In Toy Story of Terror!, Bonnie (voice of Emily Hahn) is going on a Halloween road trip to visit her grandmother. When the car gets a flat, Bonnie and her mother have to spend the night in a creepy hotel. Bonnie has brought aome of her toys with her –Sheriff Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), Jessie (Joan Cusack), Mr. Potato Head (Don Rickles), Rex (Wallace Shawn), Trixie (Kristen Schaal), and Mr. Pricklepants (Timothy Dalton). Mr. Pricklepants says that the motel feels like the setting of a horror story and he’s right! Mr. Potato Head vanishes, leaving behind only his arm. While the toys search for him, they are captured one-by-one by an iguana. The owner of hotel (Stephen Tobolowsky) is stealing his guests’ toys and selling them online.
Toy Story of Terror! introduces some other toys, all of whom have been captured and imprisoned in a glass case. Combat Carl (Carl Weathers) was my favorite but I also have a soft spot for Old Timer (Christian Romano), the alarm clock who spoke like an old man. I like the iguana too. He didn’t know he was being bad.
What makes Toy Story of Terror! so special is that Jessie has to conquer her fear of being in a box to rescue Woody and the other toys. Everyone is scared of something, even brave and confident Jessie. Like Jessie, I get claustrophobic. I’m embarrassed to admit it but I do like to a keep a nightlight on when I’m sleeping. I don’t like the idea of waking up and not being able to see what’s in front of me. Toy Story of Terror! isn’t just about toys. It’s also about how it’s okay to scared because, deep down, we all have the strength to conquer our fears. Jessie proves it when she hides in a box so she can save Woody. Maybe I’ll even turn off the nightlight tonight. Nah, I don’t think so.
Lisa and I have watched Toy Story of Terror! every year since it first aired in 2013. Every time I see it, it makes me smile and it makes me feel like there’s nothing that I can’t do. I don’t know if they’re going to broadcast the special on TV this year. There really haven’t been any special Halloween shows yet, though there’s still another week to go. If they don’t air, it’ll be a shame. It is on Disney+, though. And It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown is on Apple TV! Don’t forget to watch them this October!
Today, we celebrate Sylvester Stallone’s birthday with one of the most definitive montages of the 1980s. From 1982’s Rocky III (which was directed by Stallone himself), here is the famous Rocky/Apollo training montage.
Today is actor Andrew Stevens’ 70th birthday. I grew up watching Stevens in the Charles Bronson films 10 TO MIDNIGHT (1983) and DEATH HUNT (1981), the movie I’m reviewing today. I also enjoyed watching him in Brian De Palma’s THE FURY (1978). Later in his career he stepped behind the camera where he produces and directs mostly low budget films. As of this writing, he’s still going strong, and he’s built quite a nice career. And for me, my appreciation all started because he worked with Charles Bronson when he was in his twenties!
In the “based on a true story” DEATH HUNT, Charles Bronson plays trapper Albert Johnson, who lives in the Yukon Territory in the year of 1931 and just wants to be left alone. Early in the film, Johnson comes across a vicious dogfight and rescues one of the participants who’s almost dead. The problem is that the dog belongs to a piece of shit named Hazel (Ed Lauter), and even though Johnson pays him for the dog, Hazel heads to town and tells Sergeant Edgar Millen (Lee Marvin), of the Royal Canadian Mountain Police, that Johnson stole his dog. Millen doesn’t have time for Hazel’s B.S., so he tells him to go on. Millen would rather drink whiskey and hang out with his friends and co-workers in town. These people include the experienced tracker Sundog, aka George Washington Lincoln Brown (Carl Weathers), a young fresh-faced constable with the RCMP named Alvin Adams (Andrew Stevens), his latest lover Vanessa McBride (Angie Dickinson), and everyone’s favorite sidepiece, the Buffalo woman (Amy Marie George). Not willing to let things slide, Hazel and his men go up to Johnson’s cabin and start some more trouble, and one of his buddies gets his scalp shot off by the more than capable Johnson. Even though the entire mess has been started by Hazel and his crew of goons, who include character actors William Sanderson and Maury Chaykin, Millen is forced to try to bring Johnson in, so they can straighten everything out. When it seems Johnson may be about to go in with Millen, one of Hazel’s dumbass men opens fire, and all hell breaks loose. In the aftermath, Johnson escapes, kicking off a massive manhunt across the mountains and wilderness of the Yukon Territory!
DEATH HUNT is an awesome film, primarily because it pairs Charles Bronson, as the tough mountain man, against Lee Marvin, as the seasoned lawman who probably has only one chase left in him. This is a match made in heaven, and even though the two stars share little screen time, the icons dominate each frame of the film. Their characters respect each other and you get the feeling the two men, who couldn’t be more different in real life, probably felt the same way about each other. The remainder of the cast is filled with so many recognizable names and faces. I’d say the the best performances outside of Bronson and Marvin come from Carl Weathers, Andrew Stevens and Ed Lauter. I like the camaraderie that Weathers shares with Marvin, and of course he’s a lot of help when the action starts. Initially, Stevens seems like he’s going to be another “new kid” who’s too inexperienced to be of much help, but he proves to be more than capable by the end of the film. And good grief is Lauter good at playing a piece of crap! Everything about Hazel is cruel, sadistic, and ignorant, and he plays the part perfectly. A scene where a bullying Hazel gets his comeuppance at the hands of the young Adams (Stevens), is a highlight of the film. Sadly, Angie Dickinson, one of the most beautiful women in the history of cinema, is somewhat wasted in her small, unimportant role. I still like seeing her though, even if the part is beneath her.
Aside from the phenomenal cast that Director Peter R. Hunt (DR. NO and THUNDERBALL) was able to assemble, there are other good reasons to watch DEATH HUNT. I love movies that are filmed outside of the city, and you can’t get much further out of the city than the Canadian Rocky Mountains. This setting provides plenty of beauty, but its frozen landscape and bitter conditions also allow for a sense of loneliness, isolation and desperation to seep in for the various characters as the manhunt stretches out over time. There is also some rugged and violent action spread out through the film. I was caught off guard the first time I watched the film by some of the more graphic violence in the action scenes. I’ve already mentioned Bronson’s character basically blowing a guy’s head off, and there’s another scene involving William Sanderson getting his arm caught in a trap. These scenes make my toes curl up just thinking about them. The action highlight occurs when the men think they have killed Johnson in an explosion, to only have him emerge from the smoke and flames of his decimated cabin with slow motion shotgun blasting. It’s an incredibly badass moment in the movie and in Bronson’s overall filmography. Finally, the story is interested in contrasting the old ways of doing things, as exemplified by Bronson and Marvin, versus the new ways of doing things, as exemplified by the young Stevens and a hotshot pilot (Scott Hylands) who is called in to help with the search. Edgar Millen is somewhat of a dinosaur who isn’t ready to truly move into the 20th century. He wants to catch Johnson through old-fashioned, out maneuvering him in the wilderness, while Stevens’ character brings in a radio and the expertise to use it, and Hylands tries to locate him and gun him down from high in the sky. These two schools of thought clash and play out to varying degrees of success and failure as the chase rushes toward its conclusion.
DEATH HUNT is not a perfect film by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s been one of my favorite Bronson films since I first saw it the mid to later 80’s. Just seeing Bronson and Marvin together on screen, in a rugged, violent, badass story, goes a long way with me. It’s as simple as that! See the trailer below:
If you’re in Texas or Arkansas today, I hope you’re keeping as bundled up as Charles Bronson in DEATH HUNT. It’s cold out there people! Keep safe and stay home if at all possible! We don’t know how to drive in this weather!
Enjoy DEATH HUNT’s trailer below! Charles Bronson and Lee Marvin are as tough as it gets!
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in hosting a few weekly live tweets on twitter and occasion ally Mastodon. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of Mastodon’s #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We snark our way through it.
Tonight, for #MondayActionMovie, the film will be Fortune Dane (1986), starring the great Carl Weathers!
Then, on twitter, #MondayMuggers will be showing 2018’s Skyscraper, starring Dwayne Johnson! The film is on Prime and it starts at 10 pm et!
It should make for a night of fun viewing and I invite all of you to join in. If you want to join the live tweets, just hop onto Mastodon, pull up Fortune Dane on YouTube, start the movie at 8 pm et, and use the #MondayActionMovie hashtag! Then switch over to twitter, pull Skyscraper up on Prime, and use the #MondayMuggers hashtag!
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.
I recently reviewed John McTiernan’s classic scifi action Predator. It is a film that many kids both young and those young at heart loved watching on the bigscreen. The 1980’s some would consider the golden years of action filmmaking.
It was a decade where action instead of dialogue ruled. Where muscle-bound stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone dominated the box-office. Even with the resurgence and current renaissance of the action film genre, many still reminisce about the action flicks of the 80’s and how they truly didn’t make them like they used to.
If there’s ever a great example of just how over-the-top and testosterone-fueled the action films were of this decade of the 80’s (also known as the decade of excess) then one can’t go wrong with showing the uninitiated the jungle shootout scene from Predator.
One doesn’t need to be into guns to appreciate the majesty of this scene.
It would be accurate for one to say that Arnold Schwarzenegger was king of the 80’s action flicks. He first burst onto the scene in the titular role in Conan the Barbarian then it’s follow-up sequel. Yet, it would be his role in James Cameron’s The Terminator in 1985 that would make him a household name.
He began to crank out action films after action film every year to varying degrees of success and quality between 1984 and 1987. It would be in the summer of 1987 that he would add a third iconic action film role to stint as Conan the Barbarian and the relentless cybernetic killer, the Terminator.
Maj. Dutch Schaefer in John McTiernan’s action scifi Predator cemented Arnold Schwarzenegger as the most bankable movie star of the 1980’s. The film itself has become a go-to classic whenever film fans of all stripes discuss what were some of the best films of the era. Yes, I do categorize Predator as one of the best to come out of the 1980’s. It does more than hold it’s own when stacked up against Oscar winners, festival darlings and indie cult-favorites.
It’s a film that takes the premise that “man is the most dangerous game” to new levels by adding in a scifi element to the story. That scifi element being an extraterrestrial hunter who comes to Earth every so often to hunt. It’s chosen prey tends to be killers, fighters and soldiers at the top of their craft and usually during times of extreme conflict.
The film, as written by the two brothers John and Jim Thomas, actually works like a slasher horror film in the beginning as Dutch and his team of elite commandos trek through the Central American jungle on a rescue mission. A mission that lands the team in finding the grisly remains of another American special forces team. Questions come up as to whether their CIA liaison (played by Carl Weathers of Rocky and Rocky II fame) knows more about the true nature of their supposed rescue mission than he’s willing to let on.
It’s once the team, still being stalked through the jungle by an unseen predator, finally find the people they’re suppose to rescue that all hell breaks loose in more ways than one. The action is loud, messy and exquisitely choreographed and filmed. Unlike some of the action films of the last ten years, Predator succeeds with it’s action scenes for having a director who uses very long takes and little to no hand-held to keep the action geography easy to follow and the action choreography unencumbered by too many edits and cuts.
Even once the team realizes that they were now being hunted and that whoever, or whatever is hunting them, the film still continues to stay on a creative track. When I mentioned that the film plays out like slasher film, it does in way in that the titular character behaves and moves like slasher killers. It seems to be everywhere and nowhere. The very victims it’s hunting only see it when it’s too late and death’s upon them.
The film’s dialogue has been quoted by so many fans that memes have been created around them. Yet, this doesn’t mean that the film is hilarious. What it does have was that masculine, brother’s-in-arms banter and quips that’s become a sort of signature for screenwriter and director Shane Black who was hired to do some uncredited rewrites on the Thomas Brother’s original script. Black would also end up playing one of the commandos in the film.
Outside of Arnold himself, Predator would be best-known for the effects work by the late and great Stan Winston, who would come in to help redesign the title character (with some help from his buddy James Cameron) and the rest as they would say was film history. It would be difficult to go anywhere around the world, show the Predator to some random person and they not know what it is.
Predator was one of those films that people, at first, thought was just a mindless, popcorn flick. The type of cinema that was to be seen then forgotten for better fare. Yet, in the end, Predator ended up becoming not just a classic of its genre, but a perfect example of a film that transcends it’s genre roots to become just a great film, in general.
Through the Shattered Lens 