When the infamous epic Caligulawas first released back in 1979, a disco version of Caligula’s love theme — We Are One — was also released as a promotional gimmick.
This song is so over-the-top, so blatantly exploitive, so insidiously catchy, and so totally inappropriate for so many reasons that become clear after you watch the film it was written for that it simply cannot be ignored. To me, this song represents everything that makes the Grindhouse great.
(As well, I hope whoever was playing bass got paid extra…)
Believe it or not, when Duck Soup was initially released in 1933, it was considered to be something of a failure. Especially when compared to previous Marx Brothers films, it was seen as being a box office disappointment. The critics didn’t care much for it, either. They felt that the film’s political satire was preposterous and tasteless. Critics in 1933 attacked Duck Soup for being a cynical, anti-government satire released during the Great Depression.
Of course, today, Duck Soup is justifiably viewed as being a classic comedy. It’s certainly my favorite Marx Brothers film. In the classic scene below, Harpo pretends to be Groucho’s reflection in a shattered mirror. It’s a marvelous piece of physical humor so enjoy it!
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films is all about letting the visuals do the talking.
Today, the Shattered Lens wishes a happy birthday to director Charles Band. It’s time for….
4 Shots From 4 Charles Band Films
Meridian: Kiss of the Beast (1990, dir by Charles Band, DP: Marc Ahlberg)
The Creeps (1997, dir by Charles Band, DP: Adolfo Bartoli)
Puppet Master: The Legacy (2003, dir by Charles Band, DP: Marc Ahlberg)
Evil Bong 888: Infinity High (2022, dir by Charles Band, DP: Alex Nicolaou)
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on twitter. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.
Tonight, for #ScarySocial, I will be hosting 1957’s Attack of the Crab Monsters!
If you want to join us on Saturday night, just hop onto twitter, start the film at 9 pm et, and use the #ScarySocial hashtag! The film is available on Prime and Tubi! I’ll be there co-hosting and I imagine some other members of the TSL Crew will be there as well. It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy!
I’ve always appreciated any made-for-TV movie that’s absolutely shameless about ripping off a big budget feature film and, as such, I did appreciate the chutzpah of Taken At A Basketball Game. I mean the word “TAKEN” is right there in the title! D.B. Woodside plays Wayne Edwards, an ex-cop who is now the head of security for a casino. Wayne is haunted by a shooting that left an innocent girl dead. Wayne is also middle-aged and struggling to relate to his teenage daughter, Robyn (Claire Qute). When Robyn is abducted by sex traffickers at a basketball game, Wayne sets out to track her down and rescue her. It probably will not surprise you to hear that there’s a scene where Wayne explains that, even before he was a cop, he was a member of Special Forces and, as such, he knows how to get information out of people.
That said, it’s been quite a while since Taken was first released. The first film came out in 2008 and it can be somewhat surprising to remember how excited everyone was about it. At that time, Liam Neeson was best-known for appearing in prestige pictures so there was something enjoyably subversive about him playing a relentless torturer on a mission. A lot of people were also under the impression that Taken was based on a true story. A sequel followed in 2012 and, by that point, people were much more used to the idea of Liam Neeson killing people. The third (and, to date, final) Taken film came out in 2015 and no one really cared. There was a television series that sputtered along for two seasons. There were countless Taken rip-offs, many of which starred Nissan himself. The initial cultural footprint of Taken was huge but, by the start of the 2020s, it had pretty much evaporated. Taken At A Basketball Game comes out at a time when even Liam Neeson has started parodying his image.
This is my long-winded way of saying that Taken At A Basketball Game would probably have worked better as a parody than a straight action film. At this point, whenever an actor starts to give a monologue about how he’s been given very special training, it’s hard not to laugh because it’s a scene that has shown up in so many movies that it’s basically been done to death. Everyone thinks that they can do a perfect impersonation of Liam Neeson reciting the Taken speech. Of course, what originally sold the speech in 2008 was that Neeson delivered it with an intensity and a commitment that kept it from sounding like a bunch of empty boasts. Listening to Neeson in that first film, you sincerely believed that he could and would kill someone if he felt like it. D.B. Woodside, who is probably best-known for playing the less interesting of 24‘s two President Palmers, comes across as being a bit too mild-mannered to give a convincing “I’ve been trained to inflict pain” speech. For most of the film, he seems like he’d rather just go back to his office and maybe sell someone some insurance.
The other problem with Taken At A Basketball Game is that very little of it actually takes place at the basketball game. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a fan of basketball. Those squeaky shoes give me a migraine. But the stadium was a good location and it’s easy to imagine a fairly entertaining film could have been made out of Woodside spending 90 minutes running from one level to another, searching for his daughter and fighting off various bad guys. (Yes, I realize this would have made the film into a Die Hard rip-off instead of a Taken rip-off but Die Hard rip-offs still work whereas Taken reached its expiration date years ago.) Instead, the film abandoned the game early on and just went through the motions for the remainder of its running time.
Oh well. Maybe Liam Neeson will make a basketball movie someday….
17 year-old Brad Crain was at the movie theater in April of 1991 to see Steven Seagal’s latest action film, OUT FOR JUSTICE! Seagal’s career had shot out of a cannon with his first three films being the highly successful movies ABOVE THE LAW (1988), HARD TO KILL (1990), and MARKED FOR DEATH (1990). As a guy who loved action movies, Seagal (with his pony tail) was a cool new action star, and I was down for it.
Steven Seagal plays Detective Gino Felino, a Brooklyn cop called into duty when a guy who grew up with him in their neighborhood, mob enforcer Richie Madano (William Forsythe), goes completely off the rails. Hooked on drugs and looking to settle some personal scores, Richie murders Gino’s partner, and begins turning their neighborhood into a war zone, even pulling a woman out of her car and blowing her away in broad daylight over a simple traffic incident. Convinced that Richie will not leave the neighborhood he grew up in, Gino talks Captain Ronnie Danziger (Jerry Orbach) into letting him have an unmarked police car, a shotgun, and his approval to engage in a manhunt for the drugged out psycho. From that point forward, Gino shakes down Richie’s family members and associates to try to find out where he is. As bodies and broken bones pile up, Gino is determined to do whatever it takes to bring Richie to justice!
I’ll just say up front that OUT FOR JUSTICE is my personal favorite Steven Seagal film. It’s not the crowd pleaser or the box office champ that the next year’s UNDER SIEGE (1992) would be, and film critics largely blew it off when it first hit cinemas, but it does feature the star at his most charismatic, something that would all but disappear after the mid-90’s. I love the way Seagal plays Gino. Sure he’s tough, but he talks more, he laughs more, and it feels like he’s actually enjoying himself. His Gino isn’t just a badass cop, he’s a neighborhood guy, a former street punk who grew up and made something positive out of himself. Seagal’s performance here truly works, and he plays the role with so much confidence that it’s a shame that he didn’t remain this engaged in future performances.
OUT FOR JUSTICE is a badass action film. After it opens with Richie’s horrific murders, it then follows Gino’s hunt for the killer into smoky bars filled with wannabe tough guys who know more than they’re letting on. They get their asses handed to them. It follows Gino as Richie’s goons attack him at various places, from meat shops to apartment buildings, and he dispatches them with calm precision, but often in gruesome ways. I still wince when I see the results of meat cleaver fights and close quarter shotgun blasts. OUT FOR JUSTICE is a throwback to an era when action films featured men with integrity who kick ass and take names. While the movie does have some melodrama and humor, at the end of the day, this is tough-guy cinema done right.
I did want to shout out a few other things about OUT FOR JUSTICE that helps put it over the top for me. William Forsythe is incredible as Richie Madano. He’s sweaty, twitchy, cruel, and completely unhinged. He makes you believe that he’s literally capable of doing anything, and it seems like his goons may be following more out of fear than anything else. His Richie is a man who doesn’t expect that he’ll be alive that much longer, so he’s willing to cross every line that may have once mattered in his life. Director John Flynn captures the urgency of the film’s action very well, and we can feel the tension as Gino tries to locate the crazy Richie as quickly as possible before more innocent people are killed. He isn’t afraid to show the brutality of the violence as part of Gino’s quest, either. This shouldn’t be surprising when you recognize that Flynn directed the revenge classic ROLLING THUNDER (1977) about fifteen years earlier. The one last thing I wanted to point out about OUT FOR JUSTICE is that it was written by R. Lance Hill, who wrote the brutal Charles Bronson hitman film THE EVIL THAT MEN DO (1984). These are talented guys who know how to tell tough stories about even tougher men who are willing to do what it takes to get justice when no one else can.
At the end of the day, Steven Seagal would go on to make a lot more movies, but I don’t think he ever quite recaptured the balance of charisma and toughness that he shows here. And OUT FOR JUSTICE is a badass action movie that doesn’t really care what movie critics think, either. Buoyed by Seagal’s performance, the film’s action is angry, focused, unapologetic, and still hits hard over thirty years after it was originally released.
Let’s hear it for War of the Worlds, the 2025 film that took one of the greatest science fiction novels ever written and then re-imagined it as something really stupid.
It takes a certain amount of balls to take a book that was written in the 19th century and to adapt it as a low-budget screenlife film. Plus, the idea of making the protagonist an employee of the DHS who abuses his power to monitor his children, and his daughter’s boyfriend? That’s actually kind of clever. Good for you, movie! Way to point out just how invasive our current surveillance state is. It always kind of amazes me that, here in America, we’ve given up so much of the freedom that people died for but, whenever you point that out to people, you just kind of get an apathetic shrug.
You know what isn’t a good idea? Casting Ice Cube as the DHS employee in question.
Ice Cube plays Will Radford, the straight-laced and uptight DHS employee and 90% of the film is basically just shots of him staring at the screen of his laptop. During the day, he argues with his kids and tries to ascertain the identity of a mysterious hacker. He also checks in with Clark Gregg (who plays the head of the DHS) and with a NASA scientist who is played by Eva Longoria. Let’s give some credit where credit is due and admit that Clark Gregg seems to understand exactly what type of film that he’s in and, as such, he gives about as good a performance as anyone could in the role. Eva Longoria, on the other hand, comes across as if she’s just killing time until the next Democratic convention comes around.
But let’s get back to Ice Cube. Ice Cube is not a bad actor. When cast in the right role, he can bring an unbeatable authenticity to the screen. That said, Ice Cube does not have a particularly wide range. When he was cast as the Captain Dickson in 21 Jump Street, the intentional miscasting made for one of the best jokes in the film. In War of the Worlds, when Will starts yelling at his daughter’s boyfriend, it’s hard not to be reminded of Captain Dickson reacting to Jonah Hill dating his daughter in 22 Jump Street. The only problem — well, not the only problem — is that War of the Worlds is not meant to be a comedy.
So, what is War of the Worlds meant to be? It’s not easy to say. It’s certainly not meant to be any sort of tribute to H.G. Wells and his classic novel. If anything, the film seems to take a perverse joy in not caring about the source material. It can be argued that the film is meant to be a commercial for Amazon, seeing as how an Amazon drone plays a key role in the film’s conclusion. Considering that the film was released on Prime, that certainly seems to be a fair interpretation. In the end, even though the villains are ultimately revealed to be some of Will’s colleagues, the film still feels like a perhaps unintentional endorsement of the Surveillance State. Where would be without Ice Cube watching over us?
In 2011, the news broke that 51 year-old Doug Hutchinson had married 16 year-old Courtney Stodden. I can still remember my initial reaction.
“Who?”
Though the stories all made Doug Hutchinson out to be a some sort of household name, I wasn’t sure who he was. This was despite the fact that I had seen The Green Mile and Lost and a few other shows in which he had roles. With the exception of The Green Mile‘s Percy Wetmore, the majority of Hutchinson’s roles were small and he never made enough of an impression for me to really remember him. Doug Hutchinson was not a big star and yet, all of the initial stories about his marriage to Courtney focused on Doug and not on the 16 year-old girl that he had married. The stories often mentioned that Courtney was blonde and a few found an excuse to list her measurements but few really seemed to give much thought to how a 16 year-old ends up married to a 51 year-old. Courtney’s mother was often portrayed as being the ultimate stage mom, pushing her daughter into marrying an older man out of a belief that it would help her career (as if Doug Hutchinson was some sort of power player as opposed to being an occasionally employed character actor).
Today, it’s fashionable for everyone to claim that they were outraged from the moment that they heard about the Hutchinson/Stodden marriage. At the time the story came out, though, most people treated it as just another bit of a salacious gossip from “Hollyweird.” Doug and Courtney appeared on reality shows, including quite a few that featured them getting marriage counseling while the cameras rolled. If Doug was usually portrayed as being an old lech, Courtney was often portrayed as being a young gold digger. (Again, the fact that Doug Hutchinson was hardly a star rarely seemed to factor into these portrayals. He was an actor who had co-starred with Tom Hanks and hence, people assumed he had money.) It’s only now, with the marriage over, that people have really started to acknowledge that Courtney Stodden was a victim of both Doug Hutchinson’s grooming and the world’s tabloid culture.
Lifetime’s I Was A Child Bride: The Courtney Stodden Story dramatizes the story of Courtney’s life and her marriage to Dough Hutchinson. The film was produced by Stodden and she also provides the narration, commenting on what’s happening onscreen and trying to explain what was going through her head at the time. In the dramatization, she’s played by Holly J. Barrett while Doug Hutchinson is played, to creepy perfection, by Doug Savant. Maggie Lawson plays Krista Stoddard, Courtney’s mother. The film follows Courtney as she goes from being pushed into stardom by her mother to then being ordered to give up her career by Doug. When the story of Doug and Courtney’s marriage comes out, Doug mourns that his career is over while Krista excitedly pulls up every online story. When Courtney points out that most of the stories are bad, Krista chirps that all publicity is good publicity. (The film implies that Krista is the one who leaked the details of Courtney and Doug’s marriage to the press.) Soon, teenage Courtney is the breadwinner for both her 51 year-old husband and her mother.
The film is ultimately effective, even if it’s sometimes just as salacious as the tabloids that the movie criticizes. I was proud of Courtney for having finally broken free from Doug. That said, the story leaves quite a few unanswered questions, especially about the extent of the role that Krista played in Doug and Courtney getting married. Parents are always told to be aware of who their children are talking to online. But what do you do when the parents know and just don’t care?
Today’s scene that I love comes from the 1953 film, The War of the Worlds.
It’s a scene that perfectly establishes the fact that, in this film, humanity has no hope when it comes to defeating the Martians that have invaded the planet. Trying to reason with them, as Uncle Matthew does, is useless. Trying to fight them, as the army does, is useless. Matthew is atomized as he approaches in peace. The tough and plain-spoken military man — a reassuring authority figure in so many 50s films — is destroyed as he orders everyone out of the bunker. The Martians, meanwhile, are unstoppable and, even worse, they are without mercy or concern for the people that they are destroying.
Seriously, this is a frightening scene when viewed today! I can only imagine how it traumatized audiences in 1953! After watching this scene, all I can say is Thank God for the common cold.
Through the Shattered Lens 