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...