Laura Mosbach (Terry Farrell) is a former basketball player who is hired to be the assistant coach of the Lady Warriors, a high school team. When the beloved Coach Holliday (Lawrence Dane) has a stroke during a game, Laura becomes the new head coach and had to deal with parents who want to win at any cost, players who think they can bend the rules, and a town where no one has a private life. If you think it’s difficult being a new coach, try being a new coach who is publicly dating the father (Adrian Pasdar) of a player who you’ve just made a starter. Coach Mosbacher coaches the team her way, telling them that they are no longer Lady Warriors but now Women Warriors.
There are so many scenes in this movie that just get stuck in your head for the wrong reason. I enjoyed Laura getting so frustrated that she threw a box of cereal at a wall, where it exploded in slow motion. And there’s the scene where two basketball teams decide to just end the game rather than play the second half because the adults got into a fight in the school parking lot. I’m sure that’s a decision that many teenagers would make. It felt like one of those commercials for the Foundation For A Better Life. “Sportsmanship, pass it on!” Coach Mosbacher tells the girls that its their decision and is shocked when the the town wants to fire her as a result.
The movie’s most satisfying moment is one that isn’t meant to be satisfying. Adrian Pasdar punches out a ref who hasn’t gotten one call right the entire game. Who among us hasn’t been tempted to do the same? Let those without sin cast the first stone.
I actually agree with the movie’s message about parents putting too much pressure on their kids to win at any cost. Lawrence Dane was good as the beloved coach and so saw Adrian Pasdar, as the father who seemed nice but ultimately turned out to be even worse than the other parents. Terry Farrell, though, gave a one-note performance as Laura and the film’s plot had too many unbelievable moments to work.
Nancy McKeon gives a good performance as Cindy Fralic, the first woman to become a firefighter in Los Angeles County. The film follows her as she takes the written exam, passes the physical exam (becoming the first woman to do so in the 60 years history of the Los Angeles Fire Department), and proves herself as both a firefighter and paramedic. She also finds love after her unsupportive husband divorces her.
Firefighter‘s story is bookended by a scene of Cindy telling a group of kids about what it is like to be a female firefighter. The film was made to inspire more women to pursue a career as a firefighter and sometimes, it seems like it pulls its punches when it comes to portraying just how difficult it probably was for the real-life Cindy to be Los Angeles’s first female firefighter. With the exception of her husband and one sexist captain, every man on the force is portrayed as being open-minded and rooting for Cindy from the start. No one at the firehouse has any trouble adjusting to a woman suddenly sharing their quarters. Almost everyone is supportive. The only time Cindy gets truly upset is when she has to get her hair cut. Sometimes, the film makes it seems like it was almost too easy for Cindy to be a groundbreaker.
It’s a good for what it is, though. Nancy McKeon gives a good performance. Ed Lauter plays her supportive boss and Amanda Wyss plays her best friend. It’s a made-for-TV movie so don’t go into it expecting a raging inferno. Instead, it’s just a sincere story about a woman who made history and who can maybe inspire others to do the same.
In Rated X, two real-life brothers play another set of real-life brothers.
Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen play, respectively, brothers Jim and Artie Mitchell. Two pot-smoking entrepreneurs who found fame and fortune during the so-called Golden Age of Pornography (Behind the Green Door was their most famous film), Jim and Artie owned the O’Farrell Theater in San Francisco and became famous for their numerous legal troubles and their advocacy for freedom of speech. While Jim became a semi-respectable figure who hobnobbed with the city’s elite, Artie became known for his consumption of cocaine. In 1991, Jim drove over to Artie’s house and shot him twice. Jim, who claimed Artie had threatened to kill him, was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to six years in prison. Jim was released after serving three years. (He died in 2007, long after this film aired on Showtime.)
Rated X tells the story of the Mitchell Brothers in a flat and perfunctory manner. Emilio Estevez not only plays Jim but he also directs. He doesn’t bring much visual style or storytelling style to the film, despite a few scenes that appear to have been cribbed from Boogie Nights. Estevez doesn’t seem to be sure what he wants to say about the Mitchell Brothers and they come across as being the most boring pornographers in history. What’s really strange is that Estevez and Sheen are not believable as brothers, despite both wearing matching bald caps. There’s nothing about their performances that would lead you to believe that they grew up with each other. Casting Sheen as an out-of-control drug addict seems like a no-brainer but he’s not even believable when he’s snorting coke and handing out cheerleader uniforms. In fact, the film probably would have worked better if Sheen and Estevez had switched roles. Estevez was always better at showing emotion than Charlie. In Rated X, Jim is always intense while Artie always has the wide-eyed stare that Oliver Stone made such good use of in Platoon.
I can understand the casting, though. Jim and Artie were brothers so it makes sense to cast brothers to play them. Because Charlie has always been best-known for his flamboyant life off-screen, it probably seemed to the obvious decision to cast him as the wild brother while Estevez, who has always come across as being a stable guy offscreen, seemed right for Jim. But onscreen, Estevez is always better as an unpredictable outlaw and Charlie is always better as someone who tries to keep his real emotions bottled up. This film was cast based on Estevez and Sheen’s off-camera personas and they’re both miscast as a result.
There’s an interesting movie to be made about the Mitchells. Their rise and fall mirrored the rise and fall of the 6os counterculture. (A year before he killed his brother, Jim even tried to launch a Ramparts-style magazine for the 90s.) Unfortunately, the Showtime-produced Rated X is not it.
“What are you going to do when a dog goes bad on you… bites somebody or hurts somebody? There’s only two things you can do, right? You either chain him up… or put him down. But which do you think is more cruel?” — Ben Russell
Cold in July opens with a jolt of primal terror, the kind that shatters the fragile illusion of safety in one’s own home. It’s the sticky summer of 1989 in small-town East Texas, where Richard Dane, a soft-spoken picture framer embodied with exquisite restraint by Michael C. Hall, stirs from sleep to the creak of floorboards under an intruder’s weight. No time for second thoughts; his hand finds the .38 revolver under the pillow, and in the inky darkness of his living room, he fires. The body hits the carpet with a thud, blood pooling like spilled ink. The local law rolls up, commends him under Castle Doctrine—self-defense sanctified by statute—and hauls the corpse away. But Richard can’t wash away the echo of that shot. Hall captures the everyman’s unraveling with microscopic precision: the thousand-yard stare at family photos, the hesitant touch of his wife Ann’s shoulder, the way he now checks locks twice before bed. He’s no vigilante archetype; he’s a man whose moral compass, once pointed true north, now spins wildly in the aftermath, haunted by the ghost of a kid he never knew.
Into this fragile peace stalks Ben Russell, the dead boy’s father, a parolee fresh from Huntsville’s iron grip, played by Sam Shepard as a specter of weathered fury. Shepard infuses Ben with that laconic Texan menace, eyes like weathered shale, voice gravel ground under boot heels. He doesn’t roar threats; he etches them into Richard’s walls—”YOU TOOK MY BOY”—and reduces Richard’s beloved Cadillac to a smoldering husk in the driveway. Ben’s grief manifests as a slow siege: parked across the street, watching Richard’s young son Jordan pedal his bike, a predator’s patience masking paternal devastation. The sheriff dismisses it; Ben’s alibis are airtight, greased by unseen hands. Richard’s domestic idyll fractures—nights fractured by paranoia, meals choked down in silence, a marriage straining under unspoken blame. Here, director Jim Mickle, adapting Joe R. Lansdale’s novel with co-writer Nick Damici, pivots from chamber-piece tension to a labyrinthine noir, peeling back layers of small-town complacency to expose the rot beneath. The film’s ’80s patina is immersive: wood-paneled walls sweating humidity, CRT screens buzzing with local news, Jeff Grace’s synth pulses throbbing like a migraine.
Enter Jim Bob Luke, Don Johnson’s hurricane in cowboy boots—a private investigator with a cherry-red Cadillac horned like a longhorn bull, Stetson cocked at a defiant angle, and patter slick as spilled bourbon. Johnson channels pure Miami Vice charisma, but earthier, a good-ol’-boy philosopher packing heat and homilies in equal measure. Hired by Richard to shadow Ben, Jim Bob unearths the seismic twist: the corpse in Richard’s living room wasn’t Freddy Russell, Ben’s son. The real Freddy lurks alive, ensnared in a subterranean web of illicit recordings peddled to depraved collectors, tentacles reaching into Dixie Mafia coffers. Those grainy tapes—clandestine glimpses of human extremity, captured in derelict husks of industry—form the film’s shadowy core, a vortex pulling the trio into moral freefall. Mickle evokes the era’s snuff hysteria without exploitation: no money shots of viscera, just the implication of captured agony, faces contorted in private hells, traded like contraband smokes. Freddy’s not victim but architect, his boyish features warped in the flicker of self-made damnation, a progeny turned parasite on society’s underbelly.
This revelation refracts the narrative through fractured prisms of identity and inheritance. Ben’s vendetta, born of purest paternal fire, curdles into horror as he beholds his bloodline’s perversion—proof that nurture’s failures can birth monsters no paternal love can redeem. Shepard’s performance peaks in silent devastation, a father unmade by the reel spinning his failure. Richard, the reluctant catalyst, crosses his own Rubicon; the man who fired in panic now shoulders a rifle into the fray, his arc tracing the corrosion of innocence by complicity. Jim Bob, ever the fulcrum, tempers the descent with levity—quips about hog-tying demons, a portable TV blasting The Three Stooges amid stakeouts—yet his bravado masks a code, a line drawn against the abyss. Their alliance, uneasy as oil and water, embodies the film’s thesis on makeshift brotherhood: strangers forged in crisis, bound by shared outrage against systemic blindness.
Deeper still, the forbidden footage interrogates voyeurism’s seductive poison. Richard’s first encounter with the tapes mirrors our own—initial revulsion yielding to morbid pull, the screen a portal to unfiltered id. Mickle frames it as cultural id, echoing ’70s/’80s panics over bootleg horrors like Faces of Death, where myth blurred into reality, VHS democratizing depravity. The mansion raid—a decaying palace of vice, corridors echoing with muffled cries—confronts not just Freddy but the machinery of consumption: projectors whirring, stacks of cassettes labeled in code, a clientele shielded by badges and bribes. Ben’s Oedipal climax shatters illusions; he doesn’t save his son but euthanizes the illusion, a mercy killing of legacy. Richard emerges scarred, paternal instincts twisted—he shields Jordan not from burglars now, but from the world’s hidden reels. Jim Bob’s fate underscores sacrifice’s cost, his flair extinguished in gunfire’s roar.
Thematically, Cold in July wrestles with manhood’s brittle myths in Reagan-era Americana. Richard starts as domesticated archetype—provider, protector by proxy—only to reclaim agency through blood, a Darwinian baptism. Ben embodies failed patriarchy, his prison-hardened shell cracking to reveal vulnerability’s raw nerve. Jim Bob, the id unbound, revels in machismo yet weeps for the fallen, humanizing the trope. Violence accrues gravity: each trigger pull exacts tolls—Richard’s queasy recoil post-kill, Ben’s hollow victory, the collateral innocents. Mickle’s visual lexicon amplifies this: desaturated palettes chilling the Texas swelter, shadows swallowing faces in interrogation rooms, slow-motion casings arcing like fallen stars. Lansdale’s source infuses pulp authenticity—dialogue taut as barbed wire, twists coiled like rattlers—elevated by Mickle’s restraint, never mistaking style for substance.
Flaws surface in the third act’s escalation: a shootout inferno, bodies stacking amid explosions, tips into excess after the scalpel-precision buildup. Threads like the sheriff’s graft fray loose, accents occasionally drift Yankee-ward, and stylistic nods to Coens or Tarantino flirt with homage overload. Yet these blemishes fade against strengths: a triumvirate of leads in career-best synergy, Grace’s score evoking Carpenterian dread laced with twang, production design nailing ’89 grit from payphone booths to mullet mustaches. Mickle’s sophomore leap post-Stake Land proves mastery of genre alchemy—thriller mechanics serving thematic depth.
Ultimately, Cold in July haunts as meditation on unseen currents: the darkness we film, consume, ignore. It indicts voyeurism’s complicity—Richard’s gaze on the tape mirroring ours—while affirming redemption’s flicker amid ruin. Ben buries not just Freddy but paternal ghosts; Richard fortifies his home anew, vigilant against shadows within. Jim Bob’s ghost lingers in punchlines and principles. In VOD glut, this neo-noir endures, twisty as kudzu vines, resonant as a revolver’s echo. It clings like summer sweat, whispering that some July colds seep bone-deep, thawing never.
After a patient that he’s sleeping with commits suicide, psychiatrist Ed Altman (Mickey Rourke) moves to Palm Springs and sets up a new practice in the desert. His attorney (Carre Otis) is able to get Altman off the hook legally but Ed is soon in more trouble as he meets and falls for Ally Mercer (Annabel Schofield). When Ally’s husband is murdered, Ed realizes that Ally and her fur coat-wearing boyfriend (Anthony Michael Hall) are trying to frame him for the crime.
Plotwise, this is a standard late night cable neo-noir, the type that was very popular in the late 90s. The one thing that distinguishes this Showtime production from the film that were airing on Cinemax at the time is the lack of explicit onscreen sex. (Despite the pairing of Mickey Rourke and his then-wife, Carre Otis, this is not another Wild Orchid. Carre Otis is somehow even less convincing as an attorney in Exit to Red than she was in the earlier film.) Instead, Ed just talks about sex constantly and even gives us a long monologue about why he loves long legs as if that’s something that makes him somehow unique. Every guy loves long legs but most of us can appreciate them without having to recite a Spalding Gray-style performance piece about them. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to listen to Mickey Rourke read one of those “How To Be A Player” books, you can just listen to his narration in Exit in Red.
Director Yurek Bogajevicz is one of the many 90s filmmakers who went from doing arthouse films like Anna to directing films like Exit In Red. Watching the movie, I got the feeling that Bogajevicz was trying to be subversive with his genre film, in the style of Paul Verhoeven. There are a few times when he almost succeeds but, far more often, his direction seems as if it’s trying too hard to keep audiences from noticing the bad script and the wooden performances. Luckily, Mickey Rourke goes all out as Dr. Altman. The film would have been incredibly dull if he hadn’t.
“She kept covering her eyes, whispering ‘please take me home, please take me home, please take me home…’ a week later I got her outta there and I brought her home… but she just kept repeating it. At that point I realized… she didn’t mean OUR home.” — Victoria Dempsey
The Poughkeepsie Tapes emerges from the shadows of independent horror like a grainy artifact unearthed from some forgotten police evidence locker, its found-footage aesthetic not merely a gimmick but a deliberate plunge into the abyss of real-world atrocity documentaries. Directed by the Dowdle brothers—John Erick and Drew—this 2007 effort masquerades as a television special pieced together from hundreds of VHS recordings left behind by a serial killer known only as the Waterworks Killer, operating in upstate New York during the late 1990s and early 2000s.
What sets it apart in the crowded found-footage subgenre is its unyielding commitment to procedural authenticity: interviews with beleaguered detectives, forensic psychologists, and shell-shocked family members intercut with the killer’s own unfiltered home movies, creating a mosaic that feels less like scripted cinema and more like a leaked FBI file. The film clocks in at a taut 86 minutes, yet its impact lingers far longer, burrowing into the psyche with the relentless persistence of damp rot. For those weaned on the polished shocks of mainstream slashers, this is horror stripped bare, a methodical dissection of evil that prioritizes psychological dread over jump scares or excessive gore.
From the outset, the mockumentary framework establishes an ironclad verisimilitude, opening with a SWAT raid on a nondescript Poughkeepsie home where authorities uncover not just dozens of bodies meticulously cataloged in black trash bags, but over 800 videotapes chronicling the killer’s decade-long reign of terror. These tapes, purportedly shot on consumer-grade camcorders, capture everything from mundane abductions in broad daylight to the most intimate depravities imaginable, all rendered in that telltale analog fuzz that evokes early 2000s true-crime broadcasts.
Edward Carver—unforgettably embodied by Ben Messmer—remains an enigma, never fully named in the tapes themselves, his face often obscured, voice distorted into a childish lisp that veers from playful taunting to guttural rage, embodying pure, motiveless malignancy without the monologuing backstory that humanizes figures like Hannibal Lecter. Messmer invests the role with a chilling physicality, his lanky frame clad in a grotesque yellow rain slicker becoming an iconic silhouette of suburban nightmare. Yet the film’s true brilliance lies in its restraint; rather than revel in spectacle, it lets the banality of evil seep through, as when Carver methodically dresses a victim in ballerina attire for a mock performance, or forces another into a twisted tea party, the domesticity amplifying the horror. This isn’t about blood sprays or final girls—it’s a taxonomy of sadism, each tape labeled with clinical precision: “Victim 31 – Jennifer,” “Victim 42 – Dance Recital.”
The ensemble of talking heads grounds the proceedings in stark realism, with standouts like Stacy Chbosky as Cheryl Dempsey, the survivor whose tormented recollections form the emotional core of the investigation. Their discussions—ranging from behavioral profiling to Carver’s fetishistic rituals—mirror actual criminology seminars, lending intellectual weight without descending into exposition dumps. These interludes humanize the victims, transforming statistics into shattered lives: a missing jogger here, a single mother there, their absence rippling through communities with quiet devastation. The Dowdles excel at pacing these elements, crosscutting between tape horrors and investigative fallout to build a suffocating tension, where the real terror is Carver’s omnipresence—he films himself stalking malls, taunting police press conferences, even infiltrating a family Thanksgiving. In a genre often criticized for laziness, The Poughkeepsie Tapes weaponizes its format, making viewers complicit voyeurs, questioning why we’re watching at all.
Thematically, the film probes the pornography of violence, echoing the likes of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer or the Paradise Lost documentaries, but with a rawer edge that anticipates the analog horror wave of the 2020s. It grapples with voyeurism’s allure, as detectives pore over tapes like addicts, one admitting the footage “gets into your dreams.” Carver’s escalating fetishes—binding victims in spiderwebs of duct tape, staging puppet shows with their limbs—escalate from perverse play to outright desecration, culminating in a sequence involving a captured police officer that tests even hardened viewers. Yet amid the depravity, glimmers of perverse artistry emerge: the meticulous framing of shots, the almost balletic choreography of assaults, suggesting a mind as creative as it is corrupt. This duality fascinates—evil as both banal and sublime—without ever excusing it. The film’s independent ethos shines through its low-budget ingenuity; shot on digital video run through VHS filters, it achieves a patina of age that rivals big-studio recreations. Sound design deserves special mention—the muffled whimpers, the hiss of tape rewind, the sudden shrieks—crafting an auditory assault that lingers in the ears long after the screen fades.
Of course, no film this ambitious escapes imperfection. The grainy visuals, while immersive, occasionally border on opacity, turning key moments murky when clarity might heighten the impact; a few tapes feel repetitious, padding runtime before the finale’s revelations. Acting varies—some interviews veer toward community theater stiffness, and the killer’s voice modulation can grate like a parody of itself. Pacing sags in the midsection amid procedural minutiae, demanding patience from those expecting non-stop carnage. Distribution woes didn’t help; shelved for years post-Tribeca premiere, it finally surfaced on home video in 2017, its cult status now cemented online but still niche. These are quibbles, though, in a landscape of forgettable slashers; they don’t undermine the core achievement.
Ultimately, The Poughkeepsie Tapes endures as a gut-punch reminder of horror’s primal function: to confront the void within humanity. It doesn’t titillate or moralize—it documents, with unflinching gaze, the machinery of monstrosity. Fans of vérité terrors like Lake Mungo or The Bay will find kin here, a film that trades spectacle for seepage, leaving stains no bleach can remove. In an era of sanitized streaming chills, its refusal to look away remains a defiant virtue. Seek it out on a lonely night, but keep the lights on after.
Small town boxer Charlie Davis (Ray Mancini) travels to Reno with his best friend and manager, Tiny O’Toole (Michael Chiklis). Charlie wants to become a professional and he has the support of Tiny and Gina (Jennifer Beals), a saintly hitchhiker that they pick up on the way to Nevada. Charlie managers to impress a legendary trainer (Rod Steiger) but, as Charlie moves up the ranks, he comes under the influence of a corrupt promoter (Joe Mantegna). Seduced by a bad girl (Tahnee Welch) and allowing his success to go to his head, Charlie alienates Tiny just when he needs him the most. A chance to become the champion is coming up and the promoter expects Charlie to throw the fight.
There’s not a boxing cliche that goes unused in this movie. Simple-minded by talented boxer? Check. Loyal best friend? Check. Overwrought narration? Double check because merely calling this film’s narration overwrought doesn’t begin to do it justice. Saintly good girl? Check. Dangerous bad girl? Check. Gruff trainer? Check. Corrupt promoter? Another double check. It’s not that the cliches are necessarily unwelcome. Most boxing movies follow the same basic plot. Instead, the problem here is that the film neither has the direction or the performances to make the cliches compelling.
You would think that casting Ray Mancini as a boxer would give this film some authenticity but Mancini looks as uncomfortable in the ring as he does when he’s having to actually act. As bad as Mancini is, his performance is nowhere near as desultory as Michael Chiklis’s. Chiklis not only plays Tiny but he also narrates the movie and watching and listening to him, you would be hard pressed to believe that he would someday star in The Shield. Meanwhile, Rod Steiger and Jennifer Beals are wasted in underwritten roles.
If there is one thing that redeems the film, it’s Joe Mantegna as the crooked promoter. Using his Fat Tony voice, Mantegna at least seems to have a sense of humor about the film.
I always appreciate a good boxing movie but this ain’t it.
Joel Schumacher’s 8MM (1999) uncoils like a reel of forbidden footage you shouldn’t have found, pulling a buttoned-up private eye into the rancid shadows of underground smut peddlers and whispers of snuff films that may or may not exist. It’s a late-’90s thriller smack in the wake of Se7en and Kiss the Girls, starring Nicolas Cage as Tom Welles, a Harrisburg family man whose crisp suits and steady hands belie the unraveling ahead. Hired by a steel magnate’s widow to verify an 8mm tape depicting a girl’s torture-murder, Welles tumbles down a rabbit hole of L.A. peep shows and New York meatpacking sleaze, his moral compass spinning as the line between fantasy and atrocity blurs. Schumacher crafts a narrative engine that hums with procedural grit, doling out dread in measured doses while mirroring the protagonist’s corrosion, though it occasionally stumbles in its heavier-handed turns.
The setup hooks with surgical efficiency, painting Welles as everydad detective: he buries bodies for a living, kisses his infant daughter goodbye, and screens the tape in a vault-like study that feels like a confessional. Myra Carter’s Mrs. Christian trembles with decorous horror as the projector whirs to life, bathing the room in jaundiced flicker; the footage—grainy, handheld, a pleading teen bound for “Machine’s” blade—lands like a gut punch without lingering on gore. Lawyer Longdale (Anthony Heald, all patrician slime) waves it off as staged porn, but Welles digs anyway, tracing victim Mary Ann Mathews through missing-persons archives to her runaway dreams in Hollywood. Paired with Max California (Joaquin Phoenix), a Sunset Strip tape jockey with pawn-shop cynicism and a Zipperhead tee, they prowl fetish dens where vendors hawk needle-play loops and dismiss snuff as urban legend. Schumacher’s lens, via Robert Elswit, turns these dives into feverish grottos—neon strobes slicing steam, racks of VHS promising the forbidden—building unease through denial upon denial.
That mounting frustration propels the first hour’s finest stretches, a slow immersion where Welles’s calls home grow terse, his wife’s concern (Catherine Keener, quietly anchoring) a lifeline fraying in crosscuts. Max’s street-rat patter—”Snuff? Ain’t no such thing as snuff, man”—leavens the rot without undercutting it, Phoenix layering vulnerability beneath the snark that makes his arc genuinely affecting. Schumacher parcels revelations like a fuse burning short: a Florida trailer confirms Mary Ann’s vanishing, a porn mag scout nods toward “real death” commissions, and suddenly they’re in New York, knocking on Dino Velvet’s door. Peter Stormare vamps as the mulleted auteur of extremity, his studio a cathedral of spotlit chains where Machine (masked, hulking) performs for hidden lenses. The confrontation there explodes into sudden violence and betrayal, shattering assumptions about the tape’s origins and thrusting Welles into a desperate fight for survival, with devastating losses that harden his path forward.
This mid-film rupture peels back layers of the underworld’s machinery, revealing how far some will go to sate forbidden appetites—no vast conspiracy, just raw opportunism turning fantasy lethal. Chaos erupts in a brutal showdown that catapults Welles into lone-wolf payback, though the script’s mechanics creak here, tipping from investigation to vengeance saga with less finesse than its buildup promises. He tracks leads back to L.A., confronting scout Eddie Poole (James Gandolfini) in a derelict factory, beating out confessions amid rusted girders, then facing Machine—unmasked as unassuming accountant George Higgins (Chris Bauer), who shrugs, “I like it”—in a rain-slicked graveyard melee. Schumacher stages the violence as visceral toll, not catharsis: fists land with bone-crunching thuds, blood sprays real, and Welles emerges hollowed, sobbing in his wife’s arms over the unerasable stain. It’s raw consequence over triumph, indicting the watcher as much as the watched.
Cage shoulders the load masterfully, dialing back his manic energy for a portrait of competence curdling into obsession—hesitant stares post-tape, fists unclenching at home, exploding only when the dam breaks. It’s restrained Cage at his peak, the fury earned through incremental fracture, though some beats flirt with overemphasis. Phoenix shines brighter still, turning Max from sidekick gag into soulful foil; his death resonates because Joaquin sells the bravado as fragile armor. Stormare’s Dino struts operatic depravity, a Bond villain in wifebeater, while Gandolfini’s Poole simmers regretful everyman heft—pre-Sopranos groundwork for Tony’s shadows. Heald’s Longdale drips WASP entitlement, and bits like Norman Reedus’s twitchy dealer add lived-in texture. Schumacher elicits extremes without cartooning them, populating the underworld with deviants who feel plausibly human, not pulp cutouts.
Visually, 8MM thrums with Schumacher’s maximalist pulse tamed to noir grit: Elswit’s shadows swallow faces in peep booths’ crimson haze, the snuff reel’s jitter evokes cursed artifacts, and the loft showdown’s spotlights carve brutality like Bosch hellscapes. Mychael Danna’s score slithers—piano sparsity for Welles’s drift, synth throbs for dives—capped by Aphex Twin’s “Come to Daddy” warping a raid into glitch-rage frenzy. Production design nails the era’s analog underbelly: dog-eared tape boxes, industrial decay standing in for L.A. (shot cheap in Florida), all evoking a pre-digital void where evil hides on celluloid. The snuff aesthetic probes voyeurism smartly—we glimpse pleas and steel without exploitation, questioning our gaze alongside Welles’s, though the film’s flirtation with seediness risks tipping into the very prurience it critiques.
Andrew Kevin Walker’s script (fresh off Se7en) structures as moral diptych: procedural probe yields to vigilante spasm, bookended by domestic anchors that underscore the cost. No tidy psychologizing redeems the killers—Higgins kills because appetite wills it, Poole for “business,” others for greed—exposing evil’s flat banality over tortured backstories. The widow’s suicide post-truth, Mary Ann’s mom’s grateful note (“You cared enough to try”), and Welles’s scarred homecoming deny closure; vengeance hardens more than heals, bodies burned sans parade of justice. It’s a gut-punch thesis on film’s limits: some horrors defy capture, watching them unmakes the witness. Schumacher, slumming post-Batman gloss, revels in the ugly, though pacing drags early in porn prowls and the revenge rampage strains credulity.
Yet for all its stumbles—script contrivances like convenient turns, a third act veering punchy over precise—8MM endures as underrated descent, a thriller that stares unblinking into appetite’s void. Cage and Phoenix elevate genre tropes, Schumacher’s design makes depravity stick, and the core query lingers: does filming evil make it real, or us complicit? Flaws aside, it hums with the era’s dark electricity, a flawed reel worth unspooling for its unflinching grind.
The three Bantam Brothers (Walker Boone, Tony DeSantis, and Dave Mucci) have just gotten out of prison and they’ve all already stolen several pounds of explosives. Pretending to be international terrorists, they try to blackmail banker Adam Beardsley (John Vernon) into paying them off. Deputy Police Commissioner Ray Melton (Robert Vaughn) wants to go by the book but his superior, Thad Evans (Leslie Nielsen), realizes that this case is going to require a cop who is willing to break all the rules. It’s time to call in Jack Calhoun (Bruce Fairbairn).
When this movie started, I assumed that it was a comedy. The title sounded like a double entendre and Leslie Nielsen’s name was right there in the opening credits. The opening heist scene also felt like a comedy, up until the Bantam brothers started shooting people. That was when I realized that this movie was supposed to be a drama. Why would you cast a post-Airplane! Leslie Nielsen in a serious cop film? This film did come out before The Naked Gun but it was still after Nielsen sent up every cop show ever made with the original Police Squad television series. .And then, on top of Nielsen, the film gives us Robert Vaughn and a very grumpy John Vernon. All it needed was OJ Simpson as Calhoun’s partner.
Even though the movie was a drama, it still felt like a comedy. Bruce Fairbairn wasn’t much of a cop but luckily, the three Bantam brothers weren’t that much of a group of criminals. Jack Calhoun had a girlfriend (Kerrie Keane) who constantly reminded him that he could have been having sex with her if he wasn’t constantly searching for the Bantam brothers. “I can’t be in two places at once,” Calhoun said with a sigh. I’m still not convinced this wasn’t a comedy.
Nightstick was originally made for Canadian television. When it first aired, it was called Calhoun. The name was changed to Nightstick for the video release, even though no one in the movie uses a nightstick. Calhoun uses a gun and, at one point, a binder but he doesn’t carry a nightstick. Maybe his character should have been named Jack Nightstick to make the title work.
Did I hallucinate this movie? I’m pretty sure it was a comedy.
Bruise Brubaker (Mr. T) spends his nights as a bouncer at a club owned by his best friend (Dennis Dugan) and his days running a center for at-risk youth. Bruise is a former Marine drill sergeant who is now determined to make Chicago a better place. He’s so cool that his name is Bruise and he even has his own theme song, which plays whenever he patrols the streets and alleys of Chicago. But when it looks like the youth center is going to get closed down unless it can quickly raise some money, Bruise faces the challenge of a lifetime when he enters a competition to prove that he’s the toughest man in the world!
Is Mr. T the toughest man in the world? I pity the fool who even has to ask.
This made-for-TV movie is exactly what you think it is. Mr. T barks out his dialogue with his signature growl but he still seems utterly sincere when he orders the kids to say in school and stop trying to mug old men in the alleys. At first, it seems like Bruise should be able to easily win the Toughest Man competition but it turns out to be tougher than he thought. There’s an extended sequences in which Bruise tries to learn how to box and it turns out that he’s no Clubber Lang. There’s also an extended subplot about some broadly-played mobsters who are hoping that can drug Bruise so he’ll lose the contest.
Probably the funniest thing about the movie is the idea that everyone in Chicago would stop what they were doing so that they could gather around the television and watch the Toughest Man contest. The second funniest thing is Dennis Farina showing up in a small role and reminding us that it takes all types of actors to make a movie.
Mr. T was never a good actor but he was a great personality and that personality is on full display here. The Toughest Man In The World will make you nostalgic for a more innocent time.
Laura Mosbach (Terry Farrell) is a former basketball player who is hired to be the assistant coach of the Lady Warriors, a high school team. When the beloved Coach Holliday (Lawrence Dane) has a stroke during a game, Laura becomes the new head coach and had to deal with parents who want to win at any cost, players who think they can bend the rules, and a town where no one has a private life. If you think it’s difficult being a new coach, try being a new coach who is publicly dating the father (Adrian Pasdar) of a player who you’ve just made a starter. Coach Mosbacher coaches the team her way, telling them that they are no longer Lady Warriors but now Women Warriors.
Through the Shattered Lens 