Tag Archives: Judge Reinhold

Brad reviews DEAD IN A HEARTBEAT (2002)!

Posted on by Bradley Crain

DEAD IN A HEARTBEAT is a 2002 TV movie that stars Judge Reinhold as Tom Royko, the head of Seattle bomb squad, as he finds himself trying to stop a mad bomber named Zachary Franklin (Timothy Busfield). Franklin blames heart surgeon Gillian Hayes (Penelope Ann Miller) for the death of his son and makes it his mission in life to make her suffer like he has. His plan… volunteer at the hospital where Dr. Hayes works, rig their supply of pacemakers with explosives, and then implement a plan to begin blowing up her patients on the anniversary of his son’s death. When Royko figures out what’s going on, he enlists the help of Dr. Hayes to identify the next potential victims and stop the deranged Franklin before another innocent person’s chest explodes!

DEAD IN A HEARTBEAT is an entertaining TV movie. If you like Hallmark mysteries and Lifetime movies, it’s my guess that you will enjoy this film. The plot is a lot of fun… I love the movie SPEED and the “madman setting off ticking human time bombs while taunting the police” reminded me of that excellent thriller on multiple occasions. While I’m not suggesting this movie is in the same league as the Keanu Reeves / Sandra Bullock action classic, I am saying that I did feel genuine tension and excitement at times as some of the scenes played out, and I wasn’t really expecting that. As far as the performances, I must admit I really enjoyed watching Judge Reinhold in the lead. He’s not tough at all, but he does have a likable, sarcastic charm that appeals to me. After loving him in 80’s movies like BEVERLY HILLS COP and RUTHLESS PEOPLE, it was nice seeing him in this role. I only give Penelope Ann Miller average marks for her performance as the heart doctor who starts off really arrogant before having a crisis of conscience when the bad guy starts offing her former patients. She has a couple of solid moments, but for the most part I just found her competent in the role. Timothy Busfield is definitely good as the villain, but this movie’s TV roots left his character somewhat underdeveloped. I think the part could have worked better if more time had been devoted to the details that lead to him losing his grip on reality.

While not a must-see, DEAD ON A HEARTBEAT turned out to be an enjoyable, undemanding watch as I was scrolling through Amazon Prime. If you don’t mind a little absurdity with your early 2000’s, TV action movies, you’ll probably like this one. 

The Right To Remain Silent (1996, directed by Hubert de La Bouillerie)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

It’s one very busy night at a police station.  Everyone who is brought in from off the streets has the right to remain silent but no one exercises it.  Rookie cop Lea Thompson listens to everyone’s stories.  LL Cool J is the documentarian who thought it would be smart to put on Klan robes and a hood and try to infiltrate a demonstration undercover.  Patrick Dempsey is the drunk who killed a kid.  Carl Reiner comes in and confesses to mercy killing his wife.  Christopher Lloyd is homeless.  Fisher Stevens is a trans streetwalker.  Judge Reinhold, I don’t even know what he was supposed to be.  Reinhold actually plays two characters in this film and he’s miscast in both roles.  Amanda Plummer is a pizza delivery person who shoots someone in self-defense.  No one asks for a lawyer.  No one lies about what they did.  Instead, they just talk and talk and talk and talk some more.  Thompson listens while Robert Loggia, as the chief, growls about donuts.

The Right To Remain Silent is based on a play and that is its downfall.  Instead of being a story about a rookie cop and her first night on the job, it’s just a collection of rambling stage monologues.  Some of the actors, like Carl Reiner and Christopher Lloyd, do okay.  Most of them still seem to be acting for the folks sitting in the back row.  It ultimately doesn’t add up too much because the stories are too predictable to make much of an impression.  Everyone in this film had the right to remain silent and I wish they had exercised it.

Scenes That I Love: The First Two Minutes of Fast Times At Ridgemont High

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today, the Shattered Lens wishes a happy birthday to director Amy Heckerling!

Today’s scene that I love comes from Amy Heckerling’s feature debut, 1982’s Fast Times At Ridgemont High.  In just two minutes, Heckerling introduces us to almost all of the major characters, establishes the mall as the center of Ridgemont High culture, and leaves us with little doubt that we’ve entered a time machine and found ourselves in the 80s.  Look at all the future stars.  Look at Mike Damone, future mobster.  My heart always breaks for Stacy and her brother Brad.  They have no idea what’s waiting for them this year.

Here is today’s scene that I love:

Stripes (1981, directed by Ivan Reitman)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Bill Murray and Harold Ramis join the army.

Wait, that can’t be right, can it?  Bill Murray and Harold Ramis were cinematic anarchists.  Early in his career, Bill Murray was the ultimate smart aleck slacker who did not have any respect for authority.  Harold Ramis was hardly a slacker but he came across as someone more likely to be marching on the Pentagon than guarding it.  Stripes is one of the ultimate examples of a comedy where the laughs come from things  that don’t seem to go together suddenly going together.

John Winger (Murray) at least has a reason to join the army.  He has a dead end job.  He has just broken up with his girlfriend.  The country appears to be at peace so why not spend four years in the Army?  It’s harder to understand why John’s friend, Russell (Ramis), also decides to enlist, other than to hang out with John.  Along with Ox (John Candy), Cruiser (John Diehl), Psycho (Conrad Dunn), and Elm0 (Judge Reinhold), they enlist and go through basic training under the watchful eye of Sgt. Hulka (Warren Oates).  John and Russell go from treating everything like a joke to invading East Germany in a tank that’s disguised as an RV.  They also meet the two sexiest and friendliest MPs in the service, Stella (P.J. Soles) and Louise (Sean Young).  Russell goes from being an proto-hippie who teaches ESL to asking John if he thinks he would make a good officer.  John goes from not taking anything seriously to picking up a machine gun and rescuing his fellow soldiers.

It’s a comedy that shouldn’t work but it does.  It’s actually one of my favorite comedies, full of memorable lines (“Lighten up, Frances.”), and stupidly funny situations.  The cast is full of future comedy legends and P.J. Soles shows that she deserved to be a bigger star.  This was early in Bill Murray’s film career and he was still largely getting by on his SNL persona but, in his confrontations with Hulka, Murray got a chance to show that he could handle drama.  With all the comedic talent in the film, it’s Warren Oates who gets the biggest laughs because he largely plays his role straight.  Sgt. Hulka is a drill sergeant who cares about his men and who knows how to inspire and teach  but that doesn’t mean he’s happy about having to deal with a collection of misfits.  (Watch his face when Cruiser says he enlisted so he wouldn’t get drafted.)

The movie does get strange when the action goes from the U.S. to Germany.  What starts out as Animal-House-In-The-Army instead becomes an almost straight action movie and the movie itself sometimes feels like a recruiting video.  Join the Army and maybe you’ll get to steal an RV with PJ Soles.  That would have been enough to get me to enlist back in the day.  But the combination of Murray, Ramis, and Oates makes Stripes a comedy that can be watched over and over again.

Beverly Hills Cop (1984, directed by Martin Best)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Two years after teaming with Nick Nolte in 48 Hrs., Eddie Murphy returned to the action genre in what remains he best-known action comedy, Beverly Hills Cop.

We all know the story.  Eddie Murphy is Axel Foley, a streetsmart detective in Detroit whose childhood friend, Mickey (James Russo), is murdered because of something that he saw while working as a security guard in Beverly Hills.  Axel plays by his own rules and gets results even as he gives his boss, Inspector Todd (Gil Hill), heartburn.  Todd refuses to allow Foley to investigate Mickey’s death so Axel puts in for some vacation time and catches the first plane to Beverly Hills.

In Beverly Hills, he meets up with another childhood friend, Jenny (Lisa Eilbacher).  Axel thinks that Mickey’s murder was ordered by a shady businessman named Victor Maitland (Steven Berkoff).  The Beverly Hills Police Department orders Axel to leave Maitland alone and to return to Detroit.  Axel won’t go until he gets justice for Mickey.  Lt. Bogomil (Ronny Cox) assigns Taggart (John Ashton) and Rosewood (Judge Reinhold) to follow Axel in Beverly Hills.

Like 48 Hrs., the story is serious but the comedy comes from how the well-drawn characters interact with each other and from seeing how Axel reacts to the strange and wealthy world of Beverly Hills.  Axel has the same reactions that we would have but, because he’s played by Eddie Murphy, he always has the perfect response to everything that he sees, whether it’s dealing with a snooty hotel clerk or with someone like Serge (Bronson Pichot), Jenny’s co-worker who speaks with an unidentifiable accent.  Even more so than in 48 Hrs or Trading Places, Murphy reveals himself to be a natural star here.  One reason why we like Axel is because he’s not just funny but he’s also the type of confident hero that we all wish we could be.  He’s not intimidated by Beverly Hills for a second.

It’s now impossible to picture anyone else in the role of Axel Foley but, when the film’s script was first being shopped around, it was originally offered to Sylvester Stallone, who said the story had potential but was missing something.  He rewrote the script and took out all of the humor, turning it into a grim and serious action film.  (It is rumored that Stallone later turned his version of the script into Cobra.)  Fortunately, Stallone eventually dropped out of Beverly Hills Cop so that he could co-star with Dolly Parton in Rhinestone.  Producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, then at the start of their producing careers, then offered the role to Eddie Murphy, who took Stallone’s script and added back all of the humor.  Murphy also ended up ad-libbing several of the film’s best one-liners, improvising the hotel lobby scene and the meeting with Serge on the spot.

Beverly Hills Cop was a huge success, cementing Murphy’s status as a star and proving that Murphy could carry a movie on his own.  The film still holds up, certainly better than any of the sequels that followed.  Even though Murphy was clearly the main attraction, the movie also gave actors like John Ashton, Judge Reinhold, Ronny Cox, Bronson Pinchot, and even Paul Reiser a chance to shine.  The villainous performances of Steven Berkoff and Jonathan Banks would serve as a model for countless bad guys through the 80s and 90s.  Beverly Hills Cop is a movie that makes you happy that Sylvester Stallone didn’t have a better sense of humor.

Scenes That I Love: Nicolas Cage in Zandalee

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today, the Shattered Lens wishes a happy 61st birthday to the great Nicolas Cage.  Over the years, Cage has become an icon of everything that we love about the movies.  He’s appeared in great films.  He’s appeared in bad films.  He’s done films that barely had a budget and he’s appeared in blockbusters.  He can do drama.  He can do comedy.  He can do horror.  He can do action.  His performances are often so wonderfully bizarre that will sit through the worst films ever made just to catch a Nicolas Cage cameo.  And yet, for every strange Cage performance, there’s a Cage performance that is undeniably brilliant, like his performance in Pig.

Today’s scene that I love comes from 1990’s Zandalee.  In this scene, Nicolas Cage and Judge Reinhold share a dance on a Louisiana pier.

RUTHLESS PEOPLE (1986) – In remembrance of Jim Abrahams

Posted on by Bradley Crain

It made me sad when I saw that writer/director Jim Abrahams had passed away on November 26, 2024 at 80 years of age. Growing up in the 1980’s, Mr. Abrahams is responsible for some of my favorite comedies. AIRPLANE, TOP SECRET, and THE NAKED GUN would not exist without Jim Abrahams. As much as I love all of those movies, my personal favorite film that Jim Abrahams co-directed is RUTHLESS PEOPLE. I remember when our family rented this film and watched it in the ‘80’s. We thought it was so funny. I specifically remember my mom laughing out loud on multiple occasions as the ridiculous scenario played out. That was a fun movie night in the Crain household. 

RUTHLESS PEOPLE is about a rich businessman named Sam Stone (Danny DeVito) who truly hates his wife Barbara (Bette Midler), and hatches a plan to kill her so he can inherit her money. Unfortunately he runs into a couple of problems. First, his mistress Carol (Anita Morris) knows about the plan, so she and her dimwitted boy toy Earl (Bill Pullman) want to film Sam dumping his wife’s body so they can blackmail him for millions. Second, before Sam can execute his plan, Barbara is kidnapped and held for a ransom of $500,000 by Ken and Sandy Kressler (Judge Reinhold and Helen Slater). It seems that Sam stole Sandy’s idea for the spandex miniskirt, screwed them out of millions with a handshake deal, and then kept the money for himself. This seems like an answer to prayer at first for Sam because they threaten to kill Barbara if he doesn’t meet their needs or if he calls the police or the media. After saying no to their demands, and then immediately calling the police and the news, Sam realizes that they don’t want to kill her when they keep coming back with lower demands. Sandy tells Barbara that Sam refuses to pay even $10,000 for her safe return. Eventually the kidnappers and Barbara join together to try to take the unfaithful and unethical Sam for everything he’s worth!! 

RUTHLESS PEOPLE is one of my favorite comedies of the 1980’s. It has such a great cast. Danny DeVito and Bill Pullman are especially hilarious and have some of the film’s best lines. At the time the movie came out in 1986, DeVito was already established as a master of comedy, so Pullman’s performance as Earl, the dumbass Sonny Crockett wannabe, was the real revelation to me. Pullman made his film debut in RUTHLESS PEOPLE, and I never see him to this day that I don’t think of his character Earl’s excitement over the prospect of his newfound blackmail money:

“And then we’re off, to Haiti!”

“It’s Tahiti, you moron!”

One of the most interesting things about RUTHLESS PEOPLE is just how different it is from the directing trio’s (Zucker / Abrahams / Zucker) other popular films like THE KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE and AIRPLANE. Those films are based on non-stop visual and verbal gags. I love those films, but this is quite different. The comedy of RUTHLESS PEOPLE is based on the story itself, which is a comedy of confusion, coincidence, and character. I know it’s awesome because I still think of the film often. “Give the bag to bozo” and “a little poke in the whiskers” are phrases I’ll remember up to the point I go to my grave. 

Even though the film is almost 40 years old, if you’re looking for a laugh, I don’t think you can do much better than RUTHLESS PEOPLE. 

Scenes That I Love: The Opening of Fast Times At Ridgemont High

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today, the Shattered Lens wishes a happy birthday to director Amy Heckerling!

Today’s scene that I love comes from Amy Heckerling’s feature debut, 1982’s Fast Times At Ridgemont High.  In just two minutes, Heckerling introduces us to almost all of the major characters, establishes the mall as the center of Ridgemont High culture, and leaves us with little doubt that we’ve entered a time machine and found ourselves in the 80s.  Judge Reinhold looks like he’s on top of the world.  Jennifer Jason Leigh bravely faces the pizza oven.  Sean Penn makes us wish he had never lost his laid back stoner vibe.  And the underrated Robert Romanus struts through the mall like a king overlooking his kingdom.  With this scene, Heckerling announces that she has made the ultimate 80s high school film.

(And just a decade later, she would make the ultimate 90s high school film with Clueless.)

Here is today’s scene that I love:

Axel Foley heads back West in the Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F Teaser!

Posted on by Leonard Wilson

Personally, I think we’ve milked the Nostalgia Train for all it’s worth, but if audiences are looking forward to it, maybe it’s a good thing. I forgot there was a third entry in the Beverly Hills Cop films, but then recalled it was the one with George Lucas in it. While we’re not sure why Detroit’s Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy) is returning to Beverly Hills, it’s good to see that most of his friends are there to greet him. It looks like they brought in Judge Reinhold, Paul Reiser, John Aston and even Bronson Pinchot along for the ride. New additions appear to be both Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Kevin Bacon.

The film is due out next March.

Music Video of the Day: Shadows of the Night by Pat Benatar (1983, directed by Mark Robinson)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Today’s music video of the day features Pet Benatar as a Rosie the Riveter-type of character, working in a factory during World War II and having fantasies about being a flying ace.  Judge Reinhold appears as a pilot while the much missed Bill Paxton plays an enemy radio operators.  Interestingly, this video was filmed before either one of the two men became well-known.  Reinhold had just starred in Fast Times at Ridgemont High but he wouldn’t play his best-known role, as Detective Billy Rosewood in Beverly Hills Cops, until a year after this video came out.  At the same time that Reinhold was trading quips with Eddie Murphy, Bill Paxton was playing an ill-fated street punk in The Terminator.

Pat Benatar was not actually the first artist to record this song.  The song was originally written by D.L. Byron in 1980 for a film called Times Square but it was rejected by both the filmmakers and Byron’s record label.  The song was subsequently recorded by both Helen Schneider and Rachel Sweet before Benatar did her version.  Of course, Benatar’s recording is the best known, climbing up to the third sport on the charts and inspiring even more artists to cover the original song.

If you’ve ever stolen a car in Los Santos, there’s a good chance you’ve heard Shadows of the Night on the radio.

Enjoy!