“No!” James Earl Jones says towards the end of 1989’s The Best of the Best, his already deep voice made even more imposing by the use of slow motion.
“No, Tommy, no!” Eric Roberts joins in as he watches martial artist Tommy Lee (Phillip Rhee) internally struggle with whether or not to strike a blow that will definitely kill his opponent and, if James Earl Jones is all gravitas and stern wisdom, Eric Roberts is all emotion and desperation.
The Best of the Best is a bit of an oddity, in that the script features just about every martial arts tournament cliche imaginable (right down to the other “bad” team having a history of killing people in the ring) but those cliches are all acted out by a surprisingly distinguished cast. I counted four Oscar nominees (and one winner) in the cast. James Earl Jones (nominated for The Great White Hope) plays Coach Couzo, who gets a team of Americans prepared to fight in an international tournament. Sally Kirkland (nominated for Anna) plays their trainer, who worries not just about the team’s physical health but also their mental burdens. Eric Roberts (nominated for Runaway Train) is Alex Grady, the former martial arts champion-turned-auto worker who makes the team despite having a bad shoulder. Louise Fletcher (who won for One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest) plays Alex’s mother, who looks after his son while Alex is off getting ready to face the Korean team. And then there’s Chris Penn (who seems like, if not for his early death, he would have eventually been nominated for something) as the arrogant Travis, a cowboy who can throw a punch.
(The American team is filled out by John Dye as Virgil, an intellectual Buddhist, David Agresta as Sonny “I’m Italian” Grasso, and Phillip Rhee, who not only plays Tommy but also wrote the film’s script.)
Roberts gets top-billing in this and he does get a lot of important moments, including a scene where he breaks the Coach’s rules so that he can visit his son in the hospital. That said, the story centers around Phillip Rhee’s Tommy. Tommy’s older brother was killed in the ring by the one-eyed Dae Han Park (Simon Rhee) and — wow, what a coincidence! — that just happens to be who Tommy needs to beat for the Americans to win the big tournament. Both of the Rhee brothers actually are martial artists and they are very convincing in the fight scenes, which is good because neither Phillip nor Simon Rhee were particularly strong actors. Eric Roberts is not a particularly convincing martial artist but it doesn’t matter because he acts the Heck out of every scene in which he appears. What happens when you bring method intensity to the type of martial arts film that Jean-Claude Van Damme would later make his specialty? You get scenes of a heavily-bruised Eric Roberts crying but, because Roberts is a good actor, the tears feel earned. Still, whenever I saw Alex’s eyes starting to glisten, I imagined James Earl Jones saying, “Noooooooo!” How can you win the world’s greatest tournament when you’re constantly on the verge of tears? Well, maybe you don’t need to win. Maybe you just need to show that you have more honor than anyone else there.
Best of the Best is a classic of its kind. There’s nothing surprising about it but it’s entertaining in its own dumb way and, in the end, it reminds us that America doesn’t need medals to be the best. It just needs Eric Roberts.
Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:
Richie (Roger Wilson) is an Arizona farm boy who can play the guitar like a riot and who, after he joins a band called Magic, discovers that success is a hideous bitch goddess.
Thunder Alley was a Cannon production and it features all of the usual rock movie clichés. Though Richie is reluctant to join Magic and leave his family behind, he soon emerges as the most talented member of the band and he starts to overshadow the arrogant lead singer, Skip (Leif Garrett). Donnie (Scott McGinnis), who is Richie’s best friend in the band, gets hooked on cocaine while Richie struggles to resist groupie temptation and remain loyal to his sweet girlfriend, Beth (Jill Schoelen). The band depends on their road manager, Weasel (Clancy Bown), to get them on stage in time and to protect them from dishonest club owners.
As predictable as it may be, Thunder Alley is one of the better films to be distributed by Cannon Films in the 80s, which is saying something when you consider that Thunder Alley doesn’t feature Michael Dudikoff, Chuck Norris, or Charles Bronson. The thing that sets Thunder Alley apart from so many other similar films is that, when you actually see Magic perform and hear their music, you actually believe that the band could be a success. This isn’t one of those films where everyone is feigning enthusiasm for a band that sounds terrible. Instead, Magic actually sounds like a band that could have gone all the way in 1985. The scenes of them going from one cheap motel to another while coming together as a band feel as authentic and real as the scenes of Skip angrily realizing that Richie has replaced him as the face of Magic.
Though he was probably cast because he was one of the stars of Porky’s, Roger Wilson was also an actual musician and he’s credible whenever he’s performing on stage. The same can be said of former teen pop idol Leif Garrett, who plays an actual rock and roller in Thunder Alley and who is surprisingly convincing in the role. Sporting an impressive beard, Clancy Brown is the ideal road manager while Jill Schoelen brings a lot of life to her small role as Richie’s loyal girlfriend.
For a film that is all about sex, drugs, and rock and roll, Thunder Alley has an innocent side. Even after he becomes a star and he’s got groupies going crazy every time he steps up to a microphone, Richie’s main concern is making sure that he gets home in time to help his father with the harvest. Thunder Alley not only asks how far you would go to be a star but also suggests that there’s nothing wrong with choosing, instead, to be a loyal boyfriend or a good son. Thunder Alley brings it own earnest approach to all of the usual rock and roll clichés and suggests that, with the right combination of talent and hard work, you can have it all, the farm and the stage.
Of course, it helps if you’ve got Clancy Brown looking out for you.
So, imagine that you’ve got a huge film franchise that was built around one iconic character. And guess what? In the previous installment of your huge film franchise, that iconic character was killed so graphically that there’s no possible way that he could just pop up and go, “It was just a flesh wound.” What do you do?
This is the problem that was facing Paramount Pictures when it came to making a fifth Friday the 13th film. The previous installment made a lot of money but it also ended with Jason pretty decisively dead. Paramount’s solution? Friday the 13th without Jason. Released (much like me) in 1985 and directed by Danny Steinmann, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning remains a controversial film among fans of the franchise. A lot of people claim that it’s the worst installment. Myself, I consider it to be one of the best.
Friday the 13th: A New Beginning opens (like many great B-movies) with a cemetery in the rain. Wearing a yellow raincoat, Tommy Jarvis (played in a cameo by Corey Feldman) approaches a grave that is marked “Jason Voorhees.” Suddenly, two rather moronic gravediggers come running up. While Tommy hides in the nearby bushes, the gravediggers dig Jason up. “Yee-haw!” one of them shouts.
(I know this because I turned on the close captioning as I watched the film. It’s one thing to hear the dialogue in a Friday the 13th film being spoken. It’s another thing to see it actually written out at the bottom of your screen.)
Suddenly, Jason — complete with hockey mask and machete — pops out of the grave and kills the two grave robbers. He walks over to where Tommy is hiding, lifts up his machete, and — suddenly, Tommy(now played by a brooding and sexy John Shepherd) wakes up! It turns out that several years have passed and Tommy, after spending five years in a mental asylum, is now on his way to Pinehurst, a halfway house that just happens to be located in the Crystal Lake area.
A New Beginning has such a bad reputation that it’s often forgotten that this opening sequence is one of the few genuinely scary sequences to be found in the entire franchise. Everything from the ominous dark skies to the lushly green bushes that Tommy hides in to the artful way the lightning storm is used to punctuate the sense of danger contributes to making this sequence feel very ominous and genuinely nightmarish. It’s a bit shocking (yet undeniably effective) to go from the impressionistic lushness of Tommy’s dream to the rather harsh and grainy look of the rest of the film.
(For those of you who are familiar with Italian horror, it almost feels like the dream was directed by Dario Argento while the rest of the film was done by Joe D’Amato.)
Anyway, Tommy gets dropped off at Pinehurst where he meets the two liberal do-gooders who are in charge of the facility, Matt (Richard Young) and Pam (Melanie Kinnaman). He also meets “Reggie the Reckless” (Shavar Ross), the bratty little grandson of Pinehurst’s cook, as well as the other residents of Pinehurst. Pam and Matt inform Tommy that Pinehurst has no rules. Or as they inform him, “It’s an honor system.”
It quickly becomes apparent that they might want to reconsider that honor system because not only do Eddie (John Robert Dixon) and Tina (DebbiSue Voorhees) get caught having sex on the neighbor’s property but Vic (played by Mark Venturini, who was all sexy and dangerous in his 2 minutes of screen time) ends up hacking the annoying Joey (Dominick Brascia) up into little pieces with an axe.
(In Vic’s defense, he looked really good with an axe and Joey was really annoying.)
While Vic is whisked off to jail (Sadly, never to be seen again) two paramedics scoop up remains of Joey. One of the paramedics — Roy (Dick Wieand) — stares at the body for a long time and doesn’t seem to find his coworkers jokes humorous. Hmmm…wonder what’s up with that?
As tragic as the death of Joey is, it does lead to one of my favorite lines of all time when, the morning after the murders, the remaining residents of Pinehurst gather for breakfast and they notice that two extra places have been set for the dead Joey and the incarcerated Vic. Stuttering Jake (Jerry Pavlon) exclaims, “You don’t set a place for a dead person!” And you know what? He’s right.
Soon, people all over town are getting murdered. The guys who talks to himself while snorting cocaine (played, in a rather funny performance, by Bob DeSimone) gets an axe to the forehead. The waitress (Rebecca Wood-Sharkey) who flashes her boobs at a mirror and goes, “It’s showtime!” gets murdered as she leaves work. Two Jersey Shore wannabes are killed when their car stalls. The Sheriff (Marco St. John) looks over one crime scene and says, “What the Hell’s going on here?” Roy, standing behind him, says, “You talking to me, Sheriff?” Hmmm…it’s odd how Roy keeps popping up in the movie for no reason…
The Mayor (played by Ric Mancini) confronts the Sheriff and demands to know who is killing everyone in town. “Jason Voorhees,” the Sheriff slowly responds. “Jason Voorhees is dead! He was cremated” the Mayor screams as he empties on ashtray on the sheriff, “THIS IS JASON VOORHEES!” This is probably my favorite scene in the entire movie because St. John underplays his entire role while Mancini overplays and delivers every line as if he’s in a community theater production of Lost in Yonkers.
That gets to the heart of what I really enjoy about A New Beginning — not only does this film have the largest body count of any film in the series, it also has the most genuinely eccentric cast of characters. Absolutely nobody in this film behaves like a conventional human being. It goes beyond just the normal odd slasher movie behavior. Instead, watching this film is like peering into some sort of parallel universe where some minor shift in the Earth’s tilt has caused everyone to go a little crazy. Probably the closest the film comes to a normal person is poor traumatized Tommy and he only says about ten lines in the entire film. (That said, John Shepherd did a really good job and had a lot of presence of Tommy. There’s an oddly eerie scene about halfway through the film where Tommy stares up at a neon sign and, as I looked at his face illuminated by the glowing blue of the sign, I realized that what I had always heard about good acting — that it all starts with expressive eyes — was true.)
(In a perfect world, Tommy would have eventually ended up with Vi — played by Tiffany Helm — the new wave girl who spends almost the entire movie dancing in her room. Seriously, they would have made a cute couple.)
Anyway, once our killer has gotten through killing random townspeople, he starts to kill off the residents at Pinehurst. After taking part in one of the most explicit sex scene in the history of the franchise, Eddie and Tina are rather brutally killed off. (That’s a shame because Voorhees and Dixon both had a really good and fun chemistry together and were both likable actors. Unfortunately, their characters were sex-crazed and you know what that means…) While Matt goes off to try to find the missing Eddie and Tina, Tommy, Pam, and Reggie go off to hang out with Reggie’s rather odd brother Demon (played by Miguel Nunez, Jr.) who wears more jewelry than I do and sings a duet with his girlfriend while he’s sitting on the most disgusting toilet in the history of film. (Seriously, I had to look away…)
Anyway, the remaining residents of Pinehurst are all killed by a seemingly resurrected Jason (however, Jake and Robin — played by Juliette Cummins — do get to watch A Place In The Sun before they die so at least something good happened to them that night) and Pam ends up spending almost the entire rest of the movie running around in the rain and tripping in the mud whenever Jason shows up. Jason eventually corners Pam, Tommy, and Reggie in a barn but then ends up falling out of a window and landing on some conveniently placed spikes. Jason’s hockey mask falls off and — surprise! — it wasn’t Jason after all. Instead, it was Roy, the weird Paramedic who kept showing up randomly and looking around kinda guilty-like whenever anyone mentioned anything about the murders. Wow!
One of my favorite films book is Peter M. Bracke’s Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th. Taking on the series on a film-by-film basis, Crystal Lake Memories is a fascinating oral history that is full of all sorts of interesting behind-the-scenes facts. Reading the chapter on Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, one is left with the impression that 1) everyone on the film was constantly snorting cocaine and 2) director Danny Steinmann is perhaps the most enigmatic figure in the history of the films.
In Crystal Lake Memories, depending on who is being interviewed, Danny Steinman comes across as either a maniac, a bully, or an underappreciated genius. Quite a few people claim that Steinmann was out-of-control. However, actress DebiSue Voorhees (who you would expect to have all sorts of unpleasant stories about the film since she’s the one who had to spend an entire shooting day laying on the ground naked in front of a bunch of strangers) is a lot more complimentary, saying that Steinmann was a “gentleman” throughout the entire shoot. What everyone seems to agree on is that he was the son of wealthy art dealer and that he got his start as a director by making a hardcore porn film before moving on to make two wonderfully trashy exploitation films — The Unseen and Savage Streets. Steinmann was apparently hired to bring a certain rough edginess to A New Beginning and he obviously did just that as A New Beginning had more violent deaths and more nudity than any previous installment of the series. Because of the need to get an R rating, a lot of bloody footage hit the cutting room floor but what was left is surprisingly effective. (Pictures of what was cut can be found on several sites online and yes, it’s all pretty gruesome.)
Unlike most people, I actually think that A New Beginning is one of the best films in the franchise, precisely because it is so ludicrous and over-the-top. What Danny Steinmann did with this film was that he took everything that one expected from a Friday the 13th film and he pushed it all to its most logical extreme. Everyone knew that, regardless of whether the film was being made by a major studio or not, the Friday the 13th films were meant to trashy, ludicrous, sleazy, and fun. Steinmann was just the only one who had the guts to admit it by making a film that not only admitted what it was but celebrated it as well. Friday the 13th: A New Beginning is the most openly grindhouse of all of the Friday the 13th films and for that, it deserves more credit than it’s gotten.
Despite upsetting a lot of fans (not to mention the critics), Friday the 13th: A New Beginning was a box office success which could only mean that there would be another installment in the franchise. Coming tomorrow: my review of Friday the 13th: Jason Lives.
Through the Shattered Lens 