Movieline Online

Despite a healthy homegrown film industry in the ‘50s and ‘60s, Japan became beholden to Hollywood imports during the blockbuster years of the 1970s. With Jaws topping the box-office in 1976, struggling Toei studios adopted a “if-you-can’t-beat-em-join-em” mentality and drew inspiration from Rocky to produce its own version of an underdog fighter training his way to the top. 1977’s The Boxer might have begun life riding the coattails of the Italian Stallion but director Shuji Terayama ensures there’s enough originality here to go the full ten rounds. Tetsuo Tenma (Kentaro Shimizu) is a club-footed wannabe who’s reached a personal low. Responsible for the accidental death of a co-worker, who just so happened to be the fiancé of the women he loved, his boxing career is going nowhere when he petitions Terayama (Bunta Sugawara), the brother of the man he killed, to train him. The unlikely duo win a few matches and set their sights on the Rookie of the Year match. But the psycholog...

The “Antonioni effect” is on full display in 1971’s The Double , a decidedly non-linear pseudo-giallo that ends where it begins and challenges the audience to sort out everything in-between. Even though Blow Up was five years in the rear-view mirror, Italian cinema was still hopped up on artistic pretensions, most of which would be swapped out for exported box-office appeal in the coming decade. But director Romolo Guerrieri’s film is still somewhat essential viewing for fans with that “gotta-watch-em-all” mentality. A selfish, trust-fund playboy, Frank (Jean Sorel) is second-guessing his marriage to Lucia (Eva Aulin) when her mother, Nora (Lucia Bose) enters the scene. Instantly infatuated, Frank’s oedipal impulses wreak havoc during their trip to Morrocco and the troubles follow them home to Rome, where a free-wheeling hippie acquaintance creates a dangerous love triangle. Following the structure of a jet-set gialli but leaning far more towards psychological angst, The Double ’s ...

Author Donald E. Westlake was a crime-fiction superstar long before the “airport lounge” era of contemporary giants like James Patterson and Lee Child. Far from disposable entertainment, Westlake’s books (especially those written under his nom de plume Richard Stark) had a flair for criminal camaraderie and the rare ability to make readers feel like they were in on the job. His signature character, Parker, has been brought to the screen no less than seven times, but 1973’s The Outfit comes closest to capturing the hard, no-nonsense spirit of the books. Fresh out of a short prison stretch, Macklin (Robert Duvall) is fingered for a hit by the crime syndicate who owned the bank he robbed two years prior. Successfully avoiding the best efforts of top boss Mailer (Robert Ryan) to put him underground, Macklin proposes a deal: 250K and everything is forgotten. But one double-cross and several botched assassination attempts later, Macklin takes on the entire outfit to even the scales once...

The evolution of sci-fi from whiz-bang space operas to eco-spiritual odysseys and back again is a fascinating bit of cinematic history. But Kubrick’s 2001 wasn’t created in a vacuum; sci-fi authors themselves had evolved from futuristic prognostication to a more inward, cosmic exploration. Too deep for you? Well, it was a pretty short run until Star Wars put everything back on track. But it left audiences with more than a few socioeconomic warnings to enjoy like 1973's Soylent Green . Based on Harry Harrison’s dystopian detective novel entitled Make Room! Make Room! , the film completes Charlton Heston’s unofficial science-fiction trifecta. He plays Thorn, a cop barely scraping by in a world on the brink of ecological collapse. While Thorn handles the legwork involving the murder of a high-profile executive, his researcher, Sol Roth, (Edward G. Robinson) uncovers a conspiracy involving the latest batch of synthetic food, Soylent Green. Living off the scraps of the one-per...

Nervous breakdown. Emotional collapse. Or straight-up freak-out. Whatever you want to call it, most of us are only one heated argument, one unexpected traffic jam or one bad meal away from blowing our top. So 1993’s Falling Down has only become more relevant in a society where it seems only those who scream the loudest get any attention. But director Joel Schumacher’s film is a bit more troublesome than that, delivering a mixed-message of justified racial intolerance and vigilantism that are at odds with its cathartic tendencies. Still…it’s an undeniable attention grabber! Micheal Douglas plays a nameless desk jockey who abandons his car in the middle of traffic and walks through one angry misadventure after another while en route to the home of his ex-wife (Barbara Hershey) to celebrate his child’s birthday. Meanwhile, Lt. Prendergast (Robert Duvall) is trying to coast through his last day on the job when the string of incidents begin to add up. Tracking the suspect’s movements...

By the end of the ‘60s, westerns had become truly international. German, Italian, French and Spanish co-productions offered up a grittier version of the Old West than Hollywood could muster at the time. But even European filmmakers knew front-loading your movie with familiar faces meant more worldwide box-office appeal. Which leads us to 1971’s Red Sun , an all-star high-concept affair starring Charles Bronson, Alain Delon, Ursula Andress and Toshiro Mifune in an East-meets-West adventure that attempts to match the U.S. “event movie” vibe with all the sex and violence of European sensibilities. Forced into helping a samurai (Mifune) retrieve a stolen sword, Link (Bronson) heads off in pursuit of his former partner (Delon) who cheated him out of the proceeds of a recent train heist. Their only lead is Cristina (Andress), Gauche’s lover, who is coerced into joining them in pursuit of the loot…and the Emperor’s missing katana. Directed in rather bland style by Bond veteran Terence Yo...

Even the most rabid kung-fu fans can get exhausted from time to time. Punch, kick, tumble, twirl. Yes, it’s all elegantly choreographed and professionally executed. But wouldn’t it be cool if, like, one guy had a necklace of skulls that transformed into blood-sucking devil spawn? Then say hello to The Nine Demons , director Chang Cheh’s 1984 occult-action film that reunites most of the original Venom Mob for a distinctly outre martial arts entry that wraps horror embellishments around a sturdy wuxia frame. After selling his soul to bring his best friend back from the dead, the next item on Joey’s (Tien-Chi Cheng) agenda is revenge upon his enemies. Backed up by a posse of child demons and one hot witch, Demon Joey goes on the warpath, unleashing his supernatural fury on the baddies who killed his father and any unlucky bystanders. But his dark side is soothed by a love interest who knows there’s a good man in there somewhere. The question is, does selling your soul have a 30-day...

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 ...

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...

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...

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. ...

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...

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...

“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...

What makes Jackie Chan so compelling isn’t how he throws a punch…but how he takes one. Bruce Lee famously refused to lose any of his onscreen battles, projecting a stoic, serious take on martial arts that always kept a straight face. Meanwhile, Jackie is beaten to a pulp in nearly every one of his films, stretching his mug into comedic poses that would make Jim Carrey proud. It’s apples to oranges, but it didn’t happen overnight. In fact, it wasn’t until the early ‘90s that Jackie’s particular brand of action-comedy broke into the American mainstream with Rumble in the Bronx making a big impression during the Sundance midnight screenings. Now Arrow Video has scooped up six of those flicks from his glory days as part of a superb collection called Jackie Chan’s Breakout Hits! Here’s where we’d normally go through the plot of each film, analyze the action sequences, praise the co-stars, fight choreographers and stuntmen. But at this stage of his career, Jackie was a brand unto hims...

While collaborations with director Martin Scorsese helped establish Robert De Niro's onscreen persona, his cinematic career began several years before Mean Streets and Taxi Driver ever hit screens. In fact, his early work with director Brian De Palma reveals an actor almost fully-developed from the very beginning, working with the same level of disturbing intensity and charismatic appeal. Simply put: the camera loves him. But in films like Greetings and its sequel, Hi, Mom! , De Palma's camera takes a far more scattershot approach than his later Hitchcock-inspired genre work. Jon Rubin (De Niro), a wannabe filmmaker and full-time voyeur, returns from Vietnam and hooks up with a sleazy producer (Allen Garfield) who sees the pornography potential. However, Jon's life (and the film) takes a drastic shift into radicalization as he falls in with a left-wing theater group promoting the "Black Experience." From this point, De Palma's film becomes a POV politi...

It’s misleading to say that film noir is “in” when it really hasn’t disappeared from pop culture since taking post-WWII Hollywood by storm. The cynical worldview, pessimistic characters and shadowy visual aesthetic inherent in the genre haven’t aged a day. Newbies can get a good education by tuning into Noir Alley on Turner Classic Movies every Saturday night where host Eddie Muller smothers you in behind-the-scenes stories and production anecdotes. Or you can take the do-it-yourself route and watch this film noir classics double feature from VCI Entertainment featuring D.O.A. (1949) and Borderline (1950). While sowing his wild oats on a trip to San Francisco, horny accountant Frank Bigelow is slipped a dose of “luminous toxin,” leaving him with only a few days to figure out who, what, where, when and why. It’s a crackerjack concept that’s been lifted for countless ticking-clock thrillers, pulling our protagonist (played by a terrific Edmond O’Brien) into a complicated conspira...

So what’s it gonna take to put you into a new movie today? Honestly, for most physical media fans, there’s no arm twisting necessary. Even if, as in the case of The Himalayan (1976), it’s not an essential piece of cinema history, the urge to “get-em-all” is pretty hard to resist. And this Golden Harvest production adds a few wrinkles that make it just unique enough to pull the trigger. Hatching a scheme to wed his half-brother to the daughter of a wealthy Tibetan landowner, Kao Chu (Chan Sing) winds up using a body-double to finish the job then backstabbing his way up the family ladder. Meanwhile, poor Ching Lam (Angela Mao) is framed for adultery and must join forces with her childhood crush (Dorian Tan) to learn the mysterious Mi style of martial arts and get revenge. A busy man during Golden Harvest’s early years, Wong Fung wasn’t the studio’s most innovative director but he certainly knew what Angela Mao was capable of. Even though she’s second billed, the actress still domina...

Time travel movies usually ask big philosophical questions. G.I. Samurai (1979) asks a much more important one: if a modern military platoon got sent back to the feudal era, how long would it take before someone fired a bazooka at a horse? The answer is: not long at all. Directed by Kosei Saito, this wonderfully violent Japanese cult film crashes a convoy of Japan Self-Defense Force soldiers into the Warring States era after a fog-covered supernatural event. Suddenly, tanks, helicopters and machine guns are sharing the battlefield with samurai swords, flaming arrows and warlords who react to modern technology with the same excitement and terror most people have trying to pair their new Bluetooth headphones. GI Samurai treats its high-concept setup with just enough seriousness to drop a few moral and philosophical nuggets on historical and modern Japanese aggression. One minute, soldiers are debating the ethics of interfering with history. The next, someone’s mowing down cavalry with ...

Every decade or so Hollywood declares an arms race. “Gentlemen, we simply MUST make our devastating volcano/killer asteroid/underwater monster movie before they do!” And it’s great fun to watch studios take a crack and the same material from sometimes radically different angles. In the early ‘80s it was the super vehicle trend. Clint Eastwood’s Firefox (1982) revolved around the theft of a hypersonic Russian jet armed with advanced thought controls. But 1983’s Blue Thunder stuck closer to home – Los Angeles, to be precise - with a rogue cop uncovering a domestic conspiracy after hijacking a military super chopper. Murphy (Roy Scheider) is a stoic police pilot who still struggles with his ‘Nam flashbacks and hints of paranoia. But just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you! In this case it’s Colonel Cochrane (Malcolm McDowell) who's knee-deep in a plot to deploy military-grade weaponry to suppress potential insurrection…personal privacy and civi...

Visual Vengeance is back with, well, with a vengeance. Their latest trio of discoveries feels less like a curated collection (they’re each sold separately, by the way) than a transmission from an alternate universe where regional horror, backyard martial arts movies and late-night cable access television evolved into the dominant media species. Fungicide (2002) is the sort of movie that could only emerge from the 2000s DIY horror boom, where digital cameras, fake blood and a few free weekends resulted in a full-blown creature-feature spoof about carnivorous mushrooms. At least director Dave Wascavage has a sense of humor about the whole thing, bringing his monsters to life with sock puppets and spirit glue, interrupted by some early CGI work. It’s too long by a good half hour, but still earned itself a slot on RiffTrax , which is included as a special feature. The Screaming (2002) gets bonus points for skewering Scientology before it was trendy. Indoctrinated into Crystalnetics b...

Beginnings are tricky. Is it better to peak early or set yourself up for the long haul? When it comes to Golden Harvest, formed by three veterans of the well-established Shaw Brothers studio, the trick wasn’t topping their rival studio right out of the gate, but establishing a more talent-friendly home base to build upon. And their first two productions – 1970’s The Angry River and The Invincible Eight – might have lost the battle…but won the war. The Angry River leans into wuxia fantasy territory, overstuffed with myths, monsters and all the trappings of a Nordic fairy tale. It even does the unthinkable: sidelining star Angela Mao as a damsel in distress after trading her skills to save her sick father. It’s a rush of ideas and genres that never quite clicks but always entertains, even when switching protagonists at the halfway point. Meanwhile, The Invincible Eight pivots to straightforward swordplay, gathering a team of fighters for a “Men on a Mission” adventure to settle an ...

Celebrity romances are basically modern fairy tales, swapping out castles for press junkets, princes for movie stars and happily ever after for an obligatory producer’s credit. Romancing in Thin Air (2012) plays in the same space at Notting Hill , where fame is a roadblock to true love onscreen and off. It’s all very meta. And director Johnnie To takes things a step further with a movie within a movie third act that nudges his characters toward a make or break reunion. After being dumped at the altar, mononymous superstar Michael (Louis Koo) flees to a secluded mountain resort hoping to escape inside a bottle. But Sue (Sammi Cheng) puts him to work as a replacement for her missing husband who disappeared in the nearby woods seven years earlier. Their meet-cute relationship continues along predictable lines, even after Michael discovers she’s a founding member of his fan club. But the ghost of her husband – and his celebrity obligations - keep their love affair from truly blossomi...

Even in 1997, cinematic serial killers were a dime a dozen. And while the influence of S ilence of the Lambs looms large over director Scott Reynold’s The Ugly - introducing another caged psychotic whose methods and motivation are put under the microscope by an ambitious psychiatrist - the film makes a concerted effort to put a new twist on the story using clever camera tricks and a dislocated narrative that bends reality…and expectations. Staging her interview in a stylized asylum, Dr. Karen Schumaker (Rebecca Hobbs) hopes to get something out of killer Simon Cartwright (Paolo Rotondo) that his own doctor hasn’t managed to do in six years. Simon’s abusive childhood and learning disability seem like obvious red flags, but his scarred self-image and mysterious voices pile one causality atop another. And after Karen starts seeing her patient popping up in her weakened subconscious, there doesn’t seem to be anyeasy explanation for his madness. Full of consciously inventive camerawor...

Blessed be the tastemakers! All due respect to those leaning on Letterboxd, but it’s boutique physical media companies like Visual Vengeance that are really introducing fans to films they might have otherwise overlooked. And in the case of their latest trio of titles, films even their creators never expected to debut in such extravagant special editions. Tapping into that specific strain of low-budget ambition, Saurians (1994) has the kind of earnestness that’s too hard to fake. Filmmaker Mark Polonia shoots for Jurassic Park -level action using a blend of stop motion, hand puppets and oversize models...all on Super 8. But it’s the awkward dubbing, sleepy acting and hammy dialogue that will be most appealing to fans of homemade cinema. Saurians is cringey in the best possible way, but Polonia stays fully committed to the idea he’s making something special. And, in that respect, he succeeds. Colony Mutation (1988) lifts its inspiration from the work of David Cronenberg, whos...

Fans of ’50 and ‘60s sci-fi monster movies are a dying breed. In the CGI age, does anyone have patience for rubber suits, cosmic rays and scenes filmed in rented trailers passing themselves off as mission control? I’m willing to bet there are a few of us left tracking down unseen gems like The Crawling Hand and The Slime People now out on a remastered Blu-ray double-feature courtesy of VCI Entertainment. It looks like a bargain bin special, but the 4K scans from the original negative say otherwise. In The Crawling Hand (1963), the severed arm of an infected astronaut washes up on a California beach where the microorganisms inside infect an ambitious college student. Meanwhile, the hand itself skitters away from a pair of scientists and the local sheriff (Alan “Skipper” Hale, Jr.) as they attempt to solve a string of mysterious strangulations. Well, duh! Taking a fairly serious approach to the low-budget material, director Herbert L. Strock was no stranger to the teenage horror m...

The catchphrase for ‘70s cinema was ambiguity . Not that David Lynch nonsense that leaves every scene open to interpretation, but the sort of morally murky, post-Watergate cynicism where the answers matter less than the questions they leave behind. Cutter’s Way was actually released in 1981, but it’s soaked in the neo-noir of Chinatown , the bleach-blond decay of Shampoo and the lazy disillusionment of Five Easy Pieces . So much so that when director Ivan Passer wrings it out to dry, the movie leaves its audience just as spiritually empty. Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges) is a layabout lothario who happens to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. After witnessing a murder, he casually identifies the suspect as one of the Santa Barbara elite, a man above reproach and, perhaps, above the law. Bone is happy to leave well enough alone, but his friend, Alex Cutter (John Heard), a disfigured and disillusioned Vietnam vet, sees an opportunity to dispense justice and make some money at th...

Director Damiano Damiani has built a career on corruption. Not the obvious, everyday swindlers, but the insidious variety that seeps into government institutions and can’t be removed without killing the host. In 1971’s Confessions of a Police Captain, he reunites with Franco Nero and Martin Balsam in a dissection of the Italian justice system, staging a chess match in which the rules were fixed before the game began. Captain Bonavia (Balsam) is the experienced cop who understands there is more than one way to get your man. District Attorney Traini (Nero) is his naïve counterpart, shocked at the suggestion of city officials working with mafiosos to line both their pockets. They approach the same case from different angles as the pressure to take down a dirty land developer ruffles feathers in the underworld and the judicial bench. The chess match metaphor is particularly relevant to Bonavia and Traini’s relationship. In a rare leading role, Balsam excels as the jaded mentor who has...