George Sanders returns as the cool as a cucumber crime solver The Falcon in the second film of the series.  This time around, The Falcon must rescue a kidnapped scientist who has perfected a formula to create a flawless imitation diamond.  This naturally pisses off his perpetually put-upon fiancé who wants him to give up sleuthing and settle down with her.

A Date with the Falcon suffers from a weak plotline but it has it’s share of moments.  There’s a funny scene where The Falcon gets captured by the bad guys and foils the kidnapping by making goofy faces at a passing cop.  Also amusing is the part where The Falcon hides on the ledge of a tall building from a killer and his annoying fiancé gives him away by yelling and screaming at him.

What kinda knocks this installment down a notch is the fact that The Falcon gets a little sloppy.  I mean the bad guys get the drop on him no less than THREE times in this one.  (Once was intentional, but still.)  The ending was also wrapped up a little too conveniently for my tastes too.

The story maybe second rate, but Sanders’ great performance will keep you entertained.  Allen Jenkins yet again delivers a funny turn as The Falcon’s dim-witted right hand man Goldy.  Hans Conreid also has a memorable bit part as a slimy hotel desk clerk.

Okay, so I know you’ve all been wondering where the heck I’ve been for the past week or so.  Truth is I’ve been spending lots of quality time with my brand spanking new baby daughter and kinda forgot about reviewing movies for a bit.  To me, just watching the little faces she makes is like a hundred times cooler than any movie.  (Yes, even Star Wars.)  The other night while she was particularly fussy, I decided to pop on Dolph Lundgren’s new movie, Command Performance.  This thing can be summed up in six words:  Die Hard at a Rock Concert.  For most people out there, Command Performance will be pretty forgettable, but me; I’ll always remember it as the first movie I ever watched as a proud papa. 

Let me start off by saying that I admire Lundgren.  You can tell he really likes making movies.  It doesn’t matter to him that the studios don’t give him much of a budget and he has to shoot his films overseas on a tight schedule.  This guy just keeps his head down and continues to make better-than-mediocre low budget Direct-to-DVD action movies for his loyal fans. 

Command Performance is not quite what I would call “good”, but it’s got a high watchability factor going for it.  While there are better Direct-to-DVD Die Hard rip-offs out there (in fact, Dolph also made the superior Detention, which was Die Hard in a School), Command Performance is exactly what you would expect from the subgenre.  Nothing more, nothing less.  In addition, the film hits all it’s marks competently and moves along at a steady clip. 

Dolph does a great job in front of the camera.  His usual charisma shines through and keeps you watching; even when shit gets extremely derivative and predictable.  I do have a major criticism of his directing style though.  He goes hog wild for the Law and Order type shaky-cam shit and it gets rather annoying after awhile.

If anything, Command Performance delivers on the gore.  First off, there is plenty of arterial spray whenever someone gets their throat slashed.  We also get a gnarly scene where Dolph impales someone on a broken guitar neck.  The piece de resistance though comes when Lundgren shoves a drumstick into a guy’s head and it goes through his chin and comes out of his eyeball.  Great stuff.  Dolph also gave himself a bunch of cheesy/dumb/hey-it-made-me-laugh-because-I’m-seriously-sleep-deprived-from-being-up-all-night-with-a-crying-baby lines like “Dying is easy, Rock n’ Roll is hard!”

Sometimes a sequel comes along that outshines the original. Road Warrior, Bride of Chucky, and Friday the 13^th Part 3-D are all great examples.  Sometimes a sequel comes along that’s just as confusing and convoluted as it’s predecessor.  Such is the case with Day Watch.

This time around, Anton (Konstantin Khabenskiy) is training his girlfriend Sveta (Mariya Poroshina) to be a Night Watcher when they run into his son Yegor (Dima Martynov), who has become a serial killer.  The villain frames Anton for murder and instigates a war between Good and Evil that will bring about the apocalypse.  The only way to stop the end of the world is to find the Chalk of Fate; which gives it’s user the ability to literally rewrite history.

Day Watch starts out fairly well.  The scenes of Anton training Sveta are fun; as is the amusing subplot where Anton’s brain is switched with a sexy female operative.  (This leads up to a near-lesbian scene with Sveta.)  I also dug the cool flashback showing the insane Chinese warlord fucking up Iran in order to get the Chalk of Fate.

Unfortunately, the flick kinda falls apart after the brain-switching thing.  While the first 45 minutes or so are rather enjoyable, director Timur Bekmambetov eventually starts in with a lot of brainless incomprehensibly edited action sequences.  There are a few fun moments sprinkled here and there (like when a chick drives up a wall of a building or when the bad guy gets hit by a bus) but mostly it’s just a bunch of overkill for overkill’s sake.  Wanted showed that Bekmambetov can make a great action movie.  Night Watch and Day Watch both show that he needs a script that actually makes sense to do so.

Sveta gets the best line of the movie when she tells Anton (while he’s inside the chick’s body):  “If you give her a fat ass, she’ll give you a fat lip!”

Dance Flick is the latest spoof from The (ever-expanding) Wayans Brothers.  It lampoons just about every dancing movie from the past twenty years.  (The one notable omission:  Dirty Dancing.)  No plot rundown is needed but if I give you a list of films it makes fun of, then you’ll get the general idea of what to expect:  You Got Served, Step Up, Step Up 2:  The Streets, Bring It On, Roll Bounce, Flashdance, Save the Last Dance, High School Musical, and so on and so on.  The fact that I haven’t seen any of these movies didn’t matter because it was still funny as shit.

My main criterion for a comedy is:  Did I laugh?  A comedy could have poor editing, shitty direction, and awful acting but as long as it keeps bringing the funny, that’s all I care about.  With Dance Flick I was constantly cracking up, so I can’t bear to give it any less than *** ½.  I was flirting with even giving it Four Stars for a while but the laughs became more infrequent about ¾ into the film when the Wayans had to throw in the obligatory “plot”.

There are some things in this movie that had me straight up busting a gut.  I don’t want to really spoil the best moments for you.  Just know that you should be on the lookout for the dead-on parody of “Fame” and any scene involving Charity (Essence Atkins) and her son.  Hands down the best performance came from Amy (Strangers with Candy) Sedaris, who plays Miss Cameltoe.  (“It’s pronounced Ka-Mel-Twa!”)  I dare you not to laugh when she starts “beat-boxing”. 

Overall, I don’t think Dance Flick was quite as funny as Scary Movie but I liked it more than Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood.  If that isn't a wholehearted recommendation, I don't know what is.

When George Romero’s Day of the Dead was first released, it became sort of a national pastime to piss all over the movie.  Critics hated it and fans were turned off, but in time, the film garnered quite a following.  I personally think it ranks right up there with both it’s predecessors, Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead.

Day takes place years after the great zombie apocalypse.  Tensions are running high in an underground military installation where some scientists led by Sarah (Lori Cardille) try in vain to find out what makes zombies tick while the Army boys led by Captain Rhodes (Joe Pilato) just want to shoot the undead bastards.  Meanwhile, the crazed scientist “Doctor Frankenstein” (Richard Liberty) has an astonishing breakthrough with a zombie named Bub (Howard Sherman) and manages to make him docile.  (“He doesn’t see us as lunch!”)  The shit hits the fan when the zombies break into the compound and belly up to the All You Can Eat Human Buffet. 

Critics savaged this film mostly because it lacks the social commentary that Dawn was seeped in.  With Day, Romero is trying to scare us more than anything else.  And scare us he does.  There are two great jump scares at the beginning and end of the film that perfectly bookend the movie.  Dawn of the Dead didn’t have flat out scares.  That film was fun and colorful.  Day of the Dead is one long dark nightmare.

I love how Romero perfectly captures the way the world would look once the undead took over.  In an early scene we see the empty streets of Florida.  Gators are running loose, newspapers (“THE DEAD WALK!”) are blowing in the wind, and zombies are everywhere.  The military base isn’t much better.  It’s claustrophobic, dirty, and gloomy; just how it would feel if this was all really happening.

Likewise the characters all act how normal humans would in the same situation:  like complete assholes.  A lot of people bitch about this movie because most everyone just yells and screams at each other.  Let me tell you something folks, if you were trapped underground with shitty supplies and unreasonable rations with millions of zombies knocking at your door, you’d act pretty pissed off too.

Speaking of pissed off, let’s talk about Captain Rhodes.  Joe Pilato gives what is hands the best fucking performance ever given by a human being in the history of acting.  Whenever someone asks who gave the best performance ever, people usually say shit like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca or Robert DeNiro in Raging Bull.  I say horsefeathers to that.  I say Joe Pilato.  Captain Rhodes.  Day of the Dead.  End of story. 

Who won the Academy Award in ’85?  William Hurt?  Fuck that noise.  Let me ask you this, did Hurt ever say the line, “You’ve given us a mouthful of Greek salad!”?  Or “This ain’t a goddamn field trip, this is a fucking war!”?  Or “I’m running this monkey farm now Frankenstein!”?  Or “Is this the shit that’s supposed to knock our socks off?”  Or “That’s right, go ahead and run you fucking lunatics!”  Didn’t think so.  Pilato was robbed; plain and simple. 

I think what endears me about Captain Rhodes the most is that for all of his arrogance, I could sympathize with him.  While the other characters make him out to be an asshole he’s actually the most practical one in the bunch.  Granted, he had a screw loose but he was just looking out for his men and trying to protect them from the cockamamie hair-brained schemes of the scientists whose reckless zombie experiments threatened their well-being.

What makes the film memorable though is it’s introspectiveness.  It is by far the most thought-provoking of all the Dead films.  While Romero capped the existentialism of Dawn with “When there is no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the earth!”, he instead gives the Jamaican guy (Terry Alexander) a thoughtful soliloquy on why God is punishing the living.  Frankenstein also gives us his spiritual insights while trying to domesticate the zombies:  “They must be tricked into being good little girls and boys… the same way we were tricked.”  Little touches like that makes Day resonate a bit more than the other films in the series.

That and the special effects are fucking amazing.  Once again Tom Savani has given us some of the best effects ever devised.  Like the scenes in Frankenstein’s lab where we see a zombie whose guts spill out onto the floor as well as a zombie who is nothing more than a body and a brainstem.  We also get some juicy zombie bites, head shots, arm hacking, and a great HALF of a decapitation too.  The finale is the end-all-be-all of gore cinema.  One guy gets it when a zombie puts it’s fingers in his eyeholes like a bowling ball and rip his head off.  Another guy gets his face ripped into starting at the eyelids.  Then of course there is the scene of total disembowelment that is the standard to which all other gut-munching scenes should be measured.

The character of Bub is what gives the movie it’s soul.  The humans in the film are mostly despicable.  They yell at each other, argue, bitch and moan and fail to cooperate against a greater evil.  Even though Bub is a zombie, he is by far the most human character in the movie (although the Jamaican guy seems pretty level-headed most of the time).  Shit like that is what makes this misunderstood masterpiece stand the test of time.

Day of the Dead ranks Number 4 on The Video Vacuum Top Ten Films of 1985 List, sandwiched in between Re-Animator and Commando.

<Tomorrow’s Horror Franchise Movie:  The Evil Dead>

To me, reviewing movies like George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead can be somewhat of a difficult task.  I mean what can I tell you about this movie that you already don’t know?  Everyone knows how great it is.  Everyone knows that this flick is the most influential zombie movie ever made.  Everybody knows that this is the movie that made Tom Savani a household name (at least in my household).  Everybody knows that this was the crowning achievement of the splatter era.  Everybody knows the immortal line, “When there’s no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the earth!”  What more needs to be said?

All I can really tell you is this:  I FUCKING LOVE THIS MOVIE.  Is it better than Night of the Living Dead?  Hmm… I don’t know if it’s BETTER but I love them both for vastly different reasons.  Night is atmospheric, dark, and scary.  Dawn is energetic, bright, and fun.  I love the first four of Romero’s zombie epics just about the same (yes, even Land of the Dead), but I may have to give this one the edge.

You know the plot:  Survivors hole up in the Monroeville Mall in Pennsylvania and fend off an army of blue-faced zombies.  Lots of zombies get shot in the head and eventually, the group turns the mall into a sort of paradise.  When a group of vicious bikers break in to the mall for some plundering and pillaging, one of our heroes forgets what is really important (survival; not material things), which leads to their downfall.

Much has been made about Romero using the zombies in the mall as a metaphor for consumerism.  I think that message is there for those who want it.  Critics like Roger Ebert for instance, always bring this point up.  As if they needed some reason other than the tons of gore and action to praise this movie. 

The scenes where the survivors take the mall and claim it as their own are exhilarating; and not just from an action standpoint either.  It’s the practicality of it all that makes it exciting.  (As one character says, “One stop shopping!  Everything you need right at your fingertips!”)  I tell you one thing, if there ever was a zombie outbreak, the mall would be the first place I’d go. 

But there are so many other terrific scenes and wonderful moments throughout the film that make it a classic.  There’s the tense scene where a National Guardsman goes nuts and starts blowing away people in a ghetto tenement.  There’s Ken Foree’s encounter with two zombie rugrats.  There’s the awesome scene where the helicopter blades take off the top of a zombie’s head.  There’s the montage showing zombies stumbling around trying to walk on elevators while Muzak plays.  We even get the world’s first zombie pie fight.

Then of course there is the gore, which is truly awe-inspiring.  Savani’s special effects are as much fun to watch thirty years later as they ever were.  Often imitated and never duplicated, Dawn features more memorable gory set pieces than you could shake a severed body part at.  Throughout the course of the film we get:  a spectacular exploding head, a screwdriver to the ear, and lots and lot of bullets to the head.  (Savani’s generous use of Red Crayola tinged blood is astounding.)  The biker attack finale in particular is a non-stop jamboree of orgiastic gore, guts, and fun.  There’s the immortal machete to the skull, decapitated heads, disembodied hands, a knife in the neck, and the requisite gut ripping.  Romero also gives us a funny little scene where a guy stupidly checks his blood pressure while being attacked by zombies and they leave his arm in the machine.

I guess you could make an argument that the film goes on too long.  At over two hours, it’s probably the longest zombie movie ever made.  (The director’s cut is even longer.)  Some people say you can get too much of a good thing but when the thing you’re getting is this good, why complain?  While the film does have some slower passages (like when our heroes become so desensitized to their surroundings that they start resembling the storefront mannequins), I didn’t mind one bit because Romero is clearly having fun fleshing out his apocalyptic vision.  That vision would grow increasingly darker with his next zombie picture, Day of the Dead.

Dawn of the Dead ranks Number 4 on The Video Vacuum Top Ten Films of 1979, right in between Apocalypse Now and The Warriors.

AKA:  Zombie.  AKA:  Dawn of the Living Dead.  AKA:  Zombie:  Dawn of the Dead.

<Tomorrow’s Horror Franchise Movie:  Day of the Dead (1985)>

Fred Williamson starred in many low budget Italian made action flicks throughout the 80’s.  This one is on the higher end of the totem pole.  It’s sorta like a cross between Delta Force and Death Wish, although that’s probably giving it too much credit.

Brett Clark retires from Delta Force so he can spend more time with his pregnant wife.  Predictably, she gets gunned down by Nicaraguan terrorists about five minutes into the flick.  They also steal a nuclear weapon and fly back to Nicaragua and threaten the US with it.  Clark re-opts with Delta Force, but not to stop the terrorists from blowing shit up; he just wants revenge.  When his superior (Bo Svenson) gives orders not to pursue the terrorists; Clark decides to hijack Fred Williamson’s plane and forces him to go on an unpaid vacation to Nicaragua.  Williamson says OK because if he didn’t then we wouldn’t have a movie.  Once in Nicaragua, the duo blow away lots and lots of terrorists and eventually save the day.

Delta Force Commando is a competent no-frills action flick that manages to hold your attention throughout most of it’s running time.  The flick contains plenty of scenes where Williamson and Clark gun down tons of bad guys and say funny shit afterwards.  (“Excuse me while I throw up!”)  It also happens to be just mean-spirited enough to make you go, “Damn!”  In addition to the gratuitous death of the pregnant wife, we also get a gnarly scene in which the villains put electrodes on Williamson’s gonads.  (“They hot wired my nuts!”)  We also get some rather hilarious 80’s fashions too.  (The main terrorist wears an acid-washed blazer with the sleeves rolled up and all the women sport humongous shoulder pads.)

What kinda sinks the film is the interchangeability of all the action scenes.  Clark busts down a door, shoots a bunch of dudes, and rescues Williamson.  Repeat.  Clark and Williamson get inside a car/bus/jet and chase the bad guys until one of them shoots a rocket launcher at our heroes and they have to jump out of the vehicle seconds before it explodes.  Repeat.  Plus, the ending is mostly a letdown.

Clark (“Nick the Dick” from Bachelor Party) makes for a bland lead but at least Williamson gets to do one or two little cool things.  I especially liked the scene where the screaming guy with a machete ran at Fred and he just nonchalantly shot him.  If The Hammer wasn’t reduced to playing second fiddle, we may have had a classic on our hands.  

Williamson and Svenson also starred in Inglorious Bastards together.

A bitchy broad from Boston (Elizabeth Allen) comes to a remote South Seas island to swindle her old man out of a potential inheritance.  You see, if she can prove that he is lacking morals, she can get the family fortune signed over to her name.  Since her pops (Jack Warden) is living in sin with two bi-racial children on the island, that qualifies.  However, his drinking buddy “Guns” Donovan (John Wayne) lies and says the kids are his, then sets out to win the frigid chick’s heart. 

Donovan’s Reef was the final paring between star John Wayne and director John Ford.  Of the films of theirs I’ve seen; this is by far the worst.  For starters, it’s paced the way old people fuck; slow and sloppy.  There are a handful of decent fight scenes and barroom brawls, but you have to sit through a lot of unfunny comedic shit to get to the good stuff.  And for a movie so goofy, the anti-racist subplot is ill-fitting.  I’m sure Ford meant well, but it just seems out of place in a comedy as broad as this one.

I think that’s probably why I didn’t dig this flick.  It’s more of a comedy/travelogue than an honest to goodness John Wayne movie.  The Duke does what he can with such flimsy material, but in the end, it ain’t much.  The supporting cast fares slightly better.  Lee Marvin gets some good scenes; most of which revolve around him punching somebody.  I particularly liked the opening where he beats up a guy with a mop.  Cesar Romero also livens things up as the nominal villain of the piece, even though he is never really given anything villainous to do.

The Evil Dead movies were director Sam Raimi’s masterpieces.  Lately he’s gone all Hollywood on us with the Spider-Man series.  Drag Me to Hell is his attempt to get back to his horror roots.  It’s fun (and downright crazy in some parts) but one can only imagine how awesome the flick could’ve been if Raimi has his old set of balls and not went for the audience-friendly PG-13 rating. 

Christine (Alison Lohman) is a loan officer who denies an extension on a gypsy woman’s home, which sends the old bag into a tizzy.  The crone attacks Christine and places a curse on her so that in three days a bunch of demons will literally drag her to Hell.  Despite the protests of her incredulous boyfriend (Justin Long) Christine gets a psychic to help defend herself from the meddlesome Hellbeasts.

Drag Me to Hell is similar in spirit to the Evil Dead flicks.  It’s got tons of dizzying camerawork, floating possessed people, and scenes of old women going apeshit to occasionally bring up memories of those films.  There’s even an impressive geyser of blood in there too.  In addition, we also get a stapler to the eyeball, a ruler down the throat, maggot puking, embalming fluid puking, an extreme nosebleed, cat slaughtering, an arm down the throat, anvil to the head, an eyeball to the face, and cat puking.  Out of all the outrageous scenes, I have to say that the talking goat took the taco in terms of WTF-ness. 

Alas, the carnage is somewhat muted thanks to the PG-13 rating.  Raimi has made a safe horror movie for the masses instead of a blood-soaked epic for us gorehounds.  It’s still a heck of a lot of fun though, and I will give Raimi a lot of credit for delivering one heck of a killer ending.

As many good things I can say about this movie, I have to knock some points off for it’s gratuitous prejudiced portrayals of gypsies.  Being of gypsy blood (third-generation) I take particular offense to the gypsy woman being depicted as an evil old witch.  I can’t believe Raimi would do this because traditionally in horror films, it’s the gypsy who warns the hero of the supernatural curse (like in The Wolf Man) and not inflicts it.  My ancestors read fortunes and danced in caravans but they never once placed a death curse on someone.  As a charter member of GLAAD (The Gypsy Lady Alliance Against Defamation) and the NAAGP (The National Association for the Advancement of Gypsy People), as well as giving yearly donations to the United Gypsy College Fund, I must protest Raimi’s insensitive portrayal of my people.  Other than that; Drag Me to Hell pretty much rocks.

Two guys skip school and sneak into an abandoned mental institution where they party it up and break shit.  Bored, they mosey into the basement where they find a zombified girl (Jenny Spain) tied to a bed.  They proceed to repeatedly rape her.  Nobody’s going to care right?  She’s a zombie after all.  When more guys find out about their little undead fuck slut, things slowly start to get out of hand; especially when the chick gets loose.

There’s a great horror movie lurking somewhere in Deadgirl but the filmmakers kinda dropped the ball.  It’s easy to shock the audience with lots of graphic scenes of zombie rape.  The directors (Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel) do that really well.  Had they made the characters three-dimensional people that we could relate to, the film could have been really powerful.  Instead what we’re left with is a bunch of nihilism for nihilism’s sake.

I think the theme of the movie was supposed to be something along the lines of How Men See Women.  You know, they want a gal who will put out but is basically brain dead.  I think if this theme had been better fleshed out by screenwriter Trent (Citizen Toxie:  The Toxic Avenger 4) Haaga, Deadgirl may have actually had something important to say.  As it is, the flick is just too muddled, mean-spirited, and long-winded (over 100 minutes) to be effective.

I did like the bizarro scene where the one guy literally shit his guts out though.

Jotaro is a bad ass ninja who is in love with a hot chick.  When an old wizard makes a prophecy that whoever marries her will rule the world, a bunch of bad guys get together and make an aphrodisiac using the tears of her twin sister.  When the twin commits suicide by cutting her own head off, the villains swap out her head with that of a servant girl’s.  The newly put together woman is now known as Lady Hellfire who sends out the evil Five Devil Monks to kidnap the babe.  Jotaro doesn’t want those assholes messing with his woman so he sets out on a quest for vengeance.

Just coming up with a plot description for Death of a Ninja was kinda difficult.  This movie is all over the place and makes little sense.  The lack of coherency, erratic pacing and bloated running time took away from what could’ve been an enormously fun flick. 

I mean we have a ninja assassin who wears a big black wicker hat that tosses around a bad ass boomerang, a dude who shoots needles out of his eyes, and a monk whose fighting specialty is projectile vomiting.  The flick also has a number of quality decapitations followed by impressive geysers of blood spurting out of the neck hole.  Too bad most of the movie didn’t make a lick of sense.  On top of that, the dubbing is just plain awful.  (The villain’s evil laugh makes him sound like Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit.)  Oh and if you sneeze, you’ll miss Sonny Chiba.

AKA:  Black Magic Wars.  AKA:  Iga Magic Story.  AKA:  The Ninja Wars.

A hood (Dave O’Brien) is marked for death for threatening to blow the whistle on a crime ring ran by a devious Dragon Lady named Carney (Evelyn Brent).  A federal agent (Grant Withers) gets wind of this and goes undercover as a lowlife to infiltrate the gang and rescue him.  Carney is crafty though and captures the agent and is about two seconds away from giving him an “Oriental Manicure” before the Feds bust down the door and arrest her.

Daughter of the Tong runs a scant 53 minutes.  If you don’t count the credits, the long-winded opening crawl telling us all about how great the FBI is, and all the excessive stock footage of telephone operators and newspaper printers, the running time’s actually closer to 45.  That’s still too long in my book.

I’m up for any Poverty Row gangster movie but even I have my limits.  No matter how brief the movie is, it’s still chockfull of useless padding and has far too many lulls in between the action.  As lame as most of the stiffly choreographed fistfights and half-assed brawls were, I must admit the final car chase is actually decent for the time.  It was all done live and doesn’t rely on any of that rear screen projection nonsense you’d usually see from a cheapie like this one.  That scene alone is worth the extra Half Star.

The familiar faces of Grant (the Mr. Wong series) Withers and Dave (Reefer Madness) O’Brien help somewhat.  They can only do but so much when the rest of the supporting cast are thoroughly dreadful.  To top it all off, Brent is about as Asian looking as Benny Hill.  At least in the Charlie Chan movies the filmmakers made SOME attempt to make their Oriental characters actually look like Orientals.  No such luck here.

Boris Karloff makes his fifth and final appearance as the famed Chinese detective Mr. Wong.  This time around he’s investigating the death of a wealthy shipping magnate.  Wong’s got to wade through the usual heap of red herrings and dead ends before he finally gets his man.

Doomed to Die is strictly routine stuff.  If you’re a fan of the series though, it’s not the worst way to kill 67 minutes.  This one isn’t especially memorable but at least it moves along at a steady clip (whenever Wong’s police inspector buddy and that annoying reporter dame aren’t hogging the spotlight, that is).

Most of these Mr. Wong movies aren’t very good but they remain fun to watch because of Karloff.  There’s just something about seeing old Boris in really bad Chinese make-up that makes a thoroughly mediocre mystery movie worth watching.  You have to wait a good 15 minutes before he shows up in this one but he does have some nice moments sprinkled throughout.  (I particularly liked the part where he narrowly survives a drive-by shooting.)  It’s just a shame that the plot is so bland.

Karloff was replaced by Keye Luke (an actual Asian for a change) for the next (and last) entry in the Mr. Wong series, Phantom of Chinatown later in the year.

AKA:  The Mystery of Wentworth Castle.

Holt is one of the last decent “Lawmen” patrolling the futuristic wasteland.  When he gets killed by the crime boss Hawk, his brother Wade goes out for revenge.  Hawk is too powerful though and promptly has Wade arrested.  Five years later, the limping Wade gets out of prison and tries yet again to get his hands on the man that murdered his brother.

Death Collector is a piss-poor low budget post-apocalyptic pseudo-western.  How do we know it’s supposed to be a western?  The futuristic saloons have swinging doors on them, that’s how.  The big tip-off though is the opening credits which feature random ass scenes from old black and white cowboy movies.  You might be better off with one of those old westerns than this mess.

The dude that played the hero (he’s too dull to even bother worth looking on IMDB to find his name) is pathetic.  He has zero screen presence and is a total joke during the action scenes.  What’s worse is that he dresses like a 50’s rock n’ roller, carries a guitar, and (unfortunately) sings.

Some of the lame attempts to make things seem futuristic (lots of junkyards and parking lots are used as locations) are good for a laugh but most of the movie is just plain awful.  The fight choreography is a straight-up joke.  There are so many clearly faked punches in this movie, it’s ridiculous.  While the flick was somewhat watchable during the early going, things take a considerable nosedive once Wade goes after the villain the second time around.  The editing begins to get real crappy at this point too and the tension completely drains out of the whole thing before the end.

Ultimately, Death Collector tries too hard to be a quirky cult movie and as a result, it’s more or less worthless.  There’s an occasional moment or two of strained humor that ends up being funny though (like when the villain guns down a guy for making him late for his bowling game).  I mean this is the only movie I can think of off the top of my head where the villain is so powerful that he has his own beer commercial.  Other than that, spend your 90 minutes on something else.

“Splatterpunk” authors John Skipp and Craig Spector turn up in cameo roles.

The villain Hawk gets the best line of the movie when he says, “I like you Mr. Holt.  You’re so stupid it gives me pleasure!”

AKA:  Tin Star Void.

John Barrymore stars in the silent screen’s most memorable portrayal of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  The story has been told countless times before, so you all know what goes down:  Dr. Jekyll is a kindhearted man who creates a potion that can separate his “bad” half from his “good” half.  His “bad” half takes on the name Mr. Hyde who hangs around with trollops and kills people.  Pretty soon, Hyde takes over whenever he wants and threatens to destroy Jekyll’s life forever.

Because the overly familiar story is an old hat and has been remade and parodied to death, the only way to really grade the movie is on the transformation scenes and the murder sequences.  In that respect, it’s pretty rocking (for a nearly 90 year old movie that is.)  I still think the 1931 Fredric March version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is best of the numerous screen adaptations but this one is a close second. 

The transformation scenes are quite effective and are mostly done in a single take.  Barrymore doesn’t rely on prosthesis for his transformations and more or less just contorts his face a lot.  The results are fairly spine-tingling.

This version does a solid job at setting up Jekyll as a really nice guy, so it’s all the more shocking when he does something vile as Hyde.  At first I didn’t like all the screen time devoted to Jekyll doing charity work for the poor but this is paid off nicely when Jekyll squashes a poor homeless kid to death.  There is also an excellent scene in which Hyde bludgeons his future father-in-law with a cane over and over again that must have been pretty disturbing for the time.  We even get a stellar freakout scene too where Jekyll imagines a giant spider crawling on top of him.  I don't remember seeing that in any of the other versions.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde lands itself on The Video Vacuum Top Ten Silent Movies of All Time list at the Number 4 position, which places it in between Phantom of the Opera and The Unholy Three.

Susan (Tracy Coogan from Zombie Honeymoon) is fighting a losing battle with cancer.  After some aggressive chemo treatments, Susan’s husband Henry (screenwriter John Muscanero) decides to take her away from it all by going to their remote cabin in the woods.  Their relaxation is short lived once Susan has a bad spell and slips into a coma.  Through a set of somewhat contrived circumstances, a little Lolita wannabe named Alicia (Mary Kate Wiles) ends up staying at the cabin.  It doesn’t take long for Alicia to start flirting with Henry.  She even takes to jumping on a trampoline at one point; which as we all know is the ultimate act of seduction.  Henry more or less encourages her slutty behavior cuz he hasn’t gotten laid since his wife got sick.  Just when Henry gets all horny and makes a play for the pubescent poontang, Susan wakes up and ruins everything. 

It wouldn’t be fair to divulge what happens in the third act.  Director John Escobedo takes his time to establish his characters and their respective dilemmas, so spoiling it here for you now would do his cautious pacing a great disservice.  The film really moves at a deliberate speed and I’ll give Escobedo points for having the courage to stick to his guns all the way through to the bleak conclusion.  On the other hand, the slow moving plot also diffuses the suspense somewhat.  While the pacing works to flesh out the characters, it conversely prevents the film from gaining any real momentum.   

Muscanero wrote himself a decent enough script, but I think the flick would’ve been better served had somebody else played his role.  The film pretty much rests on his shoulders for most of it’s running time and he just didn’t have the chops necessary to keep you invested in his character.  Wiles is also kinda one-note as the jailbait Jezebel.  At least her character is unpredictable enough to keep you watching to see what she’ll do next.

Hands down the best performance of the flick came from Tracy Coogan.  She makes the most of her limited screen time and creates a character that’s wholly three-dimensional and completely sympathetic.  It’s hard to portray a character that is so frail and yet so strong at the same time, but she did a great job.  Too bad she spends so much of the dang movie in a catatonic state.  The always reliable James (Blackwater Valley Exorcism) Russo also puts in a memorable turn as the grim-faced sheriff. 

Patient viewers with a predilection for character driven psychological dramas will want to seek out Dark Woods, no questions asked.  It pretty much depressed the Hell out of me, but I consider that to be a strength rather than a weakness.  Although the film is a little too spotty to give it a wholehearted recommendation, I have to admit that Dark Woods presents us with one of the stranger love triangles filmdom has ever seen.  Because of that (and the excellent performance by Coogan), you should probably check it out.

If you want to know more about Dark Woods, I’d advise you to head on over to http://www.darkwoodsmovie.com/DARK_WOODS.html.  And if you’re like me and can’t get enough of Tracy Coogan, you should check out www.tracycoogan.com, your one stop spot for all things Tracy. 

Remember that Spielberg produced cheese-fest Batteries Not Included?  You know, the one with all the cutesy poopsy miniature UFO’s?  Okay, now imagine if John “Bud” (The Dark) Cardos had directed it using a stupid solar powered house out in the middle of a desert, some aliens made out of Play-Doh, and Robert Mitchum’s son Chris.  Okay, now imagine producer Charles (Puppet Master) Band only spent about fifty bucks on the whole deal.  It isn’t pretty is it?

Basically what we got is a bunch of extra-terrestrials hanging out in the desert making ponies disappear into glowing Key Lime Pie green pyramids.  Sometimes that snot-tinged light comes out of the bathroom too.  No one thinks much of it until aliens in tiny ships arrive and start breakdancing on the bedposts.

So far, so not-very-good-but-sorta-halfway-watchable.  From there on though, the movie kinda stops being like Batteries Not Included and starts being like a really bad episode of Land of the Lost as a bunch of Claymation monsters (it’s hard to tell if they’re supposed to be three feet tall or thirty because the animation is so bad) show up and harass the family.  Then the movie switches gears again and becomes like a really bad episode of Star Trek when the house goes through a vortex and gets beamed to another dimension.  In the end, the family wanders around their new dimension until they find a giant matte painting that looks like leftovers from The Wizard of Oz. 

Time doesn’t end in this movie.  It stands still.  Honestly, this is one of the longest 79 minutes in the history of cinema.  I don’t know who the Hell this movie’s intended audience is but it surely isn’t me.  I think the movie may have actually been OK if Cardos had stuck to the miniature UFO’s and Claymation monsters.  Those were fine.  The movie really dives into the shitter once the family enters the time-space vortex and it never recovers.  It would’ve also helped if everyone involved didn’t drink a quart of Robitussin before reporting to the set. 

AKA:  Earth’s Final Fury.  AKA:  Time Warp.  AKA:  Vortex.

Although I am a big Stephen King fan, I have never gotten around to reading Desperation (or for that matter the companion Richard Bachman book, The Regulators).  After watching the lackluster made for TV adaptation from director Mick Garris (who has done a slew of King movies from The Shining remake to Riding the Bullet), I have to say I don’t have much of a desire to read it.  Of all the King flicks Garris has helmed, this one is the worst.

Ron (Hellboy) Perlman stars as a demented sheriff who drives around the deserted town of Desperation arresting motorists for minor infractions.  As time goes on, his demeanor gets more and more surly and his face gets increasingly gross looking.  Eventually we learn that he’s been possessed by a vengeful ancient Chinese secret… err… spirit that has the ability to hop from host to host (kinda like The Hidden except it’s one of those CGI whirlwind deals) that is trying to kill as many white folk as possible. 

Desperation is anchored by good performances from a terrific cast (which includes King/Garris vets Steven Weber and Matt Frewer) but there is very little else to recommend about this dreary and dull flick.  The first half of the film was OK when it was just Ron Perlman going bat shit insane on people.  My interest was quickly zapped though once his character abruptly disappeared.  There’s an especially gratuitous scene about halfway through where the survivors huddle themselves in an abandoned movie theater and chit-chat incessantly that really put the brakes on things.  We also have to deal with an annoyingly precocious know-it-all kid who talks a lot about “God” and has a spectral sister.  He got on my damn nerves real fast.  And don’t even get me started on the borderline offensive Chinese voice the monster spirit uses. 

It’s all pretty stupid (wait until you see the hilariously idiotic silent movie flashback complete with title cards) but at least the gore is good for a TV movie.  We get:  pencils in the eyes, severed hand in a fish tank, slot machine that pays off in blood, mountain lion to the jugular, pick axe to the sternum, severed arms as well as severed cheeks.  While King wrote himself a pretty slipshod screenplay, I will say he can concoct a scene where a snake crawls out of somebody’s trachea like no one in the biz.

A lot of talented people got their start in this meandering but mostly funny flick from director Barry Levinson.  The film stars Steve (Police Academy) Guttenberg, Daniel (Home Alone) Stern, Mickey (Homeboy) Rourke, Kevin (Friday the 13^th) Bacon, Tim (Storm of the Century) Daly, and Paul (Mad About You) Reiser as a bunch of friends who like to eat at a diner in Baltimore in the 50’s.  They all have their various quirks.  Guttenberg won’t marry his fiancée until she passes a Colts football quiz.  Stern collects records and wigs out whenever his wife messes up his alphabetized collection.  Rourke has a big gambling debt.  Bacon gets drunk a lot, etc.  That’s basically the whole movie.

Since Levinson has directed nothing but stinkers for the past 12 years or so, it’s nice to know there was a time when he could actually make a decent movie.  I’ll admit that Diner kinda tested my patience for the first half hour or so but once the movie found its rhythm and the laughs became more frequent, I quite enjoyed it.  While some of the more serious aspects of the flick don’t exactly work (Rourke’s gratuitous gambling problem subplot sticks out like a sore thumb), some of the stuff is flat out hilarious (the pecker in the popcorn scene is priceless). 

Of the cast, Rourke comes off the best, mostly because he gets the most screen time.  Being accustomed to his increasingly bizarre appearance, it’s funny to look back at his early movies when he was so low key and handsome.  Bacon is pretty good as the drunk of the group and Guttenberg gives a solid performance too.  Reiser and Daly kinda get the short end of the stick and aren’t given a lot to do but they’re fine just the same.

Levinson unsuccessfully tried to get a Diner TV show (which would have starred Michael Madsen and James Spader!) off the ground the next year.

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.

Okay folks, we’re back with the final installment of TGMITHOTHR before it goes on summer vacation.  Thanks for all the positive feedback on this column and rest assured that it (like James Bond) Will Return this fall.  This week’s movie is…

DEADFALL  (1993)  ****

There are three faces to Nicolas Cage:  The Chick Flick Face, The Action Hero Face, and the Oh My God Get That Boy Some Ritalin Face.  In my opinion, Cage should just really lay off the Chick Flicks.  The Family Man?  NO!  Guarding Tess?  Egads!  Moonstruck?  The horror!  His fast-paced, high body count action flicks like The Rock, Con-Air, and Face/Off make up for his forays into female-friendly films, but it’s his out-there performances in films like Raising Arizona, Kiss of Death, and Vampire’s Kiss that I appreciate most.  Vampire’s Kiss is probably the most infamous of these films due to the fact that Cage ate a real life cock-a-roach on screen.  For my money though, his best all time Oh-No-He-Didn’t performance came in this flick, Deadfall.

Now Deadfall was directed by Cage’s brother, Christopher Coppola (and nephew of Francis), who obviously A) fell asleep B) lost a bet or C) didn’t care what the heck Nic did while filming his scenes. 

Cage’s gonzo performance aside, Deadfall is just another one of those early 90 film noir wannabes like The Grifters, Red Rock West (which also starred Cage), and The Last Seduction.  The plot... fuck it… who gives a good goddamn about the plot.  If you’ve already seen those previously mentioned movies, you know the gist of things:  Somebody is conning somebody else and you’d don’t know who’s getting conned until the very end.  That shit doesn’t matter though. 

With Cage acting this crazy, who NEEDS a plot?

Cage is completely unhinged and acts totally deranged in this flick.  That is to say, he’s fucking brilliant!  Cage wears a funny wig, oversized sunglasses, and sports a hideous tan.  He also hyperventilates, says his lines like he’s high on ecstasy, and throws temper tantrums like a two year old.  He also gets some of the best lines in Video Vacuum history.  Here’s just a few examples:

• When Michael Biehn (the hero) doesn’t answer a question in a timely manner, Cage pulls his gun out and screams, “What’s the matter, cat got your fuckin’ tongue?”

• While preparing to pull a con he says, “What do you say we have some fun time family fun?”

• When he can’t get his car started he hollers, “Fucker, fucker… FUCK!”

• Cage will also randomly speak in a Mexican accent for no reason whatsoever and says shit like, “Choo got it bebe!”

• How about the scene where he kills a dude and screams, “Let’s fuck!”

• Or the scene where Cage goes on a coke binge and says, “What am I?  A fucking retard, man!  A fucking retard?  HUH?... Well VIVA LA FUCKING FRANCE, MAN!”

• Or how about the scene where Cage pulls a gun on someone and yells, “It’s a crazy fucking world we live in… CAPTAIN JACK!... Filthy-double-crosser-filthy-double-crossing-filthy-goddamn-fucking-filthy-little-brat!”

• Then there’s the part where he says “Bull…shit, bull…shit” in a helium voice for no discernable reason.

• Then there’s the scene where Cage starts downing shots in a strip club and screeches “Mommy…mommy… HERE’S TO SAM PECKINPAH!  Mommy… I’ll be damned… ALL SUMMER LONG!!

• The best line though comes when a random extra bumps into Cage and he karate chops the fuck out of the guy while screaming, “HI-FUCKING-YA!”  Yes folks; that’s probably the all time greatest movie line of all time.  (Although “You mean we talkin’ ‘bout some damn shark’s mother?” from Jaws 3-D is right up there too.)

Sadly Cage gets killed off about halfway through the movie when Biehn sticks his face in a deep fryer.  Even though he’s only in half the movie, that shouldn’t stop you from checking this flick out.  Cage acts crazy enough for FIVE movies!  His performance IS the movie.

Although the last thirty or so minutes of Deadfall is Cage-free, you still may enjoy sticking around until the end.  I mean you get to see a goateed Charlie Sheen as a pool hustler, Angus (The Tall Man from Phantasm) Scrimm sporting a robotic claw arm, Talia Shire as a bartender, Rene Estevez, Peter Fonda, and Mickey Fucking Dolenz!  Three Coppolas, two Sheens, one Fonda, and a Monkee?  How can you not love this fucking movie?  Do yourself a favor and run out and check this flick out.  You’re guaranteed to have some “fun time family fun!”

Deadfall ranks a solid Number 9 spot on The Video Vacuum Top Ten Films for the Year of 1993; sandwiched in between The Bride with White Hair and Freaked.

Well folks, that’s gonna be it for The Greatest Movies in the History of the Human Race series for now, but it’ll be back in the fall to tell you about all the great movies you’ve may have missed and need to see.  See you soon Vacuumers…

Sarah Bay (AKA:  Rosalba Neri) was hot in Lady Frankenstein so I guess she figured she might as well star in this variation on the Dracula legend.  (It really should’ve been called Lady Dracula, if you ask me.)  She plays Countess Dracula who invites an architect (Mark Damon) into her home to inspect her castle.  He also inspects her other assets if you catch my drift (i.e. he fucks her) and she puts the bite on him.  A few days later, the architect’s identical twin (also Damon) shows up looking for his lost brother.  Little does he know that he’s actually interrupted the Countess’s plan to sacrifice five naked virginal girls to her main man, the Devil.  

The Devil’s Wedding Night is boring and longwinded and doesn’t provide any memorable shocks or schlocks.  There is one little bit of unintentional humor revolving around magic ring though that gave me a chuckle or two.  I couldn’t quite make out what it was called, but it sure as shit sounded like it was named “The Ring of Nipple-Baum” to me.  Too bad most of the movie is made up of stupid scenes where the bland-as-a-can-of-paint Damon sulks around the castle looking for his bro.

On the plus side, Bay is super sexy and looks damn fine; particularly while bathing naked in human blood.  Unfortunately, you’ve got to wade through a whole lot of slow-moving nonsense before Bay gets to show us what she’s working with.  The quintet of virgins also has some nice hooters too, so the flick isn’t a total waste of time or anything.

AKA:  Full Moon of the Virgins.

Okay, I usually only review “movies” and wasn’t going to review this because it’s technically a “series”, originally aired on the internet, and is only about 45 minutes long.  Since it was created by Joss Whedon, the creator of one of my personal favorite TV shows of the past decade or so, Firefly, and stars that show’s star, Nathan Fillion, I decided what the heck.  The fact that it was all about superheroes and villains didn’t hurt either.

Dr. Horrible (Neil Patrick Harris) is a would-be super-villain who airs a blog where he talks about his various diabolical plans.  He also falls in love with a cute chick named Penny (Felicia Day) in a Laundromat who barely notices him.  After one of Dr. Horrible’s evil schemes gets thwarted by his arch-nemesis Captain Hammer (Fillion), Penny falls in love with the square-jawed do-gooder, which real gets the low-rent villain mad.

Oh, and did I mention it’s a musical?

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is hit-or-miss for the most part, yet it has enough good-natured random-ass weirdness (wait until you see “Bad Horse”) to charm just about anybody.  The songs are all OK and even though they aren’t very catchy or memorable, they are performed with unabashed glee by the cast, which helps a lot.  And at 45 minutes, it’s a perfect length for your attention span.  

The cast by the way is excellent.  Harris runs the gamut of emotions here and although his character is totally unbelievable, he invests 100% into his role and makes Dr. Horrible a fully three-dimensional human being.  Fillion looks like he’s having a blast playing the role of the idiot hero and Day has a plucky glow about her that fits her character nicely.

I don’t know quite how all this would pan out if it ever became a “real” show, but one thing’s for sure, I’d definitely would give it a look-see.

Well folks, I know I usually do these things on Wednesdays but since I’m going to have a lot on my plate this week, I thought I’d break tradition and give you this week’s flick a few days early.  Besides, a movie this flippin’ awesome just couldn’t wait.  Of course, we’re talking about yet another of The Greatest Movies in the History of the Human Race.  This week’s flick is none other than…

DAYS OF THUNDER  (1990)  ****

You know before Tom Cruise went bugnuts crazy jumping on sofas and pledging his allegiance to Xenu, he was pretty much the biggest movie star of all time.  Sure, his Scientology antics of late have severely strained his credibility (and some would say sanity), but I still think he’s pretty awesome.  No matter what you think of the man, you have to admit that he’s made some of the greatest films in the Known Universe.

His first blockbuster Top Gun made him an international movie star, a household name, and a living legend.  Say whatever you will about Cruise, the man is not stupid.  After that, he was smart enough to make his next film a veritable remake of Top Gun.  Since they couldn’t call it Top Gun in a Pool Hall, they called it The Color of Money.  Cruise next made Top Gun in a Bar (which the studio foolishly changed to simply, Cocktail) and then went off and tried to win a bunch of Oscars with Rain Man and Born on the 4^th of July.  Needless to say, he didn’t win, so Tom Boy went back to the drawing board and came out with Top Gun on a Race Track, AKA:  Days of Thunder. 

You’ve got to hand it to the man, he kept on making the same movie over and over again, and we kept on seeing them.  Mad respect Tom.

To insure the highest quality of cinema, Cruise got Top Gun director Tony Scott to helm Days of Thunder.  Scott is smart enough to know that he’s making essentially the same damn movie with the same damn star, just with a different setting, so he rolls up his sleeves and really delivers the cinematic goods.  It’s for this reason that I think I like Days of Thunder MORE than Top Gun.  It’s basically the same damn movie as Top Gun and it’s still pretty fucking awesome the second time around.

Now personally, I hate Nascar but since Cruise is in the driver’s seat, I say gentlemen start your engines!

I don’t even think I got to tell you the plot.  If you’ve seen Top Gun, you’ve pretty much seen Days of Thunder.  If you don’t believe me:

• Cruise’s character (who has the awesomely masculine name, Cole Trickle) is new to flying planes/driving cars but his hot shot ways send him to the top of the pack.

• Cruise has a mentor (in this case it’s Robert Duvall and not Tom Skerritt) who sees potential in him.

• Cruise has a father who died under mysterious circumstances.  We never actually get to see any of it but old wrinkly-faced actors spew a lot of long-winded exposition about it.  In Days of Thunder though, the exposition is not directed toward Cruise’s father but to a driver that had previously raced for Duvall.  (Hey, they had to change SOME things up or else they’d get sued.)

• Cruise falls in love with an older woman (in this case it’s Nicole Kidman and not Kelly McGillis) who works in a ”manly” profession (in this case she’s a doctor not a flight instructor) and ends up having soft-focus love scenes with him.

• Cruise has a rival (in this case it’s Michael Rooker and not Val Kilmer) who starts off hating his guts but then becomes his friend by the end of the movie.

• When Cruise isn’t flying/driving, he rides a motorcycle while wearing sunglasses and looks like a total badass.

• Cruise gets into a near-fatal accident in his jet/car and subsequently starts acting flaky while driving/flying.

• Cruise overcomes his flakiness at the last second to shoot down enemy fighters/win the race.

In addition to the patented Cruise-ccentric plot themes, we also get a great scene that shows off what a badass Cruise is behind the wheel.  While taking a test ride around the track, he tells Duvall that he’s “Dropping the hammer”.  (Which is racer code for going REALLY fast.)  This scene also is great if you need to test your 5.1 surround sound system.  There’s also a great chemistry between Cruise and Rooker that really makes the movie.  They’re really dynamite together and it’s a shame they haven’t made another movie together.  The part where they race each other in wheelchairs is awesome (it’s even better than the wheelchair race between Cruise and Willem Dafoe in the previous year’s Born on the 4^th of July) but the scene where they take two rental cars out of the beach and race each other is even more fucking nuts.

I really like Cruise’s performance in this flick because he more or less acts just like Tom Cruise.  That’s what you want from a movie star.  I mean you don’t watch Commando to see Arnold Schwarzenegger emote, you watch it to see him be… well… Arnold.  Same goes for Cruise.  Tom doesn’t get all “actory” on us in Days of Thunder.  He just says his lines clearly and pretends to drive around in circles.  That’s all we want from the man.  And he gives that to us in spades.  Cruise also gets a lot of great dialogue like “Rubbing is racing!” that helps bump Days of Thunder into the sheer awesomeness that you’ve come to expect from the man.  In short this is Cruise at his Cruisey-est.

Days of Thunder features more than half of the items listed below and because of that, not only is it one of the best movies Tom Cruise ever made, it’s also one of The Greatest Movies in the History of the Human Race.

THE 10 MAIN INGREDIENTS TO JUST ABOUT EVERY TOM CRUISE MOVIE

1. THE ENEMY THAT BECOMES A FRIEND AFTER A LIFE ALTERING EXPERIENCE:  AKA:  THE ICEMAN SYNDROME:  Used to show that not all rivals are the true enemy.  Initially used in Top Gun where Iceman (Val Kilmer) and Maverick (Cruise) put their egos aside after the death of Goose (Anthony Edwards).  See also: Old Dog Teaches New Dog New Tricks.  Besides Top Gun, see Born on the 4^th of July (Willem Dafoe), Days of Thunder (Michael Rooker), and The Last Samurai (Ken Watanabe).

2. OLD DOG TEACHES NEW DOG NEW TRICKS:  AKA:  HOW TO SHOOT POOL/MIX DRINKS/DRIVE CARS REAL GOOD:  Used to set up an older actor as a teacher/father figure (ties into Paternal Issues).  Initially used in Top Gun where Viper (Tom Skerritt) takes Maverick under his wing after the death of Goose.  Besides Top Gun see The Color of Money (Paul Newman), Cocktail (Bryan Brown), Days of Thunder (Robert Duvall), The Last Samurai (Ken Watanabe).

3. THE OLDER WOMAN WILL BECOME YOUR LOVER IF YOU PROVE YOU’RE A MAN:  Used to show that older (taller) women are no match for Cruise’s wily charms.  The formula demands the Cruise character to grow up before he can be taken seriously as a worthy suitor.  Initially used in Losin’ It where Shelly Long played a hooker who deflowers Cruise.  Considerably polished in Risky Business where Rebecca DeMornay played a hooker who deflowers Cruise.  Besides these, see (in non-hooker roles) Top Gun (Kelly McGillis), Color of Money (Mary Elisabeth Mastrantonio), Days of Thunder (Nicole Kidman), and Far and Away (Nicole Kidman again).  NOTE:  Later replaced with Younger Woman… in Jerry Maguire (Renee Zellweger), and Vanilla Sky (Penelope Cruz).

4. PATERNAL ISSUES:  AKA:  THE SINS OF THE FATHER SYNDROME:  Used to show the difficulty of living up to or playing down the legacy of his father.  Has its roots in Top Gun and appears in Rain Man, A Few Good Men, Magnolia, Vanilla Sky, and Valkyrie.

5.  PSYCHOLOGICAL DILEMMA:  Usually appearing after the Life Altering Experience.  First appeared in Top Gun.  Results in Cruise not being able to fly (Top Gun), drive (Days of Thunder), or show his face (Vanilla Sky).

6. THE MOTORCYCLE RULE:  Movies where Cruise rides a motorcycle = Box Office.  Initially used in Top Gun but shows up in Days of Thunder, Mission:  Impossible 2 and (in a futuristic version) Minority Report.

7. TOM CRUISE IN HIS UNDERWEAR:  Used to make the girls in the audience hoot and holler.  No plot significance whatsoever.  Purely box office related.  Initially drove the girls crazy in Risky Business but had its roots in Losin’ It.  See also All the Right Moves, Top Gun, Color of Money, Cocktail, Days of Thunder, Magnolia and Vanilla Sky.

8.  THE LAWYER RULE:  Purely financial reasons.  Movies where Cruise plays a lawyer = Box Office.  Had its roots in Cocktail, but featured extensively in A Few Good Men and The Firm.

9. MASKS:  Used to show the duality of Cruise’s character.  Initially used in Mission: Impossible.  Also used in Eyes Wide Shut, Mission:  Impossible 2 and 3, and Vanilla Sky.

10.  THE VINCENT RULE:  Anytime Cruise appears in a movie with the character name “Vincent” he is obviously looking for Oscar consideration.  See Color of Money and Collateral.

Overall, Days of Thunder ranks at Number 5 on The Video Vacuum List for the Year 1990 sandwiched right in between Frankenhooker and Goodfellas. 

(PS:  I think I deserve a cookie for not using the pun “Cruise Control” anywhere in this review.  Hey, YOU write a review about a Tom-Cruise-in-a-Car Movie and try NOT to do it.)

That’s all the time we have today Vacuumers, but join me next week for the next film in the series.  What do I have in store for you?  Well, we’re talking about future Oscar winners being shredded in an industrial combine.  We’re talking about the werewolf from Silver Bullet getting eaten alive by Great White sharks.  We’re talking about Anthony Zerbe blowing up in a decompression chamber.  We’re talking about Wayne Newton acting like a complete pimp.  We’re talking about LOTS of cocaine.  We’re talking about the best James Bond movie that isn’t called Goldfinger; Licence to Kill.  It’s a movie so badass that they didn’t even spell it correctly.  See you then…

A secret society of lesbians called the Daughters of Lesbos throw a dinner party where they each relate how they came to be Sapphic sisters.  The first chick got dosed with a date-rape drug laced with Spanish Fly by some skeevy perv before swearing off men forever.  The second gal masturbated all the time before hooking up with her summer camp counselor.  The next broad picked up a female Flower Power hitchhiker who was into Free Love.  The last girl was also raped by a man but she at least had the guts to get revenge by cutting off a very sensitive area of his anatomy.

Despite the promising set-up, Daughters of Lesbos isn’t a whole lot of fun.  What bugged me about this flick was that the sex scenes (which comprises about ¾ of the film’s running time) were all boring and not very erotic.  They also suffered from a lack of variety (basically either the lesbians get raped or the lesbians play with dildos) and poor editing.  The silver lining to that cloud was that unlike some 60’s skin flicks, this one shows a lot of bush.

I really wish that Daughters of Lesbos had focused more on the revenge aspects of the plot instead of being little more than just a series of flashbacks.  The fact that there was no sound, only the female narrator’s voice also irked me too.  Still, she does get some great dialogue like, “She was forever the butch!”

AKA:  Dominique in Daughters of Lesbos.

Christopher Walken stars as Shannon, a laconic mercenary who is hired to do some reconnaissance work in a shit hole African nation.  Posing as a birdwatcher (!) he takes photos and gathers the information necessary to overthrow the Amin-like dictator.  When Shannon gets caught taking sensitive photos, he gets roughed up by the secret police and is sent back to the States.  Once home, he gets offered a big payday to lead a rebel freedom force on a siege to oust the scummy dictator.  Naturally Shannon agrees, mostly because if he didn’t, then it wouldn’t be an action movie.

Although The Dogs of War moves at a deliberate pace, it will undoubtedly be rewarding for some viewers out there.  I can see why someone would dig this movie because it shows you the intricate ins and outs of what it takes to remove an insane dictator from power.  Seriously, if you ever want to plan a coup d’etat on a foreign nation, just watch this flick.  It’s basically Staging a Military Coup for Dummies. 

This doesn’t necessarily make it fun to watch though.  John (Raw Deal) Irvin’s direction is meticulous to a fault.  Three quarters of the movie is dedicated to Walken’s endless preparation for the assault on the dictator with only the last twenty minutes or so being devoted to the actual attack.  The flick also comes up woefully short in the machismo department.  Take for example the scene where Walken tortures a guy by putting glass in his mouth and slapping him around.  Sure, this sounds good on paper, but once the glass is in the guy’s mouth, Irvin never cuts back to the dude’s face and we never get to see any blood or anything.  Weak.

Walken is good but his character is too emotionally aloof for you to really give a shit about him.  Like most mercenaries, all he cares about is money (and himself), so his character is always at arm’s length from the audience.  Some hero.  Still, if you want to see Walken acting before he became a caricature of himself, this is as good a place as any to look.  Tom Berenger, JoBeth Williams and Ed O’Neil also pop up in capably acted supporting roles, although neither of them gets enough screen time to make much of an impression.

Irvin returned later in the year with Ghost Story.

Jess Franco directed this middling science fiction tinged horror flick that may bore even his most ardent fans.  It’s all about a wheelchair bound scientist named Dr. Z (he looks like the offspring of Dr. Strangelove and Henry Kissinger) who creates a form of artificial mind control.  After successfully turns an escaped criminal into his slave, he goes before a panel of scientists lead by none other than Doctor Orloff (Howard Vernon) himself.  Everyone mocks Z for his silly idea and calls him a charlatan and the poor dude keels over from a heart attack right there on the spot.  Dr. Z’s demented daughter then perfects her father’s experiments and goes on to control the mind of a sexy cabaret dancer named “Miss Death” (Estella Blain).  She injects Miss Death’s super long fingernails with a fast-acting poison and makes her seek out and murder the scientists who ridiculed her father into an early grave.

You know, I read a lot of reviews that claimed this flick is one of Franco’s best.  I don’t know about all that.  It’s definitely no Female Vampire or Sadomania that’s for sure.  Franco films things in his usual point-and-shoot manner and although the cinematography is crisp, The Diabolical Dr. Z comes up quite short in the atmosphere department.  The movie also suffers from a decided lack of Franco trademarks; namely sex and sleaze.  The biggest crime the film perpetrates it that we never truly learn just how diabolical Dr. Z is since he croaks before the end of the first reel. 

The flick is not without its merits though.  There is a decent body count and the face operating scene wasn’t too shabby either.  The best part comes when Miss Death does her sexy little dance routine.  I especially admired the way she filled out that sexy body stocking.  Ms. Blain isn’t much of an actress, yet she has a definite knack for writhing around seductively on a giant spider web.  

For the most part though, The Diabolical Dr. Z is just pretty lame and more than a tad boring.  Die hard Franco-philes will enjoy seeing the director turning up in a supporting role as the detective who saves the day.  He isn’t bad in front of the camera but he could’ve done a lot better while in the director’s chair.  I mean come on Jess; you know you screwed up when a character says, “Take off your dress!  Hurry!  There’s no time to lose!” and then you only show the chick naked from the back.  You know better than that Jess.

AKA:  Miss Death.  AKA:  Miss Death and Dr. Z in the Grip of the Maniac.

The original Devil Bat is one of my all time favorite Bela Lugosi movies.  It’s a literally batty Poverty Row horror flick about a deranged scientist splashing pheromone laced aftershave on people’s necks before unleashing his giant ass bat to rip out their throats.  I never knew there was a sequel to that manic classic, so when it was recommended to me on Netflix, I immediately Queued up that son (err… daughter) of a bitch.  As it turns out, Devil Bat’s Daughter is similar in a lot of ways to Curse of the Cat People.  It continues the “story” and characters from the first film, but it’s really nothing like its predecessor. 

We now follow Lugosi’s daughter, a mixed-up gal who believes that she’s inherited her father’s homicidal tendencies.  To make matters worse, she has bizarre visions of blurry bats menacing her in her sleep.  A bland psychiatrist tries to get to the bottom of her mental deficiencies but she ends up going crazy and murdering the good doctor’s wife (and dog).  If you already hadn’t guessed, the shrink is the real murderer and is merely pinning the wrap on the Devil Bat’s Daughter because she’s clearly bonkers.

Whereas the original Devil Bat was tons of nutty fun that never took itself seriously for a minute, this sequel plays things very straight.  Director Frank (Strangler of the Swamp) Wisbar takes a page out of Val Lewton’s book and tries to keep the horror confined to the character’s (and audience’s) imagination.  Die hard fans of The Devil Bat will be disparaged to learn however that this sequel more or less shows blatant disrespect to the original and even goes so far as to contradict nearly everything that happened in the first film.  (We learn that Bela really wasn’t the killer after all…  HUH!?!)  Also, everyone usually refers to Bela’s character as a vampire rather than a mad scientist; which makes me think the filmmakers somehow got the original movie confused with Dracula.

Despite these major pitfalls, I didn’t mind Devil Bat’s Daughter too much.  It flows pretty well and the scenes of the DBD’s psychoanalysis are quite involving.  The nightmare sequences are also stylishly done and help to put this flick slightly above most of the Poverty Row crap that was being churned out during this period.  As tenuously related sequels to horror classics go, you can certainly do a lot worse.

Louise (Fay Spain), the titular hip chick is torn between the affections of two racing rebels.  Jim (Steven Terrell) is a sensitive blue collar kid and Fred (John Ashley) is the bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks that has a chip on his shoulder and something to prove.  Both Jim and Fred try to woo Louise by drag racing on small town streets where they almost hit pedestrians and women with baby carriages.  Eventually the two warring Romeos turn to duking it out in their favorite pizza parlor and participate in “Chicky Runs” to win Louise’s love.  Louise finally settles for Jim and that makes Fred so mad that he goes out and steals Jim’s hot rod.  While speeding through the town, Fred accidentally runs down a pedestrian.  Naturally, the police think Jim did it so they haul him away just before the big race between him and Fred.  Luckily, Louise is a hellcat behind the wheel and takes Jim’s place, winning the race and proving her man’s innocence at the same time.

Dragstrip Girl is 69 minutes of pure innocuous 50’s teenage fun.  Directed by Edward L. Cahn; a veteran of such memorable flicks like Girls in Prison, The She Creature, and Invisible Invaders; Dragstrip Girl is one of the better hot rod movies of the late 50’s and is a nice time capsule for the racing subculture.  What makes Dragstrip Girl stand out from the rest of the pack is that even though the story is cliché, the characters are not.  None of the teens are portrayed as juvenile delinquents and they're all three dimensional (more or less) and immensely likable.  Also unique is the fact that the authority figures aren’t seen as enemies to the kids.  The parents are really cool (they allow them to have parties where kids neck in the dark) and the fuzz is sympathetic enough to overlook their hot rodding (as long as they do it on the track that is). 

The performances help out a lot.  Spain plays her role with a nice amount of spunk and Ashley is quite good as the brooding hot-tempered Fred.  It’s Frank (The Riddler) Gorshin though who is easily the funniest and most memorable actor in the flick.  He gives a tour de force performance as Tommy, the goofy grease monkey who eats pizza topped with ice cream.  Gorshin and Ashley also sing the great theme song.  Its way too short (only about 45 seconds really), but you’ll wish it was much longer.

I know some of you out there will be miffed that the Girl doesn’t make it to the Dragstrip until the next-to-the-last reel.  Me, I didn’t mind too much.  There were enough scenes of kids dancing to “crazy” music on the jukebox, driving like maniacs, and spouting lots of hilarious teenage jive talk (My favorite:  “They’re taking the kicks out of all that jazz!”) to qualify Dragstrip Girl as a mini-classic. 

Fun fact:  Later in the year, Cahn directed Terrell in the immortal Invasion of the Saucer Men.  That film was later remade seven years later as Attack of the Eye Creatures, which amazingly enough starred Ashley in Terrell’s role.

An Oriental Dragon Lady sends out her "Death Machines" (three guys who can fuck shit up) to kill all her enemies so that she can be the number one crime boss in the city.  First, the Death Machines throw one dude off a building, then they take a rocket launcher to another guy.  Next, they run over a guy in a phone booth with a bulldozer and kill a dude while he's eating in his favorite Italian restaurant.  Then the Dragon Lady sends the Death Machines to kill everybody in a rival dojo but they drop the ball by leaving one guy alive who snitches to the cops.  (Even though they forgot to kill that guy, the Death Machines at least cut his hand off.)  When the Death Machines are no longer a vital part of the Dragon Lady's organization, she sends some dudes to kill them.  It's safe to say that the Death Machines don't like that very much.

Death Machines is one of those crazy ass movies that are right up my alley.  This flick has everything in it but the kitchen sink.  Besides slaughtering an entire karate school, The Death Machines also take on some dirty bikers in a greasy spoon, cut people's heads off, and blow up airplanes too.  The best scene of the flick doesn't even involve the Death Machines though.  That comes when our would-be one-handed hero takes his nurse girlfriend on a date to a titty bar where a no holds barred barroom brawl breaks out.  I also liked how the Dragon Lady villainess had to pronounce all of her dialogue phonetically too.

Death Machines isn't great or anything but at least it's consistently entertaining and features a lot of over the top violence and ludicrous moments.  There's enough general nuttiness here to make you wish they made a sequel.  In fact, the ending seems to set things up for a sequel as the Death Machines are seen boarding a plane and there's a badass freeze frame of the three dudes looking all kinds of tough.  And it's a freeze frame that lasts nearly a minute.  There are no closing credits, just the freeze frame.  You don't need the credits.  The Death Machines fucked a lot of people up and that's all you need to know.  C'mon Hollywood, where's Death Machines 2 for Christ's sake?

A sleazy Italian mobster gets the best line of the movie when he says, "You killed my driver so I killed your waiter!"