Many Blaxploitation films of the 70’s feature super-bad ass-kickers like Shaft, Superfly, or Cleopatra Jones, but the heroes of TOGETHER BROTHERS are a motley crew of street punks in this unheralded but well done film. Shot in Galveston, Texas, and featuring a cast of unknowns as the gang, TOGETHER BROTHERS is a gritty urban thriller about some boys in the hood on the hunt for a psycho cop killer. The movie gives a realistic look at ghetto life and street culture that’s as relevant today as it was forty years ago.
Black patrol cop “Mr. Kool” is respected around the ghetto for being fair with its denizens, including young HJ and his posse. When he’s brutally shot to death by a mysterious assailant, HJ’s little brother Tommy witnesses the killing, and is so traumatized he’s rendered mute. HJ and the others (Mau Mau, AP, Monk) feel “the street owes Mr. Kool”, and begin…
MAKE ME A STAR is an odd Pre Code film unsure what it wants to be. It starts off as a comedy about a movie-mad country bumpkin named Merton (Stuart Erwin) in the small town of Simsbury who dreams of becoming a cowboy star like his idol, Buck Benson (George Templeton). He’s even studying to become a thespian by listening to recordings from the National Correspondence Academy of Acting. Town busybody Mrs. Scudder (Zasu Pitts) complains about Merton’s absent-mindedness to his boss, general store owner Gashwiler (Charles Sellon). Merton has a supportive friend, Tessie (Helen Jerome Eddy) who helps him set up a photo-shoot. But things go awry when Merton, dressed in full cowboy regalia, loses control of Gashwiler’s horse, causing a ruckus in the town square. Gashwiler fires Merton, and the starry-eyed yokel takes a train to Hollywood.
“The blues had a baby”, sang Muddy Waters, “and they called it rock’n’roll”. One of rock’s many parents was the legendary Texas country bluesman Sam “Lightnin'” Hopkins. Lightnin’s phenomenal guitar wizardry is heard echoing in everything from The Animals to Led Zeppelin and beyond, and it’s given a fine showcase in this 45 minute documentary by filmmaker Les Blank. Blank gives us an amazing time capsule of life in 1960’s Centerville, Texas, a predominately black rural community midway between Dallas and Houston. We follow Lightnin’, with his ever-present shades and hip flask of whiskey, as he visits his hometown, jamming with friends like Mance Lipscomb, greeting relatives, attending a rodeo, and playing at a BBQ party. This short, cinema verite film lets the man himself tell the story through his music and tales of a life in the blues.
Les Blank began as an industrial filmmaker before deciding to follow his own…
Not many people have gone from working with Grade-Z hacks like Al Adamson to A-list directors like Steven Spielberg. In fact, I can only think of one…cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, who passed away New Years Day at age 85. “Ziggy” was born in Hungary, and emigrated to America with his friend and fellow cameraman Laszlo Kovacs after the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. The pair travelled to Hollywood, and Zsigmond found work as a cinematographer and camera operator in the world of low-budget moviemaking. He lensed epics for independent auteurs such as Arch Hall (WILD GUITAR, THE NASTY RABBIT, DEADWOOD ’76), Ray Dennis Steckler (THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES WHO STOPPED LIVING AND BECAME MIXED-UP ZOMBIES), and the aforementioned Adamson (BLOOD OF GHASTLY HORROR, SATAN’S SADISTS, HORROR OF THE BLOOD MONSTERS).
The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (1964)
I watched it so you don’t have to: “My Boyfriend’s Back” (1993)
“He died for me, He came back from the dead for me, He ate somebody for me.”
I’ll get back to that, but let’s get the technicalities out of the way first!
Stars:
Andrew Lowery as Johnny Dingle (Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Nothing, Clerks)
Traci Lind as Missy McCloud (Voyager, Fame, 21 Jump Street)
Minor roles by:
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Cloris Leachman,Matthew McConaughey, Renée Zellweger (You might have heard of them.)
Directed by:
Bob Balaban (Nurse Jackie, The Twilight Zone, plus much more)
Written by:
Dean Lorey (Arrested Development, ‘Til Death)
Plot:
To impress his wanna be girlfriend (Lind), Johnny (Lowery) decides to stage a convenience store robbery. In that staging he is killed and comes back as a zombie. Just before dying, Johnny asked Missy to the prom and she accepts.
As Johnny comes back as a zombie, he tries to integrate back into society. Facing anti-zombie discrimination. Missy finally agrees to got to prom with him in his zombie state. Going to the prom, Johnny finally disitergrates into his un-dead form.
While he made it to Heaven, he was let known that his original death was a mistake and he is given another chance. Put back in the point of the robbery, and knowing he was never meant to die, Johnny dives infront of the bullet. The bullet, caught by a locket he made of Missy and himself in the first grade, he is saved. Missy and Johnny go to the prom and (presumably) live happily ever after.
Review:
Honestly, going in, I really wanted to hate this movie. It has all the cheesy plot lines. Boy loves girl, boy dies for girl, boy comes back for girl, she ends up loving him. But if I am going to be honest, this movie was really cute. And to get back to my original quote, yeah, that worked!
Since “My Boyfriend’s Back” is not in public domain, I can’t give you a link to the entire movie, but here is a trailer if you like! 🙂
Well, not quite. FORBIDDEN PLANET is very loosely based on The Bard’s THE TEMPEST, drawing on some of its themes and characters, and putting them in an outer space setting. But the film is much more than that. It’s full of screen firsts, and one of the most influential science fiction movies ever. While watching I was more than reminded of STAR TREK, and wasn’t surprised while doing research that Gene Roddenberry cited it as “one of his inspirations”.
Today no one thinks twice about movies being set completely in outer space, but FORBIDDEN PLANET did it first. The art and set direction by MGM vets Cedric Gibbons and Arthur Lonergan are wonders to behold, shot in beautiful CinemaScope and Eastmancolor by George J. Folsey. The cinematographer began in silent pictures, and carved a niche with big, splashy musicals like MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, THE ZIEGFELD FOLLIES, TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL…
These two versions of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS have much in common. Both are visions of the paranoia of their times disguised in the veneer of science fiction. But while the 1956 film is an allegoric warning of the dangers of Communism, its 1978 remake focuses on conspiracy theory paranoia in the post-Watergate era. The films are equally good reflections of the times they were made, and the differences lie mainly in the visions of directors Don Siegel (’56) and Philip Kaufman (’78).
Siegel’s roots were planted firmly in the old studio system. He began his career at Warners, then RKO before moving onto to independent productions in the mid-50s. INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS was made for Allied Artists (formerly known as Monogram, home of The Bowery Boys and Bela Lugosi quickies.) Siegel was well versed in working within budgetary constraints. Early films like PRIVATE HELL 36 and RIOT IN CELL BLOCK 11 were…
The year 2015 saw many of our brightest stars grow dim. Cracked Rear Viewer would like to pay a pictorial tribute to some of the actors, athletes, and artists who passed on this year:
It’s generally well known that we (and by that I mean “I”) are (and by that I mean “am”) big fans of (which should read, I suppose, “am a big fan of”) Australian director Mark Harley here at TFG, and when it was first announced that his third and final documentary chronicling the history of exploitation cinema (after Not Quite Hollywood and Machete Maidens Unleashed!, which tackled the amazing backstories behind Ozploitatation and Filipino exploitation, respectively) would be focused on the exploits of Israeli- expats-turned-short-lived-Hollywood-moguls Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, the twin pillars who did their level best to prop up Cannon Films throughout the 1980s, I was stoked. And I remained stoked — for a long time.
This project was first announced around 2008, if memory serves me correctly, and while some of the delays that plagued its production were understandable enough — such…
When George Clayton Johnson died on Christmas Day 2015, the science fiction world lost one of its giants. The free-spirited Johnson was a mainly a short story and teleplay writer associated with greats like Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson in a loose knit collective known as The Southern California School of Writers. He wrote many story ideas and scripts for THE TWILIGHT ZONE, including the classic episodes “A Game of Pool” (starring Jack Klugman and Jonathan Winters) and “Kick the Can” (redone by Stephen Spielberg in TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE). Johnson wrote the first aired STAR TREK episode (“The Man Trap”), the story for OCEAN’S 11, and was a driving force behind the creation of the San Diego Comic Con. Perhaps his best known work was a novel he did in collaboration with William F. Nolan in 1967, LOGAN’S RUN, made into a big-budget movie by MGM in 1976. David Zelag…
Through the Shattered Lens