Tag: action
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FRANCHISE REWIND: Die Hard (1988)
Die Hard, 1988 (Bruce Willis) 20th Century Fox “Now I have a machine gun. Ho ho ho.” Moonlighting in 1984 was like a breath of fresh air in the rapidly stagnating crime-drama genre of television. It was an effortless mix of hot topics and an urbane approach to comedy. Cybill Shepherd played Maddie Hayes, recently…
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FRANCHISE REWIND: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, 2008 (Harrison Ford) Paramount Pictures/Lucasfilm “We seem to have reached the age where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away.” This feels wrong, doesn’t it? There’s something off about a franchise; something that started at the beginning of the 1980s, and here it…
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Vintage Cable Box: “The Road Warrior, 1982”
“You wanna get outta here? You talk to me.” The Road Warrior, 1982 (Mel Gibson), Warner Bros. This is the movie that re-invented the wheel. Australia’s post-apocalyptic wasteland depleted of natural resources serves as the perfect backdrop for director George Miller’s dissection of survival and intelligence. The Road Warrior (aka Mad Mad 2) continues the…
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Extreme Cinema! “Lazarus Has Risen”
Oh my goodness! What are we doing here? Fifteen episodes in, and we’re at a season finale that brings us to William Friedkin. As brilliant a filmmaker he could be, he chose to spend an enormous amount of money (for the time) with Sorceror. Ambitious, beautifully shot, and nearly unmarketable, Sorceror would’ve ruined big budget…
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Extreme Cinema! “I’d Buy That For a Dollar!”
Tonight, we discuss the selected work of Paul Verhoeven, from 1983’s De Vierde Man to his most recent movie, Elle, which earned Isabelle Huppert an Academy Award nomination in 2016. The credits appear to be a fly caught in a web, interspersed with images of Christ on the crucifix. A spider catches the fly and…
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Extreme Cinema! “Inquiring Minds Want To Know”
This is interesting; it’s a VHS dub, Nelson Entertainment, even has the FBI Warning (remember those?) and we have Adam Baldwin and Roy Scheider in Cohen and Tate, music by Bill Conti, and it’s an unusual score, like old time horror, like Dead Heat – that’s what it reminded me of, but first I wanted…
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Extreme Cinema! “Go Ahead, Make My Day!”
Clinton “Clint” Eastwood Jr. (born May 31, 1930) is an American actor, filmmaker, musician, and political figure. After earning success in the Western TV series Rawhide, he rose to international fame with his role as the Man with No Name in Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy of spaghetti Westerns during the 1960s, and as antihero cop…
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Extreme Cinema! “Is It Safe?”
Would ya do me a kindness? Don’t slam the fuckin’ door! So, we usually talk about movie directors on the fringe with their respective peers. The first episode we recorded was about the deceased David A. Prior, low-to-no budget filmmaker, Deadly Prey and The Deadliest Prey. Fred Olen Ray, Mark Goldblatt, Rowdy Herrington. Tonight, we’re…
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Extreme Cinema! “Don’t Use the Same Gun Twice”
Alternate Title: “McNaughton by Nature” Here we are again, nauseating you with another episode of Extreme Cinema – Action and Exploitation movies with Andrew La Ganke and David Lawler. Tonight, my stars, but we have two movies directed by John McNaughton, Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael and How to Make an American Quilt … just joking,…
Misadventures in Blissville 