Category Archives: Movies with a rural setting

Blood Lake (1987)

Posted on October 10, 2023 | Leave a comment

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By Richard Winters

My Rating: 1 out of 10

4-Word Review: Killer stalks 6 teens.

Filmed on-location in Cedar Lake, Oklahoma by a bunch of young amateurs convinced they could make a horror movie just as good as the studios. Mike Berry, who stars as Mike, wrote the screenplay and then shopped around his script, but could find no takers until he bumped into Tim Boggs at a local retail store who agreed to take on the task of directing and even quit both of his jobs to do it. The shooting took place over a course of 10 days with the storyline revolving around 6 teens who go to the house of Becky (Angela Darter) whose parents are away, which will allow them to party for the whole weekend only to have it interrupted by a deranged killer (Tiny Frazier) upset because the house they’re in used to be owned by him.

When I hear about films like this I harken back to Harold P. Warren, who wrote, directed, produced, and starred in Manos: The Hands of Fate, which has become quite infamous as one of the worst movies ever made, but also started as a bet where Warren, being a local salesmen, bet famous screenwriter Stirling Stilliphant, who was in the El Paso, Texas area scouting for locations for an upcoming film, that he could direct a horror movie that could be just as good as anything Hollywood could churn out. Of course the results where abysmal, but you can’t help but feel that the cast and crew here were equally in over their heads.

On the positive side it starts out a heck of a lot better than the Warren film, which had extended shots focusing on the passing Texas countryside for no apparent reason and got visually boring quite fast. The excuse for this was that Warren had expected to shoot the opening credits over this, but for whatever reason it got botched leaving a lot extraneous and pointless footage. Here though they get it right with a nicely edited bit showing the kids driving in a car while the credits and music play over it. In fact the editing is quite good and helps equalize the cheap video look that was done via a VCR camera. The dialogue is also well done as director Boggs was smart enough to allow the teens to paraphrase their own lines to make it sound natural and thus the characters come-off as more believable than in most other bigger budgeted horror flicks, so we’ll score one for the Okies on that.

Unfortunately everything else is pretty bad. The big problem is that not enough happens. For a film with Blood in its title you end up seeing very little of it. There’s a quick killing at the beginning, which doesn’t show much gore, and then another 48 minutes before you see another one. There’s a teaser death where you see a body floating in a lake, but it turns out to being just a prank. I realize other 80’s slasher flicks would sometimes employ this, but when you’re a cheap production you can’t play with the audiences expectations like that and you got to get to the gore and violence pretty quick to hold their interest. Spending almost 20-minutes watching the kids go water skiing turns the whole thing into a snooze feast and it’s very unlikely anyone is going to want to stick with it after that.

Spoiler Alert!

The killings, once they finally get going, aren’t impressive and all done by a guy who doesn’t look frightening at all and has no distinguishing features to make him interesting. The knife he uses is quite small and having him use a sword, or ax, or something big and sharp would’ve elicited more terror. The reason for why he goes on a killing spree is that apparently he sold the house to the new owners, but they ended up ‘not paying for it’, but how does someone take possession of the home if no money transaction takes place? You can’t really ‘sell a home’ if no actual sale happens.

The ending is confusing too as the killer’s body disappears and then it gets intimated that he reappears inside the ambulance that’s taking the injured teens to the hospital though we don’t really see this as all that gets shown is the ambulance driving away with laughter in the background. The final sequence becomes almost surreal as the killer magically reappears at the home site only for him to see all the water in the lake drained out. Apparently this was, as the closing credits intimate, an ‘act of God’, but what does it have to do with the story?

My Rating: 1 out of 10

Runtime: 1 Hour 22 Minutes

Not Rated

Director: Tim Boggs

Distributor: United Home Video

Available: DVD, Fandor, Plex, Tubi, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Adolescence/High School, Horror, Low Budget, Movies with a rural setting, Slasher/Gore

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‘Gator Bait (1973)

Posted on September 25, 2023 | Leave a comment

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By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: Woman fights off rednecks.

Desiree (Claudia Jennings) is a peasant woman living in the swamplands of southern Louisiana. To help her bring in an income she takes part in poaching of snakes. Deputy Billy Boy (Clyde Ventura) and Ben (Ben Sebastian) are sitting in a boat in the swamp waters when they catch Desiree in the act of poaching and decide to chase her down and arrest her, or try to use it to their advantage by getting some sex out of her in return for not taking her in. Desiree though proves to be more cunning than they expected as she out races them in her boat and then when she is finally cornered she throws the bag of snakes that she has into their boat, which allows her time to escape. The deputy then must fight off the snakes by using his gun to shoot them, but in the process accidentally shoots and kills Ben. He later tells his father, Sheriff Joe Bob Thomas (Bill Thurman) that it was Desiree that shot Ben and not him. The Sheriff then goes to the boy’s father (Sam Gilman) and when given the news the father decides to chase Desiree down himself with the help of his two other sons (Douglas Dirkson, Don Baldwin) and exact a violent revenge.

This was the 7th film written and directed by Ferd Sebastian and the 4th that he did alongside his wife Beverly. It’s most likely their best known effort and came about through their friendship with Claudia Jennings. Jennings, a former Playboy model, acted in one of their other films, another B-exploitationer known as The Single Girls, and struck-up a friendship with the husband and wife filmmakers and asked them to come-up with a script in which she could star. Beverly then wrote this script seemingly overnight, I’m not sure if it was actually written in that short of time, but judging from its creativity, which is very low, it’s not that hard to believe. It was then shot in a matter of 10-days in March of 1973 at Caddo Lake, which is a state park and bayou that borders Texas and Louisiana.

The film does start out with a good speed boat chase and it captures the swamplands in vivid detail and with the exception of one scene that takes place in the town of Thibodaux, Louisiana, everything else gets done in the swamps making it seem like its own little universe. The Sebastains do wisely keep their son Tracy Sebastian, from uttering any lines of dialogue as he plays Desiree’s mute kid brother who had his tongue cut-out, which is good as he later starred-in On the Air Live with Captain Midnight and it’s just a shame he couldn’t have played a mute there as well as he gives what I consider one of the worst performances ever put on screen, but here since he can’t talk his marginal acting ability is not as apparent.

Despite the few good points the movie is otherwise a failure where the tension wanes instead of intensifying as it should. Part of the reason for this is that the story spells everything out right away and offers no surprises, or twists. The boat chases are diverting at first, but soon turn stale as they become too prevalent and almost like a loop reel where we’re just seeing the same thing done over and over again with nothing new getting thrown in. The characters, particularly the male ones, are written as being extreme southern caricatures who are too one-dimensional to being even remotely interesting and I genuinely felt sorry for actors Gilman and Thurman who had already been in the business for many decades at the time and had even been in some better financed studio films, so to have to come down to starring in this brainless dreck had to feel like a low point, but I guess a paycheck is a paycheck.

Jennings’ presence doesn’t add much as she’s seen only sporadically and most of the film time is given to the bickering male yokels. She doesn’t, despite her past of being a Playboy Playmate, appear nude as that gets left to Janit Baldwin, who plays her kid sister Julie, which will disappoint male viewers who will most likely come into this expecting the pretty Jennings to be the one who gets unclothed. When Claudia does speak it’s a trainwreck too as she sounds like someone from Europe instead of a rural southern chick. Her character is also poorly defined and doesn’t really grow, or fleshed out enough to make her seem like a real person, but instead remains more of an enigma.

Spoiler Alert!

Some on IMDb describe this as a early variation of I Spit on Your Grave, but that really isn’t accurate. In the Meir Zarchi flick the rape attack takes up the majority of the film time while here the attack isn’t even on the main character, but instead the younger sister, which is also quite brief. The female character doesn’t kill off the men one-by-one like in the other one as here the men end up killing each other for the most part, with the character’s younger brother taking care of one of them, and the final one is left to live.

Had this been more violent and explicit I might’ve forgiven the rest, but overall it’s quite tepid. It’s basically a tease of a movie that promises way more than it delivers and it’s so entrenched in stereotypes that it makes you feel like you’ve seen it, or something quite similar, a hundred times before. Sure there’s a ‘surprise twist/reveal’, but this one could see coming early on as the father of the boy who is killed and who goes after Desiree with a vengeance keeps commenting on how attractive he found her mother, which doesn’t take a genius to read into that and know most likely what he’s implying. In any case it’s not much of anything even on a B-movie level, but nonetheless got made into a sequel in 1988 though without star Jennings who died in a car accident in 1979.

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: October 12, 1973

Runtime: 1 Hour 28 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Ferd and Beverly Sebastian

Studio: Sebastian International Pictures

Available: DVD-R

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Posted in 70's Movies, Cult, Movies that take place in the South, Movies with a rural setting, Outdoors, Thrillers/Suspense

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Last of the Mobile Hot Shots (1970)

Posted on September 11, 2023 | 1 comment

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By Richard Winters

My Rating: 4 out of 10

4-Word Review: A game show wedding.

Myrtle (Lynn Redgrave) and Jeb (James Coburn) meet at a game show being taped in New Orleans and find themselves working together as contestants when brought up onto the stage. They end up winning some money, but are told that they cannot collect it until they’re officially married on live television, which they both agree to. After the nuptials they travel to an old mansion known as the Waverly Plantation that has been in Jeb’s family since 1840. Jeb wishes to use the money earned on the game show to fix up the place, but finds his plans being stymied by Chicken (Robert Hooks) a multi-racial half-brother that has been residing at the place and maintaining it for many years. Chicken insists that he’ll become the next owner of the place once Jeb succumbs to terminal cancer, but Jeb wants Chicken off the premises immediately and have the document stating that Chicken is the next of kin to be destroyed. He orders Myrtle to flirt with Chicken until she can get him into a compromising position so that she can steal the document. Once that is retrieved he then wants her to kill him with a hammer while Jeb waits upstairs. Though initially reluctant Myrtle decides to go through with the plan only for Chicken to turn-the-tables on them with an unexpected twist.

While playwright Tennessee Williams is celebrated for his acclaimed work like A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof many people don’t realize that his biggest success came early in his career while towards the end,  especially by the mid-60’s through to his death in 1983, his output was very little and what he was able to get produced was generally not well received by either the critics, or the public. This film is based on his play The Seven Descents of Myrtle, which was originally written as a short story in 1942 and published in 1954. Williams then decided to turn it into a one-act play in 1967, but then expanded it to a full length stage production, which premiered on Broadway on March 27, 1968 with Harry Guardino as Chicken and Estelle Parsons playing Myrtle. This version though only ran for 29 performances and was generally considered a failure.

However, director Sidney Lumet saw the production and decided he wanted to take a stab at turning it into a movie. He made several changes to the story with the biggest one being that in the play the Jeb character, who was called Lot, was a closeted transvestite, which is something that the movie doesn’t bring up at all though would’ve been far more interesting had it done this. The play also doesn’t feature the game show segment, which was very surreal and makes the film seem almost like a misguided parody.

I did enjoy the way famed cinematographer James Wong Howe captured the decaying mansion, which was filmed on-location in St. Francisville, Louisiana, a famous small town known for its abundance of historic old buildings. Everything else though falls flat. The opening bit at the game show is funny, but becomes jarring with the second-half, which is more dramatic making it seem like two completely different movies with highly inconsistent tone rammed into one. The Myrtle character is not fleshed-out enough to make any sense, or even seem remotely believable and ultimately like with the rest of them comes-off as an empty composite that is not relatable in any way to real people.

The acting though by Redgrave is quite strong. Normally British actors have a hard time masking their accent, but here she’s able to speak in an authentic Southern dialect without her European voice being detectable in the slightest and she puts on a provocative striptease to boot. Hooks dominates the proceedings and ultimately outclasses Coburn who later admitted regret at doing the project and considered his appearance here to be a low point in his career. Having Williams write the screenplay might’ve helped and I’m not sure why he wasn’t asked, but Gore Vidal doing the task turns the whole thing into an absurd misfire that should never have been attempted.

My Rating: 4 out of 10

Released: January 14, 1970

Runtime: 1 Hour 40 Minutes

Rated X

Director: Sidney Lumet

Studio: Warner Brothers

Available: DVD-R (Warner Archive)

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Posted in 70's Movies, Black Comedy, Drama, Movies Based on Stageplays, Movies that take place in the South, Movies with a rural setting, Obscure Movies, Offbeat

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The Savage is Loose (1974)

Posted on July 19, 2023 | 1 comment

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By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: Shipwrecked family becomes incestuous.

In 1902 John (George C. Scott) and his wife Maida (Trish Van Devere) take their infant son David (Lee H. Montgomery) on a sea cruise. Unfortunately the ship hits some rocks and sinks killing all those onboard except for the young family who manage to swim ashore to a deserted island. They make a home for themselves and slowly begin to age. By the time David reaches adolescence (now played by John David Carson) he begins to have sexual urges especially as he watches his father make love to his mother late at night. As his sexual feelings grow stronger he begins to lust after his own mother and compete with his father for her affections.

Unusual production that was directed by Scott and financed mostly with his own money. After the disaster of The Day of the Dolphin you’d think he’d have learned his lesson and gone with a script with a more mainstream storyline, but instead he dove into something that was sure to offend many and then proved incredulous when it didn’t score well with either the critics, or the box office. Despite starting the decade with an Academy Award win his career, especially after two financial duds back-to-back, began to peter-out after this one and he was really never able to regain his star status, or get offered top parts afterwards.

The film runs hot-and-cold. The opening is a bit cheesy as it features only a painting of a ship hitting some rocks and sinking, most likely the budget was too small to recreate an actual shipwreck, which surprisingly, despite the compromise, kind of works especially with the sound effects of the people screaming particularly the young child. It’s once they get on land that the action really begins to sink. The huts that they build, which we never actually see them make, but can only presume, look too well crafted, when factored in all the utensils, eating bowls, table, chairs, and even bamboo blinds, to have been built by two people with limited resources. It’s also hard to understand, with the front end of the ship still always in view, why they didn’t bother to create a raft, since their carpentry skills are clearly quite superior, in order to leave the island and find help. They eventually do, with relative ease but only after coming up with the idea 18 years later, but why the hell did it take them that long to eventually consider it?

The characters are quite dull and don’t have much to say and it would’ve helped had there been a fourth survivor on the island with them to allow for some diverse dramatic perspective, or even for some much needed comic relief. Montgomery plays the young David quite well, but Carson is terrible as the older version and fails to effectively convey the intense inner frustrations of his character and his acting delivery is robotic. Van Devere is okay as an actress, but her character fails to age. The father and certainly the son do have their appearances change, as you’d expect during almost two decades, but the mother remains youthful and glowing. Maybe this was done to keep her looking ‘desirable’ to the two men, but in reality she should’ve taken on gray hair and wrinkles especially after having to deal with all the stress and hardships of being stranded for some many years.

The incest theme is not handled in any type of interesting way. Instead of being this shocking twist that we’re not expecting it gets telegraphed right from the start and even ponderously talked about amongst all three of the characters until the viewer is totally expecting it to happen and to a degree even waiting for it. It’s confusing too why the son only has his eyes set on the mother. If his quandary is really just trying to release this strong sexual urges and having hardly anyone around to do it with then why doesn’t he try having sex with some of the animals that inhabit the island, or even the old man? Why not have sex, or at least attempt to, with all three at different times? Again, the movie wants to force the viewer out of their comfort zone by exposing the animalistic urges people can have, which in civilization will be repressed, but out in the wild it won’t. With that in mind then why not go ‘all-in’ and explore all the various types of perversions besides just the mother-son one?

Spoiler Alert!

While it remains strangely captivating, despite lots of lulls and slow spots, the ending doesn’t get played-up enough to make it worth it. I commend the idea, showing the mother deep kiss the grown son, but since they’re going for shock value why not show them from a bird’s eye view on the sand, naked and humping? Movies succeed by having unforgettable images and that would’ve been one hard to get out of most viewers heads. Having the father view them going at it was a bit ridiculous as he had been tied-up just moments earlier and trapped by a fast moving fire and no chance for escape, so how he was able to survive it is not clear and doesn’t make much sense.

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: October 30, 1974

Runtime: 1 Hour 54 Minutes

Rated R

Director: George C. Scott

Studio: Campbell Devon Films

Available: DVD

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Posted in 70's Movies, Drama, Movies with a rural setting, Sex

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Buster and Billie (1974)

Posted on June 18, 2023 | 1 comment

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By Richard Winters

My Rating: 5 out of 10

4-Word Review: Dating a loose woman.

Buster (Jan-Michael Vincent) is a high school senior living in rural Georgia during the late 1940’s. He’s been dating Margie (Pamela Sue Martin), but finds her to be stuck-up and her unwillingness to have sex makes him frustrated. He begins seeing Billie Jo (Joan Goodfellow), who has moved into town and due to having limited social skills puts-out for the other boys by allowing them to have sex with her, one after the other, in the woods late at night. Buster at first dates her simply for the action, but eventually the two get into a serious relationship and he breaks-up with Margie. They begin going out publicly letting the whole town know that they’re a couple, but the other boys become jealous as they can no longer have easy sex like they use to and thus plot a dark revenge.

The story is based loosely on an actual event that occurred in Florence, South Carolina in 1948 that the film’s screenwriter Ron Turbeville remembered hearing about growing up. The recreation of the era though lacks style and this may be in large part due the film’s limited budget. While it gets a zero in  atmosphere I did at least like the way it doesn’t sugar coat things for nostalgic purposes. The teens behave in the same ways they do now and thus it’s gritty on that level.

The acting is good surprisingly even from Jan-Michael who in his other films tended to have a cardboard presence, but here he gives the thing most of its energy. He even appears, shockingly, fully nude and in fact this was the first mainstream American movie to show a male naked from the front, of which Jan stated in later interviews he was quite proud to expose of his well-endowed ‘equipment’. Goodfellow is also seen nude and is quite attractive though I wish she had more to say. Robert Englund, in his film debut, is the most memorable playing an albino with brown hair and his pale complexion makes him look creepier, at least I felt, than he did as Freddy Kruegar.

I didn’t understand though why Buster would risk his social standing for this ostracized girl. I got that Margie was annoying, so breaking-up with her wasn’t a stretch, and Billie was essentially ‘easy-pickings’, but why go public with it? It made more sense that they would’ve seen each other on the sly, but not wanting to risk the social scrutiny of letting everyone know about it. This would’ve clearly lost Buster’s social status not only amongst his friends, but the town as a whole including his own parents, so why add on all that needless stress? Billie too was very shy, so becoming center stage and having all eyes on her would be something she most likely would’ve wanted to avoid, which makes the second act overly idealistic.

It’s also frustrating that Billie doesn’t say much. You want to get to know this person, but never really do. The only time she’s ever given any insight is when Buster explains to his parents why she had sex with all the other guys (in order to be liked), but this is something we should’ve heard coming-out of her lips instead of his. By having Buster do almost all the talking, even when they’re alone together, makes it seem like she’s mentally handicapped, which I don’t believe was the intent and yet ultimately that’s how it comes-off and thus making their romantic moments sterile and uninteresting.

Spoiler Alert!

The final sequence though is where it really falls apart as the boys inadvertently kill Billie when they gang rape her (during a rainstorm even though the sky is still clear and sunny). Buster then tracks them down at a pool hall where he single-handily beats them up and ultimately kills two of them, but the guys just allow themselves to be beaten without attempting to throw a punch, which is not only unrealistic, but boring. Having a big brawl, where each side fights equally would’ve been far more exciting. The twist in which Buster somehow gets released from jail the day after her funeral, so that he can decorate her gravesite with all the flowers that he’s stolen from everyone else in town is far-fetched and overly forces the sentiment.

My Rating: 5 out of 10

Released: August 21, 1974

Runtime: 1 Hour 40 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Daniel Petrie

Studio: Columbia Pictures

Available: Amazon Video

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Posted in 70's Movies, Adolescence/High School, Drama, Movies Based on Actual Events, Movies that take place in the South, Movies with a rural setting, Movies with Nudity, Obscure Movies

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Vigilante Force (1976)

Posted on May 20, 2023 | Leave a comment

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By Richard Winters

My Rating: 4 out of 10

4-Word Review: Veteran takes over town.

After oil is found near a small California desert town many people, including oil workers, move in looking for work. All the new people coming in causes a great deal of  crime in the community and the local police force is too small to handle the influx. Ben (Jan-Michael Vincent), a longtime resident, decides to hire his brother Aaron (Kris Kristofferson), a veteran of the Vietnam War, to help act as a peacekeeper. Aaron then brings along some mercenaries to assist him, but he and his new associates begin acting more like the bullies forcing everyone to submit to their ways of doing things, or face the consequences. This causes Ben to come to the painful realization that his brother is more of a problem than the solution and forcing him to take matters into his own hands in order to rid the town of him.

This was the third film directed by George Armitage, who did Private Duty Nurses and Hit Man before this one and all three being produced within the Roger Corman family, this one by Roger’s older brother Gene, who approached George about the project having only the title in mind and no actual story. Armitage, who had only 30-days to film, decided to make it an allegory of the Vietnam War where a group of strangers would come into a town, much like the American soldiers did when they came upon a small village in Vietnam, and take it over while focusing on the helpless nature of the residents who could do seemingly little about it.

While the concept had lots of potential the execution is rushed making the story come-off as cluttered and unfocused. It’s one of the few films made where there’s violence and action immediately before there’s barely any onscreen credits, but the motivations of why it’s happening is not clear, so it’s more confusing than exciting.  The plot doesn’t make much sense. Why are these new people all resorting to criminal behavior including robbing a bank? Other towns that boast job opportunities don’t necessarily have a  dramatic spike in crime especially if the new people coming in are actually getting employed, which the film intimates they are, so then why the anger and chaos? It seemed to me that there needed to be some sort of crime boss behind it, but there really isn’t. There’s a certain figurehead shown briefly later on, but he seems to be more of a symptom of the crime that’s already had been occurring versus the main orchestrator.

The setting also has a strong country feel with men folk walking around and behaving like blue collar cowboys making Texas a better location for the town than California. Even if for budget reasons is still had to be done in Cali I would’ve at least made it seem like it was the Lone Star state, which is considered a ‘rebel’, redneck state to begin with and thus making the behavior of the townspeople seem a little more organic.

I loved Kristofferson whose laid-back demeanor comes-off as creepy and menacing, but I would’ve liked his dark side to have been played down more at the beginning. The viewer should’ve been roped-in into believing he was a good guy, or hero, and then had the big reveal in the third act that he really wasn’t versus it being obvious right from the start that there was something not right about him.

Bernadette Peters, who plays his on-again, off-again girlfriend, is a delight, but Vincent is not as good. He’s unable to equal Kristofferson’s screen presence and way too naïve. It’s obvious to everyone his brother is trouble, but he remains oblivious for too long making him seem dumb and then when he finally does catch-on he comments that he was aware of his brother’s ‘problematic side’ ever since they were kids, but if that were the case then why did he hire him in the first place?

If you like basic 70’s action, including car chases, fist fights, and explosions, then this may suffice even with the wobbly story. Anyone though expecting anything more will most assuredly walk away disappointed as the script lacks nuance and surprise.

My Rating: 4 out of 10

Released: September 9, 1976

Runtime: 1 Hour 29 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: George Armitage

Studio: United Artists

Available: DVD-R (MGM Limited Edition Collection), Blu-ray

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Posted in 70's Movies, Action/Adventure, Fast Cars/Car Chase, Movies with a rural setting

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September (1987)

Posted on March 21, 2023 | Leave a comment

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By Richard Winters

My Rating: 7 out of 10

4-Word Review: Drama at summer home.

Layne (Mia Farrow) has decided to spend the summer at the country home of her mother’s (Elaine Stritch) in order to recuperate after a suicide attempt. With her during her stay is her best friend Stephanie (Dianne Wiest). Layne is also madly in-love with her neighbor Peter (Sam Waterston) who is a struggling author who wants to write a book about Layne’s mother’s life, who was at one time a well-known actress, but who also shot her late husband in self-defense though it was reportedly Layne who pulled the trigger. Howard (Denholm Elliott) is Layne’s other neighbor who is smitten with her though she has no feelings for him as all of her emotions are tucked away towards Peter, who is more into Stephanie, a married woman with children. During the course of one night while an electrical storm occurs and the power goes out everyone makes their true feelings for the other known, but not everyone responds to the revelations the way they’d like.

This movie is unusual, or at least the behind-the-scenes production, in that two to three versions of every scene was shot and then writer/director Woody Allen took all the footage and edited it together only to be dissatisfied with the final result and decided to shoot it again, but with different actors. In the original production Charles Durning played Layne’s stepfather, but in the second version he is replaced by Jack Warden, and Maureen O’Sullivan played Layne’s mother. Since Maureen was Mia’s real-life mother it’s ashame she wasn’t kept on for the second version. Granted Elaine is excellent, but seeing a mother and daughter acting together would’ve given an interested added nuance that unfortunately gets lost with the redo.

The scenario has its share of intriguing elements, but Allen’s concept of trying to create a filmed stageplay was a mistake as the whole thing has a very static feel right from the start. The internal conflicts are not apparent right away and the first act comes-off like nothing more than lingering conversations with no idea what connects them until the second act kicks, but by that time some viewers may have already gotten bored with it. In Interiors, which was Allen’s first drama, the story clicked quickly because there was a main nemesis, which helped create the tension that’s lacking here. Having a few more characters including a couple that was invited over, but calls-in when their house gets flooded, could’ve helped enliven things.

The acting is uniformly excellent especially Farrow, who’s always had a gift for playing vulnerable characters though with this one she’s more assertive. Wiest is fabulous too though with her super short brunette haircut she looks too similar to Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby and for that reason she should’ve been given a different hairstyle. The short cut also makes Wiest’s squinty look where she constantly appears like someone who’s just walked into bright sunlight, more apparent. The male cast is overall wasted. Warden gets one poignant moment where he describes the cold, lonely universe, but otherwise doesn’t have much else to say, or do and overall gets dominated and upstaged by the caustic and brassy Stritch as his wife. Elliot has one good line early on, but then disappears for a good chunk of it only to get a walk-on towards the end, but by that point I had quite literally forgotten all about him.

The film would’ve worked better had it had stronger character arcs, but overall not much really happens. There’s brief moments of confrontations, particularly Layne’s arguments with her mother, where things appear to be getting juicy only to have them pull back and become civil again. Same thing happens when Layne catches Stephanie with Peter, a slight blow-up and then back to mundane. The characters don’t really grow, or change and everything gets treated like a minor, little tiff that quickly blows-over making the viewer feel at the end that there wasn’t much point in watching it.

On a side note I was also disappointed to learn that the whole thing was shot on an indoor sound stage. With the title of September and the location being Vermont I was fully expecting sights of beautiful fall foliage as the northeast can be one of the best areas for that during the autumn. Since Allen’s dramas can get quite talky I thought the scenic locale could help at least visually fill-in the slow spots, but we ultimately get none of that. The intention was to shoot it at Farrow’s Connecticut country house, the house had inspired Allen to write the screenplay in the first place, but by the time he was finished with the script it was already winter and thus the autumn look and feel would’ve been lost. Credit though should go to the lighting and set design as you still get a feel of Vermont during the night time scenes where you hear realistic sounds of crickets and night bugs outside. The light coming through the windows certainly looks like actual sunlight, but why would people keep their blinds closed when most anyone would have them open to take in the majestic countryside. Why bother even having a home in the country if the idea is to close the windows off from it? It’s also not logical for the sunlight to be shining through all the windows from any direction in the house as the sun can only be in one place in the sky, so some of the windows should not have had sunlight coming through though here all of them do.

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Released: December 18, 1987

Runtime: 1 Hour 22 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Woody Allen

Studio: Orion Pictures

Available: DVD-R, Blu-ray (Region B/2), Tubi, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Drama, Movies with a rural setting

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Take This Job and Shove It (1981)

Posted on February 22, 2023 | Leave a comment

job

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: Modernizing a beer factory.

Frank (Robert Hays) is hired by a conglomerate called The Ellison Group to find ways to improve a beer factory that they own and get it in the black. Since Frank is originally from the small town where the factory is located he excitedly takes-on the task, but soon finds himself at odds with many of the workers, some of whom he was friends with in highs school, but who now look at him as a threat to their jobs. While the ideas that he implements are at first resisted the situation in the factory improves and the place begins turning a profit. Unfortunately it becomes such a success that The Ellison Group decides to sell it to a man with a background in the oil business, who doesn’t know the first thing about beer production, which gets everyone in the factory to rebel from the acquisition in very physical ways when the new owner and his cronies arrive for a visit.

The movie was filmed at an actual beer factory, The Dubuque Star Brewery, in Dubuque, Iowa, that is listed in the National Register of Historic Places and although no longer functioning as a brewery it still stands today. The history of the place is similar to the movie as it was bought by Joseph Pickett in 1971 who implemented a massive renovation when he found that it was still using equipment from the 1930’s. The story itself was inspired by the hit country song that sat on top of the country charts for 2-weeks and was performed by Johnny Paycheck and written by David Allan Coe, both of whom appear in the movie.

The production has some nice on-location shooting of not only Iowa, but also the Twin Cities and I really dug the basketball court in the mansion owned by Eddie Albert’s character. The working class issues and the gritty nature of their jobs and lifestyles is basically on-target, but the movie bills itself as a comedy, and the trailer makes it seem almost like it’s going to be a farce, but in reality it’s more of drama with very little action until the end. There’s not much that’s funny either and the thin, predictable premise gets stretched-out longer than it should ultimately making it boring and a strain to sit through.

The main defect is the Robert Hays character. While he performs the part well he’s not enough of a jerk, or nemesis and thus the confrontational drama is missing. Having him from the area originally was a mistake as he seems too different from everyone else around him and creating him as an outsider from the big city that had little to no regard for the people working under him would’ve created the necessary fireworks that this otherwise benign film lacks. It also would’ve made a more interesting character arch where he’d go from arrogant, city-slicker to a humble man who would learn to appreciate those that he initially looked down on instead of having him already a semi-part of the group to begin with. It also hopelessly wastes the talents of Barbra Hershey, who gets cast as an idealistic, pro-labor lady, a perfect part for her, and I was expecting the two to quarrel over their contrasting viewpoints, but it never gels and she’s seen far too little.

The script also suffers from logic loopholes and continuity errors. While a hotel room door may seem like a minor thing to quibble about it became a big deal for me. The scenario starts out funny enough, possibly the only amusing bit in the movie, with Fran Ryan playing the owner of the hotel touring him around the cramped, rundown room and acting like it’s a more ritzy place than it really is. Later though while Hays is asleep, his buddies from the factory rip the door off its hinges by attaching a chain to it that’s connected to a pick-up truck, but there’s no scene showing, or explaining, how the door ends up getting reattached. The door is also apparently always unlocked as both Hershey and the Martin Mull character walk into the room from the outside unheeded, but most if not all hotel room doors automatically lock when they’re closed, so why doesn’t this one? In the case of Martin Mull he walks in on Hays while he’s still asleep, but you’d think Hays definitely would’ve locked the door from the inside and put the security chain on it before going to bed, so again how is Mull able to just open it? He doesn’t even bother to knock, which is absurd too since he’s never been to that hotel before, so how would he even know for sure he had the right room and wasn’t walking in on a stranger?

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: April 1, 1981

Runtime: 1 Hour 41 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Gus Trikonis

Studio: AVCO Embassy Pictures

Available: DVD-R, Blu-ray-R

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Posted in 80's Movies, Comedy/Drama, Movies Based on Songs, Movies with a Hotel setting, Movies with a rural setting

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The Beast (1988)

Posted on February 20, 2023 | 1 comment

beast1

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 9 out of 10

4-Word Review: Tankers stranded in desert.

During the invasion of Afghanistan in 1981 a group of Soviet tanks roll into a small village and callously bomb every home and building to a cinder. One of the tanks, led by Commander Daskal (George Dzundza), orders his driver Konstantin (Jason Patric) to run over an Afghan man to the shock and horror of everyone else. When Taj (Steven Bauer), who is one of the Afghan fighters, returns to the village and sees all the carnage, including the death of his father and brother, he becomes committed to seek revenge. He assembles a small group of fighters to go out into the desert to search for the tank, which they call the beast, and which has become lost when it takes a wrong turn and thus stranding them in the middle of nowhere with no option but to turn around and go back to where they came from, which they want to avoid. As the gas and rations become scarce the tensions mount particularly between Daskal and Konstantin who share widely different viewpoints as well as with Samad (Erick Avari) an Afghan interpreter who Daskal no longer trusts and now considers to be a traitor.

This film was requested for review by a reader of this blog named Nick (it was requested over a year ago and I do apologize that I got caught up with things and forgot about watching it). What struck me though is how he said it was such a gripping film and one of the best war movies, in his opinion, ever made and yet few people, including myself, had ever heard of it. I figured if the movie was as great as he said it should be better known and feared it might not live up to his billing, but when I watched it I found myself just as caught up in it as he said and impressed with how emotionally compelling it was from beginning to end.

Why this great film fell into obscurity and was dismal at the box office where it managed to only recoup a paltry $161,000 out of an $8 million budget is yet another example of the cruelty of the Hollywood business. It was directed by Kevin Reynolds who had just come-off doing the breezy road comedy hit Fandango and who wanted to follow that up by doing something completely different. He decided to do a filmization to the stageplay ‘Nanawatai’ by William Mastrosimone who was inspired to write the play after witnessing a group of mujahideen fighters capture and execute a Soviet tank crew in 1986. David Puttnam, the then head of Columbia Pictures, loved the script and threw his full support to the project. However, during the course of the filming Puttnam was ousted and Dawn Steel took over. She wasn’t as enthusiastic about the movie and when it was completed it got released to only a few theaters with no promotion. Few people heard or saw it and it went into oblivion only to finally several decades later get the recognition it deserved through the release of the DVD and has now acquired a fairly sizable cult following.

The use of a hand-held camera and graphic violence, including seeing the man get run over by a tank and then afterwards the remains of his mangled body, all help accentuate the harsh realism of war. Having it shot in a desert in Israel helps add to the authenticity as deserts in North America look different and cannot match the distinct topography of a Middle Eastern one. Leonard Maltin in his review, which I didn’t read until after viewing the film, describes the plot as ‘predictable’ and the pace ‘ponderous’ while the characters are in his opinion ‘stereotyped’, which I couldn’t disagree with more. While I haven’t seen every war movie out there I found this one to have many intriguing twists that I wouldn’t have guessed. The characters have distinct personalities and the pace is perfect with each scene and line of dialogue opening up a new story wrinkle.

My only two complaints is that the Afghan townspeople at the beginning are a bit too blissful as after all a war was going around them, which they were aware of, so I’d have thought they’d be more guarded and only cautiously gone outside if completely needed versus behaving as if they’re in a bubble with no worries about the horrors around them until it finally happens. The Russian soldiers are too Americanized. Great effort was put into the Afghans to make them seem authentic including having them speak in their native tongue with subtitles, but actors playing the Russians not only speak in English, but do it with American accents. I’m okay with them talking in English as forcing them all to learn Russian would’ve been too exhausting and requiring the movie to be completely subtitled, so I’m okay with that compromise, which seemed almost necessary. I presume for the project to get financed the studio insisted on American actors to play the parts in order to make it more marketable, so I understand that concession as well, but at least have them sound Russian should’ve been a requirement as many times throughout the movie  I had to keep reminding myself this was a Russian army as outside of George Dzundza’s brilliant performance, the rest hardly seemed foreign in any way.

Alternate Title: The Beast of War

My Rating: 9 out of 10

Released: September 16, 1988

Runtime: 1 Hour 51 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Kevin Reynolds

Studio: Columbia Pictures

Available: DVD, Amazon Video, Tubi

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Posted in 80's Movies, Movies Based on Stageplays, Movies with a rural setting, Outdoors, War Movies

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Impulse (1984)

Posted on January 2, 2023 | 2 comments

impulse

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: The townspeople act crazy.

Jennifer (Meg Tilly) and her boyfriend Stuart (Tim Matheson) return to the small town she grew up in to help care for her mother (Lorinne Vozoff) who suddenly and quite impulsively shot herself in the head while talking to Jennifer over the phone. When they arrive they find the people behaving in strange ways by acting on their inner impulses without any social restraint. Stuart, who is a chemist, believes it may have something to do with what’s in the water, but when he tests it he finds nothing unusual. The people though continue to behave in a more aggressive manner where even the kindly old doctor (Hume Cronyn) who was looking after Jennifer’s mother in the hospital begins showing homicidal tendencies. The couple fear they might not be able to get out of there alive and begin to suspect that the ultimate cause has some connection to the earthquake that shook the town just days before they arrived.

The premise is certainly intriguing and there are a share of weird moments, but director Graham Baker approaches the material in the wrong way. The original screenplay by Nicholas Kazan, which was entitled ‘Animals’, was intended as a horror film and closely inspired by George Romero’s similarly themed The Crazies, which came out 11 years earlier. For whatever reason Baker didn’t pursue it with a horror bent and that in my opinion is where it all goes wrong. It’s hard to actually know what genre to place it in. At times it seems a little bit like sci-fi and other moments like a drama, but either way the tension is lacking. You see the townspeople doing crazy stuff, which initially piques your interest, but then it goes nowhere with it. The weird acts just continue to go on and on until it becomes redundant and ultimately boring until you really don’t care what the explanation is behind it.

Spoiler Alert!

It’s not until 45-minutes in before even gets slightly suspenseful when Jennifer finds herself trapped in a burning garage, but even this goes by too quickly. There was one moment where Jennifer’s former boyfriend, apparently jealous at seeing her with Stuart, decides to bend his own fingers back, as a sort-of self mutilation, until they break, which I found genuinely shocking and cringy. However, there are other moments, which I found to be unintentionally funny making me believe it might’ve worked better as a quirky comedy.

The ending though is the most annoying. The explanation for why this all occurred is that chemicals from a nearby toxic waste dump got into the facility that produced the milk that the townspeople drank. The leak apparently caused by the earthquake that jostled one of the overhead pipes that then leaked the toxins into the milk vat. Since Jennifer didn’t like the milk she wasn’t affected, but I felt it was a stretch that all 900 of the other people in the town did drink it, as there are many folks who aren’t into milk, so there should’ve been others like Jennifer, who didn’t behave nutty instead of her remaining the only normal one.

What I found really stupid though is that the movie acts like 900 people suddenly dying in a town is apparently ‘no big deal’ and the rest of the country just ‘moves-on’, which I found preposterous. There is simply no way the media would let something like this go unchecked and the rest of the nation would be demanding answers and a federal investigation. It would become the news story of the year if not the decade and something that would be heavily talked about.

Somebody would have to be held accountable at some point, which then brings up the final issue of who the hell was the organization that dropped the crop dusting poisons onto the town via airplanes that ultimately is what killed everybody? The movie doesn’t bother to answer this, which is really frustrating making the whole thing a big build-up to nothing and not worth anyone’s time.

End of Spoiler Alert!

On a lighter note I couldn’t end this review without mentioning Tim Matheson. As an actor I found his performance here to be incredibly dull. Granted the character he played was benign to begin with, but he certainly didn’t do anything to make him interesting. However, with that said, his bare ass steals it. Many ass aficionados have felt, and even debated, that Dabney Coleman’s bare behind seen in Modern Problems wins the prize for best ass put onscreen in a Hollywood movie, but Matheson’s exposed tush, seen at the 17:49 mark, definitely deserves honorable consideration.

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: September 28, 1984

Runtime: 1 Hour 31 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Graham Baker

Studio: 20th Century Fox

Available: DVD-R, Blu-ray

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Posted in 80's Movies, Movies with a rural setting, Movies with Nudity, Mystery, Sci-Fi

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