Coming Soon: The Savage Five

This intro is for an Errol Flynn movie, but you get the drift....

As a fifth grader, I took my kung fu where I could get it. In the early 80's, theme weeks were a good choice. Southeastern Wisconsin picked up Chicago very well. WGN TV out of Chicago gave you a lot of movie "theme weeks", which very often tossed cheaply priced, oriental Shaw Brothers-produced 1970's martial arts opuses at you. David Chiang and Ti Lung, (yes, THAT Ti Lung, John Woo's muse, partnered with Chow-Yun-Fat a few times) raise this above "The Flying Guillotine" and "The Seven Deadly Venoms" with ease. It was good stuff....

Coming Soon: Shogun Assasin

In the very near future, I will be posting my MISULF take on the "Wolf and Cub" saga. "Shogun Assassin"
This was one of my "Spectrum Specials". Spectrum was the first run movie channel cast out into the midwestern airwaves using rented antenna power in Chicago. You pay, you watch. Sometimes you stay up after dark to watch some naughtiness or some awesome Samurai madness. Oh, the days of pre-cable viewing to those of us in the "BOONIES".

I was too young to stay up that late.

DIRTY MARY, CRAZY LARRY

In the late 70's in the Will household, it's obvious to say there was no cable. Get your listings from the paper. A solid week's worth of scheduling on about 4 pages of a "PARADE"--sized publication insert.

So, it was easy for a little chap like myself to scan the black and white newsprint, hopefully to find out if "White Lightning", "Eat My Dust", "Vanishing Point", or my personal fave, "Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry" were going to be aired anytime that week.

It was more miss than hit, but one of the local Milwaukee or Chicago stations would pop one of them on more than once a year, giving me a decent reason to scan the publication.

I'm no gearhead now, not even close, but as a boy I loved the car-chase movie. The roar of the engine, the endless action shots of Burt Reynolds, Barry Newman, Ron Howard, or yes, Peter Fonda whipping the steering wheel around like Devo on Acid.

Who needs plotline. Fonda, playing Larry, and his partner rip off a grocery store, pick up an idiotic airhead, Mary, along the way, and run for it. Vic Morrow, some kind of helicopter pursuit expert, is put on the case, and the chase, one that may be the longest ever filmed, ensues.

Some banter, which makes Adam Roarke the only sympathetic one of the three running from the law, is juvenile and poorly executed. Although there is a nice moment where Roarke befriends Mary, played by 70's iconette Susan George, when Fonda's character lets his assholeishniss get way out of control and pushes her. As far as emotional content, that's about as far as this one goes.

I gotta say, I showed this movie to my son earlier this summer, and he disagrees with me on the ending. There's a TON of c.b. chatter in the second half of this flick, and a lot of it is dialogue between Morrow and Fonda in the final chase segment. Just when it looks like the rogues have it made, and Morrow appears to be backing off as evidence by Oscar-worthy repartee, Fonda's Charger crashes right into a train.

Credits roll.

Greatest. Ending. Ever.

GRIZZLY

It's no secret that this movie is a blatant rip off of the "Jaws" formula, so I'm gonna get the hows out of the way right off the bat.

Locale: State forest, being ravaged by unusually aggressive Grizzly bear, is on brink of being closed down for the busiest holiday time of the year. Needless to say, the Superintendent is not thrilled.

Hero: Park Ranger (Christopher George) sick of being muscled by the bureaucrats, bent on stopping the horrific bear killings.

Grizzled Naturalist: Although, unlike Hooper of "Jaws", being a rich kid with lots of high-tech toys, he's a freakin' weirdo who lays around in strange woodland disguises, trying to record info on the local wildlife.

Pilot with war stories: Andrew Prine plays a helicopter pilot who helps in the search for the bear, even spins a campfireside yarn about Vietnam bloodbaths, ala Robert Shaw's lengthy USS Indianapolis monologue in "Jaws".

And an exploding killer creature.

The whys. To make money. "Grizzly" was the highest grossing independent film of it's year, which I believe was 1976. A surprising amount of blood for a PG-rated movie makes the movie still maintain an occasional shock value, but the FX are terrible, and some of the acting is even worse.

Lots of nice scenery though. Gorgeous woodland locales. I stayed up late for this one many times. It's a true crap classic.

TERROR IN THE AISLES

At the absolute apex of the slasher barrage in the early to mid 80's, a hollywood studio compilation was released, hosted and narrated by Nancy Allen (Dressed to Kill, Carrie) and Donald Pleasence (Halloween, Prince of Darkness) that brought you the best elements of horror and suspense from the current and most recent film runs, to classics going back to Hitchcock, arguably the master of suspense as it's obvious Carpenter and DePalma were striving to give the audience the jibes and apprehensions that Alfred created.


The film was released in 1984 as "Terror in the Aisles", but due to what apparently are legal rights issues from the obvious plethora of film clips being used from multiple studios, putting out a proper issue of this movie on DVD would probably be more costly than it would be worth. The Japanese have released it under the title "This is Shock". I'm sure it's available on Amazon or Ebay. Original copies of the American release on VHS I'm quite sure are easily acquireable.

But good luck, it may cost you a few bucks. More recent horror docs, such as "Going to Pieces", "American Nightmare", among others do give you the nice historical perspective, but not the class of having Pleasence and Allen, with their horror pedigrees as your hosts and guides through classic moments of shock.



It's getting near Halloween, it's that time of year, and this film is perfect. Good Luck.

THE CAR

http://www.hulu.com/the-car



It was long before James Brolin became Mr. Streisand. It was long before he put on his overacting clinic in "The Amityville Horror". It was years before the novel, "Christine" by Stephen King and the John Carpenter masterpiece adaptation that followed.

It was "The Car".

For some reason a very large vehicle that is of a rather nondescript and unidentifiable design is possessed by the devil. Why? You got me there.

It is "The Car"

It hangs around peoples houses and revs it's satanic engine and honks it's rather unintimidating devil-horn. It's future victims walk around in the dark and appear shocked, make stupid phone calls, and for some reason, when it's headlights, accompanied by a synthesizer "sting" explode into brightness get frightened beyond all help.

Because it's "The Car".

It waits outside metal graveyard fencing for the innocents hiding inside to come out, for it cannot enter hallowed ground. It's metal. It can wait.

It is "The Car."

At the end, the car falls off a cliff and blows up, and a devilish face can be seen in the rising conflagration emanating from it's detanation.

It is "The Car".

And I stayed up late for it.

And slept like a baby.

FOOD OF THE GODS

It's been a while, but my current foray into "Movies I Stayed Up Late For" is the 1976 drive-in late night TV staple, "The Food of the Gods".

It's an absolute Godawful piece of claptrap that did nothing upon it's cinematic release but induce projectile vomiting and groans of disdain. It starred former child-evangelist (you read that right) Marjoe Gortner. He was being ballyhooed in the early 70's as "the embodiment of cinematic masculinity" (!) but never amounted to much more than a B-movie semi-icon.

This cinematic achievement was a quaint little story about chemical corruption. It seems there's these jars labelled "FOTG" sitting on the shelves of some elderly farmer's barns. (elderly farmers barns in 70's movies, always seem to have great things hiding inside them) Some animals and insects start to eat some of the mystery juice that was accidentally spilled causing them to grow awful damn huge, develop nasty dispositions and wreak general havoc all over the rural area. (You know, eating people and stuff).

The movie was forgettable (and regrettable) beyond this great cliffhanger ending: The final shots show some of the dumped compound running off into a river. Through snappy editing, the river flows downstream (where else does a river flow, Rob?) and (gasp) some cows drink from the river. The next shots are composed in a dairy, then show a child (hold on to your butts!) drinking from a milk carton in her school lunch. Oh My God! Wait a tic, what's gonna happen? Is she gonna be an NBA player or what? Not to mention they forgot to take the scientific theory of dilution into consideration. How effective would the substance be when broken down into parts per million, and several miles of riverflow? Not well thought out, boys, but yet again, how well thought out was the concept of this movie?

Wait a minute, I'm the guy who stayed up late for it. Heh, I was a kid, right?......right?


ADDENDUM: In 1988, I remember breezing through the daily information colossus known to those "in the know" as THE WAUSAU DAILY HERALD, and seeing the cineplex (if it could be called that) down by the mall showing (probably on the screen downstairs that's no bigger than my living room TV where I saw "Good Morning, Vietnam" in it's 347th week of release) "Food of the Gods 2", a Canadian opus trying to cha-ching in on the 12 year old success of the original.

Wait a minute, the first did nothing. This makes no sense. How did the theatre manager get horranged into carrying this stupid movie anyway? Did the distributor offer him a "Food of the Gods 2" hat? These filmmakers tried to pull of the cinematic equivalent of a sequel to oh, say, "Swept Away", Madonna's movie a few years back that made something like 65000 clams in it's opening weekend despite the star's marquee name. Go figure. I should fund and release a sequel to "Satan's Cheerleaders". It would be as intelligent.