Today, the Shattered Lens wishes a happy 84th birthday to Ursula Andress!
Ursula Andress was one of the very first Bond girls, appearing opposite Sean Connery in Dr. No. Andress played the role of Honeychile Ryder, who was good with a knife and totally willing to trespass on Dr. No.’s beach. Andress set the standard by which almost all future Bond girls would be judged and the scene where Bond and Ryder first meet remains one of the most famous in the Bond franchise. It was such a culturally-defining moment in 1962 that it apparently led to rocketing sales of bikinis. Up until this film came out, bikinis were apparently considered to be too risque to be worn anywhere other than France.
(Personally, I’m thankful that Andress and Dr. No made bikinis popular. I look good in a bikini and, even if I don’t swim, I do like lying out by the pool and pretending like I’m capable of tanning as opposed to just burning.)
Of course, in the original novel, Honey Ryder is naked (except for a belt and a knife) when Bond first sees her. Personally, I think that’s a bit much. I prefer the scene as it plays out in the movie, where everyone is flirtatious and fashionable.
Though Dr. No is best known for turning Sean Connery into a star, it also did wonders for Ursula Andress’s career. Whereas she had previously been best-known for briefly dating Jams Dean and being married to John Derek, Andress was now an actress who was able to pick her roles and to become financially independent, a development she would later tell the Daily Independent that she owed to “that white bikini.” Andress also appeared in Playboy several times, even after becoming a star. When she was asked why, she replied, “Because I’m beautiful,” and I have to say that I absolutely love that answer.
Ray (Armand Assante) is a formerly viscous ex-con who has just gotten out of prison and is now determined to go straight and live on the right side of the law. After spending nearly a decade behind bars, all he wants to do is to reunite with his girlfriend, Lacy (Marcia Gay Harden), and make her his wife. However, there’s a problem. While Ray was locked up, Lacy moved on. She’s now engaged to Elliott (Sam Neill), a liberal attorney who, unlike Ray, is a pacifist. Even though Lacy is still attracted to Ray, she does not want to get back together with him.
Unfortunately, there’s a second problem. Ray may have gone straight but his former criminal associates don’t believe him. They want Ray to help them pull off a major crime and when Ray says that is no longer his thing, they react by kidnapping Lacy. If Ray ever wants to see Lacy again, he’s now got to return to his life of crime.
There’s also a third problem. Ray may be an experienced criminal but Elliott insists on tagging along with him while he’s following the kidnappers’s orders. So now, Ray not only has to commit several crimes but he has to do it with an inexperienced partner who doesn’t even believe in firing guns!
Fever is one of those HBO films that used to show up all the time on cable in the 90s. I watched it a few times back in the day, just because I was a teenage boy and the movie featured a good deal of nudity. Even at that time, though, I thought it was a slow and frequently boring movie. Rewatching it for this review, I was shocked to discover that it was even slower than I remembered. It seems like it takes forever for Ray and Elliott to finally team up and for the movie to get going. Though the plot description may make it sound like a buddy comedy, it’s actually a very tough and grim picture. Armand Assante and Sam Neill are not actors known for their light touch and they both give very serious and gritty performances. Unfortunately, the film’s pace never really matched the intensity of its stars and the film’s storyline isn’t strong enough to hold up under scrutiny. Once you start to wonder if Ray would really let Elliott tag along with him, the movie itself falls apart.
Armand Assante is a good actor who rarely seems to appear in good films. Fever is a good example of that. Assante gives an excellent and complex performance (and both Sam Neill and Marcia Gay Harden are pretty good too) but Fever itself never really clicks.
Welcome, everyone, to the end of the world (again). Today, the world ends in the 2013 film, New World Order: The End Has Come!
Demi (Melissa Farley) sits in a park, reading the Bible. She’s reading the Book of Revelation or, as she calls it, “the scary one.” As she gets in her car, she calls her friend, Christen (Erin Runbeck) and assures her not to worry. “I don’t think we’re there yet.” Then she puts the car in reverse and promptly runs over Jason (Daniel Spaulding).
Fear not! Jason’s not injured and his career as an exotic dancer (I’m not kidding, it’s a plot point) is not damaged in the least. In fact, Jason is so enchanted by Demi and her lack of driving skills that soon, they’re a couple! And, fortunately, Jason has a single friend named Cedric (Will Roberts) so that means that Cirsten doesn’t have to be a third wheel whenever everyone goes out for the night.
Cristen and Demi may be good friends but we quickly discover that there are differences between the two of them. Cristen doesn’t drink. Demi gladly accepts a beer when Jason offers it. Cristen likes to stay home and look after her younger brother. Demi is all, “So, we’re going to that party, right?” One thing that both of them do have in common is that, on Sunday morning, they giggle in church and check their messages instead of listening to the preacher. I’m sure that won’t come back to haunt them….
Flash-forward by a few years or so and — oh no! The world has totally changed! Iran briefly conquered Europe and there was a huge war but, fortunately, a man named Aldo DeLuca, not only brokered peace but also come back to life after being shot in the head. Some people think that Aldo didn’t really come back to life but instead, that his body was possessed by Satan. Those people are threats to the New World Order and you can tell who they are because they’re the only people who refuse to get NWO tattooed on either their forehead or their hand….
“Wait a minute!” Demi says, as she thinks about everything that’s happened over the past year, “I’ve read this somewhere!”
That’s right, Demi. You should have paid more attention to the Book of Revelations. But you didn’t and now, everyone’s getting the mark except for you, Cristen, and a few others. And, in order to eliminate people who refuse to get themark, the black-clad soldiers of the New World Order are now gunning people down in the streets while the brainwashed, soulless masses cheer.
The majority of this film is told in flashback, while Demi and Cristen are sitting in a prison area. They’ve been given one final chance to either get the mark and live or to refuse and die. Can you guess who sacrifices their soul and who willingly gives up their life? In order to maitainn some suspense, I will not tell you who. These are the things that I do for you.
Watching New World Order while on lockdown because of the Coronavirus was an interesting experience. On the one hand, the film’s low budget is obvious in every frame and the acting is particularly amateurish. (Just check out the scene where the Supreme Chancellor is greeted by a jubilant crowd of about 20 extras.) On the other hand, any movie about a totalitarian state using a crisis to come to power and destroy individual liberty is going to feel oddly compelling if you watch it while the country is literally shut down by government order. I actually found myself falling under the film’s spell. Normally, I’d make fun of the cartoonish NWO tattoos but instead, I found myself thinking, “What if they do decide to mark those of us who have been tested negative for Coronavirus in a different way from those who are sick? And what if they do say that only people with the mark can enter a grocery store or see a movie? And what if the mark eventually becomes a way of determining not who is healthy but instead of identifying people who never question the government? What do we do then?” I felt kind of silly after I wondered all that but …. well, not really. I imagine that, right now, a lot of people are probably having reactions to films like this that they wouldn’t normally have.
Anyway, as a Christian scare film, New World Order will probably be best appreciated by scared Christians. As a portrait of a society where people have sacrificed their freedom for a false sense of security, it feels like it could be dangerously prophetic.
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
Today, we wish a happy 81st birthday to one of the most underrated British filmmakers around, Piers Haggard. Though Haggard made few feature films over the course of his career, he is best remembered for his work as television director. Among Haggard’s triumphs: Dennis Potter’s Pennies From Heaven and Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass.
In honor of Piers Haggard’s long career and his birthday, here are:
4 Shots From 4 Films
Blood On Satan’s Claw (1971, directed by Piers Haggard)
Pennies From Heaven (1978, directed by Piers Haggard)
Jericho Jackson (Carl Weathers) is the tough Detroit cop who everyone calls “Action” because I guess Jericho was just too normal a name. He’s a legend in the department and on the streets of the Motor City. “Some people say his mother was molested by Bigfoot,” one patrolman says but the truth is simpler. Jackson was a high school football star before he went to Harvard Law and got his degree. He could have been an attorney but he decided to become a cop instead.
Unfortunately, Action Jackson is currently Desk Duty Jackson. When he arrested Sean Dellaplane, the pervert son of auto manufacturer Peter Dellaplane (Craig T. Nelson), Jackson “nearly ripped off the boy’s arm.” (“He had a spare!” Jackson snarls.) Everyone says that, since his son’s arrest and his marriage to the beautiful Patrice (Sharon Stone), Peter Dellaplane has turned over a new leaf and is now an honest businessman. Action Jackson doesn’t buy it. In fact, he suspects that Dellaplane is responsible for the brutal murder of a union rep.
Though he may be married, Dellaplane still has a mistress. Sydney Ash (Vanity) is a heroin-addicted singer. After Dellaplane watches her sing a song, Sydney tells him, “I was expecting a standing ovation.” “You’re getting one,” Dellaplane replies. Jackson knows the best way to get to Dellaplane is to get his hands on Sydney. He better hurry because Action Jackson has been framed for a murder that he didn’t commit and now he’s got every cop and criminal in Detroit after him.
A lot of people will tell you that Action Jackson is a bad movie but I like it. It’s a tribute to the classic blaxploitation films of the 70s and though the violence may be excessive, it’s all played tongue-in-cheek. Carl Weathers first suggested the movie to Joel Silver while the two of them were filming Predator and, from the start, Action Jackson is proud to be a B-movie. There’s no subtext or deeper meaning involved, beyond Action Jackson cleaning up the streets. Taking it seriously would be a crime. This is probably the only film where you will ever be able to see Apollo Creed and the dad from Poltergeist face off in hand-to-hand combat. Of course, whenever Craig T. Nelson throws a punch or a kick, the scene cuts away to disguise the fact that a stuntman is doing most of the work but even that becomes fun to watch for. Some B-movie have a visible boom mic. Action Jackson has a stuntman disguised to look like Craig T. Nelson from behind.
If I do have a complaint, it’s that the script is heavy on the one-liners, which makes sense as this film was made shortly after Schwarzenegger revolutionized action film dialogue with “I’ll be back.” Unfortunately, Weathers wasn’t as good at handling one-liners as Arnie and Bruce Willis were. As anyone who has seen the first four Rockys can tell you, Carl Weathers was an actor who could create art from a monologue of non-stop trash talk. As I watched the film, I kept wishing that Action Jackson would do some Apollo Creed-level trash-talking whenever he was fighting the bad guys. Maybe if he had, there would have been an Action Jackson 2.
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
Today, we wish a happy 69th birthday to the patron saint of all thing that are cool about the movies, the one and only Kurt Russell!
And here to help us do that are:
4 Shots From 4 Films
Used Cars (1980, directed by Robert Zemeckis)
Escape From New York (1981, directed by John Carpenter)
The 1985 film, The Falcon and the Snowman, tells the story of two friends. They’re both wealthy. They’re both a little bit lost, with one of them dropping out the seminary and the other becoming a drug dealer who is successful enough to have a lot of money but inept enough to still be treated like a joke by all of other dealers.
Chris Boyce (Timothy Hutton) is the son of a former FBI agent (Pat Hingle). He has a tense relationship with his father. It’s obvious that the two have never really been sure how to talk to each other. While his father is sure of both himself and his country, Chris is far more sensitive and quick to question. While his father plays golf and attends outdoor barbecues, Chris becomes an expert in the sport of falconry and spends a lot of time obsessing about the state of the the world. While his father defends Richard Nixon during the Watergate investigation, Chris sees it as evidence that America is a sick and corrupt country. Because his father doesn’t want Chris sitting around the house all day, he pulls some strings to get Chris a job working at the “Black Vault,” where Chris will basically have the ability to learn about all sorts of classified stuff.
Daulton Lee (Sean Penn) was Chris’s best friend in school. Daulton’s entire life revolves around cocaine. He both sells and uses it. He’s managed to make a lot of money but his addiction has also left him an erratic mess. Daulton’s father wants to kick him out of the house. Daulton’s mother continually babies him. Chris and Daulton may seem like an odd pair of friends but they’re both wealthy, directionless, and have a difficult time relating to their fathers. It somehow seems inevitable that these two would end up as partners.
Chris Boyce and Daulton Lee, together …. THEY SOLVE CRIMES!
No, actually, they don’t. Instead, they end up betraying their country. (Boooo! Hiss! This guy’s a commie, traitor to our nation!) After Chris discovers that the CIA has been interfering in the elections of America’s allies (in this case, Australia), he decides to give information to the Russians. Since Daulton already has experience smuggling drugs over the southern border, Boyce asks Lee to contact the KGB the next time that he’s in Mexico. Despite being a neurotic and paranoid mess, Lee manages to do just that.
Of course, as Chris soon comes to discover, betraying your country while working with a greedy drug addict is not as easy as it seems. While Chris wants to eventually get out of the treason game, marry his girlfriend (Lori Singer), and finish up college, Daulton wants to be James Bond. The Russians, meanwhile, soon grow tired of having to deal with Lee and start pressuring Chris to deal with them directly….
And it all goes even further downhill from there.
Based on a true story, The Falcon and the Snowman tells the story of how two seemingly very different young men managed to basically ruin their lives. Boyce’s naive idealism and Lee’s drug-fueled greed briefly makes them a powerful duo but they both quickly discover that betraying your country isn’t as a simple as they assumed. For one thing, once you’ve done it once, it’s impossible to go back to your normal life. As played by Hutton and Penn, Chris and Daulton are two very interesting characters. Boyce is full of righteous indignation and sees himself as being a hero but the film hints that he’s mostly just pissed off at his Dad for never understanding him or caring that much about falconry. Daulton, meanwhile, is a lunatic but he seems to be aware that he’s a lunatic and that makes his oddly likable. At times, it seems like even he can’t believe that Chris was stupid enough to depend on him. The film provides a convincing portrait of two men who, because of several impulsive decisions, find themselves in over their heads with no possibility of escape.
The Falcon and the Snowman is an entertaining and occasionally thought-provoking time capsule of a different age. If the film took place in 2020, Daulton would be hanging out with the Kardashians and Chris would probably be too busy working for the Warren campaign to spy for America’s enemies. If only the two of them had been born a few decades later, all of this could have been of avoided.
Dr. Michael Stoner (Dorian Harewood) is a young, black doctor who works in a hospital located in a poverty-stricken Los Angeles neighborhood that has a high crime rate. Stoner’s got the education and the talent to be working in an upscale hospital and making a lot of money but it’s more important to Stoner that he give something back to the community. Stoner is a doctor who cares and he has no hesitation letting everyone know it. When he meets a wealthy plastic surgeon at a party, he tells him that he should come down to Stoner’s hospital and try his hand at fixing up bullet holes. The plastic surgeon doesn’t react well to the suggestion.
Stoner is convinced that there’s an epidemic breaking out in the Echo Park neighborhood but he can’t get anyone to listen to him. No one cares about what happens in Echo Park. When Stoner deduces that the illness is being caused by dirty tap water, he still can’t get anyone to listen to him. He yells at people at parties and everyone ignores him. He goes to the press and the media refuses to cover the story. The corporate weasels who are responsible for poisoning the water don’t care about anything other than money. Stoner talks about his problems to a young man who is in a coma and he gets no response.
Finally, Stoner is forced to enlist the help of a group of local teenagers who are making a documentary about life in their neighborhood. Dr. Stoner may not always be polite but he gets results.
Directed by John Llewellyn Moxey, Panic In Echo Park is a made-for-TV movie and much like Where Have All The People Gone? (which was also directed by Moxey), it seems like it was probably envisioned as being a pilot for a weekly series. Watching the film, it’s easy to imagine Dr. Stoner getting mad on a weekly basis. Like most made-for-TV movies, it’s predictable and the characters are all either too obviously good or too obviously evil. However, Dorian Harewood (who is probably best known for getting shot over and over again in Full Metal Jacket) gives a good performance as Dr. Stoner. He doesn’t get to do much other than yell at people but Harewood does it well. Today, a story involving people getting sick from dirty tap water does not seem far fetched (do they have clean water in Flint, yet?) and the scenes where Dr. Stoner orders people to be put into “quarantine” feel disturbingly like the evening news.
The 1977 film, The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, opens in 1972.
J. Edgar Hoover, the much-feared and long-serving director of the FBI, has just been found dead at his home and it seems like the entire city of Washington, D.C. is scrambling. Not only are people jockeying for Hoover’s job but they’re also wondering what might be found in his secret files. As quickly becomes apparent, Hoover had a file on everyone. While Presidents lauded him and the press portrayed him as hero, Hoover spent nearly 50 years building up a surveillance state. Hoover said it was to fight criminals and subversives but mostly, it was just to hold onto his own power. Even President Nixon is heard, in the Oval Office, ordering his men to get those files.
Hoover may have known everyone’s secrets but, the film suggests, very few people knew his. The film is narrated by a former FBI agent named Dwight Webb (Rip Torn). Dwight talks about how he was kicked out of the FBI because it was discovered that he not only smoked but that he was having an adulterous affair with a secretary. “You know how Hoover was about that sex stuff,” he says, his tone suggesting that there’s more to the story than just Hoover being a bit of a puritan.
We flash back to the 1920s. We see a young Hoover (James Wainwright) as a part of the infamous Palmer Raids, an early effort by the Justice Department to track down and deport communist subversives. Though Hoover disagrees with the legality of the Palmer Raids, he still plays his part and that loyalty is enough to eventually get him appointed, at the age of 29, to be the head of the agency that would eventually become the FBI. Hoover may start out as a relatively idealistic man but it doesn’t take long for the fame and the power to go to his head.
Hoover (now played by Broderick Crawford) serves a number of Presidents, each one worse the one who proceeded him. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Howard Da Silva) is an avuncular despot while the Kennedy brothers (William Jordan as John and Michael Parks as Bobby) are two rich brats who think that they can control Hoover but who soon discover that Hoover is far more clever than they realize. Hoover finds himself a man out-of-place in the 60s and the 70s, Suddenly, he’s no longer everyone’s hero and people are starting to view the FBI as being not a force for law enforcement but instead an instrument of oppression.
Through it all, Hoover remains an enigma. He demands a lot of from his agents but he resents them if they’re too successful. Melvin Purvis (Michael Sacks) might find fame for leading the manhunt that took down Dillinger but he’s driven to suicide by Hoover’s cruel treatment. Unlike Clint Eastwood’s film about Hoover, The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover suggests that Hoover was not gay but that instead, that he was so repressed that he was essentially asexual. When one woman throws herself at him, he accuses her of being a subversive and demands to know how anyone could find him attractive. He’s closest to his mother and when she dies, he shuts off his emotions. His own power, for better and worse, becomes the one thing that he loves. He’s married to the FBI and he often behaves like an abusive spouse.
The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover is an interesting film. It’s an attempt to do a huge American epic on a less than epic budget. At the start of the film, the low budget is undeniably distracting. The 1920s are essentially represented by a back lot and two old cars. The scenes of the FBI dealing with gangsters like Dillinger and Creepy Karpis feel awkward and slapdash. But, as the film’s timeline gets closer to what was then the modern era, the film’s story tightens up and so does Larry Cohen’s direction. (One get the feeling that Cohen was, perhaps understandably, more interested in the Hoover of the 60s and the 70s than the Hoover of the 20s and 30s. There’s a sharpness to the second half of the movie that is just missing from the first half.) Broderick Crawford gives a chilling performance as a man who is determined to hold onto his power, just for the sake of having it. The scenes were Hoover and Bobby Kennedy snap at each other have a charge that’s missing from the first half of the film. Michael Parks does a great job portraying RFK as basically being a spoiled jerk while Crawford seems to relish the chance to play up the resentful, bitter old man aspects of Hoover’s personality. The film ultimately suggests that whether the audience previously admired RFK or whether they previously admired Hoover, they were all essentially duped.
Though the film never quite overcomes the limits of its low budget, it works well as a secret history of the United States. In 1977, it undoubtedly took guts to make a film that portrayed Roosevelt and Kennedy as being as bad as Nixon and Johnson. (It would probably even take guts today. One need only rewatch something like The Butleror Hyde Park on Hudson to see the ludicrous lengths Hollywood will go to idealize presidents like Kennedy and dictators like FDR.) While this film certainly doesn’t defend J. Edgar Hoover’s excesses, it often suggests that the president he served under were just as bad, if not even worse. In the end, it becomes a portrait of not only how power corrupts but also why things don’t change, regardless of who is nominally in charge. In the end the film’s villain is not J. Edgar Hoover. Instead, the film’s villain is the system that created and then enabled him. The man may be dead but the system remains.
Last night, I watched the latest Lifetime premiere, Into the Arms of Danger!
Why Was I Watching?
The obvious answer is that I was watching it because it was on Lifetime. However, I was also watching because I absolutely loved the title. Into the Arms of Danger is just so wonderfully overdramatic that there was no way I could resist it.
What Was It About?
Basically, it’s a Lifetime version of the classic 1980 grindhouse film, Mother’s Day. Two weird brothers pretend to be EMTs and kidnap young women, forcing them to go home and pretend to be a member of their family. They do it all to keep their crazy mother (Cathy Moriarty) happy.
In this film, their latest victim is Jenny (AlexAnn Hopkins), who is kidnapped after she wrecks her car and makes the mistake of calling 911. (The brothers basically intercept 911 calls, which was kind of weird.) Jenny just wanted to go to college and get away from her overprotective mother, Laura (Laurie Fortier). Instead, she’s now being held prisoner and is forced to wear an explosive ankle bracelet. It kind of sucks.
Laura knows that her daughter has been kidnapped but she can’t get the police to take her seriously. They think that Jenny has either just run away or maybe she’s gotten involved with drugs. Either way, they’re attitude is, “Don’t bother us with their domestic problems.” So, it’s up to Laura to figure out what has happened to her daughter and to rescue her from the …. ARMS OF DANGER!
What Worked?
AlexAnn Hopkins and Laurie Fortier were believable as mother and daughter. You believed that they not only cared about each other but that they also frequently got annoyed with each other. That’s the secret to realistically portraying a mother/daughter relationship on film. You have to capture both the love and the annoyance.
Cathy Moriarty gave a good performance as the demented mother. For film buffs, Moriarty is a bit of a legendary figure. She made her film debut in Raging Bulland received an Oscar nomination. She was incredible in Raging Bull and still is a great actress. Unfortunately, shortly after making her debut, Moriarty was in a serious car accident and spent several years recovering. As a result, when she returned to films, she rarely got the type of huge roles that she undoubtedly deserved. She’s still one of those actresses who, when you see her name in the credits, you know that she’s going to give a good performance.
In fact, the whole crazy family dynamic was well-done. They reminded me a bit of the family from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, just with less blood and cannibalism.
What Did Not Work?
Usually, I can suspend my disbelief when it comes to Lifetime films. I mean, we don’t watch these films because we’re expecting them to be a 100% realistic. But the whole thing with the brothers pretending to be EMTs was just a bit too much for me to buy.
“Oh my God! Just like me!” Moments
More like, “Oh my God! Just like my mom!” moments. As soon as Laura jumped in her car and drove all the way out to a party just to keep Jenny from accepting help from a strange boy, I was like, “Oh my God, I know just how Jenny feels!” Myself, I would always very dramatically roll my eyes and go, “Mom!” whenever stuff like that happened. Looking back, my mom was usually right, though.
Through the Shattered Lens