Valentina (Isabelle de Funes) is a sultry fashion photographer who has a run-in with the mysterious Baba Yaga (Carroll Baker), a MILFy witch.  Baba Yaga immediately becomes obsessed with the delectable photog and pretty soon, she’s sending Valentina bizarre gifts (like a kinky S & M Barbie doll) and playing odd pranks on her (she turns her camera into a death magnet).  As Valentina falls deeper under Baba Yaga’s spell, it’s up to her smug cartoonist boyfriend (George Eastman, the Grim Reaper himself) to save her from the clutches of the bitchy witch.

A lot of Baba Yaga is pointlessly artsy-fartsy for the sake of being artsy-fartsy.  There’s a sex scene that’s almost entirely comprised of still photographs as well as a bunch of completely random dream sequences that help pad the running time.  While the film is uneven and disjointed, I still dug it for it’s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink attitude.  I mean how can you go wrong when your movie features mature lesbian witches, sexy fashion photographers, nude modeling, cameras that kill, Nazi dream sequences, and dolls that come to life and become S & M sex slaves?

Carroll Baker does an OK job as the title character.  She looks alright I guess but she doesn’t really radiate the air of sexuality the character needed.  De Funes is the reason to check the flick out.  Her sexy wide-eyed stare and absolute willingness to disrobe at the drop of a hat totally endeared her to me. 

AKA:  Baby Yaga, Devil Witch.  AKA:  The Devil Witch.  AKA:  Kiss Me Kill Me.  AKA:  Black Magic.

The daughter of the Boogeyman obsessed doctor from Part 2 finds daddy’s diaries and when she reads from the book, it reawakens the Boogeyman.  The spectral beastie comes out of the closet (no pun intended) and kills her and then makes it look like a suicide.  Her psychology major roommate also reads the book and pretty soon, the Boogeyman murders her friends one by one before finally setting his sights on our heroine.

The first Boogeyman was a terrible PG-13 horror movie.  Part 2 was OK, but at least it was smart enough to chuck the supernatural shenanigans and give us a gory slasher flick.  This one unfortunately is more in line with the first film because it revives the ghostly murderer (although it’s mostly a guy wearing white make-up and greasy long hair rather than the CGI turd monster from the original).  On the bright side, the kills are juicy (my favorite was when the stoner gets impaled on his bong), we get to see a few titties, and the ending is marginally clever. 

Other than that, Boogeyman 3 is just another interchangeable crappy Direct to DVD horror sequel.  Gary (Mosquito) Jones directs the film with little style, which doesn’t do the flick any favors and the script suffers from way too much padding.  It also takes FOREVER to get going.  Ultimately, the flick actually feels more like a Grudge rip-off (the ghost attacks people who live in the same room over a period of time) than a Boogeyman movie.  It’s a smidgeon better than the original but that’s not exactly a ringing endorsement.   

This really should’ve been called I Was a Teenage Vampire. Unfortunately, the folks at AIP chickened out. It’s the third in the series, and while it isn’t quite in the same league as I Was a Teenage Werewolf or I Was a Teenage Frankenstein; it still has it’s moments.

The film is essentially a remake of I Was a Teenage Werewolf. Instead of Michael Landon getting hypnotized by a deranged doctor into becoming a werewolf, we get a mousy chick (Sandra Harrison) getting hypnotized by a deranged doctor (Louise Lewis) into becoming a vampire. Other than that, it’s the same damn thing. There’s even a funny rock song (called “Puppy Love”) in there for no good reason whatsoever.

The first act is great. I particularly liked the scenes with the bitchy sorority girls hazing our heroine and saying shit like, “Cool it, Old Horse Face is on a warpath!” The problem is that it takes her forever to turn into the vampire. Sure, the goofy ass make-up is hilarious, but Harrison’s transformation doesn’t occur until the movie is more than halfway over.

Also, the evil doctor’s plan doesn’t make a lick of damn sense. I mean she is trying to unleash a power within her that’s “greater than the atom bomb”. I had no idea that vampires with teased hair, oversized Halloween fangs, and extremely bushy eyebrows were more powerful than an A-Bomb.

Still, Blood of Dracula is plenty of fun. It’s got a silly looking monster, cheesy transformation scenes, and dumb rock songs. Plus, the running time is barely over an hour long. What more can you ask for in a 50’s horror flick?

AKA: Blood is My Heritage. AKA: Blood of the Demon.

The first Boogeyman movie (the 2005 one, not the 1980 Ulli Lommel mini-masterpiece) was a piss poor PG-13 CGI-heavy shit storm.  Boogeyman 2 plays almost like an apology for the first film.  All I can say is that producer Sam Raimi must’ve finally wised the fuck up.

A chick sees her family butchered by a serial killer and grows up to have some severe issues.  Years later, she checks into a nuthouse to conquer her fear of closets (don’t ask).  It doesn’t take long before The Boogeyman shows up and starts killing people by taking their worst fear and turning it against them.

The guy who is afraid of the dark gets his guts ripped out in a pitch black elevator.  The OCD kid gets a mouthful of bleach.  The cutter chick finds maggots crawling in her slash marks and has to hack into them with a straight razor.  (Not up to par with the similar scene in Hellbound:  Hellraiser 2, but still high quality.)  The guy who is afraid of “opening up” gets his heart ripped out.  The bulimic bitch gets a whole bunch of food pumped into her mouth until her belly explodes.  In addition to those fine kills, we also get some non-fear related deaths like hypodermic needles in the eyes and the piece de resistance, a stellar decapitation via hedge clippers.

Folks, this is the kind of movie where someone just can’t get stabbed and be done with it.  No, the killer has to twist his knife until their guts hit the floor.  I respect that kind of integrity.  The film also puts off a Nightmare 3 vibe because of all the troubled teens in group therapy scenes.

If you couldn’t already tell, Boogeyman 2 is ass loads more fun than Boogeyman 1.  Then again the first film set the bar extremely low.  Actually, if it wasn’t for the gore, Part 2 would’ve been just as useless and boring as the original.

In fact, Boogeyman 2 reminds me of those Amish kids.  You know the ones I’m talking about.  The ones that spend their childhood being all religious and stuff; then when they turn 18, they all go out and party till they puke because they’ve been so damn repressed their whole life.  The Boogeyman franchise is kinda like that.  The first film was a wishy-washy PG-13 crapfest.  Part 2 was all pent-up about the first film being so chaste that when it finally got the go-ahead to be an Unrated Direct-To-DVD sequel that it wore itself out trying to be a balls-out gore bonanza. 

Saw fans will enjoy seeing Tobin Bell playing the doctor who tries to help the kids.  He doesn’t do a good job, mostly because he’s still using that creepy Jigsaw voice.  I mean how can you listen to that raspy voice of doom?  Christ, just him saying, “HELLO PAUL…” in that Grim Reaper-ish tone is enough to SEND you to the loony bin, not get you out of it!

The Bottom Line:  The gore is good; everything else pretty much sucks ass. 

A karate chopping chick stands to inherit her father’s fortune but there is a bunch of no-good bad guys that want it for themselves.  That means they try to jump her repeatedly and she has to kick the snot out of them at regular intervals.  In the end, our heroine discovers that her inheritance is a humongous amount of heroin.  That gets her so mad that she sets out to kick the bad guys’ collective asses once and for all.

Before I go any further, I have to get something off my chest here about Black Rose (a film that IMDB has ZERO information on by the way).  I got this movie in a pack of 70’s blaxploitation films but it is actually a Chinese Kung Fu movie from the 80’s.  To top it off, the main character isn’t black and her name isn’t Rose either.  Talk about disappointing.

Disreputable titles aside, this is an OK Kung Fu flick.  The acting is horrible, the dubbing is atrocious, and the fight choreography leaves something to be desired.  However, what Black Rose lacks in quality, it makes up for in quantity as there is a major Kung Fu battle at just about every reel change.   

What entertained me most about Black Rose was that it ripped off so many musical scores from other films.  During a love scene, they actually play “Nobody Does It Better” from The Spy Who Loved Me.  Even better is the fact that they use Jimmy Page’s score from Death Wish 2 and 3 for several fight scenes.  The thing of it is; it’s actually pretty effective.  More composers should rip off the Death Wish theme for their movies!

AKA:  Hong Kong Tigress.

Peter Sellers stars as Chance the Gardner, a guy who is clearly a few sandwiches short of a picnic, if you catch my drift.  When he isn’t tending to his garden, he’s obsessively watching television.  One day, his benefactor dies and Chance must leave the house for the first time in his life.  Through a set of somewhat contrived circumstances (which is fitting I guess, given that his name is Chance after all), he becomes best friends with a dying billionaire (Melvyn Douglas), romances the sick dude’s wife (Shirley MacLaine), and becomes a top advisor to the President (Jack Warden); all because he constantly spouts gardening advice that people mistake for life-changing metaphors.

I will admit right up front that I am not the world’s biggest Peter Sellers fan.  While I loved him in Dr. Strangelove; the Pink Panther movies were definitely not my cup of tea and his performance in Lolita was downright irritating.  In Being There, he defied the odds and gave me a pretty great performance.  I thought at the beginning he was going to get on my nerves, but his performance became endearing rather quickly.  

What can I say?  I’m a sucker for a good Idiot Becomes a Hero Movie.  Just like Corky Romano, this Chance guy will say something dumb and the people around him misconstrue what he says as wisdom.  The whole premise asks (allow me to quote Obi-Wan Kenobi for a second) who’s the more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him?  It’s a pretty good message and fortunately, director Hal (Harold and Maude) Ashby doesn’t beat us over the head with it.

Sure, the film has it’s share of problems.  It’s overlong, has a couple of half-baked subplots (like the FBI and CIA trying to look into Chance’s past), and the pacing is spotty.  I still say that any movie in which Shirley MacLaine (looking like a fox) masturbates is top notch in my book.

AKA:  Chance.

Sometimes a sequel comes along and trumps the original in terms of story, action, and fun.  It’s a pretty short list.  Among them, we have Wrath of Khan, Road Warrior, and Friday the 13^th Part 3-D.  Bride of Chucky is right up there.  (Granted it’s not as good as either Wrath of Khan or Road Warrior, but it’s just about on par with Friday 3-D.)

This time everyone’s favorite murderous doll Chucky (Brad Dourif) is resurrected by his former flame, Tiffany (Jennifer Tilly) using a Voodoo for Dummies book.  It doesn’t take long for Chucky to get miffed at Tiff and he puts her soul into a female doll.  In order to get their souls back into human form, they need to get an amulet in Hackensack.  Chucky and Tiffany hitch a ride with an eloping couple (Katherine Heigl and Nick Stabile) and along the way continue their murdering spree.

Bride of Chucky is fucking hilarious.  There is no two ways about it.  If you’re looking for a scary movie, look elsewhere.  If instead, you want to laugh your ass off, by all means check it out.

The script by Don Mancini (who has written all the Child’s Play movies) is peppered with a lot of in-jokes that not only poke fun at the series (“It would take three or four sequels to explain it!”), but the other popular slasher franchises as well (in the opening scene there is a shot of an evidence locker featuring Jason’s hockey mask, Freddy’s glove, Michael Myers’ mask and Leatherface’s chainsaw).  He also concocted a lot of imaginative deaths.  We get a lip piercing ripping, nails to the face, and my favorite; a mirrored ceiling crashing down upon two swingers in a waterbed.

What makes the flick a classic isn’t the kills; it’s the dialogue.  The banter between Chucky and Tiffany is side-splitting and is some of the best witty repartee since Hepburn and Tracy.  I think what makes it so funny is that when they fight, they fight about normal shit just like regular people.  Like when Chucky gets pissed that Tiffany didn’t do the dishes.  (“Those dishes aren’t gonna wash themselves!”)  Hands down the funniest scene though is when Chucky and Tiffany fuck.  “Have I got a rubber?  Tiff… I’m ALL rubber!”

The addition of Tiffany gives the series a new lease on life and Tilly is very funny in both human and doll form.  Dourif once again does a dynamite job providing Chucky’s voice and he and Tilly have a good chemistry together.  It’s funny to think that there was a time when Katherine Heigl was the chick you went to if you wanted to make a kickass sequel that was better than the original.  (Under Siege 2:  Dark Territory was the other film.)  That is before she became a complete cunt and starred in that Grey’s Anatomy crap.  She does a good job here; it’s just a shame what a crummy turn her career has taken since then.  I also enjoyed seeing John Ritter.  He’s kinda the last guy you’d expect to be in a Chucky movie, so that makes his gory death that much more fun.

Director Ronny Yu, the man who did the classic The Bride With White Hair movies infuses the movie with a lot of his patented energy.  His inventiveness with the camera compliments the anarchic material nicely and he gives us a great finale in a cemetery.  Yu also “delivers” a truly awesome set-up for the sequel.  Yu’s mad skills coupled with Mancini’s witty script makes Bride of Chucky the best film in the Child’s Play series as well as one of the best horror sequels of the 90’s.

Bride of Chucky is a solid Number 8 on The Video Vacuum Top Ten Films of 1998 List, sandwiched in between Dirty Work and Rushmore.

<Tomorrow’s Horror Franchise Movie:  Leprechaun>

Francis Ford Coppola’s sumptuously mounted, painstakingly (pain-STAKING get it?) faithful adaptation of Bram Stoker’s timeless novel is far too uneven to be called a classic but it’s still quite a bit of fun.  Everyone knows the plot so why even bring it up.  The only major change Coppola made was adding a cool prologue that links the historical Dracula, Vlad the Impaler to the more traditional bloodsucker that we all know and love.  There is also an emphasis on Mina being the reincarnation of Dracula’s lost love too.  Other than that, the “plot” is the same old, same old.

Coppola does a great job in the style department.  He cleverly uses shadows to establish mood and even steals a few old school camera tricks from the silent movie days as well.  He also tosses in neat little nods to the 1931 Dracula and even Nosferatu too.  I think he went a little overboard when it comes to being faithful to the book though.  I mean the novel is basically nothing but people writing shit down in their diary.  Keeping a journal isn’t the most cinematic of activities by any stretch of the imagination, so a lot of these scenes are pretty lame.

Coppola puts in just enough random weirdness in there though to keep things interesting.  Some of these odd little touches work, like when Dracula crawls up on the castle walls.  Others just don’t make any sense whatsoever.  Like the fact that Dracula has an army of gypsies protecting him.  Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought gypsies where supposed to warn people about Dracula, not act as his bodyguards. 

The film is at its best during the early going where Harker comes to Dracula’s castle.  (Particularly when Drac’s trio of hottie brides give him a toothy blowjob.)  The scenes inside the freaky mental asylum also have a certain kick to them.  After Dracula arrives in England, the film slowly begins to run out of steam. 

The second half of the film centers around the love story between Dracula and Mina and is nowhere near as much fun.  This aspect of the film should’ve been the most involving yet it’s the most boring.  The reason for this mostly is that it’s kinda hard to get a read on Mina.  One minute she wants Drac to put the bite on her, the other minute she’s all prim and proper saying crap like, “But I’m Mrs. Jonathan Harker!”  The next minute she's slapping Dracula and crying, “OOOH you killed Lucy!”, then she’s acting all slutty and licking Drac’s bloody chest. 

Fortunately, this portion of the film also features Van Helsing cutting off heads and driving stakes into people’s hearts and saying funny shit afterwards.  I especially liked the scene where he cuts off Lucy’s head then the next shot is of Van Helsing cutting into a big slab of pot roast.  Very classy editing there Francis.

If you can’t already tell, this movie is all over the damn place.  The ending is also a bit of a letdown and feels sorta rushed.  This is forgivable mostly because of Gary Oldman’s portrayal of Dracula.  (Or “Drac-Cool” as he pronounces it.)  He’s great at playing the many different incarnations of Dracula.  There’s Soldier Drac, Old Drac (he’s pretty hilarious when licking Harker’s razor), Wolfman Drac (there’s an excellent scene where he fucks Lucy in the rain giving new meaning to the term “Doggy Style”), Gothic Gentleman Drac, and Bat Drac.  While he is rather unconvincing at playing the more romantic aspects of the character, he totally owns the screen whenever he’s covered in latex make-up. 

The other actors are pretty hit and miss.  Winona Ryder does a fine job as Mina, yet like Oldman, she has trouble conveying her character’s more seductive traits.  That’s OK though because the foxy ginger-headed Sadie Frost more than makes up for Ryder’s lack of sauciness as Mina’s sex-obsessed friend Lucy.  And I’m sorry, as much as I like Keanu Reeves; he gives one of the worst performances in the history of celluloid in this movie.  He can barely even do an English accent and is hopelessly out of his depth in his scenes with Oldman.  Watch him flounder while trying to say shit like, “I was chased by a pack of wolves through a blue inferno!”  Also painfully annoying is Tom Waits as Renfield.  Whenever he appeared he just irritating the living piss out of me.  Giving easily the best performance in the movie is Anthony Hopkins.  His deliciously hammy version of Van Helsing is downright hilarious and although his zany characterization runs against the grain of the rest of the movie, it’s still pretty awesome.

He also gets all the best lines in the movie.  While Oldman gets to recite the more classic Lugosi lines like “I never drink… wine” and “Listen to them… children of the night”, it’s Hopkins who gets all the juicy dialogue.  Try not to crack up whenever he says shit like, “She was in great pain then we cut off her head and drove a stake through her heart; then she found peace!” and “Your precious Lucy will become a bitch of the Devil.  A whore of darkness!”  Great stuff. 

I think the coolest thing about the flick though was that Dracula’s screams where provided by the late Lux Interior of The Cramps.  I can only imagine how awesome that ADR session was.  Just picture the director of The Godfather giving vocal direction to one of the greatest frontmen in punk rock.  Coppola:  “Okay Lux this time I want you to sound more like a wounded hyena!”  Lux:  “AAAAAHHHHHH!”  Coppola:  "Perfect!"  Too bad that isn’t on the DVD Bonus Features.

Coppola executive produced the similar (and to me, slightly better) Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein two years later.

As a die hard slasher movie fan, I like films that give you the “same but different” approach.  I don’t ask that a slasher flick reinvent the wheel, I just want to see teens get naked a lot and get killed in gory ways.  Every now and then you get a fresh and original take on the slasher genre that breathes new life into an old concept.  Behind the Mask:  The Rise of Leslie Vernon is such a film.

Leslie Vernon (Nathan Baesel) is a prospective serial killer who invites a documentary film crew to follow him as he sets up his latest murder spree.  He meticulously prepares his family’s rundown farmhouse so that when a group of rowdy teens show up to party, he can:  A)  Cut the power.  B)  Isolate the teens and pick them off one by one.  C)  Stack the bodies in the tool shed.  D) Chase after the virginal “Survivor Girl”.  The documentary crew eventually grows a conscience and decides to warn the potential victims that Vernon is going to kill them.  Vernon is quite a savvy serial killer though and adjusts his elaborate plan to include the trio of crew members.

Behind the Mask makes a brilliant conceit early on that Freddy Krueger, Jason Vorhees, Michael Myers, and even Chucky are REAL serial killers and that Leslie Vernon is just following in their footsteps in hopes to be the next great slasher.  By doing this, it makes the idea of a documentary crew filming Vernon kinda logical.  In the age of increasingly tasteless reality TV, this would be a ratings bonanza. 

As much as I hate shaky-cam on general principals, the “documentary” footage in Behind the Mask was absorbing.  I particularly liked the way Vernon planted newspaper clippings of his family’s history in the library so the Survivor Girl would find them.  By having Leslie show off HOW he prepares to kill everyone, director Scott Glosserman is given license to turn all the usual slasher movie clichés on their ear.  Once Leslie tells us what he’s going to do; the movie drops the shaky-cam stuff, becomes a “real” slasher movie, and we’re given a fitting payoff. 

I mean did you ever wonder how Michael Myers was always able to prop up all those dead bodies so that Laurie would find them?  It takes PLANNING.  Behind the Mask also tells us the secret of how slashers are able to catch up to their running victims by merely walking.  The answer:  Lots and lots of cardio.

As great as the idea for this movie is, the execution sometimes leaves a little something to be desired.  As I previously stated, the shaky-cam aesthetic is quite irritating.  I mean there are ways to convey that portions of the film are supposed to be a pseudo-documentary without shaking the damn camera so much.  The documentary scenes are the best written but the over-shakiness is grating.  The slasher movie portion is fun, yet Glosserman kinda rushes things too much in the third act and the editing starts getting a bit sloppy.  The gore is also kinda slack.  The sole exception is a juicy death via post hole digger.

Nathan Baesel is a name you’re going to be hearing a lot more from; hopefully.  If he doesn’t get famous from this movie then we can always take solace in the fact that he knocked it out of the park as Leslie Vernon.  Baesel (who kinda reminded me of a demented mixture of Ryan Reynolds and Jim Carrey) had impressive screen presence and made Leslie immensely likable.  Even if you don’t like slasher movies, you’ll enjoy his performance.  I also admired the work of Scott Wilson as the older retired slasher who gave Leslie a lot of fatherly advice on how to kill people.

Sure, I got some quibbles with this movie, but it’s still recommended wholeheartedly for anyone who wants to see an inventive slasher flick.  I have to admit that I would love a sequel at some point.  (The set-up for the sequel is set to the tune of “Psycho Killer”.)  Unfortunately, I have to knock a ½ * off for all the shaky-cam bullshit.  That still leaves Behind the Mask:  The Rise of Leslie Vernon with an upper-tier *** rating.

Frankie Avalon wants to try skydiving.  His girlfriend Annette Funicello wants to do it too but Frankie says ixnay to that.  His typically chauvinistic reasoning behind that is that it’s too dangerous of a sport for girls.  Annette then seeks out to prove her boyfriend wrong by jumping out of a plane and parachuting.  Meanwhile, Frankie’s pal Bonehead falls in love with a mermaid and the dumb ass biker Eric Von Zipper kidnaps a singer.

Beach Blanket Bingo was the fifth entry in the Frankie and Annette Beach Party Movies.  The only other Beach Party Movie I’ve seen was Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, so I’m not the best judge of quality for this series, but this was pretty damn weak.  It’s only slightly better than Ghost in the Invisible Bikini as there were actually a handful of funny gags in this one.

I thought it was sorta bizarre that hardly any damn time was spent playing Beach Blanket Bingo.  The only time Frankie and Company play it is during the opening credits.  The flick should’ve really been called Beach Blanket Skydiving because that’s what the whole movie is about.  I guess when you’re singing a really crappy song, “Skydiving” is a harder word to rhyme with than “Bingo”.

Another thing that struck me as odd about the movie was the subplot involving the mermaid.  It doesn’t have much to do with the rest of the film and only serves as an excuse to give Bonehead a bigger role.  The real reason I think the mermaid was even there was because she was played by the insanely hot Marta Kristen from Lost in Space.  

I don’t care how inane the mermaid scenes in this movie were, they were at least a hundred times better than any of the parts with Eric von Zipper.  This guy is odiously unfunny and grated on my fucking nerves every second he was on screen.  Thank God he gets sawed in half during the Perils of Pauline inspired finale. 

I’ve never been a Beach Party fan, so this movie may just not have been my cup of Mad Dog 20/20.  On one hand, you had about a half dozen truly nauseating songs.  On the other hand, you had a bunch of hot chicks in bikinis (including a young Linda Evans).  Then again, you had to put up with Annette’s constant feminist protesting.  Still, you had some cameos by the always reliable Paul Lynde, Don Rickles, and Buster Keaton, who at least made things bearable.  So it’s pretty much a toss-up.

The best line of dialogue came at the very end when Annette asked Frankie if he believed in mermaids and he incomprehensibly replies:  “Is there a moon?  Is there a sky?  Are there dreams?”  Try working THAT into a normal conversation sometime.  EXAMPLE:  “Hey, are you going to finish your fries?”  REPLY:  “Is there a moon?  Is there a sky?  Are there dreams?”

A mean old king has 18 hot daughters who act as his bodyguards and kill anybody that fucks with him.  When they murder this one guy, his Kull the Conqueror look-alike son tries to get revenge.  He doesn’t know Kung Fu very good so the 18 badass bitches beat the snot out of him.  This guy goes around moping for a bit until he finds this chick and this other nincompoop who all have grudges against the royal bastard.  They also conveniently learn that they each possess a third of a medallion which links them in their destiny to kill the old asshole king.

Okay before I go any further with this review, let me get a couple things off my chest.  First off, Bruce Lee isn’t in the movie, Bruce Lei is.  Secondly, we never learn his “Ways” of Kung Fu.  Last but not least, even if Bruce Lee WAS in this movie and we DID learn his ways of Kung Fu, I still don’t think it would’ve been very good.  There, I feel a little bit better now.

Bruce Lee’s Ways of Kung Fu is all over the fucking place in terms of storytelling.  Way too much time is spent on inconsequential bit players and the really important characters are given very little screen time and/or don’t even appear until the movie is almost over.  The film also feels really choppy and bounces around a lot; almost as if the flick was made up of episodes of a weekly series that got edited down into 83 minutes.

The action scenes are tolerable and will probably keep your interest for the most part.  (I’m not going to guarantee that though because I fell asleep on it last night and had to finish watching it this evening.)  The sexy 18 Daughters of Death (they are never called that but they should’ve been) are pretty cool; even though they don’t get naked or anything.  If the whole movie had been about them, Bruce Lee’s Ways of Kung Fu might’ve been tight.  Well, it wasn’t, so… Two Stars.

AKA:  Bravado of a Lady Fight. 

John Wayne stars as an Army colonel fighting in the Pacific who is ordered to leave his platoon to train a bunch of Pilipino guerillas to get them into fighting shape.  During a top secret mission, Wayne rescues a famous Pilipino freedom fighter (Anthony Quinn) from The Death March.  After being nursed back to health, Quinn joins the cause and helps fight off the Japanese but he still pines for his long-lost love.  Little does he know she just so happens to be a double agent.

Back to Bataan was still being filmed while the war was raging on.  The filmmakers wanted the utmost attention to detail, so the script was drastically rewritten on a day-to-day basis to reflect what was happening in the Pacific.  The results are understandably uneven and more than a bit choppy.  Because the movie was still being filmed as WWII was still being fought, it lacks the hindsight that most war films have.

Also, the movie reeks of needless jingoistic patriotism.  The story was already pretty involving as it was, so the gratuitous flag waving seemed a bit over the top to me.  I also found it a tad annoying whenever the movie went out of its way to remind us how accurate it was.  In addition to the obligatory title card thanking the Army for its assistance, there’s also an overly bombastic narrator who constantly rattles off names of soldiers being sent off to war who wears out his welcome rather fast. 

It may seem like I’m beating up on Back to Bataan, but these are really minor gripes in the scheme of things.  What really counts in a movie like this are the battle scenes, and brother, they’re pretty legit.  Director Edward (Captive Wild Woman) Dmytryk films the war sequences with moody panache and gives them an almost film noir-ish quality.  While there is an abundance of talk 2/3 of the way through the film, the finale where The Duke busts in on the enemy camp and blows up a slew of bamboo huts is pretty freaking great.  The flick is also a lot more graphic than most of its ilk.  There is an especially gnarly scene where a Pilipino principal refuses to take down the American flag outside of his school and is promptly hung alongside Old Glory by some mean ass Japanese soldiers.  We also get a pretty tight knife-through-the-neck scene too.

Wayne with his three-day beard delivers a solid performance.  He doesn’t really share too many scenes with Quinn so if you were expecting them to make a great screen team or something, you’re gonna be disappointed.  That’s all right by me though because The Duke gets some Grade A dialogue in this one.  Here’s my favorite exchange:

Wayne:  “Where’d you get the gun?”

Soldier:  “I killed a Jap.”

Wayne:  “Well, kill more Japs and get more guns!”

Jack Lee must protect a secret book that Bruce Lee wrote so he gives it to his good friend Bruce Le for safe keeping.  There’s a dickhead dojo owner who wants to steal the book and he sends out a bunch of his bonehead buddies to beat up Jack.  For the most part, Jack is able to stay one step ahead of the bad guys.  That is until the end when the dastardly dojo owner shoots Jack in the back and steals the book.  This finally sets the stage for Bruce to use his Fist of Vengeance.

Bruce’s Fist of Vengeance is a virtual remake of They Call Him Bruce Lee.  It even features the same star (Jack Lee) and location (Manila).  It also steals music from other movies (most notably Diamonds Are Forever).  This one is slightly better than They Call Him Bruce Lee because the filmmakers gave Jack more to do this time out.

And I’ll tell ya, Jack Lee is kinda funny in this movie.  He gets a couple of humorous fight scenes including one part in which he teaches a bad dude a lesson by pulling his pants down in front of an entire karate school.  There’s also a funny bit where he fends off a bunch of assassins in his hotel room while getting dressed.  Granted, he’s no Jackie Chan or anything, but he’s (intentionally) funnier than most Bruce Lee imitators.

No matter how many things this flick had going for it, I still had one major beef:  The fight scenes.  Yeah, Jack had a couple nifty comical fights early on, but the more serious battles later in the film are either sped up way too fast or filmed in the slowest slow motion in history.  In one scene Bruce Le will be running around like The Monkees karate chopping people, then the next, he’ll be in such Super Slow Mo that it looks like he’s hardly even moving.  The fast motion scenes are particularly idiotic because they occur in the section of the film when Bruce is trying to avenge his friend’s death.  Nothing and I mean nothing ruins the mood of a good old fashioned vendetta than silly looking fast motion that makes you look like Benny Hill. 

In the early 90’s there were a lot of quirky low budget comedies involving gays or lesbians going on an offbeat adventure.  Very few of these movies are any good.  Bound and Gagged:  A Love Story is not one of them.

Ginger Lynn Allen stars as a chick who is married to the abusive Chris Mulkey.  When he learns that she is having an affair with a lesbian (Elizabeth Saltarrelli), he flips out.  Big Time.  Even though her hubby is a walking time bomb, Ginger still gives up her Sapphic ways and goes back to him.  This pisses off her lesbo lover so much that she resorts to kidnapping Ginger and takes her to a lesbian deprogrammer (Karen Black) to make her like girls again.

Bound and Gagged is one of those movies that tries to be hip and edgy but it just comes off as being desperate and irritating.  (There is a guy who tries to commit suicide while dressed in a Santa suit, if that gives you an idea of what we’re dealing with here.)  Although the bulk of the movie is flat and joyless, there is one (count ‘em, ONE) funny scene where a guy gropes Ginger and her lesbian lover rescues her by running over his hand with a car.  Naturally, she runs over the WRONG HAND and Ginger makes her back the car up and crush the hand that touched her goodies.  If the rest of the film had successfully maintained this level of black comedy, Bound and Gagged:  A Love Story may have actually been worth a damn.

The movie does have a couple scenes of Ginger getting naked and having R rated sex.  I don’t know if this is a good thing or not.  I mean sure, we get to see her naked and everything, but if I really wanted to see her get down and dirty, I’d just put on Between the Cheeks and watch her do her XXX rated thang. 

Ginger gives an OK performance I guess.  She’s hot but she’s not much of an actress.  Again, if I want to watch her “act”, I’ll put on Ginger’s Party.  This was the only movie Saltarrelli ever did and it’s easy to see why.  She’s thoroughly annoying and has the face of a catcher’s mitt to boot.  Mulkey is typically intense and while his character is excruciatingly abrasive, he nevertheless gives the best performance of the film.  He also gets the best line of the movie when he tells Ginger, “You are seriously fucking with my mental health!”

Brother Tang is a badass with a shady past who befriends a midget pickpocket and Kung Fus the heck out of a couple dudes who mess with his diminutive pal.  Tang later gets a job working for a pearl farmer and rekindles a romance with his boss’s daughter.  When a rival pearl farmer tries to muscle his way into the chick’s father’s territory, Tang steps in to kick some ass.

So basically, it’s just like Road House, except with pearl beds and midget sidekicks.

Okay first off, there is no one named Bruce in the whole damn movie.  There are no snakes.  There are no eagles.  There is no extreme sunlight that would cause said eagles to make a shadow.  So I don’t know where the fuck they got the title from.  It should’ve been called something along the lines of Pearls and Punches.

Confounding title aside, Bruce Against Snake in Eagle’s Shadow is a fitfully entertaining second-rate Kung Fu flick.  The thing that nearly ruins the film is the excessive scenes of ugly girls scuba diving for oysters, shucking them, and pulling out pearls.  These scenes are given somewhat of a payoff however when the bad girl pearl divers start an all-out catfight with the good girl pearl divers.  Unfortunately, no one loses their tops and their shirts aren’t see-through.  Because of that glaring oversight, I have to deduct a Half Star from the flick’s rating.

I will say this for the movie; the Kung Fu scenes are solid.  I liked Bruce Against Snake in Eagle's Shadow slightly better than most middling chopsocky flicks and I’ll tell you why:  The bad guys fought Tang two at a time.  Normally in Kung Fu movies, four or five villains will surround the hero and then attack him one at a time.  Most bad guys in these movies just kinda patiently wait in line to get their ass beat.  Not these guys.  They attack Tang in pairs and as a result, they get to bloody him up a few times.  Sure, Tang always gets the upper hand eventually, but it was nice to see the villains actually try something different for once.

AKA:  Bruce vs. Snake in Eagle’s Shadow.

“What’s in the basket?”

It’s a question asked by many people in Basket Case.  Those who find out usually get torn to pieces.  Most of them deserve it.  Some of them don’t.  The ones that do boy… phew!  

Duane (Kevin Van Hentenryck) carries the titular wicker box around for most of the movie.  He checks into a fleabag hotel in New York City with the box in tow.  But he’s not in New York to sightsee.  Duane’s really there to find the doctors who…

I know most of you reading this review already know what is inside the box.  Usually I have no qualms about spoiling major plot points in my reviews.  Most of the time, I’ll tell the movie’s “big secret” in the review without so much as a Spoiler Warning.  Not this time.  If you’re reading this and have never seen Basket Case before, stop reading this and go see it IMMEDIATELY.  

You know I watched Basket Case today for the first time in several years and it’s amazing how well it still holds up even after repeated viewings.  I’ve seen it probably a half dozen times now (the first time I saw it was on Up All Night or Night Flight, I can’t remember) and it still packed a wallop today.  Why does it work so well?  Mostly because we can sympathize with Duane’s plight.  We want to see him get his revenge; that’s a given.  We also want to see him get the girl too.  Because of his attachment to what’s inside the basket, we know it can’t be.  

Another thing that makes Basket Case fire on all cylinders is director Frank (Frankenhooker) Henenlotter’s storytelling.  He expertly sets up the premise (not before starting things off with an unsettling murder set piece) and slowly builds the suspense to a boil.  He also captures the sleazy side of early 80’s New York with a lovingly affectionate eye.  The way he films The Big Apple’s rundown flophouses, Kung Fu movie theaters, hookers, and drug dealers, he makes it seem like a pretty cool place to live.

I watched the flick today with a buddy of mine who had never seen it.  Part of the fun was watching him reacting to the film.  He loved every second of it and jumped and howled at all the right places.  This flick really works with a crowd.  I can only imagine what it was like to see it in a packed theater full of people.

They don’t make movies like Basket Case anymore.  If you’ve never seen it, do yourself a favor and see it.  If you’ve already seen it, check it out again.  You’ll be glad you did.

Basket Case is on The Video Vacuum Top Ten Films of 1982 at the Number 7 spot which places it in between First Blood and Tron.

Beat Street is more or less a second cousin to the Breakin’ movies.  The major difference is that instead of being about young breakdancers trying to make it big, it features young breakdancers, rappers, DJ’s, and graffiti artists trying to make it big.  It also takes place in New York instead of LA.  Other than that, they’re basically the same movie.

A lot of Beat Street is straight-up hilarious.  It’s not intentional to be sure, but it got some pretty big laughs from me.  The part that had me cracking up the most was when Ramo, the Latino graffiti guru saw his nemesis “Spit” defacing the “art” that he worked so hard to paint on the side of a subway car.  They get into a brawl and end up falling on the train tracks and get electrocuted.  When’s the last time you saw someone die for their “art” like that?  If Ramo only painted on an easel, he may have been still alive today.  That’s OK because if he didn’t, DJ Double K wouldn’t have been able to give him the uproarious Rap Eulogy that concludes the film.

Speaking of music, Beat Street features a wonderfully ludicrous “band” that can only be described as The Village People 2.  These guys all dress up in weird costumes (Barbarian, Egyptian, Safari guide, etc.) and have off-key choreography.  They have to be seen to be believed.  Most of the music in the flick is terrible, but there is one awesome Christmas rap song by Kool Moe Dee and Doug E. Fresh.  Not only is it fly AND dope, it also manages to drop the F-Bomb in a PG movie.  Mad respect goes out to the Old School Rappers for slipping that past the MPAA ratings board.

I also want to take a moment to address the breakdancing in this movie.  I am sort of an authority on this subject because I myself participated in a breakdancing exhibition in elementary school where I did my signature move:  The Worm.  It pains me to no end to inform you that the dancers in Beat Street DO NOT DO THE WORM.  How can you have a movie about breakdancing and NOT have The Worm?  That’s like making a werewolf movie without the full moon.  Half-Star deduction for that.

The movie’s breakdancing sequences also suffer from being inauthentic.  They seem more like a glossy Hollywood musical than the real-deal breakdancing I knew.  For example:  When we breakdanced in school, we ALWAYS danced on top of corrugated cardboard boxes.  In Beat Street, all the dancers bust their moves on spotless, heavily waxed dance floors.  Another Half-star off for that glaring bit of misrepresentation.  

Even though Beat Street features ZERO Worm-age and fancifully staged dance routines, I still dug it for the most part.  The thing that prevents the film from really taking off is the fact that all the performers specialize in different areas.  Once the breakdancing scenes start to cook, we have to cut back to see how the Mexican graffiti dude is doing with his out-of-wedlock kid and bimbo girlfriend.  Just when the DJ gets the gig at the club, we have to see his little brother bust a move in a dance-off.  Because of its back-and-forth narrative, the flick is just way too disjointed for it to truly work.  

Whatever it’s flaws, Beat Street still has its moments.  It features enough scenes of people spinning on heir heads to make it worthwhile for die hard fans of breakdancing and/or connoisseurs of 80’s cheese.  And if you can believe it, it was produced by Harry Belafonte (!), co-written by Andrew (Above the Law) Davis (!!), and co-stars Duane (Night of the Living Dead) Jones (!!!).

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.  

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.

Wendy Wane (Darian Caine) is a stripper who moonlights as a costumed superhero named Batbabe who wears a skimpy negligee and an unwieldy latex mask.  Her arch nemesis is The Jerker (Robert Mandara), a guy that paints his face like Ronald McDonald and jerks off a lot.  His diabolical plan is to steal all the porn in Bacchum City and drive everyone crazy by giving them blue balls.

Okay, let’s hold it right there.  I know this flick is supposed to be a dumb softcore parody of a major blockbuster, but come on, this plan is downright stupid.  The Jerker steals all the XXX videos and magazines from the city and everyone goes insane from having no porn.  Umm… hasn’t anyone ever heard of a little thing called “The Internet” in which you can get all kinds of disgusting pornography at the touch of a button?  What a freaking idiot.

Batbabe seemed really promising but this flick is just plain sucky in just about every department.  The sex scenes are all lame and feature the requisite bumping and grinding you’d expect from one of these Seduction Cinema spoofs.  None of them are particularly hot.  (The sex scenes were so interchangeable that I was even tempted to fast forward through them.)  To make matters worse, most of the girls look pretty haggard and they all have way too many ugly looking tattoos and tramp stamps that ruin just about any chance they had at being sexy. 

Unlike say, Erotic Survivor which had the benefit of some funny jokes and a few real actors; Batbabe suffers from a lot of inane gags and atrocious performances.  Darian does what she can with the substandard material.  That isn’t much though.  I do have to say that at 35, she’s starting to look kinda rough.  Maybe she should think about hanging the g-string up.  The less said about the rest of the cast, the better.  Man, was this ever a long 78 minutes.

The budget is also really low and the effects look like they were concocted by a two year old.  Although the flick is more or less a close parody of The Dark Knight, I have no idea what was up with that random lesbian make-out scene in the gym.  That sure as shit wasn’t in The Dark Knight.

There was a smidgen of good stuff sprinkled in here and there.  We get an amusing variation on The Joker’s “pencil trick” (except with a dildo) and handful of Joel Schumacher jokes too.  Even though The Jerker was thoroughly irritating, he did have ONE semi-amusing line of dialogue: “You ever bop the bologna in the pale moon light?”

Blindness is kinda like Night of the Living Dead (or maybe 28 Weeks Later) except that instead of having a mysterious outbreak resulting in a bunch of flesh-eating zombies, there’s a mysterious outbreak that results in people going completely blind.  Unlike in Daredevil, where the blind guy got superpowers along with his blindness and got to Kung Fu a lot of scumbags, these blind people just become regular blind people. 

First an Asian dude goes blind, then a hooker.  I know what you’re thinking.  Hey, a blind hooker movie, THAT’S something I could really get behind!  Sadly, the focus shifts to Julianne Moore and her eye doctor husband (Mark Ruffalo).  He goes blind along with a whole bunch of other people and soon, all the blind folks get herded like cattle into an abandoned hospital ward.  For some unknown reason, Julianne doesn’t go blind and sticks around the hospital to keep an eye (PUN!) on her hubby.  Eventually food gets scarce and some crazed Cholo (Gael Garcia Bernal) goes crazy and proclaims himself to be the “King” and demands that the people “pay” for their food.  And by pay, I mean FUCK!  (Finally, the movie gets back on track.  I mean you can’t introduce the idea of blind hooking and then not deliver on it!)  Julianne gets tired of whoring herself out for a handful of Fritos so she decides to stick a pair of scissors into the King’s neck while he’s getting a blow job and torches the place.  She then leads what’s left of the ward people into the city (which is now in ruins) to forage for food before shacking up in her old swanky apartment so everybody can have a happy ending.

Blindness sounds good on paper, yet it’s much too leisurely paced to pack a real punch.  (It takes forever for Julianne to get to the hospital ward.)  Luckily, the second half of the movie is a lot better than the first.  Despite the sluggish start, the Rape-and-Revenge subplot works (think of it as I Spit in Your Eye) and I enjoyed the I Am Legend-ish third act as well.  (Or should that be Eye Am Legend?)

The biggest problem with Blindness is that too much of the movie is comprised with scenes of blind people stumbling around and tripping over things.  Not the most cinematic of activities to be sure.  Another thing that sucks about this movie is that the cameraman must’ve also been blind too.  A lot of the movie is either too bright or too dark and many times the framing is all off as well.

There is some good stuff however.  Moore is excellent and she leads a solid cast, which includes a creepy looking Danny Glover.  As with Night of the Living Dead, a lot of blind people end up getting shot in the head by trigger-happy soldiers, so that’s good.  Also, there’s a bunch of blind chicks without the benefit of clothing (that blind hooker IS hot); which of course is always appreciated.

The original Black Magic was an uneven mishmash of Kung Fu, sorcery, and occasional grossout moments.  This (more or less) unrelated sequel ups the ante in the WTF area and the result is one heck of a good time.  If you think you’ve seen it all, you should probably give this flick a whirl.  

The plot of BM 2 is basically the same as the first one.  A guy goes to a black magic sorcerer and pays him to cast a spell on a chick so she’ll fall in love with him.  That’s just the bare bones synopsis though.  There’s also a crocodile attack, people with snake-filled sores, magic potions made from freshly shorn pubic hair, a grown man drinking breast milk straight from the source, the C-section birth of a monster baby, a chick who rapidly ages while she’s being fucked, fingernail ripping, face melting, Black Magic Power Battles, self-inflicted eyeball gouging, eyeball eating, someone getting hit over the head with ripe roadkill, cigar store Indians coming to life, Kung Fu zombies; and lots of nails being driven into people’s heads, cheeks, and palms.  The cast is also full of a bunch of women who show their tits at the drop of a hat, something which I fully appreciated.

Black Magic 2 isn’t perfect however.  Things get a little bit sluggish around the halfway point when the evil sorcerer forces the hero scientists into a black magic-fueled love triangle.  But stick with it because the last half hour or so is almost as nutty as the first.  Although I could’ve done without the over-plotted middle portion of the film, Black Magic 2 made my jaw drop numerous times throughout it’s 90 minute running time; a hearty recommendation to be sure.

In short, Black Magic 2 is the Wrath of Khan of bat shit insane Chinese Horror Sequels.

AKA:  Revenge of the Zombies.  AKA:  Bewitch Tame Head.

Burt Reynolds is one of my all time favorite movie stars.  It doesn’t matter if the movie he’s in is bad (and often times, believe me it is), just as long as he drives a car real fast and does that funny little laugh of his, the flick is still worth watching by my standards.  Well, Burt doesn’t drive any cars real fast in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (well he does, but he isn’t being chased or anything) but he does laugh about five or six times.

Burt plays this sheriff (Oh no, The Bandit is starring as a Smokey!  Say it ain’t so!) who is in love with the madam (Dolly Parton) of the titular house of ill repute.  Some jerk-off “Watchdog” (Dom DeLuise) tries to close the place down for no good reason and Burt’s got to stop him.  So far so good.  The problem is, is this flick is a musical so that means there’s a lot of singing and dancing.  Drats.

I will say this for the musical number where Burt duets with Dolly:  It’s not that bad.  Burt’s singing voice ain’t too shabby and it’s a shame he didn’t cut an LP or something.  While the song ain’t up to snuff with Dolly’s material in Rhinestone, it didn’t make my eardrums bleed or anything.  The rest of the songs pretty much suck (the scene with the football players prancing around the locker room was a bit much) but at least Dolly got to sing “I Will Always Love You” a full decade before Whitney “Crackhead” Houston did.

As Burt movies go, it’s no Stroker Ace but if you wanna see him acting alongside Dolly, you’ll probably dig it.  At least the filmmakers were smart enough to give Burt the best line in the movie.  It comes when Dolly forces him to wear a Speedo.  He refuses and says, “That’s like putting two bowling balls in a marble bag!”

AKA:  The Best Little Cathouse in Texas.

My wife had never seen The Blues Brothers before, which is kinda odd when you think about it; seeing how she loves musicals and old school Saturday Night Live.  Last night I basically made her watch it and I think she liked it, even though she fell asleep before the monumental 28 car pile-up in the end.

I’ve seen The Blues Brothers dozens of times and it still makes me laugh like crazy.  To me, this is the best musical ever made (and yes, it is a musical because the musical numbers help to advance the story), the funniest Saturday Night Live movie, AND the best car chase flick of all time.  (Anyone who tells you Vanishing Point is the best car chase movie is higher than a hippie in a helicopter.)  It’s also the best non-American Werewolf in London movie John Landis ever directed.

The plot is simple.  Jake Blues (John Belushi) gets out of jail and he and his brother Elwood (Dan Aykroyd) set out to put the old band back together in order to raise enough dough to save their old orphanage.  The plot is more or less just window dressing to hang a bunch of thoroughly wonderful R & B musical numbers on.  Besides belting out a couple of wonderful tunes themselves, The Blues Brothers also share the spotlight with James Brown, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, John Lee Hooker, and best of all; Cab Calloway, who does a smashing rendition of Minnie the Moocher.

If the movie was nothing but musical numbers, it would’ve been great, but Landis also delivers some of the most eye-popping car stunts ever witnessed.  The Bluesmobile (an old Dodge police car) is one of the baddest cars ever to grace the silver screen.  The stunts that this baby does are downright jaw-dropping.  Nearly three decades later, there hasn’t been a car that can top that one for sheer awesomeness.  

At the center of the flick though are two great performances by Belushi and Aykroyd.  They’ve never been better and their on screen chemistry and comedic timing is impeccable.  Their musical numbers are simply amazing (my favorite is “Chicago”) and will leave you wanting more.  (My only complaint is that they didn’t sing “Rubber Biscuit”, but oh well.)

Aykroyd and Landis re-teamed 18 years later for the much-hated sequel, Blues Brothers 2000.  (It still had some good musical numbers in it though.)

The Blues Brothers is Number 4 on The Video Vacuum Top Ten Films of 1980, just ahead of The Fog and right below Airplane!

Boris Karloff stars as Dr. Garth, the “Mercy Killer” who is on trial for assisting in the suicide of his patient (kinda like a prototype of Jack Kevorkian I guess).  While on death row, the court allows Garth to continue his experiments and he winds up creating a serum that restores his youth.  The serum also has a peculiar side effect:  it turns him into a wild-eyed murderer.  Pretty soon, Garth escapes from prison and goes on a killing spree.  

This cheapie sci-fi potboiler from Columbia has a promising premise but it takes far too long to get cooking.  Even though the flick runs a scant 62 minutes, Before I Hang really plods along at a lumbering pace and seemingly takes forever to arrive at its predictable conclusion.  Karloff does a solid job playing yet another variation on his Kindly Old Scientist Who is Actually a Homicidal Maniac role, yet his presence alone isn’t enough to save this lukewarm B picture.  Edward (Dracula) Van Sloan also puts in a decent turn as Boris’ ill-fated assistant.

Boris gets the best line of the flick when he says, “Your old age is a disease and I have the cure for it!”

A baron’s wife gives birth to a set of twin boys.  Since there is a family prophecy that states the baron’s son will murder his twin in the titular room, the baron orders the room to be walled up.  Twenty five years later, the “bad” twin Gregor (Boris Karloff) is now in power and makes a habit of stealing his subjects’ womenfolk.  When the villagers threaten to lynch Gregor, he hands the throne to his “good” twin brother Anton (also Boris).  Really though, Gregor’s just plotting to kill his brother and take his place.

The Black Room is kinda like Tower of London (with parts of The Man in the Iron Mask sprinkled in) in that it’s not really a Boris Karloff horror film, but more of a costume drama about a devious, conniving murderer.  Like Tower of London, The Black Room gets a bit dull whenever Boris isn’t going batshit insane on someone.  Then again, you do get two Borises for the price of one with this flick, so it’s got that going for it.  While Boris is OK while portraying the aristocratic Anton,   he really gets to chew the scenery as the disheveled and crazed Gregor  The scenes where there are two Borises on the screen at the same time are quite well done (particularly for the time the film was made), and makes up for some of the flick’s miscellaneous shortcomings. 

While The Black Room is kinda light in the horror department, Karloff’s excellent performance(s) make it a breezy 70 minutes.  If anything, this flick is memorable for the climatic wedding scene.  You know the part in every wedding scene where the minister says, “Speak now or forever hold your peace” and someone inevitably intervenes?  Well, this is the first time in movie history I think where a dog steps in to stop the ceremony!  Unbelievable. 

Director Roy William Neill went on to helm the awesome Frankenstein Meets Wolf Man.

AKA:  The Black Room Mystery.

The first scene of Bruce Lee’s Deadly Kung Fu really got my blood pumping.  It’s totally badass and all kinds of awesome.  Although the rest of the movie never quite lived up to the opening scene, it still put this flick a notch or two or three above most of the Bruceploitation flicks I’ve been watching lately.

The scene I’m referring to plays a lot like a Kung Fu version of Waiting.  Bruce (Bruce Li) is a waiter who gets his dim-witted best friend to bus his table for him.  When the jackass customers trip him, he drops the dishes and cuts himself.  Bruce goes over to the table to see what’s wrong and the customers slap him around a bit.  Bruce then heads back to the kitchen and puts a ton of black pepper in their food.  Then the guys get all pissed at him and try to fight him but Bruce naturally mops the floor with them.

See, I’m a waiter by trade so I could really identify with this scene.  I’d be lying if I said I haven’t ever felt the urge to karate kick an asshole customer in the face.  This scene was the bitch’s tits so I thought I was in store for a classic of martial arts cinema.  As the film progressed it became apparent that it was just going to be a solid Kung Fu movie, no more, no less.  After a great first 25 minutes or so, the flick pretty much settled down into the routine Good Karate School vs. Bad Karate School clichés.  

There were parts of the film that showed signs of holding to its early promise though.  The best non-customer ass kicking scene came when the bad guy’s flamboyantly gay henchman, “San Francisco Iron Fist Man” got the snot kicked out of him by Bruce.  Other than that, it was business as usual.  The competent fight choreography and lots of action kept me from totally losing interest, and I liked seeing Carter (Big Trouble in Little China) Wong in a dignified supporting role.  The movie really belongs to Bruce Li though.  The man can ape the real Bruce like no one else and his considerable screen presence helped anchor the flick.

AKA:  A Dragon Story.  AKA:  Bruce Lee’s Secret.  AKA:  Bruce Li’s Jeet Kune Do.  AKA:  He’s a Legend, He’s a Hero.  AKA:  Master of Jeet Kune Do.  AKA:  Story of the Dragon.  AKA:  Wing Chun Big Brother.

I’m usually a sucker for these Bruceploitation movies but even I have to admit that Bruce Lee Against Supermen is possibly the worst Fake Bruce Lee movie of all time.  (Yes, worse than even Fist of Fear, Touch of Death.)  This flick has to have some of the worst editing and fight choreography I’ve ever seen.  

I’d love to tell you about the plot but it’s hard to tell what the heck’s going on because this movie is a freaking mess.  It’s got something to do with the Fake Bruce Lee (played by the premiere Bruce Lee impersonator, Bruce Li) trying to find a missing scientist.  Mostly.  That part of the movie is the only coherent section.  The other parts revolve around Bruce and his buddy getting jumped by random guys, Bruce banging chicks, and Bruce saving a little girl from a crazed sniper.

Then there are the scenes where Bruce goes up against the titular “Supermen”.  Okay, first off there is only ONE Superman.  (He has three other lame ass sidekicks that don’t have any superpowers.)  Secondly, this guy isn’t the REAL Superman as he has a Wayne Newton moustache and wears a black marching band costume with a dinky white cape.  Thirdly, the bad guys bribe Superman with money, girls, and a “truckload of booze” to get him to fight Bruce Lee.  So much for fighting for truth, justice, and the American way.

The movie also gets its facts wrong in another crucial area.  In the beginning of the film, Bruce is seen wearing his Kato outfit and driving around in the Black Beauty.  So far, so good.  But then the other idiotic characters start calling him the Green Hornet!  Dumbasses, Bruce Lee played Kato, not Green Hornet!  It’s one thing to get Superman’s M.O. mixed-up but how can you not know Bruce Lee’s character name?  Then in the end, Bruce for whatever reason dons his own Superman-ish suit (one that’s similar to the suit from 3 Supermen Against Godfather).  My brain still hurts from trying to make sense of it all.

On the plus side, Bruce Li is quite proficient in his fight scenes.  (Especially during the brief moments while he’s in the Kato costume.)  Too bad the fight choreography looks like it was done by Stevie Wonder.  Also, we get to see some titties, so it wasn’t a total loss of 84 minutes.

AKA:  Bruce Lee vs. the Supermen.

Glenn Ford stars as an idealistic teacher trying to make a difference in an urban school populated by juvenile delinquents.  Vic Morrow is the leader of the jive talking teens (they call Ford “Mr. Daddy-O”) who gets his gang to jump Ford in an alley after class.  When that doesn’t faze “Teach”, Morrow then starts playing mind games with his very pregnant wife (Anne Francis from Forbidden Planet), which really gets Ford’s blood boiling.  Eventually Morrow gets all hopped up and tries to stab Ford in class with a switchblade and Ford then has to teach Ass Kicking 101.

Although it was initially seen as over the top when it was first released, this portrait of out of control students and oblivious administrators proved to be all too prophetic in later years.  All of the scenes of Ford trying to “get through” to his kids have been copied so many times that they’ve lost some of their potency.  That’s OK though because the flick is still quite entertaining nonetheless.  It’s no Substitute or anything (heck, it’s no Substitute 4 for that matter) but it’s still a lot of fun.

What makes the film really memorable (aside from the awesome use of Bill Haley and the Comet’s “Rock Around the Clock”) is the excellent supporting cast of juvenile delinquent students.  Sidney Poitier particularly shines as Ford’s prized pupil and Paul Mazursky and Jamie Farr (billed here under his real name, Jameel Farah) are also great.  It’s Morrow though who makes the movie cook as his numerous confrontations with Ford gives the film a lot of its piss and vinegar.  I also enjoyed seeing Louis Calhern from Duck Soup as the school’s indifferent principal.  It’s Ford though who gets the best line of the flick when he says, “I’m beaten up but not beaten.  There’s a difference!  I’m not beaten and I’m not quitting!” 

Broadcast News tells the story of three diverse people caught in the midst of not only a love triangle but also a career triangle as well.  William Hurt stars as the dopey yet charismatic new anchorman at a Washington television network who charms his plucky producer, played by Holly Hunter.  Albert Brooks is the field reporter who is too ugly to put behind a news desk and is desperately in love with Hunter.  Holly on the other hand, likes Albert but only as a friend, so she makes goo-goo eyes at Hurt a lot.  In the end though, she’s more committed to her job than to either one of them.

Writer/director James L. Brooks sidesteps a lot of the usual romantic comedy clichés which is quite refreshing.  Brooks also resists the temptation for a pat happy ending and that keeps things a bit more realistic.  Also, all three of the lead actors create fully three dimensional characters; further adding to the movie’s charm.  At 133 minutes, it’s probably a good half hour longer than it really needed to be, but since the chemistry between Brooks, Hurt, and Hunter is so engaging, it doesn’t hamper the flick too much.

The best thing about the movie is Jack Nicholson’s extended cameo as the star network anchorman.  Jack must’ve done this as a favor to Brooks (he also starred in the director’s Terms of Endearment) and his sporadic appearances add a lot of zest to the film.  It definitely would’ve been awesome if Brooks made a spin-off all about Jack, but oh well.  

Brooks went on to produce The Simpsons two years later.