Writer's Note: In honor of actress Amber Heard's birthday, here's a look back at her entertaining post-exploitation flick, Machete Kills. I adore Amber, and I think this may finally be her year, thanks to her co-leading role in the forthcoming Aquaman, which she's already previewed in the Justice League movie.
She's been quietly been doing stellar work in many a not-so-stellar movies for years, and it's high time she got some recognition for it, instead of who she's dating or other such tabloid fodder- though it should be mentioned that she did an awful lot of good with the monetary fall-out (well-deserved: Team Amber all the way!) from one of those relationships, so good on her.
This article was originally published in UAB's Kaleidoscope on October 13th, 2013.
You really got to hand it to writer/director Robert Rodriguez. The guy is nothing if not consistent in his intentions. From the very beginning, his films have been made by a kid at heart- if not always for the kids themselves, in many cases.
After all, this is a guy who took an idea his seven year-old son had and made it into a movie! Granted, the movie wasn’t that good (The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3D), but you can’t blame him for trying.
His movies are filled with over-the-top imagery, often shot and edited by Rodriguez himself, that frequently come off like someone channeling their inner twelve-year-old. From his signature, establishing trilogy of El Mariachi films, to the fun, imaginative Spy Kids series, to the grittier fare of films like Sin City and From Dusk Till Dawn, Rodriguez always seems like a kid allowed to run wild in a candy store, for better or worse.
Granted, his films may lack a certain gravitas overall, but you can’t blame the guy for wanting to show moviegoers a good time. After all, isn’t that why many of us go to the movies in the first place- to escape reality, not confront it? Rodriguez’s films are nothing if not pure escape, occasionally to their own detriment.
His latest, Machete Kills, is a perfect example of this aesthetic. Much like Gretchen Wieners in Mean Girls, trying to make the word “fetch” happen, Rodriguez is hell-fire determined to make Grindhouse cinema happen, no matter what the cost.
Machete began life as a faux trailer shown with his and writer/director Quentin Tarantino’s B-movie blow-out, Grindhouse, before rapturous fan reaction led him to actually make the movie for real.
Released in 2010, the $10 million budget film was a modest success, raking in some $44 million worldwide, so Rodriguez is back with another installment, the next in a proposed trilogy, Machete Kills. Fans of the original will find plenty to like here, with the added attraction of more star power than you can shake a Swiss-army machete at. (Yes, the film features one of those- but of course.) Indeed, the film often plays like the It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World of exploitation flicks (or for my younger audiences, something like Around the World in 80 Days or Rat Race).
By which I mean the cast is wall-to-wall with the likes of- deep breath- Mel Gibson, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Antonio Banderas, Vanessa Hudgens (High School Musical), Sofia Vergara (Modern Family), William Sadler (Iron Man 3), Walton Goggins (Justified), Alexa Vega (a long way from the Spy Kids movies), Demián Bichir (Weeds), Amber Heard (Paranoia), Lady Gaga (!), and Charlie Sheen- excuse me, Carlos Estévez (his actual real name, used for the first time here)- as…wait for it…the President of the United States. If that cast didn’t get your attention, I can’t imagine this is the film for you.
As it stands, like those aforementioned films, Machete Kills occasionally plays a bit like a cameo-fest, but it’s still a fun one. I mean, if the sight of Vergara with a machine gun-equipped breastplate doesn’t make you smile, then you’re probably going to want to skip this one.
Some performances are better than others, to be sure, with Bichir in particular nailing his over-the-top role of a schizophrenic secret agent/psychotic dictator- and yes, to call anything over-the-top in a movie that’s all about being over-the-top is saying something.
Also worth a mention is Heard as Machete’s handler, who also doubles as a beauty pageant contestant. I’m a huge fan of hers, yet it seems like Hollywood never knows what to do with her at any given moment, resulting in one horrific bomb after another.
Rodriguez, on the other hand, gets that she was born for something like this, as clearly evident in the likes of the underrated Drive Angry and especially the long-withheld All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, which finally got a wide-ish release this year, making Heard quite possibly the first actress to have films simultaneously in the theaters made when she was just out of her teens and almost in her thirties!
Rodriguez also finds time for returning players Jessica Alba, Michelle Rodriguez (no relation), and special effects legend Tom Savini, among others, from the first film; along with, naturally, “Machete” himself, Danny Trejo, in the role he was born to play.
The plot is beside the point, really, but it’s nonetheless a bit needlessly convoluted. I suppose that’s part of the joke, as the franchise is kind of like a Latin spin on the James Bond films, only way trashier, and I mean that as a compliment.
Most of the celebrity cameos are so brief none of them make much of an impression, but it is fun seeing Gaga run amuck (one might say she was born for this 😏) and though he shockingly underplays things a bit, Gibson is a perfect villain, as a madman who’s equal parts George Lucas (note the hovercraft) and Steve Jobs. This aspect of the film also sets up the third installment- Machete Kills…in Space!- which gets its own hilarious trailer, both before and after the movie.
Be sure and stay put through the credits for some bonus amusing Sheen and Heard moments, the latter of which gets some of the best lines in the film, period. Heard really does knock her part out of the park, and I hope she decides to do more things of this nature, given that mainstream film doesn’t seem to agree with her.
Also worth a mention, the line: “Machete don’t tweet”- this film’s extension of the immortal “Machete don’t text.” You gotta love it, and Trejo’s always deadpan, all-of-the-time delivery.
Make no mistake; this isn’t the type of film that’s going to win any awards, save maybe the likes of a “Scream” statuette (as in Spike TV’s bro-tastic award show for genre flicks), but it’s not meant to. Rodriguez simply wants to show like-minded viewers a good time, and in that, he succeeds.
Try and see it with a wild crowd, late at night, exactly the type of crowd this was made for. Machete Kills might not be Oscar bait, but it’s a fun ride, to be sure. I give it a solid B+.
The Grindhouse equivalent of Calendar Girl Murders, which I reviewed earlier this week (click here if you missed it), The Centerfold Girls is an interesting, if flawed little film that functions as a sort of combination proto-slasher and a semi-anthology that sort of plays like Tarantino's Death Proof by way of Pulp Fiction.
Basically, what we've got here is three separate "stories" following three main women, with one antagonist pursuing each of them through the individual segments, each of which has a different feel to it. Mind you, unlike a typical anthology, the stories don't really have a big surprise "twist" at the end- mostly they just end with someone dying.
However, they really do each have a different vibe to them, which helps to distinguish each from the other, and help make this a cut above most films of this type, even if the film is still flawed in many ways. (We'll get to the specifics of that in a minute.)
Our main antagonist is Clement Dunne, played by Andrew Prine, an actor known for his extensive exploitation-heavy resume, which includes such favorites as Simon- King of the Witches, Crypt of the Living Dead, Nightmare Circus, Grizzly, The Town That Dreaded Sundown, The Evil, Amityville II: The Possession, the two V television mini-series and Rob Zombie's Lords of Salem.
Dunne is a holier-than-thou man who takes it upon himself to "help" out a group of girls who posed nude for a men's magazine, a la Playboy. Of course, this being an exploitation flick, by "help" he actually means "kill." That isn't a spoiler- he's shown disposing of one of his victims in the first scene, under the credits, no less.
We don't get a lot more than that, save a brief glimpse into his lair, which is painfully white- reportedly Prine's own idea, in an attempt to flesh out the character a bit, as in this is a man that only sees things in black & white, as it were. The "black" comes courtesy of his dapper black suit and saddle shoes, an outfit which is also very Tarantino-esque- no way he hasn't seen this film.
In the first "story," we follow Nurse Jackie- nope, not that one- as she heads out of town to interview for a job. Jackie is played by Jaime Lyn Bauer, a soap actress, best-known for The Young & The Restless and Days of Our Lives, though she did appear in an interesting-sounding TV-movie called Mysterious Island of Beautiful Women and had cameos in the 80's comedies Pray TV and Young Doctors in Love, which I'm pretty sure I saw on cable back in the day.
Along the way to her destination, Jackie picks up a hitchhiker named Linda, played by Janet Wood. Wood has some decent genre credits on her resume, including roles in Angels Hard as They Come (co-written by Jonathan Demme!) Terror at Red Wolf Inn (which I reviewed at on point and will try to post here on down the line), Snakes, Slumber Party '57, Russ Meyer's Up!; the Chevy Chase/Goldie Hawn vehicle Foul Play, Ice Cream Man (with Clint Howard) and an episode of George A. Romero's much-beloved Tales of the Darkside anthology series.
Unfortunately for her, Linda has some hippie friends that she apparently runs a regular scam with, which involves her befriending travelers in order to gain their trust, then later calling in the cavalry, aka her fellow hippie friends, to rob them blind.
If this sounds a bit Manson Family-esque, it's clearly meant to be, especially when one of them turns out to be a smooth-talking bearded fellow that tries to rape poor Jackie, after terrorizing her within an inch of her life.
As if this and the looming threat of Dunne weren't bad enough, Jackie also has to contend with local pervert Ed Walker, who ALSO tries to rape her, but abandons it because she doesn't put up enough of a fight! PC this movie is not, to say the least.
Walker is played by perennial character actor Aldo Ray, who started out his career working with such luminaries as Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy, Katherine Hepburn, John Wayne and Rita Hayworth, but was reduced to starring in bit roles like this by the 70's, thanks to a string of bad marriages that left him struggling to pay alimony to various women.
Genre fans might know him from movies like Psychic Killer, Haunts, Haunted, The Lucifer Complex, Death Dimension, Don't Go Near The Park, Bog, Sweet Savage (an X-Rated flick for which he won the Adult Film "Oscar"!), The Glove, Human Experiments, Mongrel, Dark Sanity, Vultures, To Kill a Stranger and Shock 'Em Dead (with Traci Lords, speaking of "adult" films), among many others.
Fun fact: his son was Eric DaRe, aka "Leo" from Twin Peaks, shown here with the most glorious of all mullets.
Also, the actress who plays Walker's wife, Paula Shaw, played Jason's mother in Freddy vs. Jason.
Anyway, by the time fate catches up with Jackie in the form of Dunne, she practically is resigned to death, poor thing. After the day she's had, who can blame her? Basically, this section of the film plays like a home invasion thriller, but boy, do they pile on the horror for Nurse Jackie. I'm guessing she probably wishes she stayed home. So much for being upwardly mobile.
In the second story, we have the closest thing to a slasher film, as Dunne pursues his next prey to an isolated island, where she and a group of other models are shooting even more nude photos. Needless to say, this doesn't go over well with Dunne, who takes most of them out one by one, save one poor girl who ends up the victim of not-so-friendly fire.
Our main calendar girl here is Charly, played by Jennifer Ashley, who was also in Nightmare Circus with Prine, as well as DePalma's excellent musical horror flick Phantom of the Paradise, drive-in fave The Pom Pom Girls, Jaws rip-off Tintorera: Killer Shark, Alien rip-off Inseminoid (aka Horror Planet), Guyana: Cult of the Damned (about Jim Jones) and the excellent women-in-prison flick Chained Heat, with Linda Blair.
Also cropping up in the segment is Francine York, as the woman bankrolling the shoot. York was in everything from TV's Batman, Lost in Space and Bewitched, among lots of other 60's-and-70's-era television, but is best-known to me for her role in Ted V. Mikel's proto-Charlie's Angels flick,The Doll Squad, which is a lot of fun. She would later reunite with Mikels for the Astro-Zombies sequel, M3- Cloned and Ten Violent Women: Part Two.
Keep an eye out for a quick bit by Janus Blythe as Charly's roommate before she leaves for the island. Blythe was also in Phantom of the Paradise alongside Ashley, but is best-known for her work in horror favorites like Tobe Hooper's Eaten Alive, Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes (as well as the sequel), Drive-In Massacre and The Incredible Melting Man.
This middle section is easily the most fun, with lots of seedy characters and gratuitous nudity. Granted, the movie is called The Centerfold Girls, but there is seriously a lot of nudity in this thing. Even the women who only show up for a minute or two often end up naked, apropos of nothing. Hey, they don't call it "exploitation" for nothing.
In the final section, we finally get someone who fights back, albeit only eventually. It's stewardess Vera, played by yet another genre fave, Tiffany Bolling.
After a well-received turn on the Rod Serling TV-series The New People- sort of a proto-Lost, for those unfamiliar- she began a great string of Grindhouse faves, including Triangle, Bonnie's Kids, The Candy Snatchers, Wicked, Wicked (which utilizes the split-screen technique pioneered by DePalma throughout the entire film); The Wild Party (co-starring Raquel Welch and from, of all people, Merchant-Ivory!), The Vals (a Valley Girl rip-off), Open House and my personal fave spider invasion flick, Kingdom of the Spiders, featuring none other than William Shatner.
Not unlike our first protagonist Jackie, Vera has a terrible time of things, running afoul of a dopey friend (Connie Strickland, of Black Sampson and Act of Vengeance fame), who rats her location out to stalker Dunne, two drunken sailors who drug and rape her, and ultimately, Dunne himself, who not only allows her aforementioned rape to happen, but then picks her up and takes her to a burnt-out, isolated locale to kill her when she figures out he's not who he seems- a passer-by helping her out after her nasty ordeal.
The location in question is Topanga Canyon, California, which had just suffered a forest fire and used to be where none other than the Manson Family made their home, as well as being a hot spot for various musicians of the 70's era, i.e. The Beach Boys (Manson was pals with drummer Dennis Wilson), Neil Young, Emmylou Harris and Little Feat, among others.
Part of me kind of hoped the Manson Family hippie knock-offs and the rapey sailors would randomly show up and Bolling's character would take them out, too, as they emerge unscathed in the film for their respective nefarious actions. Alas, such was not the case. Exploitation films aren't exactly known for their morality.
The film is unusually well-photographed for a movie of this type, thanks to the efforts of Robert Maxwell, an exploitation regular, who also shot the likes of Mikel's The Astro-Zombies and Girl in Gold Boots; Blood Mania, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, Point of Terror, The Severed Arm, House of Terror, The Candy Snatchers, The Candy Stripers, and two of the best Grindhouse titles I've ever heard, but haven't seen, Up Your Teddy Bear (with Julie "Catwoman" Newmar) and Did Baby Shoot Her Sugardaddy?
Wheeze her? I hardly know her!
The music score is really unique as well, and credited to "Wheeze" (no relation to Weezer- I think), about who I could find nothing whatsoever online, beyond the fact that a guy named Mark Wolin wrote and composed their music. This is his and their only credit.
It sounds a bit like the late 60's/early 70's psychedelic rock act Love at times, particularly "The Red Telephone," which you might know from the Taking Woodstock movie. Other times it has a brass-heavy sound, which is reminiscent of the cop shows and movies of the times. Neither is particularly appropriate for the movie, but I dug it nonetheless.
The film was directed by John Peyser, who primarily directed for TV, and written by Bob Peete, who went on to work in various capacities on TV, notably on Good Times and Amen. It was based on a story by Arthur Marks, who also directed Bonnie's Kids, as well as the Blaxploitation classics Detroit 9000, Bucktown, J.D.'s Revenge, Friday Foster (with Pam Grier) and The Monkey Hu$tle (with Rudy Ray Moore, aka "Dolemite"), many of which the film's producers worked on as well.
All in all, this isn't a perfect film. It doesn't do enough with the whole triptych formatting to really justify doing it in the first place, beyond the fact that each of the sections have their own vibe, and the through-line of the main girls being women who have posed nude that Prine's character is stalking.
It also has a real mean streak that makes it tough-going at times. It seems like every guy in this thing is a pervert of some kind, and many of them are rapists to boot. I get that it's exploitation, but does every guy have to be despicable?
On the plus side, the main women are reasonably well-developed as characters, and the actresses playing them are good in their roles. Ditto Prine, who, despite the inherent one-note nature of his character, still manages to add just enough layers to be interesting, a lot of which I'm guessing was all him, and not the script's doing.
Unfortunately, the aforementioned nasty vibe to the film can make it a hard watch at times, and it will likely not go over well with the more PC types out there. Party viewing this is decidedly NOT. Not that every Grindhouse film has to be, but this is definitely not one of the fun ones.
And yet, in spite of it all, it does capture the period well, and has enough going for it to recommend at least a single watch, especially for exploitation fans, and those curious to see what sort of thing eventually led to the slasher boom of the late 70's/early 80's.
The second tale in particular is very slasher-esque, and easily the most fun of the three, verging on Giallo at times, a la Bava's classic Blood & Black Lace. Also note certain tropes: the freaky phone calls, the killer "crossing off" his list of victims, the isolated locale in the middle and the stalking of victims one by one, sexual proclivities leading to death, etc.
As such, I'm just going to give it a light recommendation. I didn't love it, but I didn't hate it, either, and the cast, score and cinematography are just strong enough to warrant seeing it at least once, especially if you dig this sort of thing.
The film is relatively readily available on DVD (cover shown above) and Blu-Ray (coupled with the aforementioned Bonnie's Kids), as well as for online streaming on Amazon.
Check it out...if you dare! 👹
Writer's Note: In honor of director Edgar Wright's birthday, here's a look back at his cult classic, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. This article was originally published in UAB's Kaleidoscope on August 14th, 2010.
In what has been a lackluster summer at the movies thus far, things have finally start to pick up as we head into the fall. Thanks to the brain-bending Inception, it has been revealed that, if you have a film with originality and a working brain, people will come see it. Add to that the similarly inventive Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, a comic book adaptation that is both clever and intriguing without insulting the viewer’s intelligence.
True, comic/graphic novel adaptations have been all the rage lately, but what sets apart Pilgrim from the rest of its ilk is a sense of inventiveness on a level one only sees in the more ambitious entries in the sub-genre. Think 300 or Sin City.
Like those films, Pilgrim has a signature look and style that sets it apart from others. It’s almost like a video game adaptation for a game that doesn’t actually exist, but totally should. Might I smell a movie tie-in waiting to happen?
The plot revolves around the titular Pilgrim (Michael Cera), the bass player for an alt-rock band that falls for Ramona (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Death Proof)- only there’s a catch: if he wants to date her, he must defeat her seven evil exes. That’s about it, really, but what saves the film is its sense of humor and inventiveness.
To wit, whenever Pilgrim defeats an ex, they turn into a pile of coins, Super Mario Brothers-style, complete with the accompanying sound effects. The challenges themselves are likewise quirky, including everything from a skateboarding dare to a bass guitar battle.
The film is also littered with fun in-joke references. It may be the first film I’ve seen that doesn’t just feature visual cues or dialogue taken from other movies/TV shows, but auditory nods.
This is to say, the film features sound effects like the familiar Seinfeld music (followed by a tongue-in-cheek sampling of canned audience laughter in the subsequent scene); or the old-school computer start-up noises (played as Pilgrim wakes up in the morning); and various video game allusions.
Another key element of the film is likewise auditory in nature: the soundtrack. The boffo score by Nigel Godrich, best known for his work as a producer with the likes of Radiohead & U2, references everything from Argento mainstays Goblin (who scored Suspiria and the original Dawn of the Dead) to John Carpenter (Escape from New York) to a video-game-style 8-bit version of the Universal Pictures theme song.
Further, the soundtrack also features real-life performers providing the music of the fictional bands within the film. Pilgrim’s band, Sex Bob-Omb (another Mario Bros. reference), adapts original music by Beck; others use music by Broken Social Scene, Metric, and Dan the Automator for each of their respective bands.
Meanwhile, the soundtrack also features bands referenced in the comic book & others that fit the bill just fine; we’re talking Frank Black, the Stones, T.Rex, the Black Lips, and even lesser-known bands like Plumtree (whose song provided Scott Pilgrim with his name) and Beachwood Sparks.
However, what makes the film are undeniably the actors, who ground the results in just enough realism to make it all count emotionally, rather than being merely a display of hipster cool and spot-the-references.
Granted, the film features a hefty display of heightened hyper-realism which makes it tough to take the more realistic elements too seriously, but by now Cera (Superbad) has his nerd-shtick down to such a science that we’re immediately invested in his character.
Cera has a gift for even making cads likable (as he showed in Youth in Revolt) and his character, a lady-killer with no remorse for the girls he’s left strewn in his wake, courts unlike-ability at every turn.
Yet Cera is so self-deprecating and funny that we can’t help but forgive him for his dubious actions, including the unceremonious dumping of his adorable girlfriend Knives Chau (Ellen Wong).
Also well worth a mention are Kieran Culkin (Igby Goes Down) as Pilgrim’s gay bestie and roomie; Oscar-nominated Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air) as his snarky sister; and the delightfully acerbic Alison Pill (Dan in Real Life) and Aubrey Plaza (Funny People) as Pilgrim’s band mate/ex and friend, respectively.
Director Edgar Wright, best known for Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, adds another notch into his belt of quirky flicks, and the film is arguably his best effort yet. At the very least, it’s his most inventive work to date.
True, once you get the gist of things, Pilgrim, much like an actual video game, can become a bit redundant and repetitive, particularly towards the end, when the excellent dialogue takes a back seat to the action.
However, there’s way too much sheer creativity and imagination on display here not to give credit where credit’s due, especially in a movie-going climate where intelligence has consistently taken a back seat to mind-numbing action and brain-melting idiocy. Here, you get a healthy dose of wit to go with the latter, and it proves to make all the difference.
Writer's Note: As my faithful readers know, I didn't do a Flashback Friday this past week, so this week, I'm doing two oldies to make up for it. I actually watched the following movie as part of a double feature with the other film I'll be doing later in the week, The Centerfold Girls, which basically has the same essential plot, but less star power- depending on your definition of such, I suppose, or your age, maybe.
In addition, keep an eye out for my promised reviews of Blade Runner 2049, Amityville: The Awakening and I Do ...Until I Don't, as well as two others I saw over the past weekend, Happy Death Day and Wish Upon.
Finally, keep an eye on my social media for a poll as to which franchise I should review: Friday the 13th, Prom Night, Phantasm, Evil Dead, Saw, Alien or the Amityville series. If I do the final one, I'll just include my Awakening review as part of that.
Thanks again for reading my reviews, old and new. My site views are really starting to pick up, and I want to keep that momentum going! You all seem to like the horror stuff the most, so I'm going to focus on that more than anything else, while still doing the occasional retro review or new one. The point is, I'm going to try and keep the new content coming, starting with this all-new review! 😀
Believe it or not, younger readers, there was a time in which TV movies didn't suck. Oh, don't get me wrong. I know all about the pleasures of bad ones, though most of those Hallmark ones make me want to pound my head into a wall. If they did keep one of my childhood crushes, Lacey Chabert, gainfully employed, I'd say to hell with all of them, but, hey, an actress gotta eat sometime.
True, every now and then, there will be a good one, like Lifetime's surprisingly effective adaptation of Stephen King's Big Driver, which actually made me cringe a bit at times. And if you want to count Netflix, there's actually quite a few great ones made exclusively for them, or pay-cable services like HBO and Showtime.
But when it comes to the Big Five: ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX and The CW, pickings are mighty slim these days. Such wasn't always the case, as my older readers know. The 70's and 80's were flush with great TV movies, as well as fantastic mini-series.
Steven Spielberg got his big break on TV, doing the excellent Duel and the under-seen Something Evil (sort of a proto-Poltergeist), as well as a segment of the series Night Gallery.
Super-producer/director Dan Curtis did some great ones, notably Trilogy of Terror, as well as several Dark Shadows movies, based on his series of the same name, as well as the mini-series Winds of War, among many other TV offerings.
And, of course, the aforementioned Stephen King ruled the roost in the 90's and early 2000's, before making a recent comeback on the small screen with various TV series inspired by his work.
But, as wonderful as all that stuff is, you haven't really experienced the TV movie until you've seen some of the trashier side of things. Long before Lifetime asked the proverbial question, Mother, May I Sleep with Danger?, old-school TV used to churn out exploitation-style movies like they were going out of style.
We're talking true crime (Helter Skelter, The Deliberate Stranger, no less than three (!) movies about Amy Fisher), creature features (Snowbeast, Ants, Devil Dog: The Hound from Hell, Gargoyles), slasher movies (Deadly Lessons, Home for the Holidays, Are You in the House Alone?), teensploitation (Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway, Born Innocent, Sarah T.- Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic), lots of horror (Satan's School for Girls, The Initiation of Sarah, Dark Night of the Scarecrow, Bad Ronald), and soap opera-esque trash (Lace, The Thorn Birds, Hollywood Wives).
Something for everyone, in other words. And these films more than held their own with feature films- some of them are even regarded as being as good as, if not better than a lot of what was going on on the big screen at the time. Hell, some of them were actually remade for the big screen, like Don't Be Afraid of the Dark.
They're also chock full of big names, whether on their way up- or down- the Hollywood food chain. Back then, TV-movies were seen as the last stop for many a Hollywood actor, basically one step up from doing soaps, but also could be a launching pad for new talent as well, in the case of their younger stars.
Witness, for instance, Sally Field, whose turn in Sybil helped propel her into big-screen stardom and respect as a dramatic actress. Another example is the one I'm covering today, Sharon Stone.
Before Calendar Girl Murders, the biggest credits on her resume were a decent Wes Craven flick, Deadly Blessing, a short-lived Steven Bochco series called Bay City Blues and a host of guest-starring roles on various TV shows like Silver Spoons, Remington Steele and Magnum P.I.
While success certainly didn't happen overnight, about five years later, Stone landed a break-through role in Total Recall before knocking it out of the park with Basic Instinct in 1992, a role which would garner her multiple award nominations, including a Golden Globe, and a double win at the MTV Movie Awards.
Stone's role in Calendar Girl Murders is practically a dry run for Basic Instinct and there's no doubt it likely helped her snag the role. She plays a beautiful woman that a detective suspects may be involved in a series of murders- sound familiar?
For those who haven't seen it, I won't spoil whodunit, but suffice it to say that Stone certainly plays her model character in such a way that, at the very least, seems suspicious. But then, that's sort of par for the course in a film like this, right?
The fun begins when a model known for posing nude in a popular calendar plunges to her death off the balcony of a high-rise, just after a party celebrating the success of said calendar. Was it a suicide? Or something more nefarious?
Lt. Dan Stoner (Tom Skerritt, Alien, Top Gun) thinks the latter, and despite wanting to retire to a cushier desk job so he can spend more time with his family, opts to take on the case, at the request of his superior officer (Pat Corley, Murphy Brown).
It doesn't hurt that he gets to spend a lot of time with hot models, much to his wife's chagrin. Barbara Bosson, in The Last Starfighter the same year, and later, Hill Street Blues and Murder One, plays the wife, in a wry, wonderfully sardonic turn.
Stoner- great name!- wastes no time interviewing all concerned, and suspects are many. They include boss-man Richard Trainor (Robert Culp, I Spy, The Greatest American Hero), sleazy photographer Alan Conti (Alan Thicke, father of Robin and then-future star of Growing Pains), modelizer Nat Couray (Robert Morse, Mad Men, American Crime Story S1), Trainor's right-hand woman Cleo Banks (Barbara Parkins, Valley of the Dolls, Asylum) and all the other models in question.
Before too long, another model drops, Kara (Claudia Christian, The Hidden, Babylon 5), and this time, there's no doubt it was murder. Police protection is amped-up on all the calendar girl models, including retired one, Cassie (Stone), who left the biz for an old-fashioned desk job, just like Stoner wants to. The two get close, and Cassie soon makes it clear she'd like to get closer. Will Stoner remain faithful to his wife?
After a brazen murder attempt at a party on Heather (Wendy Kilbourne, who went on to appear in two great TV mini-series, North and South, Books 1 & 2), things heat up as the cops close in on the killer, this time intentionally trying to draw them out at an outdoor event. Will it work? You'll just have to see for yourself.
In addition to the aforementioned stars, the film also features a supporting turn as a cop by Robert Beltran, then-hot off of one of my all-time fave cult flicks, Eating Raoul, as well as the underrated Night of the Comet the same year, and who would later achieve success as a cast regular on Star Trek: Voyager.
TV regular Silvana Gallardo plays another cop, in a slyly forward-thinking turn. She was previously in Windwalker and Death Wish II and would continue to work steadily in TV until the early 2000's, in everything from Starsky & Hutch and Kojak to The Golden Girls and MacGyver.
Also, Jonathan Aluzas, who plays Stoner's horn-dog son, Todd, was in the cult favorite Monster in the Closet, before dropping off the radar completely afterwards.
Look quick for a cameo by, of all people, comedian Rip Taylor, who I mostly know from Jackass: The Movie and a cameo on an album by The Bloodhound Gang, but who was a regular fixture on 70's TV, especially game shows like The Gong Show and Hollywood Squares.
You might also know him from his rare serious turn in Indecent Proposal, of all things, or Wayne's World 2. He also did a ton of voice-over work, notably as Uncle Fester in the Adams Family cartoon series in the early 90's. He's quite the character, and his scene with one of the brain-dead-about-to-be-real-dead models is a definite highlight. If he'd turned out to be the killer, this movie would be pure win, but alas, such is not the case.
The film is ably directed by TV-regular William A. Graham, who also did the exploitation flick Honky (yep, it means what you think), the apocalyptic sci-fi movie The Last Generation, the West-ploitation movie Cry for Me, Billy (with Harry Dean Stanton), the movie adaptation of the grade-school favorites Where the Lilies Bloom and Sounder, the women-in-prison flick Women of San Quentin, true-crime stuff like Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones, Mussolini: The Untold Story and The Hunt for the Unicorn Killer, and three episodes of The X-Files, including the classic "E.B.E."
Plus, the likes of Beyond the Bermuda Triangle, Shark Kill, Contact on Cherry Street (with Frank Sinatra), The Last Ninja, The Last Days of Frank & Jesse James, Billy the Kid (with Val Kilmer), the belated sequel Return to the Blue Lagoon (with a young Milla Jovovich) and lots of Lifetime-type stuff like Beyond Suspicion and Sleeping with the Devil. The guy's a workhorse!
This movie practically screams the 80's, from the synth-driven score by Brad Fiedel (former keyboardist for Hall & Oates, the same year he did the ground-breaking, award-winning score for The Terminator- he also did the sequel- plus, Fright Night, Just Before Dawn and The Serpent and the Rainbow, among many others), to the painfully-80's fashion and hair, which, as a child of the 80's myself, is SO my wheelhouse, so I loved this.
Granted, it's not that hard to puzzle out the killer- though the why is a bit more elusive- and the script is a bit by-the-numbers, but it's well-acted, and it's fun seeing a lot of familiar faces in the early years of their careers, or, in the case of Skerritt, elegantly slumming it.
While it may not make anyone's list of the best that TV-movies have to offer, and it's no, say, Eyes of Laura Mars, it's a lot of fun, and certainly qualifies as a guilty pleasure worth seeking out.
Last I saw, it was readily available on Netflix, as well as YouTube, for the record. Here's the trailer as well, so you know what you're in for, and can tell if it's likely to be your cup of tea.
Be sure to join me later in the week, for my look at this film's trashy big-screen counterpart, 1974's proto-slasher The Centerfold Girls. I'm going to also try and catch Click: The Calendar Girl Killer- yet another variation on said theme, obviously- which I will review at a later date. Thanks for reading!
