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Troll

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No one got more mileage out of Gremlins rip-offs than producer Charles Band. His low-budget kingdom was practically built on pint-sized terrors like Dolls, Demonic Toys, Ghoulies and the undying Puppet Master franchise. 1986’s Troll came along relatively early in the pipeline, securing a theatrical release, an unexpectedly stacked cast and a slightly larger budget. But, not to worry, it’s still primarily a showcase for director John Carl Buechler’s army of misfit muppets who straddle the line between kids’ fare and bargain-bin body horror. After they move into their new apartment, the Potters are introduced to a quirky cast of neighbors: a pathetic swinger (Sonny Bono), ex-marine (Gary Sandy of WKRP ), aspiring actors (real life couple Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Brad Hall) and one mysterious old lady on the top floor (June Lockhart) with a talking mushroom on her armoire. All of them are at the mercy of a troll who has taken on the human form of the Potters’ daughter and proceeds ...
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Magnificent Bodyguards in 3D

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If you think collecting physical media has become a niche hobby, consider 3D Blu-ray which now accounts for well under 1% of the home video market. But for a format that was almost doomed from the get-go thanks to incompatible equipment, competing TV manufacturers and pricey glasses, there are still a few die-hards hanging in there thanks to used gear on Facebook Marketplace and a scattering of pre-owned titles. And every so often a new title is added to the dwindling library that saves one more film from extinction. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Jackie Chan’s Magnificent Bodyguards …in 3D! Gathering a team of martial arts experts to escort a critically ill patient via sedan chair through a bandit-filled mountain pass, Ting Chung (Jackie Chan) pledges to make the journey in three days, refusing payment for personal reasons. His compatriots also have their own agendas, but serve as protectors against a series of threats and ambushes that inevitably lead them toward the King of th...
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La Tete contre les Murs (Head Against the Wall)

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As a subset of the prison movie, the asylum scenario plays with even higher stakes. Remember poor McMurphy at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ? In cinematic terms, institutionalization does more than take away your freedom, it destroys your soul. Consider director Georges Franju’s 1959 La Tete contre les Murs (Head Against the Wall) that turns your average juvenile delinquent into a dispirited husk all to save a father’s reputation and a psychiatrist’s ego. Francois Gerane (Jean-Pierre Mocky) is the son of a wealthy attorney who has never forgiven his father for his mother’s suicide…if it really was suicide. After a family confrontation, Francois is committed to a private mental institution under the care of Dr. Varmont (Pierre Brasseur) whose old-school techniques ensure the patients are kept removed from polite society. Francois’ only hope lies in Dr. Emery (Paul Meurisse), a progressive expert in the field, and Stephanie (Anouk Aimee), a spontaneous love interest wh...
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Aesthetics of a Bullet

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By now North American audiences have more than wetted their appetite for the once obscure yakuza films of Japan. We’ve all seen enough to know what to expect, the historical background that empowered gangsters in post-WW2 black markets and the flexible code of honor that guided their conduct. But what we really haven’t seen is a reaction to the films that made them such endearing anti-heroes in the first place. That’s where Sadao Nakajima’s 1973 Aesthetics of a Bullet comes in. Kiyoshi Koike (Tsunehiko Watase) is a broke, desperate loser when he’s selected by the Tenyu clan to start trouble in Miyazaki, the better to justify an all-out war with a rival clan when he’s killed in retribution. Given a gun and one-million yen, Kiyoshi eagerly plays the part of a “made-man,” but he’s too much of a coward to actually pull the trigger. Instead he enjoys all the benefits of his newfound authority (women, booze, hotel suites) while the Miyazaki clan coddles him until reinforcements arrive. ...
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Solo

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The French New Wave never really produced an answer to the American crime film. Sure, Jean-Luc Godard gave us cool criminals in sunglasses and François Truffaut flirted with noir from time to time, but neither seemed particularly interested in the mechanics of crime itself. In Solo (1970) Jean-Pierre Mocky, isn’t really interested either. He takes a familiar policier framework and infects it with the bitterness, paranoia and political disillusionment that lingered in France after the failed social revolution of May 1968. The result is one of the strangest crime films of the era: part thriller, part political satire and part existential hangover. Vincent Cabral (Mocky), a violinist, womanizer and occasional jewel thief, returns to France only to discover that his younger brother has become involved with a radical revolutionary group responsible for a string of assassinations targeting wealthy members of the bourgeoisie. As police and terrorists close in on one another, Vincent finds hi...
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Marlowe (1969)

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Although he spent years playing PI Jim Rockford on TV’s The Rockford Files , actor James Garner isn’t exactly the first actor that you’d associate with the term “hardboiled.” Raymond Chandler’s famous private detective Phillip Marlowe had already been played definitively by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Slee p (1946) and briefly by Dick Powell in the POV mystery Murder, My Sweet (1944). But Garner fills the shoes quite well in this modernized script that mixes Chandler’s acid-tongued banter with blackmail, hippies and late-‘60s weirdness. The plot of Marlowe is as convoluted as Chandler devotees would expect. Marlowe is hired to track down a missing person, who turns out to be in possession of some naughty negatives that, if released, would ruin the career of a famous TV star. But each clue seems to uncover another corpse, each sporting an ice pick in the back of the neck. And Marlowe’s clients aren’t talking, which begs the question, is he protecting the wrong person? Garner’s easygo...
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Wake in Fright 4K UHD

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“World-building” has been a trendy cinematic term for the last decade. But what director Ted Kotcheff accomplishes in Wake in Fright (1971) is somehow more impressive than the fantastic geography of Middle Earth or the alien jungles of Pandora. He makes a spot right on our own planet look almost completely unrecognizable; not through the use of special effects or elaborate production design, but because every sweat-soaked square inch of Bundanyabba, a fictional backwater mining town in the Australian outback, feels like it belongs to a civilization operating by its own bizarre and unsettling rules. John Grant (Gary Bond) is a young schoolteacher posted at the edge of nowhere, anxious to return to Sydney for his holiday break. But those plans are waylaid when he winds up stranded in “The Yabba” (as locals affectionately call it) after losing his travel money on a gambling binge. John is taken in by an array of local characters who lead him on an alcohol-fueled bender, testing his m...
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