Tag Archives: Rae Dawn Chong

The Squeeze (1987)

Posted on September 3, 2023 | Leave a comment

squeeze

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 4 out of 10

4-Word Review: They rig the lottery.

When struggling artist and conman Harry (Michael Keaton) goes back to his ex-wife’s apartment to retrieve a mysterious package she had forgotten he finds a dead body and immediately becomes entangled in a complex mystery as well as a target of a secret organization. He enlists the help of private investigator Rachel (Rae Dawn Chong) and together they come to realize that the package that everyone is after is a large magnet that can be used to rig the lottery as it can manipulate the ping pong balls that display the winning numbers since those numbers are painted using a metallic substance. They proceed to try and stop the live broadcast of the lottery, which is being held onboard a naval ship and being hosted by the secretly nefarious Honest Tom T. Murray (John Davidson).

The film has come to have a notorious reputation on many levels. Not only did it sink at the box office where it managed to recoup a paltry $2 million from its $22 million budget, but the film’s promotional poster has star Keaton being squeezed between the World Trade Center buildings, which ultimately went down on 9-11. Even worse is that behind-the-scenes stunt driver Victor Magnotta, the movie is dedicated in his memory, died when the car he was driving went into the Hudson river on its side instead of flat, which trapped him inside the vehicle and unable to get out before he drowned though the stunt itself is left in.

While many critics and even commenters on IMDb have very little to say that’s nice about it I kind of felt that the movie was misunderstood as I saw it more as a parody of spy espionage stories and in that vein I think it works well, but since American audiences aren’t all that adept to satire and many times don’t get it, or take it seriously when they shouldn’t, it’s easy to see why this thing fell through the cracks. It does though have a few memorable moments including an unusual car chase where instead of having the hero speeding away from the bad guys they instead play a game of chicken where they intentionally crash their vehicles into the other one until both cars are left almost inoperable. I also thought the giant sized bull that Keaton created inside his apartment and made-up of a bunch of television sets was pretty cool too.

Keaton is certainly quite likable and without him the movie would’ve done far worse than it does. His engaging ability to make a joke, or even an insult, to someone, but always able to get away with it, by displaying his boyish trademark smile, is what makes his screentime entertaining though I felt the running conversation involving the old TV-show ‘Bonanza’ was a mistake. Young people of today won’t even know what that show was and even back then during the 80’s many teens would have only a vague idea of the series was as it had already been off the air since 1972 and didn’t do well in syndication and thus making the humor and inside jokes about it as out-of-touch and dated even for its own time period.

Chong is miscast, the part was intended for Mariel Hemingway who unfortunately got fired early on. While Chong can be great playing strong minded, outspoken characters she’s not as adept as a romantic lead and I failed to see much chemistry between the two. She falls-in-love with the guy a bit too quickly especially since they don’t get off to a good start. Having her come back to Keaton’s place and become outraged at seeing him in bed with another woman was out of place as no relationship had been established at that point. If anything she would’ve masked the feelings she had for him when seeing him with another lady and played it cool in order to avoid embarrassing herself when it became painfully obvious, at least at that point, that she was more into him than he was in her.

Ronald Guttman as the chief villain is a total bore and with his greased back hair looks more like a model for an Italian chick flick romance than a bad guy and his collection of shrunken heads doesn’t get played-up enough to be interesting. Meat Loaf though as his henchman is great. He has no lines of dialogue until he gets killed, via the pointy needle of a giant sized replica of the Empire State Building, which is pretty cool, though what he does say is very funny.

The film does at least give one a vivid feeling of what living in New York is like as it captures all the different levels of the city from its skyline, to the river, to its neighborhood shops and even the skid row area. Even this though does get botched as there are segments done late at night where there appears to be no other cars on the street, or pedestrians giving it a surreal look that isn’t realistic as New York is known as the city that never sleeps and thus portraying it as being virtually empty just because the action takes place in the wee hours of the morning isn’t authentic.

My Rating: 4 out of 10

Released: July 10, 1987

Runtime: 1 Hour 41 Minutes

Rated PG-13

Director: Roger Young

Studio: TriStar Pictures

Available: Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Action/Adventure, Black Comedy, Movies that take place in the Big Apple

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Commando (1985)

Posted on July 4, 2019 | 2 comments

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 2 out of 10

4-Word Review: Father rescues kidnapped daughter.

John Matrix (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is a retired colonel from the U.S. special forces who is now living the peaceful, quiet life with his young daughter Jenny (Alyssa Milano) in a secluded mountainside home. Then when day he gets visited by his former superior (James Olson) who advises him that the other members of his former unit have all been killed off. Before he has a chance to react a group of mercenaries converge on his home and kidnap his daughter. John tries to stop it, but can’t and is eventually drugged where both he and Jenny are taken to a secret location where they meet Arius (Dan Hedaya) the group’s leader. He tells John that he can have his daughter back once he carries out an assignment to assassinate the President of a South American country known as Val Verde. As John is being taken onto the airplane to carry out the plan he fights back by overpowering his captors and he then goes on a mad dash to retrieve his daughter before it is too late while using the assistance of Cindy (Rae Dawn Chong) an off-duty flight attendant that he meets along the way.

The one good thing about a Mark L. Lester directed film such as this is that it moves fast, so you get reluctantly caught up into the action before you realize just how dumb and threadbare the story and characterizations really are. For the first 45-minutes it kind of works with the best stunt coming with Arnie escaping out the cargo bay exit door of the airplane and out onto the landing wheel of the aircraft before jumping into some swamp land just before the plane takes off.

Unfortunately this ends up being the film’s only highlight as everything that comes after it gets overdone to the point that it almost starts to seem like a farce and might’ve worked better had it been played up as being one. Watching Arnie fight off a bunch of security guards while inside a mall by having them all fall down like bowling pins with one blow of his fist looks too much like something used in a slapstick comedy. The scene where he tears a phone booth from a wall and lifts it high over his head is ridiculous as no matter how strong a guy is lifting something up like that will certainly destroy or injure a person’s back.

This brings to light the film’s other issue, which is the fact that Arnie never ever gets injured, or if he does he miraculously recovers from it in a matter of seconds. Watching him shoot down all these mercenaries like they were a part of a video arcade game while hundreds of bullets go whizzing by his head, but never  actually hitting him is when I got totally tuned off from it as it ceased to be believable and I was constantly glancing at my watch every two minutes just praying that the whole stupid thing would quickly end.

Chong, who is an actress that is usually able to convey a strong personality came off here as one of the most annoying elements in the movie. The fact that she would so quickly jump into helping Arnie find his daughter even though she had just met him and jeopardizing her own life and career along the way didn’t make much sense. The scene where she is able to fire a rocket launcher despite having no experience was another head-scratcher. She states that she had simply ‘read the directions’ on how to use it, but how would she have had time to read anything when every waking second is spent with them chasing after the bad guys.

Milano, who is probably better known these days for her political activism instead of her acting, gives a flat and forgettable performance. Hedaya is equally blah as the villain although I’ll give him credit for effectively looking and sounding Latino despite being Jewish in real-life. The biggest disappointment though is Vernon Wells who plays Arnie’s muscular nemesis and tries taking him on one-on-one at the end, but when compared to Arnie’s massive physique Wells looks pretty puny and an actor should’ve been cast that would’ve looked more like Arnie’s physical equal in order to come off more like a legitimate threat.

A director’s cut of this film is also available, which adds in a few more scenes and has a minute longer runtime than the studio version, but to me that’s just one more minute of your life wasted watching this dumb thing that you’ll never get back.

My Rating: 2 out of 10

Released: October 4, 1985

Runtime: 1 Hour 30 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Mark L. Lester

Studio: 20th Century Fox

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Action/Adventure, Dry Humor, Kidnapping Movies, Movies with Nudity

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Soul Man (1986)

Posted on May 25, 2019 | 1 comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 1 out of 10

4-Word Review: Pretending to be black.

Mark Watson (C. Thomas Howell) has been accepted into Harvard Law School, but just before he’s ready to attend his father (James B. Sikking) states that he won’t help to pay for it forcing Mark to try and find other avenues of funding. He eventually decides to take some tanning pills, which makes his skin darker and then apply for a scholarship only available to African American students. After getting the money he continues with the charade, but encounters many problems along the way that he wasn’t expecting.

This is one comedy that hasn’t aged well at all. At the time of its release it wasn’t considered too great to begin with and I avoided it, but now almost 30 years later the blackface plot line has made it a bad stain on the careers of those involved particularly the producer, writer and director who were all white and apparently thought they were ‘woke’ and making something ‘socially relevant’, but really weren’t. However, even if you get past the politically incorrect scenario this is still a really bad movie either way.

The basic premise is the biggest problem as Howell never ever effectively looks black, Egyptian maybe, but more like some white guy wearing a tacky wig and who stayed under the sun lamp too long. The fact that anyone could believe that he was really black for even a second is patently absurd as his skin is more of a dark beige color and his other facial features never change, which makes the scene where his own parents don’t even recognize him all the more stupid.

The idea of having him intentionally overdose on tanning pills just brings up even more questions. For instance if he takes more than the recommended dosage wouldn’t that cause some dangerous side effect and how exactly is he able to turn white again at the end as overdosing on the pills would’ve most likely have caused some sort of long term health risk to either his system or skin.

The fact that he’s able to get the scholarship right away is pretty ridiculous too. Don’t applicants have to go through some sort of background check before they get accepted or do they simply get handed the money the minute they walk in and ask for it like it seems here and wouldn’t this background check then expose that he was really white?

This also has to be the dumbest guy ever to get accepted into Harvard. I’m not saying the character has to necessarily conform to the nerd stereotype, but the guy comes off like a world class slacker from the beginning who proceeds to say and do one clueless thing after another until you wonder if he’d ever be accepted into junior college let alone an Ivy League one.

James Earl Jones’ performance, where he channels the black version of Professor Kingsfield from The Paper Chase, is one of the film’s few bright spots. I also enjoyed Rae Dawn Chong who plays Howell’s potential love interest and who comes off as far more real and multi-dimensional than any of the other characters in the film to the point that she should’ve been made the star while scrapping Howell and his silly shenanigans completely.

Not only does the film fail to offer any true meaningful insight into race relations, but it manages to stereotype white people in the process particularly the two white male students who are constantly getting caught making racist jokes about black people. Is the viewer actually supposed to believe that this is all these two guys ever talk about as it certainly is made to seem that way, which is just one more example as to why this has to be one of the clumsiest, most unfunny and most poorly thought out satires ever made.

My Rating: 1 out of 10

Released: October 24, 1986

Runtime: 1 Hour 44 Minutes

Rated PG-13

Director: Steve Miner

Studio: New World Pictures

Available: DVD, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Basketball Movies, Cold Climate/Wintertime Movies, College Life, Romance, Satire

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Quest for Fire (1981)

Posted on April 11, 2016 | 5 comments

quest for fire

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 6 out of 10

4-Word Review: Cavemen search of fire.

After their tribe is attacked by another one and their only source of fire put out three male members from the group (Everett McGill, Ron Pearlman, Nicholas Kadi) set out to find fire from somewhere else and bring it back to the others.  Their quest is not easy as they are forced to travel through harsh terrain, escape from man eating tigers, and fight off a tribe of cannibals. They also meet up with Ika (Rae Dawn Chong) who comes from a more advanced tribe where the members live in huts instead of caves and who also harbors the secret to starting a fire, which she just might share with the others.

Filmed on-location in Canada, Scotland, and Kenya this film brings to life the true nature of prehistoric times in vivid detail and better than any other movie that has dealt with the same subject. The male actors were fitted with masks that gave them ape-like features and except for one brief moment there is no discernable line of dialogue and communication is spoken through grunts and groans as well as words not connected to modern day language. Some DVD issues do have subtitles, but to me this is taking the viewer out of the experience as the whole idea is to allow one a true sense of how things where like back then and therefore forcing one to try to understand things through the primitives means of communication during that period is the only way to do it and I’m thankful that the theatrical version and the streaming version that I saw did not offer them.

While I applaud the filmmaker’s commitment to keeping things close to the true form as possible and not willing to compromise it simply to make it more accessible to a mainstream audience I still found it to be confusing at spots and even at times boring. The opening battle between the two tribes seemed almost unintentionally funny and the loud, booming music played over most of the movie is a bit off-putting as there was clearly no music at the time of the setting, so silence or natural sounds would’ve kept it truer to the authentic tone.

There is also a scene where the men come upon the remains of some meat left from another tribe. The men are hungry and begin eating the remains only to realize that what they are chewing on is human flesh, which sickens them and they spit it out, but I wasn’t so sure that genuine Neanderthals such as the ones portrayed here would be so ‘civilized’ and instead more concerned with simply satisfying their hunger needs.

Rae Dawn Chong’s presence is a major plus and the movie gets more interesting when her character appears. She remains fully nude at all times while covered in body paint, but isn’t as erotic as you might think. The scene where she gets raped by the men late at night is brutal, but authentic to the animalistic level that I would assume sex would be approached with during that time period. The way her character ends up bonding and even forming a romantic attachment to the one of them as the film progresses is genuinely touching.

The film has a lot of lulls and may be just too unique for some. I found myself intrigued at certain parts and bored at others, but the scene where the men watch in amazement when Chong creates a fire for the first time is a surprisingly exhilarating moment where the viewer feels the same emotion that people back then must’ve felt, which to be able to convey such a feeling to a modern audience is an achievement in itself and a sign of astute filmmaking at its finest.

My Rating: 6 out of 10

Released: December 16, 1981

Runtime: 1Hour 40Minutes

Rated R

Director: Jean-Jacques Annaud

Studio: 20th Century Fox

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Instant Video, YouTube

5 Comments

Posted in 80's Movies, Action/Adventure, Foreign Films, French Films, Movies Based on Novels, Movies with Nudity, Outdoors

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