The Eric Roberts Collection: Rough Air: Danger on Flight 534 (dir by Jon Cassar)

Posted on April 13, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

It’s disaster time!

In 2001’s Rough Air: Danger on Flight 534, a plane is making its way across the country. The pilot is the arrogant Jack Brooks (Kevin Jubinville), who is convinced that all a pilot has to do is let the instruments and the plane’s computer run the flight. He has total faith in technology. His first officer is Mike Hogan (Eric Roberts), a veteran pilot whose career went downhill after he was unfairly blamed for a crash in Boston. Mike is old school. He doesn’t have much use for all this technology nonsense. Mike thinks that a pilot has to listen to his own instincts and be willing to improvise. That sounds dangerous! It’s a good thing that Jack’s in charge of this plane!

Unfortunately, turbulence and a concussion temporarily puts Jack out of commission. Mike is going to have to conquer his own fears and insecurities to land this plane. Fortunately, he has the support of the head flight attendant, Katy Phillips (Alexandra Paul). Also, one of the passengers has some flight experience! Grant Blyth (Dean McDermott) is willing to help out. Of course, Grant is also a convicted murderer who was being flown to prison but whatever. I just find it interesting that, in the movies, convicted murderers and their handlers are always put on commercial flight. That seems kind of irresponsible to me.

Rough Air is a throwback to the old disaster movies of the 70s. The airplane is full of people who have to set aside their differences to work together and try to avoid a disaster. There’s a soccer star (Mark Lutz) and an engineer (Russell Yuen) and a rich guy (Carlo Rota) who only exists that he can be told to shut up whenever he doubts Mike. Unfortunately, this film isn’t quite as fun as any of those old disaster movies. There’s one funny moments where Jack wakes up and deliriously demands to be allowed to fly the plane but otherwise, this is a pretty boring flight. Not even Eric Roberts giving a typically committed performance can save this flight from being forgettable.

Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:

Late Night Retro Television Review: Friday the 13th: The Series 3.4 “Crippled Inside”

Posted on February 22, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing Friday the 13th: The Series, a show which ran in syndication from 1987 to 1990. The entire series can be found on YouTube!

This week, it’s all up to Johnny Ventura!

By the way, it is true that these reviews usually run on Friday. This week, however, all the cold weather caught up to me and I spent most of yesterday in bed. As a result, this week’s review got preempted to tonight. Now, let’s find out what’s been going on in the world of cursed antiques!

Episode 3.4 “Crippled Inside”

(Dir by Timothy Bond, originally aired on October 21st, 1989)

This week’s episode opens with teenager Rachel Horn (Stephanie Morgenstern) nearly getting gang-raped by a group of jocks. Rachel manages to escape from them but, as she runs away, she’s hit by a car and left a quadriplegic. Feeling that her life is over, things start to look up for Rachel when an old man (John Gilbert) gives her his antique wheelchair, which he suggests will help her regain the ability to move. When Rachel sits in the antique wheelchair, she can send out her astral form. Each time she uses the wheelchair, her body heals just a little bit more. The only catch is that the wheelchair only works if Rachel kills people while in her astral form. Hey, I can think of at least four guys that Rachel might want to kill….

With Jack and Micki in London, it falls to Johnny Ventura to try to get the wheelchair back. I have to admit that I was a bit skeptical when I saw this episode was going to be a solo effort on Johnny’s part. I was like, “Johnny’s only been a regular for two episodes and he’s already working alone?” (I have to admit that my feelings towards the Johnny Ventura character are very much influenced by how much I liked Ryan.) But I have to say that this was a good episode and a lot of that was because Johnny was working alone. Not understanding the true danger of the cursed antiques, Johnny was torn about whether or not to take the wheelchair away from Rachel. Rachel was a very sympathetic character and the people she was targeting truly were terrible. Johnny, not understanding that Rachel was losing her soul to the devil, actually gave the wheelchair back at one point. By the end of the episode, he realized he had made a mistake. Steve Monarque did a wonderful job portraying Johnny’s growing realization that there are no good curses.

This was a good episode. I still miss Ryan but Johnny held his own. The story was emotionally effective and the ending left me feeling genuinely unsettled. Johnny learned the truth about curses and I learned that, even during its final season, Friday the 13th: The Series was capable of producing intelligent and memorable horror.

14 Days of Paranoia #5: Bloodknot (dir by Jorge Montesi)

Posted on February 19, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 1995’s Bloodknot, we are introduced to a grieving family.

Evelyn (Margot Kidder) and Arthur (Allan Royal) are mourning the death of their oldest son, who was in the military and who died during a military operation in the Middle East. Their other son, Tom (Patrick Dempsey), spends his time working on cars and helping out local racecar driver Mike (Craig Sheffer). Youngest daughter Gail (Ashleigh Ann Wood) doesn’t really have much of a personality but she’s definitely worried about her mother.

Suddenly, Connie (Kate Vernon) shows up in town. Wearing a uniform that is slightly too large for her, Connie claims that she served with Evelyn’s dead son and that they eventually became more than just friends. That’s strange, Evelyn says, he never mentioned you. Connie replies that she encouraged him to write more but, for whatever reason, he didn’t. Everyone agrees that what’s important now is that Connie has introduced herself to the family. Soon, Connie is living at the mansion and making flirtatious eye contact with both Arthur and Tom. One might expect Evelyn to be concerned about this but instead, Evelyn is too busy walking around in a depressed daze and blaming her “sinful” past for all the recent tragedy.

You probably already guessed that Connie is not who she says she is. Indeed, Connie has come to the family with an agenda of her own. She’s looking for vengeance and I won’t spoil it by revealing what she’s upset about but I will say that it’s fairly dumb and makes less sense the more that you think about it. Tom’s girlfriend, Julie (Krista Bridges), suspects that Connie is a liar but can she prove it? Julie even talks to the officer from whom Connie stole her uniform after Connie met and seduced her at a bar. Why would Connie, who seems to be willing to kill anyone, leave that one person alive? Obviously, it’s so Julie can learn the truth but still, it’s an oversight on Connie’s part that makes little sense.

(Julie isn’t a very interesting character but she does get to wear a really nice pair of boots so at least she’s got that going for her.)

Looking at the members of this film’s cast — Patrick Dempsey, Craig Sheffer, Kate Vernon — and you have to wonder if someone specifically said, “Let’s make an paranoia-themed, erotic thriller with the least interesting actors of the 90s.” (Yes, Dempsey got better but, in this film, he was still doing the goofy awkward thing.) This film goes through all the usual steps. Connie starts out as being friendly and then progressively reveals herself to be more and more unhinged. The men are reduced to stuttering incoherence by the sight of Connie smiling at them. For this type of film to work, the actors have to be fully willing to embrace the melodrama but instead, both Kate Vernon and Patrick Dempsey give oddly lowkey performances, with Vernon’s attempt at a seductive smile instead coming across like a smirk that should have clued everyone in to the fact that she was not to be trusted. If you’re appearing in a film like this, you should at least have a little fun. As for Craig Sheffer, he’s as mind-numbingly dull as ever.

The film does improve a bit towards the end, largely because Connie’s secret reason for harassing the family is so implausible that it can’t help but be a bit entertaining to listen to the characters discuss it. Overall, though, this was pretty boring. Let this film be a lesson to all — embrace the melodrama!

Previous entries in 2025’s 14 Days Of Paranoia:

Let’s Talk About The Last Sharknado: It’s About Time (dir by Anthony C. Ferrante)

Posted on August 20, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Yesterday was Sharknado Day.

What is Sharknado Day? If you have to ask, you’ll never understand. Sharknado Day is the day that the latest chapter in The Asylum’s Sharknado franchise premieres on SyFy. That’s the day when people like me cause twitter to go over capacity tweeting about the film. That’s the day good people all across America try to count the number of celebrity cameos while also trying to keep track of all of the homages and references to past movies that are always waiting to be found in every Sharknado Film. Yesterday was the sixth Sharknado Day since 2013 and, if we’re to believe our friends at The Asylum, it was also the last Sharknado Day.

Is it true? Was The Last Sharknado: It’s About Time truly the final Sharknado? Perhaps. But somehow, I have a feeling that the flying sharks will return someday. Critics have always underestimated the production savvy of The Asylum and I wouldn’t be shocked if, after a year or two of nostalgia, we saw Sharknado 7: A New Beginning.

But if The Last Sharknado was truly the final Sharknado, then it can be said that the franchise truly went out on a high note.

The plot — well, usually, the conventional wisdom is that the plot of a Sharknado movie really doesn’t matter. Usually, it’s assumed that all a Sharknado film needs is a lot of shark mayhem and snarky humor. And that’s true, to an extent. And yet, I still found myself getting caught up in The Last Sharknado‘s storyline. It all deals with Fin (Ian Ziering), April (Tara Reid), the head of a robot version of April (again, Tara Reid), Nova (Cassandra Scerbo), and Skye (Vivica A. Fox) traveling through time, hopping from period to period. Fin and April’s goal is to stop the first Sharknado and to save the life of their son, Gil. Nova wants to save the life of her grandfather, even though that might change history to the extent that she would never become a great shark hunter. As for the robot head … well, she develops an agenda of her own, one that really has to be seen to be believed.

The film has a lot of time travel and, of course, the journey from period to period allows for several celebrity cameos. When Fin ends up in Arthurian Britain, Neil deGrasse Tyson pops up as Merlin. During the Revolutionary War, a somewhat sarcastic General Washington is played by Darrell Hammond. Dee Snider plays a sheriff in the old west. Tori Spelling and Dean McDermott show on the beach in the 60s. Touchingly, the film even finds a way to include the late John Heard in the action. (Heard played a key supporting role in the first Sharknado.) I’m a history nerd, so I enjoyed all of the time travel. I especially enjoyed the film’s portrayal of Benjamin Franklin as a rather bitchy eccentric, largely because it’s often forgotten that Franklin was, in real life, a bit of a bitchy eccentric.

(Add to that, how can you resist a film the features both dinosaurs and flying sharks?)

The film takes a surprisingly dark turn during the second hour, as Fin and Skye spend some time in a dystopian future and Nova tries to change history by saving her grandfather’s life. When Fin points out that doing so will change history and that, for Nova to become a great shark hunter, her grandfather has to die, Nova calls him out for being self-centered. To their credit, both Cassie Scerbo and Ian Ziering play the argument totally straight and both give heartfelt performances. Amid all of the comedy and the shark-related mayhem, the film develops a real heart.

That heart is at the center of The Last Sharknado. To a large extent, the sharks are superfluous. They’re carnivorous MacGuffins. Instead, the film is about celebrating not only the bonds between Fin, April, Nova, and all of their friends but also the bond that’s been developed between the characters and those of us who have watched them over the course of six films. Towards the end of the film, when Fin talks about what his friends and family mean to him, it’s clear that he’s also speaking for the filmmakers. Just as Fin thanks his friends for sticking with him, the filmmakers take the time to thank the audience for sticking with them. It was a heartfelt scene and it was the perfect way to end The Last Sharknado.

To those who do not celebrate Sharknado Day, it may seem strange to say that I got emotional while watching the final scene of The Last Sharknado on Sunday night. Then again, is it any stranger than the idea of a franchise about a bunch of sharks flying through the air, spinning around in a funnel, becoming a major pop cultural milestone?

It’s a strange world and we’re all the better for it.

Review: Open Range (dir. by Kevin Costner)

Posted on January 9, 2011 by Arleigh

2003 marked a sort of a small comeback for Kevin Costner both as a director and as an actor. The work in question was the very well-done Western, Open Range. Open Range was a moderately budgeted film which has more in common with Costner’s first directorial work, Dances with Wolves than his last big-budget flop, The Postman.

The film was an adaptation of the Lauran Paine novel, The Open Range Men, and it captures much of the themes found in the novel. This was probably due to the fact that screenwriter Craig Storper didn’t deviate from the novel’s basic story. There were no superfluous action sequences and gunfights to ratchet up the action. Everything about Open Range was about the gradual and inevitable final confrontation between the “free-grazers” and the “barbed-wire” men. The free-grazers were played by Kevin Costner and Robert Duvall as Charles Waite and Boss Spearman, respectively. On the other side of the conflict was Michael Gambon playing Denton Baxter, the ruthless land-baron whose attempt to keep the free-grazers from grazing on his land also hides another agenda. Caught in-between these two strong-willed groups were the people in the town Baxter pretty much controls through his “town marshal” (played with fake bravado by James Russo) and the herd helpers under Boss Spearman’s employ.

The theme of freedom to roam the open country versus the rights of a landowner echoes throughout the film. Set in the latter end of the 19th-century, Open Range shows the clash of the more natural ways of the Old West slowly eroding to be replaced by the more industrial, monopolistic practices that became prevalent during the 1880’s, also known in US History as the Gilded Age. Even the personalities of the conflicting characters mirror this theme as the free-grazers only want to use the land as it has been used for years upon years and thats sharing between all men of the West. The land-baron has other ideas in mind and everything boils down to him owning everything around him, even if it means using ruthless tactics to gather even more property.

Open Range also has a bit of modernism in its subplot of Charley Waite’s growing attraction to the sister of the town doctor and the same sister’s well-rounded characterization. It’s not often that a traditional Western shows women in a very positive light instead of the usual submissive and stay-at-home characters of Western’s past. This could also be attributed to the wonderful, underrated performance by Annette Bening who plays Sue Barlow, the doctor’s sister and Charley Waite’s love interest. Bening doesn’t play Sue as the traditional Western female. She also doesn’t go overboard and turn Sue into a 20th-century feminist. She instead plays the character as someone who knows her place in the world, but also one who is strong-willed and willing to stand for what is right.

Open Range was a wonderful throwback to what made such modern Westerns like Unforgiven and Tombstone such a success both for traditionalists and new fans. Kevin Costner’s direction was very low-key. Allowing the story to tell itself at its own pace until the final confrontation. The final gunfight in the end gets a lot of well-earned attention from critics and fans. The entire sequence takes at least 10-15 minutes from start to finish. The fight itself was done in a realistic fashion. There was no sharpshooter dead-eyes in this film, but individuals who had skill but still missed. It was a fight where it wasn’t who was the fastest, but who was the calmest under fire. There’s also a suddenness to the brutality in the final gunfight that demystifies the old-style Western shootouts of past. Some complained that the film was very slow and took too long to get to the “good stuff”, but I actually thought the gradual pacing of most of the film’s length gave the final confrontation even more impact. Costner seem to have learned the lesson all good directors know: less means more.

Open Range won’t go down as a great piece of film making. It surely won’t go down as one of the best in history. What Open Range did accomplish was putting the Western back to its epic and majestic roots, but at the same time keeping the intimacy of a character-driven story. In time, Open Range would probably go down as one of the underrated gems of the last decade and find a place next to its closest comparison, Unforgiven, as one of the best Westerns of the new era.

What Lisa Watched Last Night: Wall of Secrets (dir. by Francios Gingras)

Posted on December 30, 2010 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Around 2 in the morning, I found myself watching Wall of Secrets, yet another cheap Canadian “thriller” that has apparently found a second life on the Lifetime Movie Network.

Why Was I Watching It?

My sister (and housemate) Erin was in Arlington babysitting our niece and Jeff’s going to be in Baltimore until New Year’s Eve (I miss him sooooo0000 much!) so I was alone and, as often happens when I’m alone, I couldn’t sleep. Insomnia’s a bitch and so am I after I haven’t been able to sleep more than eight hours in four days. I figured that maybe Wall of Secrets would put me to sleep so I started recording it on DVR (so I could see the rest of it after I woke up — I am the Queen of Wishful Thinking) and then I set up my little bed on the couch and I got as comfy as I could and then I closed my eyes and attempted to allow the sounds of the film lull me into sleep. No, it didn’t work. I ended up just watching the stupid movie instead.

What’s It About?

It’s the one about the newlyweds (Nicole Eggert and Dean “Mr. Tori Spelling” McDermott) who move into this huge, luxurious apartment in Seattle that they shouldn’t be able to afford. However, it seems that all of the previous tenants of the apartment have either died mysteriously or disappeared. As a result, they’re able to get a good deal on the rent.

(I attempted to do the same thing when Erin and I decided on the house we wanted to move into. I insisted to the owner that all of the previous tenants had been murdered and as such, he should really just give the house away. Unfortunately, I did not take into consideration that he was the only previous tenant.)

Anyway, McDermott is career-obsessed which gives Eggert a lot of time to hang out around the apartment, talk to the crazy old woman who lives down the hall, and get attacked by masked strangers. Eventually, she discovers that there’s actually all sorts of survellance equipment hidden in the walls and that someone has been watching her. But who?

What Worked?

Let’s see — there’s a cab driver who is in the film for 5 seconds and gets to say, “Give him Hell, lady!” That made me smile.

Voyeurs hiding in the walls? Its as if someone decided to film my sexual fantasies and then invited the whole world to come to watch!

What Didn’t Work?

My sexual fantasies usually feature better dialogue. And acting.

“Oh My God! Just Like Me!’ Moment

At one point, Eggert wanders around her apartment in just a towel and then realizes that she’s left the blinds wide open. “Oh my God!” I shouted, “That’s just like me!”

Lessons Learned

Always be sure to wear pretty underwear because you never know who might be filming you as you undress.