After her father dies in an accident, teenage Nicole (Aimee Teargarden) is sent to Santa Cruz for the summer by her mother. In Santa Cruz, Nicole meets her grandmother, Sue (Patricia Richardson), for the first time. At first, Nicole is bitter and angry and doesn’t want a thing to do with Santa Cruz or its culture of surfing. That changes when she learns about her grandfather, Max (Lance Henriksen). Max was a legendary surfer who went to Vietnam and never returned. When Nicole comes across Max’s old map of surfing spots, she and her friend Kayla (Alicia Ziegler) go on a journey that leads to Nicole not only appreciating surfing but also discovering the truth about her grandfather.
Beautiful Wave is pretty predictable and, at first, Nicole is so sullen that she can sometimes be difficult to take even if she does have a good reason for not being in a cheerful mood. I liked the idea of Nicole and Kayla going on a journey together but I didn’t like that they brought two knucklehead surfers with them. What could have been a celebration of sisterhood instead became a film about two women having to deal with two idiots.
Beautiful Wave still won me over, with its gorgeous beach footage and its story of paying respect to the past and discovering your own roots. Even with the two idiot surfers getting in the way, I appreciated the way the film showed the bond between Nicole and Kayla. The ending was heartwarming, even if it did raise more questions than it answered. There are some movies that you have to be in the right mood for and I guess my mood was the right one for Beautiful Wave.
In a base hidden away in the desert, a group of government scientists reanimate the corpse of a recent suicide victim with radiation. They bring Thor (Dan Blom) back to life but it turns out that Thor just wants to kill all of them.
Mind-numbingly dull, MindRipper is the same as a hundred other horror films with the same plot. Lance Henriksen plays the lead scientist and it’s always a pleasure to see him in even the worst movies but Mind Ripper underutilizes him in favor of Giovanni Ribisi, of all people.
Mind Ripper was executive produced by Wes Craven and sold in some markets as Wes Craven Presents Mind Ripper. Wes’s son, Jonathan Craven, did write the script and the movie was originally planned as being the third Hills Have Eyes movie. Wes Craven’s name undoubtedly helped this film get into production but the thing to remember is that Craven may have been the executive producer and his son may have written but Wes Craven did not direct the movie and that makes all the difference. Maybe Wes Craven could have done something with the limp story and the uninteresting characters. My guess is that Wes Craven was smart enough not to even try.
Don’t let this movie rip your mind. It’s not worth it.
I was just a kid, probably too young for the movie. My father rented Aliens from the local Blockbuster. It had been years since the movie had first come out but my father, who went to every Star Trek movie premiere and who still knows the lore of Star Wars better than I do, had never seen it and he was planning on correcting that oversight. My family gathered in the living room. We turned out all the lights. The tape was slipped into the VCR. Play was hit. Our boxy television turned into a movie screen and Aliens began.
And it scared the Hell out of me.
Today, I think people forget just how scary both Alien and Aliens are the first time that you watch them. After the first time, you at least know when the aliens are going to jump out at people and you also know who is going to survive. Today, if I rewatch Aliens, I know not to get to attached to the any of the Colonial Marines. I also know not to trust Carter Burke, even if he is played by Paul Reiser. I watch the movie in anticipation of Bill Paxton’s “Game over, man,” instead of dreading it. When I first watched it, all I knew is that the screen suddenly went dark, the soundtrack was full of screeches and the deaths of the Marines, and that the only thing scarier then being confronted with one alien was being confronted with a hundred of them at once. When I watch today, I know Bishop (Lance Henriksen) is going to prove to be a good android. I didn’t have the assurance when I first watched the movie. For all I knew, he was going to just abandon Ripley (Weave), Newt (Carrie Henn),and Hicks (Michael Biehn) on the planet.
Sigourney Weaver was the heart of that film. She went from being angry and bitter over what happened during then first Alien to still being angry and bitter but willing to risk her life to save Newt. From the start, she alone understood the Xenomorph threat and she was ultimately victorious because she was not only as determined and ruthless as the Queen but she actually had the heart that her opponent lacked. Ripley won because she was actually fighting for something more than just conquest. She was fighting to save Newt from becoming an incubator.
I usually think of Aliens as being the last Ripley film. I don’t acknowledge the third film because I find the idea of killing Newt and Hicks to be a betrayal of what made the first Aliens more than just a scary action movie. The fourth film, I don’t acknowledge because it asks me to believe that Winona Ryder would still be acting like Winona Ryder in the 23rd century. Aliens is a scary movie but it’s also a movie that ends with the promise of hope. After all that she’s been through, Ripley finally has a chance to start again with Newt, Hicks, and Bishop. That hope is something that is too often missing from the follow-ups.
Happy birthday, Sigourney Weaver! I’m going to go watch Aliens.
Though the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences claim that the Oscars honor the best of the year, we all know that there are always worthy films and performances that end up getting overlooked. Sometimes, it’s because the competition too fierce. Sometimes, it’s because the film itself was too controversial. Often, it’s just a case of a film’s quality not being fully recognized until years after its initial released. This series of reviews takes a look at the films and performances that should have been nominated but were, for whatever reason, overlooked. These are the Unnominated.
First released in 1984, TheTerminator was the one of the top box office hits of the year. It’s the film that established James Cameron as a filmmaker. It’s the film that made a bona-fide star out of Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s a film that was imitated a thousand times before it even got its first official sequel. It’s a film that’s still celebrated today. 41 years later, people are still saying, “I’ll be back.” Would Arnold Schwarzenegger ever have become governor of California if he hadn’t first played a killing machine? There’s a reason why his political nickname was the Governator.
And yet, TheTerminator was not nominated for a single Oscar. For all of the explosions and the gunfire and the screaming, it wasn’t even nominated for Best Sound. Some of the special effects may now seem a bit hokey in this age of rampant CGI but it’s still a surprise that TheTerminator was not nominated for Best Visual Effects. The breath-taking action scenes did not result in a nomination for Best Editing. Linda Hamilton was not nominated for her fantastic performance as Sarah Connor, a young woman who finds herself being pursued by a killer cyborg from the future. Arnold Schwarzenegger was not nominated for playing one of the most memorable villains of the past 40 years. Those who claim that Schwarzenegger was just playing himself are being overly glib. Anyone could have said, “I’ll be back.” It took Schwarzenegger’s delivery to make it a great line.
The lack of nominations aren’t really not a surprise, of course. The Academy has only recently started to show an openness to nominating genre films for major awards and, even now, a genre film has to be considered a “cultural event” to even get a nomination. Black Panther, Get Out, and even Mad Max: Fury Road and Dune were all nominated because it was felt that they had transcended their genre origins. TheTerminator is a sci-fi action movie and it’s proud to be a sci-fi action movie. (Terminator 2: Judgment Day, it could be argued, transcended its genre origins but it was released in 1991 and Silence of the Lambs was destined to be the genre nominee that year.) It’s also so relentlessly paced and intelligently written and directed that it’s a film that, even after all these years, it can still leave you breathless. Nominated or not, The Terminator is a film that grabs your attention and holds it for a full 107 minutes. There’s not many films that can make that claim.
TheTerminator is a film that has held up surprisingly well. (It’s certainly held up better than some of its more recent sequels.) The performances of Linda Hamilton, Michael Biehn, and Arnold Schwarzenegger still work. It’s still terrifying to watch as The Terminator relentlessly kills everyone that he comes into contact with. (One thing that always gets me about the Terminator is that, even though he’s huge and superstrong and could probably physically rip anyone he wanted to apart, he still carries and uses a gun. This makes him seem like even more of a bully.) The Terminator is a machine and what makes him especially intimidating is that he doesn’t care if people see him coming or if they witness his crimes. He has one function and that’s all he worries about. When Michael Biehn first shows up, you can’t help but wonder why this guy, with his slight build and his somewhat nervous mannerisms, would be sent to try to stop the Terminator. Of course, by the end of the movie, you understand.
(And what an ending! The sight of those clouds, Linda Hamilton’s delivery of her final line, and the feeling that the future has already been determined, it all definitely makes an impression that has managed to survive every sequel after JudgmentDay. There’s a reason why Skynet — much like “I’ll be back” — has taken on a cultural life of its own.)
There were a lot of very good films that were nominated for Oscars in 1984. The Terminator, much like Once Upon A Time In America, was not one of them but it will still never be forgotten.
In New Orleans, a drug raid gone wrong leads to eleven cops being gunned down and then blown up. The disastrous raid was being filmed for a Cops-like reality show The show’s producer, Bill Knight (Jeffrey Combs) finds himself being pursued through New Orleans by a collection of rogue intelligence agents, cops, and gangsters, all of whom want the tape of the massacre.
It’s a simple direct-to-video premise and the film’s plot hits every chase film cliche, while keeping the action moving at a decent pace. Bill Knight is not supposed to be a typical action hero. He’s just a television producer who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yet Knight proves himself to be as indestructible as any Arnold Schwarzenegger hero. He gets shot, twice. He falls from a great height. He crashes through a window. He repeatedly gets hit over the head. And yet, his injuries never seem to really slow him down or even hurt that much. He does hook up with a nurse (Ashley Laurence) but still, it’s hard to believe anyone could take that much punishment and keep running. Jeffrey Combs, the brilliant star of films like Re-Animator, is miscast as Knight but he’s still always entertaining to watch.
In fact, the cast is the main thing that Felony has going for it. David Prior was able to assemble a true group of B-movie all-stars. Lance Henriksen and David Warner are the evil intelligence agents who are determined to kill Knight. (Warner finally gets to handle a grenade launcher and we’re all the better for it.) Leo Rossi and Charles Napier are the two New Orleans cops who are investigating the drug raid. Joe Don Baker is the rogue intelligence agent who dresses like a cowboy and who is trying to clean up everyone else’s mess. The cast keeps the action moving and there are enough eccentric personalities in this film that it’s always watchable. I think this might be the only film to feature Joe Don Baker and Lance Henriksen performing opposite each other. If nothing else, it deserves to be watched for that!
(The cover for Felony features Lance Henriksen and Leo Rossi but not Jeffrey Combs, even though Combs is the lead in the film and Rossi’s role is actually pretty small. Henriksen also doesn’t have blonde hair in the movie. There are plenty of double crosses in the movie but I can’t think of any that really qualify as the “ultimate double cross.”)
Even with its miscast lead and its cliche-heavy plot, Felony is what direct-to-video action movies should be all about, fact-paced action and a cast unlike any other,
Jill Clayburgh would have been 81 years old today. She was quite an actress, receiving 2 Academy Award nominations during her career for her performances in the films AN UNMARRIED WOMAN (1978) and STARTING OVER (1979). She will always be special to me based on her performance as Jill Ireland in the 1991 Made-for-TV film REASON FOR LIVING: THE JILL IRELAND story. Clayburgh passed away in 2010 after a long struggle with leukemia.
Evil businessman John Pilgrim (Nicholas Pryor) and his assistant Brooke Alistair (Lance Henriksen) want to turn Utah’s Choke Canyon into a dumping ground for toxic waste. The only problem is that Dr. David Lowell (Stephen Collins), a cowboy scientist, has signed a 99-year lease and is using the canyon as a place to conduct experiments that are designed to turn the soundwaves from Halley’s Comet into an alternative energy source. Pilgrim sends pilot Oliver Parkside (Bo Svenson) to get Lowell out of the canyon by any means necessary. However, Pilgrim’s rebellious daughter, Vanessa (Janet Julian), has also gone to the canyon because she finds Dr. Lowell to be intriguing. Lowell’s reaction is to kidnap Vanessa and hold her hostage but, of course, they fall in love while trying to fly a giant ball of toxic waste out of the canyon.
Directed by the legendary stuntman Charles Bail, Choke Canyon is at its best when it focuses on Parkisde using his plane to chase Lowell’s helicopter. Some of the aerial sequences are really exciting, even if they don’t make much sense. (Surely, someone as powerful and rich as John Pilgrim could have afforded to send more than three guys and a cropduster to take care of Lowell.) Stephen Collins, years before his career would collapse after he admitted to inappropriately touching three minor-aged girls, is as personable and bland here as he was in the first Star Trek movie. The idea of a cowboy scientist is interesting but Collins really didn’t have the screen presence to pull it off. It doesn’t help that Collins was having to act opposite a certifiable badass like Bo Svenson. This is one of the rare movies where I wanted the bad guys to win because they were just so much cooler than the hero.
Some of the stunts are impressive, as they should be with Chuck Bail behind the camera. Stephen Collins is boring and Janet Julian feels miscast. (She would give a much better performance as Christopher Walken’s lawyer and girlfriend in King of New York.) I don’t understand how a power source based on Halley’s Comet would work. It might have worked for a few months in 1986 but what are they going to for energy until 2061 rolls around?
There’s a brilliant scene that occurs towards the end of 1983’s The Right Stuff.
It takes place in 1963. The original Mercury astronauts, who have become a symbol of American ingenuity and optimism, are being cheered at a rally in Houston. Vice President Lyndon Johnson (Donald Moffat) stands on a stage and brags about having brought the astronauts to his supporters. One-by-one, the astronauts and their wives wave to the cheering crowd. They’re all there: John Glenn (Ed Harris), Gus Grissom (Fred Ward), Alan Shephard (Scott Glenn), Wally Schirra (Lance Henrisken), Deke Slayton (Scott Paulin), Scott Carpenter (Charles Frank), and the always-smiling Gordon Cooper (Dennis Quaid). The astronauts all look good and they know how to play to the crowd. They were chosen to be and sold as heroes and all of them have delivered.
While the astronauts are celebrated, Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) is at Edwards Air Force Base. Yeager is the pilot who broke the sound barrier and proved that the mythical “demon in the sky,” which was whispered about by pilots as a warning about taking unnecessary risks, was not waiting to destroy every pilot who tried to go too fast or too high. Yeager is considered by many, including Gordon Cooper, to be the best pilot in America. But, because Yeager didn’t have the right image and he had an independent streak, he was not ever considered to become a part of America’s young space program. Yeager, who usually holds his emotions in check, gets in a jet and flies it straight up into the sky, taking the jet to the edge of space. For a few briefs seconds, the blue sky becomes transparent and we can see the stars and the darkness behind the Earth’s atmosphere. At that very moment, Yeager is at the barrier between reality and imagination, the past and the future, the planet and the universe. And watching the film, the viewer is tempted to think that Yeager might actually make it into space finally. It doesn’t happen, of course. Yeager pushes the jet too far. He manages to eject before his plane crashes. He walks away from the cash with the stubborn strut of a western hero. His expression remains stoic but we know he’s proven something to himself. At that moment, the Mercury Astronauts might be the face of America but Yeager is the soul. Both the astronauts and Yeager play an important role in taking America into space. While the astronauts have learned how to take care of each other, even the face of government bureaucracy and a media that, initially, was eager to mock them and the idea of a man ever escaping the Earth’s atmosphere, Chuck Yeager reminds us that America’s greatest strength has always been its independence.
Philip Kaufman’s film about the early days of the space program is full of moments like that. The Right Stuff is a big film. It’s a long film. It’s a chaotic film, one that frequently switches tone from being a modern western to a media satire to reverent recreation of history. Moments of high drama are mixed with often broad humor. Much like Tom Wolfe’s book, on which Kaufman’s film is based, the sprawling story is often critical of the government and the press but it celebrates the people who set speed records and who first went into space. The film opens with Yeager, proving that a man can break the sound barrier. It goes on to the early days of NASA, ending with the final member of the Mercury Seven going into space. In between, the film offers a portrait of America on the verge of the space age. We watch as John Glenn goes from being a clean-cut and eager to please to standing up to both the press and LBJ. Even later, Glenn sees fireflies in space while an aborigines in Australia performs a ceremony for his safety. We watch as Gus Grissom barely survives a serious accident and is only rescued from drowning after this capsule has been secured. The astronauts go from being ridiculed to celebrated and eventually respected, even by Chuck Yeager.
It’s a big film with a huge cast. Along with Sam Shepherd and the actors who play the Mercury Seven, Barbara Hershey, Pamela Reed, Jeff Goldblum, Harry Shearer, Royal Dano, Kim Stanley, Scott Wilson, and William Russ show up in roles both small and large. It can sometimes be a bit of an overwhelming film but it’s one that leaves you feeling proud of the pioneering pilots and the brave astronauts and it leaves you thinking about the wonder of the universe that surrounds our Earth. It’s a strong tribute to the American spirit, the so-called right stuff of the title.
The Right Stuff was nominated for Best Picture but, in the end, it lost to a far more lowkey film, 1983’s Terms of Endearment. Sam Shepard was nominated for Best Supporting Actor but lost to Jack Nicholson. Nicolson played an astronaut.
1978’s Damien: Omen II is a perfectly ludicrous film that mixes soapy melodrama with apocalyptic horror. It’s a fascinating mismash that doesn’t really work and often, the most dramatic scenes are also the ones most likely to draw a chuckle from the viewer. That said, there are a few good moments.
For instance, I’ve always liked this scene where young Damien (Jonathan Scott-Taylor) shows up one of his teachers. It’s a good thing that Lance Henriksen stepped in when he did!
The great character actor Lance Henriksen is 84 years old today!
Ever since he made his film debut in 1970, the legendary Henriksen has played a collection of villains, bikers, police officers, soldiers, and even the occasional android. One of his earliest appearance was in 1975’s Dog Day Afternoon. His role is small but he definitely makes an impression. His faux friendly suggestions that Sal point his gun upwards is the line that sets off the film’s haunting ending. For viewers today, of course, we know that Sal and Sonny are screwed as soon as Lance Henriksen shows up outside of the bank.
In today’s scene that I love, Lance Henriksen does what only a great character actor can do. In less than a minute, he created a truly unforgettable character.
Through the Shattered Lens 