Well, it took a nice, long weekend up at Lake Texoma (I actually got in the water and practiced swimming which is a big deal for a drowningphobe like me but then I ended up cutting my foot on a rock on the lakefloor — agck!) and another few nights of a little bit more sleep than usual but I am happy to say that I am back and I’ve brought the latest edition of Lisa Marie’s Favorite Grindhouse and Exploitation Trailers with me! So, without further ado, let’s get started…
1) Killer Fish (1979)
In honor of my weekend at the lake, let’s start out with this trailer for a little film called Killer Fish…
2) Dogs (1976)
Now, I may have conquered my fear of swimming for like 10 minutes at the lake but I have yet to conquer my fear of dogs and this trailer shows why. Seriously, dogs are freaking scary!
3) The Doberman Gang (1972)
Dogs don’t just kill people. They rob banks too.
4) King Frat (1980)
Wow! Those dogs are scary, aren’t they? Let’s take a break from scary dogs with another breed of dog — the American frat boy.
5) Chain Gang Women (1971)
I love trailers that brag about how the characters in the movie live by only “one rule.” (Speaking of chain gangs, I recently saw an excellent film from 1932 that was called I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang. But that’s something I’ll save for a future post…)
6) The Stranger and the Gunfighter (1974)
Yes, between the chain gangs, the killer fish, the dogs, and the frat boys, it’s a scary world out there. Luckily, protection is right around the corner because here comes “(a) savage…a saint…a stranger…”
In the new horror film Silent House, Elizabeth Olsen plays Sarah, an emotionally unstable young woman who goes to her family’s old lakefront vacation home with her father. After years of neglect, the cottage is on the verge of collapse and Sarah has been recruited to help her dad and her uncle prepare the house for collapse. It’s obvious from the first minute that Sarah appears on-screen that she’s emotionally unstable. Whether she’s staring out at the desolate lake or (in the first genuinely disturbing scene in a film that’s full of them) awkwardly dealing with her uncle’s blatant attempt to flirt with her, Sarah is a bundle of nerves. When, at one point, Sarah hears something wandering around the house, her father replies that he’ll check it out because “I know how you are.”
Unfortunately for Sarah, things are about to get a lot worst.
Shortly after Sarah is visited by a mysterious girl who claims to be a childhood friend (“I do remember you,” Sarah says at one point though she doesn’t sound too convinced herself), her father disappears and Sarah finds herself being chased through the house by a pursuer who only seems to exist in the shadows. As she struggles to escape the house, she continually sees a silent girl watching her, just to disappear whenever Sarah tries to approach her. Even when Sarah does manage to get out of the house, she quickly finds herself brought back against her will until finally, she discovers the dark secrets that are hidden within the house and she’s forced to confront an evil far more disturbing than she had originally suspected.
Silent House is a film with a gimmick — director Chris Kentis and Laura Lau have filmed and edited it to give the impression that the movie was shot in a single take and, therefore, all of the horror takes place in real time. Usually, I’m not a big fan of movies that rely on gimmicks but, in this case, it actually works pretty well at giving the impression of a truly relentless thrill ride. Fortunately, Kentis and Lau don’t just rely on the film’s gimmick to make the movie effective. From this film, it’s obvious that they understand that taking the time to create the right atmosphere is just an important to a succesful horror film as having proverbial monster suddenly jump out of the shadows.
It helps that Elizabeth Olsen (who really should have received an Oscar nomination for Martha Marcy May Marlene) is totally believable and sympathetic as Sarah. It takes a while to realize that Olsen is giving a great performance. For most of the film, I just thought she was doing a good job at playing scared. (For most actresses, being chased in a horror movie is a rite of passage.) It was only during the final 15 minutes that it become apparent that, more than just playing frightened, Olsen was instead laying down the foundation for the film’s finale. I’ve read some criticism claiming that the film’s final twist came out of nowhere but I actually found it to be effective and disturbingly plausible. That is almost totally due to commitment that Olsen shows in creating the character of Sarah.
I saw Silent House earlier today with Jeff and seriously, I was so happy he was there because I spent almost the entire movie with my face buried in his shoulder. Admittedly, I’m usually pretty jaded when it comes to gore and horror. (For example, I saw Dale get his guts ripped out on The Walking Dead last Sunday and I may have arched an eyebrow but otherwise, it was nothing I hadn’t seen before.) But seriously, Silent House is an intense film that, wisely, doesn’t allow logic to get in the way of being scary. The critics can nitpick all they want on this film. What matters is that Silent House works.
(As a sidenote, I really hope that after this movie and Martha Marcy May Marlene, Elizaebeth Olsen takes break from running for her life and makes a nice, happy romantic comedy. She deserves a break!)
As a result of my continuing effort to see every single film ever nominated for best picture, I’ve been lucky enough to both discover and rediscover a handful of excellent films that, for whatever reason, have ended up forgotten and neglected in the years since they scored their nominations. One of the more recent of these films was Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece of a paranoia, the 1974 Best Picture nominee The Conversation.*
The Conversation tells the story of Harry Caul (played by Gene Hackman), a surveillance expert who, along with his colleague Stan (played by the great John Cazale), is hired by a businessman (Robert Duvall) to bug a conversation between Duvall’s much younger wife (played by Cindy Williams) and a man who might be her lover (played by Fredric Forrest). Harry, we quickly discover, is a man who values his privacy and who manages to find a balance between his unsavory job and his devout religious faith by maintaining an impenetrable shield of detachment from the rest of humanity. He is a man who hides from the world inside of his apartment, only allowing himself to show the slightest hint of emotion when playing his saxophone. In one of the film’s best scenes, Harry finds himself awkwardly socializing with a far more sleazy acquaintance (played by Alan Garfield, one of the great character actors of the 70s) and it becomes apparent that Harry may be the best in the business but he’s still the ultimate outsider.
However, Harry is forced to confront the contradictions of his own lifestyle when he listens to the conversation between Forrest and Williams and believes that he might have found evidence that both Forrest and Williams are in fear for their lives. With Duvall’s operatives demanding the surveillance tapes, Harry Caul soon finds himself becoming more and more paranoid and unstable as he finds it more and more difficult to justify his detachment. Harry finds himself obsessively listening to the conversation over and over again, going over every possible nuance and emphasis to try to figure out what’s actually being said. Of course, by the end of the film, it’s obvious to both Harry and the audience that nothing is as simple as it sounds.
Compared to the Godfather films and Apocalypse Now, the Conversation is a surprisingly low-key and rather muted film. A lot of this is because, as opposed to the Corleones and Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard, Gene Hackman’s Harry Caul is a complete and total introvert, a man who makes his living by observing a world that he refuses to be a part of. Though the film works quite well as a thriller, it works best when viewed as a sympathetic character study of a paranoid and anti-social human being. Hackman full inhabits the role, bringing Harry — with all of his frustrating contradictions and conflicted actions — to oddly vibrant life. The film ultimately serves as a sad-eyed look at how a good person can justify doing bad things and how the inevitable consequences of those bad things can only be delayed for so long.
On a final note, an impossibly young Harrison Ford shows up here as Duvall’s sinister assistant. He plays the role with just the right amount of prissy arrogance and he has a great scene where he asks Harry is he wants to try a homemade cookie. “They’re good,” Ford assures him.
So is The Conversation.
—–
* Of course, another Coppola film — The Godfather, Part II — beat the Conversation for best picture. However, The Conversation did win the Palme D’Or at Cannes that year. It was a good year to be Francis Ford Coppola.
During my sophomore year of college, I had a political science professor who, every day of class, would sit on his desk and ramble on and on and on about his past as a political activist. He protested Viet Nam, he hung out with revolutionaries, he loved Hugo Chavez, and I assume he probably had a Che Guevara poster hanging in his office. Whenever he wanted to criticize George W. Bush, he would compare him to Richard Nixon and then pause as if he was waiting for the class to all start hissing in unison. He always seemed to be so bitterly disappointed that we didn’t. What he, and a whole lot of other people his age, didn’t seem to understand was that Richard Nixon was his boogeyman. The rest of us could hardly care less.
That was the same problem that faced the 2008 best picture nominee Frost/Nixon.
Directed rather flatly by Ron Howard, Frost/Nixon tells the true story about how a light-weight English journalist named David Frost (played by Michael Sheen) managed to score the first televised interview with former President Richard Nixon (Frank Langella). Both Frost and Nixon see the interviews as a chance to score their own individual redemptions while Frost’s assistants (played by Oliver Platt and Sam Rockwell) see the interview as a chance to put Richard Nixon on trial for Watergate, the Viet Nam War, and every thing else under the sun. That may not sound like a very exciting movie but it does sound like a sure Oscar contender, doesn’t it?
I’ve always secretly been a big history nerd so I was really looking forward to seeing Frost/Nixon when it was first released in 2008. When I first saw it, I was vaguely disappointed but I told myself that maybe I just didn’t know enough about Richard Nixon or Watergate to really “get” the film. So, when the film later showed up on cable, I gave it another chance. And then I gave it a chance after that because I really wanted to like this film. Afterall, it was a best picture nominee. It was critically acclaimed. The word appeared to be insisting that this was a great film. And the more I watched it, the more I realized that the world was wrong. (If nothing else, my reaction to Frost/Nixon made it easier for me to reject the similarly acclaimed Avatar a year later.) Frost/Nixon is well-acted and slickly produced but it’s not a great film. In fact, Frost/Nixon is epitome of the type of best picture nominee that inspires people to be cynical about the Academy Awards.
Before I get into why Frost/Nixon didn’t work for me, I want to acknowledge that this was a very well-acted film. By that, I mean that the cast (Frank Langella, Michael Sheen, Kevin Bacon, Sam Rockwell, and Oliver Platt) all gave very watchable and entertaining performances. At the same time, none of them brought much depth to their characters. Much like the film itself, nobody seems to have much going on underneath the surface. Frank Langella may be playing a historic figure but, ultimately, his Oscar-nominated performance feels like just a typically grouchy Frank Langella performance. Michael Sheen actually gives a far more interesting performance as David Frost but, at the same time, the character might as well have just been identified as “the English guy.” In fact, a better title for this film would have been The Grouchy, the English, and the Superfluous.
For all the time that the film devotes to Rockwell and Platt blathering on about how they’re going to be giving Richard Nixon “the trial he never had,” this film is ultimately less about politics and more about show business. Ron Howard devotes almost as much time to the rather boring details of how the interviews were set up and sold into syndication as he does to the issues that the interview brings up. Unfortunately, for a movie about show business to succeed, the audience has to believe that the show is one that they would actually enjoy watching, This, ultimately, is why Frost/Nixon fails. While the filmmakers continually tell us that the Frost/Nixon interviews were an important moment in American history, they never show us. Yes, everyone has hideous hair and wide lapels but, otherwise, the film never recreates the period or the atmosphere of the film’s setting and, as a result, its hard not to feel detached from the action happening on-screen. For all the self-congratulatory claims made at the end of the film, it never convinces us that the Frost/Nixon interviews were really worth all the trouble. Much like my old poli sci professor, Frost/Nixon never gives us a reason to care.
For a far more interesting and entertaining look at the Watergate scandal, I would recommend the 1976 best picture nominee All The President’s Men. Recreating the story of how two Washington Post reporters (played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman) exposed the Watergate scandal that eventually led to Nixon’s resignation, All The President’s Men is the movie that Frost/Nixon wishes it could be. Despite being made only two years after Watergate, All The President’s Men doesn’t take the audience’s interest for granted. Instead, director Pakula earns our interest by crafting his story as an exciting thriller. Pakula directs the film like an old school film noir, filling the screen with menacing shadows and always keeping the camera slightly off-center. Like Frost/Nixon, All The President’s Men is a well-acted film with a bunch of wonderful 70s character actors — performers like Ned Beatty, Jason Robards, Jack Warden, Martin Balsam, and Robert Walden, and Jane Alexander — all giving effectively low-key and realistic performances. The end result is a film that manages to be exciting and fascinating to those of us who really don’t have any reason to care about Richard Nixon or Watergate.
Both of these two films were nominated for best picture. Frost/Nixon quite rightly lost to Slumdog Millionaire. All The President’s Men, on the other hand, lost to Rocky.
Well, it’s almost here! One more week and then, it’s Oscar time. This is the time of year that I always end up remembering an infamous little film from 1966 that I’ve always wanted to see. The film in question was meant to be an expose of all the sordid side of show business but instead, it has since become legendary for the number of critics who have declared it to be one of the worst films ever made. The film is called “The Oscar” and it even scored nominations for both its sets and its costumes. Each year, around this time, I swear that I’m going to track down and finally watch this movie. Will this be the year that it finally happens?
Probably not. To be honest, this is going to be a pretty busy week for me and, once this year’s ceremony is over with, I’ll probably be burned out on Oscar talk.
It happens.
However, even if I don’t see the film anytime soon, I can still share this YouTube video of highlights from 1966’s The Oscar.
Last night, as I attempted to drift off to sleep, I switched over to TCM and watched the 1931 film Trader Horn.
Why Was I Watching It?
I’m on a mission to see every film ever nominated for best picture and Trader Horn was nominated back in 1931. (It lost to the first western ever to win best picture, Cimarron.) Trader Horn is a bit of an oddity among Oscar contenders in that it received no other nominations save for best picture and it has never been released on DVD. When I saw it on TCM’s schedule last night, I figured that might very well be my only chance to see this forgotten best picture nominee.
What’s It About?
So Trader Horn (Harry Carey) is a heroic ivory hunter. Yes, this film was made a long time ago. He makes his living in Africa where he spends his time killing animals and explaining how, whenever the natives start playing their drums, it means that “every black devil is in the bush.” Again, this film was made a very loooooooong time ago.
Anyway, at the start of the film, Trader Horn is introducing his apprentice (Duncan Renaldo) to the facts of life in Africa. Eventually, they meet a missionary (Olive Golden) who is looking for daughter who was kidnapped by a tribe years ago. When Golden is killed, Trader Horn takes it upon himself to find her daughter (played by Edwina Booth) and bring her back to civilization.
What Worked?
Trader Horn was the first non-documentary to be filmed on location in Africa and, as you watch the movie, it quickly becomes apparent that the film’s plot is really just an excuse to show off all the nature footage that director W.S. Van Dyke managed to capture. Countless time the film’s story comes to a complete halt while Carey and Renaldo simply stop to watch a grazing giraffe or to watch a leopard hunt a wildebeest. Normally, this is the sort of thing I would complain about but, in this case, the story was so predictable and silly that I was happy for the interruption. It helps that the 80 year-old nature footage is still visually impressive and exciting to watch. According to the research I did on the Internet after seeing the film, Trader Horn’s footage was used as a stock footage in countless “jungle” films over the next three decades in much the same way that the same old distressing mondo footage tends to show up in every single Italian cannibal film.
There’s a scene were Renaldo finds a lion cub and oh my God, it’s just the most adorable little kitty ever!
Trader Horn actually has an interesting production history and I enjoyed reading about it after I watched the movie. Apparently, Van Dyke spent seven months in Africa making this film and almost the entire crew ended up falling ill. At least two cameramen were killed while filming the wild animals and Edwina Booth returned so sick that her film career was pretty much ended.
On one final note, there was apparently a pornographic remake of this film in the late 60s. Its title? Trader Hornee.
What Didn’t Work?
Did I mention this film was made a really looooooong time ago? Because, seriously, it was. On occasion, I’ve heard an old film described as being “creaky.” I never really understood what that meant until I saw Trader Horn because, quite frankly, this film is amazingly creaky. It moves slowly, the performers are rather melodramatic (though Harry Carey does a good job), and. while the cultural attitudes may have been acceptable in 1931, they now come across as extremely racist and its hard not to feel really uncomfortable with scenes where Renaldo ogles the bare-breasted native women and says, “Why, they’re not savages at all! They’re like little children!”
I recently discovered that Uverse has select films from the Criterion Collection available OnDemand. Last night, I took advantage of this service and watched 1940’s The Great Dictator. Along with being Charlie Chaplin’s first all-sound film, the Great Dictator was also a best picture nominee. (It lost to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca.)
The Great Dictator is a broad comedy that, ultimately, has a very serious message. Made at a time when the second world war was looking more and more inevitable, The Great Dictator features Charlie Chaplin in two roles. As the film opens at end of World War I, Chaplin plays a meek but well-meaning Jewish barber who has found himself serving in the army of Tomania. Though the barber manages to survive the war, he also loses his memory and ends up spending the next 20 years in a mental hospital. When his memory finally does return, the barber returns to his barber shop and quickly discovers that things have changed. His shop has been boarded up and the word “JEW” has been painted over the windows. Thugs wearing military uniforms now patrol the streets and continually threaten to send people to concentration camps. Tomania is now ruled by a dictator named Adenoid Hynkel.
Hynkel, who happens to look just like the barber (and who is, of course, also played by Chaplin) is quickly established as being a crazy and rather simple-minded buffoon. As played by Chaplin, Hynkel gives long speeches in a harsh gibberish language that is designed to sound German without actually being German (fortunately, Hynkel has a translator on hand to tell us, after he has just spent two minutes harshly ranting, “Hynkel just explained his position on the Jews.”) and he continually runs throughout his palace in an attempt to prove that he’s capable of doing a hundred more things than the average person. In his private time, he does a child-like dance with a big inflatable globe, speculates on how glorious it will be to be the “brunette dictator of the Aryan people,” and tries to maintain a shaky alliance with his fellow dictator Benzino Napaloni (Jack Oakie). Playing a character that was the polar opposite of his usual persona, Chaplin’s performance manages to be both comedic and disturbing. You laugh at Hynkel’s buffoonish behavior but you never forget that he’s a very dangerous man. (Admittedly, I say that with a hindsight that was not possessed by either Chaplin or the audiences of 1940.)
The film proceeds to follow these two characters in two separate storylines that finally come together at the end of the movie with (SPOILER) Chaplin giving a nearly 5-minute plea for world peace. While Hynkel schemes to conquer the world one country at a time, the barber attempts to adjust to his new life while sweetly romancing the outspoken Hanna (Paulette Goddard), While the film is probably best known for Chaplin’s performance as Hynkel, I found the barber and Hannah’s relationship to be sweetly poignant. Their relationship gives this film a heart to go along with its biting satire.
For me (and admittedly, I’m a secret history nerd), it’s interesting to watch The Great Dictator today and try to imagine how audiences first reacted to it in 1940. According to Wikipedia, the Great Dictator was Chaplin’s most financially succesful film and Chaplin was even invited to the White House to recite the film’s climatic speech for President Roosevelt. And, of course, The Great Dictator also scored Oscar nominations for best picture, actor (Chaplin), supporting actor (Jack Oakie), screenplay, and original score. Chaplin also said, in his later years, that if he had known what was truly being done by Hitler and the Nazis, he would never have made a comedy like The Great Dictator.
I think that would have been a mistake on his part because if The Great Dictator proves anything, it proves that satire and humor is often the most powerful weapon against the forces of evil. Though Chaplin makes no secret of the fact that Hynkel is meant to be Hitler and Oakie is meant to be playing Mussolini, they could also serve as stand-ins for just about any dictator who has seized power through exploiting prejudice and hatred. The sight of Hynkel dancing with that globe is actually a far more effective anti-totalitarian statement than the heartfelt and undeniably sincere speech that ends the film.
The title character (as played by George Clooney) is a sleazy attorney who “fixes” problems for one of the biggest law firms in New York. When Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), one of the firm’s partners and Michael’s mentor, has a nervous breakdown while at a deposition in Minnesota and ends up in jail, Michael is sent to retrieve him. Michael soon discovers that Arthur’s mental collapse was due to a class action law suit involving an evil, faceless corporation. Before he reveals any more details, Arthur flees and is subsequently murdered by two assassins. With the police calling Arthur’s death a suicide, Michael soon finds himself being pursued by the same assassins.
Though I’ve owned the DVD for a couple of years, this was only the second time that I had ever actually sat down and watched this film. (The first time was during its initial theatrical run.) There have been many insomnia-filled nights when I’ve gone to my DVD collection, fully intending on grabbing Michael Clayton and allowing the images of an unshaven George Clooney to flicker in my dark bedroom. However, every time, I always ended up suddenly remembering a film that I wanted to see more.
That’s the thing with Michael Clayton. Having seen the film a second time, I can say that it remains a well-made film and an entertaining film and I can also say that I noticed a whole lot of small details that I had either missed the first time or had subsequently forgotten about. Like a lot of best picture nominees, Michael Clayton is a good film. It’s just not a very memorable one. Seriously, is anyone surprised when business executives and attorneys turn out to be the villains in these type of films? And if you couldn’t guess that Tom Wilkinson was going to end up dead from the minute he turned up on-screen then you may need to surrender your filmgoer card.
That said, Michael Clayton remains a fun little film and I enjoyed watching it even if it was predictable. In fact, I may have enjoyed it even more the second time around because I currently work for an attorney so I was able to spend the whole movie playing the “What would my boss do in this situation?” game. (Hopefully, the first thing he would do would be to send his loyal and capable red-headed assistant on a nice, long, all-expense paid vacation Italy.) Beyond that, Tony Gilroy’s direction is efficient and fast-paced, George Clooney gives one of his less-smug performances (It can be argued that Michael Clayton — along with Up In The Air and The Descendants — forms Clooney’s Mediocre White Man Trilogy) and Tilda Swinton deserved the Oscar she won for playing a villain who isn’t so much evil as just really insecure. However, for me, the best performances in this film come from two unheralded actors by the name of Robert Prescott and Terry Serpico. Playing the two assassins who pursue both Wilkinson and Clooney, Serpico and Prescott play their roles with a nonchalant sort of respectability that is both compelling and genuinely frightening. During those brief moments when Serpico and Prescott are on-screen, Michael Clayton actually becomes the film that it is obviously trying so hard to be.
Taking place in turn-of-the-century England, The Woman In Black tells the story of Arthur Kipps (played by Daniel Radcliffe), a young lawyer who is still struggling to recover from the death of his wife four years previously. Arthur is sent to an isolated village to settle the estate of a woman named Alice Drablow. Despite several warnings from the superstitious townspeople, Arthur goes to Alice’s decrepit old mansion and he soon finds himself haunted by fleeting glimpses of a woman in black who seems to be in the house with him. With each sighting of the woman in black, another child in the village commits suicide.
Despite a few genuinely disturbing scenes (mostly involving children committing suicide), The Woman In Black is, ultimately, a pretty typical PG-13 horror film. There’s a few good, if predictable, jump scenes (most of which involve the title character popping up in the background) and there’s all the usual Insidious-style tracking shots through the creepy old house. However, any time that it seems like the film is about to become truly disturbing or scary, it runs smack into that PG-13 rating and it has to pull back. The end result is that the film is creepy yet oddly bland, like something you might find playing on Chiller around one in the morning.
Of course, The Woman in Black is getting a lot of attention because this is Daniel Radcliffe’s first film since the end of the Harry Potter franchise. How does Radcliffe do in his first adult role? Well, he’s okay. In fact, I would say that he’s better than okay. He’s perfectly adequate. I think the main issue I had with Radcliffe’s performance is that he sometimes seems to be trying too hard to make sure that we understand that he’s not playing Harry Potter. For that reason, he doesn’t shave and he spends almost the entire film with a grim expression on his face. Radcliffe’s a good actor and I think he’ll have a long career but he’s just miscast here. Arthur Kipps is a man who has given up on life and Radcliffe is simply too exuberant of a performer to play defeated. Oddly enough, Ciaran Hinds (who co-stars in this film) would have made the perfect Arthur.
I did enjoy spotting the various references to other horror films that were littered throughout The Woman in Black. While the film obviously owes its existence to the success of the Paranormal Activity films, both the film’s overall plot and isolated village setting reminded me of Mario Bava’s masterpiece, Kill, Baby, Bill. Furthermore, the film’s somewhat effective ending reminded me of the end of Lucio Fulci’s The House By The Cemetery. I’m not sure if any of those homages were intentional but they were still fun to spot.
As a final note, The Woman in Black is the latest PG-13 rated horror film to be advertised with annoying infrared footage of people watching the movie and screaming. Personally, I think it might be time for a new cliché.
Well, its Super Bleh weekend, the time of year when everything is just football, football, football! And Lisa says, “A bleh on both your houses!” Still, because I love theme posts, here’s the latest edition of Lisa Marie’s Favorite Grindhouse and Exploitation Trailers — 6 Super Trailers For a Super Weekend! Yay! 8)
1) J.D.’s Revenge (1976)
He came back from the dead to possess a man’s soul, make love to his woman, and get the vengeance he craved!
2) Texas Adios (1967)
Starring the best, the one and only Franco Nero!
3) H.O.T.S. (1979)
Trailers like this prove that it was apparently a lot easier to be considered attractive back in the 70s.
4) Inglorious Bastards (1977)
I think this film features a former football player so it goes with the whole Super Bowl theme. Plus, the title was borrowed for Quentin Tarantino’s super Inglorious Basterds.
5) Wild Orchid (1990)
This film was directed by the super Zalman King who passed away on Friday. R.I.P.
6) Roadhouse (1989)
The film co-stars the even more super Ben Gazzara, who also passed away on Friday. R.I.P.
