Cinemax Friday: Demolition High (1996, directed by Jim Wynorski)

Posted on July 17, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

A group of terrorists take over a high school and announce that, unless their demands are met, they will launch a nuclear missile at a nuclear power plant which I guess will cause double the nuclear destruction. Since they already have a nuclear missile, it feels like also threatening to blow up the power plant is definite overkill. With the school now full of terrorists and explosives, it’s up to one student to kill the terrorists one-by-one and save his classmates. It’s Die Hard in a High School (cool!), with the Bruce Willis role being taken on by … COREY HAIM!

That bit of casting tells you both why Demolition High doesn’t work and also why anyone would be watching this direct-to-video “action” film in the first place. The 25 year-old Haim plays Lenny Slater, a high school student who knows Kung Fu because he grew up in the Bronx. His father (played by Alan Thicke!) moves to a small town, both to become a police chief and to hopefully keep Lenny from getting into any more trouble. Lenny’s all trouble, though, and terrorist leader Luther (the great Jef Kober) is about to discover that he’s invaded the wrong high school.

If I had watched this film in the 90s or even the early aughts, I would have laughed at how bad Corey Haim is as an action hero but today, knowing all we know about his life and how Hollywood essentially enabled his worst tendencies and then abandoned him when he become too self-destructive to work, it’s not as easy to watch an obviously troubled actor who has gone from being a big star to appearing in a direct-to-video Die Hard rip-off. Trying to disguise the fact that he’s too old to be playing a high school student, Haim wears a flannel shirt and an earring and has a bowl cut. Whenever he talks to his classmates, you expect him to say, “How do you do, fellow kids?” As heavily edited as the fight scenes are, it’s still obvious that Haim had no idea how to throw a punch. On the plus side, even while obviously addled by drug abuse, Corey Haim was still a better actor than Stephen Seagal.

Demolition High is pretty dumb but it was directed by Jim Wynorski so at least there’s some inside jokes. Gerrit Graham and Dick Van Patten both have small roles and Alan Thicke gets to tell an FBI agent to “Think with your heart, not with your badge.” Wynorski also cast Melissa Brasselle as Tayna, a sexy terrorist who wears black leather. He deserves some credit for that. (When the film was released on video, Brasselle was featured on the cover, not Haim.) Some of the techniques that Lenny uses to take out the terrorists are creative, if never really plausible. In this case, Lenny is helped by the stupidity of the terrorists. It’s not every evil terrorist who is clumsy enough to stumble head first into a table saw.

Demolition High was apparently successful enough to be followed by a sequel, Demolition U. I’ll look at the movie tomorrow.

Song of the Day: Regan’s Theme by Ennio Morricone

Posted on July 17, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today’s song of the day comes from Ennio Morricone’s score for Exorcist II: The Heretic. This is not a film with a great reputation but I think almost everyone agrees that it has a great score.

This is Regan’s Theme. This song was also later used in Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight.

Previous Entries In Our Tribute To Morricone:

Disaster on the Coastliner (1980, directed by Richard C. Sarafian)

Posted on July 16, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

A completely computerized passenger train is traveling across the country, with the Vice President’s wife as one of the passengers. When Jim Waterman (Paul L. Smith), a man who blames the railroad for the death of his family, manages to hijack the train he plans to ram into a locomotive until his demands a met. He wants railroad president Estes Hill (Raymond Burr) to take responsibility for the crash that killed his wife and children. With Waterman determined to crash the two trains, it falls to dispatchers Al Mitchell (Lloyd Bridges) and Roy Snyder (E.G. Marshall) to try to figure out a way to stop the collision. Helping them out on the train is a con artist named Stuart Peters (William Shatner!) who may be wanted by the police but who is still willing to do whatever it takes to save his fellow passengers.

Disaster on the Coastliner is an above-average made-for-TV disaster movie. Even though it was obviously made for a low-budget and that the majority of the money was probably spent on securing the B-list cast, there are enough shots of the train careening on the tracks to bring happiness to the hearts of most disaster movie fans. The cast is full of the type of people who you would typically expect to find in a movie like this, people like Raymond Burr, Lloyd Bridges, and William Shatner. Bridges, interestingly enough, gives the same performance here that he gave in Airplane! and when he starts ranting about how everything’s computerized, he sounds like he could be reciting dialogue from that film. The only difference is that Airplane! was a comedy while Disaster On The Coastliner is meant to be a drama. Raymond Burr also does a good job hamming it up as the president of the railroad. He spends most of the movie sitting behind his desk and looking annoyed, which was pretty typical of Burr in the years after Perry Mason and Ironside.

For a lot of people, the main appeal of this film will be seeing what William Shatner was doing in between Star Trek movies. This is a typical early 80s Shatner performance, when he was still trying too hard to win that first Emmy but also when he had just starting to develop the self-awareness necessary to poke fun at his own image. Shatner really digs into the role of a conman with a heart of gold. He delivers his lines in his trademark overdramatic style but, in scenes like the one where he sheepishly discovers that a door that he’s been pounding on was unlocked all the time, Shatner actually seems to be in on the joke. Shatner also did his own stunts in this film, including one where he had stand on top of a speeding train. In his autobiography, Shatner wrote that he wasn’t even wearing a safety harness in the scene so give it up for Bill Shatner. That took guts!

Fast-paced and agreeably unpretentious, Disaster On The Coastliner is an enjoyable runaway train movie.

Song of the Day: The Main Theme From The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly by Ennio Morricone

Posted on July 16, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

You knew this one was coming, right? Seriously, no tribute to Ennio Morricone is complete without the main theme from The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.

Morricone’s score is as much of a character in this film as the ones played by Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, and Lee Van Cleef. It perfectly sets the moods, telling us that we’re about to see something that is truly epic. The opening notes, which have so often been parodied but which have never lost their power, truly capture the feel of Sergio Leone’s mythical vision of the old west.

So, without further rambling from me, here it is:

Previous Entries In Our Tribute To Morricone:

The Gladiator (1986, directed by Abel Ferrara)

Posted on July 15, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

A serial killer known as The Skull is prowling the dark streets of Los Angeles. Driving a customized death car, he chases down other motorists and forces them into fatal accidents. Though the police aren’t convinced that the Skull’s real, Rick Benton (Ken Wahl) knows that he’s out there. Rick was teaching his younger brother (Brian Robbins) how to drive when the Skull chased them down and ran them off the road. His brother was killed. Rick spent several days in a coma. Even after the police try to convince him that he was the victim of a drunk driver, Rick suspects that he and his brother were deliberately targeted.

Rick is a car guy, himself. After attending a support group for people who have lost loved ones to drunk drivers, Rick decides to take the law into his own hands. He modifies his pickup truck and then takes to the streets, tracking down drunk drivers and ramming them off of the road. He then calls the police, letting them know where they can pick up the drunks. Rick is careful to never actually hurt anyone but Lt. Frank Mason (Robert Culp) still isn’t happy that there’s a vigilante out there, taking the law into his own hands.

With all of Los Angeles wondering about the identity of the vigilante that the media has dubbed “The Gladaitor,” Rick prepares to track down the Skull.

The Gladiator was directed by Abel Ferrara, who brings his trademark style to the film. Rick is not just a vigilante with a super truck. He’s also a man who is clearly still in mourning and who deals with his own feelings of guilt by tracking down unsafe drivers. When he realizes that someone is deliberately killing other drivers, he becomes grimly obsessed with tracking down the Skull and, in typical Ferrara fashion, it often seems as if his quest for vengeance might leave him as unhinged as the man he’s trying to stop. Though Rick is clearly the fim’s hero and all of the drunks that he stops are obnoxious and deserving of what they get, Ferrara doesn’t blindly celebrate Rick’s actions. Some of the people who treat the Gladiator as a folk hero are just as dangerous as the ones that Rick is taking off the streets.

It helps the film that both the Skull’s death car and Rick’s vigilante pickup are pretty cool. Who wouldn’t want to own a truck that can fire projectiles at bad drivers? In typical Ferrara fashion, almost all of the action takes place at night and the chase scenes are excitingly filmed. Though the cars and the stunts may be the main reason to watch the film, Ken Wahl still does a good job with the title role and fans of Brian DePalma and RoboCop will enjoy the presence of Nancy Allen, cast here as a radio talk show host who is also Rick’s girlfriend.

The Gladiator is an effective car chase thriller. Watch it and drive safely.

Song of the Day: The Ecstasy of Gold by Ennio Morricone

Posted on July 15, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today’s song of the day comes to us from the classic score that Ennio Morricone wrote for Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly! When we started our tribute to Morricone, there was no doubt that we would eventually include at least a few songs from this film’s soundtrack. Today, we share The Ecstasy of Gold, which plays in the background of one of the greatest scenes in the history of cinema. It’s hard to listen to this without thinking about Eli Wallach (as Tuco) joyfully running through that cemetery.

Here is The Ecstasy of Gold:

Previous Entries In Our Tribute To Morricone:

Film Review: Becky (dir by Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion)

Posted on July 14, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Becky is a fairly intense thriller, featuring two actors who you normally wouldn’t expect to appear in a film about a 13 year-old girl savagely attacking and killing a group of criminals in the woods.

For example, Kevin James is best-known for starring in The King of Queens and for playing Paul Blart: Mall Cop. He’s a member of the Adam Sandler stock company and almost his entire career has involved playing goofy but lovable manchildren. In Becky, he plays Dominick, a member of the Aryan Brotherhood who has escaped from prison and, along with a group of other fugitives, is desperately searching for a key that will apparently unlock something that will lead to a race war. Over the course of the film, Dominick murders several people. He orders his associates to kill children. He tortures a man with a branding iron and he taunts an interracial couple. He has a big bushy beard and a swastika tattooed on the back of his saved head. In other words, this isn’t the Kevin James movie to show your grandma.

And then you have Joel McHale. Joel McHale is best-known for hosting The Soup and playing Jeff Winger on Community. In Becky, McHale plays another character named Jeff. This Jeff is the father of an angry 13 year-old girl named Becky (played by Lulu Wilson). Jeff wants to have a nice weekend up at the lake with Becky and he’s hoping that he can get Becky to accept the fact that Kayla (Amanda Brugel) is going to be her new stepmother. Needless to say the weekend does not go well. Not only does Becky resent Kayla but Dominick and his crew show up at Jeff’s cabin, searching that key.

While Dominick is holding her family hostage, Becky is hiding in the woods and picking Dominick’s men off one-by-one. As Kayla explains it, Becky is unstoppable because she’s “a vindictive 13 year-old girl.” The majority of the film is taken up with scenes of Becky coming up with creative ways to kill people who are a lot bigger than her. It turns out that everything from an art pencil to a ruler can be turned into a deadly weapon. (Of course, sometimes, a lawn mower works just as well.) Becky is the type who will scream over the corpse of someone who she has just killed. It’s not because she’s upset over what she’s done. It’s because she’s so pissed off. And believe me, I could relate. I was a pissed off 13 year-old too. Luckily, I never had to kill anyone with my art supplies so let’s all be happy about that.

Becky is a bit of throwback to the grindhouse films of the past. There’s even a scene that plays a very obvious homage to the ending of the original I Spit On Your Grave. There’s a lot of violence. There’s a huge amount of gore. If you’ve ever wanted to see what an eye looks like when it’s literally hanging out of its socket, this is the film for you. There are some moments of very dark humor as well. Lulu Wilson gives a fierce performance as Becky and, In general, the film’s well-directed. The first 20 minutes of the movie are actually rather brilliant, with scenes of Becky dealing with school bullies alternating with scenes of Dominick killing people in prison.

That said, the film itself runs out of gas long before the final scene. A huge part of the problem is that Domenick and his associates are all way too stupid to really be a legitimate threat to Becky and, as a result, there’s not much suspense as to whether or not Becky will be able to kill them. (It was hard not to unfavorably compare the buffoonish, easily outwitted Neo-Nazis in this film with the legitimately terrifying ones that appeared in Green Room.) As well, for all the film’s violence and it’s homages to the grindhouse, it oddly allows two characters to survive the film despite the fact that there was no reason for the film’s villains to keep them around. Their survival reminds you that you’re just watching a movie and it takes you out of the moment. You realize that if the movie doesn’t have the guts to kill the two of them, then it’s probably not going to have the guts to really surprise us further down the road.

I have to admit, I really wanted to like this film, if just because I was intrigued by the against-type casting of Kevin James and Joel McHale. I may not care for the majority of Kevin James’s films but I’ve always felt that he was a good actor. Joel McHale, as well, has always been a personal favorite of mine and, like James, he’s a better actor than he’s often given credit for being. I was hoping that both of them would get a chance to shock viewers by brilliantly playing against type. But McHale is stuck playing a character who is just too wimpy to be sympathetic and Kevin James, bless him, often seems to be trying too hard to project menace. True menace has to feel natural. Once it becomes obvious that you’re trying to be menacing, then you’re not. Dominick is a Sid Haig role being played by Kevin James. Despite (or perhaps because of) the goofy appeal of such an idea, it just doesn’t work.

Despite its flaws, Becky is a well-shot, quickly paced film and it has enough entertaining moments to be watchable if not entirely satisfying. If you’re looking gore, this film has what you’re looking for and, as any horror fan can tell you, there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. The film doesn’t quite work but still, directors Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion do a good enough job that I look forward to seeing where they do next.

Marooned (1969, directed by John Sturges)

Posted on July 14, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

Imagine The Martian or Apollo 13 without any humor or narrative momentum and you’ve got an idea what Marooned is like.

Three American astronauts (played by Richard Crenna, Gene Hackman, and James Franciscus) are returning to Earth after serving on an experimental space station when the engine to their spacecraft fails. Now stuck in orbit around the Earth, they only have two days before they run out of oxygen. While flight commander Crenna tries to keep everyone calm and make sure that all the proper procedures are followed, Gene Hackman yells at NASA and demands to be rescued.

Down on Earth, the head of NASA (Gregory Peck) says that there’s nothing that can be done. There’s no way to get a rescue mission set up quickly enough to save the lives of the astronauts. Both the President and David Janssen disagree with him. Janssen demands to be sent into space immediately, regardless of the dangers, so that he can bring America’s astronauts home.

Marooned is a painfully slow movie that went into production at the height of the space race and which was released just a few weeks before the first successful moon mission. Because it was made at a time when there were still many who claimed that NASA was a waste of money, the movie goes out of its way to explain that, even though the astronauts are probably going to die in space, NASA is in no way to blame. Richard Crenna absolves NASA of blame after being told that a rescue mission isn’t feasible. Gregory Peck holds a press conference, where he gives a lengthy speech about why space exploration is still important. The movie is very detailed in showing that NASA is staffed by personality-free professionals, which might have boosted confidence in NASA but which also leads to a dull story. You’ll notice that I haven’t referred to anyone in this film by the names of their characters. That’s because their names don’t matter because, other than Gene Hackman and David Janssen, none of them is really distinguished by any sort of identifiable personality. Hackman chews the scenery while Janssen plays another surly character who seems like he has a permanent hangover. I wouldn’t trust Janssen to pilot a spaceship.

Marooned won an Oscar for its Special Effects, which were probably impressive back in 1969 but which are dull by modern standards. Winning that Oscar meant that Marooned would eventually earn the distinction of being the only Oscar winner to be featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000. On MST 3K, it aired under the title Space Travelers, which is a perfectly generic name for a perfectly generic film.

Song of the Day: Man With A Harmonica by Ennio Morricone

Posted on July 14, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Once Upon A Time In the West (dir. by Sergio Leone)

For the first week of our tribute to Morricone, I kind of shied away from his best-known spaghetti western themes, just because I wanted to highlight some of his other films. I wanted to remind people that Morricone’s genius wasn’t just limited to his work with Sergio Leone or the western genre.

That said, there’s a reason why Morricone’s western themes have become classics and that’s because they’re really, really good. They capture the grandeur of both Leone’s visuals and his themes. For all the credit that rightfully goes to Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Charles Bronson, the music of Ennio Morricone is one of the main reasons why we remember films like Once Upon A Time In The West and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly while forgetting about certain other westerns that were being made in Europe at the same time. In Leone’s films, Morricone’s music is just as much of a character as The Man With No Name.

So, any tribute to Morricone has to include the music that he composed for Leone. Therefore, today’s song of the day is a familiar one but a great one. Here is Man With A Harmonica from 1969’s Once Upon A Time In The West:

Previous Entries In Our Tribute To Morricone:

Footsteps (1972, directed by Paul Wendkos)

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

Paddy O’Connor (Richard Crenna) is a former football player-turned-coach whose record of success has been overshadowed by his own arrogance and heavy drinking. O’Connor has such a bad personal reputation that he’s found himself unemployable. Only one man is willing to give him a chance. Jonas Kane (Clu Gulager) played football with Paddy and he’s now coaches for a small college. Kane may not like O’Connor but he knows that O’Connor might be the key to turning around his team’s fortunes and, at the same time, saving Kane’s job. Kane hires O’Connor to serve as a his defensive coordinator.

At first, O’Connor’s cockiness rubs people the wrong way. It’s not until O’Connor moves offensive player J.J. Blake (Bill Overton) to defense that the team starts to win. And once the team stars to win, everyone’s problems with O’Connor disappear. Kane can only watch helplessly as O’Connor moves in on his girlfriend (Joanna Pettet), knowing that he owes his job to O’Connor remaining at the school.

However, when Blake gets a concussion, O’Connor is forced to decide whether or not to let him play. Boosters like Bradford Emmons (Forrest Tucker) want Blake to play, regardless the risk. The NFL scouts, who are looking for the next number one pick, want to see Blake on the field. Blake says he wants to play but O’Connor can tell that he’s lying about the extent of his injury. With everyone breathing down his neck and a syndicate of gamblers pressuring O’Connor to shave points so that the spread pays off, O’Connor has to decide what to do.

Though this made-for-TV movie may not be as well-known as some other films, it’s one of the best movies ever made about college football. Though it may be short (only 74 minutes), it still examines all of the issues that have always surrounded college football. Despite not getting paid for their efforts, the players risk serious and permanent injury during every game, just on the slight hope that they might someday make it to the NFL. The coaches, who are supposed to be looking after the players, are more interested in padding out their win-loss record and hopefully moving onto bigger and better-paying jobs. Meanwhile, aging alumni and boosters demand that the team win at all costs, regardless of what happens to the men on the field. Footsteps intelligently explores all of those issues and suggests that the risks are ultimately not worth the rewards.

Along with an intelligent script, Footsteps is helped by a talented cast. Crenna and especially Gulager both give excellent performance as the two rival coaches. Al Lettieri (Sollozzo from The Godfather) plays one of the gamblers. Beah Richards plays Blake’s mother, who makes the mistake of believing O’Connor when he says that he’s going to always have Blake’s best interests at heart. Ned Beatty has a small role as another assistant coach who is forced to make an important decision of his own. Keep an eye out for Robert Carradine and James Woods, both of whom have tiny roles.

As far as I know, Footsteps has never officially been released on DVD. I saw it late one night on the Fox Movie Channel.