Tag Archives: Lara Parker

Late Night Retro Television Review: Highway to Heaven 4.6 “Playing for Keeps”

Posted on 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 Thursdays, I will be reviewing Highway to Heaven, which aired on NBC from 1984 to 1989.  The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi and several other services!

This week, Highway to Heaven makes a mockery of legitimate theater.

Episode 4.6 “Playing for Keeps”

(Dir by Michael Landon, originally aired on November 4th, 1987)

Jonathan and Mark are directing a play!

The play stars movie star Rhett Clark (Eric Douglas, the least talented son of Kirk Douglas).  Rhett plays a young man who is struggling to come to terms with the impending death of his father.  In the play, Rhett’s father is played by his actual father, Jackie Clark (Donald O’Connor), a old-time comedian who can’t get work anymore.

It’s not an easy rehearsal process.  Rhett resents his father.  Jackie wants to tell jokes.  He wants to put on  a dress and a wig because, according to him, all of his fans will want to see him play “Aunt Jackie.”  Rhett explains that the play is not a comedy.  There’s no room for Aunt Jackie.  Really, explaining all of that should have been Jonathan’s job.  He’s the director!

The problem with this episode is that we’re supposed to be angry at Rhett for not supporting his father’s attempts to turn the play into a vaudeville comedy but actually, Jackie’s a jerk.  Rhett’s a jerk too but he’s a jerk who understands that, when you’re doing a dramatic play, the actor playing a dying man can’t suddenly get out of his hospital bed, duck into a closet, and then come out as Aunt Jackie.  An actor ad-libbing dialogue and then turning the play into a comedy because he’s petulant and insecure is not the type of behavior that would be tolerated in all-volunteer community theater, much less on a professional stage.  The fact that Jackie is getting paid to appear in the show makes his unprofessional conduct all the more annoying.

This episode puts on the blame on Rhett.  We’re meant to see Rhett as the ungrateful son who refuses to see things from his father’s point of view.  Because Rhett is being played by Eric Douglas, an actor who did not exactly have the most likable screen presence, it’s easy to blame him.  I mean, everyone loves Donald O’Connor,  But honestly, Jackie is the jerk here.

How big of a jerk is Jackie?  On opening night, he gets mad at his son and does his Aunt Jackie schtick.  Somehow, this leads to Rhett and Jackie reconciling and hugging it out while the audience applauds.  Honestly, though, it should have led to Jackie being fired.  If you’re not going to be professional, you have to go.  This episode would have been far more touching if Jackie had been willing to put his ego aside and actually allow his son to have the spotlight for once.

This episode will definitely not be remembered as one of my favorites of the series.  In the past, I’ve defended this show’s tendency to go for sentimentality over realism but this episode just pushed things a little too far.

Film Review: Save The Tiger (dir by John G. Avildsen)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

1973’s Save The Tiger tells the story of Harry Stoner (Jack Lemmon).

When Harry was a young man, he loved baseball and he felt like he could conquer the world.  He saw combat in World War II and spent the final part of the war on the Island of Capri, recuperating after being wounded in battle.  Harry went on to partner up with Phil Greene (Jack Gilford) and they started a clothing company in Los Angeles, Capri Casuals.

Now, Harry is a middle-aged man who is still haunted by nightmares about the war.  He’s married.  He has a daughter attending school in Switzerland.  He’s respected in the industry.  He lives in a nice house in Beverly Hills.  And he’s totally miserable.  He wakes up every day and wonders what is happening to the country.  He talks about witnessing a wild pitch at a baseball game, missing the days when something like that could seem like the most important thing in his life.  He spends all of his time at work, cheating to balance the books and keeping clients happy by setting them up with a sophisticated prostitute named Margo (played, with a weary cynicism, by Lara Parker).

Save The Tiger covers just a few days in the life of Harry Stoner, as he searches for some sort of meaning in his life.  He gives a ride to a free-spirited hippie (Laurie Heineman) who offers to have sex with him.  (Harry replies that he’s late for work.)  He accepts an award at an industry dinner and, as he tries to give his acceptance speech, he is haunted by the sight of dead soldiers sitting in the audience.  With Phil, he debates whether or not to balance the books by setting fire to one of their warehouses in order to collect the insurance.  Harry sees a poster imploring him to “Save the Tigers.”  Who can save Harry as he finds himself increasingly overwhelmed by the realities of his life?

As I watched Save the Tiger, I found myself thinking about two other films of the era that featured a middle-aged man dealing with a midlife crisis while searching for meaning in the counterculture.  In Petulia and Breezy, George C. Scott and William Holden each found meaning in a relationship with a younger woman.  And while Petulia and Breezy are both good films, Save The Tiger is far more realistic in its portrayal of Harry’s ennui.  There is no easy solution for Harry.  Even if he accepted the hippie’s offer to “ball” or if he acted on the obvious attraction between himself and Margo, one gets the feeling that Harry would still feel lost.  Harry’s problem isn’t that he’s merely bored with his life.  Harry’s problem is that he yearns for a past that can never be recaptured and which may only exist in his imagination.  If George C. Scott and William Holden were two actors who excelled at playing characters who refused to yield to the world’s demands, Jack Lemmon was an actor who played characters who often seemed to be desperate in their search for happiness.  Save The Tiger features Lemmon at his most desperate, playing a character who has yielded so often and compromised so much that he now has nowhere left to go.

It’s not exactly a cheerful film but it is one that sticks with you.  Jack Lemmon won his second Oscar for his performance as Harry and he certainly deserved it.  Lemmon does a wonderful job generating some sympathy for a character who is not always particularly likable.  Many of Harry’s problems are due to his own bad decisions.  No one forced him to use “ballet with the books” to keep his business open and no one is forcing him to hire arsonist Charlie Robbins (Thayer David, giving a performance that is both witty and sinister at the same time) to burn down not only his warehouse but also an adjoining business that belongs to an acquaintance.  Harry could admit the truth and shut down his business but then how would he afford the home in Beverly Hills and all the other symbols of his success?  Harry yearns for a time when he was young and his decisions didn’t have consequences but that time has passed.

This isn’t exactly the type of film that many would expect from the director of Rocky but director John G. Avildsen does a good job of putting the viewer into Harry’s seedy world.  I especially liked Avilden’s handling of the scene where Harry hallucinates a platoon of wounded soldiers listening to his awards speech.  Instead of lingering on the soldiers, Avildsen instead uses a series of a quick cuts that initially leave the audience as confused as Harry as to what Harry is seeing.  Both Rocky and Save The Tiger are about a man who refuses to give up.  The difference is that perhaps Harry Stoner should.

“You can’t play with us, mister!” a kid yells at Harry when he attempts to recreate the wild pitch that so impressed him as a youth.  In the end, Harry is a man trapped by his memories of the past and his dissatisfaction with the present.  He’s made his decisions and he’ll have to live with the consequences but one is left with the knowledge that, no matter what happens, Harry will be never find the happiness or the satisfaction that he desires.  The tigers can be saved but Harry might be a lost cause.

Retro Television Review: The Chadwick Family (dir by David Lowell Rich)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay.  Today’s film is 1974’s The Chadwick Family!  It  can be viewed on YouTube.

Who are the Chadwicks?

They’re a family living in San Francisco.  They claim to be an average middle class family but, as has apparently been typical of television since its very first broadcast day, they live in a way that can only be explained by having a good deal of wealth.

Consider this: Patriarch Ned Chadwick (Fred MacMurray) is a prominent newspaper columnist who writes so well that a mere column from him can settle a potential labor strike.  A national magazine has noticed the power of Ned’s words and they’ve offered him a job.  They want to turn him into a national figure.  The only catch is that he and his wife (Kathleen Maguire) would have to leave their beloved San Francisco and move to Chicago.  There’s no ocean in Chicago, as Ned puts it.  Sure, it would mean more money but who needs money when you’re a fabulously wealthy couple pretending to be middle class?

Moving would also mean leaving behind their children, all of whom have dramas of their own to deal with.  Tim (Stephen Nathan) is a college student, struggling to make the grade.  Lisa (Jane Actman) is engaged to Lee (Frank Michael Liu) and, for some reason, decides that it would be a good idea to tell her future mother-in-law that her desire for a long engagement is “bad chop suey.”  (Lee’s family is Chinese.)  Eileen (Lara Parker) is pregnant and her husband worries this will sabotage their support for “zero population growth.”  And Joan (Darleen Carr) is having to deal with the fact that her charismatic and fun-loving husband, Duffy (a young Barry Bostwick), is seriously ill and might even die before he can finish teaching Ned how to play the bagpipes.  Like all middle class people, Duffy owns his own airplane.

This is one of those movies that was obviously meant to serve as a pilot for a weekly television series and it’s easy to imagine Ned handing out wisdom to his kids on a weekly basis as they tried to navigate their way through the 70s.  Fred MacMurray gives off a nice grandfatherly vibe as Ned, so much so that it’s hard to believe that he’s the same actor who brought to life memorable heels in Double Indemnity, The Caine Mutiny, and The Apartment.  Unfortunately, the rest of the cast is not as memorable as MacMurray, largely because their roles are underwritten and their characters never feel like more than caricatures.  Barry Bostwick acts up a storm as Duffy but the fact that he’s listed as being a “special guest star” in the opening credits pretty much gives away his fate from the start.  As for Lisa, I usually like any character who shares my name but how much sympathy can you have for someone dumb enough to use a phrase like “bad chop suey” while speaking to her Chinese future in-laws.  Indeed, it was kind of weird how everyone in the family seemed to be totally comfortable with making jokes about Lee being Chinese and speaking with an accent.  One has to wonder how Lee felt about that.

Anyway, as far as I know, The Chadwick Family has no further adventures but their sole outing will live forever thanks to YouTube.

Film Review: Hi, Mom! (dir by Brian De Palma)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Released in 1970, Hi, Mom!, tells the story of Jon Rubin (played by a 26 year-old Robert De Niro).  The somewhat spacey and kind of creepy Jon has just returned to New York City from Vietnam.  After moving into a run-down apartment building and meeting the building’s superintendent (Charles Durning), Jon is hired to direct a pornographic film by producer Joe Banner (Allen Garfield).  Jon’s idea to simply point his camera at his building and to film his neighbors as they go about their day.  As quickly becomes apparent, Jon is mostly just looking for an excuse to watch and film Judy Bishop (Jennifer Salt).

Also living in the building is Gerrit Wood (Gerrit Graham), who is first seen triumphantly putting posters of Che Guevara and Malcolm X up in his apartment.  Gerrit is a freshly-minted political radical and the leader of a group of performance artists who put on a show called Be Black, Baby, in which the white audience members are forced to wear blackface and are then chased, attacked, and assaulted by black actors wearing whiteface.  (Gerrit himself is white.)  Jon is hired to play the police officer who beats and arrests the members of the audience at the end of the performance.  Of course, eventually, the real police show up….

An attempt at an episodic counter-culture comedy, Hi, Mom is definitely a product of the time in which it was made, both in its style and its thematic content.  Today, it’s best-known for being one of Brian De Palma’s early independent films and for featuring Robert De Niro in one of his first starring roles.  De Palma and De Niro aren’t exactly the first names that come to mind when one thinks about comedy and Hi, Mom shows that there’s a good reason for that.  As both a screenwriter who felt he had something important to say and a young director who was obviously eager to show off everything that he could do with a camera, Brian De Palma simply cannot get out of his own way.  Scenes are needlessly sped up.  Scenes are pointlessly slowed down.  The musical cues are obvious.  The dialogue is often so broad that it comes across as being cartoonish.  One gets the feeling that De Palma didn’t trust the audience to get the jokes so he went overboard to make sure everyone knew when to react.  All of the pointless camera trickery serves the same purpose that a laugh track would on an old sitcom.  Interestingly enough, the only sequence that really works as satire is the Be Black, Baby sequence and that’s because De Palma directs it in a semi-documentary fashion.  De Palma gets out of his own way and allow the sequence to develop a natural rhythm.  (Of course, seen today, the scene will bring to mind the upper class white liberals who pay money to have an activist lecture them about their privilege while having their friends over for dinner.)

As for Robert De Niro, he gives a typically nervy performance, one that feels like a dry run for his later work in Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and King of Comedy.  Despite the reputation of those films, there are some genuinely funny moments to be found in all of them.  Most of them, like the classic Taxi Driver conversation between De Niro’s Travis and Peter Boyle’s Wizard, are funny because of how people react to De Niro’s obviously unhinged characters.  Both Taxi Driver and King of Comedy got mileage out of having normal people try to deal with De Niro’s unstable characters.  In Hi, Mom, everyone is equally wacky and, as such, De Niro doesn’t really have anyone to play off.  No one is really reacting to anything, De Niro-included.  (There is some spark to his scenes with Charles Durning and Allen Garfield but even those scenes seem to drag on forever.)

On the plus side, Hi, Mom! is was shot on the actual streets of New York City, guerilla-style.  (A “Re-Elect Mayor Lindsay” sign in the background confirms that the film was made on location in 1969.)  When De Palma isn’t getting in his own way with all of his fancy camera tricks, he manages to capture so memorably bleak images of New York City.  Hi, Mom! presents New York as being a dirty, crime-ridden, and menacing city but it also captures the odd grandeur of urban decay.  At its best, Hi, Mom! captures the love/hate relationship that many seem to have New York City.  The city feels both alive and dangerous at the same time.  Hi, Mom! is too uneven to work as a sustained satire but, as a documentary about New York at the end of the turbulent 60s, it’s worth watching.

I should mention that this was not the first time that De Palma and De Niro teamed up.  Indeed, De Niro was De Palma’s muse even before he met Martin Scorsese.  Hi, Mom! was a loose sequel to an earlier De Palma/De Niro film called Greetings.  (Like many of De Palma’s future films, both Greetings and Hi, Mom! were originally rated X but later re-rated R.)  De Palma and De Niro, of course, would both go onto have long Hollywood careers.  (They would later reunite for The Untouchables, a big-budget spectacle of a film that’s about as far from the grungy Hi, Mom! as one can get.)  De Palma’s career has had its ups and downs but, as of late, many of his films have been positively reevaluated.  As for De Niro, he can finally kind of play comedy.  That said, I’d rather watch Hi, Mom than Dirty Grandpa.

Horror Film Review: Night of Dark Shadows (dir by Dan Curtis)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Since I just reviewed House of Dark Shadows, it only makes sense to now take a look at 1971’s Night of Dark Shadows today!

While Night of Dark Shadows is not a direct sequel to the first film, it is still definitely a part of the same cinematic universe.  There may not be any vampires in this film but it does take place in the same house and it features two members of the family that was decimated over the course of the previous film.  At one point, it’s mentioned that Joan Bennett’s character from House of Dark Shadows died after the first film but no one goes into any details.  I guess a vampire in the family is something that’s simply not discussed amongst polite company.

Night of Dark Shadows deals with Quentin (David Selby) and Tracy Collins (Kate Jackson).  Quentin is an artist who confesses that he wasn’t particularly nice before he married Tracy.  When they move into the Collins mansion, they bring two friends with them, Alex (John Karlen) and Claire (Nancy Barrett.)  Interestingly enough, Karlen and Barrett both played different characters in House of Dark Shadows.  Grayson Hall, who played Dr. Hoffman in House of Dark Shadows, also returns for Night of Dark Shadows.  This time Hall is playing Carlotta Drake, the creepy housekeeper.  (Needless to say, all mansions comes with a creepy housekeeper.)

Soon after everyone moves in, Quentin starts acting strangely.  He becomes obsessed with the painting of a beautiful woman who was named Angelique (Lara Parker) and with the story that Angelique was hanged when it was discovered that she was having an affair with Quentin’s ancestor, Charles.  (For his part, Charles was apparently walled up in the mansion.  That sounds a bit extreme to me but I guess that’s the way they did things in the 19th century.)  Quentin starts to have visions and nightmares involving his ancestor who, it turns out, looked exactly like him!  Meanwhile, Carlotta and the groundskeeper, Gerard (Jim Storm), seem to be determined to make sure that Tracy doesn’t feel welcome in her new home.  It’s almost as if they’re trying to drive everyone but Quentin away from the house.

Night of Dark Shadows is a much more polished film than House of Dark Shadows but it also unfolds at a far more leisurely pace.  It lacks the relentless energy that distinguished House of Dark Shadows.  This wouldn’t be as much of a problem if the plot itself wasn’t so totally predictable.  From the minute that Quentin first sees that portrait of Angelique, you know that he’s going to get possessed and start acting strangely.  There are a few atmospheric scenes but, for the most part, the film just doesn’t grab the viewer’s attention the way that House of Dark Shadows did.

On the plus side, David Selby is properly intense and brooding in the dual roles of Quentin and Charles Collins while Lara Parker does an equally good job as the wonderfully evil Angelique.  Grayson Hall, who tended to go overboard in House of Dark Shadows, gives a much better and far more menacing performance here.  Night of Dark Shadows isn’t a bad film.  It’s just not a particularly memorable one.

Horror On TV: Kolchak The Night Stalker 1.14 “The Trevi Collection” (dir by Don Weis)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Tonight on Kolchak….

After witnessing the murder of an informant, Kolchak finds himself being targeted by the mob!

Of course, after some of what Kolchak has been through, a simple Earth-bound threat like the Mafia would be a nice change of pace.  However, Kolchak soon discovers that he’s also got a witch after him!  With the help of a model (Lara Parker), Kolchak sets out uncover the witch at the heat of Chicago’s fashion industry!

This episode originally aired on January 24th, 1975.

Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DM01oObdUg

A Movie A Day #144: The Incredible Hulk (1977, directed by Kenneth Johnson)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

It may seem hard to believe now but there was a time when comic book adaptations were considered to be a risky bet at best.  In 1977, Marvel Comics sold the television rights for four of their characters to Universal Productions. This led to three unsuccessful pilots (one for Dr. Strange and two for Captain America), a Spider-Man series that lasted for two seasons, and The Incredible Hulk.  As opposed to the other Marvel adaptations, The Incredible Hulk series was popular with fans and (some) critics and ultimately lasted for four seasons.

It all started with a 90 minute pilot that aired in 1977.  Haunted by the car accident that caused the death of his wife and his inability to rescue her, Dr. David Banner (Bill Bixby) is researching why, in times of extreme stress, ordinary people can suddenly experience moments of super human strength.  What he theorizes is that it is a combination of body chemistry and gamma radiation caused by sun spots.  Eager to test his theory, David straps himself into a chair and zaps himself with gamma radiation.  At first, it seems as if nothing has changed.  But when David’s driving home, he gets a flat tire.  When he struggles to change the tire, in the middle of a hurricane nonetheless, David gets mad.  Suddenly, his eyes turn green and soon so does the rest of him as David Banner is transformed into the Incredible Hulk (Lou Ferrigno, except for one shot where the Hulk is played by Richard Kiel).  The Hulk runs through the woods, accidentally scaring a girl and getting shot by a hunter.  When the Hulk falls asleep, he transforms back into David, who has no memories of what he did while he was the Hulk.  While David and his colleague, Elaina Marks (Susan Sullivan), investigate what happened to him, tabloid reporter Jack McGee (Jack Colvin) tries to uncover the results of David and Elaina’s research.

Other than introducing the Hulk and giving Banner a backstory, the pilot didn’t have much in common with the series that followed.  Along with being a comic book adaptation, the series was also a remake of The Fugitive.  With everyone convinced that the Hulk had murdered both him and Elaina, David was always on the run and trying to find a way to cure his condition.  Every episode would begin with David working a new odd job and getting involved in a new situation and almost every episode ended with David hitchhiking while the show’s famous piano theme played over the final credits.  Because David was always either getting beaten up or tangled in barbed wire, the Hulk would show up twice an episode.  David Banner just couldn’t catch a break.

The pilot seems to take forever to get going, devoting a lot of time to David and Elaina doing research.  In those days before the success of The Dark Knight and the MCU legitimized comic books as a cultural force, The Incredible Hulk was determined to show that it was not just a show for kids.  Today, the pilot is too slow-paced and self-consciously serious but still contains the elements that made the show itself became a success.  Bill Bixby takes his role seriously and Lou Ferrigno is the perfect choice for the Hulk.  Decades after they first aired, the Hulk-transformation scenes are still undeniably cool.  It was also during the pilot that Dr. Banner uttered those famous and oft-parodied words: “Mr. McGee, don’t make me angry.  You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.”

As of this week, reruns of The Incredible Hulk are now being shown, daily, on both H&I and the El Rey network.  I will be watching.

Film Review: Race With The Devil (1975, directed by Jack Starrett)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

220px-RaceWithTheDevilWarren Oates and Peter Fonda versus …. SATAN!

Roger (Peter Fonda) and Frank (Warren Oates) are lifelong friends and business partners who, along with their wives Kelly (Lara Parker) and Alice (Loretts Swit), are planning on taking the “best damn vacation we ever had.”  Traveling to Colorado in Frank’s RV, they decide to camp for a night next to a river.  Not only do Frank and Roger witness what appears to be a human sacrifice but they also have to run for their lives when they are spotted.  The local sheriff (R.G. Armstrong) tells them that they probably just saw a bunch of hippies killing an animal but Peter Fonda knows hippies and those were not hippies.  Taking some blood-stained dirt so it can be analyzed by the authorities, Roger and Frank try to drive on but find themselves being pursued by Satanists.

A relentless and entertaining B-movie, Race With The Devil is a hybrid of Rosemary’s Baby, Smokey and the Bandit, and Easy Rider, with some Parallax View-style paranoia mixed in as well.  Eventually, it seems as if everyone in rural Texas — from the sheriff to the gas station attendant to the residents of an RV park where our heroes try to spend the night — is a Satanist.  (Even a wrecked school bus turns out to just be an excuse to get the RV to slow down so the Satanic rednecks can attack, leading to Warren Oates’s classic line, “I don’t believe in a school bus on Sunday.”)

A big part of the fun of Race With The Devil is getting to watch Peter Fonda and Warren Oates acting opposite each other.  (A lot of drive-in patrons probably left Race With The Devil with a crush on the lovely Lara Parker as well.)  Friends both on and off-screen (Oates previously co-starred in Fonda’s directorial debut, The Hired Hand), Fonda and Oates are a lot of fun to watch playing off of each other in Race With The Devil, with Warren Oates’s natural intensity providing a good contrast to Fonda’s laid back style.

It may not rank up there with the movies that he appeared in for Sam Peckinpah and Monte Hellman but Race With The Devil is still one of Warren Oates’s most entertaining films.

race-with-the-devil-1

10 (Plus) Of My Favorite DVD Commentary Tracks

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

It seems like I’m always taking a chance when I listen to a DVD commentary track.  Occasionally, a commentary track will make a bad film good and a good film even better.  Far too often, however, listening to a bad or boring commentary track will so totally ruin the experience of watching one of my favorite movies that I’ll never be able to enjoy that movie in the same way again.  I’ve learned to almost always involve any commentary track that involves anyone credited as being an “executive producer.”  They always want to tell you every single detail of what they had to do to raise the money to make the film.  Seriously, executive producers suck. 

However, there are more than a few commentary tracks that I could listen to over and over again.  Listed below are a few of them.

10) Last House On The Left (The Original) — Apparently, there’s a DVD of this film that features a commentary track in which stars David Hess and Fred Lincoln nearly come to blows while debating whether or not this movie should have been made.  The DVD I own doesn’t feature that commentary but it does feature a track featuring writer/director Wes Craven and producer Sean S. Cunningham.  The thing that I love about their commentary is that they both just come across as such nice, kinda nerdy guys.  You look at the disturbing images onscreen and then you hear Cunningham saying, “We shot this scene in my mom’s backyard.  There’s her swimming pool…”  Both Craven and Cunningham are remarkably honest about the film’s shortcomings (at one point, Craven listens to some of his more awkward dialogue and then says, “Apparently, I was obsessed with breasts…”) while, at the same time, putting the film’s controversy into the proper historical context.

9) Burnt Offerings — When Burnt Offerings, which is an occasionally interesting haunted house movie from 1976, was released on DVD, it came with a commentary track featuring director Dan Curtis, star Karen Black, and the guy who wrote the movie.  This commentary track holds a strange fascination for me because it, literally, is so mind-numbingly bad that I’m not convinced that it wasn’t meant to be some sort of parody of a bad commentary track.   It’s the commentary track equivalent of a car crash.  Curtis dominates the track which is a problem because he comes across like the type of grouchy old man that Ed Asner voiced in Up before his house floated away.  The screenwriter, whose name I cannot bring myself to look up, bravely insists that there’s a lot of nuance to his painfully simple-minded script.  Karen Black, meanwhile, tries to keep things positive.  The high point of the commentary comes when Black points out that one actor playing a menacing chauffeur is giving a good performance (which he is, the performance is the best part of the movie).  She asks who the actor is.  Curtis snaps back that he doesn’t know and then gets testy when Black continues to praise the performance.  Finally, Curtis snaps that the actor’s just some guy they found at an audition.  Actually, the actor is a veteran character actor named Anthony James who has accumulated nearly 100 credits and had a prominent supporting role in two best picture winners (In the Heat of the Night and Unforgiven).

8 ) Cannibal Ferox — This is a good example of a really unwatchable movie that’s made watchable by an entertaining commentary track.  The track is actually made up of two different tracks, one with co-star Giovanni Lombardo Radice and one with director Umberto Lenzi.  Lenzi loves the film and, speaking in broken English, happily defends every frame of it and goes so far as to compare the movie to a John Ford western.  The wonderfully erudite Radice, on the other hand, hates the movie and spends his entire track alternatively apologizing for the movie and wondering why anyone would possibly want to watch it.  My favorite moment comes when Radice, watching the characters onscreen move closer and closer to their bloody doom, says, “They’re all quite stupid, aren’t they?”

7) Race With The Devil — Race with the Devil is an obscure but enjoyable drive-in movie from the 70s.  The DVD commentary is provided by costar Lara Parker who, along with providing a lot of behind-the-scenes information, also gets memorably catty when talking about some of her costars.  And, let’s be honest, that’s what most of us want to hear during a DVD commentary.

6) Anything featuring Tim Lucas — Tim Lucas is the world’s foremost authority on one of the greatest directors ever, Mario Bava.  Anchor Bay wisely recruited Lucas to provide commentary for all the Bava films they’ve released on DVD and, even when it comes to some of Bava’s lesser films, Lucas is always informative and insightful.  Perhaps even more importantly, Lucas obviously enjoys watching these movies as much as the rest of us.  Treat yourself and order the Mario Bava Collection Volume 1 and Volume 2.

5) Tropic Thunder — The commentary track here is provided by the film’s co-stars, Jack Black, Ben Stiller, and Robert Downey, Jr.  What makes it great is that Downey provides his commentary in character as Sgt. Osiris and spends almost the entire track beating up on Jack Black.  This is a rare case of a great movie that has an even greater commentary track.

4) Strange Behavior — This wonderfully offbeat slasher film from 1981 is one of the best movies that nobody seems to have heard of.  For that reason alone, you need to get the DVD and watch it.  Now.  As an added bonus, the DVD comes with a lively commentary track featuring co-stars Dan Shor and Dey Young and the film’s screenwriter, Bill Condon (who is now the director that Rob Marshall wishes he could be).  Along with providing a lot of fascinating behind-the-scenes trivia, the three of them also discuss how Young ended up getting seduced by the film’s star (Michael Murphy, who was several decades older), how shocked Condon was that nobody on the set seemed to realize that he’s gay, and why American actors have so much trouble speaking in any accent other than their own.  Most memorable is Young remembering the experience of sitting in a theater, seeing herself getting beaten up onscreen, and then listening as the people sitting around her cheered.

3) Imaginationland — As anyone who has ever listened to their South Park commentaries knows, Matt Stone and Trey Parker usually only offer up about five minutes of commentary per episode before falling silent.  Fortunately, those five minutes are usually hilarious and insightful.  Not only are Parker and Stone remarkably candid when talking about the strengths and weaknesses of their work but they also obviously enjoy hanging out with each other.  With the DVD release of South Park’s Imaginationland trilogy, Matt and Trey attempted to record a “full” 90-minute commentary track.  For the record, they manage to talk for 60 minutes before losing interest and ending the commentary.  However, that track is the funniest, most insightful 60 minutes that one could hope for.

2) Donnie Darko — The original DVD release of Donnie Darko came with 2 wonderful commentary tracks.  The first one features Richard Kelley and Jack Gyllenhaal, talking about the very metaphysical issues that the film addresses.  Having listened to the track, I’m still convinced that Kelley pretty much just made up the film as he went along but its still fascinating to the hear everything that was going on his mind while he was making the film.  However, as good as that first track is, I absolutely love and adore the second one because it features literally the entire cast of the movie.  Seriously, everyone from Drew Barrymore to Jena Malone to Holmes Osborne to the guy who played Frank the Bunny is featured on this track.  They watch the film, everyone comments on random things, and it’s difficult to keep track of who is saying what.  And that’s part of the fun.  It’s like watching the film at a party full of people who are a lot more interesting, funny, and likable than your own actual friends.

1) The Beyond — This movie, one of the greatest ever made, had one of the best casts in the history of Italian horror and the commentary here features two key members of that cast — Catriona MacColl and the late (and wonderful) David Warbeck.  The commentary, which I believe was actually recorded for a laserdisc edition of the film (though, to be honest, I’ve never actually seen a “laserdisc” and I have my doubts as to whether or not they actually ever existed), was recorded in 1997, shortly after the death of director Lucio Fulci and at a time when Warbeck himself was dying from cancer.  (Warbeck would pass away two weeks after recording this commentary).  This makes this commentary especially poignant.  Warbeck was, in many ways, the human face of Italian exploitation, a talented actor who probably deserved to be a bigger star but who was never ashamed of the films he ended up making.  This commentary — in which MacColl and Warbeck quite cheerfully recall discuss making this underrated movie — is as much a tribute to Warbeck as it is to Fulci.  Highpoint: MacColl pointing out all the scenes in which Warbeck nearly made her break out laughing.  My personal favorite is the scene (which made it into the final film) where Warbeck attempts to load a gun by shoving bullets down the barrel.  The wonderful thing about this track is that Warbeck and MacColl enjoy watching it too.