Cleaning Out the DVR: Scared Straight! Another Story (dir by Richard Michaels)

Posted on August 4, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Who is ready to be scared straight … again!?

Scared Straight! Another Story is a made-for-television movie from 1980. As you can tell by the name, the movie was inspired by the documentary Scared Straight! and the addition of Another Story to the title would lead one to suspect that this was actually a follow-up or continuation to that documentary and I guess it kind of is. A group of teenagers, all of whom have been in trouble with the law, are sent to a prison where they are finger-printed, forced to stay in a cell, and then yelled at by a bunch of prisoners who assure them that they don’t have what it takes to survive in prison. Then, just as in the documentary, the teenagers leave the prison. Some of them continue to get in trouble and some of them are scared straight. As for the prisoners, they remain imprisoned.

The main difference is that, instead of featuring real prisoners and real delinquents, Scared Straight! Another Story is a dramatization. As a result, the prisoners are saying the same thing that they said in the first Scared Straight! but now the prisoners themselves are played by actors who will be familiar to anyone who has watched enough old TV shows. The prisoners may be yelling about how much life sucks but the viewer knows that they are all actors and, as a result, Scared Straight! Another Story lacks the rough authenticity of the first film. (It also doesn’t help that most of the profanity from the original documentary has been replaced with softer expressions of disgust.) The film again makes the argument that the Scared Straight program can turn someone’s life around but it’s not as effective because, again, the troubled teens are all actors. The viewer knows that they’re actors. Their lives have already been turned around.

Surprisingly, the scenes of the prisoners yelling are the least effective parts of this film. Instead, Scared Straight! Another Story works best when it is exploring everyone’s life before and after the trip to the prison. Stan Shaw, in particular, is effective as a prisoner who is inspired to take part in the program after he comes across the body of an inmate who has been driven to suicide. Also well-cast is Terri Nunn, playing Lucy, the girlfriend of a small-time drug dealer. Both she and her boyfriend are scared straight but it turns out to be too little too late as her boyfriend is eventually sent to jail for the crimes that he committed before the program. (There’s an interesting scene, one that I wish had been explored in greater detail, where Lucy’s father observes the scared straight program and, instead of understanding that prison is a terrible place to send a kid, reacts by saying that the prisoners are all getting what they deserve.) Finally, Cliff De Young, who has played a lot of corrupt government agents and out-of-touch teachers over the course of his career, gets a sympathetic role as Paul, the idealistic juvenile probation officer who sends three of his clients to the program. The program works for two of them while the other eventually ends up joining the inmates who previously tried to warn him. If nothing else, the film deserves some credit for admitting that the Scared Straight program isn’t going to magically reform everyone who attends.

Despite some good performances, Scared Straight! Another Story lacks the rough edged authenticity of the documentary. It’s just not as effective when you know that everyone, including the prisoners, could go home at the end of the day. Today, this is one of those films that is mostly interesting as a historical artifact. Apparently, there really was a time when anything could inspire a TV movie.

The Bingo Longo Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976, dir. by John Badham)

Posted on May 31, 2021 by Dazzling Erin

Up until 1947, Major League Baseball was segregated. Though there was no written rule barring blacks from playing on major league teams, there was an agreement among the team owners that no blacks would be signed to a major or minor league contract. Instead, starting in the 1920s, black players could only play for the teams in the Negro League. It was in the Negro Leagues that future greats like Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays got their start. Josh Gibson, who spent his entire career playing in the Negro Leagues, is believed to have hit more home runs in a season than Babe Ruth ever did. For that reason, many baseball fans believe that any MLB records set before 1947 should come with an asterisk included. How can you determine who was the best when many of the best players in the game were never allowed to compete against each other?

The Bingo Longo Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings is a comedy that pays tribute to those players. Billy Dee Williams plays Bingo Longo, a charismatic pitcher who plays in the Negro Leagues but who, frustrated with the money that he’s earning and the owner’s callous attitude towards the players, breaks away and forms his own independent, barnstorming baseball team, the All-Stars Among the players that he recruits are catcher and power hitter Leon Carter (James Earl Jones) and Charlie Snow (Richard Pryor), who is constantly changing his name and lying about his background in an attempt to get signed to the major leagues. Bingo also steals a player named Esquire Joe (Stan Shaw) away from one of the teams that the All-Stars defeat.

Going across the country and playing other teams, the Bingo Longo Traveling All-Stars make a name for themselves as both players and showmen. Though Leon just wants to concentrate on playing the game, Bingo understands that importance of putting on a show for the people in the stands. They start out playing other independent black teams but soon, they’re even playing against amateur white teams. The games against the white teams are tense, as the All-Stars ever know how the people in the stands are going to react when the All-Stars win. The All-Stars usually do win, though. They’re the best and they’re not going to let the people watching forget it.

The Bing Longo Traveling All-Stars is a good film, especially if you’re interested in the history of baseball. It’s an episodic comedy with the emphasis on the various situations that the members of the All-Stars find themselves in as they travel from town to town but there’s also a serious subtext. The All-Stars are proving to a League that refuses to let them play that they are the best. At the same time, no matter how many games they win, the All-Stars still have to deal with living a society that treats them like second-class citizens. Even though they win on the field, they still have a hard time finding a hotel to stay at. It’s a movie that will make you laugh but it also makes you think. Billy Dee Williams is perfect in the role of Bingo Longo and James Earl Jones is the type of player that anyone would want on their team. The Bingo Longo Traveling All-Star & Motor Kings is a good film for both baseball fans and people who have never even heard of the designated hitter rule.

Film Review: Cutthroat Island (dir by Renny Harlin)

Posted on September 19, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today is Talk Like A Pirate Day which, let’s just be honest, is an extremely stupid holiday that mainly exists to remind us that “doubloon” is a deeply silly word.

Doubloons were a currency that were popular in Europe and South America back in the 18th century and pirates were always looking for doubloons. If you listen to enough pirate talk, you’ll quickly discover that there’s a lot different ways to say the word doubloon. Some people put the emphasis on the fist syllable while others emphasize the second. Some people say Due-bloon while others say Duh-bloon. Either way, it’s impossible to listen to pirates talk about doubloons without thinking that they sound very, very silly. The secret behind the success of The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is an understanding that it’s impossible to take pirates seriously.

Unfortunately, I chose not to watch The Pirates of the Caribbean for Talk Like A Pirate Day. Instead, I watched 1995’s Cutthroat Island.

Cutthroat Island is a story of pirates, a lost treasure, and one big sea battle that literally seems to go on and on. There is occasional talk of doubloons, though not enough for my liking. Instead, most of the film deals with the efforts of Morgan (Geena Davis) to find a hidden treasure before her uncle, Dawg (Frank Langella), discovers it. Morgan has one-third of a map. It was originally tattooed on her father’s head. After he died, she scalped him and took over his boat. She also purchased a swashbuckling slave named Shaw (Matthew Modine) because Shaw is capable of reading Latin, the language in which the map is written. Needless to say, Shaw and Mogan fall in love while Dawg teams up with corrupt colonial officials to not only track down the treasure but to also capture his niece.

The film starts out as a romance with a dash of comedy before eventually transforming into a standard action movie. That means that boats get blown up and there’s a lot of scenes of people fencing. There’s also a lot of slow motion footage of bodies plunging into the ocean. The climatic battle goes on forever and it actually features Morgan hissing, “Bad dawg!” at her uncle.

(Amazingly, “Bad Dawg” isn’t the worst of the dialogue to be heard in Cutthroat Island. Morgan has a habit of saying stuff like, “I will maroon you on a rock the size of this table, instead of splattering your brains across my bulkhead” and “Since you lie so easily and since you are so shallow, I shall lie you in a shallow grave.”)

Throughout the film, there are hints of what Cutthroat Island could have been, if it hadn’t been such a by-the-numbers action flick. The fact that it was Morgan who was continually rescuing Shaw was a nice change-of-pace from the usual damsel-in-distress clichés that one finds in most pirate movies. When Morgan effortlessly breaks the neck of a soldier and sets free her crew, it’s a great moment, comparable to Angelina Jolie taking out Liev Schreiber in Salt or Milla Jovovich kicking zombie ass in a Resident Evil film. Unfortunately, director Renny Harlin (who was married to star Geena Davis, at the time) is usually too concerned with getting to the next action set piece to truly take advantage of the film’s subversive potential.

Frank Langella is smart enough to bellow his way through his villainous role while Matthew Modine appears to be so amused by the film’s terrible dialogue that it’s impossible not to like him. Geena Davis is convincing when she’s breaking necks and swinging swords but she delivers her dialogue like someone who has already figured out that the movie was a bad idea and resigned herself to the fact that her film career will never recover. She doesn’t appear to be having any fun, which kind of defeats the purpose of being a pirate.

Cutthroat Island was a huge and notorious box office flop and it’s still considered to be one of the biggest financial disasters in film history. Apparently, Hollywood was so traumatized that it would be another 8 years before there was another major pirate production. That production, of course, was Pirates of the Caribbean, a film that captured the fun that was so lacking in Cutthroat Island.