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, August 11th, we’ll be watching RUNNING SCARED (1986), starring Gregory Hines, Billy Crystal, Steven Bauer, Darlanne Fluegel, Joe Pantoliano, Dan Hedaya, Jon Gries, Tracy Reed, and Jimmy Smits.
The plot:Two street-wise Chicago cops have to shake off some rust after returning from a Key West vacation to pursue a drug dealer who nearly killed them in the past.
Peter Hyams directed RUNNING SCARED, and it’s one of the very best “Buddy Cop” films out there. So, if a night full of action and laughs sounds good to you, join us on #MondayMuggers and watch RUNNING SCARED. It’s on Amazon Prime, Tubi, and PlutoTV! I’ve included the trailer below:
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 March 17th, we celebrate Kurt Russell’s 74th birthday by watching THE MEAN SEASON (1985) co-starring Mariel Hemingway, Richard Jordan, Richard Masur, Richard Bradford, Joe Pantoliano, and Andy Garcia.
Kurt Russell plays Malcolm Anderson, a reporter for a Miami newspaper. He’s had enough of reporting the local murders, so he promises his school teacher girlfriend (Mariel Hemingway) that they’ll move away soon. Before Malcolm can hand in his notice, the murderer (Richard Jordan) from his latest article phones him. The murderer tells Malcolm that he’s going to kill again. The phone calls and murders continue, and soon Malcolm finds that he’s not just reporting the story, he is the story.
We thought it would be fun to join The Shattered Lens and make Kurt Russell our centerpiece for the day. There’s absolutely nothing more enjoyable to me than watching movies with friends. And If you enjoy Russell, Miami, and serial killer thrillers, you should like this one. So, join us tonight for #MondayMuggers and watch THE MEAN SEASON! It’s on Amazon Prime.
The trailer for the THE MEAN SEASON is included below:
Ray Mercer (Peter Weller) has just gotten out of prison and already, he and his wife Rebecca (Tia Carrere) are heading to Nevada for a quicky divorce. However, a stopover in Las Vegas leads to Ray having a run of luck in a casino owned by Charles Atlas (Dennis Hopper). Ray and Rebecca start to reconsider their divorce but their reconciliation is temporarily put on hold when the casino is robbed by a bunch of thieves led by Martin Kove. Because of Ray’s criminal history, the police (led by David Alan Grier) consider Ray to be the number one suspect. Ray and Rebecca try to escape from the casino and clear Ray’s name, leading to a night on nonstop action and an explosive climax at the Hoover dam.
One thing that you can say about Top of the World is that it certainly isn’t boring. The action starts earlier and lasts nonstop until the end of the movie. No sooner has Ray escaped from one scrape than he finds himself in another. Despite the low-budget, the action scenes are often spectacularly staged and exciting to watch. Another thing that you can say about Top of the World is that, for a B-movie, it certainly has a packed cast. Along with Weller, Carrere, Hopper, Grier, and Kove, the movie also finds room for Peter Coyote, Joe Pantoliano, Ed Lauter, Gavan O’Herlihy, Eddie Mekka, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, and even Larry Manetti of Magnum P.I. fame. This movie paid off a lot of mortgages and probably funded more than a few vacations.
One thing you can’t say about Top of the World is that it makes any sense. It doesn’t. There are so many holes in the plot that you could fly a helicopter through them and that’s exactly what this film does. But with the nonstop action and the entertaining cast, most people won’t mind. I certainly didn’t!
The Brawler is a biopic of boxer Chuck Wepner (adequately played by Zach McGowan). A resident of Bayonne, New Jersey and nicknamed “The Bleeder” because of how much he usually bled in the ring, Wepner was the first boxer to face Muhammad Ali (played by Jerrod Page, who looks and sounds like Ali but who has none of his fabled charisma) after Ali’s famous defeat of George Foreman. No one gave Wepner much of a chance. Ali barely bothered to train for the match and falsely accused Wepner of using racial slurs while talking to him. To everyone’s shock, Wepner not only went 15 rounds with the champ but he even knocked Ali off of his feet. Wepner ultimately lost the fight but he won the hearts of many of the people watching. He also inspired Sylvester Stallone to write and star in a movie called Rocky.
Though he was famous being “the Real Rocky,” Wepner initially didn’t make a dime off of Rocky or any of the sequels that followed. While Stallone became a superstar, Wepner got addicted to cocaine, fought exhibition matches against Andre the Giant and a bear, and finally ended up in prison. After getting out of prison, Wepner returned to his old job of selling liquor and made money signing memorabilia. After he nearly got arrested as a part of a fraudulent autograph scam, Wepner finally took Stallone to court and sued for the money that he felt Stallone owed him. Stallone settled, making Chuck Wepner the only man to go the distance with both Muhammad Ali and Sylvester Stallone.
If the plot of The Brawler sounds familiar, maybe you’ve seen one of the many documentaries that have been made about Chuck Wepner. Or maybe you saw Chuck, a 2016 film about Chuck Wepner that starred Liev Schrieber. The Brawler hits all of the same points as Chuck, so much so that it almost feels like an unofficial remake. (Both films even features a voice-over narration from the actor playing Chuck.) The main difference between the two films is that The Brawler spends a lot more time on Wepner’s time as a drug addict and it also portrays Stallone (played unconvincingly by Anthony Mangano) in a much more negative light. Even though Wepner screws up every opportunity that he’s offered (including a chance to appear in Rocky II), it’s Stallone who is portrayed as being a villain because he didn’t always return Wepner’s calls and Stallone’s assistants were sometimes rude. While Chuck spends all of time whining about how unfair his life is, Stallone comes across as being often clueless but hardly malicious in the way he treated Chuck. It’s not easy to make a Hollywood superstar into a more sympathetic character than the poor underdog who is suing for the money that he’s owed for inspiring one of the most successful franchises of all time but The Brawler manages to pull it off. In Chuck, Wepner is an inspiring underdog who never lets life keep him down. In The Brawler, Wepner is a self-destructive child who lets down everyone who tries to help him. When it comes to Chuck vs The Brawler, it’s Chuck by a clear knock-out.
The most interesting thing about The Brawler is that Burt Young has a cameo as a man watching the Wepner/Ali fight in a bar. You have to wonder how Stallone felt about that. Et tu, Paulie?
In this episode of HBO’s horror anthology, Tales From The Crypt, Joe Pesci plays a con artist who tries to swindle twin sisters, just to discover that the sisters have a secret of their own. Pesci is at his best here, poking fun at his own screen persona while playing a character who discovers that he’s not quite as clever as he thought he was.
The episode originally aired on August 26th, 1992.
If you watch the 1983’s The Final Terror, be prepared to frequently hear the names of the film’s characters. For a slasher film about a bunch of campers wandering through the forest, The Final Terror has a surprisingly large cast and they all spend a good deal of time walking around and yelling out each other’s names. Somehow, people keep getting lost even though they know that there’s a killer out there and they all really should be sticking together.
Interestingly enough, for a slasher film, there aren’t that many deaths. The majority of the cast survives. Even the most obnoxious of the campers, the one who seems like an obvious victim, manages to make it through to the finale. I guess we should be happy that most of them survived and this was apparently their final terror. The majority of the campers were teenagers and if you’re having your surviving your final terror when you’re not even old enough to drink yet …. well, consider yourself lucky.
The Final Terror is set up like an entry in the Friday the 13th franchise but it’s never anywhere close to being as sleazy as those films. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing depends on what you, as a viewer, want in terms of a wilderness slasher film. If you want lots of sex, blood, and people making stupid decisions, The Final Terror will probably bore you to death, despite the fact that it includes all three. If you want a relatively realistic film about being lost in the wilderness while being stalked by an unseen killer, you’ll probably appreciate The Final Terror. This film was directed Andrew Davis, who went on to direct several big budget Hollywood action films. Before he became an action director, though, he worked as an assistant to cinematographer Haskell Wexler on the semi-documentary Medium Cool. Davis brings that realistic style to The Final Terror. Even though the film does feature some familiar faces, it’s easy to believe that you’re just watching a bunch of campers trying to survive for the weekend.
As for the cast, Rachel Ward plays one of the leaders of the campers. Joe Pantoliano makes an early appearance as the creepy Eggar. Daryl Hannah plays Windy. Mark Metcalf plays another camper named Mike. The entire ensemble actually does a pretty good job. As I said, you really do believe that the majority of the cast are delinquent teenagers who have been sent on a camping trip. When they work together to keep someone from bleeding to death, it almost feels like an educational film. “Because the campers worked together,” you can imagine a narrator saying, “they might survive The Final Terror.”
The Final Terror is not bad, though I have to admit that I like my 80s slashers to be a little bit more sordid. But for what it is — an attempt to take a realistic approach to a genre that is regularly held in dismissive disdain — The Final Terror works surprisingly well. As captured by Andrew Davis, the wilderness is both beautiful and terrifying. You’ll never catch me camping!
Bad Boys For Life came out in January of this year. It was the first big release of 2020 and despite some skepticism (mostly from people like me, who pointed out that it had been 18 years since the release of the previous Bad Boys film), it went on to become the most financially successful January release of all time. Not only did audiences love it but critics were surprisingly positive as well.
When I watched the film last week, I occasionally felt as if I had stepped into a time machine. Even though the movie was just released a few months ago, it really does feel like an artifact from another age. I mean, here we have a film named after the theme song of Cops, a once inescapable reality show that has largely been memory-holed as its uncritical depiction of the police has fallen out of fashion. The film even features several scenes of the heroes singing the Bad Boys song, a song that declares that there’s nothing you can do now that the police are coming for you.
Of course, the film itself is about the type of supercops who, up until a few months ago, were popular in films and television. These are the type of cops who are always quick with a quip and who have no problem trampling all over the Constitution in their pursuit of the bad guys. The film celebrates the idea of the “super cop” in a way that seems almost unthinkable in our current cultural moment. Defund the police? How could you possibly want to do that when the cops are as charming as Will Smith and …. uhmm, Martin Lawrence?
Smith and Lawrence return as Miami Detectives Mike Lowery and Marcus Burnett. Played by Smith, Mike is a confident and cocky playboy whose carefree façade hides a complicated path. As played by Lawrence, Marcus is a mild-mannered family man who thinks that his partner needs to settle down and perhaps show a little bit more caution with some of his life choices. Together …. THEY SOLVE CRIMES!
No, this time I’m not joking. That is literally what they literally do. They’re famous for solving crimes and Mike is known as being the “bulletproof cop.” However, they’re both getting older. Mike’s beard is going gray. Marcus wants to spend more time at home. Even their old boss (Joe Pantoliano) is talking about his retirement. Unfortunately, a man named Armando (Jacob Scipio) is riding around Miami on a motorcycle and murdering anyone who was involved in the arrest and incarceration of an infamous Mexican drug lord. He’s doing so on the orders of his mother, Isabel (Kate del Castillo), who is also known as La Bruja. When Armando targets Mike, everyone is forced to reconsider their plans.
That may sounds simple and straight forward but the film complicates things with a third act twist involving Mike and Armando’s relationship. It’s a twist that really shouldn’t work and yet it does, largely because Will Smith is a strong enough dramatic actor that he makes Mike seem like an actual human being, as opposed to being just an infallible action hero. Smith gets not only the best dramatic moments but also some of the best comedic ones, especially when he ends up working with a bunch of younger cops who aren’t as impressed with Mike as Mike is with himself. Martin Lawrence doesn’t get to do as much as Smith but he has a few funny moments and, most importantly, the friendship between Mike and Marcus feels real. Lawrence and Smith have an undeniable chemistry that works in both comedic and dramatic scenes. When Marcus says that he can’t stand to see Mike putting his life in danger, you believe him. When Mike reacts to Marcus’s desire to retire as being some sort of personal betrayal, you understand exactly what’s going through Mike’s head to make him overreact. You believe that Mike and Marcus really do care about each other and it adds a surprising amount of emotional depth to certain scenes.
Bad Boys For Life is a good action film, one that has a surprisingly big heart. The action scenes are well-handled. The chase scenes are exciting. Will Smith again shows why he’s a movie star. Though the film may seem like a relic of a bygone era, it’s undoubtedly entertaining. (Considering the ADD-nature of popular culture nowadays, it’s easy to imagine that supercops will be back in fashion sooner than later.) Naturally, it ends with the promise of sequel and I imagine that we’ll eventually get one. The only real question is whether or not Marcus and Mike will still be singing their theme song. Let’s hope so.
William McNamara plays Jeremy, who was given up for adoption 24 years ago and has never gotten over it. After killing his adoptive parents, his birth father, someone’s mistress, and a private investigator played by Tia Carrere, Jeremy wants to celebrate his 25th birthday by killing his birth mother, Sandy (Lesley Anne Warren). However, Jeremy wants to draw out Sandy’s suffering so he comes up with a plot so complex that it’s hard to believe that anyone could actually pull it off.
After Jeremy finds out that Sandy’s new husband, Ted (Donald Sutherland, massively slumming), is the head of a small brokerage firm, Jeremy reads every book that he can find and somehow become an expert on the stock market. Even though Jeremy could have a high-paying job with any firm, he wants to work for Ted’s little firm. Ted hires Jeremy and Jeremy proceeds to worm his way into Ted and Sandy’s life. Jeremy also frames Ted for securities fraud, which leads to Ted losing his job and being blacklisted by all of Ted’s highly ethical Wall Street colleagues. (Yes, I managed to write that with a straight face.) Despite the fact that Jeremy is obviously disturbed and that Ted and Sandy’s life starts to fall apart from the exact moment that Jeremy becomes a part of it, only Ted and Sandy’s son, Chris (Christian Tessier), suspects that there’s something strange about Jeremy.
This is one of those dumb revenge thrillers that is dependent upon everyone in the movie being as dumb as possible. Even Jeremy turns out to be dumb. After killing almost everyone that he meets, Jeremy suddenly decides to keep one person alive and, of course, that decision comes back to haunt Jeremy in the end. Jeremy is smart enough that he can trick people into believing that he’s a brilliant stock broker but he’s dumb enough to make an obvious mistake. Of course, everyone else is dumb enough to to not catch on to the fact that Jeremy is a sociopath so the mass dumbness evens out in the end.
Probably the most interesting thing about this movie is that, somehow, Donald Sutherland ended up starring in it. Even great actors have to put food on the table and hopefully, Sutherland ate well as a result of starring in Natural Enemy.
You couldn’t go anywhere in 1984 without hearing “On the Dark Side” blaring from a car radio or your neighborhood bar’s jukebox. That’s thanks in large part to audiences rediscovering 1983’s EDDIE AND THE CRUISERS via repeated showings on HBO, turning the film into an instant cult classic and veteran Providence-based rockers John Cafferty & The Beaver Brown Band into FM-radio favorites. The film hadn’t done well when first released to theaters, but exposure on the fairly-new medium of Cable TV garnered new fans of both it and Cafferty’s soundtrack album.
Investigative reporter Ellen Barkin looks into the mysterious death of Eddie Wilson (played by Michael Pare’), lead singer of The Cruisers, whose death in a car accident is shrouded in secret, as the body was never found. Was it suicide? murder? or is Eddie still alive? She digs deep to uncover the facts about what happened that fateful night…
From the very first few scenes of the 1985 film, The Mean Season, one thing is abundantly clear. People are dying in Florida.
In itself, that’s probably not a shock. Death is a part of life, after all. Add to that, the majority of The Mean Season takes place in Miami, the seventh most populous area of the United States. It makes sense that the more people you have living in one area, the more people are also going to end up dead. That’s just the way things work.
Still, Malcolm Anderson is getting tired of all the death. Played by a youngish and sexy Kurt Russell, Malcolm’s a journalist. He covers the crime beat for the Miami Herald. He spends all day reporting on death and violence and he’s finally reached the point where he’s burned out. He and his girlfriend, a teacher named Christine (Mariel Hemingway), are even planning on moving to Colorado. Malcolm says that he could be very happy working at a small town newspaper. His editor (Richard Masur) doesn’t believe him and, quite frankly, neither do we. Malcolm may say that he wants peace and quiet but it’s hard not to feel as if he’s fooling himself.
One day, Malcolm gets a phone call. The voice on the other line (which belongs to character actor Richard Jordan) is deceptively calm. The caller explains that he’s a fan of Malcolm’s work. The caller also claims to be responsible for a series of murders that have recently taken place. At first, Malcolm is skeptical. After all, he gets calls from crazy people all the time. That’s one reason why he wants to leave Miami, after all. But then the caller starts to give Malcolm details about the crimes, details that haven’t been released to general public…
The killings continue and, after every murder, the caller contacts Malcolm. Soon, Malcolm is appearing on the national news, giving carefully calculated interviews about what it’s like to be a celebrity. Malcolm is soon on the front page of all the papers. Malcolm’s happy. His editor is happy. But you know who isn’t happy? The killer. He didn’t go to all the trouble to kill those people just so Malcolm could get famous off of his hard work! Soon, the killer is no longer content to just call Malcolm. Now, he wants to meet face-to-face and maybe even get to know Christine as well…
The Mean Season is one of those movies that starts out well but then falls apart towards the end. It’s not a spoiler to tell you that the killer eventually ends up kidnapping Christine. You probably figured out that was going to happen as soon as I told you that Malcolm had a girlfriend. (It doesn’t help that Christine is such an underwritten character that it feels like the only reason she was put in the film was so she could be used for one gratuitous nude scene and then get kidnapped.) Once the killer kidnaps her, he goes from being a genuinely intriguing menace to just being a typical and overly verbose movie psycho.
That’s a shame because the first half of The Mean Season is really quite good. The film makes excellent use of its locations, capturing the humid atmosphere of Florida in the summer. As the killer, Richard Jordan alternates between being coldly calculating and surprisingly vulnerable without missing a beat. (Interestingly, he appears to be personally hurt when he realizes that Malcolm doesn’t consider him to be a friend.) Not surprisingly, Kurt Russell is likable as the conflicted Malcolm but his best moments are the ones where he suggests that Malcolm has become so addicted to fame that he’s almost hoping that the killer strikes again. As the two homicide detectives who are assigned to keep an eye on Malcolm, both Richard Bradford and Andy Garcia are perfectly cast. A scene where Bradford tries to comfort a child who accidentally gets in the middle of the search for the killer is the best in the film. “We’re just looking for the bad guys,” he tell the traumatized child. It’s small moments like this that elevates The Mean Season above the typical mid-80s serial killer film.
Seen today, The Mean Season — with its emphasis on newspapers — feels like a historical artifact. If the film were made today, Russell would definitely work for either a 24-hour cable news channel or an online news site. It actually would be interesting to see this story updated and retold for the age of clickbait. Somebody needs to get on that and, while they’re at it, come up with the type of ending that an otherwise intriguing story like this deserves.
Through the Shattered Lens 