Anthony Perkins plays yet another emotionally disturbed man with severe parental issues in this extremely lame Made-for-TV movie from producer Aaron (Charlie’s Angels) Spelling and director Curtis (Ruby) Harrington.  Perkins stars as this schmo named Allan who stupidly let his father burn to death in a house fire.  Wracked with guilt, he becomes psychosomatically blind and has to be institutionalized.  When his vision goes from pitch black to blurry, he is released into the care of his sister (Julie Harris) who runs a boardinghouse.  She was burned trying to save their father in the fire and as a result has to wear a flesh-toned faceplate.  She takes on a mysterious boarder who begins messing with poor Allan by throwing his voice and trying to push him down stairs.  Of course, no one believes Allan and they naturally assume it’s time for him to go back to the nuthouse. 

Will Allan be sent back to the funny farm?  Will Allan uncover the sadistic boarder’s identity?  Will you fall asleep before then?

Perkins’ solid, if all too familiar performance is the only thing that makes this turd remotely worth watching.  Since it’s a TV movie, you’re guaranteed there won’t be much in the way of T & A or blood and guts.  This would’ve been forgivable if there was actually any suspense, but there isn’t.  How Awful About Allan is slow moving, boring, and just plain stupid.  And if you can’t see the painfully obvious “twist” ending coming from a mile away; then you’re the blind one.

How awful indeed.

A stupid college co-ed wins a dubious contest that pays for an all expense paid weekend to a quaint old fashioned inn that’s ran by two old farts.  The chick develops a crush on the proprietors' slow witted grandson and doesn’t really notice when the other guests start disappearing.  Turns out that the old fogies are actually cannibals and they’re planning to put the dumb broad on the menu.

Terror at Red Wolf Inn was better than I expected but it really wasn’t “good” per se.  Everything that happened was fairly predictable, right down to the scene where the heroine escapes the house only to run straight into the arms of her captors.  (Just like in Texas Chainsaw Massacre; which was released two years later.)  I can let that slide.  I can also forget about the fact that the main character was dumber than a bag of hammers.  I was even able to deal with the murky cinematography too. 

Let me tell you why I can easily forgive this movie for its various shortcomings:  THE SCENE.  There is a scene in Terror at Red Wolf Inn that had me in stitches.  Seriously, I don’t think I laughed this hard at a scene since Boat Trip. 

This scene involves the dim bulb hunk of a grandson trying to impress the bimbo leading lady on the beach.  First, he starts by idly playing in the sand and she joins him.  They stare at each other longingly for a minute or so before he awkwardly (and I do mean AWKWARDLY) learns in for a kiss.  That’s not the best part.  You see, right before he’s about to kiss her, his fishing rod hooks something and their lovebird shit comes to a screeching halt.  He reels the line in and is horrified to find a baby shark on the hook.  He screams, “SHHHHAAAARRRKK!” and picks the thing up by its tail and smashes it against a rock about 13 times.  After it’s good and dead, the guy REPEATEDLY PUNCHES THE SHARK IN THE FACE.  It’s here where he turns to the chick and solemnly says, “I love you” before storming off.  The bewildered chick then proceeds to BURY THE SHARK on the beach while crying.  

When Donnie Darko was released, Mind Fuck Movies like Fight Club and Memento were all the rage.  I saw it on video when it first came out and instantly loved director Richard Kelly’s unique vision and loopy Kubrickian logic.  Unfortunately, in the past couple of years, the flick has been embraced by the pathetic pseudo-Goth Emo teeny-boppers that frequent Hot Topic and wear too much eyeliner.  You can’t talk about Donnie Darko without one of these poseurs chiming in and telling you how it’s a movie for “their generation” and “perfectly encapsulates what they’re all about”.  Well, I’m here today to take Donnie Darko back from those worthless fucks.  Donnie Darko belongs to open-minded moviegoers that can appreciate originality and clever twist endings and not to whiny Emo cuntflaps who will cut themselves wide open with a razor at the drop of a hat because their mascara got a little runny.

If you already don’t know the plot:  Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a disturbed teenager who has a history of arson and pops scripts like crazy.  He starts having visions of a demented bunny rabbit named Frank who tells him that the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds.  Donnie also finds out that he can somehow travel through time thanks to bubbles that come out of his chest.

I know I’m not explaining it very well, but I don’t want to give away the surprises that the film holds.  One of the flick’s many charms is that you’re assured to be surprised even after repeated viewings.  That’s part of the fun of the movie.

Kelly effectively creates a world that is sublimely locked in time (1988) yet feels like it could happen today.  It’s a place that seems otherworldly but looks perfectly ordinary.  He also crafts a bat shit insane ending that simultaneously wraps things up and leaves you scratching your head trying to piece everything together.  The man can also film a jazz recital like no one in the business.  How many directors can brag about that?

Then there are the performances.  Gyllenhaal is note perfect as Donnie.  He’s awkward like a real teenager yet he still possesses a potentially dangerous aura around him.  Jena Malone does some stellar work as Donnie’s love interest and Mary McDonnell is MILF-errific as his caring mother.  But hands down the best actor in the bunch is Patrick Swayze.  He plays this diluted self-help guru with a sleazy past.  His informercials are hilarious and his pep rally speech to the school is a classic.  It’s easily the man’s best performance since Road House.

These Emo idiots nowadays try to live their life based around Donnie Darko.  They think that they’re just like Donnie because they take medication too.  (It’s probably for asthma not schizophrenia.)  They need to get a life.  Either that or go watch Twilight or something.  Leave the good movies to the rest of us.

PS:  Donnie Darko:  The Director’s Cut is to be avoided at all costs as it tries to over-explain things and features different song cues which ruin the overall mood of the film.

Donnie Darko is filled with enough trippy coolness to land it on The Video Vacuum Top Ten Films of the Year for 2001 at the Number 8 spot, smack dab in between The Royal Tenenbaums and Ocean’s Eleven.

Jack Lee stars as a “Trustee of Bruce Lee” who is in possession of a book that Bruce wrote that blows the whistle on an unsavory dojo.  Naturally, the no-good karate school wants to get their hands on it, so they send some goons to rough him up every five minutes or so.  He gets a bit fed up with all the non-stop Kung Fu fighting and entrusts the book to a dude named Rey and his comic relief idiot buddy Tito.  When the bad guys kidnap Rey’s gal pal, he dons Bruce Lee’s trademark yellow jumpsuit from Game of Death and sets out to rescue her.

As low budget Kung Fu movies from the Philippines go, you can certainly do a lot worse than They Call Him Bruce Lee.  Although the IMDB says this flick came out in 1979, it had to be released in America no earlier than 1984 because it features music stolen from Tron, First Blood, and Ghostbusters.  (Not to mention Enter the Dragon as well.)  Hearing those familiar tunes definitely bumps ups the cheese factor but it’s not enough to completely save the flick. 

Jack Lee makes for a suitable Bruce Lee substitute.  He’s really flexible and can kick his foot waaaay up over his head.  He’s a little bit of a one-trick pony though because that high kick thing is basically his only move.  I dug the flick whenever Lee was on screen kicking people in the face, but he disappears from the film after about 45 minutes.  Then it’s up to that other dude to carry the movie.  Sadly, he’s not up to the task.  Lee had a modicum of charisma but this other guy (I’m sorry I don’t know his name.  IMDB identifies him as Jack Lee too, but I think they’re mistaken.) just doesn’t have the (karate) chops that old Jack did. 

Oh, and just for the record:  No one ever calls him Bruce Lee.

The second half of the film is also hampered by way too much soap opera shit and a needless subplot where Rey gets set up by the bad guys to cheat on his girlfriend.  While there are a handful of fun Kung Fu battles, far too many of them rely too much on over-cranked slow motion that only succeed in showing the audience just how ordinary the fight choreography is.  (It also helps pad the running time too.)  There’s also a lot of pointless business involving the girlfriend’s shotgun-toting father that is supposed to be funny but isn’t.  At least the pissed-off papa gets the best line of the movie when he shouts, “May herpes infect your toes!”

An undercover cop gets kidnapped by some ruthless heroin dealers and the police turn to his karate champion sister, Tina (Etsuko Shihomi) to rescue him.  The drug kingpin has a diverse army of assassins around him at all times so he’s pretty tough to get to.  (He “collects killers as a hobby” don’t you know.)  Luckily, Tina has the ability to kick all sorts of ass and with a little bit of help from “The Street Fighter” (Sonny Chiba), she’s able to bring down the drug cartel.

First thing’s first:  This is NOT a sequel to the amazing The Street Fighter that starred Sonny Chiba.  Sonny does NOT play the same character he played in the other Street Fighter movies, even though a couple people call him “Street Fighter”.  He doesn’t get a whole lot of screen time but that’s fine because he still kicks people’s asses left and right whenever he is on screen. Also returning from the first movie is Masashi Ishibashi, who is also playing a different villain (named Hammerhead) that is constantly surrounded by henchmen who wear wicker trashcans on their heads.

Sister Street Fighter has a bizarre tone that seems more like a live action anime as opposed to the raw, grungy feel of the first movie.  Okay, I know I probably shouldn’t compare this flick to the original because they’re completely unrelated.  However, to me, any film that stars Sonny Chiba AND features the words “Street Fighter” in the title must be judged accordingly.  How does it hold up to the original you ask?  Surprisingly well.

There isn’t a lot of plot to get in the way of the Kung Fu sequences and the action set pieces are pretty consistent all the way through.  The film is also rife with odd touches that will leave you shaking your head in bewilderment, which is always a good thing if you ask me.  For instance, the bad guy smuggles heroin hidden inside of women’s wigs!  When’s the last time you saw that in a movie?   Then there are the title cards that introduce each of the villain’s henchmen and their particular set of skills (which include a group masked Amazon women).  The final battle between Sister Street Fighter and the evil smuggler is pretty whack too.  First, they fight in a cave filled with rubber bats on strings.  Then once outside, they jump hundreds of feet high in the air and Kung Fu each other while hurtling through the sky.  Like I said, whack.

The gore is fairly decent and while it doesn’t live up to the precedent set by the original film, it’s still pretty cool.  Sister Street Fighter throws forks into people, plants a scythe into someone’s forehead, and drops a sai on the top of a guy’s bald head.  The flick also features a good amount of boobies, and that’s always a welcome sight.

Although Sonny’s barely in the movie, Shihomi makes for a very appealing action heroine.  She does some damn fine martial artsy moves and is cute as a button.  There’s a great scene early on in the film where she catches flies with chopsticks (eight years before Mr. Miyagi made it chic) before inciting a barroom brawl that perfectly captures her charm and energy.

If Sister Street Fighter (the movie) does have a flaw it’s that Sister Street Fighter (the character) is virtually indestructible so there’s zero suspense.  At one point, she’s tied up and dangled upside down over a bed of spikes while the S & M Mistress assassin sets the rope on fire.  After the rope breaks though, Sister Street Fighter just somersaults over the spikes.  There’s no “Oh shit, how’s she gonna get out of this one?”  It’s more like “Oh yeah, this movie’s so goddamn insane that she can pretty much do anything!”

You know, when I first saw Sister Street Fighter as a teenager I remember being pissed that Sonny Chiba had such a small role.  Watching it now though, I admired the flick for doing its own thing.  If you go in thinking that it’s going to be a hardboiled sequel to The Street Fighter, you’re bound to be disappointed.  If on the other hand you just want a goofy, anything goes Kung Fu flick, you’re guaranteed to be entertained.

AKA:  Female Fighting Fist in Danger.  AKA:  Woman Certain Kill Fist.

Three homely sorority girls (Linnea Quigley, Michelle Bauer, and Brinke Stevens) invite some dorky fraternity boys over to play Twister and hold a séance.  When the severed head of a fortune teller (Haunted Garage frontman Dukey Flyswatter) appears in their crystal ball, he urges them to “break the circle” and touch the ball.  Predictably it turns them into H-O-T and H-O-R-N-Y succubuses (or is that succubi?) that want to bite off the boys gonads and swallow their…souls.

Nightmare Sisters is one of the films that shaped my sexuality.  When I was about 11 or so, I caught this flick late at night on Skinamax.  I took one look at Linnea Quigley, Michelle Bauer, and Brinke Stevens taking a bubble bath together and something inside me said, “Yes sir, welcome to the world of heterosexuality.”

Not only do the three greatest Scream Queens of all time take a bubble bath together in this flick, but they also smear cream pies all over their breasts.  In addition, they each get different fantasy sequences.  Michele wears a loincloth and fucks in a jungle themed room, Linnea dons some ripped clothes and sings “Santa Monica Boulevard Boys” (and she isn’t a half bad singer either), and  Brinke dresses up as an innocent schoolgirl complete with pigtails and an oversized lollipop.  (She also gets to briefly wear a sexy leather S & M get-up.)  Why this movie hasn’t been put on the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress is beyond me.

The flick may take a while to heat up (the ten minute pre-credit sequence seems like an eternity) but stick with it.  Once the girls lose their tops it’s damn good times.  It’s also fucking hilarious to boot.  Out of all the funny one-liners, my favorite came when the perplexed nerd first encountered the supernatural succubuses and said, “Advanced Trigonometry did not prepare me for this!”

Director David DeCoteau got Quigley, Bauer, and Stevens (and Dukey too) back together again for the equally enjoyable Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama the next year.

AKA:  Sorority Sisters.  AKA:  Sorority Succubus Sisters.

Joan Fontaine stars an unnamed woman who meets moneybags Maxim De Winter (Laurence Olivier) on vacation and falls head over heels in love with him.  After a whirlwind courtship, Maxim brings his new bride to his estate which is presided over by a stone faced maid named Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson).  Maxim’s still haunted by the sudden death of his first wife Rebecca and always chides his new gal whenever she wears Rebecca’s clothes.  Mrs. Danvers is still fiercely loyal to her deceased employer and sets out to tear the two lovebirds apart.  Things get even more complicated when Rebecca’s body is found in a shipwreck and an inquest is held to determine the cause of her mysterious death.  

Rebecca was the first American feature for director Alfred Hitchcock and the only Hitchcock film to ever win an Academy Award for Best Picture.  It’s more of a gothic melodrama than a thriller and lacks the punch of Hitchcock’s better films but it does manage to keep the audience enthralled throughout most of its running time.  The first act where Olivier romances Fontaine is spellbinding.  The second act involving the newlyweds moving into the mansion is less so.  Things get back on track though once the secrets of Rebecca’s sordid past slowly start to be revealed.

The performances anchor the flick and keep you invested in the characters.  Olivier acts like a pimp in this movie.  He insults Fontaine, yells at her, and generally treats her like dog snot; yet she completely worships him.  Mad respect Larry.  No wonder they call him The Greatest Actor of All Time.  Fontaine is also quite good too.  She may be a fucking doormat but she somehow seems plucky and likable throughout.  Fontaine also starred in Hitchcock’s Suspicion the next year.

A ruthless land snatcher named Stiles (Cy Kendall) guns down an old homesteader and his wife and steals his 100 acre property.  The homesteader’s young son witnesses the murder and grows up to become John Wayne.  Even though Wayne is an upstanding mild-mannered lawyer, that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t still has a taste for vengeance.  First, he goes through the proper legal channels to take down the greedy robber baron.  Wayne scores an upset victory in the courtroom which leaves the bad guy with no water rights in town.  That makes Stiles so mad that he goes out and shoots Wayne’s girlfriend’s father.  Wayne eventually decides to go outside the law and take care of the no good villain once and for all.

Like most old school John Wayne westerns from the 30’s, King of the Pecos has a scant running time (under an hour) and a lot of action.  The flick also benefits from a strong opening scene that nicely sets up Wayne’s need for revenge.  I also enjoyed seeing Wayne play a vigilante for a change.  He gives a solid performance and plays the duality of his character very well.  I liked the way that he used the law up to a certain point to nail his nemesis but then gave in and gunned the son of a bitch down in the end anyway.  It’s this textured characterization that puts King of the Pecos a notch above most programmer Wayne westerns.

On the downside, there are too many annoying side characters that muck things up and prevent the flick from kicking into high gear.  The obligatory love interest is shoehorned cumbersomely into the plot and the deaf old guy who tells everybody “Come again?” will get on your nerves real fast.  If you can stomach those intrusions, King of the Pecos will be a rewarding way to kill 55 minutes.

Jim “The Christ” Caviezel stars as an alien named Kainan who crash lands his spaceship in 8^th century Viking country.  Also aboard his ship is a large hungry beast called a Moorwen that promptly goes about gobbling up the locals.  Since the Vikings think Kainan is the one responsible for the deaths, they capture and imprison him.  Soon after, the Vikings go out to hunt the beast with Cainan as a guide.  When Cainan saves the King (John Hurt) from a bear, he is made an honorary Viking.  It doesn’t take long though for the Moorwen to return and capture the King’s foxy daughter (Sophia Myles).  Because Cainan has a thing for her, he sets out to rescue the damsel in distress.  Conventional swords won’t penetrate the monster’s tough hide so Cainan salvages his ship and forges a sword out of space age metal that is strong enough to slay the Moorwen.

The premise of this movie is nuttier than a Payday but it takes itself far too seriously for it to truly be a classic.  The film’s opening scenes are hilarious though and will make you wish that director Howard McCain kept that same jovial tone throughout the picture.  When Caviezel lands on Earth, he speaks in an alien language.  Because he knows that the audience doesn’t want to read subtitles the whole movie, he opens some futuristic device that gives him super Lasik surgery that teaches him the English language in ten seconds.  Naturally the first English word he says is “FUCK!”  That’s pure comedy gold right there.  The next scene has John Hurt’s daughter refusing to marry the man he’s arranged for her and she gets so upset that she GETS INTO A SWORDFIGHT WITH HER OWN FATHER!

These moments of goofy charm dry up once the monster rears its ugly head though.  It’s unfortunate because if Outlander had been able to maintain that kind of zany energy, it may have been another Doomsday.  As it is, the rest of the movie feels a bit too Sci-Fi Channel-ish to be a Four Star Flick.

Another thing that was kinda disappointing was the Moorwen.  The scenes where the Vikings fend off the alien are fairly intense but the monster itself just resembles a four-legged version of the Roland Emmerich Godzilla.  It also has these stupid looking Day-Glo ridges on it that make it look like Tron’s pet chameleon or something. 

Despite the weak monster, Outlander is still the best Vikings vs. Aliens movies I’ve ever seen.  Imagine a second tier knockoff of Army of Darkness except with an alien instead of a skeleton army, and you may have some idea of what you’re getting into.  The cast certainly helps.  Caviezel makes for a stoic leading man and Myles is one sexy wench.  Hurt lends the flick a touch of class and Ron Perlman is a hoot as the loudmouth Viking asshole.

McCain also co-wrote the script with the awesomely named Dirk Blackman.  Supposedly these guys are going to write the new Conan movie.  If that’s the case, I’d say the old Barbarian is in good hands.

A bunch of idiot British “teens” get bored by their hip, mod, swinging party and decide to go check out a haunted house.  Because no American in their right mind would watch a stupid horror movie without a washed-up American has-been leading man, Frankie Avalon is also part of the group.  On the way over to the house, he tells everyone that it’s supposedly haunted by a psycho who murdered a bunch of people and then committed suicide twenty years earlier.  After a lot of inane shenanigans, one of the “teens” gets hacked up by an unseen killer.  The other “kids” go apeshit and cover up the murder and split.  Eventually, the psycho starts stalking the “teens” who fled the scene and picking them off one by one.

The silly title wrongly sets you up into thinking that this is going to be a haunted house movie but it’s really more along the lines of I Know What You Did Last Summer.  Except that it’s so bad that it makes I Know What You Did Last Summer look like Scream by comparison.  Man, if you thought Frankie’s beach party movies were bad, wait till you see this one.  It’s almost exactly like those beach flicks except everyone speaks in a British accent (except Frankie of course) and a couple people get stabbed to death.

There are numerous shortcomings that this flick shoulders.  From the sluggish pacing, to the dingy cinematography; everything is more or less bottom of the barrel.  Special mention must be made of the awful British cast.  These are some of the most irritating British farts I’ve ever seen in a movie.  Especially that one chick who kept yapping about getting some coffee.  I hate cunts like that who go on and on about grabbing Starbucks.

The only thing worth a shit in this movie are the slashings  Although you don’t get any gore, there is an abundance of cool looking 70’s blood (you know the kind that looks like red Sherman Williams paint).  I was tempted to give the movie One Star for the longest time (practically since the start of the film) but the scene where Frankie Avalon gets stabbed in the crotch was worth the extra Half Star if you ask me. 

Director Michael Armstrong did a much better job with his next film, Mark of the Devil.

AKA:  Horror House.  AKA:  The Dark.

A bunch of archeologists head over to the mysterious Snape Island to look for some Phoenician treasure.  Since the island is mostly just rocks surrounding an old decrepit lighthouse, you’d think it be easy to find.  Anyway, they’re real keen to find this Phoenician spear but the downside to that is that it drives anyone who holds it crazier than an outhouse rat and forces them to kill.

Beyond the Fog is pretty much one big uneven mess but it at least has the benefit of a terrific opening scene:  Some sailors land on the foggy island and find a bunch of naked decapitated women.  Eventually they come across a screaming bloody naked lady wielding a large knife who stabs them both. 

After a doctor hypnotizes the catatonic chick and she recounts what happened on the island, Beyond the Fog starts slowly going down the shitter.  The film continuously cuts back and forth between the treasure hunters snooping around Snape Island with the crazy chick’s flashbacks of what happened to her friends.  Because of the choppy narrative, the film never really manages to build up any suspense.

I will say that the stuff involving the partying teens on the island getting picked off is way cooler than the scenes involving the stuffy Brits wandering around looking for treasure.  The stalk-and-slash scenes are rather well done and serve as an interesting precursor to the slashers of the 80’s.  The gore is solid (hands get cut off) and the headless naked women effects are impressive.

Also, all of the girls in the flashbacks end up getting naked pretty quickly, which is always a good thing in my book.  It’s almost as if director Jim (Valley of Gwangi) O’Connolly said, “Look girls, if you wanna be in my movie, you gotta make with the ta-ta’s!”  My hat is off to you sir.  Now only if you didn’t make those damn treasure hunting scenes so damn boring…

AKA:  Tower of Evil.  AKA:  Horror of Snape Island.  AKA:  Horror on Snape Island.  

You know all of those Old Dark House clichés in movies from the 30’s and 40’s?  Well every single one of those movies owes a major debt to The Cat and the Canary.  When it was originally released, the film was a smash hit so naturally every horror-comedy/murder-mystery copied the formula.  (I hesitate to use the term copy “Cat”.)

All the familiar ingredients are here:  There’s the old millionaire who dies.  There’s the scheming relatives who gather at the spooky mansion to hear the reading of the will (at the stroke of midnight).  There’s the morose looking servant woman who claims the house is haunted.  There’s the escaped lunatic with long fingernails stalking the grounds.  There’s the elaborate series of secret passageways that the killer uses to move unseen around the house.  Etc., etc., etc.

You’ve probably seen all of these clichés before but since this is where they all originated, you’ve got to give The Cat and the Canary mad props for blazing the trail. 

The Cat and the Canary is a bit slow and creaky at times and some of the humor isn’t really funny but Paul (The Man Who Laughs) Leni’s lively direction keeps you watching.  The scenes where the killer’s hairy-handed poorly-manicured hand reaches out from the darkness are still very effective even 80 years after the film’s release.  I also liked the funhouse mirror effects that stretched the protagonist’s faces too.  The title cards are also very funny and I dug the all the different fonts for the title cards.  (Wait till you see how they edit out the cursing.)  It all makes for a solidly splendid slice of spooky silent cinema.

In addition to the numerous rip-off the film spawned, there were also three official remakes (’30, ’39, and ’78).

Joel M. (Bloodsucking Freaks) Reed made his directorial debut with this ho-hum skin flick.  Porn legend Georgina Spelvin stars as a fake doctor (who has a phony shock of white hair to make her look old) that acts as an on screen narrator and tells us all about people who advertise in dirty magazines for sex.  She informs us on advertisements for S & M (pliers to the earlobe, soldering iron to the nipples, electroshock treatments, etc.), masked orgies (kinda like in Eyes Wide Shut), “bird watching” (voyeurism), and sleazy casting couch producers.  We also learn about people who use sex advertisements to scam their potential clients; including (but not limited to) con artists who use Lonely Hearts columns to fleece lovesick losers and white slavers who place ads for “nannies”.

Reed films everything in a pseudo Mondo movie style and that helps up to a certain point.  At first seeing people place sexy ads is kinda funny (think Craigslist:  The Movie) but after awhile, the flick gets stale and it ultimately fails to live up to its early promise.  It also doesn’t help that most of the girls look like a deer in headlights and often look directly at the camera.  And although Spelvin gets a lot of screen time, sadly she doesn’t get naked

Sex by Advertisement isn’t very sexy but it is good for an unintentional chuckle or two.  Most of the segments though are just interchangeable and boring; and bored is the last thing you want to be while watching a skin flick.  Reed returned the next year with the slightly better Career Bed.

A loathsome stage mother (Honey Hunter) will do whatever it takes to make her luscious daughter Susan (future porn star Jennifer Welles) a star.  When Susan’s boyfriend comes and tries to elope with her, Mom promptly seduces him so she won’t have anything to do with him.  She also arranges for Susan to go on dates with slimy agents but won’t let them go all the way with her until she gets a contract.  Finally, Mom trades Susan’s virginity so she can have a screen test.  In the end, Susan gets fed up with Mother and finally stands up for herself.

I know awhile back I told you that you should kill me if I ever rented another Something Weird movie from Netflix but I kinda forgot this one was on my Queue.  As it turns out, it’s not halfway bad.  Although it’s clunky and doesn’t know when to wrap things up, it definitely has its moments.  What puts Career Bed a notch or two above most Something Weird sex flicks from the 60’s is the twisted mother-daughter relationship.  The scenes where Mommy cruelly manipulates her would-be starlet daughter are pretty memorable and give the flick SOMETHING to hang the stilted sex scenes on.

I think a lot of credit must be given to writer/director Joel M. Reed.  He really wrote some truly hateful dialogue (“If you say you love her, I’ll vomit!”) and knows how to put his characters in degrading predicaments.  If he only focused as much attention on the sex scenes as he did on the plot; Career Bed could’ve been a contender.  I’m willing to give him a Mulligan on it though because it was still early in his career.  (Reed went on to direct the immortal Bloodsucking Freaks nine years later.)

The performances are better than the film deserves.  Hunter is suitably nasty as the bitchy mother and Welles plays the innocent virgin nicely.  In addition to Welles, you should also get a kick out of seeing a young Georgina Spelvin four years before she starred in the classic Devil in Miss Jones.  Their sex scene together is the best of the bunch.  Spelvin also appeared in Reed’s Sex by Advertisement the previous year.

During World War II, a private named Kelly (Clint Eastwood) learns about a secret Nazi bank filled with $16 million in gold bars from a drunken Kraut.  He goads his tough-talking superior (Telly Salvalas) into getting their outfit together to blow up the bank and swindle the loot.  Meanwhile a glory hungry general (Carroll O’Connor) learns about the team’s illegal mission and follows in hot pursuit.

I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about this movie.  On one hand the war scenes are solidly done and lots of stuff blows up real good.  On the other hand, Kelly and his Heroes never really become fully fleshed out characters so it’s difficult to root for them.  The movie is also way too long for it’s own good.  An inflated running time can be good for a star-studded war movie (like The Great Escape or The Dirty Dozen), but that’s because it gives you time to care about the characters.  In Kelly’s Heroes, director Brian G. Hutton (who also directed Clint in Where Eagles Dare) spends more time on unfunny gags and bizarre side business.  I was able to down a few beers while watching the flick and that didn’t even help. 

Even though the opening scenes hold potential, Hutton’s pacing is slower than a constipated turtle and the flick wears out its welcome pretty quickly.  Hutton tries in vain to be irreverent and goofy (at one point Clint walks into a gunfight while fake Fistful of Dollars music plays) and fails miserably.  I guess he was trying to go for a MASHy kind of vibe but it doesn’t really work.  All of this would’ve been worthwhile had the flick actually been funny but Kelly’s Heroes is woefully short on laughs.  I guess that makes it the 1941 of its day.

I like just about all of the cast members… in other movies.  Telly Savalas probably fares the best but that’s mostly because he just more or less plays himself.  Don Rickles is OK I guess but he’s never allowed to really shine.  Although I like Donald Sutherland, he’s pretty annoying in this movie.  He basically plays a hippie, which is kinda odd because THEY WE’RE INVENTED FOR ANOTHER 25 YEARS!  (The hippie theme song is also perplexing considering the time frame of the movie.)  Harry Dean Stanton, Stuart Margolin, and Jeff Morris are also in there too; it’s just a shame that they are never given enough screen time to become real characters.

Clint ekes by on his considerable charisma but I think the real problem lies with the Hollywood studios.  With this flick and Paint Your Wagon, Hollywood was seemingly trying to tame Clint by putting him in cutesy/goofy/weird movies that (I can only imagine) would soften his edge and show his “range”.  Clint’s steely eyed performance is just about the only thing worth a flip in this flick, so die hard Eastwood fans may still enjoy it.  For everyone else, it’ll be a chore to sit through the film’s bloated running time.

Future director John Landis was a production assistant and stuntman for the film and frequently uses actors from the flick for his movies.

John Wayne stars as the captain of an airplane flying over Greenland.  When the wings freeze over, Wayne is forced to make a crash landing on the uncharted frozen tundra.  Exposed to subzero temperatures and low on supplies, Wayne and his men fervently try to reach their base to order a rescue but since they are in the middle of nowhere, their signal is much too faint to be heard.  Pretty soon, the men start losing their marbles (one guy goes out hunting and never comes back) and it’s up to Wayne to keep everyone sane.

Like most movies that involve people awaiting a rescue, Island in the Sky loses a lot of tension whenever it cuts away from the stranded passengers.  I suppose we HAVE to see the rescue team try and do their thing, but the drama on their end isn’t nearly as involving as the drama concerning Wayne and his crew.  (Seriously, did we really need the protracted scene where the fat dude spends time swimming with his kids before going off on the rescue mission?  Look, there’s a bunch of guys who are going to freeze to death and all you can think of is doing laps at the YMCA!)  There’s also some really stupid comic relief involving a rescue pilot that doesn’t want to get out of bed that seems out of place given the desperateness of the situation.  Not to mention the superfluous Rod Serling-esque narrator who gets on your nerves PDQ.

Although fatally flawed in several areas, Island in the Sky benefits from a stellar performance by Wayne.  His mannerisms aren’t as broad and showy as they usually are and he essays his role in a realistic way.  In short, he’s actually “acting” in this one and not just playing himself like he normally does.

Assistant Director Andrew V. McLaglen later went on to direct Wayne in five movies including Chisum and Cahill:  U.S. Marshal.  

The Duke himself, John Wayne stars in his first film as Stony Brooke, the leader of The Three Mesquiteeers.  This time out Stony, Tuscon Smith (Ray “Crash” Corrigan), and Lullaby Johnson (Max Terhune) are riding on the range trying to put the kibosh on some dirty spies who are trying to smuggle deadly poison gas.  Stony naturally finds time to romance a purdy little lady, who also happens to be an undercover government agent trying to nab the criminals.

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again:  I love these old school John Wayne B Movie westerns.  They usually run just under an hour and pretty much get right to the point.  Most of these flicks generally have the same plot (Wayne is wrongly accused of murder and has to clear his name) but this flick is unique among these low budget oaters.  Yeah, sure Wayne gets wrongly accused of murder and has to clear his name, but Pals of the Saddle is still the only western that I can think of that mixes cowboys and foreign spies, I’ll give it that.

Now Pals in the Saddle has its share of faults to be sure.  The middle portion of the flick is draggy despite the scant running time and the love interest isn’t nearly as interesting as most of Wayne’s leading ladies.  Luckily, the climax is explosive (literally) and features some solid stunt work.  

The young(ish) Wayne carries the film nicely and his star power is evident.  Corrigan lends fine support and Terhune provides the so-so comic relief, which means he unfortunately carries around a ventriloquist dummy a lot.  Wayne went on to play Stony seven more times; the next being Overland Stage Raiders.

Pals of the Saddle lands itself on The Video Vacuum Top Ten Films of 1938 at the Number 5 spot; sandwiched in between The Invisible Menace and Terror of Tiny Town.

Tumak (Victor Mature) is a member of the warring “Rock People” who gets separated from his tribe after he gets conked on the head.  He gets taken in by the “Shell People”, a peaceful lot of folks and adopts their ways.  Tumak also falls in love with a hot Wilma Flintstone looking chick (Carole Landis).  Eventually Tumak brings both the Rock People and the Shell People together and they learn live in harmony.  Their bliss is short lived however once a volcano erupts nearby.  The catastrophe causes them to run for their lives and find a new place to call home.

I’m not going to say that One Million B.C. is a classic or anything but it’s definitely goofy fun.  I have an admitted weakness for movies in which the entire cast is draped in fur pelts, eat big slabs of meat roasting over a spit, and speak in inarticulate grunts and growls so I may like this one more than most of you out there.  I’m also a sucker for a good rubber dinosaur movie too.  There are also REAL lizards that are photographed to look like they’re enormous so if you like those kinds of dinosaurs, you’ll dig this movie as well.  (Don’t you just love it when a movie has something for everybody?)

The effects are really good and must’ve wowed them back in ’40.  Although the giant lizards are pretty funky looking, the special effect dinosaurs look fairly convincing.  We get a very cool baby triceratops and a decent T. Rex in there too.  The Wooly Mammoth is basically just an elephant wearing arts n’ crafts hair but that’s okay.  I mean YOU try to apply fake hair to an elephant. 

The scenes of natural disasters are equally impressive.  I particularly liked the scene where the lizards got trapped in an earthquake.  The coupe de grace though was the scene where the cave people got engulfed in the cascading lava flow.  Man that was cool.

One Million B.C. isn’t all sunshine and roses though.  There’s a blatantly stupid opening scene where some schmuck in a fake beard tells an idiot in ridiculously short shorts all about the cave people before the movie starts.  The flick also takes its sweet time to end too.  (The volcano erupting should’ve been the climax.)  All of that really didn’t bother me too much because One Million B.C. gave me enough cool dinosaurs for my dollar to make me happy.  Plus, you also get the great Lon Chaney Jr. as a hideously scarred caveman, so how can you possibly go wrong?

AKA:  Battle of the Giants.  AKA:  Cave Man.  AKA:  Man and His Mate.  AKA:  The Cave Dwellers.

John Wayne plays a hardass squadron leader with a heart of gold that leads his men into a bunch of dogfights against the Japanese during WWII.  In the air, he battles a bunch of blurry stock footage.  On the ground he butts heads with his second-in-command (Robert Ryan).  Meanwhile, his ragtag team of pilots…

Fuck it.  Flying Leathernecks is just like every other goddamn John Wayne WWII movie, except it’s not as good.  It features every single goddamn war cliché in the goddamn book and features more goddamn stock footage than you can shake a goddamn stick at.  Producer Howard Hughes probably thought that by filming this flick in eye-popping Technicolor that no one would notice all the tiresome clichés and predictable goings-on.  Boy was that rich fucker ever wrong.

The flick was directed by Nicholas Ray, who went on to helm the immortal Rebel Without a Cause.  His heart must’ve not have been in this one because it’s dramatically flat as a pancake.  Even Wayne seems to be on cruise control.  Wayne sleepwalks through his all too familiar role and never imbues his character with the brawny machismo you’d expect from The Duke.  No one else in the cast has half the screen presence that Wayne does so he’s pretty much the whole show. 

That said; bad John Wayne flicks are still better than good flicks starring lesser movie stars.  I’m a Wayne completist, so despite the film’s many, many, many flaws; it still managed to keep my interest for the most part.  The Duke went on to star in The Quiet Man the next year.  

Jack Nicholson stars as a hippie named Stoney who along with a couple of pals (biker movie staple Adam Roarke and The Mack’s Max Julien) helps a deaf girl named Jenny (Susan Strasberg) find her drop-out acid-head brother (Bruce Dern).  Another hippie (Dean Stockwell) gives Jenny a powerful form of LSD called STP and it causes her to trips balls and wander around Haight-Ashbury.  That means that Stoney has to go find HER while she’s looking for her brother.

So basically the whole movie is just a bunch of stoned out of their gourd hippies looking for other stoned out of their gourd hippies.

I have a low tolerance for hippies as it is so the soft focus scenes of hippies frolicking around while being high as a kite didn’t do much for me.  The barest minimum of plot didn’t help matters any either and the hippie characters were all thinly sketched.  The cheesy kaleidoscopic faux trip sequences were pretty annoying and mostly just served to pad the running time.  Also, the random ass downbeat ending is more or less just there to remind you that “Drugs are bad”.  (The flick was produced by Dick Clark after all; not the kind of guy who would condone illegal substances.)

The music is also pretty lame.  At one point Jack plays some fake Jimi Hendrix music; which is kinda hilarious.  Oh well, at least you get to hear Strawberry Alarm Clock sing “Incense and Peppermints” two years before they were in Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

The only real reason to watch this flick (unless you’re an old hippie trying to remember what the heck happened in the 60’s) is the cast.  Nicholson (who also helped concoct the story) is decent in the starring role and it’s funny just to see him wearing a ponytail.  Psych-Out may reek of hippie bullshit, I still say any movie that features Nicholson, Dern, AND Stockwell is worth checking out at least once.  I also had fun spotting future directors Henry Jaglom, Bud Cardos, and Robert Kelljan in small roles as well.

There is one great scene however.  It comes when Jaglom takes a bunch of acid and has a major freakout and imagines all of his friends are zombies.  Then he tries to hack off his own hand with a band saw.  If director Richard (The Stunt Man) Rush put a couple more of these cool touches into the flick, Psych-Out might’ve kicked a little ass.  Unfortunately, it’s just kinda whatever.  Rush also directed Hell's Angels on Wheels the previous year, which featured a lot of the same people.

OK so when Knowing came out it was universally panned by everyone on God’s green earth EXCEPT for Roger Ebert who gave it ****.  My tastes are usually about on par with Ebert so I figured that the flick might actually be somewhat decent.  Then I remembered that this is the man that gave Die Hard ** here, so I should pretty much just disregard his review.  

The funny thing is; the first half of Knowing IS worthy of **** (or at least *** ½ anyway).  The problem is that the second half is an absolute train wreck.  To add insult to injury the final “twist” ending is so completely out of left field that you just have to go “HUH!?!”  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Nicolas Cage stars as an alcoholic widowed MIT professor with an annoyingly precocious son.  The kid’s school opens up a time capsule that contains a bunch of random numbers and Cage becomes obsessed with trying to find out what they mean.  After downing a bottle of whiskey, he learns that the numbers are really predictions of every major disaster of the past 50 years.  There are only three more sets of numbers left; which means that we're only three more disasters away from the end of the world. 

The first half of Knowing is semi-brilliant.  Director Alex (The Crow) Proyas slowly builds up the tension and suspense and keeps you squarely on the edge of your seat.  The movie also asks some pretty lofty questions too.  There’s a classroom scene early on in the film where Cage teaches a lesson on determinism vs. randomness which more or less sets up the whole premise of the movie.  Can Cage stop the catastrophic events or are they pre-determined?    

It’s a pretty interesting notion.  Unfortunately, Cage’s answer to his class is simply, “Shit happens”.  Boy does it ever.

Man this movie ended up sucking.  After a pretty mesmerizing first half, Knowing drops it’s transmission in record time.  (BEWARE MAJOR SPOILAGE TO OCCUR)  The movie’s problems start when these gaunt looking albino motherfuckers begin hanging around Cage’s house.  They start talking to Cage’s kid through his hearing aide and show him haunting visions that freak him out.  If this wasn’t goofy enough, we eventually learn that these guys are actually ALIENS who already know the world is going to end but want to take Cage’s kid and another little brat back to their home world so they can play Adam and Eve while the rest of the Earth gets blowed up when the sun collapses.  Like I said, “HUH!?!”

The CGI is also all over the place.  The scenes where masses of people (and wildlife) get burned alive are pretty impressive and the airplane crash is startlingly realistic.  But the CGI subway train run amuck looks akin to something you’d see on the Sci-Fi (excuse me, SY FY) Channel.  Speaking of Sci-Fi, the CGI aliens in this movie are some of the worst CGI aliens I’ve seen since The Day the Earth Stood Still Remake.  

And I won’t even mention the extremely stupid ending that rips off Deep Impact where the main character reconnects with a loved one seconds before dying a horrible death (except that this horrible death is by fire instead of water).  Oh wait, I said I wouldn’t mention it but I did.  Oops sorry about that.

So I guess the question we should all ask ourselves is, “Was Knowing DETERMINED to suck, or was it just an unavoidable random occurrence?”  If you answered, “Shit happens” then you get an A+ from The Video Vacuum Institute for Bad Nicolas Cage Movies.  Someone needs to bury this flick in a time capsule and not bother to dig it back up.

I love character actor Timothy (Glen or Glenda) Farrell and I love women’s wrestling, so it should come as no surprise to you that I dig Racket Girls.  It’s slow moving and pretty stupid but it features plenty of scenes of Farrell being smug and seedy as well as lots and lots of footage of women wrestling, so what’s not to like?

Farrell plays Umberto Scalli, a greasy racketeer who uses a wrestling gymnasium as a front for his various underworld dealings.  He hires a vibrant new wrestler named Peaches Page (who plays herself) who instantly falls for Scalli.  When Scalli wants the reigning champ Clara Mortensen to throw her big match against Rita Martinez, Clara gets upset and refuses because wrestling is the only “clean” sport left.  After Scalli blows the whistle on “Mr. Big”, he finds himself on the run from both the gangsters AND the police.

Now a lot of people will say that Racket Girls has far too many scenes of women putting each other into headlocks and writhing around.  Not me.  I couldn’t get enough of these dated scenes of women rassling.  Sure, these women might not be GLOW girls (some of them are downright butch) but they can definitely throw down.  

Most of the gals may be pretty rough looking but Peaches is kinda cute and definitely has a smattering of star presence.  I absolutely loved the gratuitous training scene where the jiggly Peaches jogged, jumped rope, and tossed a medicine ball around.  It’s Farrell who steals the show though.  His scenery chewing turn is the best thing about the flick and keeps you watching throughout the film’s slower sections.  Farrell also starred as the sleazy Scalli in The Devil’s Sleep and Dance Hall Racket.

Martinez gets the best line of the flick when she says, “You forget that I am the champion of ALL Mexico!”

Racket Girls has enough scenes of sexy sirens in strangleholds to put it on The Video Vacuum Top Ten Films of the Year for 1951 at the Number 7 spot, placing it in between Alice in Wonderland and Comin’ Round the Mountain.

AKA:  Blonde Pickup.  AKA:  Pin Down Girl.  AKA:  Pin Down Girls.  AKA:  Wrestling Racket Girls.

A whiny brat named Danny (Lowell Brown) leaves his life of privilege and wealth behind so he can be a hobo.  Danny isn’t a very good hobo though and gets manhandled by a bunch of thugs fairly early in the film.  That means vagrant extraordinaire Bix Dugan (Brett Halsey) has to take Danny under his wing and show him the ropes of drifting.  The homeless duo wander into a jerkwater town and Bix falls in love with a homely waitress named Carrie (Joyce Meadows) who is relentlessly leered at by a creepy stalker (Jack Elam).  After Carrie is murdered by the loathsome lothario, Bix is blamed for the crime and a lynch mob comes after him.  After 80 minutes or so, Danny finally does SOMETHING right and catches the real criminal.

The Girl in Lovers Lane is a sluggishly paced B Movie melodrama that offers more insights into the ins and outs of being a hobo than anything else.  The drama is ineffective and the script is clumsily plotted.  There are no surprises whatsoever and you can pretty much see where this thing is going from the get-go.  The cinematography is dreary at best and Charles Rondeau’s direction is painfully wooden.

The good news is that the acting is more or less solid.  Elam is pretty memorable as the lecherous loverboy with a taste for homicide.  I also thought Halsey did an admirable job, all things considered.  He went on to star in the much better Return of the Fly later in the year.

Michael Dudikoff stars as a GI named Joe who rescues his colonel’s daughter (Judie Aronson from Friday the 13^th Part 4) from some kidnappers using his lightning fast Kung Fu skills.  Joe suffers from amnesia so he doesn’t know why he’s so good at the ninja arts but at least he can dodge bullets by somersaulting and turn everyday household objects like tire irons and garden hoses into deadly weapons. 

Most of the time though he’s content to just let his stunt double do all the hard stuff (like clumsily jumping through some lattice work).

Eventually Joe finds out that the colonel is in cahoots with the bad guys so he teams up with his buddy (Steve James from The Exterminator) to Kung Fu a bunch of motherfuckers.  Then a Japanese landscaper clues Joe in on his forgotten past (he taught him to be ninja when he was a kid).  Now that Joe knows he’s a ninja, he dons some black pajamas and proceeds to kick the shit out of some more motherfuckers.

American Ninja is one heck of a lamebrained action movie but it goes down pretty smooth.  It also suffers from a severe bout of schizophrenia.  Often times, director Sam (Breakin’ 2:  Electric Bugaloo) Firstenberg plays things seriously.  For the first hour or so, the film is very laid back and the plot slowly builds in a coherent manner.  There are brief glimpses of random nuttiness (Dudikoff puts a bucket on his head at one point; sort of like the scene in Star Wars where Luke practices against the target droid with his blast shield down), although nothing too out of the ordinary. 

Then about 75 minutes in, American Ninja really cuts loose and starts to fire on all cylinders.  Once Joe trades in his Army fatigues for black ninja pajamas, the movie cooks in crazy-as-an-outhouse-rat fashion.  Let me clue you in on just how nutty things get:  Before Joe fights the evil “Black Star Ninja”; he must compete side by side with him in a ninja obstacle course.  If that wasn’t crazy enough, the Black Star Ninja also has the power to shoot flames from his wrists and can fire laser beams out of his knuckles!

Firstenberg treats this with no explanation whatsoever.  He merely filmed it and said “Cut” afterwards.  Almost as if we, the audience were SUPPOSED to already know that laser beams were standard issue ninja equipment nowadays. 

If that wasn’t loony enough, I’m pretty sure there was a scene where a ninja disappeared for no apparent reason.  And I don’t mean “disappeared” as in he dropped his little smoke bombs and ran away as the smoke cleared either.  I mean this motherfucker disappeared Obi-Wan Kenobi style.  Slow-Mo fade fashion.  Am I crazy?  Did I dream that part?  

If Firstenberg kept this level of I Don’t Believe My Eyes level of WTF-ness going throughout the entire movie, I honestly believe American Ninja would’ve been a classic.  Unfortunately the rest of the film isn’t quite goofy enough to be considered bat shit insane, nor is it exactly competent enough to be called quality action.  A lot of the early action sequences are flat and suffer from a claustrophobic setting (they mostly take place on or around the same Army base) and/or are just inferior rip-offs (like the scene involving an Army truck that blatantly steals from Raiders of the Lost Ark).

I’m torn because I want to really like American Ninja but its tone was just way too out of whack.  For every well done fight scene (the scene where Dudikoff fights off some ninjas in a warehouse ain’t too shabby), there is a scene of utter stupidity that makes you doubt your sanity (like when the bad guy’s Jeep runs off the road and barely nudges a tree then blows up).  I think a big part as to why the film falls just short of becoming a classic is Michael Dudikoff.  The man is clearly not a karate expert and he isn’t much of an actor either.  He also has the screen presence of a cantaloupe to boot.  If the film had a star that was either a legit fighter (like Bloodsport era Van Damme) OR who could do all this silly stuff in a tongue-in-cheek manner (like Brandon Lee in Showdown in Little Tokyo), it might’ve worked.  

American Ninja has plenty of action and isn’t boring, so that’s a plus.  Although it’s no classic, it’s still a better than your average Cannon flick that’s for damn sure.  Four sequels followed.

Sometimes the presence of a washed-up icon in a really bad horror movie can make the film in question a lot of fun.  Sometimes their appearance is the only thing that prevents you from slashing your own wrists.  Adam West’s performance in Zombie Nightmare is a case of the latter.  Seeing the former Caped Crusader trying to escape this film with his dignity intact is the only worthwhile thing in this dung heap posing as a horror movie.

West plays a bleary-eyed cop who is investigating a series of homicides in which teenagers end up with their necks broken.  To keep things quiet, he tells the press that they were just high on angel dust and did it to themselves.  Hey, it happens.  We’ve all been there.  

What really went down was that a softball player (Jon Mikl Thor, who also provided some odious heavy metal music for the soundtrack) got ran over by some rowdy teenagers, who fled the scene of the accident.  His grieving mother used her last favor to the local voodoo witch to resurrect his body so that Thor can go out and kill the teens responsible for his own death.  Since Adam has a checkered history with the old witch, he has a vested interest in everything; hence all the phony baloney leaks to the press.  In the end, Thor drags West to Hell, which is where the movie should’ve gone 90 minutes ago.

Zombie Nightmare is bad in just about every sense of the word.  The cinematography is muddy, the pacing is lethargic, and the make-up is laughable.  And don’t get me started on the cast.  Save for Adam West of course.  (It was Tia Carrere’s first movie so I’ll give her a free pass too.)  Thor is ridiculously inept, as are the posse of hit-and-run cretins.  But the worst performance of the film has to go to Manuska Rigaud who played the voodoo lady.  She speaks in an overdone Haitian accent that resembles Elmer Fudd trying to imitate Bob Marley.  I dare you to understand one word of her dialogue.  

West seems to leave the movie relatively unscathed.  Most of his scenes revolve around him drinking hard liquor.  Something tells me he wasn’t “acting” with “props”.  If that wasn’t alcohol in his glasses, he’s a much better actor than I give him credit for.

When Allen Funt invented Candid Camera I don’t think he had any idea that Sacha Baron Cohen would take the concept to such a raunchy degree.  As with his 2006 smash Borat, Cohen ambushes everyday people (and even a few celebrities too) by posing as a bizarre character and films their reactions.  This time, Cohen plays Bruno, a very, very, very gay host of an Austrian fashion television show.  His run-ins with the public are (in no particular order) gross, disgusting, lewd, outrageous, politically incorrect, shocking, and just downright WRONG.

In short, it’s fucking hilarious.

Cohen is a comic genius.  There is no two ways about it.  In Borat, you could see the seeds being planted.  With Bruno, Cohen makes good on his potential and proves that Borat was not a fluke.  In fact, I think Bruno is even funnier than Borat.  There is a major laugh in every single scene in the film.  How many comedies pull that off?

I would tell you about some of those scenes but I just can’t bring myself to spoil the film for you.  Part of the fun of Bruno is Cohen’s spontaneity.  His continuously clever off-the-cuff comebacks to his public’s befuddled reactions are what keeps the film’s premise from becoming stale or slow.  I guarantee you that you’ll be in a constant state of suspense just from wondering what Cohen will do next. 

The spontaneous nature of the film may diminish with repeated viewings (as with Borat) but since the jury is still out on that, Bruno gets ****.  It’s by far the best comedy of the year and also a contender for the best line of dialogue:  “I remember you; you tried to get my face pregnant!”

Bruno has enough belly laughs to land itself on the list for The Video Vacuum Top Ten Films of the Year at the Number 4 slot; placing it right below My Bloody Valentine 3-D and just above Taken.

Undercover vice cop Candy (Elizabeth Kaitan) gets a new partner named Traci (Raelyn Saalman) and they engage in the usual Vice Academy shenanigans.  Meanwhile, the Commissioner’s computer nerd son Irwin (Chad Gabbert) creates a Virtual Reality Hooker named Heidi Ho (J.J. North) who escapes from cyberspace and starts turning tricks in the police station parking lot.  It’s up to Candy and Traci to bust the buxom binary bimbo and bring her to justice.

Vice Academy 5 is slightly better than the other Vice Academy sequels, although that really isn’t saying much.  All the stuff involving the Virtual Reality Hooker is kinda funny but VIRTUALLY (pun!) nothing is done with her character.  There is a funny bit where she gives her clients sexually transmitted computer viruses though.  (Virtual VD?)  Sadly, director/writer/producer Rick Sloane couldn’t decide whether or not to make her into a sexual mentor (a la Kelly LeBrock in Weird Science) or a legitimate villain and as a result, the character doesn’t have as much of an impact as she should’ve.  

It’s not North’s fault though.  She’s super smoking hot, gets naked a lot and seems to be having a lot of fun.  Kaitan and Saalman also have some nice nude scenes as well, making this the most tit-ccentric Vice Academy movie since the first one.

Despite having a bunch of boobies, Vice Academy 5 falls flat in a couple other areas.  Way too much time is spent on the Commissioner (Jay Richardson) and Ms. Devonshire’s (Jayne Hamil) crumbling marriage.  Their counseling scenes aren’t very funny and get in the way of the VR Hooker stuff.  The film also reeks of shameless self-promotion on Sloane’s behalf.  (Several Hobgoblin hand puppets can be seen in the background as well as posters for Sloane’s other films.)  It’s still marginally better than say, Virtuosity. 

Even though Vice Academy 5 isn’t very good, I have to hand it to Sloane for one thing:  Although he made the film in 1996, it still looks like it was made in 1988.  I don’t know how he did it or what kind of camera he used, but it’s pretty uncanny how everything looks like it came from the 80’s.  You have to respect that.

Vice Academy 5 also has the benefit of a smattering of funny lines.  My favorite came when Ms. Devonshire asks the Commissioner if he wants a little “TLC”.  He responds with, “You know I hate rap music!”

North, Richardson, and Saalman all starred in the classic Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfold the previous year.

Edmond (William H. Macy) is a schmo who decides to leave his wife (Rebecca Pidgeon) because he’s bored.  He then heads down to a strip club where he turns down sex with Denise Richards because she’s “too expensive”.  Afterwards, he visits Bai Ling in a peep show booth but turns down sex with her because she’s “too expensive”.  Edmond next goes to a massage parlor ran by Debi Mazar and tries to have sex with Mena Suvari.  Predictably, he turns her down because she’s “too expensive”.

Then Edmond gets rolled by some black dudes and decides to pawn his wedding ring to buy a badass knife to protect himself.  The knife comes in handy when a black pimp tries to roll him and he gets to slash him up while saying a bunch of racial epithets.  Triumphant, he seeks solace in the bed of a lowly waitress (Julia Stiles) who apparently fucked him for free.  After he spouts off a lot of crazy talk, she gets scared and tries to run and he slashes her to ribbons.  Edmond gets picked up by the cops and goes to prison where his big black burly cellmate (Bokeem Woodbine) rapes him.

Moral of the story:  If you express your White Hate, you’ll get Brown Sugar in your ass.

Edmond was written by David (Glengarry Glen Ross) Mamet and directed by Stuart (Re-Animator) Gordon.  At first glance, this may seem like a bizarro pairing but the duo used to run around in the same theater circles back before they got famous.  Although Edmond is more of Mamet’s movie than Gordon’s (it’s no From Beyond I’ll tell you that), it still had enough squirm-in-your-seat moments to make it his best movie in years.

Macy delivers a solid turn as Edmond and keeps your attention throughout his various misadventures.  The best part of the movie though is the supporting cast that’s chockfull of hotties.  Unfortunately, out of all the foxy ladies, only Bai Ling gets naked.  Jesus, and wait till you see Jeffrey Combs in this movie.  Words can’t describe it; you’ll have to see it for yourself.

While the flick coasts on the performance of Macy it’s far from perfect.  Often the movie feels stagy and more than a tad contrived.  Also, a lot of the over the top dialogue is just way too theatrical to be taken seriously.  Then again, I laughed really, really hard at the following exchange near the end of the movie:

Edmond:  Did they tell you what happened?

Prison Priest:  No.

Edmond:  I was sodomized.

Prison Priest:  Did you report it?

Edmond:  Yes.

Prison Priest:  What did they say?

Edmond:  It happens.

With that kind of priceless dialogue, how can I give Edmond anything less than ***.

Sergeant Stryker (John Wayne) is a gruff no-nonsense hardass who leads his squadron of men into battle during World War II.  He takes a shine to one young soldier (John Agar, who also starred in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon with Wayne the same year) who only went to war because of his military minded father.  Since Stryker reminds him of his old man they naturally butt heads.  After saving each others’ lives, the two men learn to respect one another.  Eventually, Stryker leads his troops to the titular island so they can raise the US flag and be immortalized forever.

Sands of Iwo Jima is not only one of John Wayne’s best flicks, it’s also one of the best war movies ever made.  Usually when a war film relies heavily on stock footage for its battle sequences, it comes off phony looking and cheap.  But here, director Alan (The Gorilla) Dwan makes excellent use of the stock footage.  The “real” and the “reel” are blended together quite seamlessly and the stock footage lends an authenticity to the picture that most war films lack.  (The flag used for the finale was the actual flag from the battle of Iwo Jima.  How’s that for authenticity!)  There are even a couple of gruesome (for the time) scenes of violence (one guy gets shot in the eyeball, another is bayoneted in the gut, some soldiers get B-B-Q’ed via flamethrower, etc.) that gives the movie an added punch.

The Duke was nominated for an Oscar for his performance and deservedly so.  Wayne is pretty great and is equally adept at showing his tender side as he is his tough side.  Even though he’s hard on his men, he has his reasons, and deep down inside, he has a heart of gold.  I particularly liked the Mr. Miyagi style scene where he teaches a soldier how to use a bayonet by incorporating a few dance steps into his slashing technique.

What made the flick for me though was the motley crew of supporting characters; all of whom went on to have healthy careers in B horror films.  Besides Agar (who starred in the immortal The Brain from Planet Arous), there was Arthur (Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man) Franz (who also narrates), Richard (Blood Song) Jaeckel, and Forrest (The Crawling Eye) Tucker. This may have been Wayne’s movie but it’s Tucker who gets all the best lines like:  “My natural dislike for you is developing into a great hatred!” and “That’s war:  Trading real estate for men!”

Sands of Iwo Jima is just badass enough to wind up on The Video Vacuum’s Top Ten Films of the Year for 1949 at the Number 2 spot; placing it below Mighty Joe Young and right above The Third Man.

Two smarmy privileged asswipes (John Dall and Farley Granger) murder a schoolmate that they deem as “inferior” by strangling him with the Rope of the title.  They then stash the body in an old chest and invite the dead guy’s father and girlfriend over for a cocktail party.  The two murderers even serve finger sandwiches on top of the chest just to be showy.  No one suspects that the guy’s body is in there until the duo’s professor (Jimmy Stewart) gets wind of their scheme and tries to unravel the mystery.

Rope is one of director Alfred Hitchcock’s all time best flicks.  What I dug most about his direction in this film is that his attitude behind the camera was just as brash and cocksure as the two main characters.  First off, the flick is filmed in “real time”.  Hitch has a field day with this gimmick and builds up the suspense in manner that’s just as devilish as our anti-heroes.  Secondly, The Master filmed Rope in several unbroken continuous camera takes (some are noticeable if you look hard enough).  Since the film was based on a play, this technique helps to reinforce the stage dynamic of the material and seeps the flick in claustrophobic dread.  Finally, Rope is notable for being Hitchcock’s first film in color.  The rich hues really enhance the suspense and makes the proceedings that much more realistic.

Stewart is really awesome here in his first Hitchcock film.  Apparently he didn’t like his performance or the movie because he felt he was cast against type, but I thought he did a Hell of a job.  I particularly liked the way he tongue-in-cheekily encouraged the murder of “inferior” people, much to Dall’s approval.  Dall by the way is equally stellar and can play a smug prick like it’s nobody’s business.  Granger has the thankless job of playing the sweaty accomplice who always tenses up whenever he feels like he’s being interrogated and/or someone gets too close to the corpse.  That’s OK because he and Dall are great together, especially whenever they bicker about the body.

Everyone always mentions in their review of Rope about how it was based on the infamous Leopold and Loeb case.  (You know the one where the two gay guys killed someone and it was shocking because they were the first gay murderers or something.)  This is the part in my review where I mention that.

I don’t really care about that stuff though.  What I find more interesting is the fact that Hume Cronyn wrote the screenplay.  I guess he’s most famous for being one of the old dudes in Cocoon, but he also acted in Hitchock’s Shadow of a Doubt and Lifeboat too.  He also wrote Hitch’s next pic, Under Capricorn as well.

Rope is Number 2 on The Video Vacuum Top Ten List for the Year 1948; located below Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and above Red River.