A Blast From The Past: The Fourth Man (dir by Joanna Lee)

Posted on October 4, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today’s Blast From The Past comes to us from 1990 and it’s a scary one.

In The Fourth Man, Peter Billingsley (yes, the kid from A Christmas Story) plays Joey Martelli, an insecure high schooler who thinks that he’ll be more attractive to girls if he becomes more like his best friend, friendly jock Steve Guarino (Vince Vaughn, making his film debut and already physically towering over everyone else in the cast). With Steve’s encouragement, Joey tries out for the track team and, to everyone’s surprise, he makes it!

Joey is now an athlete. He finally has friends. Girls (including Nicole Eggert) are talking to him. His father (Tim Rossovich) is finally proud of him. But Joey soon discovers that staying on the track team is not an easy task. His coach tells Joey that he has to pick up his speed. Feeling desperate, Joey does what so many other television teenagers before him have done. He starts taking steroids! (Dramatic music cue!) Soon, the kid from A Christmas Story is breaking out in pimples, throwing temper tantrums, and becoming a rage-fueled monster! Joey only took the steroids because he wanted to be as cool as Steve but, unfortunatey, Joey learns too late that Steve’s success and popularity are not due to how big and strong he is but to the fact that he is played by a young Vince Vaughn.

(Myself, I was fortunate enough to go to a high school where the emphasis was placed more on the arts and intellectual pursuits than athletic success. My school didn’t even have its own football field. We had to share with the high school down the street! Anyway, as a result, I don’t think knew anyone in high school who was abusing steroids and I never had to deal with anyone suddenly flying into a rage and punching a hole in a wall or any of the other stuff that always happens whenever anyone abuses steroids on television.)

The Fourth Man was written and directed by Joanna Lee, who is perhaps best known for playing Tanna the Alien in Ed Wood’s Plan Nine From Outer Space. (Lee, it should be noted, had a very long and respected career as a writer and director of television dramas. In many ways, she had the career that Ed Wood imagined that he would someday have.) Along with Billingsley and Vaughn, the cast includes horror mainstay Adrienne Barbeau as Joey’s mother and football player-turned-horror-actor Lyle Alzado as a man who has his own history with steroids. The film has good intentions and a good message about not taking shortcuts and being happy with who you are but I imagine that most people will just want to watch it to see Peter Billingsley descend into roid rage. And I will say that, for all the film’s melodrama, there is something a little bit disturbing about watching fresh-faced Peter Billingsley turn into a physically aggressive bully.

From October of 1990 (and complete with the commercials than ran during the program’s first broadcast), here is The Fourth Man.

Cinemax Friday: Blown Away (1993, directed by Brenton Spencer)

Posted on January 31, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

Rich Gardner (Corey Haim) and his brother, Wes (Corey Feldman) both work at a ski resort in Canada. When Rich rescues the wealthy Megan (Nicole Eggert) from being trampled by a horse, she invites him to attend her 17th birthday party. Despite the fact that he’s already dating Darla (Kathleen Robertson), Rich goes to Nicole’s party. Nicole greets him in her underwear and soon, the two of them are having softcore, late night Cinemax-style sex. It’s only in the morning that Rich discovers that Megan is the daughter of his boss, Cy (Jean LeClerc).

With Wes’s encouragement, Rich continues the affair, even after Cy demands that Rich never see his daughter again. Megan eventually tells Rich that she believes that Cy was responsible for the death of her mother and that she thinks they should kill Cy and, after Megan has gotten her inheritance, run off together. At first, Rich is hesitant but when Megan turns up bruised and claiming that her father beat her up, Rich reconsiders Megan’s proposition.

In many ways, Blown Away is typical of the neo-noirs that used to dominate late night Cinemax in the 90s. Take a faded TV or a film star. Toss in an up-and-coming starlet who is willing to do nudity. Add a dimly lit sex scene or two and a surprise twist at the end. In this case, the surprise twist was actually a good one, the faded stars were the Two Coreys, and the up-and-coming starlet was Nicole Eggert.

Before they become direct-to-video mainstays in the 90s, both Corey Haim and Corey Feldman had a good, if brief, run as legitimate film stars. With their subsequent notoriety, it’s easy to forget that they were two of the busiest and most critically acclaimed child actors of the 80s. Corey Haim appeared in movies like Murphy’s Romance and Lucas while Corey Feldman did The Goonies and Stand By Me. They co-starred in films like The Lost Boys and License to Drive. Unfortunately, neither one of them was able to make the transition from being child stars to adult actors. (It didn’t help that both of them had very public struggles with substance abuse and that the 90s saw both of them developing a unique talent for tracking down the worst projects possible and agreeing to star in them.) Blown Away was one of the first of their post-stardom films and, whatever else you may say about it, it’s definitely better than the majority of the films that the pair made afterwards. (Just try sitting through Dream A Little Dream 2.) After years of playing best friends, Blown Away cast them as brothers who always seem to be on the verge of throwing a punch at each other. When Rich and Wes say that they secretly hate each other, it feels less like a movie and more like real-life couples therapy.

Blown Away is a classic of its kind. Though Rich is not a very sympathetic hero and there’s a few scenes where Haim’s tendency to overact gets in the way of the film, Nicole Eggert is a perfect femme fatale and Corey Feldman again shows that he had more talent than he was usually given credit for. If you can overlook a few plot holes (and not spend too much time worrying about how a bunch of teenagers became experts in setting explosives), the film’s storyline is interesting and far darker than the usual late night Cinemax fare. When people like me talk about being nostalgic for the old days of watching Cinemax after midnight, this is the type of film that we’re talking about.

Movie A Day #178: Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects (1989, directed by J. Lee Thompson)

Posted on July 5, 2017 by Jedadiah Leland

This is the one where Charles Bronson sodomizes a guy with a dildo.

Don’t worry, though. Bronson does it off-screen and the guy was abusing Nicole Eggert so he had it coming.

In Kinjite, Bronson plays Lt. Crowe, a tough LAPD vice cop who hates two groups of people: pedophiles (which is cool, who doesn’t hate them?) and the Japanese (which is not cool). Not only does Crowe sodomize a pervert but he also forces a pimp to eat a gold watch and later, with the help of his partner, he holds another man over the edge of a balcony, just to have that man accidentally slip out of his shoes and plunge to his death. Finally, Crowe tosses a convict into a prison cell, where another prisoner (played by Danny Trejo, in what may have been his film debut) announces that he’s “got something big and long for you.” Crowe chuckles, “That’s justice” and then walks away.

Danny Trejo in Kinjite

Of the many strange films that Bronson made for Cannon Films, Kinjite may be the strangest. The main plot involves Crowe searching for and rescuing the kidnapped daughter of a Japanese businessman (James Pax). Before his daughter was kidnapped, the businessman groped Crowe’s fifteen year-old daughter on a city bus. The entire movie seems to be building up to the moment that Crowe, who is portrayed as being overprotective of his daughter, discovers what the businessman did but that moment never comes. There are numerous scenes of the businessman in Japan but they do not have anything to do with the rest of the plot. Strangely, neither Crowe’s daughter nor his wife (played by Peggy Lipton) are ever menaced by the bad guys. What type of Charles Bronson movie is this?

In Bronson’s defense, he was 71 year-old when he made this movie and, off screen, his wife Jill Ireland was battling the cancer that would eventually take her life. Bronson can be excused for not appearing to be overly invested in Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects. (Since Kinjite means Forbidden Subjects in Japanese, the actual title of this movie is Forbidden Subjects: Forbidden Subjects.) No one appears to have made much of an effort on Kinjite, though Bronson’s stunt double gets a good work out. Kinjite is full of scenes where Bronson throws a punch in close-up but his first in never actually shown connecting with anyone. Most of the action scenes are clumsily filmed so that Crowe keeps his back to the camera. All Kinjite needs is a supporting turn from Troy McClure and a cameo from McGarnagle and it would be perfect viewing for The Simpsons.

Kinjite would be the final film that Bronson made for Cannon Films. It would also be the last Bronson film to be directed by J. Lee Thompson. After Kinjite, Bronson appeared in two more feature films: Sean Penn’s The Indian Runner (which, if not for Penn’s pretentious direction, could have launched Bronson on a second career as a first-rate character actor) and a final Death Wish film. Bronson returned to television, appearing in three made-for-TV movies before retiring in 1999. Bronson died in 2003 but, as long as there are people who enjoy a good action movie, he will never be forgotten.

This scene is not from Kinjite but it’s still pretty fucking cool.

What Lisa Watched Last Night: Wall of Secrets (dir. by Francios Gingras)

Posted on December 30, 2010 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Around 2 in the morning, I found myself watching Wall of Secrets, yet another cheap Canadian “thriller” that has apparently found a second life on the Lifetime Movie Network.

Why Was I Watching It?

My sister (and housemate) Erin was in Arlington babysitting our niece and Jeff’s going to be in Baltimore until New Year’s Eve (I miss him sooooo0000 much!) so I was alone and, as often happens when I’m alone, I couldn’t sleep. Insomnia’s a bitch and so am I after I haven’t been able to sleep more than eight hours in four days. I figured that maybe Wall of Secrets would put me to sleep so I started recording it on DVR (so I could see the rest of it after I woke up — I am the Queen of Wishful Thinking) and then I set up my little bed on the couch and I got as comfy as I could and then I closed my eyes and attempted to allow the sounds of the film lull me into sleep. No, it didn’t work. I ended up just watching the stupid movie instead.

What’s It About?

It’s the one about the newlyweds (Nicole Eggert and Dean “Mr. Tori Spelling” McDermott) who move into this huge, luxurious apartment in Seattle that they shouldn’t be able to afford. However, it seems that all of the previous tenants of the apartment have either died mysteriously or disappeared. As a result, they’re able to get a good deal on the rent.

(I attempted to do the same thing when Erin and I decided on the house we wanted to move into. I insisted to the owner that all of the previous tenants had been murdered and as such, he should really just give the house away. Unfortunately, I did not take into consideration that he was the only previous tenant.)

Anyway, McDermott is career-obsessed which gives Eggert a lot of time to hang out around the apartment, talk to the crazy old woman who lives down the hall, and get attacked by masked strangers. Eventually, she discovers that there’s actually all sorts of survellance equipment hidden in the walls and that someone has been watching her. But who?

What Worked?

Let’s see — there’s a cab driver who is in the film for 5 seconds and gets to say, “Give him Hell, lady!” That made me smile.

Voyeurs hiding in the walls? Its as if someone decided to film my sexual fantasies and then invited the whole world to come to watch!

What Didn’t Work?

My sexual fantasies usually feature better dialogue. And acting.

“Oh My God! Just Like Me!’ Moment

At one point, Eggert wanders around her apartment in just a towel and then realizes that she’s left the blinds wide open. “Oh my God!” I shouted, “That’s just like me!”

Lessons Learned

Always be sure to wear pretty underwear because you never know who might be filming you as you undress.