Tag Archives: John DiSanti

Live Tweet Alert – #MondayMuggers present RUNNING SCARED (1986), starring Gregory Hines and Billy Crystal!

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, 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:

A Blast From The Past: Ace Hits The Big Time (dir by Robert C. Thompson)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Made in 1985 for CBS, Ace Hits The Big Time is a seriously strange little film.

It tells the story of Horace Hobart (Rob Stone, a likable actor), a 16 year-old kid from New Jersey who has just transferred to a new high school in New York.  He’s paranoid about going to his new school because it’s supposedly populated by gang members.  The school is so notorious for gang activity that the members of the gang even make an appearance on the front page of the paper of record, The New York Freaking Times!  Looking at the newspaper makes Horace Hobart so paranoid that he has musical fantasies in which the members of a gang known as the Purple Falcons surround him, start singing, and then beat him up while doing an interpretive dance.

Horace does eventually find the courage to go to his new high school but he insists on calling himself “Ace,” he wears a jacket with a fearsome dragon embroidered on the back of it, and he wears an eye patch because he’s got …. ewwww …. pink eye.  (Remember when Bob Costas got pink eye at the Olympics and traumatized thousands of viewers by insisting on going on the air every night and talking about snowboarding while struggling to keep his eye from popping out of its socket?  Those were crazy times!)  Ace looks so tough that the real Purple Falcons mistake him for being an associate of a notorious New Jersey gang (no, not the Sopranos) and they recruit him to be a member of their gang.  Ace is so convincing as a tough guy that a film crew decides to use him and his friends as extras in a movie!  (Interestingly, the director is really involved in picking and working with the extras.  There’ll be no second unit crap for Ace and the Purple Falcons!)  Unfortunately, another gang insists on trying to make the Purple Falcons look bad.  Fortunately, Ace is able to defuse the tension by baking a cake.  What?

This is like the dorkiest version of West Side Story ever made and I can’t really figure out what the message is supposed to be.  On the one hand, Ace is totally paranoid about any sort of gang violence and goes out of his way to try to prevent a gang war.  On the other hand, even before Ace shows up and starts quoting John Lennon, neither one of the show’s gangs are particularly violent or even intimidating.  The Purple Falcons are pretty much impossible to take seriously because they’re called “the Purple Falcons.”  (They all wear purple, as well.  I guess some other gang had already claimed all the cool falcon colors.)  They really don’t do any sort of “gang” stuff.  Instead, they eat a lot of pizza and appear in a movie.  That sounds like a pretty good deal, actually.  With its mix of dorky humor, random dance numbers, and “tough” gang talk, this is one of those old time capsules that simply has to be seen to be believed.

And here it is!

The TSL’s Horror Grindhouse: Eyes of a Stranger (dir by Ken Wiederhorn)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In this 1981 slasher film, bad things are happening in the city of Miami.

There’s a serial killer on the loose.  He’s chopping off heads and leaving bodies on the beach and basically just making a huge mess of things.  Local new anchorwoman Jane (Lauren Tewes) is upset that there’s a killer roaming the streets of her hometown.  She even talks about how upset she is during a local newscast, which takes everyone at the station by surprise.  I don’t know why they’re so shocked.  Don’t they know that Jane has a younger sister named Tracy (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and that Tracy’s been blind, deaf, and mute ever since she was attacked by a maniac?

One day, Jane is returning to the apartment that she shares with her sister.  As she’s parking her car, she sees her neighbor, Stanley (John DiSanti), stuffing what appears to be a bloody shirt in a trash can.  Oh my God, could he be the murderer!?

Well, yes, he is.  The film actually makes no attempt to hide the fact that Stanley is the murderer.  Stanley is one of those movie murderers who is either hyper competent or totally oblivious, depending on what the scene demands.  For instance, despite being a rather heavyset, middle-aged man, he can still sneak up behind people without them ever hearing and chop off their head with one wave of a meat cleaver.  On the other hand, when he kills a couple on the beach, his car ends up getting stuck in the sand.

Anyway, Jane is pretty much instantly convinced that Stanley is the killer and she immediately starts doing stuff like taunting him over the telephone.  (Despite the fact that she’s on TV every night and her voice is apparently heard by everyone in Miami, she makes no effort to disguise her voice whenever she calls Stanley.)  She also breaks into his apartment to look for clues.

As I watched this film, I found myself thinking about how much more interesting it would have been if Stanley hadn’t been the killer and if Jane felt so guilty about what happened to her sister that she ended up harassing a totally innocent bystander.  But no, Stanley is the murderer so naturally all of this leads to an extended sequence where Stanley breaks into and then follows Tracy around Jane’s apartment.

So, Eyes of a Stranger is a fairly mediocre film, one that would probably be totally forgotten if not for the fact that it’s also the debut film of Jennifer Jason Leigh.  While the film is obviously meant to showcase Lauren Tewes (a TV actress who gives a rather wooden performance), Jennifer Jason Leigh steals every scene in which she appears.  Her total commitment to her character shines through and she even manages to sell a rather implausible plot twist that occurs towards the end of the film.  John DiSanti also deserves some credit for his performance as Stanley.  Again, it’s hard not to feel that the film would have worked better if it had tried to keep us guessing as to the question of Stanley’s guilt.

Eyes of a Stranger was directed by Ken Wiederhorn, who also did the far superior zombie movie, Shock Waves.  It’s interesting to note that both Lauren Tewes and Jennifer Jason Leigh would subsequently appear in Twin Peaks: The Return, though Leigh’s role was significantly larger.

 

A Movie A Day #263: Running Scared (1986, directed by Peter Hyams)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Running Scared is weird but good.

Ray Hughes (Gregory Hines!) and Danny Costanzo (Billy Crystal!!!) are two tough detectives in Chicago.  All they want to do is three things: retire, open a bar in Florida, and bust Chicago’s most ruthless drug dealer, Julio Gonzalez (Jimmy Smits).  Their captain (Dan Hedaya) wants them to leave for Florida as soon as possible but they are determined to take down Julio first.’

There are two strange things about this otherwise formulaic crime film.  First off, the two tough cops are played by Gregory Hines and Billy Crystal.  According to the film’s Wikipedia page, director Peter Hyams realized that Running Scared‘s plot was nothing special so he decided that the only way to make the movie stand out was by doing it “with two actors you would not normally expect to see in an action movie.”  The other strange thing is that Hyams’s gambit worked.  Gregory Hines may have been best known as a dancer and Billy Crystal as a comedian but both of them were surprisingly believable as Chicago cops.  Running Scared is actually one of Billy Crystal’s best performances.  For once, he’s believable as being someone other than a version of himself.  Even his frequent one liners seem like something that a detective would say instead of Crystal recycling punch lines from his act.  Whether they are chasing down perps and firing their guns at a moving vehicle, Hines and Crystal are never less than credible as action stars.  Lorenzo Lamas has got nothing on the team of Hines and Crystal.

Predictable though it may be, Running Scared is one of the better late 80s cop films.  The action scenes are exciting and Hyams does a good job capturing the grittiness of Chicago.  Jimmy Smits is a good villain and Joe Pantoliano, Steven Bauer, and Jon Gries all shine in supporting roles.  Keep an eye out for the always underrated Darlanne Fluegel, playing Danny’s ex-wife.