What cult movies have you been watching lately?, Here are a few of my recent viewings

ROLLING THUNDER (1977) - Believe it or not, I haven't seen this film until tonight. I was surprised by a few things.

POSSIBLE SPOILERS

For starters, it's not really the vigilante flick I was expecting, as it's been lumped in with that DEATH WISH-inspired subgenre. Secondly, until the epic shootout in the Juarez whorehouse, it's really pretty average, despite a career performance by William Devane. There's a lot of missed opportunities--I think Paul Schrader and Heywood Gould's script was probably quite a bit deeper and explored more thematic issues than the film ends up doing. I think it has more in common with Sam Peckinpah and, in particular, THE WILD BUNCH, than it does with anything post-DEATH WISH. One reason this theme is only touched upon instead of explored is that Tommy Lee Jones has far too little screen time to really make the idea work. Why is he barely in this? When Devane talks him into accompanying him to kill the bad guys, I got that same vibe I got when Holden, Borgnine, Oates, and Johnson were proudly walking towards their date with Mapache and their destiny. Devane and Jones have that same chemistry, but it's all too brief, as director John Flynn pads the film with way too much Linda Haynes, which is hard to gripe about because she's very good as well. By the time Jones, who only has two or three brief scenes prior to the climactic bloodbath, finally reappears, it's almost like Flynn is rushing to meet his allotted 100 minutes. Indeed, the credits start rolling IMMEDIATELY after Devane is out of bullets. They really could've trimmed some fat from the middle of this and done more with the Devane-Jones dynamic. Just my two cents.

Very glad I watched it, and that climax is one for the ages, but I kinda have the same feeling I did at the end of APPALOOSA when that awesome Mudcrutch song is playing over the closing credits: the film ends on such an amazing high note that it almost tricks into thinking it was a lot better than it really was.

Agree with you on ROLLING THUNDER. I saw that in the mid-90s and wondered to myself, "Hmmm, that's it?" It is a good movie, but not a great one. I think I might have be biased because I had constructed a pretty rad movie in my head over the years off the theatrical trailer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-LIoZpHzX0

DOUBLE IMPACT (1991)--Directed by Sheldon Lettich. Stars Jean-Claude Van Damme, Geoffrey Lewis, Alonna Shaw, Alan Scarfe, Bolo Yeung, Cory Everson. It’s “double the Van Dammage!” in the first film of his transition from chopsocky star to mainstream action hero. J-C plays twins separated at birth: Chad, a California karate teacher who wears pink shorts, and Alex, a cigar-chomping smuggler in Hong Kong. The boys’ “uncle” Frank (Lewis) brings the brothers together in Hong Kong to go after Griffith (Scarfe), their father’s old business partner who masterminded the massacre of their parents 25 years earlier. Entertaining old-school action vehicle with passable direction by Lettich and a script that takes full advantage of the dual-role gimmick, including a predictable scene where Alex’s girl (Shaw) seduces Chad by mistake and, of course, the prerequisite fight between Van Dammes. Definitely of note is the casting of the intimidating Yeung (Van Damme’s BLOODSPORT co-star) and bodybuilder Everson, who has a luscious scene patting down Shaw, as baddies more than worthy of Jean-Claude’s time. Film is a little long, although I wouldn’t have wanted to lose the hilariously out-of-place sex scene that practically defines “gratuitous.” Julie Strain and Shelley Michelle appear as Chad’s karate students. Fifteen years later, Lettich was still directing Van Damme vehicles (THE HARD CORPS).

I saw ROLLING THUNDER on the big screen a couple of years back, part of an Exhumed showing, and I remember liking it a lot, actually. I liked how stripped down it was, I liked how the critique of the War didn't punch you over the head, the way so many movies, of this period especially, did, I liked Devane's performance, probably the best thing he ever did and I really like William Devane. I liked Tommy Lee Jones, I liked the gritty vibe of the thing, I liked the male mythopoetic dynamics and how they're implicitly critiqued. I actually liked how it ended the way it did, no fuss no muss. Not at all what I was expecting, I seem to remember going in somewhat skeptical, but my two cents is that it's one of the better low budgets around. It's still an exploitation movie, essentially, mind, just one with a brain behind it.

FRATERNITY VACATION (1985)--Directed by James Frawley. Stars Stephen Geoffreys, Cameron Dye, Leigh McCloskey, Sheree J. Wilson, Tim Robbins, Matt McCoy, Kathleen Kinmont, Barbara Crampton. Frawley won an Emmy for the first thing he ever directed (the premiere MONKEES episode), and cultivated a reputation in the 1970s as a hip director of offbeat features, culminating in the witty THE MUPPET MOVIE. The 1980s found him falling into episodic television, and I suppose he was hoping this teen sex comedy would be his ticket back to the big screen. It didn’t make it, and Frawley settled into a prolific TV directing career that saw him going strong more than forty years after that MONKEES show.

If nothing else, Frawley deserves credit for assembling a cast far better than the genre deserves, including knockouts Kinmont and Crampton (who get topless) and Wilson (who doesn’t). Nerd Wendell (Geoffreys) and his cool friends Joe (Dye) and Mother (Robbins) head to Palm Springs for a week of partying and chasing babes. Their asshole school rivals Chas (McCloskey) and J.C. (McCoy) bet them $1000 that they can score with the mysterious Ashley (Wilson, later Chuck Norris’ love interest on the long-running WALKER, TEXAS RANGER) before Joe and Mother do.

Who else is in this movie? John Vernon as the jerk police chief (there’s an incredible piece of business where Vernon literally yanks Geoffreys out of a chair and over a table), Charles Rocket as a DJ, Britt Ekland and her cleavage as a waitress, Nita Talbot, Franklin Ajaye, Julie Payne, Max Wright, and Amanda Bearse as Wendell’s girl. Geoffreys (who moved on to gay porn) and Bearse (later on MARRIED WITH CHILDREN) ended up in FRIGHT NIGHT together the same year. Writer Lindsay Harrison moved on to pen many TV-movies.

I won't argue that there isn't too much of Linda Haynes in it (though her performance is fine), but ROLLING THUNDER is a heckuva good movie with some nice character bits. My favorite scene is the one where Devane, consigned to the garage while his wife and her new boyfriend share the house, turns the tables on the boyfriend's attempt to make nice by demonstrating some of the torture he underwent in Vietnam. There's a lot going on in the scene, and Devane is great in it.

I have no idea why it isn't on DVD; I guess the studio has an aversion to making money. I recorded a nice LBX print off Showtime a few years ago.

MEET BOSTON BLACKIE (1941)—Directed by Robert Florey. Stars Chester Morris, Rochelle Hudson, Richard Lane, Charles Wagenheim, Constance Worth. Enemy to those who make him an enemy, friend to those who have no friend, Boston Blackie was created by author Jack Boyle in 1917 as an antihero in novels and short stories. The character was first portrayed on film in a handful of early silents, but this Columbia B-picture spawned a series of 14 entertaining programmers, all starring Morris (THE BIG HOUSE) as the reformed jewel thief who found himself in all sorts of criminal messes. Blackie returns to New York on a ship from Paris to find his friendly nemesis Inspector Faraday (Lane) waiting to take him into custody. Blackie intends to cooperate, until he stumbles upon a corpse in his stateroom. He ducks out on Faraday to pursue a mysterious blonde (Worth) he and his sidekick Runt (Wagenheim) saw talking to the dead man. Florey was one of the more visually accomplished genre directors of the period, and he does a fine job arranging the chases and fights in this rapidly paced mystery about enemy spies disguised as carnies.