Guilty Pleasure: Blood Harvest (dir by Bill Rebane)

Posted on October 23, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 1987’s Blood Harvest, college student Jill Robinson (Itonia Salochek) returns to her hometown in rural Wisconsin and discovers that there have been some changes.

For one thing, the local farmers are struggling and the bank is foreclosing on their land. Since Jill’s father is the president of the bank, people are not particularly happy to see her in town. (One farmer spits at her.) When Jill arrives at her parents home, she discovers insulting graffiti on the exterior and a strawman hanging in the front corridor. Even more upsetting, her parents are nowhere to be found!

Jill goes to see Sheriff Buckley (Frank Benson) about the graffiti but when they go back out to Jill’s house, both the graffiti and the strawman have vanished. The sheriff tells Jill not both him anymore and then leaves her alone at her home. Most people would probably panic about this but not Jill! Instead, Jill hangs out with her childhood friend, Gary (Dean West).

Gary’s has had a tough time of it recently. His parents recently died mysteriously and he now takes care of his brother, Mervon (played by 60s folk singer Tiny Tim). Gary and Mervon are an oddly matched pair of siblings. For one thing, Gary appears to be no older than 20 while Mervon is in his late 60s. Gary looks like a fresh-faced jock. Mervon has long stringy hair, speaks in a falsetto voice, and always wears clown makeup. Mervon, who prefers to be called The Magnificent Merv, also likes to sing about how Gary and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. As for Gary, he is disappointed to hear that Jill not only has a boyfriend at college but that she’s also engaged to him. It doesn’t help that Jill keeps saying stuff like, “If my father hadn’t caught us that time, it could have been you and me getting married!”

While Jill’s parents remain missing, she is visited by her boyfriend (Peter Krause, making his film debut) and her best friend, Sarah (Lori Minnetti). Because Jill isn’t particularly smart, she doesn’t notice when both her boyfriend and her BFF are dragged over to her family’s barn and brutally killed. (Jill does eventually start to worry about the whereabouts of her boyfriend but it’s not like Sheriff Buckley is going to help her….) Who is the person who is not only murdering Jill’s friend but also frequently drugging her and undressing her so he can take pictures? Well, there’s only two suspects and the scare scenes are so clumsily staged that you’ll see the killer’s face long before you were probably meant to.

Blood Harvest was directed by Bill Rebane, the Wisconsin-based filmmaker behind The Giant Spider Invasion and The Demons of Ludlow. (Ludlow even gets a shout-out.) It’s a typical Rebane film, with all of the inconsistent acting and incoherent plotting that he is typically known for. At the same time, it’s also a film that’s a bit more interesting that one might expect just from the plot description. There’s an interesting political subtext to Jill’s father being the banker who is responsible for the decline of Jill’s hometown and one gets the feeling that Rebane shared the anger of the film’s famers when it came to banks foreclosing on people’s land. One could never doubt Rebane’s love of rural Wisconsin and, even though the film itself is a bit grainy, the countryside looks lovely. Finally, I have to admit that I could actually relate to Jill, both in her desire to escape country living and her dislike of wearing pants while at home.

That said, the main attraction for most people will be the very odd screen presence of Tiny Tim, who gives a surprisingly earnest performance as poor old Mervo. Everyone may think Mervo’s crazy because of the makeup he wears but he is a clown who is definitely crying on the inside.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

Guilty Pleasure No. 67: Aerobicide (dir by David A. Prior)

Posted on October 16, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

It doesn’t get more 80s than 1987’s Aerobicide, a rather ludicrous slasher film that is also known as Killer Workout.

The clients and the staff at Rhonda’s Work-Out are in danger. People are being murdered inside the gym, left and right. One member of the gym is slashed to death in the showers. Another one is beaten to death with a barbell while his friend is killed with a very large safety pin. One instructors ends up hanging in a closet while another is stabbed to death in a locker room. A group of teens show up to spray graffiti on the outside of the club and they all end up getting murdered as well.

Most people would assume that, with all of those murders going on, that the place would be closed down or, at the very least, people would stop frequenting the gym. But no, the opposite happens. Every murder is followed by an aerobics class, in which the camera shamelessly lingers on the lycra-clad participants, none of whom seem to be particularly concerned about working out at a crime scene. ( If your body’s looking too big, one of the film’s many songs tells us, Like a hippo or a pig/ Gotta workout/ gotta work out….) The gym’s owner, Rhonda Johnson (Marica Karr), doesn’t seem to be particularly concerned about the gym getting a bad reputation as a result of all the murders. Instead, she’s more annoyed with her surviving instructors, snapping at one, “Stop showing off your tits and that tight little ass!” Personally, I would think looking good would be a top priority for someone working at a gym but apparently, Rhonda feels differently.

(Then again, if people were being murdered at my gym, I’d probably cancel my membership, despite the fact that my gym is only a few blocks away from my house and most of the people who go there are relatively cool. That said, the main reason why I signed up for a membership was so my sister could get a discount on her membership fees. Personally, I prefer running.)

Even if Rhonda refuses to close the gym, you would think that Lt. Morgan (David James Campbell) would make sure that the gym had a full-time police presence. Eventually, Morgan does assign one policeman to watch the gym but that’s only after several murders have already occurred and that one policeman’s presence doesn’t really do much good. Then again, Lt. Morgan never comes across as being a particularly good cop. Morgan is spectacularly bad at his job, which wouldn’t be a huge problem if not for the fact that Morgan is also the hero of the film. Eventually, he does figure out that the murders are connected to a tragic tanning bed accident but it’s hard to say how exactly he managed to do that. Rather than actually showing us Lt. Morgan gathering clues and drawing conclusions, the film just has him randomly blurt stuff out.

It’s all pretty ridiculous but, because the film is such a film of it’s time, it’s also rather fascinating. Killer Workout may not have been the only or even the first film to combine Flashdance with slasher chills but it is the first one to feature a song with lyrics like, “It’s the perfect body you’re looking for/it’s aerobocide.” This is one of those films where you come for the big hair and the 80s fashions and the bass-heavy score and you stay for the ludicrous plot twists, the overacting, the overheated dialogue, and the out-of-nowhere plot twists that dominate the film’s final 30 minutes. It’s not necessarily a “good” film but I defy anyone to look away once it begins.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

Guilty Pleasure No.66: Cloverfield (dir Matt Reeves)

Posted on October 9, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Let’s just be honest, here. In many ways, 2008’s Cloverfield is a remarkably stupid film.

I mean, don’t get me wrong. It’s an entertaining film. It’s a fun film. It’s a film that I’ve seen a few times and I usually enjoy it whenever I see it. But it’s still a film about someone who refuses to stop filming, even in the middle of an alien invasion. It makes sense, of course, that Hud Platt (T.J. Miller) would want to film the going away party that’s being held for his friend Rob (Michael Stahl-David). But why would Hud keep holding onto that camcorder even after the aliens invade and New York starts to explode all around him? There are several moments in the film where it’s obvious that the camera is slowing Hud and his friends down. The easiest thing to do would be to drop the camcorder and run to safety. I mean, it’s not like the destruction of New York by aliens is going to be lost to history if Hud doesn’t film it. But instead, Hud not only keeps filming but, for all the shaky cam effects and the heaving breathing of people running for their lives, Hud still somehow manages to capture every important event on camera.

In many ways, the film epitomizes everything that tends to drive people crazy about the found footage genre but Cloverfield is an undeniably fun movie. I mean, there’s a scene where the head of the Statue of Liberty is literally tossed into the middle of the street. It’s such an over-the-top moment that it’s impossible not to love it and, to be honest, the fact that Hud manages to hold the camera still enough to perfectly capture the image of Lady Liberty’s head crashing to the ground is kind of cool. The film follows a group of friends as they try to make their way across New York City to try to rescue Rob’s girlfriend Beth (Odette Yustman) before then evacuating the city and there’s something rather exciting about the sight of this small group of people continually moving in the opposite direction of the crowd around them. While everyone else runs away from danger, our heroes move straight into it, even though none of them are exactly action heroes. They’re nerdy hipsters on a mission and, even though you know from the start that they’re all doomed, it’s hard not to kind of love them. The film’s final moments carry more an emotional punch than you might normally expect from a found footage alien invasion film.

That said, if the aliens do come and they are literally tearing apart the Statue of Liberty before your very eyes, there’s no shame in putting down the camera and running. In fact, if there’s any lesson to be learned from Cloverfield, it’s that sometimes, it’s best just to run for it.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

Guilty Pleasure No. 65: Invaders From Mars (dir by Tobe Hooper)

Posted on October 2, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1986 film, Invaders from Mars, opens with a dark and stormy night.

12 year-old David Gardner (Hunter Carson, son of actress Karen Black and filmmaker L.T. Kit Carson), who dreams of growing up to become an astronaut, witnesses something strange happening outside of his bedroom window. He watches as a spaceship lands on a nearby hill and apparently drills itself into the ground. The next morning, David convinces his father (Timothy Bottoms) to go out to the hill and see what he can find. When his father returns, he says that he didn’t see anything strange at the hill. However, he is now acting strangely, no longer showing emotion.

Soon, everyone in the small town is also acting strangely, from David’s mother (Laraine Newman) to his teacher (Louise Fletcher). David notices that everyone has a mysterious mark on the back of their neck. Even more alarmingly, he walks in on his teacher eating a mouse. Investigating the hill himself, David discovers that his father was lying about nothing being there. Instead, there’s a cavernous spaceship that is patrolled by aliens! A creature with a giant brain has taken control of almost everyone in David’s life. David discovers that the hill right outside of his house is now the headquarters of an intergalactic invasion. It’s a war of the worlds and David is stuck right in the middle.

Fortunately, David does have a few allies. The aliens have not managed to take control of everyone. The school nurse (Karen Black) believes David and helps him explore the spaceship. The surprisingly nice General Wilson (James Karen) is not only willing to launch a military operation on the advice of a 12 year-old but he also doesn’t have any problem allowing that 12 year-old to take de facto command of his soldiers. Can David save his community from the Martians?

A remake of the 1953 sci-fi classic, Invaders from Mars was directed by Tobe Hooper, the Texas-born director who was best known for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Poltergeist. At first, the deliberately campy Invaders from Mars might seem like an unexpected film from Hooper but actually, it has quite a bit in common with Hooper’s other credits. Like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it plays out like an increasingly surreal dream, one with an emphasis on isolation. Like Poltergeist, it’s ultimately a satire of suburban and small town conformity. (Indeed, one could argue that Invaders From Mars is Poltergeist without the interference of Steven Spielberg.) If the original Invaders From Mars was about the dangers of communism, the remake is about the danger of losing your childhood imagination and just becoming a mindless drone.

Invaders From Mars is often a deliberately silly film. Sometimes, it’s definitely a bit too silly for its own good, hence the guilty in guilty pleasure. That said, whenever I see it, I can’t help but smile at how quickly General Wilson starts taking orders from David. (James Karen plays the role with such earnestness that General Wilson seems to be less concerned with David’s age but instead just happy that he has someone around who can tell him what he needs to do.) But it makes sense when you consider that the film is meant to be a child’s fantasy of what would happen if there was an alien invasion. Who wouldn’t want to be the one telling the adults how to save the planet? For all the aliens and the mind control, this is a rather innocent film. Featuring entertaining performances from Hunter Carson, Timothy Bottoms, Karen Black, and the great James Karen, Invaders From Mars is an entertaining daydream of interstellar conquest.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

Guilty Pleasure No. 64: Karate Warrior (dir by Fabrizio De Angelis)

Posted on September 30, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smfvJ_EYHNM&t=25s&pp=ygUWa2FyYXRlIHdhcnJpb3IgdHJhaWxlcg%3D%3D

“Oh, come on,” I said last week, “this is a perfectly fine film.”

I was saying that because I was watching the 1987 film, Karate Warriors, with a group of friends. They felt that it was a largely pointless film that didn’t really have much of a plot. I felt that it was an interesting piece of history, seeing as how it was an Italian rip-off of The Karate Kid that was made by several associates of Lucio Fulci. And while Fulci himself wasn’t involved with the film, the scene where the lead character, young Anthony Scott (Kim Rossi Stuart), is savagely beaten up with the bad guys is so unnecessarily bloody that it feels like an homage to Fulci if nothing else. The scene, which makes this rip-off of The Karate Kid too graphic for the film’s target audience, really does epitomize everything that made the Italian exploitation industry so memorable.

Teenager Anthony Scott is in the Philippines so he can visit his father (Jared Martin, who starred in Fulci’s Warriors of the Year 2072), a journalist who is apparently in semi-hiding because of a series of articles that he wrote that exposed government corruption. (Don’t worry too much about the father’s backstory because it doesn’t really play any sort of role in the film.) Anthony runs afoul of the local teenage crime lord, Quino (Enrico Torralba). Quino is not only running a protection racket but he’s also the local karate champion. When Anthony stands up to Quino, he gets beaten up and Anthony’s girlfriend, Maria (Janelle Barretto), nearly loses her home when Quino’s gang sets it on fire. The half-dead Anthony is discovered by Master Kimura (Ken Watanabe — no, not that Ken Watanabe). Master Kimura takes Anthony into the forest and teaches him the “Stroke of the Dragon.” One montage later, Anthony is ready to enter the local karate tournament and take on Quino. For some reason, it never occurs to Anthony to let his father know that he’s now living with Master Kimura so, while Anthony is training, his father and his mother (Janet Agren, who co-starred in Fulci’s City of the Living Dead) are desperately searching for him in Manila.

Karate Warrior is only 84 minutes long and, for reasons that are not quite clear, Anthony’s training and the final tournament are all crammed into the film’s final 20 minutes. Before that, the film is a travelogue of Anthony wandering around Manila, getting conned by nearly everyone that he meets, and trying to flirt with Maria. So yes, the film is a bit plotless but I found the film’s meandering spirit to be a bit charming. It’s rare to see a film that’s so honest about only having 20 minutes worth of plot. The English language version also has the extra treat of some really bad dubbing. At one point, it sounds as if a totally different actor took over dubbing Anthony. The cheerful of ineptness of it all was rather likable.

The film was directed by Fabrizio De Angelis, who produced Fulci’s Beyond trilogy. My friends may have disliked it but the film was a big enough of a success in Italy that it led to 6 sequels. I can’t wait to watch every one of them!

Previous Guilty Pleasures

Guilty Pleasure No. 63: Julie and Jack (dir by James Nguyen)

Posted on September 25, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“Sex isn’t the only thing I care about. It’s just that I’ve always imagined myself falling in love with someone …. who’s alive. I know that may sound strange to you, but it’s just the way I was brought up.”

Sometimes, it just takes one line to transform a mere bad movie into a masterpiece of weirdness and that’s certainly what happens in 2003’s Julie and Jack when Jack Livingston (Justin Kunkle) attempts to explain why he’s having trouble with the idea of committing to Julie Romanov (Jenn Gotzon). Jack is a computer chip salesman who has been unlucky in love until he joins CupidMatchmaker.Com and meets Julie Romanov. He quickly falls in love with Julie, despite the fact that she refuses to tell him anything about her past and he never meets her in person. Instead, they spend their time walking around a virtual reality recreation of San Francisco.

Why is Julie so sensitive? Well, Julie is not exactly alive. When she was among the living, she was a brilliant computer programmer but, when she found out she was dying of a brain tumor, she managed to transfer her mind into the Internet. Her body may be dead but her mind and her personality live on, haunting dating websites. When Jack discovers the truth about his new girlfriend, he has to decide if he can be in love with someone with whom he can never have sex.

(It never seems to occur to either Jack or Julie that there also might be issues involved with someone having a relationship in which one person who is no longer among the living and will never age while her partner gets older and closer to his own death.)

It’s pretty dumb but it’s also so earnest and stupidly sincere that it’s kind of hard not to like it. Julie and Jack was the directorial debut of James Nguyen, who went on achieve a certain cinematic infamy with the Birdemic films. Just as the Birdemic films seemed to sincerely believe that they had something important to say about environmentalism, Julie and Jack has similar delusions of grandeur, with the main difference being that the message of Julie and Jack is a bit more heartfelt than Birdemic’s Al Gore-inspired preachiness.

The film has all of the things that we normally associate with James Nguyen’s work. The pointless driving scenes, the meandering travelogue shots of San Francisco, the scenes were everyone in a boardroom applauds, they’re all here with Nguyen’s other trademark obsessions. Because it’s not a Nguyen film without a reference to Hitchcock, Tippi Hedren has a cameo appearance as Julie’s mother and, of course, Nguyen includes a scene in which she talks about how much she loves birds. Do you think Hedren ever got tired of directors telling her to react to birds? I mean, she did make other films. Of course, other than Marnie and Roar, I can’t really think of any of them right now….

Anyway, Julie and Jack is silly and dumb and visually, it looks like a community college student film. At the same time, it’s so sincere and so cheerfully clueless about its inability to be the thought-provoking and mind-bending love story that it wants to be that I can’t help but like it a little. It’s a film that tries very, very hard and it’s difficult not to appreciate, on at least some level, the effort.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

Guilty Pleasure No. 62: Backtrack (dir by Dennis Hopper)

Posted on September 4, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Sometimes, you see a film that is just so weird and incoherent that you can’t help but love it.

Of course, it also helps if the film has a once-in-a-lifetime cast of actors who you would never expect to see acting opposite each other.

For me, that’s certainly the case with 1990’s Backtrack. Directed by Dennis Hopper, Backtrack is a film about an artist (Jodie Foster, channeling Jenny Holzer) who witnesses a mob murder committed by Joe Pesci, Dean Stockwell, Tony Sirico, and John Turturro. An FBI agent played by Fred Ward suggests that the artist should go into the witness protection program but she doesn’t want to give up her life as a New York sophisticate who creates challenging LED displays and who can eat Sno Balls whenever she gets the craving for one. (Yes, this is a plot point.) Turturro and Sirico break into the artist’s apartment and kill her boyfriend, who is played by a wide-eyed Charlie Sheen. The artist puts on a blonde wig and goes on the run, eventually getting a job in advertising.

Realizing that his men can’t get the job done, mob boss Vincent Price decides to hire a legendary hitman played by Dennis Hopper (who also directed this film) to track down the artist. However, the hitman becomes fascinating with the artist’s work, finds pictures of her posing in black lingerie, and immediately falls in love with her. Not only does he wants to save her life but he wants her to wear the same lingerie exclusively for him. (Yes, this is a pretty big plot point.) At first, the artist refuses and views the hitman as being some sort of pathetic perv. But then she discovers that he’s covered her bed with Sno Balls….

Meanwhile, a young Catherine Keener shows up as the girlfriend of a trucker who briefly considers giving the artist a ride to Canada.

And then Bob Dylan shows up, handling a chainsaw.

And there’s Helena Kallianiotes, the outspoken hitch-hiker from Five Easy Pieces, yelling at Joe Pesci!

And there’s Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie co-star, Julie Adams! And there’s Toni Basil! And there’s director Alex Cox!

Dennis Hopper not only starred in Backtrack but he also directed and it’s obvious that he placed a call into just about everyone he knew. In fact, one could argue that the only thing more shocking than Vincent Price showing up as a mob boss is that Peter Fonda, Karen Black, Elliott Gould, Robert Walker Jr., and Kris Kristofferson are nowhere to be found in the film. Hopper’s first cut of Backtrack was reportedly 3 hours long but the studio cut it down to 90 minutes, renamed it Catchfire, and Hopper insisted on being credited as Alan Smithee. Later, Hopper released a two-hour version with the Backtrack title and his directorial credit restored.

Regardless of which version you see, Backtrack is an odd film. It’s hardly the first film to be made about a hit man falling for his target. What distinguishes this film is just how bizarre a performance Dennis Hopper gives in the role of the hitman. It’s as if Hopper gave into every method instinct that he had and the end result was a mix of Blue Velvet‘s Frank Booth and the crazed photojournalist from Apocalypse Now. Jodie Foster’s cool intelligence makes her the ideal choice for a conceptual artist but it also makes it hard to believe that she would fall for a jittery hitman and, in her romantic scenes with Hopper, Foster often seems to be struggling to resist the temptation to roll her eyes. Somehow, their total lack of romantic chemistry becomes rather fascinating to work. They are two talented performers but each appears to be acting in a different movie. What’s interesting is that I think a movie just about Hopper’s spacey hitman would be interesting (and, if you’ve ever seen The American Friend, it’s hard not to feel that such a movie already exists) but I think a movie about just about Foster’s artist and her life in New York would be just as fascinating. Taken as individuals, the artist and the hitman are both compelling characters. Taken as a couple, they don’t belong anywhere near each other.

But let’s be honest. This is a film that most people will watch for the parade of character actors delivering quirky dialogue. Even if one takes Hopper and Foster out of this mix, this is an amazingly talented cast. One need only consider that John Turturro did Do The Right Thing before appearing in this film while Joe Pesci and Tony Sirico did Goodfellas immediately afterwards. This film features a once-in-a-lifetime cast, made up of actors who were apparently told to do whatever they felt like doing. Turturro plays up the comedy. Sirico plays his role with cool menace. Stockwell barely speaks above a whisper. Fred Ward plays the one sane man in a world of lunatics. Vincent Price delivers his line as if he’s appearing in one of Roger Corman’s Poe films and somehow, it makes sense that, in the world of Backfire, an Italian gangster would have a snarky, mid-Atlantic accent.

It’s an odd little film, an example of 80s filmmaking with a 70s sensibility. While it’s not touched with the lunatic genius that distinguished Hopper’s The Last Movie, Backtrack is still something that should be experienced at least once.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

Guilty Pleasure No. 61: Double Dragon (dir by James Yukich)

Posted on May 1, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The time is …. the future!

The future looks a lot like a cheap music video. Due to repeated earthquakes, California is now an island and Los Angeles has been left in ruins. The city has been renamed New Angeles, even though the correct name would have been Nuevos Angeles but whatever. The important thing is that city is now a mess. The police allow the gangs to run rampant at night in return for not running rampant during the day. The nightly news, which is anchored by George Hamilton and Vanna White, is full of stories about the federal government refusing to send any more aid to California, despite the fact that Jerry Brown is the Vice President. For some reason, Andy Dick plays the weatherman and gives continual updates on the smog and rain.

Despite the fact that the city is the most dangerous place on Earth, Satori Imada (Julia Nickson) still makes the time to drive her teenage sons, Billy (Scott Wolf) and and Jimmy Lee (Mark Dacascos, who was clearly not a teenager when this film was shot) to and from their karate tournaments. However, that might all end because Sartori possesses half of a magic medallion and the evil Koga Shuko (Robert Patrick, looking oddly like Sugar Ray’s Mark McGrath) has the other half. Satori gives her half of the medallion to Billy and tells him that he and his brother must keep it out of the hands of Shuko.

That’s not going to be easy because Shuko not only has control of the local gangs but also the police. Fortunately, rebel leader Marian Delario (Alyssa Milano) is willing to help out the Lee brothers. It all leads to a lot of fights, a lot of running, some campy humor, and stiffly delivered dialogue. For whatever reason, the filmmakers decided that the way to make this marital arts film a success would be to push accomplished martial artist Mark Dacascos into the background and instead focus on Scott Wolf, who spends most of the movie looking like he’s either confused by the plot or terrified as to what Double Dragon might do to his career.

Yeah, this movie is pretty stupid and the plot is pretty much impossible to follow. And yet, it is oddly entertaining in its own weird way. If you ignore the story and just focus on the visuals, it can actually be kind of fun. Look at all the bright colors. Look at Robert Patrick, with his goat-tee and his 90s pop star hair. Look at Alyssa Milano, who, surprisingly, seems to actually be in on the joke. Look at all of the Mad Max-inspired fashion choices. From a purely visual point of view, New Angeles is a huge improvement on Los Angeles. Along with the film visuals, the film is also worth watching just so one can witness just how over-the-top Robert Patrick goes in his performance. I don’t normally think of Patrick as being someone who chews the scenery but, in this film, he gives into every cartoonish impulse that he has and it’s actually a lot of fun to watch. There’s not a moment of subtlety to be found in either his performance or Alyssa Milano’s and thank the Angels for that. Finally, I have to appreciate the fact that the film’s main message appears to be that the government and all other forms of civil authority are basically useless. Not even Vice President Jerry Brown can be bothered to help out the people of New Angeles. That pretty much tells you all that you need to know.

In the end, Double Dragon is not a particularly good film but it’s fun in its own deeply dumb way.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

Guilty Pleasure No. 60: The Running Man (dir by Paul Michael Glaser)

Posted on January 7, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“Killian, here’s your Subzero… now plain zero!”

Uhm, excuse me, Mr. Schwarzenegger, but a man just died. He probably had a family who just watched you kill him on national television….

Oh well, it happens! In the role of Ben Richards, Arnold Schwarzenegger kills quite a few people over the course of the 1987 film, The Running Man, but they were all bad. In fact, when we first meet Ben Richards, he’s a cop who is trying to save lives. His superiors want him to open fire on a bunch of protestors who simply want enough food to eat. When Richards refuses to do it, he is framed for perpetrating “the Bakersfield Massacre” and is sent to prison. When he is recaptured after escaping, he is given a chance to compete on America’s number one game show, The Running Man! Hosted and produced by Damon Killian (Richard Dawson, oozing smarm in a performance that — in a fair world — would have received Oscar consideration), The Running Man is a show in which prisoners are given a chance to win prizes like a trial by jury or maybe even a pardon. While the audience cheers and puts down bets, the prisoners are stalked by professional killers like Buzzsaw (Gus Rethwisch), Dynamo (Erland Van Lidth), Fireball (Jim Brown), and Sub-Zero (Professor Toru Tanaka). Along with Killian, Captain Freedom (Jesse Ventura) provides commentary and analysis on how the game is going. Ben soon finds himself joined by Amber (Maria Conchita Alonso), who proves herself to be just as tough as he is.

Seen today, The Running Man feels more than a bit prophetic. Due to worldwide economic collapse, the poor are getting poorer while the rich are getting richer. The American government has become both increasingly corporate and increasingly authoritarian. The citizens are entertained and manipulated by “reality” programming. On camera, Killian is a charismatic host who delivers his lines with faux sincerity and who loves to meet and give away prizes to the public. (There’s something both undeniably creepy and also rather familiar about the way that Killian sniffs the hair, rubs the shoulders and holds the arms of the audience members to whom he’s speaking. It’s all very calculated and one gets the feeling that Killian washes his hands as soon as the camera are off of him.) Behind the scenes, he drinks, smokes, curses, and is full of contempt for everyone around him. He may not be happy when Ben outsmarts and kills the show’s stalkers but he definitely cheers up when he hears how good the ratings are. The film is set in 2017, which was 30 years in the future when The Running Man was first released. Seen today, The Running Man’s 2017 feels a lot like our 2017….

That said, The Running Man is also a big, flamboyant, and undeniably entertaining film. It’s also surprisingly funny, at times. Living in a dystopia ahs turned everyone into a quip machine. None of the bad guys die without Schwarzenegger making a joke about it. (“Buzzsaw? He had to split.” Yes, he did.) The show’s vapid studio audience, who go from cheering the prospect of witnessing a bloody death to crying when their favorite stalker is killed, is both disturbing and humorous. (Also memorable is the faux somber dance number that is performed while the show memorializes all the dead stalkers.) For all the costumed heroes and villains, the film is practically stolen by an older woman named Agnes who becomes Ben Richards’s favorite fan. The gaming “quads” may be dark and dangerous and full of angry people but they’re also full of advertisements for Cadre Cola. Dey Young of Rock and Roll High School and Strange Behavior fame has a cameo as Amy, who pays six dollars for a can of Cadre. (That may seem like a lot for a can of anything but Cadre is the official cola of The Running Man! Damon Killian endorses it! And, of course, when The Running Man was produced, the studio was owned by Coca-Cola so the jokes about Cadre’s corporate dominance also serve as a “take that” towards the corporation who put up money for the film. Either that or Cadre is stand-in for Pepsi.)

It’s easy to compare The Running Man to The Hunger Games films but The Running Man is infinitely more fun, if just because it doesn’t make the mistake of taking itself as seriously as The Hunger Games did. (Add to that, The Running Man manages to wrap up its story in 90 minutes, whereas The Hunger Games needed four movies.) Like The Hunger Game, The Running Man is based on a book, in this case a very loose adaptation of one of the pulpy novels that Stephen King wrote under the name of Richard Bachman. While King said that he enjoyed the film, he also asked that his real name not be listed in the credits because the film had little in common with his book, which is fair enough. The Running Man may have been inspired by a Stephen King novel but it’s an Arnold Schwarzenegger production through-and-through.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

Guilty Pleasure No. 59: Teen Wolf (dir by Rod Daniel)

Posted on October 29, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

First released in 1985, Teen Wolf is a bit of an odd film.

Michael J. Fox is Scott Howard, a 17 year-old high student in Nebraska. There’s nothing special about Scott. He plays on the school’s lousy basketball team. He has a crush on the most popular girl in school, even though she barely seems to know that he’s alive. He’s completely oblivious to the fact that his lifelong best friend, Boof (Susan Ursitti), is totally crushing on him. His parents are clueless to Scott’s angst. Maybe the only thing that Scott has going for him is that he is friends with the coolest kid in school, Stiles (Jerry Levine). How cool is Stiles? He’s so cool that his name is Stiles! Actually, to be hones, Stiles seems just as dorky as Scott but this is an 80s film so who am I to argue with the film’s argument that everyone wants to hang out with Stiles?

Then, one night, Scott discovers that he has inherited the family “curse.” He’s a werewolf! But, on the plus side, he’s a really popular werewolf. Everyone at school loves the werewolf. The popular girls want to date the werewolf. Everyone loves seeing the werewolf van surfing. And, even more importantly, the werewolf is really good at basketball! It’s weird because the Werewolf is just as short as Scott was but apparently, being a wolf makes you good at basketball. You have to wonder why the other teams wouldn’t protest having to play against a werewolf. I would be worried that the werewolf would get mad if it missed a shot and kill everyone on the court.

Anyway, Scott is popular but he soon learns that popularity is empty, regardless of whether you’re a werewolf or not. He also realizes the Boof is the girl that he should be going out with but Boof only wants to date Scott. She doesn’t want to date the werewolf. Will Scott find the courage to go to the school dance as himself?

This is a pretty stupid movie but Michael J. Fox brings a lot of heart to the role of Scott and his romance with Boof (who really needs a better nickname) is actually rather sweet. The highlight of the film are Scott’s interaction with his supportive but nerdy father (played by James Hampton). There are a lot jokes that fall flat and the plot never makes much sense but the film itself so amiably dumb that it’s hard not to kind of like it. That said, don’t ever try to surf on top of the van. Werewolf or not, that looks dangerous!