Reviews

Warren Oates is really playing Sam Peckinpah in this dark, alcohol-soaked downward spiral tidal wave of redemptive self-destruction. Bennie is a piano playing three-time loser trapped in a Mexican dive bar who hopes to change his fortunes by a promised reward from a powerful rancher due to a family scandal, except Alfredo is already dead and Bennie has no qualms digging up the grave with his prostitute girlfriend in hopes to use the reward money to start a new, clean dream life. Things only get worse from there and devolve into a crazed, near-hallucinatory road movie with Bennie conversing with Alfredo's decomposing, fly-covered head in a bag tossed in the passenger seat. A pernicious suicidal Odyssey? Or Peckinpah's sly allegory of the Hollywood system? The only film he ever directed completely untouched by the studios.

One of the many fascinating aspects of this movie is that it's written by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins (!!!) and only adds an extra bonus of awesomeness to an already much-loved but criminally under-seen movie. SHEILA is a groovy early-70's cinematic multi-tasker that balances a whodunnit murder mystery, a picturesque travelogue, and the sordid, backstabbing underbelly of the Hollywood backlot all under the clever gimmick of an elaborate parlor game aboard a capacious yacht. An eternally smiling, ascot-wearing James Coburn, a legendary but despised film producer/director, ritualistically holds intricate party games with specially invited guests each year to celebrate his birthday. After a hit-and-run accident kills his wife, this one particular game consists of the party guests own ignominious and damaging real-life secrets written on cards, scrambled and issued to other players who have to discover which secrets apply to them. Without revealing anymore possible spoilers, the film itself manages to develop into a clever puzzle that becomes a game in itself for the viewer. It's a perfect cult movie that doesn't seem to have much of a cult surrounding it, but it does have a really interesting cast that seems deliberately hand-picked to represent possible based-on-real-life Hollywood figures (Yet another game within the game?) Richard Benjamin, Dyan Cannon, the great Joan Hackett, a young and prime Ian McShane, a perfectly vapid and tony Raquel Welch, and the amazing James Mason who almost hijacks the entire film single handed. Did I mention hand-puppets? A flick I watch religiously several times a year.

This flick must be really edgy, original, and entertaining...If you haven't been exposed to any film before, say-- 1998.

What seemingly held the promise of being an off-beat, independent, semi-obscure B-Movie gem winds up a straight-to-DVD feeling, poor man's pulp fiction copied copy with the usual, check-the-reference-box filthy-wit run-on sentence dialogue, charactery characters and the regularly-paced twist within a twist cues that read like a connect-the-dots game on a fast food placemat.

I can't say it was all bad-- there were a few bright bits sprinkled about, and I can't figure out how exactly Dave Foley suddenly showed up in the movie, but there he was.

I couldn't decide if he was playing a character I was supposed to be interested in and wanted to know more about or if he was merely performing an old unused Kids In The Hall skit and won some crazy drunken Texas Poker game with the filmmakers and to square the bet they wrote the sketch into the script they just happen to be shooting that weekend.

There were a couple of half-decent moments, a nicely calculated editing payoff here and there, some near-interesting if should have been truncated sequences, and even a chuckle or three, accidentally trapped inside the movie-- like an enemic colony of semi-talented honey-bees frozen in amber-- but somebody couldn't stop cut-and-pasting in these heavily soundtracked music video 'tone poems' that separated the parts of the movie where actors spoke and interacted and "story" happened, coming in at regularly paced intervals where I suppose the commercials will be placed in later when it runs on some triple-digit cable channel at three-thirty in the morning.

I did noticed a few lucky good castings (mostly the cameos by Paul Dooley and Peter Jason) and I kinda half-expected Quentin Tarantino himself to appear in the film at some point, playing some creepy, scatalogically-mouthed Coroner's Office worker telling some colorful and convoluted dirty jokes or some equally weird and creepy strip club patron.

Admittedly, I went into this expecting perhaps not a better film than it's predecessor, but with the fine cast attached to it, and Cate reprising one of her best roles, I had hoped at the very least to see a film that could sustain my attention-- which it failed to do miserably.

This so-called historical drama felt more like a bad, third-rate Early-90's USA made-for-television movie.

A textbook example of a great cast squandered and wasted in a clunky, badly-directed historically hysterical stink bomb.

Frankly by the time the director eschewed any reasonable (or logical) storytelling devices and started randomly hoisting the camera in the farthest reaches of the rafters for no discernible reason, I found myself observing the theater interior I was sitting in and the lighting design details in particular. The bathrooms were notable as well with fully stocked paper towels as I quite dislike those hand dryer machine things...

This film should only be seen by serious fans of either Owen and/or Blanchette. All other humans should avoid.

I remember this show's theme song and opening vividly and recall it with much fondness. Followed Sesame Street on Channel 13 out of NY.

The music, the kids, learning to count in Spanish, and the great, GREAT Carmen Zapata as the town's Mayor. I am always stunned that this show has not been more remembered, continued, re-made, celebrated, and made more available. I have never met anyone who has any recall of the program at all.

Is education, cultural heritage, awareness and diversity merely uninteresting, fashionable buzz-words? It's a disappointing loss for kids and adults alike.

I found this flick on a three movie DVD compilation of Fred Williamson films for around three or four bucks. I discovered it at the supermarket of all places and what a return on that initial four dollar investment (If you strung together the randomly occurring "good bits" from all three shows you'd have one cool, effectively kick-ass movie-- it wouldn't make any sense of course but it'd be chock full of good bits!).

I love Fred Williamson-- he's like the funky love-child of John Cassavetes and Jim Brown. There may be rambling and fumbled story lines and plot focus, the quality of the production may waver and shift with the tenuous availability of funds, always some friends-doing-a-favor-casting, bizarre and clunky setups, obtuse angles and ham-fisted camera work, self-indulgent faux-introspective montage, and lots of technical sloppiness and cheap shortcuts are all evident throughout his oeuvre. But the fervent passion and pure love for cinema all seem to somehow leak through like tepid, runny kindergarten paste holding everything together by some incredulous force of will. Fred's shrewd and clever will.

Fred may not be easily filed in the same category with directors of such influence and artistic gravitas as Lang, Welles, or Kurosawa, but they probably wouldn't mind hanging out with him over a couple of drinks and some girls.

Mean Johnny Barrows is not a good movie. But it is fun, goofy, dumb, sleazy, cheap, silly and thrilling. For the right pair of eyes that delight in the subtle contextual appreciations of Blaxploitation, Crime/Mob Pictures, or just choice 1970's trashy film-making it is an inimitable masterpiece.

The casting is priceless. Luther Adler is perfect as a post-Godfather era cardboard cut-out patriarch with the additional ludicrous premise of having Roddy McDowall play his own son. McDowall's hairstyle alone is enough to justify purchasing this movie, with the appearance of a melting dollop of brown Cool Whip. He frets and blanches and swallows as a Fredoesque nervous Nellie, uncomfortable with his familial role as oldest son and next-in-line Family Boss.

The astounding Stuart Whitman plays a rival Mob Boss who owns an Italian Restaurant and spends most of the time interfering in the kitchen. His hair also invokes an instinctual fight-or-flight response like Mary-Tyler Moore at an Alice Cooper concert. He has a strange tendency to instantaneously change entire outfits without warning in a singular scene. He also keeps one arm stiffly bent at chest level at all times for no discernible reason whatsoever and in most scenes appears to have been sleeping in his wardrobe, woken up only seconds before filming any of his takes.

R.G. Armstong is undeniably electrifying as the filling station owner who reluctantly gives the jobless and homeless Mean Johnny Barrows employment for no other reason than he needs someone to clean his bathrooms.

And Elliot Gould makes his legendary "Special Appearance" as the worlds most colorful and erudite hobo in motion picture history.

There's lots of music and walking sequences, bad suits, nasty cops, bigotry, ambition, and eating out of garbage cans. There's romance and violence and lots of giant 70's cars pulling in and out of driveways, all inevitably leading up to fisticuffs and gratuitous gun play, of course.

I would say if you have four bucks in change floating around inside your couch or car or even in the pockets of an old coat in storage somewhere and you have developed an appreciation for this enjoyable genre, trade in those rolls of pennies and pick it up! 'Cause at the end of the day, it's all about Fred.