“G.I. Joe is the code name for America’s daring, highly trained special mission force. Its purpose: to defend human freedom against Cobra, a ruthless terrorist organization determined to rule the world!”
With their numerous victories over Cobra, the Joes have been getting pretty cocky. When they’re nearly defeated in a surprise Cobra attack, General Hawk brings in Sgt. Slaughter to whip them into shape. Sgt. Slaughter, the wrestler? More or less. He’s never identified as being a wrestler. Instead, he’s supposed to be a real, tough-as-nails drill sergeant. But he’s voiced by the wrestler, and he looks just like the wrestler so he is the wrestler whether he admits it or not.
Meanwhile, some members of Cobra think that it might be time for a change in management, seeing as how Cobra Commander has yet to launch a single successful operation. Dr. Mindbender decides to steal DNA from the tombs of the world’s greatest conquerors and use it to create a Cobra Emperor. Since this is the ’80s, it requires a full-scale military operation to get DNA. The Joes can’t stop Cobra from getting the DNA of Napoleon, King Tut, and Rasputin, but they do keep them from getting Sun Tzu’s. The new Cobra Emperor has determination, strength, and whatever Rasputin was supposed to provide, but he doesn’t have Sun Tzu’s patience. He still manages to briefly take over Washington, D.C., which indicates that Sgt. Slaughter was right about G.I. Joe needing to shape up.
G.I. Joe is being commanded by a pro wrestler, and Cobra has perfected human cloning? What the hell is going on? It’s a cartoon about soldiers and battles where no one ever gets injured or killed. I guess they can get away with the Cobra Emperor. I liked that, even though the Cobra Emperor was loud and determined, he didn’t know the basics, like how to keep from running out of fuel and weapons in the middle of a battle. It turns out Cobra Commander was more on top of things than anyone noticed.
Who joins Cobra anyway? There are always hundreds of them, even though they never win a battle. This episode features Zartan recruiting new members. Cobra must have a good dental plan.
Shortly after the end of the famous Woodstock music festival, a hippie-hating local (Tige Andrews) goes out to the now-deserted festival grounds and attempts to destroy the stage. Since the stage is still attached to the power lines, he ends up getting electrocuted. He survives, but now, whenever there’s an electrical storm, he turns into a hippie-hating werewolf. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately, depending on how you look at it), the world’s most clean-cut hippie band has shown up in town so that they can say they performed at Woodstock.
The plot of The Werewolf of Woodstock sounds like a comedy, but the movie takes itself fairly seriously. Most of the film’s campiness appears to be unintentional. Producer Dick Clark was able to rope a fairly respectable cast into appearing in this short film. Along with Tige Andrews as the werewolf, Andrew Stevens appears as a member of the band, while Belinda Balaski plays a groupie who gets kidnapped by the werewolf. Michael Parks and Meredith MacRae show up as two big-city cops who are called in to deal with the town’s werewolf problem. I believed that Tige Andrews really did hate the hippies with every fiber of his being, but otherwise, no one seems that invested in their roles.
Is the movie worth watching? It is, just because it’s short and there’s a scene where the werewolf steals a dune buggy. I watched it on a Russian site, though it wasn’t a very good upload. It doesn’t appear that it’s even been released on DVD or Blu-ray. I’m surprised. I would think some company would have released it just for the title alone.
In 2021’s A Deadly Grudge, Lindsey (Annika Foster) owns a restaurant with her fiancé Gavin (Jonathan Stoddard). (It’s a Lifetime film and, in the world of Lifetime, there’s nothing easier than owning your own restaurant or opening your own art gallery.) Her father, Jim (Patrick M.J. Finerty), is internet-famous for his cooking videos. And her mother… well, she’s dead. She dies while she’s out jogging and a car runs her over. What’s odd is that she doesn’t bother to get out of the way of the car despite having several minutes in which to do so. It’s always strange to me how people in Lifetime films always seem to end up jogging in the middle of the road. I start nearly every morning with a jog and I usually manage to stay on the sidewalk. It’s just safer that way.
At her mother’s funeral, Lindsey is shocked to see Jim hugging a younger woman. Lindsey immediately assumes that Jim is having an affair, because why else would you hug someone at a funeral? Jim explains that the younger woman is actually Sarah (Aubrey Reynolds). Sarah is not his mistress. Sarah is his daughter. It turns out that Lindsey never learned that she had a half-sister. Lindsey also didn’t know that her parents never actually got married. Instead, Jim was legally married to Sarah’s mother because Sarah’s family would have disowned her if she had a child out of wedlock. To be honest, not a single part of Jim’s story makes any sense, but somehow Lindsey accepts it.
To continue being honest, it’s pretty obvious that Sarah was the one who ran over Lindsey’s mother. If you’ve ever seen a Lifetime film, you know that Sarah’s guilty, because long-lost siblings are always guilty. In typical Lifetime fashion, Lindsey is immediately suspicious of Sarah, but everyone else loves her. Jim is especially happy when he discovers that Sarah knows how to bake. Whoops — Sarah put some cinnamon in one of her recipes! Lindsey is deathly allergic to cinnamon! It never ceases to amaze me how every Lifetime film seems to feature at least one person with a deadly food allergy. I always get the feeling that Lifetime studios must be full of discarded EpiPens.
The title refers to Sarah, who definitely does have a grudge against Lindsey. However, it could also refer to Lindsey, who takes an immediate dislike to her half-sister and who spends the entire movie getting mad about the fact that not everyone else seems to hate her as much as she does. More like Two Sisters’ Grudges, to be honest. (The film was also released as A Sister’s Grudge, which is closer, but still only counts one of them.) It actually gets kind of amusing after a little while. Every time someone says anything nice about Sarah, Lindsey scowls and dramatically rolls her eyes. Occasionally, she gasps in disbelief. She’s so vocal about her dislike of Sarah that you actually end up feeling a little bit sorry for Sarah. I mean, Sarah is the one who grew up with an unstable mom and the knowledge that her father had another family that he loved more than her.
Anyway, this is pretty much a standard Lifetime melodrama. Unfortunately, no one in the film is particularly sympathetic. Lindsey comes across like someone who would talk about you behind your back. Sarah comes across like she would try to poison you with cinnamon. I’ll let you decide which is worse.
In Brookfield, Connecticut, a 20-something man named Kenny Miller (played by a young Kevin Bacon) is on trial for murder. He stands accused of killing his landlord for no clear reason. While the media (represented by Cloris Leachman and Ken Kercheval) watch, Kenny’s attorney (Richard Masur) announces that Kenny did not actually commit the murder of his own free will. Instead, Kenny was possessed by a demon. The judge (Jack Davidson) is not impressed by the argument.
The film flashes back to the previous year. The family of Kenny’s girlfriend, Nancy Frazier (Liane Langland), has moved into a new house. Kenny notices that Nancy’s younger brother, Brian (Charles Fields), seems to spend a lot of time talking to himself. This concerns Kenny. What if Brian is talking to a demon that’s trying to possess him? It turns out that the Fraziers should have listened to Kenny because soon the house is shaking, the lights are blinking, and Brian is speaking in the voice of Harvey Fierstein.
The family gets in contact with occult investigators Guy (Andy Griffith) and Charlotte Harris (Beverlee McKinsey). Guy and Charlotte arrange for an exorcism. Actually, they arrange for several exorcisms. A total of six priests (one of whom is played by Eddie Albert) attempt to get the demon out of Brian. At one point, Kenny dares the demon to take him on personally. “Never do that!” Guy says before explaining that daring a demon to fight you is a great way to get possessed yourself. Kenny doesn’t seem to believe Guy, and I can kind of understand why. Watching this film, it was obvious that Andy Griffith was not actually Catholic, even if he did play a priest in Go Ask Alice. You can always tell these fake Catholics because they never make the sign of the cross correctly. They either use the wrong hand, or they start at the chest, or they confuse which shoulder to go to.
The Demon Murder Case was made for television in 1983 and, if the plot sounds familiar, that’s because it’s based on the same case that was dramatized in The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It. Only the names have been changed. Ed and Lorraine Warren become Guy and Charlotte Harris and, needless to say, they’re a bit less glamorous in the made-for-television version. Surprisingly enough, the television version actually works pretty well. The low budget forces director William Hale to concentrate on atmosphere as opposed to special effects, and the cast is full of talented actors. Even though Griffith is not a convincing Catholic, he’s still likable in the role of the no-nonsense Guy, and Kevin Bacon does a pretty good job as the well-meaning but ultimately confused Kenny Miller. Earlier today, I complained that Bacon seemed miscast in Hollow Man. This film, however, makes good use of his down-to-earth persona. You watch this film and you think that, if Kevin Bacon could get possessed, it could happen to anyone.
As for the actual case, Arne Cheyenne Johnson (who was renamed Kenny Miller in this film) was convicted of manslaughter despite his defense that he had no control over his actions. He served five months in prison and married his girlfriend after he was released. He continues to insist that he was possessed.
“If you look for me, you will find me,” announces a billboard outside the apartment inhabited by a young man named Santos (Miguel Ortiz). The billboard also features a picture of a woman who appears to be beckoning whoever is viewing her. When Santos steps out of his apartment, he stares at the billboard. Later, under far different circumstances, he asks, “What was I supposed to find?”
Santos is an aspiring musician who lives in post-Franco Spain. At a performance, he sees another man flirting with his girlfriend. Suddenly, Santos finds himself standing in front of the man with blood on his hands. The man has been stabbed. There’s never any doubt that Santos killed the man, but the film leaves it ambiguous as to whether the murder was an act of impulse or calculation.
Santos spends two years in prison before he’s paroled. On his first night out, he meets a prostitute named Lola (Giannina Facio) and goes to a mansion with her. The next morning, he has breakfast with four old, rich men who tell Santos that they want to hunt him. If he can escape the grounds of the mansion, he will have a million dollars’ worth of gems to start a new life with. When Santos says that he’s not interested in being hunted, the men reply that he doesn’t really have a choice.
The thing that one notices is that Santos rarely shows any emotion. Whether he’s just killed a man or been informed that he’s going to be hunted, Santos is pretty much a blank. Even when he learns that one of the men who will be hunting him is also the father of the person he killed, Santos seems to shrug it off. Some of that was undoubtedly due to the acting limitations of Miguel Ortiz. But as the film progresses, it becomes obvious that Santos is as much of a hollow shell as the decadent men who are hunting him. If Santos seems empty, that’s because he is empty. The hunters, who obviously expected him to be easy prey, instead find themselves up against a sociopath who is just as determined as they are to get revenge. What began as just another rip-off of The Most Dangerous Game instead becomes a look into the world of absolute zero. There is no empathy, guilt, warmth, or mercy. The billboard invites the viewer to “find me,” but there is nothing to find.
Released in 1984, Poppers is a Spanish film and, to understand it, it helps to know a little about Spanish history. General Francisco Franco was the head of the Spanish government from 1936 to 1975. (My grandmother was born in Spain and came to the United States shortly after World War II. Growing up, I was usually the only kid in class to have encyclopedic knowledge of General Franco.) Franco died in 1975, nine years before Poppers was released. After being ruled for nearly forty years by one man, Spain’s transition from Franco’s regime to a more democratic system was not always an easy or smooth one, especially with Franco himself having been such a controversial figure. In Poppers, the hunters are the type of older rich men who presumably did what they had to do to thrive under Franco’s regime. (At least two of the hunters are gay, which was illegal in Francoist Spain, leaving one to wonder what they did to remain free and rich while so many others were being imprisoned or exiled.) Santos and Lola represent the next generation, the one that grew up largely without Franco. When they go after the hunters, they can be seen to represent the youth sweeping away the remains of Franco’s Spain. However, since neither Santos nor Lola are motivated by any ideology beyond their own self-preservation, the message seems to be that the more things change, the more they remain the same. Santos and Lola are not class warriors and they’re not political dissidents. They’re two people who are as empty as the people they’re replacing.
Poppers is an interesting and always watchable film. At times, the film’s imagery borders on the surreal. Director José María Castellví had a good eye for decadence. Ultimately, though, it’s a film that leaves you feeling uneasy. The closest thing the film has to a hero is a sociopath who takes a bit too much joy in killing. (The fact that all of the people he kills are bad does not make his demented smile any less unsettling.) The billboard asks us to look, but all we see is a world defined by absolute zero.
This short was really well done. It had some scary moments and great comedy. This filmmaker has some real talent.
A woman gets a cursed painting from old woman and the painting houses an evil spirit who likes to mock the main character. I highly recommend this short. It is so rare to be able to do this genre well that I’m going to see their other work. This is a must see!
In the 2000 film Hollow Man, Kevin Bacon stars as Sebastian Caine. Sebastian is a brilliant scientist who has created a serum that, when taken, will turn someone invisible. It’s quite an accomplishment, but you get the feeling that no one’s particularly happy about Sebastian being the one who discovered it. That’s because Sebastian is an arrogant narcissist who is not only a bit of a perv but who also listens to terrible prog rock whenever he’s driving around town. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned in the past, I am firmly of the opinion that progressive rock is the music of evil people, and no film makes that argument clearer than Hollow Man.
Having already successfully tested the serum on a gorilla, Sebastian decides to take the experiment a step further and take the serum himself. Soon, Sebastian is invisible. At first, Sebastian is content to play mean but ultimately harmless pranks on his colleagues, but soon his behavior grows worse and worse. Is the serum causing Sebastian to lose his mind, or has being invisible allowed Sebastian to reveal his true self? It’s not easy to say, because Sebastian was hardly a likable guy before he took the serum. He’s always been a jerk and, even before taking the serum, he was already obsessed with both his ex-girlfriend Sarah (Elisabeth Shue) and his next-door neighbor (Rhona Mitra). What is certain is that Sebastian soon becomes addicted to his invisibility. Whenever the serum wears off, he resents the tests that his colleagues put him through. The invisible man starts to stalk and kill his colleagues.
Oh, this film. Hollow Man is an update of The Invisible Man, but it doesn’t quite work. The first time that I saw this movie, I thought it seemed to be excessively mean-spirited, but I figured that, since it was a Paul Verhoeven film, there had to be some sort of satiric subtext to all of the blood and the sexual violence. But then I read an interview with Verhoeven where he said that Hollow Man was the most impersonal of his American films and that it was also a film that he felt any director could have made. Verhoeven said that making the film was such a discouraging experience for him that, despite the film’s box office success, it still inspired him to leave Hollywood and return to Europe.
The film is relentlessly cruel. The actors who play Sebastian’s colleagues — Shue, Josh Brolin, Joey Slotnick, Kim Dickens, Greg Grunberg, Mary Randle, and William Devane — are all likable, but they’re also stuck playing stock characters who have to do stupid things so that they can be in a position to die in the most gruesome ways possible. (The scene where Grunberg’s neck starts spurting blood is particularly grotesque.) With the exception of a scene where an invisible Sebastian drives around Los Angeles, there’s very little of Verhoeven’s trademark wit. Perhaps if this film were a low-budget grindhouse film, it would be more fun. As it is, the admittedly effective special effects just leave you wondering if any of that money could have been spent on a better script.
It’s also hard to watch Kevin Bacon play such an unlikable character. It’s not that Bacon can’t play villains. It’s just that he projects such a down-to-earth, blue-collar attitude that he feels miscast as a mad scientist. Sometimes, he seems to be trying too hard in the role. If there’s anything that we should have learned from Flatliners, it’s that Kiefer Sutherland should play the mad scientist while Kevin Bacon plays the guy who understands how dangerous an uncontrolled experiment can be. Bacon should have been the one saying, “You’re going to make yourself invisible? Are you stupid or something?”
In 1959’s Night of the Ghouls, con man Dr. Alcula (Kenne Duncan) moves into Bela Lugosi’s old mansion and pretends to talk to the dead. What Alcula doesn’t realize is that the house is actually haunted (by Tor Johnson’s Lobo, among others) and real ghosts don’t appreciate pretend ghosts.
What can you say about a film like of Night of the Ghouls? It’s an Ed Wood film, with all that suggests. However, how can you resist a film that starts with Criswell sitting up in his coffin and providing commentary?
The role of Dr. Alcula was originally written for Bela Lugosi. After Lugosi’s death, veteran actor and longtime Wood friend Kenne Duncan got the role instead. Also of note, Wood appears twice in this film. Not only does his picture appear on a wanted poster in the police station but Wood also plays one of the ghouls.
Hi, everyone! Tonight, on Mastodon, I will be hosting the #TubiThursday watch party! Join us for 1979’s The Warriors!
You can find the movie on Tubi and you can join us on Mastodon at 9 pm central time! (That’s 10 pm for you folks on the East Coast.) We will be using #TubiThursday hashtag! See you then!
Today, the Shattered Lens wishes a happy birthday to the one and only Sigourney Weaver. Seen here with Jonesy the Cat, Weaver will always be best-remembered for bringing to life Ellen Ripley and totally revolutionizing both horror and science fiction!
Today’s song of the day comes from Jerry Goldsmith’s iconic score for Alien.
