1997 - THE SECOND CIVIL WAR, surprising still relevent film about politics

 Joe Dante's satire on American politics, the media and just about everything else is 25 years old and the film is surprisingly contemporary considering our present day political climate.

It seems the Governor of Idaho who has been having an affair with a Hispanic news reporter has decided to close his state's borders to any new immigrants.  This prompts a crisis in Washington DC as the President of the United States and his advisors decide to confront the Governor.  Meanwhile a powerful cable news network is manipulating both sides of the crisis in order to secure higher ratings.  The whole situation eventually becomes an armed conflict between the state of Idaho and the Federal government.  While all of this is going on the Governor of Idaho is trying to rekindle his affair with the Hispanic reporter.

This is one of Joe Dante's best films as he skewers both sides of the crisis.  This story allows him to really show his satirical side.  Dante also has an excellent cast in this film.  Beau Bridges is the clueless Governor, Phil Hartman is the ineffectual President.  James Coburn is an advisor to the President who doesn't seem to have much good advice.  Meanwhile at the cable news network, Dan Hedaya is the manipulative news editor.  Dennis Leary is the cynical reporter covering the story and everyone is struggling with how to prevent preempting All My Children during this crisis.

 

The Second Civil War was made for HBO but I doubt they would finance a political satire like this today. Anyway,  the film is a good black comedy.

 

The film was written by Martyn Burke, the running time is 98 minutes.

1989 - THE BURBS, an underated Joe Dante film.

Dante's funny black comedy about life in the suburbs has seen it's reputation grow since it was originally released.  Tom Hanks is the everyman character Ray Peterson who along with his neighbors Art Weingartner and Lt. Mark Rumsfield are spying on their very creepy new neighbors, the Klopeks.

Dante put together a great cast staring with Tom Hanks who has never been a slouch in the comedy department.  Bruce Dern is his right wing nut neighbor and Richard Ducommun is his just plain nuts neighbor.  Throw in Dante's usual stock company which consists of Corey Feldman, Dick Miller and Robert Picardo.  I also have to mention Gale Gordon, Henry Gibson, Wendy Schaal, Rance Howard and Carrie Fischer.  It's just a fun cast.

 

This film is one of Dante's most underrated films.  For once he isn't dealing with Gremlins or Warner Brother's cartoon characters. Dante allows his sense of humor to shine through dealing with real people for a change.  It's still somewhat of a cartoon like atmosphere but at least it's a little more real world identifiable before the craziness sets in.

 

The film was written by Dana Olson and runs 101 minutes.

1998: THE WARLORD BATTLE FOR THE GALAXY aka THE OSIRIS CHRONICLES

A bad science fiction film that Joe Dante directed.  This was a pilot for a science fiction series about a crew of rebels flying around space attempting to reestablish a galactic republic.  

With the exception of Rod Taylor the acting is extremely poor.  The cast doesn't seem to be able to put over the plot with a spec of enthusiasm.  The extremely poor and very derivative script doesn't help since it is a mismash of elements from Star Trek and in particular Star Wars.  The film was obviously trying for a wide appeal with the appearance of busty women and teenagers in primary parts.  Our so called hero is a very poor man's Han Solo.

The production is extremely cheesy looking the cardboard looking sets look like they are about to topple down around the actors throughout the film.  The special effects aren't particularly well done with the usual computer image assistance of spaceships flying around shooting laser beams at each other.  

Clearly Joe Dante brought no passion to this project the film doesn't even contain any of his typical movie references or in-jokes.  A very depressing film.

97 minutes, written by Caleb Carr (huh).

1994 - RUNAWAY DAUGHTERS, another Joe Dante exploitation film wallow

Joe Dante remakes an old AIP film and not very well.  This film was part of a Showtime anthology series called Rebel Highway.  Dante loves all those American International Picture films and worked for Roger Corman as an editor for a while so you would think this would be his kind of project.  However his heart doesn't appear to be in it this time.

The story such that it is has something to do with three high school girls on the run.  One of them is pregnant and wants to marry her boyfriend before he joins the navy.  Their parents think they have been kidnapped and all sorts of adventures of the road happen to them.

Dante as usual has loaded the cast up actors he has worked with before but they don't get much to do and frankly their acting is not very good.  Everyone including Dante seems to be going through the motions on this one.

At least it's short like a true "B" movie should be.

 83 minutes.

1981 - THE HOWLING, Joe Dante updates another old film genre

There just isn't much to say about this one.  The Howling is a typical Joe Dante film.  Some of the characters are named after old Universal studios horror directors.  The film has scenes from The Wolf Man scattered throughout the story and there are lots of references to wolves with jokes about dog food and eating rare hamburgers

Being that this is a 1980's film, no studio was going to finance a werewolf film unless it had lots of blood and sex which The Howling does.  Dante knows that if he wants to make his genre influenced films he has to play the Hollywood game.

The big thing in The Howling at the time was the actual on screen transformation of a man into a werewolf.  This prosthetic effect probably looked reasonably cool back in the 80's but now it's just a bunch of inflatable balloons attached to an actor's face.  This kind of thing is now done with computer effects these days.

This is an entertaining update of an old horror genre.

 91 minutes, written by John Sayles.

1990 - GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH, is more of the same but less

 Warner Brothers wanted a sequel to Gremlins and finally lured Joe Dante back with the promise of complete control over the picture.  This was a bad idea.  Dante ran amok indulging himself with his cartoon sense of humor and let the picture get completely out of control to the point of incoherence.

 Dante crammed a lot of stuff into the picture.  It was a spoof of Die Hard, and a satire of cable TV.  He indulged himself with cartoon sequences from past his prime animator Chuck Jones and a musical sequence.  The first Gremlins was barely credible but at least it had a story.  Gremlins 2:  The New Batch doesn't even bother with a story so it is virtually impossible to get involved with the film.

 Dante brought back some of the original cast which included a rather haggard looking Phoebe Cates who was only 26 years old.  Rick Baker made the gremlin puppets for this film but even the fuzzy cuddly "Gismo" seems to have lost a lot of it's cuteness along with Phoebe Cates between the first and second film. 

Gremlins 2: The New Batch is what you get when you let an interesting cult director go nuts on a large budget.

106 minutes.

1984 - GREMLINS, Joe Dante's horror comedy

Gremlins is one of the few films that Joe Dante has directed where audiences responded to his comic book style of film making.  Dante, also a major film buff (nerd)  has packed the film with lots of in jokes and old actors he grew up watching.

This is a nostalgia wallow of old character actors with Kenneth Tobey, Edward Andrews, Scott Brady, Harry Carey Jr, William Schallert, Dick Miller, Jackie Joseph and Keye Luke.  The film gets even more inside with appearances from Jerry Goldsmith, Robbie the Robot (reciting dialog from Forbidden Planet), Steven Spielberg sitting in George Pal's time machine, Chuck Jones and pictures of character actor Edward Arnold prominently displayed.  Amazingly, all this stuff doesn't get in the way of the film.

The film sends up small town middle class American life with the gremlin assault on a housewife in her kitchen the highlight of the film.  Americans can wallow in sloppy holiday sentimentality but they are also capable of developing a real vicious and violent streak when push comes to shove. 

 

106 minutes, written by Chris Columbus.

1983 - TWILIGHT ZONE THE MOVIE, is pretty bad considering the talent

Four big names directors pay tribute to Rod Serling's anthology series and for the most part the segments can't touch any old black and white episode of the series.

John Landis directs, Time Out, the only original episode in the series.  This was the notorious episode that killed the actor Vic Morrow and 2 children.  It's a hit you over the head story about racism that is about as subtle as a steamroller.  Pretty bad.

Steven Spielberg directs Kick the Can and he directs poorly.  This slop about elderly people at a nursing home discovering their youth brought out the worst in the director, the sloppy overblown music, the too glowing photography, the sentimental garbage about old age and childhood, it’s just awful.  This is a director barely in control of his story, possibly the worst thing he has ever been associated with.

Joe Dante directs It's a Good Life and sort of redeems the film.  Dante is able to indulge his interest in cartoons and does make the segment his own.  The problem is that the original episode was a brilliant horror story and Dante chooses cartoonish silliness over horror.

The director of The Road Warrior George Miller, directs Nightmare at 20,000 Feet like it's a Mad Max movie but he has the same problem as Dante, he can't really capture the  horror of the original black and white episode, still probably the best of the short films.  John Lithgow's over the top hysterical performance is pretty fun but he can't top the original actor William Shatner.

 Considering how influential The Twilight Zone still is, this is a pretty poor tribute.

101 minutes, written by John Landis, George Clayton Johnson, Richard Matheson and Melissa Mathison.

2003 - LOONEY TUNES BACK IN ACTION, very disappointing

An attempt by the director Joe Dante and the writer Larry Doyle to reintroduce the famous Warner Bros. cartoon characters fails.  These two men would have seemed like the right individuals to make this film.  Dante had a love of old genre films and clearly knew the characters.  Doyle is a writer who had worked on The Simpsons and Beavis and Butthead. 

The biggest problem with the film beside the lack of story and actual funny situations, the failure to realize that these hyper animated cartoon characters probably played best in their cartoon short six minute format.  A ninety minute film with all this frantic action is more exhausting than entertaining. The film also lacked actual funny situations and an identifiable story to hang the whole mess on.   

The cast is another issue.  Brandon Fraser as the thick headed security guard was sort of funny, but inconsequential actor Jenna Elfman was completely miscast as the female lead.  Elfman actually has a rather hard looking face and isn't very funny which is odd considering she got her big break playing in TV sitcoms.  Steve Martin as the president of the ACME corporation falls back on the "wild and crazy"  stuff he did on Saturday Night Live years ago.  In this film he's more stupid than funny.

As for the Looney Tunes characters,  their integration into the live action seems way off,  they don't mix into this film at all. The old Disney films had been adding animated characters to their films for some time and they were a lot more skillful at blending live action and animation that this film. 

Its a Joe Dante film so its fun for a film buff to watch all of his little jokes.  The Robot Monster, the Daleks from Dr. Who, and Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet.  Some of the live action characters include, Vernon Welles, the "Wez" from The Road Warrior as one of Steve Martin's henchmen.  Roger Corman shows up directing a Batman film and a character actor named Marc Lawrence who is about as inside as you can get is one of the board members of the ACME corporation.  All these little inside jokes don't really mean anything if the film isn't any good.

Another disappointing film from Joe Dante.

91 frantic frenzied minutes.

1998 - SMALL SOLDIERS, attempt at another Gremlins type of film

The  director Joe Dante loves the cheezy horror and science fiction films of the 1950's and 1960's.  He also loves satirizing the white suburban middle class culture.  He loads his films with actors from Roger Corman's old movies and throws in lots of in jokes from his favorite films.   The problem for Joe Dante is that not everyone shares his vision. 

For a director like Joe Dante to survive in the film business he needs to combine his interests with a way to appeal to a general audience and not just a bunch of film nerds.  He pulled this off only once with the commercially successful but very mean Gremlins.  That film was his take on ET.   Small Soldiers was produced by Steven Spielberg's company that had also produced Gremlins.  Dante probably seemed like the go to guy for Spielberg when they went to make this film which is basically Gremlins as crazy little GI Joe dolls come to life.  

Small Soldiers is clever but pretty slow moving at times for the kid crowd.  The film starts with a very long prologue about 2 inventors who install high tech computer chips into their new product line of action figures without realizing that the toys will come to life and go on a militaristic rampage.  After this long opening the film finally gets going with the toy soldiers parodying scenes from other movies like Apocalypse Now and Patton.

Joe Dante has a classic old fashioned film making style but I think he struggled with trying to keep the elaborate effects from taking over the film, always a problem when you have a special effects heavy film like this.  Dante also probably needed to make the film shorter, an extended sequence with Barbie dolls coming to life like The Bride of Frankenstein could probably have been cut.

Dante's pretty good working with the actors in his film.  Kirsten Dunst gets top billing playing the traditional part of the girlfriend.  Dunst is actually kind of likable but this film was early in her career so it was before she turned into Kirsten Dunst.  The real star is this kid Gregory Smith who goes on another one of those boring young male personal journeys of self discovery that the movies like to do so much.

Small Soldiers has some funny but pretty mild satire about the  Leave It To Beaver type of neighborhood that the toys attack.  Using some of the original cast from The Dirty Dozen as the action figure voices was a clever idea but since that film came out in 1967 no kid was going to know who they were.

Small Soldiers is funny and entertaining but it doesn't look like it turned out the way Joe Dante or Steven Spielberg intended.

 Written by Gavin Scott, Adam Rifkin, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio.  The running time is 108 minutes.

1987 - AMAZON WOMEN ON THE MOON, not to funny spoof of genre films

Pretty poor, a rehash of The Kentucky Fried Movie by people who should have been able to make this thing a WHOLE lot funnier. A very interesting cast was completely let down by a creative group behind the camera who should have been able to get the job done. Even the nudity ( and there is a lot of it) was extremely boring.  
 

THE CREATIVE TEAM

Joe Dante: He's made a career studying and speaking about cult and camp movies he should have been able to knock this out of the park with his eyes closed. Probably the only good section in the movie was "Reckless Youth". But even this wasn't as funny as "Reefer Madness".

John Landis: He's known for his admiration of movies that mix genres such as "Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein". He at times seems to have a sense of humor and he tries to incorporate traditions of slapstick and violence in his movies. However he didn't have one funny segment in the entire movie. His preoccupation with women running around topless is kind of disconcerting.

Carl Gottlieb: Is a veteran screenwriter, He wrote "Jaws". His segment "Son of the Invisible Man" was probably the funniest.

Peter Horton: Is an actor, director and production executive. He directed a couple of segments and starred in the very lame hospital scene with a very young Michelle Pfeiffer who was big time paying her dues.

Robert K Weiss: The real auteur. Is the producer of, (Superhero Movie, Scary Movie 4, Scary Movie 3). Michael Barrie: A writer for David Letterman for many years.

Jim Mulholland: A writer for David Letterman and Johnny Carson.

Running time, 85 minutes.