard, fire a warning shot. If that doesn’t work, aim for the head. See, that’s one reason why I love my sister. I may be terrified of guns but she’s a great shot.

However, Arden doesn’t get a gun. Even though her totally kickass sister, Gwen (Laurie Fortier), suggests that Arden take advantage of her constitutional rights, Arden doesn’t want a gun in the house. Maybe she doesn’t trust Emma. Then again, she does live in the People’s Republic of California and it would probably be a lot more difficult for her to get a gun than it would be for me to get a gun here in Texas. Who knows?

So, since Jerry Brown won’t let her defend herself with a gun, what ever can Arden do?

She and Gwen do a google search for self-defense classes and they come across an old Geocities site for Logan Chase (David Cade). Logan not only knows how to break someone’s arm but he looks good without a shirt as well! Plus, he apparently teaches his self-defense class in a tiki bar. Gwen enrolls and, one montage later, she can now kick ass with the best of them!

(While I understand that you can learn how to do practically anything in a montage, I was still impressed. My knowledge of self-defense is basically either use mace or, if you can’t get to your mace, yell, “I don’t know you! That’s my purse!” and then kick like a Rockette.)

Unfortunately, Logan has some issues. He seems like a nice guy and a good teacher and it’s kind of sweet in a creepy way when he suddenly shows up at the Los Angeles Arboretum, where Arden is apparently one of two employees. However, Logan is soon talking about how his ex-girlfriend was murdered because she didn’t know to fight back. He also has a habit of suddenly yelling about how, if Arden doesn’t learn how to defend herself, she’ll never be able to fight off psychos like him. That may seem like a red flag but he is kind of cute and that GeoCities web site of his was pretty impressive. But then Logan suddenly puts handcuffs on Arden’s wrists and locks her in the trunk of his car. Things kind of go down hill after that…

My twitter friends and I had a lot of fun last night, watching and snarking on Fatal Defense. It was a fun and entertaining Lifetime film, one that mixed over the top melodrama with some real-world concerns. (I mean, let’s be honest. We all need to know how to defend ourselves. It’s a scary world.) This is one of those films where it’s best not to worry too much about whether or not the plot totally makes sense. Myself, I was amazed that Arden could afford such a nice and big house. I guess the Los Angeles Arboretum pays well. But, at the same time, that’s why we watch Lifetime movies! We don’t want to see the cramped apartments that most people live in. We want to see big beautiful houses and big beautiful melodrama. On both counts, Fatal Defense delivered.

That said, it’s still hard not to feel that Arden could have avoided a lot of trouble if she had just got a gun.

The only defense you need.

The TSL’s Grindhouse: Night Game (dir by Peter Masterson)

Posted on April 2, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Apparently, today is the opening day of the 2017 baseball season. The only reason that I know that is because of my sister Erin. I don’t know much about baseball, to be honest. I know that my city’s team is the Texas Rangers and they were once owned by George W. Bush. I know that Houston has a team called the Astros. But, really, the main thing that I know about baseball is that my sister absolutely loves it.

So, when Erin asked me to review a baseball movie today, how could I say no? I mean, I may know next to nothing about baseball but I certainly know something about movies!

For that reason, I’m going to take a few minutes to tell you about a 1989 film called Night Game. Night Game is many things. It’s a movies that features a lot of baseball, even though it’s not really a sports film per se. It’s a police procedural, though the film itself suggests that the police often don’t have the slightest idea what they’re actually doing. It’s a serial killer film, though its killer is never quite as loquacious as we’ve come to expect in this age of Hannibal Lecter and Dexter Morgan. At times, it’s a slasher film, though it’s never particularly graphic. Mostly, Night Game is a Texas film.

Directed by native Texan Peter Masterson, Night Game is like the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre in that it is one of those rare films that not only takes place in Texas but was actually filmed on location. To be exact, Night Game was filmed in both Galveston and Houston. The entire film has a friendly and quirky Texas feel to it. Masterson may not have been a great visual director (If not for some language and nudity, Night Game could pass for a TV movie) but Night Game is a movie where the plot is less important than capturing the little details of a time. a location, and the people who lived there. Though Night Game is 28 years old, it’s portrait of my home state still seemed very contemporary to me. I guess Texas hasn’t really changed that much over the past few decades.

As for the film’s plot, someone is murdering young women in Galveston and leaving their bodies on the boardwalk. Obviously, that’s not going to be good for attracting Spring Break revelers. The film doesn’t make any effort to keep the murderer’s identity a secret. We see his face fairly early on. We also see that he has a hook for a hand. Eventually, we do learn the murderer’s motives. They’re pretty silly but then again, individual motives rarely make sense to anyone other than the guy with the hook for a hand.

Detective Mike Seaver (Roy Scheider) has been assigned to solve the case. One thing that I really liked about Night Game was that Mike was pretty much just a normal guy with a job to do. He wasn’t self-destructive. He wasn’t always drunk. He wasn’t suicidal. He wasn’t always lighting a cigarette and staring at the world through bloodshot eyes while the lighting reflected off of his artful stubble. He was just a detective trying to do his job and get home on time. After sitting through countless films about self-destructive cops and criminal profilers, the normalcy of Mike was a nice change of pace.

Mike does have a backstory. He used to play baseball and he still loves the game. He goes to every Astros home game in Houston. He’s in love with Roxy (Karen Young), who works at the stadium. Things are only slightly complicated by the fact that Mike had a previous relationship with Roxy’s mother (Carlin Glynn). Don’t worry, Mike’s not secretly Roxy’s father or anything like that. It’s not that type of movie.

Anyway, Mike is such a fan of baseball that he realizes something. The killer only strikes on nights that the Astros win a game. And he only strikes if a certain pitcher was throwing the ball. The obvious solution would be to shoot the pitcher in the arm and end his athletic career. However, Mike’s too nice a guy to do that. Instead, he just tries to track down the killer…

And, as I said, Night Game actually isn’t a bad little movie. Make no mistake, it’s a very slight movie. At no point are you going to say, “I’m going to remember that scene for the rest of my life!” That said, it’s a surprisingly good-natured film and Roy Scheider’s performance is likable and unexpectedly warm. With all that in mind, Night Game is an entertaining and (mildly) bloody valentine to my home state.

Plus, it’s a baseball movie! I don’t know much about baseball but, if my sister loves it, it has to be a good thing!

I Am Legend: THE OMEGA MAN (Warner Brothers 1971)

Posted on April 1, 2017 by gary loggins

cracked rear viewer

When I was a lad of 13, back in the Stone Age, I saw THE OMEGA MAN on the big screen during it’s first run. I remember thinking it was real cool, with Charlton Heston mowing down a bunch of mutant bad guys with his sub-machine gun, some funny one-liners, and a few semi-naked scenes with Rosalind Cash. What more could an adolescent kid ask for in a movie? Now that I’m (ahem!) slightly older, I recently re-watched the film, wondering just how well, if at all, it would hold up.

I’m happy to report THE OMEGA MAN, despite some flaws in logic, stands the test of time as a post-apocalyptic sci-fi action/adventure, with a touch of Gothic horror thrown in. The film is the second of three based on Richard Matheson’s novel I AM LEGEND, the first written by Matheson himself (under the pseudonym Logan Swanson) as THE LAST MAN ON EARTH, a 1964…

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A Movie A Day #84: Made In U.S.A. (1987, directed by Ken Friedman)

Posted on April 1, 2017 by Jedadiah Leland

Dar (Adrian Pasdar) and Tuck (Chris Penn) are two losers. Dar is angry. Tuck is a moron. They live in a dying Pennsylvania industrial town, where they have no future. Dar is worried that the air has been poisoned by the nearby coal mine. He and Tuck decide to go to California so that they can look for a woman whose picture they’ve seen in a magazine. Since Dar and Tucker have no money and no one is willing to pick up two hitchhikers who look like they are on sabbatical from the Manson Family, they end up having to steal cars and hold up convenience stores. They also pick up a mentally unstable woman named Annie (Lori Singer). Annie may be dying because of all the pollution in the world. Dar and Tuck take the time to transport a Native American runaway back to her reservation, where they both get scalped. Mostly, Dar and Tuck just drive through some of the ugliest parts of America and talk about how, because of pollution, everything is all messed up.

In the 1990s, Made In U.S.A. used to show up frequently on HBO. It’s a lousy movie, featuring one of the worst performances of Chris Penn’s career. (Adrian Pasdar is also pretty bad but more is expected from Chris Penn than from Adrian Pasdar.) Made in U.S.A. does provide a contrast to the relentlessly pro-American films that dominated the box office in the 1980s but it’s really only noteworthy for the soundtrack, which features songs by Sonic Youth and Timbuk3.

Whatever you do, do not mistake this Made In U.S.A. for Jean-Luc Godard’s.

Harrow Alley, A Film That Never Was

Posted on April 1, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Harrow Alley (1880, Gustave Dore)

Originally, I was thinking that, since it’s April Fools Day, I would write a 2,000-word review of an “obscure” Italian horror film and then, after I gotten everyone all enthused about tracking down this masterpiece, I would go “April Fools!”

But you know what?

I freaking hate it when people do stuff like that. Seriously, that’s a really awful way to treat your loyal readers. If any of the blogs that you follow pull anything like that on you today, I suggest you unfollow them and instead, switch your allegiance over to us. We love you.

But anyway! Since I won’t be writing about a fictional film, I thought I might take this opportunity to tell you about Harrow Alley, a screenplay that has frequently been described as the best script to never be produced.

(Now, I should admit that one of the people who said that was a writer for The Huffington Post and usually, disagreeing with The Huffington Post is point of honor for me. But, seriously, Harrow Alley sounds so intriguing that I’m willing to make an exception to this rule.)

Harrow Alley was written, in 1970, by a screenwriter named Walter Brown Newman. It’s a historical film, one that is set in the 17th century. The Bubonic Plague is ravaging London but the citizens of the Harrow Alley neighborhood are simply trying to survive from day-to-day without sacrificing their humanity. Harry is a well-meaning alderman who, after every other official flees the city, finds himself as the unofficial leader of Harrow Alley. He’s an optimist who provides strength to the entire neighborhood but the demands of being positive in the face of death start to wear on him. His wife is pregnant and, much like Rick Grimes in The Walking Dead, he has to wonder whether it’s right to bring a child into this Hellish world. As the film progresses, he watches as his friends and neighbors die of the plague. He’s even forced to kill his beloved dog.

Harry befriends Ratsey, a thief who survived the plague when he was a child. With everyone wrongly convinced that Ratsey is now immune to the plague, the former thief becomes one of the most respected men in the neighborhood. (Because of his “immunity,” he is also one of the few people who can help dispose of the dead.) With Harry as his mentor, Ratsey becomes respectable. Ratsey starts out as a cynical opportunist but, in the middle of the Great Plague of London, he discovers his humanity. Even when Ratsey learns that no one is immune to the plague, even if they’ve had it before, he does not flee. He continues to help dispose of the dead.

But even as Ratsey becomes stronger, Harry grows weaker. When his wife and child die, Harry vanishes. Ratsey steps into his place. Ratsey becomes the new leader of Harrow Alley. And, months later, when Ratsey arrests a beggar who has just killed a man, he is shocked to discover that the beggar is Harry.

And so the film ends.

Sounds like a really happy movie, doesn’t it?

And did I mention that the script is apparently 180 pages, which would translate to three hours of screen time?

It’s easy to see why Harrow Alley has never been produced. Can you imagine being the advertising genius who has to make a three-hour film about the Bubonic Plague into a box office success? That said, the film still sounds incredibly intriguing to me. Maybe it’s because I’m a history nerd, but the story just fascinates me. From what I’ve heard, this is a script that literally has everything: tragedy, romance, and even a little dark comedy.

Interestingly enough, Harrow Alley apparently came close to being produced in the 80s. In this projected version, Harry would have been played by George C. Scott while a young Mel Gibson would have played Ratsey. It sounds like brilliant casting to me.

Harry?

Ratsey?

If they produced the film today, I could just easily imagine Gibson in the role of Harry and maybe Tom Hardy as Ratsey.

(Bring the Mad Maxes together!)

Harry?

Ratsey?

Though Walter Brown Newman died in 1993, his script is still out there. Maybe, someday, it will be produced. If it is, I’ll definitely be there to watch it.

All three hours of it.

A Movie A Day #83: Shattered: If Your Kid’s On Drugs (1986, directed by Burr Smidt)

Posted on March 31, 2017 by Jedadiah Leland

Shattered: If Your Kid’s On Drugs is a typical anti-drug video from the 1980s. The story is familiar after school special material. Kim (Megan Follows) and Rick (Rick Segall) are upper middle class kids who live in the suburbs. Rick is a track star. Kim is at the top of her class. That all changes when they start hanging out with the local drug dealer (Dermot Mulroney), who gets Rick hooked on marijuana and Kim hooked on cocaine. Kim gets an F on her report card. Rick can no longer jump the hurdles. Eventually, their parents stop drinking and taking valium long enough to force them into rehab. The message is that tough love is the only solution.

The only thing that makes Shattered: If Your Kid’s On Drugs noteworthy is the strange and unexpected presence of Burt Reynolds and Judd Nelson, playing themselves and commenting on the action. The first scene in the video is Burt and Judd driving their pickup truck through the suburbs, talking about how nice it is. “Lot of nice restaurants,” Burt says. “Are you going to buy me lunch?” Judd asks. “Lot of nice restaurants,” Burt replies. “This town is the American Dream,” Judd says. “Or the American nightmare,” Burt adds. When Kim and Rick are getting high in Dermot Mulroney’s chartreuse microbus, Burt and Judd sit on a picket fence and shoot the crap. Burt can’t understand why teens would use drugs and Judd reminds him that it has been a while since he was a teenager. Rumor has it that both Burt and Judd appeared in this video to fulfill court-ordered community service.

Everything works out in the end. If you have any doubt, just look at Burt giving us a thumbs up before the final credits roll.

Lisa Cleans Out The DVR: Road Gang (dir by Louis King)

Posted on March 30, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

I was going to start this review with a quote from Gandhi: “A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its prisoners.” That was something that I first heard from a perpetually stoned ex-seminarian who used to live in a trailer park in Lake Dallas. I always figured that, being as stoned as he usually was, he probably knew what he was talking about but, upon doing research for this review, I have discovered that Gandhi actually didn’t say that. What Gandhi said was, “A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members.” Fortunately, it’s the same basic idea and, regardless of how you phrase it, it’s a quote that perfectly encapsulates the message of the 1936 film, Road Gang.

Road Gang tells the story of Jim (Donald Woods) and Bob (Carlyle Moore, Jr.). Bob is fun-loving. Jim is more serious and engaged to marry heiress Barbara Winston (Kay Linaker). Jim and Bob live in an unnamed Southern state (though I’m going to assume that the state is supposed to be Georgia, just because). Jim has just written an article that exposes the corruption of political boss, J.W. Moett (Joe King). The article is so good that both Jim and Bob have been offered jobs in Chicago! There’s a lot of corrupt political figures who can be exposed in Chicago!

However, while driving up north, Jim and Bob are arrested on trumped-up charges. At first, Jim and Bob laugh off Moett’s desperation but, unfortunately, another criminal happens to be breaking out of jail at the same time that Jim and Bob arrives for booking. That criminal kills the arresting officer and then forces Jim and Bob to drive him across the state. Eventually, the police recapture the three of them. However, the escaping criminal is killed and Jim and Bob are arrested as accessories. Under the advice of their lawyer, Mr. Dudley (Edward Van Sloan), they plead guilty and accept a deal. What they don’t know is that Dudley works for Moett and that, as a result of pleading guilty, they are going to be sentenced to five years in a prison camp.

Okay, so the film gets off to a pretty melodramatic start. And, to be honest, the entire film is extremely melodramatic. A lot of time is devoted to Barbara trying find evidence that Jim and Bob were set up, something that is made difficult by the fact that Barbara’s father, like Mr. Dudley, works for Moett. Fast-paced and not-always-logical, this is a B-movie, in every sense of the term.

And yet, as melodramatic as it is, Road Gang is deadly serious when it comes to portraying the brutality of the prison camp. From the minute that Bob and Jim arrive, they find themselves at the mercy of the corrupt warden and his sadistic guards. The prisoners are largely used as slave labor and subjected to punishments that are often arbitrary and extreme.

Road Gang doesn’t flinch when it comes to portraying why prison often not only fails to rehabilitate but also helps to transform minor offenders into hardened criminals. There’s a disturbing scene in which Jim, Bob, and the other prisoners are forced to listen as another prisoner is whipped. The crack of the whip and his howls of agony explode across the soundtrack in a symphony of pain and sadism. Jim and Bob have two very different reactions to being in prison. One survives. One allows himself to be killed rather than take one more day in confinement.

Road Gang is often compared to I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang. Actually, beyond the theme of a fatally compromised justice system, there is no comparison. The angry and fact-based I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang is a hundred times better and, quite frankly, Donald Woods was no Paul Muni. However, Road Gang still has its moments of power. Decades after it was made, the issues it raises continue to be relevant. Do we send people to prison to rehabilitate them or to punish them and are the two goals mutually exclusive? And how can we say that someone has “paid his debt to society” when, even after a prisoner serves his time, the stigma of having been imprisoned closes and locks most doors of opportunity?

Road Gang shows up occasionally on TCM. There’s where I recorded it on January 23rd of this year.

A Movie A Day #82: Sweetgrass (2009, directed by Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor)

Posted on March 30, 2017 by Jedadiah Leland

101 minutes of sheep and mountains.

That’s the best description that I can give of Sweetgrass. Sweetgrass is a documentary about shepherds in Montana who take a herd of sheep across the Beartooth Mountains. There is no real plot. The shepherds are not interviewed and very little is revealed about who they are. They are men of few words so mostly the only sound heard is the constant baas of the sheep. One of the shepherds does yell at the sheep, usually to curse at them for wandering off. It is only at the end of the documentary that it is revealed that this was the last time that the shepherds herded their sheep and that their ranch, after 104 years of operation, closed the following year.

The scenery is often amazing and the documentary works as a record of and a tribute to a dying way of life. Sweetgrass does not attempt to explain why these men do the work that they do or why the ranch is finally having to close. It is a pure documentary, with no outside commentary, making it both enlightening and frustrating. How much you enjoy Sweetgrass will depend on how much patience you have for baaing sheep.

A Movie A Day #81: The Great White Hype (1996, directed by Reginald Hudlin)

Posted on March 29, 2017 by Jedadiah Leland

The Rev. Fred Sultan (Samuel L. Jackson) has a problem. He is the richest and the best known fight promoter in America but the current (and undefeated) heavyweight champion is just too good. No one is paying to watch James “The Grim Reaper” Roper (Damon Wayans) fight because Roper always wins. Sultan has a plan, though. Before Roper turned professional, he lost a fight to Terry Conklin (Peter Berg). Conklin has long since retired from boxing and is now a heavy metal, progressive musician. Sultan convinces Conklin to come out of retirement and face Roper in a rematch. Since Conklin is white and Roper is black, Sultan stands to make a killing as white boxing fans get swept up in all the hype about Conklin being the latest “great white hope.”

In the days leading up to the fight, crusading journalist Mitchell Kane (Jeff Goldblum) attempts to expose the crooked Sultan before getting seduced into his inner circle. Meanwhile, boxer Marvin Shabazz (Michael Jace) and his manager, Hassan El Rukk’n (Jamie Foxx), unsuccessfully pursue a match with Roper. Conklin gets back into shape while Roper eats ice cream and watches Dolemite.

In its attempt to satirize boxing, The Great White Hype runs into a huge problem. The fight game is already so shady that it is beyond satire. This was especially true in the 90s, when the The Great White Hype was first released. (Even more than the famous Larry Holmes/Gerry Cooney title fight, The Great White Hype’s obvious inspiration was the heavily promoted, two-minute fight between Mike Tyson and Peter McNeeley.) The Great White Hype is a very busy film but nothing in it can match Oliver McCall’s mental breakdown in the middle of his fight with Lennox Lewis, Andrew Golota twice fighting Riddick Bowe and twice getting disqualified for low blows, or Mike Tyson biting off Evander Holyfield’s ear.

The Great White Hype has an only in the 90s supporting cast, featuring everyone from Jon Lovitz to Cheech Marin to, for some reason, Corbin Bernsen. Damon Wayans is the least convincing heavyweight champion since Tommy Morrison essentially played himself in Rocky V. The Rev. Sultan was meant to be a take on Don King and Samuel L. Jackson was a good pick for the role but the real Don King is so openly corrupt and flamboyant that he’s almost immune to parody.

When it comes to trying to take down Don King, I think Duke puts it best.

Lisa Cleans Out Her DVR: Girls Night Out (dir by Philippe Gagnon)

Posted on March 28, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Last night, before I went to bed, I continued to clean out my DVR by watching a Lifetime film, Girls Night Out. I recorded Girls Night Out off of the Lifetime Movie Network on January 22nd. It was the earliest recording on my DVR.

Girls Night Out tells the story of McKenzie (MacKenzie Mauzy) and three of her closest friends. They’ve been close since college. They were all in the same sorority. They have a long history laughs, pranks, fun, and barely concealed resentment. Now, they have all graduated and they’ve all found individual success. McKenzie is marrying Reese (Cody Ray Thompson), who is nice but kind of boring.

While her friends take McKenzie out to celebrate, Reese runs into a guy at a bar. Brandon (Jacob Blair) seems nice but he’s not! In college, Brandon used to date McKenzie. But, one night, after getting her drunk, Brandon raped McKenzie. When McKenzie reported him, Brandon was kicked out of school. He lost all of his friends at his fraternity. He lost his chance to play in the NFL. Brandon wants revenge and that revenge starts with kidnapping Reese.

Brandon announces that, unless McKenzie and her friends follow his every order, he will kill Reese. He divides the four of them into two teams and then has them recreate extreme versions of some of the pranks they played in college. One team is sent searching for thrown-away food and used condoms. One team is ordered to sneak into a morgue and kiss a corpse. One friend has to strip down to her underwear while her teammate writes on her with a marker. Meanwhile, the other two friends have to go buy crack. And that’s only the beginning…

Girl’s Night Out is a film that asks, “How far would you go for your friends?” That’s the question that I found myself wondering as I watched. I never joined a sorority but, when I was in college, I had a group of friends who were like sisters to me. I called us the SBS, which stands for Sexy Bitch Squad. My friend Lea used to call us the BNC, which stood for Big Nose Crew, which I think was her sweet way of trying to make me feel better about my own nose. But regardless of what we were called, we were and are extremely close. So, I could definitely relate to the scenes involving the bachelorette party and the male strippers.

But, I asked myself, if someone’s fiancée was being held prisoner and being threatened with murder, would I go to the same lengths as the characters in Girls Night Out?

Probably not.

I mean, seriously — climbing into the dumpster and looking for a used condom? Ewwww. Kiss a corpse? No way! But, luckily, I know that none of the members of SBS (or the BNC) would ever ask me to. They know me well enough to know better. That’s the great thing about friendship. You don’t have to pretend like you’d wear high heels in a crack house just to keep your friend’s boyfriend from being murdered. You can be yourself, flaws and all.

As for the rest of Girls Night Out … well, it took it a while but it won me over. At first, everyone in the film seemed so shallow that I had a hard time imagining how I could ever have any sympathy for them. But then Brandon showed up and was such a hateful character (and Jacob Blair did such a good job of bringing this loathsome jerk to life) that I found myself really looking forward to seeing him get his comeuppance. Let’s face it — we’ve all had a Brandon in our lives and our greatest regret is that we never go a chance to witness him getting repeatedly kicked in his genitals. Knowing that Brandon would eventually get his ass kicked was more than enough to keep me watching the film.

It took a while but seeing Brandon get what he deserved made the film more than worth watchiing.