Tag Archives: Jennifer O’Neill

Whiffs (1975)

Posted on December 20, 2025 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: Robbing with laughing gas.

Dudley (Elliot Gould) sacrifices his body to be a guinea pig for the army’s tests. All their latest warfare weapons get used on him first to see how effective they are. He feels he’s doing it to help his country and therefore doesn’t mind the toll that it takes, but as his health declines his superior officer Col. Lockyer (Eddie Albert) realizes that they’re going to have to find someone else to replace him. Dudley is offered a small monthly disability payment, which he feels won’t be enough to survive on. He tries to get other jobs to supplement his measly income but is unable to hold any of them down. He then meets a former fellow test subject Chops (Harry Guardino) at a bar and the two concoct a plan to rob banks using the nerve gas that Dudley has snuck out of the military facility. The scheme is, with the help of a crop-duster named Dusty (Godfrey Cambridge), to spray the gas onto the town’s population, which will disable the folks for certain amount of time and give the two a chance to take the money without any impediment. Trouble ensues when Lockyer catches on to what they’re doing and becomes determined to stop them by bringing in the military.

Screenwriter Malcolm Marmorstein, who wrote also wrote the script for S*P*Y*S, which came out a year before, learned from his mistakes from that one making this a slight improvement. The protagonist has a better arc and the plot is more concretely structured. The humor’s focus is improved as it takes some major potshots at the armed forces and it also manages to have a normal character, as in Dudley’s nurse girlfriend Scottie (Jennifer O’Neill) who is sensible and relatable to the viewer. It features a great performance by Guardino, who’s effective particularly as he riles in pain during one of the tests, but still manages somehow to continue his conversation with Gould. This is also not quite as silly as the other one as it ventures into some dark areas though at times it gets a bit difficult to keep laughing when you witness what terrible, painful things the army gets the two test subjects to agree to.

The main weakness comes in the form of the main character who’s likable enough, but not particularly relatable. I’ll give Gould credit for going against type and taking on a role that was way different from any of the ones he did before. Usually, he played caustic intellectuals who would routinely question and challenge authority, but here he’s a passive simp that does whatever he’s asked without argument, but this then becomes part of the problem. No sane person would agree to allow their bodies to go through such a battering even if it was for the ‘good of the country’ and thus it becomes confusing why Gould would put up with it for so long and the viewer is unable to connect emotionally with his quandary as much as they should.

Spoiler Alert!

The ending doesn’t pack much of a punch and becomes boring just as the tension should’ve been heightening. The idea that Gould decides to drug the whole town just to rob a bank didn’t make much sense as they could’ve easily just used it on the bank employees, which would’ve taken up much less time and effort and not attracted all the needless attention. It also comes off as disingenuous that Gould, who spends the majority of the film being a dope who can’t seem to think for himself, would then suddenly become so cunning as he quickly, on the spur of the moment, comes up with crafty ways to outfox those that are chasing them, but if he was so smart then why did he stupidly subject himself to being the army’s guinea pig for so long? He wasn’t even the one who came up with using the gas to rob the banks in the first place as that idea came from Guardino, so if the story were going to be consistent then Guardino should’ve been the one who continues to do the thinking while Gould would simply take the orders like he had through the first two acts.

Having Gould then jump off Dusty’s crop duster plane just as it’s taking the three men to the safety of Mexico, so he can instead have sex with O’Neil, as his impotency miraculously gets cured, isn’t a satisfying payoff. During the early part of the decade watching two people copulate onscreen in unusual places might’ve been deemed edgy and irreverent, but by this point it had been done too many times, making the moment here, no pun intended, anti-climactic. It would’ve worked better had the sex stuff been written out and O’Neill just been a part of the robbery versus having her disappear for long periods as she does here.

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: October 15, 1975

Runtime: 1 Hour 32 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Ted Post

Studio: 20th Century Fox

Available: DVD-R

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Posted in 70's Movies, Black Comedy, Buddy Movies, Robbing Banks

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Steel (1979)

Posted on November 25, 2024 | Leave a comment

steel

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 4 out of 10

4-Word Review: They build a skyscraper.

Big Lew (George Kennedy) runs a construction company that builds skyscrapers and is under pressure to get his most recent project, which will be one of the tallest he’s ever been put in charge of making, completed under budget. While climbing onto a metal high beam, one of the other workers with him freezes and refuses to come down. Lew attempts to relax him, but in the process, he loses his balance and falls to his death. Cass (Jennifer O’Neill) is put in temporary charge, but she’s overwhelmed with the demands and thus goes to Mike (Lee Majors) to help take over the project and make sure it gets done in time. Mike used to be a part of the hard-hat team, but an accident caused him to become afraid of heights and forced him to take a job as a truck driver, but when the daughter of an old friend comes calling, he can’t refuse. He assembles a motley crew of misfits who all have eccentric personalities but also know how to build tall buildings and do it right even when put under grueling circumstances. Not all of them know about Mike’s fear and he tries to hide it from them due his concern that they might not respect him anymore if they found it, but while he struggles to keep everyone working at a near impossible pace he must also fight-off the likes of Eddie (Harris Yulin) who’s been tapped by a criminal conglomerate to do whatever he can to hijack the efforts of Mike’s crew and make sure the building is never finished.

The film is for the most part just a TV-movie if not for one brief moment when a prostitute gets into the truck that Lee Majors is driving and takes-off her shirt. It would’ve been best had it been made for that medium because as a theatrical release it didn’t do well and has been largely forgotten without any DVD, Blu-ray, or even a steaming venue to its name. Infact the only thing that stands it out is what occurred behind-the-scenes as stuntman A.J. Bakunas died when attempting the world record by diving off a construction site at 315 feet from the 22nd story where he reached speeds of 115 mph. The jumped looked perfect, but upon landing the air bag split and he died from the injuries the next day.

While his death was certainly regrettable, his father was a part of the 1.000 onlookers who witnessed it, it was not shot in a way that makes it work in the film. While the footage was kept and edited into the movie you only end up seeing a few seconds of it making it seem like it wasn’t even worth attempting if that’s all that was going to be seen. It was also used to kill-off George Kennedy, it was his character’s fall that the jump was created for, but Kennedy’s hard-ass persona is the one thing that gives the story any color and it’s a shame that he hadn’t stayed in all the way through.

The supporting cast if full of familiar B-movie faces and some of them are quite good, but they’re not in it enough. The movie might’ve been more entertaining had the workers themselves carried it, but instead we get introduced to their quirky temperaments, while Majors busily makes the rounds to beg them to come aboard as his crew, but then after that they’re largely forgotten and instead the focus gets put on Majors who is by far the dullest of the bunch and it would’ve worked better had he not been in it at all. O’Neil had great potential, seeing a woman trying her best to head an all-male crew, most of whom weren’t exactly gentile, could’ve made for some high drama and been considered even groundbreaking and the film clearly misses-the-mark by not having taken that avenue.

The building that was used for the film was the Kinkaid Towers in Lexington, Kentucky, which when compared to major skyscrapers in large cities is quite puny and unimpressive. The opening shot capturing it from the ground-up as its half-built doesn’t help to dispel this feeling and if anything seems rather laughable especially when there’s no other tall building around it, so there’s no cosmopolitan vibe at all to it.  However, the shots showing the men walking on the high beams several stories up with seemingly nothing holding them down is nerve-wracking to watch especially for those who fear heights, so in that vein it succeeds, but with everything else it’s rather flat.

My Rating: 4 out of 10

Released: July 25, 1979

Runtime: 1 Hour 42 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Steve Carver

Studio: Fawcett-Majors Productions

Available: DVD-R

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Posted in 70's Movies, Drama, Movies that take place in the South, Movies with Nudity, Obscure Movies

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The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975)

Posted on October 12, 2014 | 1 comment

the reincarnation of peter proud

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 4 out of 10

4-Word Review: Reliving a past life.

College professor Peter Proud (Michael Sarrazin) starts having reoccurring dreams where he sees himself living a past life somewhere in a small New England town and killed by a woman (Margot Kidder) while out on a lake. The dreams become so strong that they interfere with his job and even his relationship with his girlfriend Nora (Cornelia Sharpe). He travels to Massachusetts in search of the place and finally finds it and even starts a relationship with Ann (Jennifer O’Neill) who may be his daughter from the previous incarnation. He also meets her mother Marcia who is the same woman who he sees killing him in a past life during his dreams. As the three get to know each other tensions and dark secrets eventually begin to surface.

The idea has some potential, but director J. Lee Thompson gives the material a very standard treatment making it seem almost like a pedestrian drama. The dialogue is dull and corny, the characters cardboard and the storyline is predictable and formulaic. For what is supposed to be a horror movie/mystery it is not very compelling or intense. The visions that Peter sees in his dream are quite ordinary and generic and eventually become redundant. In fact the film’s only twisted moment, which is when Peter makes love to Ann, who is technically his daughter from a past life, gets treated like a sweet romantic scene instead of the underlying perverse act that it really is.

The story also gets farfetched including having Peter drives through every town in Massachusetts until he finds the one he is looking for. The character of the dream researcher, which is played by actor Paul Hecht, gets overly enthusiastic about Peter’s statements regarding experiencing reincarnation and becomes almost wide-eyed at the idea of writing a book about it and making millions even though a true researcher would be much more reserved about what Peter was saying and realize it would entail much more years of study before it could even be termed a reality. I also thought it was strange that when they put Peter into a sleep study the machine is unable to read the dreams that Peter is having about his past life. Supposedly this is because they are not dreams, but ‘visions’ of some sort, but wouldn’t that still create brain activity in order for Peter to see them and thus still get recorded on the machine?

Jennifer O’Neill is always great to watch simply because of her beautiful face and Cornelia Sharpe has a few choice nude scenes as Peter’s sarcastic girlfriend, but Margot Kidder is miscast as O’Neill’s mother. For one thing she is the same age as O’Neill and although they try to make her look older by putting some gray streaks in her hair her skin is still quite smooth and in need of some age lines in order to look more authentic. However, the scene where she masturbates while naked in a tub isn’t bad.

The ending is terrible and makes having to sit through this thing a complete waste of time.

My Rating: 4 out of 10

Released: April 25, 1975

Runtime: 1Hour 45Minutes

Rated R

Director: J. Lee Thompson

Studio: American International Pictures (AIP)

Available: VHS

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Posted in 70's Movies, College Life, Drama, Movies Based on Novels, Movies with Nudity, Mystery, Obscure Movies

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Scanners (1981)

Posted on November 19, 2012 | 7 comments

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 7 out of 10

4-Word Review: His head will explode.

Scanners are people with strange psychic powers that can not only read other people’s minds, but also kill them and even move objects with their brainwaves. A corrupt group of scanners lead by Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside) threatens world domination. Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan) who works for a company that is trying to stop these dangerous people finds a scanner named Cameron (Stephan Lack) that Darryl’s groups is seeking, but has not yet located. Ruth trains Cameron on how to hone in his scanning powers and then track down Darryl’s group and destroy it.

Director David Cronenberg is still in my estimation one of the premiere cult/horror directors around. It is one thing to make a great horror movie when you have a big budget and state of the art special effects, but it is another to make an effective movie when you have little to work with and yet Cronenberg has continually shown that a creative imagination can triumph over all else. He has also shown a refreshingly daring vision throughout his career and seems to have no hesitation in tackling taboo subjects.

This film proves no exception. The story is quite creative and there are continually new and surprising twists thrown in. The special effects are excellent and imaginative. I loved the protruding, blood spurting veins coming out of the arms and heads of Cameron and Darryl during their intense scanner showdown at the end. The melting telephone receiver isn’t bad and off course the exploding head is memorable and deserves its place in the annals of gross cinema history.

With that said I still felt the film could have done a better job at setting up the story. It starts right away with a lot of action before anything is explained and makes things confusing. Some sort of prolog in this case would have been appropriate. Everything also seems rushed. This is a great plot with interesting scenarios and I as a viewer wanted a little more time to soak it all in, but wasn’t given any. The sets and backdrops are redundantly dark and grimy and lack visual design. Overall the film has a seriously dated look and although there are way too many films being remade these days and some that are not necessary this is one movie were I would advocate it especially if done with a high budget and a competent director.

Stephan Lack makes for incredibly weak leading man. He is better known in the art world as a renowned painter and his film career was quite brief. After watching his performance here it is not hard to see why. He has very much of a ‘deer-in-headlights’ look and a voice tone that shown no infliction, or emotion. His lack of charisma or stature seriously weakens the film’s overall effect and why he was chosen for the part is a mystery.

Jennifer O’Neill is gorgeous as Kim a female scanner who works with Cameron in his quest to find Darryl. The woman, who was a former model, has a face that is so beautiful it is mesmerizing no matter what angle she is shown at or emotion that she is conveying. My only complaint is the small streak of gray that was put into her hair, which I found unnecessary especially since she was portraying someone who was Cameron’s same age, which was the early 30’s.

On the villainous side Ironside certainly has the chiseled threatening features of a bad guy. However, I actually thought that Canadian character actor Lawrence Dane who plays one of Darryl’s spies was actually more effective.

The artwork done by the Benjamin Pierce character (Robert A. Silverman) visualizing giant heads and the thoughts inside people’s heads was really cool and avant-garde.

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Runtime: 1Hour 43Minutes

Rated R

Director: David Cronenberg

Studio: AVCO Embassy Pictures

Available: DVD

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Posted in 80's Movies, Cult, Foreign Films, Low Budget, Movies from Canada, Sci-Fi, Slasher/Gore

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