What cult movies have you been watching lately?

I have only just started this, but I got a laugh out of the director telling Graves his mission and then two minutes later saying, "You figured our your character yet?"

I have only just started this, but I got a laugh out of the director telling Graves his mission and then two minutes later saying, "You figured our your character yet?"

Dude is a quick thinker. How do you think he got that promotion to head the Impossible Missions Force?

Just to play devil's advocate for a moment, if you've been awake long enough -- days, for instance -- you will hallucinate and start acting strange, so in that sense we can probably give it to them.

ILLUSION INFINITY (2004)

Fans of over-the-top psychodrama (like THE ROOM) will "enjoy" this 2004 offering from director Roger Steinman (writer of METALBEAST). Inexplicably popular Las Vegas singer Patricia Paradise (Dee Wallace Stone) wants to give up her career to raise a family with husband Francis (Timothy Bottoms). Everyone else wants her to "Finish the album!" - her husband, who needs cash to pay off his casino debts, her shady manager (Barbara Carrera) with mob ties, and of course her soul-sucking fans. When Francis goes missing and is declared dead, Patricia loses it and is confined to her house under the care of a sadistic nurse (Lilyan Chauvin). She escapes, and here the movie goes off the rails. She is searching for Shangri-La, and keeps meeting strangers that she mistakes for her husband (all played by Bottoms). Martin Kove picks her up roadside and tries to attack her, only to apparently fall off a cliff in the middle of a flat desert. And all the while she has flashbacks to kindly priest Mickey Rooney. Or is he really her guardian angel? Beats me. The whole movie is like an acid trip and makes as much sense.

IMDB has it at 6.8 stars. The ballot box has obviously been stuffed by someone, as 16 of the 30 voters gave it a 10/10 rating. Discounting these votes brings it to 2.7, which is about right. Dee does a near nude scene, and she was in her mid fifties at the time. It has a great closing image - you will want to grab this for your desktop wallpaper. The whole thing gives off a 70s/80s vibe, from the cast to the lackluster full-frame transfer. After watching, send yourself down the rabbit hole by visiting Paradise-Film.com, which claims this is a true story! Available on DVD from Netflix.

This sounds incredible.

"Why the Hell isn't this on DVD yet?" -- Number 75




CITIZEN'S BAND (a.k.a. HANDLE WITH CARE) (1977 Paramount) Starring Paul Le Mat, Candy Clark, Charles Napier, Roberts Blossom, Bruce McGill, Ann Wedgeworth, Alix Elias, Marcia Rodd. Directed by Jonathan Demme.

Interstate trucker Napier (handle: Chrome Angel) has an accident while hauling cattle during a rainstorm in rural Nebraska. His S.O.S. is answered by LeMat (handle: Spider), a local CB repairman and R.E.A.C.T. volunteer on a crusade to prevent FCC violations. LeMat's pet peeve is frivolous use of Channel 9 (by rule reserved for emergencies like Napier's) but his do-gooding isn't limited to public causes. He also buffers tension between his brother McGill (handle: Blood) and their aging father Blossom (handle: Papa Thermodyne) who lives with LeMat but for his cherished air time.

LeMat also learns that his former flame Clark (handle: Electra) is one of those violators he's after, and also that she is now romantically interested in McGill. Meanwhile Napier is convalescing with prostitute Elias (handle: Hot Coffee) when he learns that he has a triangle of his own to resolve: his two wives Rodd (handle: Portland Angel) and Wedgeworth (handle: Dallas Angel) have met and they're both headed to the Cornhusker State.

HANDLE WITH CARE marked Demme's move to Paramount after three exploitation films for Roger Corman's New World. The studio chose to misleadingly market this low-key, quirky ensemble comedy-drama as a redneck drive-in flick to cash in on the CB craze, complete with change in title to CITIZEN'S BAND. In the year of SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT, this deceptive approach led to predictably disappointing box office.

Far from a trucksploitation good ol' boy film, and really not "about" the (alternate) title fad either, HANDLE WITH CARE belongs to a different but still distinctly '70's subgenre. Slice-of-life recognition humor with interweaving plots populated by familiar faces rather than big name stars, with the characters and stories coming together in the final act. Every filmmaker from Altman (NASHVILLE) to Schlesinger (HONKY TONK FREEWAY) seemingly tried one, but Demme perfected it right away with help from the wry screenplay by Paul Brickman (RISKY BUSINESS). More than a study of Citizen's Band enthusiasts, HANDLE WITH CARE explores the use of the public airwaves as escape mechanism by those whose lives could use some spicing up.

They say things on the CB they'd never dream of saying face to face, enjoying the anonymity of their handles the same way many hide behind screen names on the internet today. Several characters figuratively have alter egos, becoming completely different people on their mics. Out of stater Napier goes a step further than the Great Plains locals: with the assistance of his constant travel he literally leads a double life. If HANDLE WITH CARE was remade today, the trucker would probably blame his bigamy on sex addiction and tearfully beg for forgiveness, but refreshingly the filmmakers leave all judgements up to the audience and the ladies in Napier's life.

Subtle but constant evidence abounds indicating the stronghold that CB radio has on everyone's life. Napier's accident is caused when he is distracted by a risque conversation, Blossom (almost mute away from the mic) is so engrossed in chatter that he's oblivious to his near nakedness outside, LeMat destroys private property in the name of protecting regulations, and it is routine for several CB'ers to drive to the outskirts of town to converse in privacy.

Prototypical character actor Napier gives perhaps the film's finest performance in arguably the meatiest role of his career. Already a Russ Meyer regular, Napier became a Demme regular, appearing in ten of the director's films, including PHILADELPHIA, SOMETHING WILD and MELVIN AND HOWARD. In the latter Napier was joined by HANDLE WITH CARE castmate LeMat, who played the put-upon everyman to perfection in both collaborations with Demme and was rewarded with a Golden Globe for the 1980 sleeper.

HANDLE WITH CARE was sadly denied that kind of recognition, and faded from view along with the Citizen's Band radio while its makers went on to bigger and better things, but it is a genial, amusing and consistently perceptive 1970's gem.

So...why isn't this on DVD yet?

The CB theme dated the film fairly quickly, and Paramount's initial marketing campaign was misleading, with alternate title CITIZEN'S BAND meant to cash in on the then-current craze. The alternate titles and lack of box office names didn't help the film's visibility. Also, Paramount is known for dropping the ball on even its popular titles from this period (Exhibit A: LITTLE DARLINGS).

Why it should be on DVD:

Truly undeserving of its obscurity, HANDLE WITH CARE is a real find in Demme's canon, boasting a strong ensemble cast of well-known yet underappreciated character actors, with Napier, Blossom, Elias and LeMat all making strong contributions.

Netflix Instant may have lost a ton of films from Starz last month, but the opportunity to see otherwise rarely seen unsung classics like HANDLE WITH CARE (Netflix has it under the CITIZEN'S BAND title) is why I kept my streaming. Well worth your queue spot.

This post has been edited by Hal Horn on Mar 8 2012, 01:54 PM

DEATH IN SMALL DOSES is filled with great names: besides Mink Reynolds, there's service station owner "Dunc" and early drug casualty "Shug," who flips out during Graves' first day on the job and goes wild with a hook, plus "bennies," "co-pilots," and my favorite, "happy pills." Then you've got Connors calling Graves "dad" and acting/dancing like Steve Martin's wild 'n' crazy guy. And Mara Powers' hilarious final scene with Graves, plus one of the greatest opening cards ever (the movie doesn't want "to minimize the importance of the drug Amphetamine"), and plenty of 50's jukebox dancing. Lots to like here, if only Graves wasn't so wallpaper.

Just finished this one and agree that the best reason to watch this is Connors' performance. Man, was he great. From his first scene to the Bennie-fueled fist fight, he was wired. I love that partying hard in the 1950s involved hanging out with hot broads and a dude with a ukulele. I also love that despite getting into a brawl and being in a straight jacket that Connors' hair still retains its perfect form.

"Why did you bring this people here?!" Peter Graves is such a square. Like so many anti-drug movies, DEATH IN SMALL DOSES sure makes speed look awesome.

Since I finally got a scanner and can scan my old photos into the computer now, I dug out some of the photos I took of 42nd Street and scanned them. I'll be doing an occasional series on 42nd Street and Times Square theaters on my blog (link in my signature). The first entry is about LAST ACTION HERO and its use of 42nd Street as background for several scenes. I use some of the photos I took of the street when it was tricked up with fake marquee titles for the shoot.

Here's a teaser:

THE MAN WHO DIDN'T WANT TO DIE (1988) - So-so TV thriller from Lamberto Bava. A group of thieves rob a house for a rich old lady, who comes in and marks the art pieces she wants with chalk. Gianetto figures he will make a little extra on the deal by cutting Renoir painting out of the frame and hiding it in a work shed. He is exceedingly greedy in his vices too, trying to rape one of the hostages and getting his head kicked in by another hostage. Seemingly brain dead, the group drop his body in a forest, but he recovers and they all start to freak out because they think he will talk to the cops. Oh jeez, where to start with this one. The biggest mistake is that Bava somehow wants the audience to have a vested interest in the survival of a guy who rapes a woman in the first 15 minutes. Kinda hard for me to root for him when he cowers in fear under a hospital bed when the ringleader is looking for him. Also, you have to love the notion of a lunkhead thug thinking he will somehow unload a Renoir painting on the black market. There are a couple of stylish murders, but that is really all this has going for it.

MESSENGER OF DEATH (1988) - Charles Bronson's penultimate '80s Cannon vehicle is a mostly low-key, change-of-pace mystery. 67-year-old Bronson is crusading Denver newspaper reporter Garrett Smith, who finds himself in the middle of a war between two feuding Mormon brothers (Jeff Corey, John Ireland), but it's really all part of a nefarious water company's plot to gain access to an artesian well on Ireland's property. MESSENGER OF DEATH ambles along and is rather slowly-paced and predictable (never trust a prominently-billed, recognizable actor who doesn't have much to do with the plot), but Bronson makes it enjoyable entertainment.

The star had remained busy throughout the decade (teaming up once again with his favorite '80s director J. Lee Thompson) but as the '80s came to a close, his films became less popular, especially in the wake of big-budget hits like LETHAL WEAPON and DIE HARD. Even Clint Eastwood vehicles were underperforming during this period and he was a decade younger than Bronson. Younger audiences weren't really interested in Bronson films directed by a 74-year-old Thompson, just as older folks who might like a cozy Bronson mystery were likely turned off by all the violence and sleaze in most of his films. The R-rated MESSENGER tones much of that down (not as much as 1987's PG-13-rated ASSASSINATION), with a few bits of gunshot splatter and an occasional "bastard" and "son-of-a-bitch" and one late F-bomb from the bad guy, and feels a lot like the TV movies Bronson would do in the '90s that would represent his final work. Bronson only fires a gun once in MESSENGER, and it's at an empty casket so he can prove no one's inside of it (I don't know why he couldn't just, you know, open it). All that, plus a cast filled with aging character actors (Corey, Ireland), and familiar TV faces (Laurence Luckinbill, Marilyn Hassett, Charles Dierkop, Don Kennedy, plus Daniel Benzali, Bronson's now-clothed 10 TO MIDNIGHT co-star Gene Davis, and a completely underutilized Trish Van Devere), meant that there wasn't much of a chance for MESSENGER OF DEATH in theaters, and it died a quick death. Bronson and Thompson had the much more typically trashy KINJITE: FORBIDDEN SUBJECTS out in theaters five months later and it did just as poorly, and Bronson was effectively done in theatrical features except for a small character role in Sean Penn's THE INDIAN RUNNER (1991) and a one-shot return to his vigilante schtick in 1994's DEATH WISH V: THE FACE OF DEATH.

MESSENGER OF DEATH is hardly top-drawer Bronson, but looking it again 23 years later (I haven't seen it since renting the VHS when it came out) and far removed from the "Bronson just makes the same tired movie over and over again" criticisms, it's not all that bad. Slight and forgettable, yes...but even in B fare like this, Bronson was still The Man, and the Cannon intro always pleases my sentimental side.

Yeah, you're basically right. MESSENGER OF DEATH is a solid action film with an unusual setting and an interesting supporting cast, but it doesn't quite come together satisfactorily.  Bronson is a passive observer this time out, fighting only when attacked.  He doesn't ferret out the identities of the baddies on his own and plays little part in their apprehension.  He does battle with a trio of water trucks, a chase nicely staged by Thompson, but even there, Bronson is the victim.  Paul Jarrico's screenplay doesn't completely hold water (pardon the pun), and his climax feels like an extended episode of MURDER, SHE WROTE, as all the red herrings gather in a parlor waiting to be identified by a convenient witness.  The Colorado locations and Robert O. Ragland's score add some novelty, but there isn't much here to distinguish it from most of Bronson's other Cannon pictures.  It opens powerfully enough and dabbles in themes of religious persecution and revenge, but devolves into a TV-movie. 

Look closely, and you'll see a truck explode just a moment too soon, before a semi smashes into it.  Oops.

FIVE GOLDEN DRAGONS (1967) - another case of intrigue and adventure in exotic locales courtesy of producer Harry Alan Towers, this time directed by Jeremy Summers. Bob Cummings is the everyman who finds himself in the wrong place (Hong Kong) at the wrong time and gets dragged into a web of murder and globespanning organised crime.

The film opens with one of the best unintentionally hilarious dummy-falling-from-a-great-height moments I've seen and together with a similar incident later on when a man is thrown to his death accompanied by comedy sound effects it sums up the uneven tone of this film perfectly. A lot of the intended humour falls flat (almost all of it in fact) while the best laughs come from the dated shortcoming of the film as mentioned above.

The real weak link is Cummings though. There's a guest cast including Klaus Kinski, Maria Rohm and Christopher Lee among others and frankly I spent the whole film wishing any one of them would just off the "hero" of the story as soon as possible. The camp mugging by Cummings gets extremely tired very quickly and his smartalecky wisecracks are not remotely funny. Like a cross between Cary Grant and Jerry Lewis but without the wit or charm of either, his presence derails the film from the moment he appears.

I cannot remember the last time I was more irritated by a film's protagonist than I was by this guy. The most punchable movie hero I can remember, turns a fairly average pulp thriller into a really bad one.

That sounds like just about every Bob Cummings performance I've seen, though I do like his TWILIGHT ZONE guest appearance quite a bit.

WHITE PHANTOM (1987)—Directed by Dusty Nelson. Stars Bo Svenson, Jay Roberts Jr., Page Leong, Jimmy Lee. Ninjas hijack a truck carrying weapons grade plutonium that is guarded by just one man—the driver—who is easily subdued in about .2428 seconds. On the case is Colonel Slater (Svenson), who appears to be based in China, even though the hijacked truck had California plates. Slater blackmails Mei Lin (Leong), a dancer and the girlfriend of chief hood Hanzo (Lee), into helping him retrieve the plutonium from Hanzo’s Sakura crime family (spelled “famliy” here). The real hero of WHITE PHANTOM, however, is Willi (Roberts), an obnoxious American who digs drinking, hookers, and the harmonica (Roberts fakes the playing badly). Willi is a Yankees fan, which is obvious shorthand for “this guy is an entitled American jagoff.” Occasionally, a masked white ninja pops up to beat on some Sakura hoods. For some reason, director Nelson treats this like a big mystery, as if we’ll never figure out the ninja’s identity. If you’re in the mood to laugh at a terrible movie about ninjas, WHITE PHANTOM will do, though I can think of many others that will do the trick even better. The script is a mess; it certainly isn’t explained why the theft of material capable of destroying an entire city is being investigated by just a colonel and a stripper. Roberts is one of the least appealing leading men I’ve ever seen, and the film’s attempt to weave together its parallel storylines involving him and Svenson makes no sense. At least Nelson knows to end the picture with a taciturn hand-to-hand fight between white ninja and black ninja. I really don’t know why Svenson is in this, unless it was the free vacation.

SUMMER LOVE (1958)—Directed by Charles Haas. Stars John Saxon, Judi Meredith, Molly Bee, Rod McKuen, Jill St. John, John Wilder. Young John Saxon (then 22 years old) and many other cast members returned for this tame Universal-International sequel to ROCK, PRETTY BABY. Henry Mancini was a composer of the original songs, and it’s weird to see noted poet and musician McKuen (who composed a calypso song for the movie) playing one of Saxon’s combo. Jimmy Daley (Saxon) and his band get a month-long gig playing at a summer camp, but they arrive to find out they’re just playing on weekends and expected to perform menial jobs the other five days. Voomy Erica Landis (teenage St. John) causes tension within the band by flirting with drummer Mike (Wilder) and scheming to steal Jimmy from his girlfriend Joan (Meredith). Of course, Mike and Joan conspire to make their squeezes jealous. That plan always works, right? Songs include “Beatin’ on the Bongos,” “Ding-A-Ling,” and “Calypso Rock.” Rock-and-roll has never been squeakier. Meredith later co-starred with Saxon in QUEEN OF BLOOD. Fay Wray (KING KONG) and Edward Platt (GET SMART) return from ROCK, PRETTY BABY as Saxon’s parents with Shelley Fabares (THE DONNA REED SHOW) and George Winslow (a bad kid actor) also back as his younger siblings. Also with Gordon Gebert, Bob Courtney, Beverly Washburn, and Troy Donahue as Daley’s sax player. Filmed around Big Bear Lake and Lake Arrowhead, California.

I still need to get around to FIVE GOLDEN DRAGONS in the Netflix queue. Cummings' best film work came before his TV fame, notably in KING'S ROW, REIGN OF TERROR and SABOTEUR.

I wrote the following on his best-known role for his 100th birthday a few years back:

http://hornsection.blogspot.com/2008/06/so...-his-100th.html

I still need to get around to FIVE GOLDEN DRAGONS in the Netflix queue. Cummings' best film work came before his TV fame, notably in KING'S ROW, REIGN OF TERROR and SABOTEUR.

I wrote the following on his best-known role for his 100th birthday a few years back:

http://hornsection.blogspot.com/2008/06/so...-his-100th.html

I still say BEACH PARTY is Cummings' best. He's got both Annette Funicello and Dorothy Malone pursuing him--and he was 55 at the time!

BTW, why are there only three topics visible on this board?

This post has been edited by Brian Camp on Mar 19 2012, 06:22 PM