Opened 40 Years Ago: ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (7/10/1981)

 

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK opening
in Toledo, OH on 7/10/1981

In Theaters: ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD (2019)

ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD
(US/UK/China - 2019)

Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Al Pacino, Emile Hirsch, Margaret Qualley, Timothy Olyphant, Austin Butler, Dakota Fanning, Bruce Dern, Kurt Russell, Luke Perry, Julia Butters, Damian Lewis, Mike Moh, Lorenza Izzo, Damon Herriman, Zoe Bell, Lena Dunham, Rumer Willis, Samantha Robinson, Costa Ronin, Rafel Zawierucha, Nicholas Hammond, Mikey Madison, Madisen Beaty, Maya Hawke, Michael Madsen, Clifton Collins Jr, Scoot McNairy, Rebecca Gayheart, Marco Rodriguez, Clu Gulager, James Remar, Martin Kove, Brenda Vaccaro, Daniella Pick, Harley Quinn Smith, Omar Doom, James Landry Hebert, Lew Temple. (R, 161 mins)

An epic, freewheeling, kaleidoscopic wet dream for hardcore movie nerds, ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD allows Quentin Tarantino to fly his geek flag like never before. What other director could get away with stopping a big-budget, wide-release summer movie cold for an impromptu lesson on the making of 1960s Italian spaghetti westerns and the Americanized pseudonyms that were often employed by their directors? A love letter to the Hollywood 50 years ago on the cusp of tumult and tragedy, HOLLYWOOD takes place in February and August of 1969 and centers on Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), an actor desperately clinging to the fading fame brought by his starring turn a decade earlier on a TV western called BOUNTY LAW. The show was cancelled when he quit to do a pair of movies that ended up bombing (and he lost out to Steve McQueen for the lead in THE GREAT ESCAPE, a role he was up for along with "the Three Georges--Peppard, Maharis, and Chakiris") and has spent the latter half of the '60s doing failed pilots and bad guy guest spots on nearly every network TV show. He's desperate enough that he's seriously considering an offer by his new agent Marvin Schwarzs (Al Pacino) to head to Rome to make easy money doing spaghetti westerns and 007 knockoffs. He's also gotten a bad rep around town for his drinking, and multiple drunk driving accidents have caused him to lose his license, forcing him to be driven everywhere by his longtime stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), who's also his errand boy, confidante, drinking buddy, and seemingly his only friend. When he isn't driving Rick around, house-sitting for him, or being a handyman around his house, Cliff lives in a broken down trailer behind the Van Nuys Drive-In with his loyal pit bull Brandy. Cliff's fortunes mirror those of Rick's: where Rick can only land quick-paycheck guest spots because of two costly big-screen flops and a troubled personal life, Cliff has become persona non grata among the Hollywood stuntman community after the mysterious death of his wife Billie (Rebecca Gayheart). It was ruled an accident but rumors still persist that he killed her and got away with it.

There's a kinship among the pair, but the laid-back Cliff tends to spend much of his time consoling the insecure and depressed Rick, who has a slight stutter offscreen and laments that he's "washed-up" and doesn't want to do "Eye-talian westerns." The third figure in the story is Rick's next-door neighbor, promising VALLEY OF THE DOLLS co-star Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), whose new husband, Polish filmmaker Roman Polanski (Rafel Zaweirucha), is the toast of the town with the huge success of ROSEMARY'S BABY. The lives of Rick, Cliff, and Tate will intersect in a variety of ways over the course of HOLLYWOOD's 161-minute running time, and while the specter of Charles Manson (played here by Australian actor Damon Herriman, also cast as Manson in the upcoming season of Netflix's MINDHUNTER) looms large over the proceedings, this is not another HELTER SKELTER chronicle of the Tate-LaBianca murders of August 9-10, 1969. Tarantino, with the help of veteran visual effects maestro John Dykstra (STAR WARS), vividly, almost obsessively, recreates 1969 Hollywood to the point where you feel immersed in the past. The period detail is often astonishing, from the cars to the movie marquees to the production design to its depiction of the counterculture and the perfect selection of needle-drops (bonus points for possibly being the first late '60s-set film involving hippies to not feature Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth"). Rick's derisive scorn toward "the goddamn hippies" signifies his being stuck in the past of his heyday, while Cliff has a more accepting, come-what-may attitude, particularly in his recurring flirtaceous encounters from afar with hitchhiking flower child Pussycat (Margaret Qualley) until one fateful day when he finally decides to give her lift. As played by Robbie, Sharon Tate is the ingenue with a heart of gold, and the scene where she goes solo to a matinee at the Bruin in downtown L.A. to see herself in the Dean Martin "Matt Helm" adventure THE WRECKING CREW ("I'm in the movie!" she cheerfully tells the girl at the ticket booth) and gets quietly overcome with joy at the audience laughing at her comedic performance and cheering her kung-fu ass-kicking of co-star Nancy Kwan is truly touching.

Countless familiar faces play figures--both real and fictional--who wander in and out of the story, sometimes in the blink of an eye. On the entertainment front, there's Timothy Olyphant as LANCER star James Stacy, who would lose his left arm and leg in a motorcycle accident in 1973; the late Luke Perry, in his last film, as LANCER co-star Wayne Maunder; Nicholas Hammond as TV director and character actor Sam Wanamaker; and Rumer Willis as Tate friend Joanna Pettet. Emile Hirsch is Tate's ex-boyfriend Jay Sebring, who still remains close to her, patiently waiting for her to leave Polanski; Damian Lewis is an uncanny Steve McQueen getting stoned at the Playboy Mansion; Mike Moh is Bruce Lee in possibly the film's funniest scene; Kurt Russell and Zoe Bell are husband-and-wife stunt coordinators on LANCER (Russell is also the film's occasional narrator and is not playing his DEATH PROOF character Stuntman Mike as some speculated); Dakota Fanning is Manson follower Squeaky Fromme; Lena Dunham, Harley Quinn Smith (Kevin's daughter), and Maya Hawke (daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman) are other Manson disciples; and in a role intended for Burt Reynolds, who attended a table read with Pitt and Fanning but died just before he was scheduled to shoot his scenes, Bruce Dern is elderly and blind George Spahn, the owner of Spahn Ranch, a long out-of-commission 55-acre movie and TV western location set that was taken over by Manson and his "family."

Tarantino treats ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD as his cinematic playground, and the more well-versed you are in obscure TV and Eurocult titles of the day, the more fun you'll have with it (I would love to see Rick Dalton and Gordon Mitchell in an Antonio Margheriti Eurospy thriller called OPERAZIONE DYN-O-MITE!). As has been the case with latter-day Tarantino (never more than in the bloated THE HATEFUL EIGHT, a story that didn't need to take 168 minutes to be told), his tendency to meander does rear its head every now and again. While it's important to the story in terms of Rick's bottoming out and eventual path to redemption, the painstakingly laborious recreation of long takes and sequences from LANCER, where Rick has a guest spot as a bad guy, is the filmmaker at his most self-indulgent. At the same time, Rick's interaction on the set of LANCER with a committed, eight-year-old method actress (Julia Butters) provides HOLLYWOOD with one of its most genuinely moving moments, along with the final scene, which actually had people in the audience applauding. As good as DiCaprio and Robbie are, the secret weapon here is Pitt, who delivers a possible career-best performance. He's at the center of one of the film's strongest sequences--a visit to the Spahn Ranch that's every bit as intense and stomach-knotting as Jake Gyllenhaal's journey into the film programmer's basement in ZODIAC--and he's the key element of a shocking climactic showdown for the ages in a startling bit of revisionist history that makes this a great companion piece to Tarantino's INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS.

Luke Perry (1966-2019)

Though mournful and elegiac at times, ultimately, ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD is surprisingly wistful and uplifting in its own strange way, and even though it exists in an insulated, alternate universe of make-believe (Vietnam is barely mentioned), it's indicative of an older and more reflective Tarantino. Granted, it's jaw-droppingly outrageous at times, but in the redemptive arcs of Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth in an industry that's leaving them behind, there's a certain parallel with Pam Grier's and Robert Forster's characters in JACKIE BROWN, and for all the game-changing influence that PULP FICTION had 25 years ago, it's JACKIE BROWN that's looking more and more like Tarantino's best work with each passing year. Like most Tarantino films, ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD is compulsively rewatchable--maybe fast-forward through a couple of those LANCER scenes on subsequent revisits--and filled with several moments that are instantly etched in your moviegoing memory. In spite of his self-indulgent tendencies--which some believe came about after the unexpected death of his regular editor Sally Menke in 2010, but he was getting pretty tough to rein in way back around the time of KILL BILL--and his omnipresent foot fetish (he seems really taken with Robbie's and Qualley's), he's one of the few American auteurs for which each new film remains a legitimate and wildly unpredictable event, and to that end, ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD delivers the goods.

On Blu-ray/DVD: CRYPTO (2019) and SLAUGHTERHOUSE RULEZ (2019)

CRYPTO
(US/UK - 2019)

No movie that features someone yelling "That's not Dad's tongue, Caleb!" should be as dull as CRYPTO, a Bitcoinsploitation financial thriller that's destined to be the ROLLOVER of the cryptocurrency era. Martin Duran (Beau Knapp) is a savant-like fraud investigator with the ominously-named Manhattan financial behemoth OmniBank. Despite the support of his immediate supervisor (Jill Hennessy), he pisses off the company's CEO, who busts him down to a local branch in his podunk western New York hometown of Elba, and if you think there's a clever "Napoleon's exile" metaphor there that a smarter film would leave unspoken, don't worry, because the filmmakers actually have Martin say "Exiled to Elba...this is just like Napoleon." He hasn't been back to Elba since his mother's death a decade earlier, and he's completely estranged from the rest of his family--rage-case older brother Caleb (Luke Hemsworth, Chris and Liam's elder sibling), who hasn't been the same since Afghanistan, and their stoical potato farmer father Martin Sr. (a slumming Kurt Russell), who's facing bankruptcy and foreclosure. But something else is going on in Elba, and the more Martin digs into OmniCorp's files, the more evidence he finds that the Russian mob has taken over the town and is using the bank to launder money involving smuggled paintings at a swanky new art gallery, along with a Bitcoin scam run out of a local bait shop, and a human trafficking ring operating along the Niagara River at the US/Canada border.

Martin figures all of this out with the help of his high school buddy Earl (Jeremie Harris), who owns the local convenience store and conveniently moonlights as a hacker with a high-tech command center in his stockroom. About as enthralling as listening to a hipster talk about Bitcoin, CRYPTO is competently directed by John Stalberg, Jr. (his first film since 2010's little-seen Adrien Brody stoner comedy HIGH SCHOOL), but it's so draggy and listless that it never engages until it's too late, and it doesn't take advantage of the potentially politically-charged notion of the blue-collar, salt-of-the-earth Elba townies completely oblivious to all the Russian crime going on right in front of them. Knapp tries to create something with a character who's likely on the spectrum, but the film pretty much drops that aspect after demonstrating some examples of Martin's tendency toward faux pas and misreading signals ("I'll get out of your hair now," he says after questioning his predecessor in his job, a cancer patient undergoing chemo). Hemsworth again demonstrates why he's the perennial third-string Hemsworth, Alexis Bledel has little to do as an art gallery employee and potential love interest for Martin, and Vincent Kartheiser resembles a young Russell Crowe as a Russian mobster incognito as a skeezy Elba accountant. In a role that will never be lumped in with the Snake Plisskens and Jack Burtons of his legendary career, Russell is uncharacteristically bad here, using a weird sort-of Noo Yawk accent that he simply forgets about midway through. At this point, the beloved icon really should have better things to do than schlep his way through one of these kinds of Redbox-ready, Lionsgate/Grindstone VOD clunkers with 38 credited producers. (R, 106 mins)



SLAUGHTERHOUSE RULEZ
(UK - 2018; US release 2019)

Don't go into the abysmal SLAUGHTERHOUSE RULEZ expecting another fun Simon Pegg/Nick Frost teaming. The SHAUN OF THE DEAD fan favorites have supporting roles and share only one scene together in this tedious and painfully unfunny mash-up of '80s REVENGE OF THE NERDS-style slob comedy and slimy, TREMORS-esque creature feature. Slacker ne'er-do-well Don (Finn Cole of PEAKY BLINDERS and ANIMAL KINGDOM) is read the riot act by his widowed mom (Jo Hartley), who enrolls him in the posh Slaughterhouse boarding school, a beacon of class and upstanding citizenry since 1770. He becomes fast friends with sardonic misfit Willoughby (Asa Butterfield of HUGO), whose previous roommate committed suicide. There's a vicious social hierarchy at Slaughterhouse, and at the top is the cruel Clegg (Tom Rhys Harries), a William Zabka-like asshole who lords over Slaughterhouse with the wink-and-a-nod approval of sneering headmaster "The Bat" (Michael Sheen) and spineless administrator Meredith (Pegg). Don ends up part of Sparta House, the de facto Lambda Lambda Lambda for the Slaughterhouse dorks and dweebs, but their top concern is a fracking tower installed at the edge of the Slaughterhouse property by powerful conglomerate Terrafrack. The Bat is in favor of partnering with Terrafrack, but Sparta House, inspired by a group of shroom-enthusiast environmental activists led by Woody (Frost), take a stand against it, which seems to be the appropriate idea once Terrafrack opens a massive sinkhole that exposes a series of subterranean tunnels and caves that have been home to large, lizard-like creatures that come crawling to the surface and attacking the school.

Directed and co-written by Pegg buddy and Kula Shaker frontman Crispian Mills (son of Hayley Mills, and also the director of Pegg's career-worst A FANTASTIC FEAR OF EVERYTHING), SLAUGHTERHOUSE RULEZ takes over an hour for the creatures to figure in, and when they do, the horror action is so dark that it's nearly impossible to see what's going on amidst the severed limbs and splattery goo. Until then, it's a glacially-paced YA bore that quickly collapses after some occasionally amusing bits in the early going. The film seems significantly longer than 104 minutes, and Mills is far too indulgent to Pegg, who gets entirely too much screen time begging and pleading to get back together with his ex (a Skyped-in cameo by Margot Robbie) in scenes that have nothing to do with the story and everything to do with Pegg mugging shamelessly (eliminating just these pointless Pegg/Robbie scenes could've cut this down to a still-awful but more reasonable 90 minutes). There's little wonder why Sony buried this on VOD with no publicity, but after this and the unwatchable A FANTASTIC FEAR OF EVERYTHING, the real question is how many more times Pegg will keep stepping up to get the green light for his buddy's terrible movies. (R, 104 mins)

In Theaters: DEEPWATER HORIZON (2016)

DEEPWATER HORIZON
(US/China - 2016)

Directed by Peter Berg. Written by Matthew Michael Carnahan and Matthew Sand. Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Kurt Russell, John Malkovich, Kate Hudson, Gina Rodriguez, Dylan O'Brien, Ethan Suplee, J.D. Evermore, Trace Adkins, James DuMont, Douglas M. Griffin, Brad Leland, Dave Maldonado, Peter Berg, Stella Allen. (PG-13, 106 mins)

This riveting chronicle of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon rig explosion 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico, which led to the worst oil spill in U.S. history, reunites LONE SURVIVOR star Mark Wahlberg and director Peter Berg. Berg shot this back-to-back with the upcoming PATRIOTS DAY, with Wahlberg as a cop working security detail on the day of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. These three Wahlberg/Berg collaborations tentatively form a loose trilogy of ordinary people finding themselves in extraordinary situations and summoning a fighting spirit from deep within to do whatever they need to do to survive. With AMERICAN SNIPER and SULLY, Clint Eastwood has also staked a claim to this territory, but Berg (who came onboard at Wahlberg's request after A MOST VIOLENT YEAR director J.C. Chandor quit over creative differences during pre-production) doesn't resort to Eastwood's hagiographic tendencies, nor do he and screenwriters Matthew Michael Carnahan and Matthew Sand have to pull a SULLY and invent a bad guy to manufacture dramatic tension. The tension is there from the start, when Jimmy Harrell (Kurt Russell), the installation manager contracted to run operations on the Transocean-owned semi-submersible oil rig, is arriving for a 21-day stint and already butting heads with corporate guys from BP, who had a longstanding lease on the Deepwater Horizon. The bad omens manifest before they even get on the rig, from a bird strike on the plane ride out, to Harrell--"Mr. Jimmy" to his loyal crew--superstitiously requesting that smug BP pencil-pusher O'Bryan (James DuMont) take off his magenta-colored tie.

Mr. Jimmy is irate over BP's cancellation of a standard cement test in order to cut costs. All over the rig, little things are malfunctioning and snowballing into bigger issues--the wi-fi, the smoke alarms, pieces of drilling equipment are showing their age or even breaking. Chief electronics tech Mike Williams (Wahlberg) stands by Mr. Jimmy in his mistrust of BP's assigned rig supervisor Donald Vidrine (John Malkovich), who thinks the gauges indicating too much pressure represents a fault in the gauge that's not a cause for concern. While most of the crew is in the mess hall celebrating Mr. Jimmy getting a safety award from O'Bryan, Vidrine and another BP rep, Robert Kaluza (Brad Leland) essentially bully senior rig worker Jason Anderson (Ethan Suplee) into proceeding with the drilling when the blowout preventer malfunctions and all hell breaks loose. It begins with a massive oil eruption followed by an explosion caused by gas leaking from damaged and aging valves. 11 people were killed in the tragedy, with 115 evacuated to the nearby supply ship Damon Bankston, captained by Alwin Landry (Douglas M. Griffin).

While any film of this sort takes some dramatic liberties, DEEPWATER HORIZON for the most part sticks with the events and the timeline as the disaster unfolded. It makes no attempt to mask its contempt for the years of systemic corner-cutting by BP, whose reps aboard the vessel are only concerned with getting the work done as quickly and cheaply as possible (and, it should be noted, they're the first ones scurrying to the lifeboats when the shit hits the fan), and Berg does a very good job of conveying that sense of encroaching dread over a compelling first 45 or so minutes where we meet the characters and get a strong sense of who they are as they go about their routines, often speaking their own shorthand and work jargon (like Eastwood, Berg understands the importance of this). It shows us that these are reliable people who know what they're doing as Berg has the camera follow them around as things get increasingly tense, shaky, and claustrophobic. The film is perhaps a bit too ham-fisted when it comes to Malkovich's cartoonishly malevolent depiction of Vidrine, using an over-the-top Louisiana drawl that illustrates what might happen if James Carville was cast as the next Ernst Stavro Blofeld. There's plenty of blame to throw to lay at the feet of BP and their negligent malfeasance without Malkovich slathering on the faux-folksy local color so thick that even the late, great Justin Wilson might politely request that he take it down a notch. The actor gets dangerously close to CON AIR mode here, and other than some scattered shots of the now-mandatory unconvincing CGI fire, it's the one big misstep the film makes.

Wahlberg is fine as Williams, who became the face of the heroic rescue, and his scenes with Kate Hudson as Williams' wife and young Stella Allen as their daughter have a believable, lived-in feeling of genuine affection that Berg wisely doesn't oversell like Vidrine's villainy. But the key character in DEEPWATER HORIZON is the no-time-for-your-bullshit Mr. Jimmy, who joins the ranks of USED CARS' Rudy Russo, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK's Snake Plissken, THE THING's R.J. MacReady, THE BEST OF TIMES' Reno Hightower, BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA's Jack Burton, TANGO & CASH's Gabriel Cash, TOMBSTONE's Wyatt Earp, DEATH PROOF's Stuntman Mike, BONE TOMAHAWK's Sheriff Franklin Hunt, and THE HATEFUL EIGHT's John "The Hangman" Ruth in the annals of essential Kurt Russell characterizations. Russell is an actor who's generally liked by critics while at the same time never hailed as a great actor, and that's a shame. There's a Russell persona that the actor has perfected over the years, even in fantastical genre fare like his work with John Carpenter. Though he's proven his versatility, Russell excels at playing the kind of guy DEEPWATER HORIZON is all about: working men of ethics and principle with a strong sense of duty and a code of honor who get shit done. The Russell archetype is a quiet, thinking man's badass (Jack Burton being an exception) and even now at 65, with the lines in his aging face showing a leathery weariness that reminds one of Clint Eastwood, he's still showing everyone how it's done. Even spending the second half of the film hobbling around and blinded by glass in his eyes, Russell's Mr. Jimmy is a fearless leader. DEEPWATER HORIZON pays tribute to everyday working men who lost their lives on the job, and while it may be a Mark Wahlberg movie, the star and producer is smart enough to realize it's just as much a showcase for the underrated icon that is Kurt Russell.

In Theaters: THE HATEFUL EIGHT (2015)

THE HATEFUL EIGHT
(US - 2015)

Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. Cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Walton Goggins, Demian Bichir, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern, Channing Tatum, James Parks, Zoe Bell, Lee Horsley, Gene Jones, Dana Gourrier, Keith Jefferson, Craig Stark, Belinda Owino. (R, 168 mins)

Quentin Tarantino's second consecutive western (after 2012's spaghetti tribute DJANGO UNCHAINED) is a three-hour epic that's equal parts classic western, Agatha Christie mystery, Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, bitterly misanthropic screed, and a horrific, splatter-filled gorefest. It has everything you'd want in a Tarantino film--quotable dialogue, vividly-detailed characters, a spirited love of all cinematic genres, and some truly inspired creative violence. But it's also Tarantino at his most self-indulgent. THE HATEFUL EIGHT is a very good movie that could've been a great one if there was less of it. For the first time since the 107-minute European cut of DEATH PROOF, the shorter version of which was his contribution to GRINDHOUSE, a Tarantino film has moments of rambling, florid overwriting. Tarantino characters have a lot to say, but in THE HATEFUL EIGHT, they simply talk too much. And then they talk some more. It's the stagiest Tarantino film--even more so than his 1992 debut RESERVOIR DOGS, which had a lot more cutaways and flashbacks and was an hour shorter--but that's by design. For about 90 minutes, THE HATEFUL EIGHT is top-tier Tarantino, with a deliberate buildup that brings a group of wildly disparate characters together during a blizzard and the audience can just lean back and watch a great filmmaker get great performances out of his cast, letting the story gradually build into a stomach-knotting powderkeg of suspense and tension. But then Tarantino loses focus, a couple of major characters are Janet Leigh'd out of the film far earlier than you'd expect, and then it becomes a bit of an unwieldy mess, complete with the requisite Tarantino flashbacking, fractured timelines that bring both plot threads together. To call Tarantino self-indulgent is like calling water wet, but as a director, he's growing too enamored of the words of his favorite writer--Quentin Tarantino--to remain objective. DJANGO UNCHAINED ran a little long, but THE HATEFUL EIGHT starts to feel oppressive after a while, its story not nearly substantive enough to justify its bloated run time. It may sound like I didn't care for it, but I liked it quite a bit. I just would've preferred less of it.

Set several years after the end of the Civil War, THE HATEFUL EIGHT opens during a Wyoming blizzard as a stagecoach heads toward the mountain town of Red Rock. Bounty hunter and former Union Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), with the corpses of three outlaws in tow, hitches a ride on the coach transporting legendary bounty hunter John Ruth, aka "The Hangman" (Kurt Russell), who's taking his latest capture, outlaw Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to hang in Red Rock (she's wanted dead or alive, but as Ruth says, "I don't like to cheat the hangman"). As the blizzard gets closer and travel becomes more treacherous, they decide they'll have to wait it out at a lodge called Minnie's Haberdashery. Warren and Ruth form a Leone-esque unholy alliance to have one another's backs with their respective bounties, and on the way to Minnie's, they're joined by another traveler, new Red Rock sheriff Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), on his way to being sworn in and whose horse broke a leg in the storm and had to be killed. Mannix is the son of a legendary Confederate officer and tensions flare with Warren over old North and South grudges. Coach driver O.B. (James Parks) gets them to Minnie's to find others stranded: former Confederate General Sanford Smithers (Bruce Dern); cowboy Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), who's penning his memoirs; the very British Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), Red Rock's hangman; and Bob (Demian Bichir), a Mexican employee of Minnie's. Owners Minnie and Sweet Dave are nowhere to be found and Bob claims they went to visit Minnie's mother on the other side of the mountain and left him in charge. Warren is suspicious of their absence (Bob: "Are you calling me a liar?" Warren: "Not yet") and Ruth doesn't trust anyone in the group, remaining shackled to Daisy in the event anyone plans on collecting the $10,000 reward for her capture. Words are exchanged, war-era grievances exhumed, and alliances shift as it becomes clear that at least one person in the room isn't who they claim to be.

Though it doesn't involve an alien creature, the scenario should sound familiar to any Kurt Russell fan who's seen John Carpenter's 1982 version of THE THING. That's one of the most obvious homages in THE HATEFUL EIGHT, right down to the film's use of unused cues from the legendary Ennio Morricone's THING soundtrack (one of the very few times a Carpenter film was scored by someone other than Carpenter). Though Tarantino uses his usual mix-tape approach to scoring the film, throwing in some Roy Orbison and The White Stripes as well as a memorable borrowing of Morricone's "Regan's Theme" from EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC, the film also contains some original Morricone music written specifically for it. Tarantino's grandiose vision for THE HATEFUL EIGHT borders on hubris at times--who else would stage an overlong drawing-room mystery taking place mostly on one set while shooting in Ultra Panavision 70, a 65mm format that hasn't been used since 1966 (in keeping with that, a roadshow edition running 175 minutes (plus an intermission and an overture with some new Morricone music, debuted on 100 screens a week earlier than this general release version)? The snowy exteriors look incredible on a big screen, and Tarantino's the kind of gifted filmmaker who can make such lofty ambitions work in such a claustrophobic setting, also tossing in a few unmistakably De Palma split diopter shots to make the really hardcore movie nerds trickle a little with giddy excitement (guilty as charged).

From Tarantino's ego (the opening credits declare "The 8th Film by Quentin Tarantino," and midway through, he can't resist giving himself the role of narrator) to the inflated length to the use of Ultra Panavision for what's mostly a single-set production, everything about THE HATEFUL EIGHT is grandiosely overblown, including--intentionally so--the performances. Russell fans will be delighted to see him resurrecting the John Wayne swagger he used as Jack Burton in 1986's BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, though his better--and more restrained--2015 western performance can be seen in BONE TOMAHAWK. Jackson does his furious indignation schtick that no one does better, and no one drops an enraged "motherfucker" quite like him (and he gets to spit out his most vile Tarantino monologue yet with a story he tells Dern's Smithers about crossing paths with his son), and Leigh is positively feral at times, especially once she's missing some teeth and covered in blood and brain matter, looking like a possession victim in a '70s EXORCIST ripoff by the end. THE HATEFUL EIGHT is a film that's unmistakably the work of its mad scientist auteur creator, showcasing both his strengths and weaknesses, and operating at an estimated rate of 75% riveting to 25% tedious. Tarantino is one of the very few major directors whose new films constitute a legitimate event, but he could really stand to start taking a "less is more" approach.

In Theaters/On VOD: BONE TOMAHAWK (2015)

BONE TOMAHAWK
(US/UK/France - 2015)

Written and directed by S. Craig Zahler. Cast: Kurt Russell, Patrick Wilson, Matthew Fox, Richard Jenkins, Lili Simmons, David Arquette, Evan Jonigkeit, Kathryn Morris, Sid Haig, Fred Melamed, Michael Pare, Sean Young, James Tolkan, Jamison Newlander, Geno Segers, Zahn McLarnon. (Unrated, 132 mins)

An instant cult classic that actually earns the distinction, the horror-western hybrid BONE TOMAHAWK is the slow-burning directorial debut of novelist/musician/jack-of-all-trades S. Craig Zahler. Zahler's toiled on the fringes for much of his career, with his biggest brush with fame being when he was commissioned to script a ROBOTECH adaptation back in 2007 that ultimately never happened. He wrote the 2011 DTV horror film ASYLUM BLACKOUT, and in 2012, he had a martial arts series titled DOWNTOWN DRAGONS in the works for FX, but the network never moved it beyond the planning stage. Zahler found acclaim for his "western noir" novels like 2010's A Congregation of Jackals and 2013's Wraiths of the Broken Land, both books finding a huge fan in Kurt Russell, and the two became friends. Zahler wrote BONE TOMAHAWK for the legendary actor and the project was a labor of love--made for just $1.8 million, a shoestring budget by today's standards--that took several years to become a reality. It's a western like no other, one of the strangest and grisliest films of the year, and the kind of offbeat, original work that you just don't see much of these days. There's a reason it's getting a very limited theatrical release and being shuffled off to VOD. There's very little concern for commercial appeal here, though it will undoubtedly find an appreciative audience that will show it a lot more love than mainstream multiplexers ever would. Let there be no doubt: for better or worse, Zahler made exactly the film he wanted to make.

In the tiny town of Bright Hope, doctor Samantha O'Dwyer (Lili Simmons), Deputy Nick (Evan Jonigkeit), and injured outlaw Purvis (David Arquette) are abducted in the middle of the night from the sheriff's office by a tribe known as the "Troglodytes." Stone-age cannibals living undetected in caves in the vast terrain several days away from Bright Hope, the tribe came in search of Purvis who, with his late cohort Buddy (Sid Haig), disturbed a Troglodyte burial site and now everyone must pay the price. Sheriff Hunt (Russell), his loyal deputy Chicory (Richard Jenkins), sartorially dandy, lothario gunman John Brooder (Matthew Fox), and, against the wishes of everyone, Samantha's injured husband Arthur (Patrick Wilson), hobbling around and delicately nursing a broken tibia being held together by two splints, embark on the long journey to find Mrs. O'Dwyer and Deputy Nick.

Of course, they encounter every obstacle on the way--the elements, their horses get rustled away, Arthur's leg keeps needing reset--and for about 90 minutes, it's a harsh, brutal western. That's just an opening act for the harrowing last section of the film, when the heroes encounter the Troglodytes and are taken prisoner, at which point the film turns into what might happen if Ruggero Deodato remade THE SEARCHERS. For all the talk of Eli Roth's THE GREEN INFERNO being the big 2015 Italian cannibal homage, time will show that BONE TOMAHAWK was the better gutmuncher throwback, despite its old west setting (the Troglodytes are legitimately terrifying and far more effective than the cannibal tribe in Roth's film). But before all that, in character-driven sequences that many may find laboriously-paced, Zahler spends a lot of time establishing who these people are and what life is like in Bright Hope, engaging in world-building the likes of which you'd find in a novel. That kind of detail is uncommon in most movies today and yes, BONE TOMAHAWK takes a good 40 minutes to really get rolling, but viewer patience pays off by the end, when you realize just how well you know these people and how emotionally invested you are in the horrific, nightmarish predicament in which they've found themselves. Russell (his facial hair a work-in-progress for its epic state in Quentin Tarantino's upcoming THE HATEFUL EIGHT, which he worked on immediately following this) is so good here and has one particular line of dialogue late in the film that's so devastating and heartfelt that it brought tears to my eyes, and I don't get like that over movies, especially cannibal horror westerns. The performances are just terrific across the board. Every few minutes, Jenkins, basically playing the chatty, Gabby Hayes/Walter Brennan old coot sidekick, gets some goofy bit of dialogue or there's some sardonically funny and quotable line from somebody (Sheriff Hunt's deadpan reaction to seeing Chicory's geriatric horse: "That is not a handsome horse") that really makes you come to know and care about the characters.

BONE TOMAHAWK overcomes some early jitters over the possibility of gratuitous fanboy-pandering with the brief presence of cult horror scenesters and convention regulars like Haig, Michael Pare, Jamison Newlander (THE LOST BOYS' Alan Frog) as the mayor, and Sean Young as the mayor's abrasive, henpecking wife, but they're soon out of the picture when the rescue mission gets underway. In an age when horror filmmakers approach their movies with a sense of entitlement that it's a cult classic right out of the gate, it's nice to see a film take some chances and risk alienating the audience, and to see the creative force behind it earn the trust of experienced lead actors who typically don't do this kind of "extreme" fare. Unfolding just like a really good book, BONE TOMAHAWK very slowly and deliberately pulls you in and its power sneaks up you. It's the kind of film where revisits will reveal something new and interesting that you didn't catch before. I can't wait to watch it again. Even the really gross parts.

On DVD/Blu-ray: THE ART OF THE STEAL (2014) and 47 RONIN (2013)

THE ART OF THE STEAL
(Canada - 2013; US release 2014)

Is there anybody who doesn't like Kurt Russell?  Over his 50-year career, he's managed to become a beloved movie icon without actually having many blockbusters at the box office.  1991's BACKDRAFT and 1994's STARGATE were his biggest hits, and they never broke $80 million in 1990s dollars. Russell's best films tend to cultivate their bases over time, which is a trait he shares with his old friend John Carpenter.  None of their collaborations performed spectacularly on their initial theatrical releases, but 1981's ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, 1982's THE THING, and 1986's BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA are frequently cited as essential films of their decade.  They found their audience on video and cable and they've remained popular over the years as they've been discovered by new generations of fans. Even TOMBSTONE wasn't that massive a hit in 1993.  But it has such a fervent following today that it's hard to believe it topped out at $56 million and never got higher than third place at the box office.  The typical Russell vehicle has been one that did modest business in theaters and became popular video rentals on their way to constant rotation on cable. Russell's filmography reads like TNT's and AMC's weekend schedule over the last 20 years: USED CARS, OVERBOARD, TEQUILA SUNRISE, TANGO & CASH, UNLAWFUL ENTRY, CAPTAIN RON, EXECUTIVE DECISION, ESCAPE FROM L.A., BREAKDOWN, DARK BLUE, POSEIDON, etc. Russell may be the patron saint of "Movie you end up watching until it's over if you find it while channel-surfing."

Now 63, Russell's slowed down in recent years and took a five-year break after his turn as Stuntman Mike in the DEATH PROOF half of GRINDHOUSE before returning in a supporting role as a coach in the barely-released 2012 football drama TOUCHBACK.  It's no surprise that, with today's "$100 million on the opening weekend or it's a bomb" mindset, a new Kurt Russell movie only managed to get released on 60 screens for a $64,000 gross, but THE ART OF THE STEAL is a fun heist comedy that finds the man in vintage "Kurt Russell" form.  Russell is Crunch Calhoun, a veteran wheelman who just spent over five years in a Polish prison after taking the fall for his younger brother Nicky (Matt Dillon) when their last job went south.  Nicky is a slick con artist who's just made off with a priceless Georges Seurat painting but did so by cutting out his partner (Dax Ravina) who demands compensation from Crunch. Crunch touches base with Nicky and they reassemble the old crew--French forger Guy (Chris Diamantopoulos) and Paddy the Rolodex (Kenneth Welsh), with new additions Francie (Jay Baruchel), and Crunch's greedy wife Lola (Katheryn Winnick), on a $20 million plan to get a rare Gutenberg-printed Gospel According to James out of a Montreal customs house and smuggle it over the US border into Detroit, all with an incompetent Interpol agent (THE DAILY SHOW's Jason Jones) and a reluctant informant (Terence Stamp) on their tail. Of course, double and triple-crosses transpire and there's really nothing here plot-wise you haven't seen in a ton of other caper movies, but the Russell-led ensemble works very well together and writer/director Jonathan Sobol throws in some offbeat touches (like Ravina's brawny goon being a Seurat connoisseur), and numerous snappy exchanges and bits of quotable dialogue (Crunch and Nicky referring to lecherous Paddy as "Uncle Fucks-a-lot" and "Sloppy Balls McCarthy"; Francie putting on a fake Amish beard and telling a border officer that he's starring in a Broadway musical version of WITNESS! "with an exclamation point").  The heist itself is fairly routine and the story rather slight, but THE ART OF THE STEAL is an enjoyable little movie that doesn't overstay its welcome and gets a lot of mileage out of Russell's engaging presence and genuinely funny performance. It's the kind of film you'll stop on and end up watching if you come across it on TV some lazy Saturday afternoon--in other words, it's a quintessential Kurt Russell movie, and you can always use one of those.  Also, "Crunch Calhoun" is right up there with "Snake Plissken," "R.J. MacReady," "Reno Hightower," "Jack Burton," "Gabriel Cash," and "Bull McCaffrey" on the list of Awesome Kurt Russell Character Names.  (R, 90 mins)


47 RONIN
(US - 2013)

In the coming years, the long-delayed 47 RONIN is likely to be regarded less as just a bad movie and more as a case study for meddlesome production mismanagement and apocalyptically out-to-lunch decision-making.  It's not just a case of too many cooks in the kitchen--it's also a case of everyone just assuming someone else has got the cooking covered.  Every problem that the production encountered got worse when simply throwing more money at it failed to magically solve anything.  The legendary Japanese tale of the 47 Ronin has been told before and referenced many times in Japanese cinema:  in the 18th century, 47 outcast former samurai seek to avenge the death of their master, driven to suicide after being shamed in a dispute with a rival lord who insulted him.  It's a story that's influenced everything from Japanese folklore to the classic samurai films of Akira Kurosawa or Kenji Mizoguchi, who made the original 1941 version of 47 RONIN (Kon Ichikawa directed the 1994 remake).  The 2013 47 RONIN may share a title and the setting, but it ends there.  Why?  Because the people behind the latest 47 RONIN offer what the other versions lack and they felt we've been missing all this time:  a first-time director (Carl Rinsch) working with a $175 million budget; a shape-shifting witch disguising herself as a demonic fox and casting spells on samurai warriors; and absurdly inappropriate creatures like ogres, orcs, dragons, something called "the Lovecraftian Samurai," and Keanu Reeves. It's the famous story filtered through LORD OF THE RINGS and coming out as something akin to IN THE NAME OF THE RONIN. Who thought any of this was a good idea? Reeves has done some fine work over his career, but after DANGEROUS LIAISONS and BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA, how does anyone willingly cast him in a serious period piece?

Universal knew they were in trouble when they announced a writedown before the film even opened.  It grossed just $38 million domestically and bombed overseas. Of course, it was Rinsch who got thrown under the bus, but things only got ridiculous when the suits didn't like the rough cut he submitted as far back as the fall of 2011. They complained that it felt like "a samurai art film" and demanded more special effects and more Reeves. Reeves plays Kai, a Japanese/British half-breed adopted by the benevolent samurai leader Lord Asano (Min Tanaka). Kai is a character invented for the film, and it constantly struggles to find a use for him.  The real star is veteran Japanese actor Hiroyuki Sanada as Oishi, the leader of the late Lord Asano's disgraced ronin, who's plotting vengeance against Lord Kira (Tadanobu Asano), who's under the control of the aforementioned shapeshifting witch (Rinko Kikuchi). Kikuchi was added to the film after Rinsch's original cut was rejected and DRIVE screenwriter Hossein Amini was brought on to reconstruct Chris Morgan's script.  Amini added the supernatural elements as well as more scenes for Reeves, whose Kai was so secondary to the crux of the plot that he initially wasn't even involved in the climax of the film.  Production was delayed since they had to wait until Reeves was finished with MAN OF TAI CHI so he could return to shoot the new scenes, causing the fall 2012 release date to get bumped to over a year later, when the film finally opened on Christmas Day 2013. It already felt like Reeves was in another movie altogether, but it's never more glaring than in the climax, where Oishi and Kira fight it out while Kai battles the witch, who has shape-shifted into a snake-like, fire-breathing dragon.  Not since hastily-shot footage of Eddie Murphy goofing off in a tank was shoehorned into the two-years-on-the-shelf Dudley Moore comedy BEST DEFENSE in 1984 has post-production stitching looked so cumbersome and desperate. How does a beloved, culture-defining story of the samurai code of honor end up with Keanu Reeves discovering his CROUCHING TIGER-meets-THE MATRIX flying powers while battlling a dragon?

Actual shot from 47 RONIN

You want to know the extent of the cluelessness of everyone involved?  It wasn't discovered until shooting began that many of the Japanese actors weren't fluent in English and had to speak their dialogue phonetically (some of them are quite clearly dubbed or they at least looped it in post).  Who was in charge here?  Sure, some of this probably lies on Rinsch, but this stopped being his vision once the rough cut was shot down.  From that point on, he was simply an employee on his way to becoming a convenient scapegoat.  The majority of the blame should rest with the producers and studio execs who insisted on abandoning the source story with the lethal combo of Reeves and CGI monsters and let the budget bloat without ever really settling on or communicating to Rinsch exactly what it was they wanted.  Sanada and Asano give it their best effort and try to bring some sense of dignity to the grease fire spreading around them, and the film would work a lot better if it stayed focused on them instead of Reeves and orcs and dragons.  The visual effects are subpar for such an obscene budget and where's the sense of spirit that vital to any samurai film? These things are supposed to be rousing and alive! Where's the camaraderie among the ronin? There's 47 of them but we meet something like five, tops. This whole catastrophe might've been more palatable with the right kind of tongue-in-cheek attitude, but 47 RONIN is dour, dull, and takes itself far too seriously for a film that has little use and even less respect for its source story.  Its only accomplishment is in the way it effectively demonstrates everything wrong with Hollywood in just under two hours.  (PG-13, 119 mins)

Summer of 1982: BLADE RUNNER and THE THING (June 25, 1982)

When I first noticed online chatter about the 30th anniversary of the Summer of 1982 and all the classic genre fare that rolled out during that eventful season, I noticed that a lot of it was centered around this weekend.  Yes, there was already CONAN THE BARBARIAN and THE ROAD WARRIOR and STAR TREK II and POLTERGEIST and E.T., but really the weekend of June 25, 1982 is what was generating the most enthusiasm as the 30th anniversary approached.  Moviegoers had no way of knowing it at the time, but they wouldn't realize the impact of this weekend for quite some time.  Years, in fact.  On Friday, June 25, 1982, two of the most important, groundbreaking, influential, and universally respected genre films of the last 30 years were unveiled:  Ridley Scott's BLADE RUNNER and John Carpenter's THE THING.

But it was certainly a different story in 1982.  BLADE RUNNER, heavily hyped as not only Ridley Scott's follow-up to ALIEN (1979), but also Harrison Ford's first film since 1981's blockbuster RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, opened well but nosedived its second weekend and fell short of recouping its budget.  Considering Ford's recent track record of STAR WARS, THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, and RAIDERS, audiences didn't want a slow, bleak, philosophical, meditative film noir-inspired science fiction film that didn't offer much in the way of action.  Not helping matters was that the released film, as we would find out in the coming years, was not Scott's preferred version, but a compromised one with a changed ending and voiceover narration added after the fact by Ford, who wasn't enthused about this decision and sounds like he's doing it at gunpoint.  Nevertheless, the film, based on Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, almost instantly developed a fervent cult following despite disappearing from theaters rather quickly.  It's easy to see why: even if you don't like the story or find it too ponderous and slow, there's no denying that it looks and feels like no other film.  From Lawrence G. Paull's production design to Douglas Trumbull's photographic effects to the contributions of "visual futurist" Syd Mead to its rainy Los Angeles of 2019 to the hypnotic electronic score by Vangelis, then riding high on his CHARIOTS OF FIRE theme, BLADE RUNNER was a wholly unique cinematic vision that had never been seen before.

The incredible opening scene of BLADE RUNNER:

Harrison Ford as Deckard

The film had to have a few moments of violence trimmed to avoid an X rating, but an unrated version eventually appeared on VHS.  A somewhat mislabeled "director's cut" was released in 1992, done without Scott's involvement but assembled based on his original cut.  It removed Ford's narration and reinstated the original ending and the important dream sequence with the unicorn.  This quickly became the new "official" version of BLADE RUNNER until 2007 when Scott issued BLADE RUNNER: THE FINAL CUT, his first fully-approved director's cut with the previous 1992 changes (or reinstatements), along with some different shots, improved visual effects, corrected gaffes (like the digital removal of the visible wires on the flying police spinners), and a more smoothly-done chase sequence between blade runner Deckard (Ford) and replicant Zohra (Joanna Cassidy), a scene that was bungled a bit in past versions by Cassidy's curly-haired stunt double being all too obvious.

Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) delivering one of cinema's great speeches

No less than five versions of BLADE RUNNER exist--the 1982 R-rated theatrical, the unrated version of the 1982 cut, the 1992 "Director's Cut," the 2007 Final Cut, and, exclusively on the Blu-ray set, a pre-release workprint version--though the 2007 Final Cut is now considered by Scott to be official.  Nevertheless, there are a small number of folks who prefer the 1982 theatrical.  It gives you the proper visual impact, but it's not the film Scott wanted to make (which, all the way up to the just-released PROMETHEUS, seems to be the story of his career), has a happy ending (Deckard escapes with Sean Young's Rachel) and makes clear the many plot elements that co-writer Hampton Fancher preferred to remain ambiguous, though Scott has been pretty clear in his own interpretation of the "Deckard is really a replicant" ending.  It took 25 years for Scott's intended version--really a fine-tuning of the 1992 cut--to finally see the light of day, and it works because its technical changes are not overwhelming.  Scott uses 2007 technological advancements on a 1982 film but does it in subtle ways.  He doesn't put the changes front and center in a way that takes BLADE RUNNER out of its proper era and context.  I generally don't agree with filmmakers going back and enhancing or "fixing" a film with technology that didn't exist when that film was made, but if there is indeed a right way to do it, then that's what Scott has done with BLADE RUNNER: THE FINAL CUT.

John Carpenter's THE THING, like the 1951 sci-fi classic THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD, is based on John W. Campbell, Jr's classic short story "Who Goes There?"  The 1951 film had an Antarctica outpost attacked by an alien being (James Arness).  Carpenter's film follows the story more faithfully:  an alien life form infiltrates an Antarctica research facility and starts killing, absorbing, and imitating the protagonists.  It's an exercise in nail-biting, sweat-inducing paranoia and Carpenter and screenwriter Bill Lancaster (son of Hollywood legend Burt) milk it for all it's worth.  But what really set THE THING apart from everything else in the summer of 1982 was its shocking, inventive special effects by Rob Bottin.  These gory effects were a major gripe for film critics of the old guard, who probably saw Carpenter as a symbol of all that was wrong with horror films in the early 1980s.  His HALLOWEEN was instrumental in starting the slasher craze that was flooding theaters and presumably warping the minds of impressionable children.  Horror fans who saw THE THING thought very highly of it, but it was a box-office disappointment at the time.  It found a strong fan base once it hit video and then became a fixture on pay cable for the rest of the decade.

Kurt Russell as R.J. "Hey, Sweden!" MacReady.

But then something funny happened:  years and years later, THE THING started being regularly name-checked by serious film critics as a great horror film.  It's not uncommon for John Carpenter films to get belated accolades years after they're released and instantly dismissed (in recent years, critics have finally started coming around to 1987's ambitious, physics-heavy PRINCE OF DARKNESS and 1988's more-relevant-than-ever THEY LIVE), but there's almost nothing but nice things said about THE THING today.  Sure, some of the critics of the early '80s have changed their tune, but it's also indicative of a new generation of film critics and historians and the films that mean something to them.  In his essential 1985 study Nightmare Movies, Kim Newman was one of the first critics to praise the merits of slasher films, zombie films, and splatter films by people like Carpenter, Wes Craven, and Lucio Fulci, and to say they were just as important as the classics cherished by old-guard stalwarts like William K. Everson, who blasted new films like NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and THE EXORCIST in his mid-1970s book Classics of the Horror Film, a survey of horror films going back to the silents.  Everson lamented the rise of excessive violence and sex, while Newman essentially said "Times have changed, these are the new classics."  One of the best lines in Newman's book is when he hopes some kid reading his book writes another decades down the road that contradicts everything he's just written.

The Norris defibrillation scene:

The point is, there were still a lot of older critics who didn't take a shine to Carpenter and HALLOWEEN and his gore effects and thought the new THING was an insult to the black & white classic from 1951.  That is, if they deemed horror a real genre at all, which many highbrow critics didn't.  The decades have altered that sentiment, even if Leonard Maltin's book still rates it a mere *½.  Aside from Palmer's (David Clennon) top-loading VCR, Nauls' (T.K. Carter) Stevie Wonder-blaring ghetto blaster, and R.J. MacReady's (Kurt Russell) J&B-doused battle with the Chess Wizard, THE THING has aged better than arguably any horror film of its day.  As a horror film, it's incredibly intense, and as a study in paranoia, it's top-notch.  The characters are believable and they use their heads, and the film establishes ground rules and sticks to them, never cheating.  Maybe one reason the film didn't catch on at the time or didn't initally seem appealing to audiences is because horror was fast-becoming a teen genre, and this was filled with cranky-looking character actors like Wilford Brimley, Donald Moffat, and Richard Dysart, with Russell (fresh from Carpenter's ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK), Carter (a comedian who was just in Walter Hill's SOUTHERN COMFORT), and Thomas G. Waites (Fox in Hill's THE WARRIORS) the closest thing to "youth appeal."  Maybe everyone was still going to see E.T. and if that was sold out, they opted for BLADE RUNNER because of Harrison Ford.  Regardless of the whys, THE THING's day eventually arrived (last year saw the release of a passable but pointless prequel--also titled THE THING--about the events that led up to the 1982 film).  Carpenter's THE THING is cherished by fans, and Carpenter, lambasted by film snobs for so many years, is finally held in high regard and lauded as a great filmmaker.  I can't recall meeting anyone--in person or online--who doesn't think THE THING is one of the great horror films not just of the last 30 years, but ever.  It's a classic, period.  And the DVD commentary with Carpenter and Russell is almost as entertaining as the film itself.

BLADE RUNNER and THE THING proved to be films that were years ahead of their time, and both have not only stood the test of time, but they get better with each passing year. Not many 30-year-old films can make that boast, and two of them, so neglected and underappreciated in 1982, were released on the same day.

And then there's MEGAFORCE.

Hal Needham's MEGAFORCE also hit theaters this same weekend.  Budgeted at $20 million (quite a bit by 1982 standards), it grossed about a quarter of that and was one of the biggest bombs of the early 1980s, even with a tie-in Hot Wheels playset and an Atari 2600 game. MEGAFORCE is pretty hard to see these days:  it was released on VHS and aired on cable, but it's never been released on DVD (though there are bootlegs, and it periodically turns up on YouTube before being taken down), despite it accruing a bit of a following over the last 30 years.  Used VHS copies start at $34 on Amazon.  The action-packed story centers on Ace Hunter (Barry Bostwick), the leader of Megaforce, a freelance organization of international mercenaries.  Megaforce is hired to help the fictional nation of Sardun defeat an invasion by neighboring country Gamibia--an invasion led by Ace's former friend Duke Gurerra (Henry Silva).  Filled with flying motorcycles and laser-shooting megacruiser dune buggies, MEGAFORCE is a total comic book fantasy, and Needham (director of numerous Burt Reynolds car chase comedies, starting with SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT) was said to be very discouraged by its horrible reception.  Being released the same weekend as BLADE RUNNER and during the summer of E.T. probably didn't help.  It wasn't exactly the big break to the A-list that TV star Bostwick was hoping for, either.  Bostwick co-starred in THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975), but was primarily a TV actor by 1982, and after MEGAFORCE mega-bombed, he licked his wounds and went right back to TV, where he's enjoyed a busy career to this day with only occasional supporting roles on the big screen. 

Also starring in MEGAFORCE were Michael Beck and Persis Khambatta.  The engaging Beck established himself as an actor to watch as Swan in 1979's THE WARRIORS, but just couldn't catch a break after that (he once said--I think on the WARRIORS DVD, perhaps?--that "THE WARRIORS opened a ton of doors...that XANADU immediately closed").  After Razzie nominations for both XANADU and MEGAFORCE, Beck moved on to the Roger Corman-released WARLORDS OF THE 21ST CENTURY (aka BATTLETRUCK) and co-starred with Richard Harris in the barely-released TRIUMPHS OF A MAN CALLED HORSE, and then it was pretty much TV guest spots and made-for-TV movies after that.  Beck hasn't acted since 2004 but has found a lucrative career as an in-demand voice for TV commercials and audiobook readings.  MEGAFORCE did nothing to help anyone's career, but Khambatta seemed to fare worse than her co-stars.  After the Indian actress' breakthrough as the bald Ilia in 1979's STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE and as a sultry international terrorist in 1981's NIGHTHAWKS, MEGAFORCE was essentially her last shot at Hollywood fame.  Within a year, she was co-starring in the Italian post-nuke WARRIOR OF THE LOST WORLD and did a few TV roles and straight-to-video titles before essentially retiring from acting in the late '80s.  She had a couple of bit parts on TV in the '90s and was only 49 when she died of a heart attack in 1998.

With the increased popularity of studios doing manufactured-on-demand DVD releases, it seems unlikely that MEGAFORCE will never see the light of day on DVD or Blu-ray, but there's no sign of it happening in the immediate future.**

**UPDATE: Actually, it appears Hen's Tooth is releasing it on DVD on September 4, 2012.