Partners (1982)

A 92-minute gay panic joke, PARTNERS put a pin in Ryan O’Neal’s career as a leading man. After a string of flops (anyone remember GREEN ICE, SO FINE, or OLIVER’S STORY?), O’Neal hit a wall with this regressive comedy that not only failed to click with both critics and audiences, but also offended nearly everyone who saw it with its homophobia. Even in 1982, the film’s bad taste was obvious to everyone except Paramount Pictures.

The only feature directed by television legend James Burrows, whose career ranges from THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW to WILL & GRACE, PARTNERS treats homosexuals as if they’re aliens from another planet. References are made to “their stores” and “their restaurants,” as if gay people don’t shop and eat in the same places straight people do. Gays are portrayed in PARTNERS either as mincing queens who will screw anybody who asks or violent psychopaths. Or in the case of John Hurt’s character, fussbudgets who cook and clean and listen to 1940s music while sipping tea.

The humor, such as it is, in the screenplay by Francis Veber (LA CAGE AUX FOLLES) is centered around the odd coupling of macho Homicide detective Benson (O’Neal) and closeted records clerk Kerwin (John Hurt, just off THE ELEPHANT MAN), who are assigned to investigate the murder of a cover model on a gay magazine. Their gruff boss (Kenneth McMillan) forces them to move in together and pretend to be a couple. One would think driving around Los Angeles in a pink Volkswagen is bad strategy when working undercover, but who am I to argue with Kenneth McMillan?

The only fun in PARTNERS is O’Neal’s obvious discomfort knowing he’s in a career-killing turkey. You can almost smell the flop sweat. Though none of PARTNERS is funny — or maybe because none of it is funny — Burrows makes the odd choice to basically chuck the comedy heading into the third act and concentrate on the mystery angle, which is ludicrous. The cops spend precious little time investigating, and the clues are designed to get super-straight O’Neal into wacky gay situations instead of solving a case. It’s clear the filmmakers put little thought into who the serial killer is or the motivation for the murders.

To give the film some credit, Hurt plays his role sympathetically, as if he’s actually in a drama about a gay man in an unrequited relationship. O’Neal’s character faces his own prejudices after getting up close to the same cruel treatment Hurt’s character and other gays live with every day. Oddly, Burrows later directed two television sitcoms titled PARTNERS, but neither was related to this film.

The Tall Texan

The same year Elmo Williams won an Academy Award for editing HIGH NOON, he made his directing debut with another western, which was partially filmed at City of Rocks State Park in New Mexico. Hiring a trio of then-blacklisted performers — Lloyd Bridges (SEA HUNT), Lee J. Cobb (OUR MAN FLINT), Luther Adler (D.O.A.) — as well as Marie Windsor (THE NARROW MARGIN), all of whom shared an agent, Williams shot THE TALL TEXAN in eight days with Elizabeth Reinhardt (LAURA) typing new dialogue during production.

With its genesis in an original screenplay by Sam Roeca (ANGEL BABY), THE TALL TEXAN stars Bridges as a convicted murderer being escorted by sheriff Samuel Herrick to an El Paso prison aboard a covered wagon. The wagon is attacked by Indians, who kill one of the passengers and overturn the wagon. Stranded in the desert without horses, Bridges, Herrick, and the other survivors, who include sea captain Cobb, Eastern widow Windsor, driver Syd Saylor (THE THREE MESQUITEERS), and Indian George Steele (BADMEN OF THE WEST), team up with trader Adler to investigate an alleged gold cache.

Suffice to say, many of them come down with a wicked case of gold fever, even the sheriff, who neglects his duties in taking in Bridges. The emphasis is on drama over action in this agreeable B-picture with more than a little debt to TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE. Bridges and Cobb predictably clash over the only woman in the group. Whether the short schedule or Williams’ status as a first-time director is to blame, the movie suffers from occasional sloppiness, such as the tire tracks of the camera car consistently getting into the shot. Though the film establishes Bridges’ conviction earlier, later dialogue calls for Bridges to continue to El Paso to stand trial (Reinhardt probably has to take the hit for this).

On the other hand, Williams served as his own editor and cut the picture to a tight 81 minutes. He does a nice job moving the camera to spice up the visuals, and uses his barren New Mexican locations to good advantage. The blacklisted stars appear to relish their roles at a time when they weren’t getting many. Cobb and Bridges cooperated with the House Un-American Activities Committee and resumed their careers.

Night Of Bloody Horror

Yes, that’s Emmy-winning star Gerald McRaney of SIMON & SIMON, DEADWOOD, MAJOR DAD, HOUSE OF CARDS, and THIS IS US fame making his film debut in NIGHT OF BLOODY HORROR. Then a local New Orleans actor cast by the aunt of executive producer Albert Salzer (NIGHT OF THE STRANGLER), McRaney plays young Wesley Stewart, whose lady friends have a nasty habit of getting dead around him.

Shot in “Violent Vision,” which represents the psychedelic blue swirls surrounding McRaney during his periodic headaches, the film opens with Wesley and Susan (Lisa Dameron presenting the requisite bare breasts) finishing up a roll in the sack. Several slowly paced minutes later, Susan is stabbed in the face while giving confession!

The bikinied body of Wesley’s next girlfriend, a nurse named Kay (Charlotte White) who dragged his drunk ass home one night after he was mugged outside a bar, takes a fatal axe to the chest. Not that two murdered girlfriends and a trip to the cop shop prevent a pretty reporter (Gaye Yellen) from asking him out to a bar to watch a groovy (real) band called The Bored.

Directed by Joy N. Houck Jr. for his father’s Howco International outfit, NIGHT OF BLOODY TERROR is dreadful but watchable, if only for McRaney and Houck’s earnest attempts to be hip. Besides the psychedelic pinwheels, Houck adds fast zooms and solarized effects to The Board’s number while McRaney punches the hell out of a bully. The fight choreography is as bad as the photography and particularly the sound, which was recorded on Louisiana locations with poor acoustics. If you’ve seen PSYCHO — and if you’re reading this, you have — you’ll suss out what’s happening.

The skinny McRaney (who is shirtless a lot) gives a credible performance — he obviously took the role seriously — though you wouldn’t have predicted he’d have the career he did. To his credit, in his later years, he didn’t put NIGHT OF BLOODY HORROR down. McRaney did another movie for Houck, WOMEN AND BLOODY TERROR, before moving to Los Angeles and working regularly in episodic television until landing the co-lead on SIMON & SIMON in 1981.

The Prince

Jason Patric (RUSH) is The Prince in this dreary direct-to-video crime meller courtesy of dreary direct-to-video director Brian A. Miller (VICE). At least The Prince is what mechanic Patric (with remarkably clean hands) used to be called in the old days when he was a professional assassin.

Now retired with daughter Gia Mantegna (THE FROZEN GROUND) away at college, Patric is pulled back into his old life John Wick-style when his junkie daughter leaves college to hook up with New Orleans drug kingpin 50 Cent (ESCAPE PLAN). While bashing his way through the underworld in search of Mantegna, Patric gains the attention of Bruce Willis (DIE HARD), a big-time mobster still seething from the deaths of his wife and child by Patric’s hand twenty years earlier, the result of a hit gone awry that led Patric to retire.

The plot by SAN ANDREAS writers Andre Fabrizio and Jeremy Passmore is ridiculous. For some reason, Patric drags along his daughter’s cokehead friend Jessica Lowndes (90210) to New Orleans so she can “point out” where to find a drug dealer, but all she had to do was tell him the name of a bar. Willis tells his goons to bring him The Prince alive, yet their strategy is to immediately shoot at him. But the biggest flaw is that Willis’ character doesn’t seem like a heavy. After all, he’s just looking to enact revenge against the hitman who murdered his wife and daughter, which would make him the hero in almost any other movie.

Miller has no idea how to shoot an action sequence. It’s pretty easy for Patric to shoot down a dozen bad guys when they stand right out in the open or run straight at a concealed target. John Cusack (THE SURE THING), of all people, shows up for a few scenes backing up his old pal Patric, “Jung Ji-Hoon aka Rain” (which is how he’s billed) does some kung fu, Johnathon Schaech (THE THING YOU DO) cameos in a gun shop, and the palpably disinterested Willis, who makes no effort to change his appearance in scenes set twenty years apart, never left his Mobile hotel (better tax breaks in Alabama than Louisiana) to shoot his scenes.

The Snow Creature

From the father/son director/writer team who gave you KILLERS FROM SPACE, PHANTOM FROM SPACE, and MANFISH comes THE SNOW CREATURE. And because you’ve seen those other films by W. Lee Wilder and Myles Wilder — the great Billy Wilder’s brother and nephew, respectively — you know to stay the hell out of THE SNOW CREATURE’s way. Its only claim to fame is that it is the first American science fiction movie about the Abominable Snowman. It also holds the distinction of being the first American science fiction movie with an actor (reportedly Lock “Gort” Martin) inside a cheap-looking Abominable Snowman suit.

Probably the only Abominable Snowman (hell, I’m calling it a Yeti from here on — less typing) movie partially set in Southern California, THE SNOW CREATURE stars Paul Langton (patriarch of the Harrington family on PEYTON PLACE) as a scientist in charge of an expedition into the Himalayas. He scoffs when his Sherpa guide Teru Shimada (YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE) tells him Shimada’s wife has been kidnapped by a Yeti, so Shimada kidnaps the whole party at gunpoint and forces them to search for his wife. Of course, they find a whole family of them, but only one survives (see the title) to be taken KING KONG-style back to Los Angeles.

Here the movie bogs down (as if it hadn’t already) in an inexplicable subplot about governmental red tape as Customs and Immigration argue whether a frozen Yeti is cargo or a person. Nobody is interested in this — it’s hard to believe the Wilders did — and it would be a huge relief when the Yeti inevitably escapes to wreak havoc in L.A., except the Yeti scenes are so cheap and boring. The creature is tall, but too slight of build to raise fear on its own, and W. Lee uses the same dull shot of it walking out of the dark toward the camera many times, even in reverse.

Oddly, climactic scenes of policemen (including FIVE’s William Phipps) chasing the creature through Los Angeles’ storm drains bring to mind THEM!, another 1954 release. Langton, who provides narration throughout, is a dull leading man, as if a more exciting one would have saved this movie. United Artists gave it a theatrical release.

The Frozen Dead

I don’t know if Herbert J. Leder is the only filmmaker to write, produce, and direct a Warner Brothers double bill, but I feel safe saying he is the worst. Both THE FROZEN DEAD and IT, a killer Golem movie starring Roddy McDowall, were filmed in color by Leder in Great Britain, but released in the United States in black and white.

Dana Andrews — a long way from LAURA — stars in THE FROZEN DEAD as a Nazi mad scientist in London twenty years after the fall of the Third Reich. Undeterred, Andrews moves forward with his heady scheme to rejuvenate the 1500 Nazi soldiers he placed in suspended animation during the war. Unfortunately, their brains don’t work, leaving Andrews with drooling idiots in full Nazi uniforms stinking up his lab (one of them is played by Edward Fox, future star of THE DAY OF THE JACKAL).

To Andrews’ and Leder’s credit, everything is played completely straight. Even the mere hint of camp would have made this material insufferable rather than silly. Though Leder’s direction is unexceptional, some of his images are indelible: a trio of Nazis hanging in a meat locker awaiting eventual reanimation, a wall of dangling arms (foreshadowing!), the decapitated but still living head of a young woman (Kathleen Breck) who can somehow communicate psychically with her best friend Anna Palk (THE SKULL), Andrews’ innocent niece.

No matter how many times filmmakers attempt it (here’s looking at you, THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN’T DIE), a disembodied talking head on a tray is impossible to take seriously (which is why the great RE-ANIMATOR didn’t try), and who knows what Andrews was thinking in his scenes with Breck. Too static and talky to work as a thriller, THE FROZEN DEAD wins points for its ridiculous premise and Andrews’ professionalism, but not enough points to recommend.

Colossus: The Forbin Project

Universal’s perceptive science fiction thriller owes a tad to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, but manages to stand on its own, thanks to a literate script by James Bridges (THE CHINA SYNDROME) and taut direction by Joseph Sargent (THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE).

Though THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS star Eric Braeden isn’t without talent, COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT could have used more star power to counteract the drab photography (by television vet Gene Polito) and costuming (Edith Head). Albert Whitlock’s visual effects are quite good.

American scientist Forbin (Braeden) creates a super-computer called Colossus that is designed to keep an eye on the Soviets and launch nuclear missiles automatically if it senses an imminent attack. But — whoops — Colossus discovers the Soviets have their own super-computer, and the two machines team up to rule the world. They even shoot off a few nukes to prove they mean business. Can Forbin find a way to destroy his indestructible creation?

Considering COLOSSUS is mainly white guys in suits (and Georg Stanford Brown) looking at monitors, Sargent manages to work up a great deal of suspense. Stakes couldn’t be higher — nuclear annihilation — and the film melds elements of espionage and foreign intrigue into the sci-fi plot. Braeden was known for playing German soldiers in World War II mellers — he was a semi-regular on THE RAT PATROL — and brings a firm intelligence to Dr. Forbin. He and colleague Dr. Cleo Markham (drab Susan Clark) cleverly pretend to have a sexual relationship in order to have private conversations — Colossus agrees not to monitor the couple in bed — but expanding it into an actual romance is the film’s only major misstep.

X: The Man With The X-Ray Eyes

With more money for special effects, X (often given the off-screen subtitle THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES) could have been a science fiction classic. In one scene, leading character James Xavier looking with x-ray vision at a skyscraper is represented by a shot of a building under construction! As it stands, however, X ranks among director Roger Corman’s finest science fiction movies, anchored by a committed performance by Ray Milland (THE LOST WEEKEND) and an acerbic dramatic turn by standup comedian Don Rickles (BEACH BLANKET BINGO). Plus, boy, what an ending.

Dr. Xavier (Milland) is carving new paths in optical research, but is in danger of losing the grant money necessary to continue. Out of desperation, he tests his new eyedrops on himself, and gains the ability to see through walls, book covers, clothing, anything. Unfortunately, as his powers grow, his human brain isn’t advanced enough to process the otherworldly information his eyes absorb, which leads to insanity. Instead of the scientific breakthrough Xavier intended, his new power turns him into a sideshow act. He hits the road after being falsely accused of murder and hides out in a traveling circus owned by the crooked Crane (Rickles).

Though AIP marketed X with an exploitative subtitle, it’s evident Corman took the film more seriously than that, turning out a mature, thoughtful sci-fi parable. Robert Dillon (FRENCH CONNECTION II) and Ray Russell (THE INCUBUS) wrote the screenplay, and while Corman must add bits of unnecessary padding to reach a scant 79-minute running time, the script is intelligent and ambitious — too ambitious for the visual effects department to reach.

Diana van der Vlis (THE SWIMMER), Harold J. Stone (later in Corman’s THE ST. VALENTINE’S DAY MASSACRE), and John Hoyt (ATTACK OF THE PUPPET PEOPLE) provide more than capable support, and Corman repertory players Jonathan Haze (LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS) and Dick Miller (A BUCKET OF BLOOD) offer humor as hecklers of Xavier’s carny act. AIP released X on a double bill with Francis Ford Coppola’s DEMENTIA 13.

Demon Seed

Four-time Academy Award nominee (and winner for DARLING) Julie Christie may have given the screen performance of her life in this literate and underrated science fiction movie with a daring premise. Based on a Dean Koontz novel, DEMON SEED is a computer-goes-rogue story in the tradition of COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT and hundreds of other films, stories, and television shows as far back as Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN. However, it’s directed so intelligently by Donald Cammell (PERFORMANCE) and given such visual and dramatic flourish that it plays like a true original.

Fritz Weaver (BLACK SUNDAY) co-stars as Alex Harris, a scientist developing an artificial intelligence called Proteus IV. Advanced enough to cure cancer, Proteus is advanced enough to want — and what it wants is Harris’ wife, Susan (Christie). Living alone after Harris’ obsession with Proteus broke up their marriage, Susan becomes trapped in her home by Proteus, which has taken control of the entire house with plans to impregnate Susan and live forever in human form.

The actors and the screenplay by Robert Jaffe (MOTEL HELL) and Roger O. Hirson (THE BRIDGE AT REMAGEN) take the outrageous premise seriously — wisely so, as any hint of humor would blow the film apart. Though serious, the plot is also sloppy at times with a few annoying questions left unanswered (for instance, what happens to a car belonging to one of Susan’s visitors?) The special effects, particularly a snake-like tetrahedron that represents one of Proteus’ physical forms, are imaginative, and the orchestral score by Jerry Fielding (THE ENFORCER) is impressive.

Because DEMON SEED is basically a two-hander, it’s important that Christie play off an impressive foe, and she does — not just the mechanical effects representing Proteus, but also the uncredited Robert Vaughn (THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E.), whose voice is perfectly menacing and controlling. Weaver is believable, Gerrit Graham (USED CARS) is an effective sacrificial lamb, and Berry Kroeger (BLOOD ALLEY) gets to be a good guy in his final film.

Scream (2022)

More than ten years after SCREAM 4 stank up American multiplexes, another sequel to Wes Craven’s influential 1996 slasher classic hit screens. Inexplicably given the same title as the original film, SCREAM brings back several original cast members, though not Craven, who died in 2015. 

Less a movie than a collection of “ho ho remember that” and “okay yeah I get it” fan service callbacks to earlier SCREAMs, SCREAM 5 even opens with a less scary retread of the first movie’s famous teaser with Drew Barrymore. This teen, Tara (Jenna Ortega), who is totally into “enhanced horror” like THE BABADOOK, survives the Ghostface attack, spurring her older sister Samantha (Melissa Barrera) and Sam’s boyfriend Richie (Jack Quaid) to return to Woodsboro, where Tara is hospitalized. 

While Sam conducts her own investigation into Tara’s precocious high school friends, former Woodsboro sheriff Dewey Riley (David Arquette, still accompanied by Hans Zimmer’s BROKEN ARROW cue), a survivor of previous Ghostface attacks, checks in with ex-wife Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox), now a network television host, and Sydney Prescott (Neve Campbell), who seems to have adjusted well to her past trauma, which includes shooting to death a close relative in SCREAM 4. 

While the veteran SCREAMers have grown comfortably in their roles, bringing authentic mileage to their characters, the newcomers are awkward and unconvincing, stricken by some awful dialogue by screenwriters James Vanderbilt (THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN) and Guy Busick (READY OR NOT), the worst of the SCREAM series. With Craven gone, SCREAM 5 is in the restless hands of co-directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, whose superior READY OR NOT is, oddly, more faithful to the mix of scares and smiles in the original film’s DNA than this dismal sequel. 

In the middle of the dull fan service and lazy plotting (the people of Woodsboro are remarkably incurious about police sirens blaring during the day in quiet residential neighborhoods) is Arquette’s remarkable performance, projecting human pain, loss, and regret in a movie that frankly doesn’t earn it. Long live Deputy Dewey.

The Final Option

Right-wing propaganda masquerading as shoot-’em-up entertainment, this thriller was known as WHO DARES WINS upon its original British release, but was retitled THE FINAL OPTION for MGM’s U.S. release. It was not a hit in American theaters, but it played on HBO seemingly 70,000 times, despite its R rating, so somebody must have been watching it. It’s too long (125 minutes) and the political story is not terribly interesting, but when director Ian Sharp, who later directed second unit on GOLDENEYE, gets the opportunity to stage violent action, THE FINAL OPTION is impressive. If only there was more of it.

Based loosely on the Special Air Service’s 1980 raid on London’s Iran embassy, which had been hijacked by Arab terrorists, THE FINAL OPTION stars Judy Davis (A PASSAGE TO INDIA) as the leader of “The People’s Lobby,” a terrorist organization that takes over the home of the American ambassador to England (Don Fellows), who is hosting a dinner for Secretary of State Richard Widmark (COMA) and Army general Robert Webber (S.O.B.). All she wants is for the U.S. to blow up one of its Navy bases in Scotland. Fat chance, sister, with the SAS on the case!

The SAS’ secret weapon, luckily for them, is already in the house. Top-billed Lewis Collins (TV’s THE PROFESSIONALS) botched his undercover assignment to infiltrate the People’s Lobby, but Davis takes him along on the hostage-taking anyway, probably because he turns her on in the sack (anything for England, dear boy). Edward Woodward (THE WICKER MAN) is properly staunch as the SAS man who sends Collins on the mission, and horror fans may recognize Ingrid Pitt (THE VAMPIRE LOVERS) as one of the terrorists (British television star John Duttine is another).

Collins was almost in OCTOPUSSY, but judging from his work in THE FINAL OPTION — his first lead in a feature — he would have been a Lazenbyesque James Bond. He’s okay in the fight scenes, but has little chemistry with Davis or the actress playing his wife and is generally lacking in color and charisma. That’s a problem with a thriller with so little action (Davis’ group doesn’t invade Fellows’ home until the third act) and so much dialogue. His mainstream film career never took off, nor did that of director Sharp, who went back to television.

She Devil

Scientists Dan Scott (Jack Kelly, who went from this to MAVERICK) and Richard Bach (Albert Dekker, who played mad scientist DR. CYCLOPS in 1940) live platonically with their elderly maid Hannah (Blossom Rock, Grandmama on THE ADDAMS FAMILY) in a mansion with a lab in Los Angeles. This may actually be the least believable element of SHE DEVIL, which 20th Century Fox released on its Regal Films label for exploitation movies as a co-feature with KRONOS.

Stanley G. Weinbaum’s short story “The Adaptive Ultimate” starred Zachary Scott and Peter Hensen when it was adapted as an episode of SCIENCE FICTION THEATER, Richard Derr and Lola Albright as a TALES OF TOMORROW, and Richard Hart as a STUDIO ONE. So it was already a well-worn tale on television when Carroll Young (JUNGLE JIM) and Kurt Neumann (THE FLY) adapted it for Regal. Dr. Scott believes he has created a serum that can cure all diseases, punctures, broken bones, and other ailments. He wants to test it on humans, but Dr. Bach isn’t sure that’s ethical.

However, one patient, Kyra Zelas (Mari Blanchard), a terminal tuberculosis patient with no family, friends, or income, interests Bach, and he okays the injection of Scott’s serum. It works. She’s up and walking around Beverly Hills in no time, and the two doctors invite her to move in with them and Hannah. They don’t yet realize Kyra has also changed into a stone cold killer who can mentally change the color of her hair (director of photography Karl Struss achieves this without cutting or visual effects by using lens filters).

The worst of Neumann’s four science fiction films as a director, SHE DEVIL basically just plods along with Kyra vamping the men around her to get all the nice things she’s always dreamed of and poor lovesick sap Scott falling for her. It isn’t the fault of Blanchard (ABBOTT & COSTELLO GO TO MARS), who looks smashing as a blonde and acts believably as a murderous trollop. It’s merely that the story’s stakes aren’t high enough. Kyra is dangerous, but she isn’t that dangerous. Bach and Scott don’t even kick her out of the house, and Scott remains in love with her even after she has killed two people.

Plus, SHE DEVIL is just sloppy. Neumann expects the audience to believe that just changing her hair color makes Kyra unrecognizable to others. When she forces her new husband (John Archer) to drive over a cliff, Neumann cuts to a stock shot of a car backing over the cliff. Blanchard made a few more movies and plenty of television episodes before dying of cancer in her 40s.

World Without End

Writer/director Edward Bernds was better known for comedies starring the Three Stooges and the Bowery Boys, but he also made occasional forays into science fiction (SPACE MASTER X-7, QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE). He directed WORLD WITHOUT END, a time travel adventure, for Allied Artists in Technicolor and CinemaScope. Despite the advanced technical specs, Bernds does little with the camera to provide visual excitement, and the scenes of the rocketship barreling through outer space are cribbed from Monogram’s earlier release FLIGHT TO MARS.

A flight from Mars opens WORLD WITHOUT END, as four astronauts played by Hugh Marlowe (EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS), Rod Taylor (THE TIME MACHINE), Nelson Leigh (CREATURE WITH THE ATOM BRAIN), and Christopher Dark (SUDDENLY) return to the Iverson Ranch 500 years after they left it. Nuclear war has devastated the Earth’s surface, and the survivors, who are mainly hot young chicks in short skirts and middle-aged men jealous of the glamorous astronauts, live in an underground city. Apparently only Caucasians survived “the big blow.” Above live “mutates:” hideously deformed beasts who attack the astronauts on sight.

The opposite of sophisticated 1950s sci-fi like FORBIDDEN PLANET and THIS ISLAND EARTH, Bernds’ film is akin to MISSILE TO THE MOON, CAT-WOMEN OF THE MOON, and other silly films about stiff Earthmen stumbling onto futuristic civilizations populated by horny women looking for mates. It allows Australia native Taylor to use his natural accent, but the performances are stiff, and the actors playing the future Earthmen look silly in their costumes and skullcaps. Nothing is sillier than the foam spiders that “attack” our heroes in a cave.

Allied Artists released WORLD WITHOUT END on a double bill with INDESTRUCTIBLE MAN. Noted character actors Paul Brinegar (RAWHIDE) and Strother Martin (COOL HAND LUKE) are “underground people,” and Herb Vigran has lines in an early scene as a reporter. Considering the similarities between the two films, Rod Taylor must have felt deja vu when he starred in THE TIME MACHINE four years later.

Night School

The director of CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG ended his career with the atrocious SEXTETTE (starring a stuffed Mae West) and this minor slasher movie filmed in Boston. Paramount released Ken Hughes' NIGHT SCHOOL on a double bill with the slasher spoof STUDENT BODIES, but you’d be hard-pressed to decide which film is funnier.

NIGHT SCHOOL is certainly the duller, and hardly anyone would remember it if not for its 24-year-old star, Rachel Ward, making her first feature. The English actress quickly appeared in SHARKY’S MACHINE and DEAD MEN DON’T WEAR PLAID before THE THORN BIRDS, which aired on ABC a year and a half after NIGHT SCHOOL vanished from theaters, made her a brief household name.

Not much about her performance in NIGHT SCHOOL indicates success in Ward’s future, though she’s certainly beautiful (and isn’t shy about revealing her body). Producer Ruth Avergon also provided the screenplay about a mysterious killer in a leather jacket and motorcycle helmet who decapitates young women and deposits their heads in containers of water. Leonard Mann, usually the star of Italian thrillers (THE HUMANOID), plays the Boston detective in charge of the case. His main suspect is anthropology professor Drew Snyder (AMERICAN HORROR STORY), who is boffing his live-in teaching assistant (Ward).

Hughes, perhaps unsurprisingly for a filmmaker with British classics like CROMWELL and THE TRIAL OF OSCAR WILDE on his resume, seems unsuited for bloody horror and unwilling to get into it. Keeping the murders off-camera lowers the interest of horror fans, but NIGHT SCHOOL is too dull, stiffly acted, and light on characterization for more refined thriller fans. The only suspense is the revelation of the killer’s identity, but Avergon’s script provides too few suspects to make a real game of it. Ward made another cheap horror flick, THE FINAL TERROR, but it didn’t get released until after she was famous. Composer Brad Fiedel (THE TERMINATOR) and director of photography Mark Irwin (SCREAM) also went on to better things.

Demonstone

R. Lee Ermey (FULL METAL JACKET) is radically cast against type as a foul-mouthed Marine (“I got more pesos in my pocket than a big horse can shit.”), and a visibly drunk Jan-Michael Vincent (WHITE LINE FEVER) is his partner in DEMONSTONE, an action movie with supernatural elements shot in the Philippines.

Director Andrew Prowse’s background as an editor (his credits include THE SIEGE AT FIREBASE GLORIA for director Brian Trenchard Smith, who receives a producing credit here) came in handy when staging DEMONSTONE’s action sequences with stunt coordinator Patrick Statham (LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD). Surprisingly, given the participation of writer Frederick Bailey (SILK) and producer Clark Henderson (ANDROID), as well as the film’s story, tone, and Manila production, Roger Corman had nothing to do with DEMONSTONE. The prolific Charles Fries, who jumped between film (TROOP BEVERLY HILLS) and television (THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES) productions with equal aplomb, was DEMONSTONE’s executive producer and theatrical distributor.

An Australian co-production with producer Antony Ginnane (TURKEY SHOOT), DEMONSTONE puts Ermey and Vincent on the trail of a killer. The suspect is fellow Marine Tony McKee (Pat Skipper, Scully’s brother on THE X-FILES), but the murders are too vicious and gory to have been committed by one person.

The real killer is Sharon (Nancy Everhard, fresh off DEEPSTAR SIX), a television reporter possessed by a long-dead monk who placed a curse on the descendants of the tribal chief who burned him alive. Because said descendant is Belfardo (Joonee Gamboa), a corrupt senator, and the victims are in his circle, the admiral (FOXY BROWN’s Peter Brown) is on Ermey’s back to solve the case. Ermey is probably ad-libbing half of his profanities. Somehow, not a single bamboo hut is blown up. You should watch DEMONSTONE anyway.

Bear Island

Except for Cannon’s little-seen RIVER OF DEATH, released to a handful of theaters in 1989, BEAR ISLAND was the last adaptation of an Alistair MacLean novel to play on the big screen. It was the 13th of MacLean’s novels to be turned into a film (though WHERE EAGLES DARE was written as a novel and a screenplay at the same time), beginning with 1961’s THE GUNS OF NAVARONE. Amazingly, despite MacLean’s enormous popularity during the 1960s and 1970s, he seems to be a forgotten author today. A pity, as his best thrillers still hold up.

Director Don Sharp (THE FACE OF FU MANCHU), who rewrote MacLean’s PUPPET ON A CHAIN screenplay and directed second unit on it, must have thought 1971’s BEAR ISLAND didn’t hold up well. He, along with David Butler (VOYAGE OF THE DAMNED) and Murray Smith (SCHIZO), made a lot of changes in the BEAR ISLAND screenplay. Whereas the novel told the story of moviemakers shooting a production on remote Bear Island, well above the Arctic Circle, the film turns the doctor protagonist Christopher Marlowe into an American named Frank Lansing (Donald Sutherland), one of several United Nations scientists who travel to Bear Island to study climate change.

Everyone seems to be harboring a secret, and some of the scientists are murdered. Lansing, surrounded by snow, ice, and suspicion, investigates and comes to believe the violence has something to do with the abandoned German U-boat base located on Bear Island. And that leads to Lansing’s secret: his late father was the captain of that U-boat during World War II, and family legend is that a cache of Nazi gold is hidden on Bear Island. Well, it’s not all that secret, because it seems everyone on the island is posing as someone else as an excuse to search for the treasure.

Sharp was an effective action director, and his BEAR ISLAND setpieces are the best part of the film. It was not a hit, which is why future MacLean adaptations were scrapped, nor was it critically praised. Second unit director Vic Armstrong (JOSHUA TREE) also contributes to the fine stuntwork. The script takes shortcuts with characterization and throws in an unlikely romance between Lansing and a humorless psychologist played by Vanessa Redgrave, but the actors’ chemistry is as icy as the Bear Island winter. It’s fun to watch the all-star cast, including Richard Widmark (MADIGAN), Christopher Lee (HORROR OF DRACULA), Lloyd Bridges (TV’s SEA HUNT), and Barbara Parkins (VALLEY OF THE DOLLS), wrestle with their accents.

Firepower (1979)

FIREPOWER is a deliriously silly international thriller with an affecting cast of middle-aged movie stars and one of the most absurdly convoluted storylines I’ve ever attempted to decode. At one point, when director Michael Winner (DEATH WISH) and screenwriter Gerald Wilson (THE STONE KILLER) get trapped in a corner, they reach into their rear ends and pull out an exact double of James Coburn’s character, who is never seen or heard from again.

If nothing else, Winner knows how to grab an audience’s interest. Before the main titles have started to unspool, Winner kills off a chemist, the husband of Sophia Loren’s Adele Tasca, in an explosion and then guns down the chemist’s brother and a bunch of hoods at the funeral parlor. It’s an effective formula that works for Winner. When the plot starts to get confusing, blow up something or kill a bunch of guys to wake everybody up.

Adele believes the man responsible for her husband’s murder is the mysterious Karl Stegner, a wealthy recluse in Antigua who’s wanted by American authorities, but can’t be extradited, and nobody knows what the hell he looks like anyway. The Feds, with FBI agent Frank Hull (Vincent Gardenia) in charge, want flower-loving merc Jerry Fanon (Coburn) to go get Stegner, so they bribe retired mobster Sal Hyman (Eli Wallach) to convince Fanon to do the job. See what I mean about convoluted? Why couldn’t Hull just ask Fanon directly? Probably because Sir Lew Grade at ITC wanted to squeeze another star, Wallach, into the production somewhere.

Fanon takes along heist man Catlett (O.J. Simpson) as backup. Neither seems to be the brains of the outfit, as their plan involves setting Stegner’s house on fire and then running inside the abandoned blaze to find clues. The piling on of twists over doublecrosses grows silly after awhile, but FIREPOWER is always watchable for its star power and its harrowing stunt sequences involving airplanes, helicopters, automobiles, boats, bulldozers, whatever it takes. Trying to follow the plot is more effort than it’s worth.

Action Jackson

Finally, a movie where Craig T. Nelson has a karate fight with Apollo Creed. I’m still sad we didn’t get, like, nine Action Jackson movies. Carl Weathers (ROCKY) plays Jackson like Fred Williamson Meets Apollo Creed and definitely worthy of the nickname “Action.” Somehow, ACTION JACKSON was not a hit, and Weathers ended up in television.

So, yeah, Jericho Jackson. Track star. Harvard Law grad. The Detroit Police Department busted him back down to sergeant after he tore off a pervert’s arm. Evil auto manufacturer Peter Dellaplane, portrayed deliciously by a bleached-blond Nelson (COACH), hates Jackson, because his son was the pervert.

Dellaplane wants to be the puppetmaster of the next U.S. President, so he engineers the murders of big-time union officials. Sure, that could work. He has a sexy wife, Patrice (Sharon Stone), and an even sexier mistress, a junkie nightclub singer named Sydney (Vanity, way too sexy to play junkie roles). Life is pretty good for Peter Dellaplane, the kind of rich asshole who breaks his karate teacher’s arm just for laughs.

The feature directing debut of ace stuntman Craig R. Baxley, ACTION JACKSON is farfetched, slick, often hilarious, and populated by ace character actors who bring a lot of color to their roles, such as Ed O’Ross (RED HEAT), Robert Davi (LICENSE TO KILL), Thomas F. Wilson (BACK TO THE FUTURE), and Bill Duke (PREDATOR). This movie may hold the record for macho ball-busting. A running gag is a young purse snatcher who keeps fainting in fear of the badass Action Jackson.

The performers help ground the nonsense in Robert Reneau’s (DEMOLITION MAN) screenplay in some sort of reality. Everyone plays it with the right amount of tongue in cheek, so when Weathers leaps over a speeding taxicab or swaps karate blows with Nelson after driving a sports car into his house and up the stairs to the second floor, it seems like, well, of course that’s what would happen. Joel Silver produced, which explains the constant quipping and huge explosions. Baxley blew up a lot more cars in I COME IN PEACE and STONE COLD, as perfect a trifecta of badass action flicks as any director can boast.

Messenger Of Death

Charles Bronson worked with director J. Lee Thompson (THE GUNS OF NAVARONE) nine times, and MESSENGER OF DEATH may be the least of the lot. It was Bronson’s next-to-last collaboration with both Thompson and Cannon Films, which opened it in just 450 theaters to moribund business.

Nine women and children from the same Mormon family are murdered by a shotgun-wielding assassin. The lone surviving family member, husband and father Orville Beecham (Charles “Flat Nose Curry” Dierkop), refuses to identify the killer. Bronson plays Garrett Smith, a Denver newspaper reporter investigating the massacre, whose path leads to Orville’s father Willis (Jeff Corey) and Willis’ brother Zenas (John Ireland).

Both men hate each other passionately and blame the other for the murders. As the intrafamilial blood feud boils over into violence, Smith becomes a target for murder by mysterious employees of the Colorado Water Company, a corporation owned by one of Denver’s richest and most respected families, one with little connection, it would seem, to the wild-eyed Beecham clan.

An unusual action vehicle for Bronson, MESSENGER OF DEATH casts the stone-faced icon as a passive observer, fighting only when attacked. He doesn’t fire a gun at anyone, nor does he have much to do with identifying and apprehending the killers. In his most notable setpiece, he battles a trio of water trucks, but even there, Bronson plays the victim.

Though it’s more of a mystery thriller than action flick, MESSENGER OF DEATH is solid enough with an unusual setting and interesting supporting cast, but it doesn’t quite come together satisfactorily. Thompson and Cannon cinematographer Gideon Porath (AVENGING FORCE) do an outstanding job staging the opening massacre with dread and stark menace, using the Colorado scenery to creepy advantage.

As well, Robert O. Ragland’s score adds novelty, but MESSENGER OF DEATH is barely distinguishable from Bronson’s other Cannon pictures, except it’s classier. The screenplay by Paul Jarrico (TOM, DICK AND HARRY) holds little water, and the climax plays like MURDER, SHE WROTE with a line of red herrings gathered in a parlor waiting to be identified by a convenient witness. Themes of religious persecution and revenge add some flavor to the mystery.

Trish Van Devere (THE HEARSE), Marilyn Hassett (THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN), Laurence Luckinbill (STAR TREK V: THE FINAL FRONTIER), Daniel Benzali (MURDER ONE), Gene Davis (10 TO MIDNIGHT), and Penny Peyser (THE IN-LAWS) fill out the cast. Jarrico was blacklisted during the 1950s and ended up writing spaghetti westerns in Europe, making him perhaps the perfect scribe for a tale about persecution.

Halloween (2018)

There is a good movie to be made about a Laurie Strode who survived the attack on her and her friends on Halloween night of 1978 and used it to grow into a strong, positive adult who refused to let that night forever define her. Hollywood has never wanted to make that movie. Every time Jamie Lee Curtis has returned to play Laurie, the character is a “basket case” (as she calls herself in HALLOWEEN 2018 or H40) who has never been able to escape her past.

So it goes with H40, from PINEAPPLE EXPRESS director David Gordon Green and VICE PRINCIPALS writers Jeff Fradley and Danny McBride, which ignores every other HALLOWEEN sequel. Exactly forty years after Michael Myers went on a killing spree in little Haddonfield, Illinois, he escapes custody during a prison transfer and — inexplicably — returns to Haddonfield to finish the job. Laurie is a paranoid, alcoholic, twice-divorced agoraphobe who has somehow gotten herself together well enough to construct a $10 million compound in the woods (no explanation is given as to how she accomplished this, nor how her high-security complex is so easy to infiltrate in the climax).

Laurie is estranged from her daughter Karen (Judy Greer), who lives a normal middle-class life with her nice husband Ray (a welcome Toby Huss) and their daughter — Laurie’s granddaughter — Allyson (Matichak). Other characters include Dr. Ranbir Sartain (Haluk Bilginer), Michael’s new shrink after the death of Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence died in 1995); British podcasters Dana Haines (Rhian Rees) and Aaron Korey (Jefferson Hall), doing a story on Myers; deputy Hawkins (Will Patton), who reveals he was there the night Myers was first arrested (a potentially intriguing character point muffed by director Green); and various cannon fodder that includes Allyson’s high school friends. Few of these characters will survive to the closing crawl.

Which is another problem with H40 and probably its biggest: it isn’t scary. Though Green and his special effects crew have figured out how to mangle the human body — Michael has grown more creative as he has reached his 60s — the killings seem perfunctory with little suspense. A couple of sequences work, one of them a lengthy tracking shot that follows Michael into a house and back onto the sidewalk, leaving death in his wake. Most of the kill scenes are predictable, including the climax set inside Laurie’s House of Booby Traps that would leave Maxwell Smart salivating.

What’s good? Most of the acting, particularly Curtis, who embraces the badass gramma role and sells her obsession with Michael, even though the Green/Fradley/McBride script leaves her hanging. As well, Greer and Matichak are believable as Curtis’ relatives, though Karen’s impatience with her mother is also underwritten. John Carpenter, of all people, agreed to score the film, collaborating with his son (with Adrienne Barbeau) Cody and his godson Daniel Davies on a familiar soundscape that fails to paper over the egregious lapses in screenplay logic and lack of suspense in Green’s direction.

While H40 succeeds in leavening the shocks with dollops of intentional humor (the little toenail-clipping boy played by Jibrail Nantambu should star in the next sequel), the film is ultimately a depressing exercise undertaken by filmmakers who don’t understand the allure of Michael Myers or, even worse, the power of Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode.