1994 - GIRLS IN PRISON , another in the Rebel Highway series

Girls In Prison as the title states is about girls in prison.  Songwriter Angie O'Hara is framed for the murder of a record executive by a couple who want to steal her soon to be hit song.  While in prison she endures the usual girls in prison tropes.  In this instance, lesbianism, the naked gratuitous shower scenes and the usual girl on girl violence.

The latest film I viewed in this series has the same good points and bad points in the series.  Excellent sets and costumes reflecting the 1950's settings are the good points and the strangely indifferent attitude these directors seem to bring to this series are the bad points.  This film as typical in this series, seems to lack the craziness of the old AIP films they are based on which in turn makes them less fun to view.

 

The acting is all over the place, some of the girls seem to be sleep walking though their parts while others, in this case Anne Heche embrace their over the top characters in an entertaining fashion.

 

For the most part this is about an average film in the series.

Written by Samuel Fuller of all people and his wife Christa Lang, the running time is 83 minutes.

1986 - RUNNING SCARED, standard buddy cop film stuff.

There's nothing particularly wrong with this buddy cop film from the 1980's but it's not that special.  Comedian Billy Crystal and dancer Gregory Hines are the usual buddy cop team running around Chicago busting heads.  After taking a vacation down in Key West, Florida they decide to retire from the Chicago PD and run their own business in Florida.  The film deals with the two cops trying to finish out their time as cops before they retire without getting themselves killed.  Hence the title Running Scared.

This film was directed by Peter Hyams and per usual photographed by him as well.  It's one of Hyams rare films where he doesn't have a story or screenplay credit. The action scenes are fairly well staged particularly a chase on the famous Chicago "L" line and a shoot out in a high rise towards the end after Crystal's ex wife played by former model Darlanne Fluegel, is taken hostage by some (what else) evil drug kingpin.

 

Crystal and Hines seem like an odd pair to be playing cops but I'm going to assume the thought was to cast against type.  The actor Jimmy Smits early in his career is in the cliched role of the Hispanic drug dealer, it's all fairly standard stuff when you get right down to it.  However the actors do a fairly decent job with their roles.

No great shakes as a film but not bad.   It was written by Gary DeVore and  Jimmy Huston,  the film runs 107 minutes and was moderately successful.

1990 - THE NARROW MARGIN, unnecessary remake

Apparently the director/writer Peter Hyams found the first version of The Narrow Margin, lacking.  He decided to remake it by opening it up.  We have expansive scenes of the train traveling through British Columbia and some action scenes not set in the train.  What Hyams lost by doing this was the sense of claustrophobia and tension that the original version captured so well.

The film has Gene Hackman who does his usual fine job as an assistant district attorney attempting to bring a star witness played by Anne Archer, back to Los Angeles in order for her to testify against a crime lord played by Harris Yulin who's part is way to small.

 

Another problem with this film is the casting of Hackman who was a major Hollywood star.  The viewer knows that nothing is going to happen to him unlike the first version where the cast was played by character actors and their survival was in serious doubt.

The film is watchable enough but rather uninspired, this is just another example of remaking an old film that didn't need remaking in the first place.  Unfortunately as long as there is a movie making business there will always be a "movie remaking business,"  apparently it's just a lot of work to find original ideas.

The running time is 97 minutes.

1994 - ROADRACERS, from the Rebel Highway series

 Roadracers involves a greasy haired hot rod driver racing around a small town while being harassed by the local sheriff. The sheriff has a son who is basically a juvenile delinquent who is also the antagonist of the hot rod driver.  It all comes to a head one night and in a violent showdown.

 The roadracer is played by David Arquette an actor usually known for playing goof balls on TV shows and in films.  Arquette improbably has a hot Hispanic girlfriend played by Salma Hayek.  Perennial character actor villain William Sadler is the sheriff and you can throw in a cameo by actor Kevin McCarthy watching himself in The Invasion Of The Body Snatchers.

 

The film was directed by Robert Rodriguez in that frenzied manner he brought to his debut film El Maricachi.  This attempt at making a B-movie generally succeeds.  Coming from a background of making a film for next to no budget Rodriguez probably was probably in heaven with a budget of around one million dollars.  

 

The whole point of these Rebel Highway films was to make them on the cheap and to replicate the AIP exploitation films. Although I am only two films into this series this seems the most successful so far.

Written by Rodriguez and  Tommy Nix, the running time is 95 minutes.

1994 - MOTORCYCLE GANG, my first film in the Rebel Highway series.

Time to give the Rebel Highway series a look.  This series was an attempt to recreate the exploitation films of the 1950's and early 1960's by giving directors a small budget and allowing them to have control over their films.  Macho director John Milius is up with this pagan to the motorcycle films that AIP cranked out for a while.

The film is unsurprisingly called Motorcycle Gang. TV veteran Gerald McRaney plays a father who is traveling to California with his hot to trot daughter played by Carla Gugino (a 22 year old actress attempting to pass for a teenager) and his cheating wife.  The family gets involved with a motorcycle gang of killers who kidnap the daugher.  The film deals with the father and mother attempting to get their daughter back.  However all is not what it seems, the father has a secret violent past unbeknownst to the motorcycle gang.   Let the violence commence.

 

This would seems like a film right up John Milius's alley but he directs the film in an extremely pedestrian manner.  The actors at times seem like they are kind of sleepwalking through their cliched characters and the whole thing kind of suffers from a lack of tension.  The action scenes are somewhat on the lame side as well.

 

This is not a particulary good start for the first film I'm viewing in the series, kind of a disappointment.  The running time is 84 minutes.  It was written by Laurie McQuillan and Kent Anderson.

1979 - TIME AFTER TIME, deliberately old fashioned fantasy, romance

The writer and director Nicholas Meyer is about three years away from making the best of the Star Trek films, Star Trek: The Wrath of Kahn.  He's six years away from contributing to the the time travel Star Trek film,  Star Trek:  The Voyage Home.  Time After Time is almost a warm up for those two films.

The plot has Malcolm McDowell (for once not playing some kind of cinematic psycho character) as H.G. Welles.  In this story, back in 1893 Welles invents a time machine which is stolen by Jack The Ripper who uses it to escape through time into the future.  The time machine automatically returns to Welles who also travels through time to find and stop Jack the Ripper from killing again.

Into this story is woven a love story as Welles meets a woman from the 20th century and has to confront the various challenges of understanding the future age he has traveled into.  It's a clever screenplay.

  

The acting by McDowell and David Warner as Jack The Ripper is tops,  however Mary Steenburgen plays McDowell's love interest and her performance is so low key it almost seems like she is barely awake in her scenes. Actually if there is a criticism to be made about this film it's Nicholas Meyer's direction which could have used a little more energy to it, the film is awfully low key at times.

 

The special effects and the music provided by Miklos Rosza (in his final score) deliberately evoke an old fashioned feel to the film.  All in all Time After Time is an entertaining film, the running time is 112 minutes.

1966 - ONE SPY TOO MANY, hard not to review

What we have here are two episodes of the old Man From U.N.C.L.E., TV series repackaged as a quasi movie.  This was an attempt by MGM to squeeze as much money out of the then popular spy series as much as possible.  Since it was the 1960's and the height of the spy movie craze, I guess this shouldn't have been a complete surprise that something like this would get released.

Considering that the film was shot on the back lot of the once formidable MGM studios and no one even bothered to edit out the TV transitions, the film is actually entertaining.  Rip Torn amusingly plays an evil industrialist bent on taking over the world with a mind control gas.  Dorothy Provine, who was a very underrated actor and comedian, is his wife trying to obtain a divorce.  Robert Vaughn and David McCallum are the U.N.C.L.E agents assigned to stop Torn by their boss played by Leo G Carroll.  Carroll was an expert at playing the head of secret spy agencies, he had worked with Alfred Hitchcock on a number of films.

 

The film does have that cheap TV look to it but the director Joseph Sargent keeps the plot moving and the writer Dean Hargrove had his tongue firmly in cheek as the story rolls along.

 

One Spy Too Many is at times almost a nostalgia piece for another time and world in movies that has now turned into an age of computer generated images and formula comic book stories.

The running time is 102 minutes.

2014 - MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT, late period Woody Allen romantic comedy

 Another late period Woody Allen film.  Magic In The Moonlight is a romantic comedy, the kind of film Woody Allen had made before and probably a little better.  Still the film does have it's charms for the most part.  

Colin Furth is a magician called to the southern part of France to help expose a clairvoyant played by Emma Stone who has managed to ingratiate herself into a rich American family.  I've seen Furth's character before in other Allen films, the athiestic skeptic who doesn't believe in real magic but succumbs to the charms of Stone's clairvoyant.  The film at times becomes a discussion between rationality and the need to believe in a higher authority, god if you will.

The film eventually turns into a romance between Furth and Stone.  Let's get this out of the way, Furth is too old to be involved with Stone who was probably in her 20's when she filmed this but the two performers are so good you can kind of set the age difference aside, kind of.

 

In fact the film is well cast as is typical for a Woody Allen film.  The film also has nice photography on some pleasant locations and it is a pleasure to look at.  Woody Allen films are always well assembled.  For the most part this is a minor film but not without it's compensations particularly the performers and some of the amusing dialog.

 

Written as usual by Woody Allen, the film runs 98 minutes.

1934 - THE GAY DIVORCEE, the first starring Astaire and Rogers musical

After a couple of featured parts in some other films, RKO finally teamed Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and made them the leads of The Gay Divorcee.  The film was a hit and Astaire and Rogers went on to star in a series of RKO films for about the next 6 years.

Nobody watches a musical for the plot and this one is as about as silly as they come with Astaire falling in love with Rogers, who is trying to get a divorce from her cheating husband.  Lots of mistaken identity scenes as only screenwriters in the 1930's could come up with in between the dance sequences.

 Astaire was known for being a perfectionist and he would patiently work out the dance routines during pre production.  Astaire was also insistent that that the dances would be photographed with the least amount of editing in order to showcase the performers better.  The songs were a mixture of different composers, the big production number "The Continental,"  was written by Cole Porter.  Frankly "The Continental" could have used a dance director like Busby Berkley, at times the dancers seem to be lumbering around. 

 

Viewed today the film seems a tad primitive, the comedy scenes are kind of a chore to sit through, but the art-deco sets are fun to see and the dancing is still very good.

 The film was written by George Marion Jr., Dorothy Yost and Edward Kaufman,  the film runs 107 minutes.

2008 - REDBELT, David Mamet's marital arts film

 Usually I enjoy Mamet's films.  They are plot twisty clever stories with entertaining tough guy dialog.  For some reason this is not really top Mamet.  He brings out his usual careful plotting but the film kind of telegraphs where it is going before we get to the end. Chiwetel Ejiofor is the owner and instructor of a martial arts academy.  He's struggling with money issues trying to keep his school open.  He gets involved with loan sharks and it all leads up in a big martial arts match at the end of the film.

I don't think you can find fault with the cast.  Besides Ejiofor, Tim Allen, Ricky Jay, Alicia Braga, Emily Mortimer and Joe Mantegna give good performances.  The fight scenes seem sort of decently staged but the emotion core of the film, a man struggling to keep his moral balance just doesn't seem to be completely convincing.

 

Well it's a Mamet film so if it's not exactly top tier for him, compared to a lot of other films it's certainly  heads above just about every other martial arts film.

 

Written by Mamet of course, the running time is 100 minutes.

1981 - VICTORY aka ESCAPE TO VICTORY

Probably looking for a commercial hit, John Huston one of the old guard Hollywood directors got himself involved in this film.  Huston's heart didn't really seem to be into the film, it's filmed in a professional but not really involving manner.

The film is about an Allied prisoner of war camp during World War II.  To entertain themselves, the British play football (soccer).  This comes to the attention of one of the German officers who arranges for a football match between the German soldiers and the British prisoner of war soccer team.  Frankly this film is about as big a fantasy as Quentin Tarantino's fantasy World War II epic, Inglourious Basterds.

Huston and his production team put together a decent cast of British and German actors.  The leads were Michael Caine as the British soccer coach, Pele, one of the greatest players in the game, Max Von Sydow the Swedish actor playing a German yet again and Sylvester Stallone as the goalkeeper.  Apparently Stallone and Huston didn't really get along very well during the filming.  The film is also loaded with soccer stars from England.

 

The last part of the film is given over to the big game and for the most part it's fairly exciting.  The film as a whole is decent if undemanding entertainment.  An OK time killer at best.

 

Written by Evan Jones and Yabo Yablonsky, the running time is 117 minutes.