1976 - SKY RIDERS, modest action thriller

On location filming, a decent director, spectacular Greek scenery and a hang glider assault on a Greek monastery add up to a fast moving action film.

The cast is not uninteresting, James Coburn, Robert Culp, Susannah York, Charles Aznavour, Harry Andrews and Kenneth Griffith which keeps you interested in the film until the big battle at the abandoned monastery which seems to be filled with a battalion of international terrorists.

The last 20 minutes of the film are really the best part with the spectacular hand glider sequences around the Greek mountains. 

91 minutes

1979 - FIREPOWER, not a winner from Michael Winner

Even for prehistoric auteur Michael Winner,  this film is pretty low by his standards.  Firepower is a confused mess of an action thriller, that wants to be an Alister MacLean type of story with a little more violence thrown in for the late 1970's.

Originally set up as a Charles Bronson film.  Supposedly he backed out when the producer Sir Lew Grade didn't create a part for his wife Jill Ireland.  If you can't get Charles Bronson, (who had no taste in scripts) to star in your film then it's probably going to be a really bad film

Sophia Loren is top billed and although a great beauty she's looking a little rough.  She was probably in her mid 40's when she made this and between the amount of makeup and the wigs she had seen better days.  James Coburn was clearly brought in to fill in for Bronson in some sort of strange double role.  He did what he had to do in this film, shoot lots of people and set a lot of stuff on fire.

As typical with a Michael Winner film, everything is shot and recorded on location.  The stunts are real which include driving a bulldozer through a house or actually setting people on fire.  The film has a lot of action however it's still a pile of crap.

104 minutes written by Gerald Wilson.

1936 - KING OF THE PECOS, semi early John Wayne western

The excellent DVD Savant website gave this early B-movie John Wayne western a good review, so I took a look at it.

Well it's short which is nice for a change, it comes in under an hour.  John Wayne wears a white hat and rides a white horse so you know he's the good guy.  Wayne plays a lawyer/gunfighter out for revenge against the guy who killed his father when he was a young kid for the water rights.

It's easy to see why John Wayne became a star, his easy going personality is predominant throughout the film, he certainly outshines his female lead Muriel Evans,  you probably aren't going to see a lot of blog posts about her career

The end of the film has the standard good guys vs. bad guys fight.  It's kind of unnerving to watch these stuntmen fall off of horses and horses taking spills.  This was all done for real back in the 1930's.

Overall not bad.

54 minutes

1978 - THE LORD OF THE RINGS, the animated version

Before the Peter Jackson's epic there was this oddball animated film version of the Tolkien book.

This The Lord of the Rings is essentially the same as  the other Lord of the Rings with the main virtue of this film being that it gets through 1.5 of the books in roughly 2 hours, something that Peter Jackson probably couldn't have begun to contemplate doing.

Ralph Bakshi, the director struggles with the usual Tolkien adaptation issues, the unwieldy number of characters, some with 2 or 3 different names and the desire to stay faithful to Tolkien's very long story.  Bakshi's other problem is with his mix of the cartoon characters representing the Hobbits and Golem and the live action characters who are rotoscoped.  It all blends together very uncomfortably,

Frankly the film is kind of ugly looking.

132 minutes, written by Chris Conkling and Peter S. Beagle.

1979 - THE CONCORDE...AIRPORT 79, final film in the sequel series

The final film in the Airport sequel series, The Concorde...Airport 79, should have been the goofiest of them all with another crazed cast mash up and a plot which features the Concorde jet evading cruise missiles and renegade jet fighters.  It's certainly got a lot of silliness going on for it, but at this point this sequel has so descended into some kind of absurd parody that it's not really much fun as a campy bad movie.

The casting is as nutty as ever.  John Davidson as a sports reporter, Charo as Charo, Alain Delon (who had worked with Visconti and Jean Pierre Melville), George Kennedy as Patroni and soft core porn actress Sylvia Kristel.

Jennnings Lang the producer and writer on this one loads up the rest of the film with the usual eclectic actors, Susan Blakely, Robert Wagner, Eddie Albert, Bibi Andersson, Martha Raye, Cicely Tyson, Jimmie J. J. Walker, Sybil Danning, David Warner, Mercedes McCambridge and Avery Schneider.  It's actually more fun looking at the names then watching them in the movie.

After watching two hours of this stuff what make the biggest impression is the complete waste of talent and money on this movie.

123 minutes

1984 - FEAR CITY, fantasy on NYC gangsters, strippers & psycho killers

A psycho killer skilled in martial arts is mutilating and killing strippers in order to "purify" New York City in this junk from supposed cult director Abel Ferrara. 

Ferrara indulges himself with lots of scenes of women taking their clothes off particularly Melanie Griffith who never seemed to have had much of a problem with disrobing for movies.  Throw in a lot of violence particularly directed at women and mix in some nonsense about rival gangsters competing for the stripper business and you got one very sleazy piece of junk.

Fear City has nice photography particularly of NYC strip clubs and an interesting supporting cast with actors like Jan Murray, Rossano Brazzi and playwright and acting coach Michael V. Gazzo.  The leads Tom Berenger and Melanie Griffith seem miscast, California actors pretending to be east coasters.

What finally kills this film is the ridiculous amount of cliches that Ferrara piles on to this film.

 95 minutes.

2012 - ABRAHAM LINCOLN VAMPIRE HUNTER, another film in the Lincoln screen trilogy

This first film to be released based on the life of Abraham Lincoln in 2012.  Putting it mildly, this is a very different take on Lincoln's life than the Spielberg film.

It seems that Lincoln along with being a politician is also a vampire hunter.  Apparently the South is loaded with vampires and they are using slaves as food.  Lincoln comes to the rescue using his resources as President and slayer of the undead. 

Vampire chicks always wear tight outfits.

The film took a beating from the critics with the primary emphasis being that this story line was taken extremely seriously by the director (whose name I do not wish to type) and the producer Tim Burton.  Got to say they were right on this one.  The seriousness which runs throughout the film is a little absurd, after all this is a film about vampires.

Let's get this out of the way.  This is a typical summer film, too much computer faked imagery, too many absurd slow motion action scenes and just too dumb.

105 minutes.

1977 - AIRPORT '77, the 2nd in the Airport trilogy sequels.

This Airport film doesn't really reach the highs of the first zany sequel.  This time they sink the 747 in the Bermuda Triangle which leads to a spectacular rescue sequence courtesy of the United States Navy.

In Airport '77, our past his prime star is Jack Lemmon who actually brings a surprising amount of conviction to the part of heroic pilot Captain Don Gallagher.  Brenda Vaccaro is 2nd billed as his main squeeze.  James Stewart is the millionaire who has placed his substantial art collection on board the 747 which is hijacked by a gang of thieves bent on stealing the collection.

The cast is not really up to the goofy standards of the first film sequel but it does have some interesting actors in it.  Arlene Golonka, Tom Sullivan, Lee Grant, Gil Gerard, Pamela Bellwood, Juanita Moore, Robert Foxworth and George Kennedy again as Joe Patroni although his part is just a glorified cameo.

 

The director victim on this film is Jerry Jameson a television veteran of shows like Ironside, The Six Million Dollar Man and Dallas.  Jameson gets the job done for what this film is, a rip off of a rip off.

Jerry Jameson would probably be an interesting guy to interview, he's really been around.  He was an editor on TV shows like I Spy, Gomer Pyle and That Girl. 

113 minutes, written by Michael Scheff and David Spector.

1974 - AIRPORT 1975, first in the Airport sequel series.

OK, it is easy to make fun of this bad film but the bottom line is that for all it's badness this is just a very entertaining film. 

Universal studio executive Jennings Lang got the brilliant idea to make a sequel to Airport that had nothing to do with Airport other than it stuck a lot of actors on a plane and put them in danger.  The director Jack Smight was one of those guys who was reasonably decent as a director but never really got the big pictures or the good scripts and there is only so much he could do with this terrible script and incredibly bad but incredibly quotable dialog that runs throughout the film.  However this film is all about the cast.

The amazing air rescue scene.

Charlton Heston on the back end of an impressive film career is our hero who just happens to be the airline's top expert on flying 747's and he'll need to be an expert.   The plane has a big hole in the side caused by Dana Andrew's star of Zero Hour, (the grandaddy of airplane disaster movies) who has a heart attack and flies into the 747, thus the big hole.  Karen Black is the stewardess who is Heston's mistress (she wants to get married of course) who ends up flying the plane.

But really it's the collection of supporting actors that surround the stars that makes this movie.  There's Conrad Janis, Martha Scott, Myrna Loy, Beverly Garland, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Ed Nelson, Nancy Olson, Kip Niven, Bob Hastings, Irene Tsu, Sharon Gless, Laurette Spang honestly the list is endless.  This cast is a bizzaro gold mine of Hollywood working actors.

Airport 1975 usually makes the "bad movies we love" film lists and it is bad, but this film is incredibly entertaining as it wallows in it's deliberate mediocrity.

107 minutes.

2012 - LINCOLN, 1st in the Lincoln film trilogy

Finally a decent Spielberg film after crap like Tin Tin and Indiana Jones.  Spielberg supposedly spent 10 years off and on developing this film.  Tony Kushner was the 3rd writer on the project he delivered a script based on all the political maneuvering that went on to pass the 13th amendment.

In a film like this the acting runs the show and there is no question Daniel Day Lewis has given a very committed performance.  He got a lot of decent support from a number of actors.  David Strathairn as Secretary of State William Seward who's life and career you could make a film about. Seward was responsible for the purchase of Alaska from the Russians.

Sally Field,  has received some criticism as Mary Todd Lincoln.  I thought she was all right.   Mary Todd Lincoln was kind of crazy.  Tommy Lee Jones played Thaddeus Stevens a radical Republican legislator.  I didn't care for this character.  This is what happens when you give a larger then life actor a larger then life character, lots of hammy acting.

Also didn't care much for the photography of Janusz Kaminski who Spielberg works with these days, too many artistic shots of diffused sunlight shining through windows for me.  John Williams did the music as usual and he seems to have restrained himself, the film isn't swimming in music.

Final minor criticism, the film is a little long and the ending showing Lincoln dead in bed probably was unnecessary the film could have easily ended with Lincoln's impressive 2nd inaugural address a speech that is inscribed on his Memorial.

Everything in this film is about the writing and acting and it's on a very high level.

150 minutes.

1981 - FOR YOUR EYES ONLY, on Blu Ray

Watching For Your Eyes Only after seeing the super serious and frankly not much fun Skyfall here are a few thoughts:

Roger Moore is actually pretty stiff when it comes to the action sequences.  Fortunately he was lucky to be directed by John Glen the ace editor and 2nd unit director who had worked under Peter Hunt the original editor of the Bond films.  Glen knew how to pace an action sequence.

Roger Moore finally figured out how to meld his personality into the Bond character.  He actually looked like he's worried a couple of times throughout the film.  Carole Bouquet was a good looking model who did a pretty good job in a serious role for a Bond girl.  This film had a decent cast, Topol, Lynn-Holly Johnson as a horny figure skater and Julian Glover as the main bad guy. 

The bottom line, everyone tried a little harder for a more realistic Bond film after the entertaining but excessive and out of control Moonraker.  Skyfall may be making the big bucks but it drained the fun out of the series.

127 minutes written by Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson.

1924 - KRIEMHILD'S REVENGE, the conclusion of Lang's Die Nibelungen saga

Stills from the conclusion of Lang's Die Nibelungen saga two years in production at UFA studios.  An amazing fantasy film.

 Hagen of Tronje

Attila the Hun

The Cathedral at Worms.

The tomb of Siegfried

145 minutes, written by Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou.

1924 - SIEGFRIED, first film in Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen.

Some images from Siegfried, directed by Fritz Lang and written by Thea von Harbou.  An amazing fantasy film series.

Brunhild the Amazon queen of Iceland.

Siegfried and the dwarf.

Entering the castle of Die Niebelungen.

The famous full sized dragon.

Amazing stuff.

143 minutes.

1958 - ASHES AND DIAMONDS, Polish war drama

Andrej Wajda's film is highly regarded as a film classic from Poland.  While well directed it seems a little less when I watched it.

The basic story is about the last day of World War II in Poland.  The communists are getting ready to take over the government but there is a resistance movement with a plan to assassinate one of the  leaders by Maciek a young resistance leader who is starting to have doubts about his role. 

The film is well directed by Wajda but seems a little stuffy. Probably having to film it under the watch of the communist controlled Polish government may have cramped his ability to carefully examine the political situation in Poland.

Ashes and Diamonds has as it's lead an extremely charismatic leading actor Zbigniew Cybulski.  The guy is a serious bad ass whether he is shooting up commies with a machine gun or sweet talking the hot little Polish blonde bartender into bed for a one night stand.  Cybulski is the major reason to watch this dated film.

110 minutes.

2004 - BAD EDUCATION, melodrama from Almodovar

 The Spanish director Almodovar wrote and directed a soap opera like melodrama about two friends from school who are reunited years later.  One of the friends is a successful film director the other is an actor.  This film is not unlike something Douglas Sirk would have made at Universal in the late 50's or early 60's.  The difference here is that almost every character in the cast is gay.

There's child abuse by priests, transvestism, transsexualism and just lot's of gay stuff going on in this film.  The characters are not exactly sympathetic but they are interesting. 

I have not seen a lot of Almodovar's films but I have seen enough to know that he is a very skilled director.  If you ignore the gay element of the story in a lot of ways it's pretty standard stuff.  However Almodovar is an extremely gifted filmmaker and his talent kept me watching mostly to see how this story would resolve itself. 

Worth a look however there is a whole lot of gay stuff going on.

105 minutes.