Somewhere in New York, former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson stands on a stage, wearing a white suit and talking about his life.
Or, I should say, he talks about parts of his life. Mike Tyson’s one-man show, which shared the name of his then-just published autobiography, was both insightful and frustrating. Tyson spends a good deal of time on some topics while skipping over others entirely. When Tyson talks about his difficult childhood and the experience of literally being adopted by the legendary Cus D’Amato, it provides a rare glimpse into the background of the man who, at his peak, was one of the most fearsome champions in the history of boxing. When Tyson talks about his fights, especially his battles with Mitch Green, he is as engaging and charismatic as I have ever seen him. In fact, there are times when Tyson came across as being so likable that I had to remind myself that Tyson is also a convicted rapist who, after returning to the ring, won a series of fights against weak opponents and then bit off Evander Holyfield’s ear. I was disappointed that Tyson did not devote any time to discussing his fight with Peter McNeeley. If Tyson has devoted two seconds to every second of the McNeeley fight, that still would have just taken up 3 minutes of screentime. That’s less time than Iron Mike spent talking about Brad Pitt fucking Robin Givens or doing his Don King impersonation.
I had mixed feelings about Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth, largely because I have mixed feelings about Mike Tyson himself. When it comes to ranking the heavyweight champions, Mike Tyson is definitely a contender for the top spot. That Tyson was a great boxer cannot be denied and when he throws a few punches during Undisputed Truth, he still looks he could get in the ring and win. (At least he does until he has to stop to catch his breath.) Tyson may not be the most articulate speaker but occasionally, he shows some hints that he is smarter than he is given credit for. He also tells some truly terrible jokes. Tyson was a great boxer but as a stand-up comedian, he leaves something to be desired. At the same time, Tyson is open about his emotional and mental difficulties and his history of violence. Every time I started to like Tyson too much, he would say something that would snap me back to reality. No sooner had he won my sympathy by talking about how much the death of Cus D’Amato affected him than Tyson lost it by verbally attacking the woman that he was convicted of raping. By the end of his one man show, Tyson represents both everything good and everything bad about boxing. Boxing saved Tyson from the streets but it also thrust him into a world that he was not emotionally mature enough to handle. Tyson was barely 20 years old when he became champion and, with Cus D’Amato having died a year before, Tyson no longer had anyone looking out for his interests and protecting him from those who wanted to take advantage of him. Toss Don King into the mix and both Tyson’s rise and eventual fall feel predestined.
Undisputed Truth ends with Tyson declaring that he has finally found peace. I hope he has.
If you had just moved to a small town in Georgia and your teenage son was framed for marijuana possession and sentenced to years of hard labor, what would you do?
The year is 1983 and things are looking bad for the Second Marine Division of the U.S. Marine Corps. The officers are almost all college graduates like Major Powers (Everett McGill) and Lt. Ring (Boyd Gaines), men who have never served in combat but who are convinced that they know what it means to be a Marine in the 80s. Convinced that they will never have to actually fight in a war, the latest batch of recruits is growing soft and weak. All of the slackers have been put in the Recon Platoon, where they are so undisciplined that they think that wannabe rock star Cpl. Jones (Mario Van Peebles) is a good Marine. MARIO VAN PEEBLES!
The streets are being flooded with lousy, synthetic heroin. Could the source be somewhere inside of Trabuco Federal Prison? That is what Nick Slater (Ben Maccabee) has been assigned to find out. Nick is a tough cop but now he is going undercover, pretending to be a tough but incarcerated bank robber. Nick discovers that Trabuco is like no other prison out there. For one thing, Wings Hauser is the warden. Warden Pitt is a smirking Aryan who forces his prisoners to box for his amusement and who enforces discipline with a CIA-style torture chamber. (Because the Warden is a boxing fanatic who likes to reward his best fighters, he also regularly brings prostitutes into the prison, which allows the film to reach its quota of B-movie nudity.) Even worse, Warden Pitt and the head of the Aryan Brotherhood, Jigsaw (Paulo Tocha) are working together. Only Nick can end Warden Pitt’s reign of terror but he will have to survive prison first. Fortunately, Ben knows how to throw a punch and deliver kick and he is going to have to do a lot of both if he is going to make it out alive.
Sybil Danning vs. Wings Hauser? What could go wrong with that?
Sometimes, the story behind a movie is more interesting than the movie itself.
Recall Total Recall?
That Bill Shakespeare really gets around.
Everyone’s favorite hippie action hero, Peter Fonda, plays Virelli, a long-haired Vietnam vet turned mercenary who is hired by a corrupt African general (Robert Doqui) to protect the construction of a dam that will result in the flooding of a native village. Got all that? Though Fonda is top-billed, he is not the star of the film. The star is Reb Brown, who plays T.J. Christian. T.J. starts out as a member of Fonda’s team but then he falls in love with a nurse (Joanna Weinberg) and he switches sides. The villagers need someone to lead their revolution and all it takes is hearing Reb Brown do one of his trademarks power yells to know that he’s the man for the job. Reb Brown was famous for yelling whenever he did anything and he yells a lot in Mercenary Fighters, even more than he yelled in Space Mutiny.
Through the Shattered Lens 