Tag Archives: Craig R. Baxley

Made-For-TV Horror Review: Mind Over Murder (dir by Ivan Nagy)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In the 1979 made-for-TV movie, Mind over Murder, Deborah Raffin stars as Suzy.

Suzy is a model and an actress.  She has a nice apartment, which she shares with her football-loving boyfriend, Ben (Bruce Davison).  She has a best friend (Penelope Willis), who is constantly looking to get laid.  Her latest job requires her to dance with a man who is dressed up like a giant hamburger.  It would seem that, by the standards of 1979, Suzy has the perfect life.

However, her life is turned upside down when she suddenly starts having visions.  All of the action around her will either switch to slow motion or stop altogether while Suzy has a vision of a scary-looking bald man (Andrew Prine) stalking her.  Her most disturbing vision involves Suzy hearing the sound of a pilot begging for help while his airplane crashes.  Ben tells her that she’s probably just working too hard but, the next morning, Suzy looks at a newspaper and immediately sees a headline about a plane crash.

With Ben dismissing her concerns, Suzy takes it upon herself to meet with the two detectives (David Ackroyd and Robert Englund — yes, Robert Englund!) investigating the plane crash.  They are surprisingly sympathetic to Suzy’s story of hearing the plane crash before it happened.  They arrange for her to meet a psychic researcher, who explains that Suzy must have some sort of mental connection to whoever was responsible for the crash.  While Ben continues to be skeptical and jealous of all the time that she’s spending with one of the detectives, Suzy keeping having disturbing visions of the bald man….

Considering its origins as a made-for-TV movie, Mind Over Murder is a surprisingly frightening film.  This is a film that proves that slow motion can make just about anything creepy and Deborah Raffin does a good job of showing us just how much Suzy dreads those moments when everything starts to slow down and she realizes that she’s about to get hit with another vision.  That said, what truly makes this film frightening is the performance of Andrew Prine, who plays the bald man as being every woman’s nightmare.  He’s a misogynist, the type who is convinced that every woman should be in love with him and that those who aren’t should be punished.  Whether he’s appearing in Suzy’s visions or stepping into her reality, Andrew Prine is never less than terrifying.

Along with featuring a scary performance from Prine, this film also features a genuinely likable one from Robert Englund.  Englund is playing a nice guy here.  In fact, before he made horror history in A Nightmare in Elm Street, Englund almost always played nice guys.  It’s interesting to watch him here, with his friendly manner and his polite style, and to imagine the roles Englund would have ended up playing if he hadn’t gotten typecast as a horribly scarred serial killer.

The first hour of Mind over Murder is brilliant.  The final 30 minutes, unfortunately, find the film turning into a far more conventional thriller, as Suzy’s visions are replaced by the Bald Man actually coming after her.  That said, this is still an effective horror thriller and one that deserves to be rediscovered this Halloween season.

Brad’s “Scene of the Day” – William Forsythe in STONE COLD (1991)!

Posted on by Bradley Crain

Today is actor William Forsythe’s 70th birthday. Forsythe is a good character actor, and I’ve always had a fondness for a movie he appeared in called STONE COLD, because it was partially filmed in the town of Conway, Arkansas, which is about seven miles from the house I grew up in. I even remember when they had the downtown blocked off so they could film their scenes. STONE COLD starred All-American football player Brian Bosworth, who was making his film debut. As was the norm back in those days, Forsythe played a really bad guy. So happy birthday, Mr. Forsythe! Enjoy!

I Come In Peace (1990, directed by Craig R. Baxley)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

“I come in peace.”

“And you go in pieces.”

How have I not reviewed this one yet?

Dolph Lundgren is Jack Crain, a Houston cop who teams up with FBI agent Larry Smith (Brian Benben) to investigate who is killing criminals in H-town.  The killer is a drug dealer but not your everyday drug dealer.  He’s an alien named Talec (Matthias Hues) and he’s figured out how to say “I come in peace,” but the rest of the English language is beyond him.  “I come in peace,” turns out to be the scariest phrase you can hear when you’re being pursued by a white-haired, intergalactic mass murderer.  His targets include Jesse Vint and Michael J. Pollard.  This terminator wannabe is after character actors!

On the second-tier action stars of the 90s, Lundgren was the one who could actually act.  Van Damme could actually do all the acrobatic stunts his characters did but he couldn’t show emotion like Lundgren.  Steven Seagal seemed like he could handle himself in a fight but he lacked Lundgren’s self-aware humor.  Lundgren plays Jack as almost being a parody of the type of hard-boiled cop who is always getting yelled at by the commissioner for wasting the city’s money.  Brian Benben is remembered, by some, as the star of HBO’s Dream On, the sitcom that convinced a generation of young men that there’s nothing women love more than obscure pop cultural obsessions.  Benben is actually pretty funny in I Come In Peace.  He’s the everyman who can’t believe he’s having to deal with an intergalactic drug dealer.  Good heroes need a good villain and Matthias Hues is just right as the drug dealing alien who literally doesn’t know what he’s saying.

If you want to see a Terminator rip-off with nonstop action, a memorable villain, frequently (and intentionally) funny dialogue, an Al Leong cameo, and Dolph Lundgren as a hero who pushes people around just because he feels like it, I Come In Peace is the movie for you!

#MondayMuggers presents DARK ANGEL (1990) starring Dolph Lundgren!

Posted on by Bradley Crain

Every Monday night at 9:00 Central Time, my wife Sierra and I host a “Live Movie Tweet” event on X using the hashtag #MondayMuggers. We rotate movie picks each week, and our tastes are quite different. Tonight, Monday May 5th, we celebrate Cinco de Mayo with DARK ANGEL (1990) starring Dolph Lundgren, Brian Benben, Betsy Brantley, Matthias Hues, and Michael J. Pollard. 

I really enjoy Amazon Prime’s plot description for the film… “A renegade cop undercover on a drug sting discovers a murderous alien who feasts on the brains of heroin addicts.” Honestly, if that description doesn’t make you want to watch the film, there’s probably nothing I can say to bring you along. On a side note, I remember this movie going under the name I COME IN PEACE when I was in high school, which is kind of cool because the bad guy will say he comes in peace right before committing horrific murder. But now it’s called DARK ANGEL, so that’s that.

So join us tonight for #MondayMuggers and watch DARK ANGEL! It’s on Amazon Prime. The trailer is included below:

Film Review: Left Behind: World At War (dir by Craig R. Baxley)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

With the 2005 film, Left Behind: World At War, the Left Behind series enter special guest star territory.  Kirk Cameron and Brad Johnson, while still present in the film, were largely pushed to the background and Louis Gossett, Jr. and Charles Martin Smith popped up as Nicolae Carpathia’s two main adversaries.

Gossett plays President Gerald Fitzhugh.  Smith plays Vice President John Mallory.  (Speaking as someone of Irish descent, it fills me with pride to think that America will someday be led by the presidential ticket of Fitzhugh and Mallory.)  Despite the fact that Carpathia (again played by Gordon Currie) spent the previous film talking about how, under his leadership, there would be no more borders, it appears that there still are borders.  However, Carpathia has a plan to take care of that.  Mallory has discovered the plan but, right after he tells Fitzhugh about it, they’re attacked by Carpathia’s goons.  The presidential limo is blown up and with it, John Mallory.  (Poor Charles Martin Smith.)  Fitzhugh manages to escape, thanks to the help of the Tribulation Force.

It turns out that Carpathia’s latest scheme is to steal the few remaining bibles in the world, lace them with anthrax, and then distribute them back to the believers.  Gossett gets to go full action hero as he tries to stop Carpathia and good for him.  As for the other members of the Tribulation Force, Buck (Kirk Cameron) marries Chloe Steele (Janaya Stephens) and Chloe’s father, Rayford (Brad Johnson), meets his former lover, Hatti Dunham (Chelsea Noble).  Hattie is now Carpathia’s lover and is pregnant with his child.  Some members of the Tribulation Force die over the course of the film.  Buck has a moment of anger at God, which is the best scene in the film because it at least acknowledges that one can believe and still be angry.  The majority of the film, however, is Lou Gossett, Jr. wandering around with a “How did I go from winning an Oscar to appearing in this?” look on his face.

Anyway, credit where credit is due.  World at War is the most action-packed of the Left Behind films and, while it’s still definitely an evangelical film, it’s considerably less preachy than either the first Left Behind film or Tribulation Force.  World at War is pure melodrama, with a lot of plotting and evil cackling and overdone action scenes.  If you don’t want to listen to the dialogue, you can focus on just how small the film’s version of the Oval Office is.  That’s what happens when you try to a globe-spanning epic on a low budget.  Sometimes, you have to settle for a small replica of the Oval Office instead of trying for the real thing.

That’s not to say that World At War is a particularly good film.  Brad Johnson gets even less to do than in the second film and Kirk Cameron is still Kirk Cameron.  Since he lost his job at the end of Tribulation Force, we’re no longer asked to believe that Kirk Cameron’s playing a respected journalist.  Instead, Buck is now just a self-righteous evangelist and, for obvious reasons, it’s easy to believe Kirk Cameron in that role but Kirk Cameron is one of those actors who is far more likable when he’s miscast than when he’s playing himself.  Much as with Tribulation Force, World At War can’t seem to decide just how powerful Carpathia actually is.  He’s got supernatural powers and is apparently actually immortal and yet, he is often easily deceived by the simplest of ruses and is incapable of killing anyone until their usefulness to the film’s narrative has expired.

Louis Gossett, Jr. was smart enough to play a character who dies at the end of World At War, therefore freeing him from having to appear in any more Left Behind movies.  It turned out to be a moot point, however.  This was the last Left Behind film until the recent unsuccessful attempt to reboot the franchise with Nicolas Cage as Rayford Steele.

Action Jackson (1988, directed by Craig R. Baxley)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

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.