My Favorite Era: Escape From New York (1981)

Escape From New York (1981)

10/10

John Carpenter's Escape From New York is one of his best, a lean and mean action flick with a bare bones plot and an iconic Kurt Russell performance.  Russell is Snake Plissken, a loner in the classic Clint Eastwood mold (though much more cynical) who has been press ganged into saving the life of the President (Donald Pleasence).  There's good action, a great cast and just an utter sense of coolness that permeates the entire film.  Let's take a closer look.

• First off, this is another one of those films in the 70's and 80's that spawned a bunch of European knockoffs.  The best one is 2019: After the Fall of New York which I have examined elsewhere on the site.
• To the film, it starts us off on the right foot with Carpenter's awesome main title theme.  Carpenter did the music for most of his films and this is one of his better scores.
• The cast is, as I said, awesome.  Russell is great of course but you also get good work from Harry Dean Stanton, Adrienne Barbeau, Ernest Borgnine, Pleasence and Isaac Hayes.  Now that's a damned cast!  We also get bit parts from a few Carpenter regulars such as Charles Cyphers and Tom Atkins.
• I dig the simple, basic way the story is set up with a little text and narration telling us New York City has been turned into a maximum security prison.  Carpenter is generally quite good at this sort of lean storytelling.  I say usually because, well, it has been quite a while since he had a good movie.
• Russell is fantastic as Snake, managing to out-badass Clint Eastwood by simply growling out the few lines of dialogue he has in a whispery drawl while stalking around with his eye patch and a big gun.  He just oozes cool.
• Lee van Cleef is fun as usual as Bob Hauk, the guy who enlists Snake and he brings a certain charm to the role.
• Pleasence is fun as always, though it's a little odd to have the American president played by a rather small bald guy from England.  I've read reviews that say he's a little too wimpy in the part but considering the story requirements, it works to have a crap president in charge of what has become a rather crappy country.  The world the story inhabits is quite well put together and it  makes one wonder what the rest of the world looks like.  Plus, he does get to kill the bad guy at the end while cackling insanely as only Donald can.
• Like most action films of the early 80's, this one takes its time setting up the story.  It's nearly eighteen minutes into the 99 minute running time before Snake is given his task.  Carpenter keeps the film moving though, never letting the viewer become bored.
• Injecting Snake with mini-explosives to make sure he sticks to schedule is also a nice touch.

• The film was put out by Avco/Embassy and released on Embassy Home Video.  Always like the box art.
• I love that some of the denizens of the prison are putting on a Broadway revue.  Just a great touch.
• The trio of Borgnine, Stanton and Barbeau are an entertaining trio as Borgnine provides some good natured humor; Stanton is fun and Adrienne Barbeau is cool as always.

•  Isaac Hayes is great as The Duke of New York.  Cool, eerily calm and casually violent, he's one of Carpenter's better villains.  The chandeliers on the guy's car are a nice touch as well.
• Back to Kurt's performance, one of the great things he does is give Snake a sense of casual urgency.  He wants to get the job done, since it's his neck...literally but the way he goes about it is nicely understated.  He observes and thinks things through, a rarity in the genre.  He's also quite amusing in a dark way,
• Gotta love the fight Snake is out into with a huge mountain of a man (former pro wrestler Ox Baker).
• I get a kick out of Frank Doubleday as The Duke's right hand man.  He's just a weird, bizarre little freak who fits in nicely with the rest of the film.  Doubleday was also in Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 which is also pretty damn good.
• The escape from Duke and the following action sequence with Snake and company trying to cross the heavily mined 69th Street Bridge is pretty good with Carpenter showing no mercy to his characters.  By the end of it all, only Snake and the president are left standing.
• I get a chuckle out of Snake making the president look an idiot as the end credits roll.  It's a nice cynical touch.

Escape From New York is one hell of a fun ride that still works pretty well today.  The 1996 sequel Escape From L.A. is also decent, though it is really just a re-working of the first one which is kind of cool in a way.  The first one is the best, however, with a great Kurt Russell performance, some good action and a fantastic look.

Blasts From the Past: TNT Jackson (1974)

TNT Jackson (1974)

6/10 

TNT Jackson is the breakout film (and that's pushing the term in many ways in this case) of famed Filipino action director Cirio Santiago.  Playboy Playmate Jeanne Bell stars as the title character who travels to Hong Kong after her brother is killed in the first scene.  She teams up with a local fighter named Joe and together, they fight against the local drug dealer and his henchman Charlie (Stan Shaw).

Santiago made the film for Roger Corman's New World Pictures and it's a fairly blatant attempt to create a new Pam Grier since the real deal was just getting popular.  The film is, to be frank, quite terrible.  The action scenes are shot badly with an obvious stunt double for Bell; the film somehow manages to drag despite running a lean 72 minutes, the plot is essentially non-existent, the editing is choppy as hell in places, the score is criminally un-funky  until the last nine minutes or so considering the period in which it was made and for the most part it comes off like a re-hash of any number of better action films of the period.

Performances are not really too much to talk about as Bell is rather wooden and unlikable (though she's very attractive which is the main reason she was hired) though Stan Shaw makes for an acceptably slimy killer.

Having said that, the film is actually pretty entertaining if you like bad kung fu films.  The action is plentiful (the highlight being a pretty decent chick fight and Bell taking on some bad guys while topless), the film is shot badly enough that it's funny and there are the usual out of nowhere twists one gets in this sort of film that generally make one chuckle.  The  bad guy's girlfriend turning out to be a fed is a decent enough twist but the payoff of her killing the drug dealer (and herself in the process) comes off as perfunctory.

TNT Jackson is not a good movie by any stretch but it's worth seeing if you're in search of something bad in a funny way.

My Favorite Era: Starcrash (1979)

Starcrash (1979)

7/10 

Once again we venture into the world of cheesy Italian versions of hit movies with the wonderfully daft riff on Star Wars, Starcrash.  Caroline Munro (herself alone worth giving this film a good review) is Stella Star, our ostensible hero for the evening though she doesn't do nearly as much as one would expect from a lead character.  Joining her in her fight against evil are former child evangelist Marjoe Gortner as Akton, her mysterious alien sidekick, Judd Hamilton as a robotic cop and the immortal David Hasslehoff.

Opposing them is the evil Lord Zarth Arn, overlord of the universe, played by the late Joe Spinell and Christopher Plummer also has a supporting role as Emperor of the universe.  Add to that a soundtrack from John Barry and  this easily beats seven shades of crap out of Galaxina!

Not that that's a tall order, as anyone who has seen that film (including myself) will tell you.

Luigi Cozzi directs and I have to say that he may be my favorite director of Italian genre pictures, right along with Lucio Fulci and Enzo Castellari.  When you go into one of his sci-fi movies, you pretty much know what you're going to get.  Cheesily awesome starscapes (he uses the same ones here that he does in the Hercules movies), lots of action and blissful insanity.

The plot is fairly episodic as Stella and Akton are enlisted by Plummer's Emperor to find his missing son Simon (The Hoff!) and stop Zarth Arn and his super weapon (concealed in a planet), going to several different planets and getting into wild, cheesily fun battles.  To be honest, the plot of the actual Star Wars movies aren't much more deep than this one.  The only real difference is one of budget as the pacing here is just as breakneck.

Munro is hot as usual, though her voice is dubbed for some odd reason, as is Joe Spinell's.  Actually, in the case of Joe I can see it since an evil overlord of the universe probably shouldn't sound like a numbers guy from Brooklyn.  Come to think of it, I think most of the actors are dubbed here.

Still, even dubbed the guy manages to deliver a wonderfully hammy performance, even if he doesn't really do all that much besides stalk around his fist shaped ship (because he's evil) and shout.

The rest of the cast has fun too with Gortner turning in a wooden but entertaining performance, Plummer doing his usual and...Well, that's about it really.  Hasslehoff doesn't get to do much but the simple fact that he's there makes this a must-see for fans of cheese.  To be fair, he does take a turn with a lightsaber, so there's that...Which is nice.

Action is pretty damn good, some nice space battles and one scene where Akton cuts loose with a lightsaber.  It's just simply, goofy fun.

The same can be said for the movie as a whole.  Sure, the f/x are cheap, the plot is goofy, the dialogue inane and the acting wooden but honestly, it's such a blast to watch it just doesn't matter.  Pacing is good, Caroline Munro is scantily clad throughout, we get giant robots, Amazons, if nothing else it's a lot more fun that The Phantom Menace!

Starcrash is one of the more entertaining bad films you will find.  It's worth checking out, just don't expect anything brilliant.

Blasts From the Past: Licensed Video Games

I'm not really an avid gamer (the last system I owned was a Super Nintendo and I take an unreasonable amount of pride in having mastered the Nintendo 64 controller in 2004 or so, at the expense of the sanity of one of my cousins.

Having said that, I've played my fair share of video games based on hit movies (as in a bunch of stuff before 1995) plus one or two more recent ones.  So here it is, the good the bad and the ugly of my licensed gaming travels.

 Let's start off with a few that are good, though I never beat the damn things.

 A legend of 16 bit gaming, this is also one of the most horrifically difficult games I have ever tried to play.  I also has just regular Star Wars for the Gameboy and good lord, I think trying to beat it may have given me some sort of mental disorder.

 Had the non-super version of this on Gameboy as well and I have never made it past the Hoth levels on either version.

 Ditto for this one, though it's a very enjoyable game to play.

 I actually like this one quite a bit as it puts the first three movies into one giant game (something I always thought would have been cool for the James Bond series to do) and it's actually quite awesome providing you like the 16 bit era.  I made it to the very last level but never quite pulled it off.  Still, a damn fine game and you get to play Harrison Ford.

 This actually surprised me as I didn't really care for the film but the game is a pretty nice (though really long) shoot-em-up.  Bonus points for playing Kurt Russell which is just cool.  It gets a little repetitious but the bad guys are pretty easy to kill (your character is basically nearly impossible to kill) and it's a pretty decent challenge.

Equally challenging but nowhere near as fun are these two games based off of mid-90's Stallone flicks.  I'd mention the Cliffhanger game, but I never played more than thirty seconds of the thing before giving up.

 The first level of this is actually pretty entertaining.  The rest of the game I've seen... Well, the first level is okay.

 This one is just a royal pain in the ass to play.  That is all I have to say about it, really.

Next we have a prime example of how to do a good movie to game adaptation and how not to do one.

 This is a fantastic, difficult but manageable, fun game that sticks to the film and is a hell of a lot of fun to play.  Hell, it even holds up today.

 This however, is a steaming pile of excrement.

 I don't why but for some reason, I played this a lot when I was a kid.  It was fairly decent, as far as Gameboy games go.

 Let's go for something a little more recent (a ten year old game still counts in this case) with this pretty acceptable 007 first-person-shooter.  The missions are okay (but really repetitive after a while) and while there are some fun shootouts the last level is just a royal pain to try and beat.  I had the PC version and after beating it once or twice, I just used the three or four levels I actually enjoyed to blow off steam after a bad day at work.

 This one is actually a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine (as is the one below) as while both of these games are decent, the regular film adaptation is a little too easy to beat (my best time was about thirty minutes I think) and the arcade version is too hard to beat.

 And now, I have to vent about a really, really, horrible piece of garbage.

 This is maybe the worst thing I have ever tried to play in my entire life.  Confusing, virtually impossible to play, the fact that the Gameboy version is better is the worst thing I can say about it.  And that version sucks, believe me.  I played it a lot, I know.  Just awful.

With that being said, here's my favorite SNES game of all time.

There are so many things about this admittedly bland shooter that are hilarious it just boggles the mind.,  The Arnold sprite is funny (it looks like Arnie hit Dunkin' Donuts for a week before the game starts), you get some hilariously overdone blood pools after you kill a bad guy (and there are tons of them) and the ending is a bit of a cop-out as you have to just kill this guy weilding two machine guns and then you get digitized screens from the end of the actual film.  Honestly, the best way to play this is to use the cheat codes that give you invincibility and unlimited ammo.  That way, you're genuinely emulating a Schwarzenegger film!

VHS Memories XXXIV: Embassy Home Video

Been a long time since I did one of these but I really wanted to highlight one last VHS distributor.  Embassy was one of my favorites, from the catalog of titles to the logo itself, it just oozed coolness to me.  They released titles from 1981 to 1986 after which they were bought by Nelson Entertainment who kept the releases going for another few years.  Here's a nice cross section of stuff from Embassy, Nelson and sublabel Charter Entertainment which went the way of the dodo after the sale.  There are a few things here I've talked about before and some things I will into in the future, enjoy.

 The classic Mel Brooks comedy was one of their early releases.  Dig the sparse design too, though there are variations I prefer more.  As for the movie, it speaks for itself really, one of the funniest things ever with a hilarious Gene Wilder performance and tons of other great stuff.

 Not a lot to say, I just always dug those highlight reel tapes.  Good stuff.

 Chuck's first real movie, this is a dubbed Hong Kong action flick from the early 70's with Chuck as the main bade guy.  Embassy would also release Breaker!, Breaker! and An Eye for an Eye.

 This is the last film from the late William Girdler, one of the more interesting 70's b-movie directors.  He also made the Jaws rip-off Grizzly.

 John Stamos: Action Hero!  Yeah, not really.  Having the front man for KISS as the main bad guy wasn't a good move either.

 They also put out  a stack of Roger Corman productions, such as these women in prison flicks from The Philippines.

There are some good releases from Corman's New World pictures I've written about before.

 Gotta love this cheesy ghost story/devil movie.  Good stuff.

 One of the last great exploitation films Corman produced...

 And here might be the absolute last great one.

Since the company was big in the 80's, they naturally put out their fair share of slasher flicks.

 A great sleaze classic with an amazingly over the top Wing Hauser performance.

 I saw this at last on Blu-ray (thank god for Shout Factory) and it's a fun, cheesy, surprisingly dark at times little horror flick.  Not exactly good, but still pretty neat.  Awesome cover as well.

To round things off, the titles that I always went for whenever I wanted to go on a rental binge (thanks to Amazon Instant Video, this tendency lives on).

 One of my all-time favorites.

 I actually prefer the more lurid Embassy cover but alas, I can't find it anywhere.  Fantastic film too.

And that's Embassy in a nutshell.  Until next time...

My Favorite Era: Caddyshack (1980)

My Favorite Era: Caddyshack (1980)

9/10 

 Caddyshack is one of the great 80's comedies.  A typical "slobs vs snobs" type story, it nevertheless has become one of the most quotable movies ever.  The directorial debut of Harold Ramis, it is ostensibly about young caddy Danny Noonan (Michael O'Keefe) and his search for a good role model and a win in a golf tournament that will help pay for college.  What it's really about, however, is putting Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Rodney Dangerfield and Ted Knight in the same movie and telling them to have a good time.  It's the quintessential 80's slobs vs. snobs comedy, let's take a closer look at my ten favorite bits (in no particular order), seeing as it's been pretty much reviewed to death.

1. Chevy Chase is hilarious through the entire film (ah, the days before he stopped giving a damn) but his best stuff comes when he's sharing scenes with Ted Knight.  Both guys are funny and the way Chase just insults Knight is just great.  Chase was really in his prime at this point, a prime that would last until the end of the 80's.  Literally.  Christmas Vacation is the last thing he's done even remotely good.
2. Ted Knight was a terrific comic actor (his blustering rage is always good for a chuckle) and his portrayal of Judge Smails is a masterpiece of arrogant snobbery.
3. Bill Murray is a force of nature here, coming in and out of the film with just the most hilarious bits of business imaginable.  Cleaning golf balls in a suggestive manner, tossing off oddball speeches, his war with the gopher, I think I actually like him here more than Dangerfield.
4. A small note, I love all the side characters at the country club.  The various caddies are funny; the club members are just wonderfully snobbish, Smails' nephew is just amazingly funny and I even get a kick out of Danny's girlfriend Maggie (Sarah Holcomb).  Though to be fair, it's just the hideous fake Scottish accent.  As far as her part in the film, it's pretty dire.
5. Rodney Dangerfield is, as many others have noted, a force of nature in this movie.  He pretty much just does his act and that's more than enough as he's hysterical.  Hell, even his golf bag is funny!
6. O'Keefe is pretty good as Danny, he has a few funny moments with the various characters and he's an okay anchor for the ostensible plot of the film.
7. Cindy Morgan is sexy and funny as Lacy, her stuff with Chevy is quite entertaining.
8. I love Kenny Loggins' 80's output and the main song he contributes for this one (I'm Alright) is a great one.
9. The lone scene with Chase and Murray is a marvel of improvisational comedy as two really awesome comics go back and forth.  It's just a fantastic scene.
10. Apart from the laughs and the numerous great moments, I think what I like most about the film is its willingness to just tell a story by existing, rather than going from Point A to Point B.  This usually doesn't work, and to be frank it's a pretty stupid idea to try regularly but if you get the right folks together at the right time and place, it can work.

 Caddyshack is a comedy classic that happened at just the right time and place.  It's just hilarious.

Blasts From the Past: Post #200-10 Of the Worst Films I've Ever Bought

Wow, post #200!  While some folks would take an opportunity like this to sing their own praises and make themselves look good, I am made of different stuff.  As one might have gathered from reading this blog, I'm a movie buff.  I've seen tons of films and have bought tons.  As with all things, some of those purchases are...less than wise, to put it gently.

Therefore, here are ten of the worst movies I have ever purchased.  One or two of these I've written about elsewhere, some of them I can actually justify but all of them would (and should) make anybody of a sane and rational mind raise a quizzical eyebrow.  Also, there are a few I'm leaving off for space purposes.  These are just ten of the more egregious choices.  I won't be reviewing the films necessarily but rather why the hell I bothered to buy them in the first place.  Yes, rather than taking the piss out of the films, I'll be taking the piss out of the dummy who bought them.  Me.

10. Batman & Robin (1997)

In all fairness, this one really shouldn't count seeing as I bought it as a box set with the other three Burton Schumacher entries.  That being said, Batman and Robin is a genuinely excruciating experience that is both unpleasant visually and aurally.  George Clooney is actually sort of okay as Batman (though he pretty much head-bobs his way through the entire movie which is his go-to signal for "Screw this, time to phone it in") and it is sort of fun to watch Arnold Schwarzenegger ham it up as Mr. Freeze (though he should never be allowed to cry on screen ever again) but everything else is just noise and neon with rubber nipples and molded groins.  Just terrible.

9. Jaws: The Revenge (1987)

Now this one I can sort of justify as it's one of the funniest unintentional comedies of all time and I was thinking of writing an article about it for The Agony Booth at one point (the list of stalled projects I have for that place is immense.  More on that later).  Michael Caine earns money for a new house; shark f/x in 1987 somehow look more primitive than those from 1975, a shark follows Lorraine Gary all the way from New England to the Bahamas in order to avenge its death, a franchise dies and the only reason it's this low on the list is because it's just so damn funny.

8. Hudson Hawk (1991)

Most folks (most being a rather large understatement) hate this Bruce Willis comedy and I freely admit it's not very good but for some ungodly reason, I dig it.  It's tonally confused, way too goofy for its own good and every single frame screams out vanity project but somehow it works for me.  Having said that, there is no sane excuse for me buying the special edition.  Not even writing an article on it for Agony Booth can justify that.

7. The Avengers (1998)

 Equally bizarre is the fact that I paid money for this muddled, confused, utter bore of a movie that tries for the whimsical strangeness of the TV series and misses by a huge margin.  Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman look bored, Sean Connery is in "I got a house payment" mode and the whole thing is so confusing that I couldn't even manage to make it into an Agony Booth article.  And I once devoted 12,000 words to Howling II, folks.  I can take confusion!

6. John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars (2001)

I don't have too many bad habits but one of them is definitely an intensely impulsive nature when it comes to buying movies (I know, from a guy who purchased The Avengers and Hudson Hawk that's a shock), especially when the film is from a director I genuinely admire.  John Carpenter is maybe my favorite director of all time (at least if you count his output up to 1988 plus In the Mouth of Madness) and I was dying to catch his 2001 sci-fi horror epic Ghost of Mars.  The premise sounded cool, the cast was cool...sort of, and I damn near drove the poor bastard at Blockbuster crazy trying to find it.  I should have let it be and caught it on TNT.  God, is that film a stinker!  I almost feel sorry for having driven the clerk nuts, but then again he was a bit of an ass anyhow and the service at that particular store was sub-par at best.  Customer service is vital folks, vital.

5. Casino Royale (1967)

Now being the huge James Bond fan that I am, owning this terrible spoof is somewhat understandable.  It's loud, it's stupid and there are maybe only one or two real laughs in the entire 130 minute running time but still, it's Bond so I can justify it on that level.  What's a little shaky is that I not only own the first version that was released, but also the 2007 collector's edition.  I don't know, I just don't know.

And now, we really get to the part where my sanity/intelligence/worth as a member of the species comes into question.

4. Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation

I sort of planned on doing something on the franchise as a whole but that never panned out but what really makes this an unconscionable purchase is that I watched this non cable one bleary eyed Friday night in college...And I hated it.  Every single stupid, annoying, shrill, nonsensical moment.  Like the other sequels, it's essentially a loose remake of the original but here Leatherface turns out to be a cross-dresser, Matthew McConaughey and Renee Zellweger find a reason to fire their agents and the big twist has something to do with the Illuminati and a fear experiment.  And for some reason, even though I have no plans on doing that article (since I'd have to cover the recent reboots as well which is another story altogether), I own this piece of crap.

3. The Haunting

This may be the most inexcusable entry since I saw this in the theater and loathed it.  I can't even tell you why I bought the VHS, it's just...I can't explain it.  The film is, as anyone who has seen it can attest, is awful with no scares, too much CGI and no reason for existing.  The only reason this is not #1 is that the last two are worse quality wise, and the stories behind my owning them are more amusing.

2. Leonard Part 6

Yes, I, a man who likes to consider himself rather picky when it comes to comedy, owns a movie so awful that even the star told people not to go see it when it came out in theaters.  Bill Cosby was right, as this is maybe the worst comedy I've ever tried to sit through.  It's so un-funny that the only way to wring a single laugh from it is to tell you how I came to own it.

The market I work at carries DVDs.  Some new releases, but for the most part we have a smattering of catalog titles that the studio could only pawn off on a supermarket.  One evening, it was a bit on the quiet side and I saw that this monstrosity was stocked, for the very low price of $3.33.  Seeing that I was the closer that evening, I decided to purchase the film after my shift, as it is much easier to justify a purchase like that after midnight than before.  Needless to say, my co-workers were perplexed and to honest, I am too.  Not sure what the hell I was thinking, I just had to see it for myself.


1. Mad Dog Time

 Just having to see it for myself is also the reason I paid for this, an incomprehensibly bad crime comedy from 1996 that ended up on Siskel & Ebert's worst of the year show.  I can't even describe the plot as I'm fairly certain there is none to be found.  It's just long stretches of pointless dialogue punctuated by someone getting shot.  Odd as it may seem, having two noted film critics take a film out behind a barn and beat it senseless makes me want to see the damned thing...And I did.  The video store I used to frequent had it on clearance, discounted to $2.50 from $5.00.  I often wonder what that money could have gone to if I hadn't spent it on an abysmal Tarantino knock-off made by Richard Dreyfuss and a bunch of other talented actors who should have known better, as should I.  Maybe I am crazy.

Nah!

Thanks for reading, more to come soon.