Category Archives: Film Review

The Films of 2025: Borderline (dir by Jimmy Warden)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Every year, Hollywood publishes The Black List.

The Black List is a survey of the unproduced screenplays that are considered the “most-liked” by various studio executive and producers.  It comes out the second Friday of December and it’s always the top news story for at least half the weekend.  After the weekend, everyone promptly forgets about it.

Now, I will admit that some good movies have been made from Black List scripts.  The King’s Speech, Hell or High Water, Argo, Promising Young Woman: they all appeared on the Black List.  But, to be honest, I’m far more interested in the amount of forgettable and downright bad movies that appeared on The Black List, some of them often listed near the top of list.  Anonymous, The Bucket List, Cedar Rapids, The Beaver, Broken City, The Ides of March: they all appeared on the Black List too.  Appearing on The Black List is no guarantee of quality.

That’s bring us to Borderline.  The screenplay for Borderline appeared on the 2020 Black List and evidently that appeared paid off because the script was put into production with screenwriter Jimmy Warden making his directorial debut.  (Undoubtedly, it probably helped that Warden’s wife, Samara Weaving, agreed to star in the film.)  The film was released in March of this year and, if you’re so inclined, you can currently watch it on Peacock.

Borderline takes place in the early 90s.  Weaving plays a vacuous pop star named Sofia.  Ray Nicholson plays Paul Duerson, who is obsessed with Sofia and believes that he’s destined to marry her.  When we first see Paul, he’s stabbing Sofia’s head of security, Bell (Eric Dane), and then dancing around Sofia’s house.  At the time, Sofia is out.  However, when Paul returns 6 months later, Sofia is home.  Paul somehow has managed to gather some crazy associates who are willing to work with him.  Penny (Alba Baptista) is just as unstable as Paul and I’m going to assume that her character was meant to be an homage to Sandra Bernhard’s character in The King of Comedy.  (Indeed, the film seems to owe a lot to The King of Comedy.)  Sofia and a Dennis Rodmanesque basketball player named Rhodes (Jimmie Falls) finds themselves trapped by Paul and his fantasy of marrying Sofia.

It’s easy to see why this screenplay would get the attention of the studio execs who voted on the Black List.  It mixes comedy, drama, and horror in a way that is very trendy right now.  It also features a lot of crazed monologuing on the part of Paul.  Unfortunately, as a director, Jimmy Warden doesn’t seem to know how to manage his own script’s frequent shifts in tone and the film itself drags to such an extent that it could almost be mistaken for a Project Greenlight film.  (Seriously, remember The Leisure Class?)  Add to that, the film features some remarkably bad acting.  There are undoubtedly worst performance out there than Alba Baptista’s but I doubt I’m going to see more annoying one for a while.

For this film really to work, Paul would have to be at least interesting in his insanity.  It’s possible to make a character like Paul compelling but having Ray Nicholson do an imitation of Christian Slater imitating Ray’s father Jack is not the way to go.  Ray Nicholson bears a passable resemblance to Jack and he throws himself into playing Paul as being a nutcase.  What Ray Nicholson doesn’t have is Jack’s screen presence.  Ironically, that means that Ray Nicholson probably gives a pretty realistic performance as the type of anonymous loser who would fantasize about marrying his favorite singer but who wants to spend 90 minutes watching one of those people?

In the end, Borderline is another mediocre Blacklist film.

Brad reviews LIONHEART (1990), starring Jean-Claude Van Damme!

Posted on by Bradley Crain

As a teenager of the late 80’s, I became a huge fan of Jean-Claude Van Damme when I watched movies like BLOODSPORT (1988), CYBORG (1989), KICKBOXER (1989), and DEATH WARRANT (1990). He really seemed to be going big-time with movies like UNIVERSAL SOLDIER (1992), HARD TARGET (1993) and especially TIMECOP (1994). Unfortunately, through a variety of problems, including a reportedly uncontrollable ego, a seemingly never ending supply of gratuitous butt shots for the ladies, and potential drug issues, his star would begin to wane in the mid-1990’s and he’d soon find his career heading the wrong direction. Through it all though, I’ve always loved Van Damme, and I still like to watch his movies (both new and old) to this day. One of the films that he made in his prime was LIONHEART (1990). I remember renting the movie as soon as it became available at our local video store, and even though I don’t hear it spoken of often these days, it’s always been one of my favorite films of the so-called “Muscles from Brussels!”

LIONHEART stars Van Damme as Lyon Gaultier, a French Foreign Legionnaire who deserts his post in North Africa after finding out that his drug addict brother, who lives in Los Angeles, has been set on fire and is barely clinging to life. Determined to help his brother’s family, Lyon goes AWOL and hops a boat to the United States of America. Unfortunately, Lyon finds himself stranded in New York with no money, until he stumbles across an underground street fight. With the connections of a hustler named Joshua (Harrison Page) and a sexy fight organizer named Cynthia (Deborah Rennard), Lyon’s talent in the ring allows him to make the money he needs to go to L.A. When he finally makes it to the west coast, his brother has passed away, leaving huge medical bills for his wife Helene (Lisa Pelikan) and young daughter, Nicole (Ashley Johnson). Continuing to fight in the underground market in L.A. to provide funds for his sister-in-law, Lyon takes on increasingly dangerous opponents, including the savage Attila (Abdel Qissi) in a high-stakes fight that could settle his family’s financial problems for good… if it doesn’t kill him. 

I mentioned earlier that I’m a big fan of LIONHEART. With that said, I can certainly see some flaws in the film. The performances aren’t all great. For example, Deborah Rennard is somewhat ridiculous as the sexy, duplicitous Cynthia. Her character is as cliched as it gets, even if she does look good in her see-through stockings. It’s also too long. Clocking in at almost an hour and fifty minutes, the film is at least twenty minutes too long. There are definitely scenes that could have been trimmed down to make for a more efficient movie. Flaws acknowledged, I watched it again today, and I still love the movie. Directed by Sheldon Lettich (DOUBLE IMPACT), LIONHEART delivers the goods as a badass, fight film with a heart. The action sequences drew me in with Van Damme’s athletic spins and kicks, but it also reminded me of my favorite film of all time, HARD TIMES (1975) starring Charles Bronson. In HARD TIMES, Bronson takes out a cocky bastard with one punch to the face. In LIONHEART, Van Damme takes out a cocky bastard with one punch to the nuts. Both films deliver final showdowns against awesome opponents that deliver brutal and satisfying climaxes to the action. And both films go for real emotion. In HARD TIMES, those relationships are limited to the men in Bronson’s life, but in LIONHEART, Lyon’s relationships with his friend Joshua, as well as his love for his niece and widowed sister-in-law really set the film apart. Van Damme isn’t a great actor at this point in his career, but there’s just something really appealing about his unconditional love for his family. He won me over with his earnest performance, and I was all in when everything comes to a head at the end. It was also fun seeing producer Lawrence Bender (PULP FICTION, ANNA AND THE KING, KILL BILL) cameo in an early fight scene as a doofus with a pony tail who gets his ass handed to him by Van Damme. That’s just fun movie stuff. 

Playing on Amazon Prime as I type, I easily recommend LIONHEART to any person who likes Van Damme or action films of the 80’s and 90’s. It may be as cheesy as hell, but in my opinion, it’s one of the star’s best films. 

The Films of 2025: Snow White (dir by Marc Webb)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Let’s just get this out of the way.

Snow White is bad.

I’m not talking about the original Grimms’ Fairy Tale and I’m certainly not talking about the classic animated Disney film, which is one that always make me smile whenever I watch it.  For that matter, I’m also not talking about the majority of the Snow White remakes that have come out over the years.  (There’s been a surprisingly large amount.)

No, I’m talking about the live-action remake of the Disney animated film.  This the Snow White that finally came out earlier this year, after being delayed a countless amount of times.  If it wasn’t the SAG-AFTRA strike that delayed the film, it was the PR nightmares caused by Rachel Zegler’s inability to promote the film without hectoring everyone about her politics.  Even before that, the film was controversial because of a photo from the set that people interpreted to mean that the seven dwarves had been replaced by seven people of average size.  In Disney’s defense, it turned out that the people in the photo were not meant to be the Seven Dwarves.  Instead, the Seven Dwarves were created via CGI, which turned out to be an even worse solution.  (Though Peter Dinklage famously complained about Snow White being a “backwards story about seven dwarves living in a cave,” it’s also true that there are plenty of actors with dwarfism who probably would have appreciated the work.)

Whenever there’s a film that gets totally slammed online before it’s even released, there’s a part of me that always hopes that the film will prove the naysayers wrong and turn out to be a masterpiece.  I wanted Snow White to be good just because the online vitriol often seemed to go overboard.  For example, I may not have agreed with a lot of Rachel Zegler’s comments and I think it was selfish of her to drag her own personal politics into the promotion of a film that a lot of people worked on but I still think it’s important to be able to set aside those feelings when judging the actual film.  People who insist that they can only celebrate films made by people that they agree with are truly limiting themselves.

I was determined to ignore all of the bad publicity and watch the film with an open mind.  And the first few images made me smile.  The film opens with a bunch of animals opening up a storybook and that was such a cute image that I was briefly optimistic.  Unfortunately, the rest of the film is pretty bland.  Rachel Zegler can sing and Rachel Zegler can dance but, at least as far as this film is concerned, she has absolutely zero screen presence.  (For the record, I wasn’t really that impressed by her in West Side Story either.)  As a character, Zegler’s Snow White is boring.  The only person more boring than Zegler is Andrew Burnap as Jonathan, the bandit who is this film’s version of the original’s Prince.  They both give boring performances and they’re saddled with boring songs and neither actor seems to be sure how they should perform opposite the CGI dwarves.  (As for the CGI dwarves, they look like cartoons and they’re distracting in a way that could have been avoided by simply casting actual actors in the roles.)

I have to note that much of the online criticism of Snow White has been directed at Gal Gadot, who plays the Wicked Queen with the magic mirror.  The online film community insists that Gal Gadot is a bad actress despite all of the evidence to the contrary.  (Many of the people who insists on criticizing her now were the same people who swooned when she first played Wonder Woman.  Of course, that was before most of them went down the activist rabbit hole.)  Reading the criticism of Gadot, much of it seems to have less to do with Gadot’s performance and more to do with the fact that she’s from Israel.  If you’re that much of an anti-Semite that you’re going to judge someone’s performance based on where they were born, I don’t really know what to tell you.  Personally, I found Gadot to be one of the few bright spots of the film.  She understood the assignment and she thoroughly embraces the melodrama as the Wicked Queen.  Good for her.  It’s exactly the type of performance that the film needed.

I opened this review by saying that Snow White was bad and I stand by that.  That said, it’s main sin is that it’s so bland that it’s not even enjoyably bad.  After all the drama that went into the production, the film product is about as forgettable as a film can be.

The Films of 2025: The Alto Knights (dir by Barry Levinson)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In The Alto Knights, I’m pretty sure that Robert De Niro sets the record for saying “What’s the mater with you!?” the most times in one movie.

I don’t know for sure, of course.  While I was watching the movie last night, I didn’t keep an exact count and, for that, shame on me.  That said, when you consider that The Alto Knights features Robert De Niro playing not just one but two old school Italian gangsters, you can be sure that there were a lot of scenes of either Vito Genovese (Robert De Niro) or Frank Costello (De Niro, again) demanding to know what was the matter.  When Genovese watches Costello testifying in front of a Congressional hearing, the “What’s the matter with you!?” count truly goes haywire.

The Alto Knights was directed by Barry Levinson, who has directed some great films.  It tells the relatively true story of the rivalry between Costello and Genovese.  Both Costello and Genovese were present when the modern Mafia was first created.  The diplomatic and negotiation-minded Costello was known as the “Prime Minister of the Underworld.”  Genovese was a much more violent gangster and he became one of the most powerful members of the New York Mafia by basically killing anyone who stood in his way.  Costello and Genovese started out as weary friends before coming mortal enemies.  Costello retired from the rackets after Genovese ordered one of his men to shoot Costello in the head.  Meanwhile, Genovese ended up involving the Mafia in the drug trade and died in prison.  In the film, Costello narrates their story.  There’s a lot of shots of an elderly Costello sitting in what appears to be a park as he speaks directly to the camera.  Interestingly enough, Gotti tried to do the same thing, with Travolta’s John Gotti speaking directly to the audience while standing in front of the Brooklyn Bridge.

The Alto Knights pretty much features all of the usual Mafia tropes.  All the usual points are hit.  Albert Anastasia (played by Michael Rispoli) is assassinated while getting a haircut and some viewers will remember that, before De Niro played the man who ordered Anastasia’s assassination, he also played the man who claimed to have shot Anastasia in The Irishman.  Personally, I love Mafia films but The Alto Knights felt a bit too recycled to be truly effective.  Barry Levison does the usual thing of dropping real-life newspaper headlines and photographs into the middle of the film and it doesn’t so much add verisimilitude as much as it just reminds one of David DeCoteau’s film about Bonnie and Clyde.

The film’s main selling point is that it features Robert De Niro playing two gangsters but there’s really not much gained from casting De Niro in both roles.  We get a few scenes of De Niro acting opposite of himself and it’s hard not to notice that Genovese’s reactions often don’t seem to match whatever it is that Costello’s saying.  As an actor, De Niro has the ability to be believable as both the cerebral Costello and the hot-headed Genovese but ultimately, the double casting just feels like a distraction.  Watching De Niro acting opposite himself, I found myself thinking how much more entertaining it would have been if Joe Pesci, Al Pacino, Harvey Keitel, or even John Travolta had played Genovese.  To be honest, if Levinson really had any courage, he would have given the role to James Woods and given us the Once Upon A Time In America/Casino reunion that we all deserve.

The film did win me over a bit towards the end with a recreation of the Apalachin meeting.  That was when Genovese invited every mob boss in the country to come to a meeting in upstate New York, just for the feds to suddenly show up and send everyone scattering.  For most of the film, it was hard not to feel that Barry Levinson was past his prime as a director but he actually did a good job with the Apalachin scenes.  I genuinely laughed when Genovese got into a pointless argument with his driver.  I loved the way the film captured the real-life absurdity of a bunch of mob bosses fleeing into the woods, all of their bravado suddenly dissipating as they scrambled into the wilderness.  If the entire film had just been about the Apalachin meeting, this review would probably be a lot of different.  As it is, one good sequence can’t save the film as a whole.

This is an offer you can refuse.

Prince of Bel-Air (1986, directed by Charles Braverman)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Robin Prince (Mark Harmon) is a laid-back former volleyball player who, at the age of 32, makes his living as a pool guy.  It’s an easy life and he enjoys it.  He sleeps with the wife (Deborah Harmon) of one of his clients and he hangs out with his richer friends.  Robin enjoys being a bachelor but that all changes when he agrees to give a job to Justin (Patrick Labyorteaux), the son of Stanley Auerbach (Robert Vaughn) and meets Justin’s cousin, an artist named Jamie Harrison (Kirstie Alley).  Justin goes from being bitter about having to work to idolizing Robin and his lifestyle.  Robin, meanwhile, falls for Jamie.

This film came out before Summer School, another movie that featured Mark Harmon as a laid-back guy who falls for Kirstie Alley, but it has a similar vibe.  Again, Mark Harmon is playing a likable guy who has never grown up and again, Kirstie Alley is playing a sophisticated woman who, at first, seems like she’s too serious for Harmon’s character.  Robin’s mentorship of Justin feels a lot like Hamon’s mentorship of his Summer School students.  (Dean Cameron even plays a supporting role in both Prince of Bel-Air and Summer School, though he’s far more memorable in Summer School.)  Prince of Bel-Air is more dramatic than Summer School.  In Prince of Bel-Air, Mark Harmon plays a character who secretly understands that there’s not much of a future in his lifestyle, even if he’s not initially willing to admit it.

Prince of Bel-Air is a likable movie.  Mark Harmon gives an amiable and relatable performance as someone who is finally trying to grow up and, as always, Robert Vaughn is a perfectly smug villain.  Kirstie Alley’s sultry performance is the highlight of the film.  In the 1980s, Alley has a smoky-eyed beauty that, when combined with her ribald sense of humor, made her irresistible.  It only takes a few minutes to understand why Robin would be willing to give up his previous life to be with her.  There’s nothing particularly deep about Prince of Bel-Air but it’s still an entertaining 100 minutes.

Brad reviews DEAD IN A HEARTBEAT (2002)!

Posted on by Bradley Crain

DEAD IN A HEARTBEAT is a 2002 TV movie that stars Judge Reinhold as Tom Royko, the head of Seattle bomb squad, as he finds himself trying to stop a mad bomber named Zachary Franklin (Timothy Busfield). Franklin blames heart surgeon Gillian Hayes (Penelope Ann Miller) for the death of his son and makes it his mission in life to make her suffer like he has. His plan… volunteer at the hospital where Dr. Hayes works, rig their supply of pacemakers with explosives, and then implement a plan to begin blowing up her patients on the anniversary of his son’s death. When Royko figures out what’s going on, he enlists the help of Dr. Hayes to identify the next potential victims and stop the deranged Franklin before another innocent person’s chest explodes!

DEAD IN A HEARTBEAT is an entertaining TV movie. If you like Hallmark mysteries and Lifetime movies, it’s my guess that you will enjoy this film. The plot is a lot of fun… I love the movie SPEED and the “madman setting off ticking human time bombs while taunting the police” reminded me of that excellent thriller on multiple occasions. While I’m not suggesting this movie is in the same league as the Keanu Reeves / Sandra Bullock action classic, I am saying that I did feel genuine tension and excitement at times as some of the scenes played out, and I wasn’t really expecting that. As far as the performances, I must admit I really enjoyed watching Judge Reinhold in the lead. He’s not tough at all, but he does have a likable, sarcastic charm that appeals to me. After loving him in 80’s movies like BEVERLY HILLS COP and RUTHLESS PEOPLE, it was nice seeing him in this role. I only give Penelope Ann Miller average marks for her performance as the heart doctor who starts off really arrogant before having a crisis of conscience when the bad guy starts offing her former patients. She has a couple of solid moments, but for the most part I just found her competent in the role. Timothy Busfield is definitely good as the villain, but this movie’s TV roots left his character somewhat underdeveloped. I think the part could have worked better if more time had been devoted to the details that lead to him losing his grip on reality.

While not a must-see, DEAD ON A HEARTBEAT turned out to be an enjoyable, undemanding watch as I was scrolling through Amazon Prime. If you don’t mind a little absurdity with your early 2000’s, TV action movies, you’ll probably like this one. 

Gun Smoke (1945, directed by Howard Bretherton)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

On the frontier, a stagecoach has been overturned and both the passenger and the driver have been killed by outlaws.  The passenger was Hinkley, an archeologist.  Who would want to kill a harmless archeologist?  That’s what Marshals Nevada Jack McKenzie (Johnny Mack Brown) and Sandy Hopkins (Raymond Hatton) set out to discover.  While Nevada Jack asks questions in the nearby town, Sandy disguises himself as a medicine man.

It all links back to an old Indian site that is said to be full of gold relics.  Jane (Jennifer Holt), the daughter of Hinkley’s partner, reveals that the only other person who knows the location of the site is an old Indian named Shag (Dimas Sotello).  Jack and Sandy have to try to track down Shag before he’s found the gang that killed Hinkley.

Yes, it’s another Johnny Mack Brown western.  Despite the title, this has nothing to do with the television series that featured James Arness and Amanda Blake.  Gun Smoke is still a solid western, featuring a determined performance from Johnny Mack Brown and some memorable villains from the usual poverty row western stock company.  Once again, Frank Ellis shows up as a henchman, though the identity of the main villain is actually a little more interesting than was typical for these films.  Johnny Mack Brown is a little more serious than usual, throwing punches with authority.  For fans of B-westerns, Gun Smoke is an above average entry in Johnny Mack Brown’s seemingly endless filmography.

Brad reviews COLLEGE KICKBOXERS (1991)! 

Posted on by Bradley Crain

Continuing my theme of low budget, direct-to-video, B-movie action films from the early 90’s, I found a movie called COLLEGE KICKBOXERS playing on Amazon Prime.

Also known as TRAINED TO FIGHT in some circles, COLLEGE KICKBOXERS follows James Caulfield (Ken McLeod, credited as Ken Rendall Johnson for some unknown reason), a young man with martial arts skills, as he navigates his freshman year of college. Things just aren’t going so well for James his first week of school. First, his roommate Mark (Marc D. Williams), an upperclassman, isn’t very nice to him when they first meet, so it appears that their dorm room may not be a place of peace and relaxation this semester. Second, the pretty girl he sets his sights on, Kimberly (Kendra Tucker), seems much more interested in saving the whales, the ozone layer and the planet than she does in dating him. Rude! And third, to cap it all off, one day while James and Mark are working out their differences through martial arts sparring, a racist gang called the White Tigers show up and hurl some very offensive slurs at Mark, who’s black. While James doesn’t seem to like Mark much at this point, he dislikes the racist bigots even more so he defends Mark’s honor, putting himself on a collision course of pain with The White Tigers and their A-hole leader Craig Tanner (played by Matthew Ray Cohen, whose only other role in his career was “Dancer #1” in the classic erotic thriller BODY CHEMISTRY). In all fairness, this clash with racists did result in James and Mark becoming best friends so that was a pleasant and unexpected surprise. 

When it looks like things can’t get much worse for James, Craig Tanner and his racists show up at the Chinese restaurant where he works and proceed to take advantage of their superior numbers and kick his ass real good. That’s when something strange happens, the annoying cook Wing (Tak-Wing Tang), who had just messed up James’ chances to score with a chick a few minutes earlier, steps in and shows himself to be a kung fu master, easily dispatching the White Tigers with moves defined by speed, grace, balance, agility, and acupunctural science. Amazed by what he has just seen, James wants some of that and begs Sifu Wing to train him so that he too can become a martial arts master. Receiving the kinds of real-life lessons from Wing that could never be learned in a college classroom, James soon finds himself putting it all on the line in a martial arts tournament that gives him the chance to win $25,000 for his now-injured bestie’s martial arts dojo for at-risk youth. As a bonus, he’ll also get the opportunity to humiliate and destroy the White Tigers once and for all!

An impartial critical assessment of COLLEGE KICKBOXERS would probably not be very kind. For starters Ken McLeod, AKA Ken Rendall Johnson, is not a very good actor. Neither are Marc D. Williams, Kendra Tucker or Matthew Ray Cohen. To be completely honest, they’re pretty bad. I think it would be fair to say that both Ken’s and Marc’s line deliveries are awkward and amateurish, that Kendra is annoying, and that Matthew is over-the-top, and not in a good way. The script is nothing to write home about either, completely relying on the cliches of the genre and the cheesiest of dialogue. In another somewhat bad sign, clocking in at just 88 minutes, it doesn’t necessarily feel like a short movie as the middle portion definitely leaves you wanting more action to show up. 

With that said though, I still had a great time with COLLEGE KICKBOXERS. I think the main reason is that I just love a good underdog story where bullies, and in this case racists, get their comeuppance, and at-risk youth get their own dojos. And I really enjoyed Tak-Wing Tang’s performance as Sifu Wing! He underplays the role in a subtle and humorous way that I found really appealing. Wing also completed the action choreography, which is the true highlight of the film. McLeod isn’t great in the acting department, but he does a fine job when called upon to kick butt. To further illustrate my appreciation of Wing’s action direction, the year after this film was made, he would serve as an action choreographer for Jackie Chan’s amazing POLICE STORY III: SUPERCOP, and a couple of years after that he’d work on Chan’s DRUNKEN MASTER II. The man is talented! And finally, COLLEGE KICKBOXERS has that intangible nostalgic charm that takes me back to the early 90’s when I’d scan over my local video store’s entire inventory, an inventory that was chock full of these types of movies. I enjoyed watching them back then even if they were silly and cheesy, and watching movies like that now takes me back to that more simple and undemanding time. There’s real value in that to me! 

Cross Streets (1934, directed by Frank R. Strayer)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Having graduated from medical school, Dr. Adam Blythe (Johnny Mack Brown) is finally ready to marry his glamorous fiancée, Ann (Claire Windsor).  However, when Ann learns that Adam is going to have to spend years as an lowly paid resident, she ditches him and instead marries Dr. Jerry Clement (Niles Welch).  Blythe, heartbroken, becomes an alcoholic and, after a disastrous operation that leaves a patient dead, Blythe ends up on skid row.  Twenty years later, Blythe is spotted by his old friend Mort (Kenneth Thomson).  A self-made millionaire who dropped out of college, Mort takes Blythe to their 20-year reunion and talks him up as a brilliant surgeon.  When Blythe is pressured into performing a delicate piece of surgery, he is offered a position as the head of the college’s new research wing.  Blythe, meanwhile, meets and falls in love with June (Anita Louise), a young woman who reminds him of Ann.  It turns out that the resemblance is not a coincidence because June is Ann’s daughter!  Ann wants Blythe back and, when she discovers that Blythe is in love with June, she threatens to tell everyone that Blythe is actually June’s father!  All of the secrets and lies lead to the type of  sudden and tragic ending that only a pre-code film could get away with.

Cross Streets is a 65-minute soap opera that features Johnny Mack Brown in a non-western role.  Brown gives a likable performance but he’s less convincing when he has to be bitter.  One reason why Brown was such a successful B-western star is that he always came across as if he had never had a moment of self-doubt in his entire life.  Dr. Adam Blythe is all about self-doubt so he feels miscast in the role.  Claire Windsor is more convincing as the vampish Ann.  The movie has its slow spots and the plot requires a healthy suspension of disbelief but the ending still packs a punch.

Cross Streets is not easy to find but there is a not-great upload available on YouTube.

Brad reviews THE NAKED GUN (2025), starring Liam Neeson!

Posted on by Bradley Crain

When I first saw that THE NAKED GUN was being rebooted with Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin, Jr., I must admit that I was quite skeptical. You see, the original THE NAKED GUN (1988) with Leslie Nielsen came out when I was 15 years old, and I remember watching it at the movie theater on a field trip with our high school’s Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA) club. I loved it so much! I eagerly watched THE NAKED GUN 2 1/2 (1991) and NAKED GUN 33 1/3 (1994) at the theaters as well. To be completely honest, this series is one of my favorites of my “growing into an adult” years, and I didn’t want to see it screwed up. When the trailer was released a couple of months ago my reaction was cautious optimism as I must admit it looked quite funny, and I decided that I would go watch it in the theater when it came out. Well, tonight my wife and I headed to the Cinemark in Little Rock to see what director Akiva Schaffer and his crew had come up with…

In THE NAKED GUN (2025), dedicated Detective Lt. Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson) follows in his father’s footsteps by leading Police Squad and causing an endless array of problems for Police Chief Davis (CCH Pounder). When a bank heist is staged by Sig Gustafson (Kevin Durand) in order to obtain a mysterious P.L.O.T. Device, Drebin teams up with his partner, Captain Ed Hocken Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser), and the beautiful crime novelist Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson) to investigate. Their subsequent probe leads them to tech mogul Richard Cane (Danny Huston) and his sinister plot to use the device to revert humanity to a base barbaric state as the balls drop on New Year’s Eve. With the help of his deceased father’s spirit that’s being housed in the body of a large owl, Drebin goes all out to foil Cane’s plans while simultaneously falling in love with Beth! 

I’m going to go ahead and alleviate any suspense and state that I love the new NAKED GUN movie. I laughed out loud throughout the entire film, including the end credits, and I wasn’t the only one as there were people in our showing that were laughing much louder than me. It was a fun “crowd experience,” and I’m so glad we caught it in the theater. Not every joke is funny, but in the tradition of the original series, they come so fast and furious that there’s a good chance the next joke will be hilarious. Liam Neeson does a great job as Frank Drebin, Jr., infusing the character with just the right amount of seriousness to allow the absurdity all around him to be played for laughs. I told a friend a few months ago that I’d be really impressed if Neeson was able to pull this role off, and I’m glad to report that he passes with flying colors. He doesn’t make you forget the comedic genius of Leslie Nielsen, but he’s darn good. And Pamela Anderson is perfect in the crime novelist / love interest role. I haven’t seen her in anything in a long time, but she’s truly hilarious in the film. After watching her performance, I honestly don’t think any actress could have done any better. The rest of the game cast, including Paul Walter Hauser, Danny Huston and Kevin Durand each have good moments that add to the fun. I also enjoyed some of the specific throwbacks to the original series, including brief appearances by Priscilla Presley, Weird Al Yankovic, and especially the stuffed beaver, which got a big laugh out of me, just like it did when I was 15! 

Overall, I had a great time at the movie theater with THE NAKED GUN (2025). Director Akiva Schaffer delivers a hilarious, 85 minute film that’s a worthy follow-up to the original Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker / Leslie Nielsen classics. What else could you ask for?!!