Night Hawks (1981)

Price: $1
Year: 1981
Length: 99 mins
Director: Bruce Malmuth (replacing Gary Nelson)
Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Billy Dee Williams, Lindsay Wagner, Nigel Davenport, Joe Spinell, Persis Khambatta, Catherine Mary Stewart, and Rutger Hauer as Wulfgar

I always ignored this movie cause I thought its title sucked. It makes me think of Edward Hopper, Tom Waits, Matthew Broderick, Michelle Pfieffer, Rutger Hauer, Cage, and Camu Tao in that order before settling on a mental image of Stallone, which is a pretty horrible rate of recall for my phoney baloney Stalloney mind. Whenever anyone describes anything as being over the top around me I turn my hat around and start crashing trucks into Robert Loggia's house, for gosh sake. But there are only so many Stallone films in the world and I have a standing order to purchase all unseen ones at any given chance regardless of consequence or funds. So Night Hawks was a no brainer.

Fortunately, the movie is much better, weirder, and prescient than its weak title would suggest. For starters, Sylvester Stallone has the typically strong character name DEKE DASILVA. A name so strong that posters for the movie touted him as being "DEKE DASILVA, THE MOST DANGEROUS COP KNOWN TO MAN" despite the fact that this movie is mostly about what a wimpy sour puss DaSilva is up until the final heartgripping moments. Anyway, Billy Dee Williams is his partner, the tragically named Det. Sgt. Matthew Fox; such a step down from being Lando Calrissian to being linked to that dry rag of a Party of Five alum. BDW had good luck with LC initials, bet he wished they had gone with Lacey Chabert instead. Also, we get Rutger Motherfucking Hauer in his American film debut as the awesomely named international super-villain of terror WULFGAR. It is a fucking travesty that this guy has gone from Verhoeven muse status to straight to video after thought, but so it goes. He's great here and really puts this movie OVER The Top and into being pretty decent territory.

So the movie opens with a burly female nurse with an oddly plasticine and motionless face walking down the street in a bad neighborhood as hoods and toughs swarm around her for the easy mugg. But wait, that weird inhuman face was merely a mask being worn by Sylvester Stallone as Deke DaSilva, the cross-dressing Serpico surrogate the 80's demanded and received. Then Billy Dee Williams jumps out from behind a corner and the dastardly creeps of crime have been stifled again. On the other side of the globe, Rutger Hauer with a beard blows up a department store for some terrorist groups or something, but they get mad at him for killing kids and he's all like pfffft. Then he gets found out when he's trying to seduce some co-eds while posing as a college professor, so he gets plastic surgery that consists of shaving his beard and wiping the putty that won Kidman an Oscar off his nose. Then it's off to New York, which is where Deke and Matthew reign, thus setting up them up for a confrontation!

The movie is kinda slow for the first hour or so, but really picks up during this sweet chase scene, which happens to be on Youtube.
Part 1:


Part 2:


I really dig BDW's Superman tee here and the use of Slow Ride by Foghat during the disco dance scene. Was that seriously a disco dance hit? If so, awesome. If badly placed by misguided people working on movie, awesomer. Either way, a bunch of stuff explodes and Wulfgar is all like I'm gonna kill your girlfriend DEKE DASILVA! But just when he gets ready to stab her, she turns around and has Stallone's face and gun in her hand, which is also Stallone's hand now. Thus bringing us back to the drag show from the beginning and being kind of a bummer of an ending cause DaSilva doesn't like killing, it's just his job. Either way, good show. I mean, it ain't COBRA, but it sure as hell is a buttassload better than PARADISE ALLEY. Now I just need to find a copy of F.I.S.T. cause Anthony Kiedis plays Stallone's son in it. Yes. Oh yeah, the hot bald chick from the first Star Trek movie is in this, too. Looks like she's wearing a wig, which makes sense since this is only 1-2 years later. CHECK IT OUT!

Serbis

Director: Brillante Mendoza
Cast: Coco Martin, Gina Pareno, Jacklyn Jose,
Run time: 90 minutes
Price: $20 at NYFF

I'll start of by saying that I actually am glad I saw Serbis, even though the freaking New York Film Festival charged me the the price of 20 dollar vids in order to see it. I mean, who do these NYFF fools think they are? GOD!

But I digress. Here are the reasons I am glad I saw Serbis.

1. I have never before seen a movie from the Phillipines, so it gave me a cursory glance at their film culture.

2. On a similar note, this is the kind of movie that might not get too much of a release beyond the festival circuit, since it is not a Wes Anderson rip off featuring over-educated white kids with a script ripped from Urban Dictionary, or an Oscarbatory big budget November surprise. Instead, it is low budget in a way where that actually means something. Also, it has so much nudity that it would have to have an NC17 rating here.


3. Nothing warms my nerdy heart like a decaying movie theater film.


That being said, Serbis is a deeply flawed movie. On paper it sounds pretty fantastic. Its got family melodrama, prostitution, theft, and absurdism, all occurring in a run down colonial relic of a movie house, that now only shows porn. By my standards, these combined elements sound like a winning formula.

However, Serbis teaches the viewer that good ideas simply aren't enough. While I watched it, the most startling element was the amount of potential that was being squandered. The movie dilapidated movie house, which really is an incredible setting, is done a disservice by being filled with such hollow characters. The Pineda family consist of a meandering crew of cousins, aunts, and uncles who all live and work in the "Family" movie house, which currently only shows porn movies. Also populating the building are gay hustlers, and and a few female prostitutes. While many of the characters in the film have some potential, their story lines are underdeveloped, leaving the viewer little to clasp onto. The main drama of the film is Mama Flor's case against her estranged husband, who took up with and started a family with his mistress. She irrationally seeks retribution from the justice system for this emotional abandonment, and resents her children for not wanting to see their father go to jail. Despite Flor's misguided intentions, this plot line could have been quite interesting. However, the entire court case takes place off screen, and all we are left with is the lackluster before and after. Meanwhile, the plots that are actually happening within the house are pretty dull. A character played by pretty boy Coco Martin gets his girlfriend pregnant and pops a boil on his butt. Nayda (who is the DE facto matriarch since Flor is such a drama queen) is in love with her cousin, but since we are not given a good revelatory scene dealing with this love, it also falls flat. The characters in this film wander around the frame without any purpose or heft, and alienate more than they engross.

The naturalistic style in which this is filmed and recorded is something that I appreciate, but I can't say that it is particularly well done. While a little bit of shaky camera movement can be effective, in this film it often looks amateurish, and does not achieve its aesthetic potential. As for the soundtrack, while I see what they were trying to do with all that background noise, it once again seems sloppily done. A more effective approach may have been to have a few more nearly silent moments to provide some contrast that may have been effective to the film's cause.
There are a few truly wonderful moments in the film. My favorite is the scene in which a goat somehow gets into the movie theater, causing the employees to turn the lights on, revealing many audience members who are in very compromising positions. If the film had more scenes that were this refreshing, it would truly be the gem that it promised to be. However, very little of the film is as imaginative as this. I also must add that the last image of the film is something that I consider the type of technical misstep that one wouldn't even subject their freshman year film class to. While two characters are talking, a very digital looking image of burning celluloid overtakes the frame. It is not appropriate considering the content of the previous 89 minutes and 50 seconds, and has been done with much more skill in other (better) films. Ending one's movie on such a note to my mind is a real blunder.

Once again, the premise of this film is promising enough to carry a forgiving spectator through it, but the execution is severely lacking. Serbis was the first Filipino film I have seen, and I hope to view some of the nation's more impressive offerings soon.

Announcement

Hello IBTFAD readers (if there are any of you left)

I want to apologize for the long absence. A combination of transitional phases and coast hopping have taken the authors of this here blog out of commission for many months.

However, all of that is about to change, in a way that we can believe in, my friends!!

The dollar video reviews that (we hope) you love will be returning shortly, and in additon, we will be broadening our scope to include lots of other different types of films, and media. Dollar vids will remain the heart and soul of this tiny corner of the internet, but we will also be including media of all sorts that have stuck out to us recently. We hope that you will keep on reading, and even leaving comments, even if they are angry and unwilling to humor the idea of a lesbian subtext in the movie Gold Diggers. The internet, after all, is a place where we've all got a voice!

Anyway,

Much love

Stay tuned...

One Last Thing

Price: Fiddy Cents
Year: 2006
Length: 94 minutes
Director: Alex Steyermark
Cast: Michael Angarano, Cynthia Nixon, Johnny Messner, Sunny Mabrey, Gina Gershon, Gideon Glick, Matt Bush, Ethan Hawke, Wyclef Jean

The happy (?) ending of this movie is a kid who just died of terminal cancer fishing on a heavenesque beach with Ethan Hawke, who plays his father who also die(getic)d of terminal cancer many moons ago, and then Wyclef Jean swings by on a bicycle because I guess he's an angel now or some shit, then the soundtrack swells into some shitty latter day Wyclef treaclemuck about how heaven is in New York City. FIN.

Jesus, what a great fucking ending, right? It's like What Dreams May Come for the post-Rock of Love 2 set, amylrite? But still, this movie is simply not very good because it is based on a horrible premise, shifts tones more uncomfortably than my bowels, and has a recurring motif of the main character being haunted by the haunting visage of soulful, intellectual poet, Ethan Hawke. But let's bring out the magic of this clusterfuck before diving into the turgid morass of misguided tallow that keeps this movie from being rewatchably, hilariously misguided (oh, it'll all mesh together anyway).

First (1): It is about a kid with terminal cancer declaring on National Television (on the dying kid wish channel apparently) that his dying wish is the spend the weekend alone with some fug "supermodel" who wouldn't last 3 weeks on ANTM. OK, so far so LOLZ.

2nd (2): It was prodouched by the irrepressible golden goofball of the NBA, Mark Cuban! I somehow feel that the non-Michael Chiklis Commish, David Stern, must have had a role in this. Maybe it was he who slipped the script along with some roofies and a bunch of pens into El Cubano's ComicCon ToteBag. We will never know; unless Mark Cuban reads this while Googling himself, as I am sure he is right right now, and sends me some angry e-mail about how this movie is heartwarming and not a result of a David Stern plot against him, although he doesn't remember signing the paperwork for this which is kind of weird and come to think of it that red wine at dinner with the Sternmeister was a little bitter. Hmm. Maybe this'll pop up in his newsfeed. I demand answers!

Third (3): The cast is miss guided lee funny. We get the cancery Michael Angarano being all cancery again hot on the heels on his cancertastic turn in Lords of Dogtown, where he dies of cancer at the end. Johnny "Hot" Messner uses the acting chops he developed in ANACONDAS: THE HUNT FOR THE BLOOD ORCHID to sympathetically love up on Cynthia Nixon while her son is dying, which is presented as a classy move within the movie, even though in the real world, it's maybe i dunno creepy? Then there is the lifeless face of GinaGershon2006 coasting on Cristal Connors goodwill yet again, but I ain't mad because she was and always will be GODDESS. Then we get Wyclef Jean as a cabbie/angel/"magikal negro" a la Cuba Gooding JR in Wet Dreams Make Cum. HE IS SO CHARISMAGIC!! Also, a kid in this is named Gideon Glick and he kinda looks like the illegitimate step son of Gideon Yago and Jiminy Glick, so there's that. BUT the crown jewel of this all is, of course, the UNBILLED role of Ethan "Mi Douchi Weighs a Ton" Hawke squinting and squirming his ways into our hearts as the dead father whose death from terminal illness a few years prior makes Cynthia Nixon the saddest woman ever to bone a football star on the side while her dying son is getting beaten up by bouncers at a strip club and vomiting blood all over them. Which conveniently transitions us into

Four (4): th blud. This movie is constantly on the verge of getting enjoyable and silly; but right whenever the movie starts to become mildly enjoyable, the main character (Angarano) starts bleeding black blood out of his nose and coughing up red blood everywhere. This seriously happens every four minutes in this otherwise relatively silly film. It's like if you're masturbating to porn and just when you're about to jizz into the carefully folded napkin in your right hand, the porno switches to being video of aborted feti eating the shit out of the asshole of an experimental mutant crossbred between Melissa Rivers and a Whooping Crane. You may still jizz in that napkin, but by G-d if that switch up didn't kill yr buzz. It's like that except with laughter instead of cum.

(5) Phive: This movie presents a world in which Ethan Hawke has died years ago of a terminal illness and that, my friendos, is a world in which I wish we all lived.

Crucial Context: This movie was purchased for 50 cents on DVD at the final closing blow out of a Hollywood Video near where I work in San Franshitsco. They maybe had a total of 35 DVDs left in stock at this point. 15 were copies of ONE LAST THING, 10 were copies of SILVER CITY (some misguided seeming John Sayles Bush murder mystery satire feat. Billy Zane, which I also bought), and the remaining ten were miscellaneous direct to DVD crap starring people like Jeff Speakman and Lorenzo Lamas.

In spite of this seeming non-popularity, this movie is somehow (ballot stuffing) pulling a 7.0 on the ever reliable bastion of taste, the IMDB. I guess, people find it heart-warming? Depressing? I guess that since it's about a cancer boy nobody wants to hate on it too much. After all, what kind of sick fuck hates on a movie about a kid who wants to fuck some coke addicted, scotch sipping "model" who he's never even met before as his dying wish? Why I can feel the cockles of my heart gaining temperature as I type! Maybe it'll be the next PATCH ADAMS! Either way, this movie is better than PATCH ADAMS because, at least for the first ten minutes, the main character is constantly smoking weed, which makes it somewhat redeemable in my red red eyes. It gives you the brief hope that you might be embarking upon some unholy teeny amalgam of THE GIRL NEXT DOOR, THE FUCKET LIST, and EVIL BONG, that is alas dashed as the kid inexplicably hangs up his joints only to find that not being stoned all the time makes it a lot weirder when you start mistaking Wyclef Jean for DEAD FATHER ETHAN HAWKE.

Either way, it gave my roommate and me the idea to make a post-apocalyptic, terminal illness stoner comedy. You see this guy has deadly incurable parasites inside him that only the calming effects of some marijuana can stagnate. However, the rub is that he's living in a post-apocalyptic world thats a barren wasteland with a finite amount of bud left lying around so he has to like go on an adventure to find more or some shit. I dunno, it's basically Mad Max but with like weed instead of gas, and bad pot humor in place of awesome car chases. If the parasites are heartworms, I can say it's HEARTWORMING! on the box! It will make us dozens! Maybe Mark Cuban can produce it?G-d, I hope (no barack) so!

Boy Wonderz

Price: 75 centz
Year: 2001
Runtime: 85 minutes
Director: Morris G. Sim
Cast: Mickey Blaine, Hunter Garner, Dylan Cooper, George Mitchell, Stephen Martines

Apathy has seized upon me like a derelict grabbing at the ass of another more attractive and seemingly passed out derelict. And I have not updated this blog in a hot minute as a result of this apathy. The oddness is that my dollar video hoarding and consumption has spiked insanely in the last couple months since I decided to be all lazy about this page. I can't stop buying dollar videos at a precipitous rate and trying to blow them out the other end in due time like a fart through Delta Burke (check the timely irony). But in glancing over what I've been watching lately, it's obvious stuff surrounded by bacon. I've been working mostly common standard everyone has already seen that shit fare as of late, albeit in larger quanitities than usual. But one film stood the fuck out on my list of recent plowings and that is the hopelessly obscure and fundamentally brilliant BOY WONDERZ.

Now to put this in perspective, this film was originally called THIS IS THE DISK-O-BOYZ, which is a more accurate title as the film is about a boy band called The DISK-O-BOYZ and not some fan fic about cloning and burt ward. Let's get to what is important: a member by member breakdown of the DISK-O-BOYZ.

DISCLAIMER: Although this movie is completely unutterably magikal, I barely remember whole sections of it and I don't have my copy handy, so forgive me if I lack what the feds like to call "truth" here.

First, we have the gay one. Squint at the box and he's in the upper left corner almost completely obscured by the hunkiness of all the other members. Perhaps he is being discriminated by the box for being gay, but actually, I think it is because he is balding and looks 40 when everyone else is supposed to be 17. Either way, he splits off from the group for a solo career because he keeps making out with dudes on camera and the tabloids report it and it totally kills their mall tour in the dirty south. At the end of the movie, he comes back to the group and makes out with the dude in the band who was totally gaybashing him earlier in the movie because you know like latent homosexual, duh. I think he was called Dylan-Tee (the balding one, not the beefy guy).

Oh yeah, and then there's the beefy guy, fuck it, what was he called? Uh, was he Kenny? You see Kenny's hook was that there was no hook. Everyone else got a stupid two-times name a la Dylan-Tee, but Kenny was too dumb to come up with something that worked well with Kenny. He really liked Kenny G because it sounded gangsta, but then he found out about that spirited mop of curls and his fantastical flute (ed: sax), so he just kept it real and kept it Kenny. He's the one in the middle of the box, with his head slightly below Dylan-Tee looking all pouty and fab. He's the reformed bigot and maybe also the half-brother of the dude on the right, but that part of the movie is too fuzzy to recall.

Then there's the other two bozos that aren't the huge dude on the right extending his arm to us in a gesture of friendship. They are Sammy-Hay and Ozzie-Bay. One of these guys is actually the half brother by adoption of the huge guy, so I guess it wasn't Kenny after all. I don't really remember much about these dudes except that they are kinda mushy headed and vaguely snarky and perhaps also fun-loving(?). Their noses resemble penis's and this resemblance carries over to their personalities. I did not like either of these cowards and was quite pleased with their lack of screentime.

Then we get to the star of this vehicle, the very large man with the inviting Blue Oyster Cult Album Cover gesture. He is Indy-Lee. He is the main character for all intents and purposes. The main plot often centers on him. Particularly in the maudlin second half, where his search for his real parents drives him mad (hint: it's actually his adopted parents! happy ending!). He is also the only actor from this movie to have any non THIS IS THE DISKO BOYZ credits on the imdb, having put in work on PORT CHARLES and GUIDING LIGHT and something called MONARCH COVE. He also used a fake name for this role calling himself Coltin Scott instead of his nom de soap Stephen Martines. He is dynamic and he is fierce. He is also boring.

Dylan-Tee and Kenny are the best characters. They are creepy, monomaniacal, and erotic. This flitter across the screen with the delicacy of a firefly flittering across a screen. It is delicate and it is fierce.

I miss boy bands and I'm not alone in this if the excessive number of AJ Maclean fan fiction hunting g00gl3rs are any indication. This movie takes us back to those wunnerful times, with shoddier production values, explicit gay sex, and a lurking sense of unease. It is a post-modern pastiche of genre and intention. It subverts what it cannot make it's own, and what it makes it's own, it masticates and spits back out in the form of an elaborate ruse. The movie has more in common with the minimalist plays of Harold Pinter (THE DUMB WAITER in particular) than it does the slavish populist pifflepoof of Lou Perlman. May god have vengence upon his soul. ESXCELSISO!

The Wild Pair

Year:1987
Price: 75 cents
Duration: 89 minutes
Director: Beau Bridges
Cast: Beau Bridges, Bubba Smith, Lloyd Bridges, Gary Lockwood, Lela Rochon

I'm not Geste-ing when I say that Beau knows movies. He'll beau you over with his splendid visage and everyman bodytype. He's like the Beaulushi brother who decided to beaucome a tax consultant, but instead he's a Bridges and he decided to act. And it was with this same characteristic decisiveness that Beau first embarked upon the worldly battledome of film directordom with a couple of tv movies and an afterschool special that I haven't seen, but fantasize about the quality therefore of. Up until the time that I saw The Wild Pair, a film that barely exists, I was absent minded and aloof in regard to the Beau, never giving him the time of day or even allowing his bushy brows to make cameos in my Peter Gallagher fan fiction. Don't make the same mistake!

Keep in mind, I'm not actually recommending you see this movie. In fact, you probably shouldn't. It is an actionless and laughless pile of rote action comedy. It's only charms are merely nostalgic in nature, but unremarkable in execution. Virtually any other 1986-88 action comedy would fulfill the same criteria and probably pack a whole bunch more entertainment for your 75 cents. Although, I must admit that Bubba Smith's kneehigh cholo socks and highwatertower sweatsuit look is one that lends credence to the idea of his awesomeness more than any content of the film's story does.

But what this film did do was get me started thinking about this Beau Bridges character. And for that I am thankful. He is a beaut. As a small child, he had an uncredited little role in film noir classic Force Of Evil and a smattering of the kinds of unremarkable small kiddie roles that come naturally when one contains the same genetic material as Lloyd Bridges. One thing that is particularly conspicuous is the absence of notable roles in his filmography. Who could forget his nickname begatting performance in THE WIZARD? No one that's who, but beyond that it gets kooky. I used to think he was in TRON, but that was Jeff Bridges. Either way, I am glad he is alive and that he is able to thwart busted face sibling related hatred from the criminally underrated and superior in every possible way, Randy Quaid. But mostly, thinking about Beau Bridges got me thinking that I really should update this shit again and, if it had to be an unremarkable interracial buddy cop movie from the mid to late 80's starring the lesser half of a divergently attractive brother actor duo, well then, THE WILD PAIR just about fits better than anything. Straight 2008.