Reviews

Shot in 18 days on a budget of $52 000 this is guerrilla film making at its best. After a businessman's daughter is kidnapped those who took the child deliberately toy with him leading to his interaction with various types of people he would normally not have anything to do with. Seeing how the other half lives in overdrive. Includes footage of a pre Giuliani Times Square with all the various weird and wonderful characters that inhabited this domain. Well acted by the entire cast. The scenes with the taxi driver deserve an Academy Award for realism. The sleazy bartender/drug dealer is played by the director's father. The director optioned the script to other movie makers including those who filmed the similar Ransom but ended up doing it himself. Mercy was released first and I think it is the better of the two.

A documentary which traces a 9000 mile ocean journey using balsa wood rafts equipped with sails. The crew started in Ecuador and finished in Australia. Narration is by actor Robert Webber. The captain of the expedition Vital Alsar was interested in finding out if the ocean voyages of the South American native peoples from centuries past could be replicated using the same materials for the rafts. The crew became adept at fishing and this became their staple diet especially as tinned food started rotting and had to be thrown overboard. Two monkeys and two kittens joined the sailors for the journey. The cats even befriended a bird that landed on one of the rafts and stayed for a couple of days. One of the rafts was called Mooloolaba which is the name of a place in the state of Queensland which was their intended destination. Unfortunately they were off course and landed further south in the New South Wales town of Ballina. Nevertheless they were given a warm welcome and were happy to be on dry land.

An interesting documentary about Ukraine which was dubbed "the breadbasket of Europe" but in the early 1930s was forced to endure a famine not because of crop failure or any other natural disaster but because it was targeted by the leadership of the Soviet Union including Josef Stalin and Lazar Kaganovich. The Ukrainian farmers known as kulaks were regarded as class enemies and on the Soviet communist hit list. The borders of Ukraine were sealed by the Soviet secret police and grain confiscated by the state. As a result millions starved to death. It is interesting to note that Winston Churchill knew about the Holodomor but still embraced Stalin as an ally in 1941. Churchill didn't care about the millions of deaths. At their first wartime meeting Stalin remarked to the British prime minister "Ten million kulaks have been liquidated". He was implying that they were killed by the enemy when he himself was responsible. Same thing with Franklin Roosevelt. He didn't care about the millions of deaths. In fact at the same time the Holodomor occurred the Roosevelt administration was giving diplomatic recognition to the USSR. Churchill and Roosevelt both claimed to be fighting against dictatorship yet fully supported Stalin who was a dictator. World War 2 - when cognitive dissonance reigned supreme.

Paramount has released this film on dvd and bluray but with no extras at all not even a trailer. Could it be that a Hollywood studio does not want to publicise a movie which shows the decadence and and profit hungry mentality of a Hollywood studio because it cuts too close to the bone ? A case of art imitating life ? Burgess Meredith plays an over the hill vaudeville performer. I imagine he could relate to the subject matter of this film as he started his acting career in the 1930s appearing in several films most notably Of Mice and Men. Donald Sutherland appears as a character called Homer Simpson yet this movie was released over a decade before the tv series first appeared. Another offbeat character is "Adore" a child who is an aspiring dancer/singer. Although meant to be a girl the part is played by a male actor (Jackie Haley). Maybe this was an allusion to Shirley Temple ? Believe it or not some people actually thought that Shirley Temple was a boy disguised as a girl. Cult horror film director William Castle plays a film director during the battle of Waterloo sequence. Excellent score and use of period music by John Barry.

A lot of people don't know this show exists because it came and went so quickly. This obscure TV program had the premise of at least one character being a robot in disguise who was up to no good. For this reason I call it the "Guess Who is a Robot?" show. For early 80's TV it is watchable but compared to the movies WESTWORLD and FUTUREWORLD it is pretty lame. The ratings must have really been in the toilet for the network to cancel the show after only 5 episodes! It was interesting to see the cast list of guest stars which include Robert Alda, Rene Auberjonois, Ronee Blakely, Christopher Connelly, Monte Markham, Michael Pataki and George Takei amongst others.

An ultra cheap bikie/mateship movie. If STONE is a low budget bikie movie then COSY COOL is a microscopically budgeted bikie movie. There is a scene where Cosy and Gracious are told to leave a property by a farmer with a dog - the actor playing the farmer in his mannerisms looked and acted a bit like former Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen. There is another scene where devil maniacs sacrifice a woman and drink her blood. This comes across as a completely different film and looks like it has been spliced into COSY COOL. I have this on a 1998 DVD release and the blurb at the end of the movie states that the Milperra Massacre occurred in 1982. Which drongo wrote that? That event actually occurred on Fathers Day 1984. A z grade production but that's the way I like them. I would rather watch this than a big budget Hollywood production.