With this, director Robert Clouse made what is easily Bruce Lee’s finest film (and then proceeded to follow it up with a never-ending string of schlock). While Lee is technically one point of a heroic triangle — with A Nightmare on Elm Street’s John Saxon and blaxploitation icon Jim Kelly being the others — let’s […]
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Jack the Giant Slayer
The film’s fatal mistake? Perhaps it was director Bryan Singer embracing the 19th-century nature of the story as tightly as he did Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie for his own Superman Returns. These days, to satisfy family audiences, it’s evidently not enough to revive an old-fashioned tale; you have to hip it up with nods […]
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Terror on a Train
As the title has it, the film is more concerned with the work half of that equation. A terrorist has planted a package of explosives on a train — or, as one character puts it, “Some joker’s been monkeyin’ around with your load!” — and Lyncort is called into action to diffuse the situation. Meanwhile, an […]
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Mad Max Trilogy
The first film introduces future cop Mad Max Rockatansky and director George Miller’s violent, pedal-to-the-metal world of carmageddon. Its chase sequences are as exciting as anything the action genre had seen, and they still hold up because their influence is ever-present. While Max’s family life slows the middle, it fuels a bang-up final act of […]
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Childrens Hospital: The Complete Fourth Season
The good news is that it’s as hilarious as it’s ever been. The bad news is that its title still lacks the necessary apostrophe. (Perhaps that’s only bad news if you’re a writer/editor.) How does it stay fresh and funny? By not adhering to any pesky distractions like “story arcs” and “character development.” Each episode […]
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FBI Code 98
No matter, really; I loved it all the same, so much so that I wish it had birthed a series of big-screen outings. (Instead, the idea eventually was rejiggered (sort of) into the long-running Efrem Zimbalist TV show, The FBI, and that doesn’t count.) Directed by Leslie H. Martinson (1966’s Batman: The Movie), the black-and-white, […]
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The Bowery Boys: Volume Two
For this four-disc follow-up to 2012’s set, Warner Archive again mined its vaults for 12 of the Boys’ Poverty Row features. The best way to describe their style is that it comes from the “why I oughta!” school of comedy. I’m unsure if it ever graduated, given exchanges like “How can you read in the […]
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Fast Company / Fast and Loose / Fast and Furious
For the record, the titles in question on this single-disc set from Warner Archive are Fast Company, Fast and Loose and Fast and Furious. Don’t let that third title make you believe they’re about racing cars; they’re not. They are about finding books. And that may be why neither you nor I have heard of […]
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Terminator Anthology
Cameron’s The Terminator of 1984 was and is a well-made piece of sci-fi trash that bears the ingenuity-on-a-budget scars of most Roger Corman graduates. If it proved a breakthrough for Cameron (who then earned the Aliens gig as a follow-up), it was arguably double that for its monosyllabic center, Arnold Schwarzenegger, then considered near-inconceivable as […]
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The Tarzan Collection Starring Jock Mahoney and Mike Henry
For Mahoney, that’s 1962’s Tarzan Goes to India and 1963’s Tarzan’s Three Challenges. He may have been a fine father to actress Sally Field, but he makes for one dull Tarzan. This pair of adventures is notable for getting the character out of Africa and into Asia, yet only the latter sojourn is worth watching […]