CLEANING OUT THE DVR: BUS DRIVER (2016) ***

Here’s another film from the old DVR, this one recorded off the El Rey Network.  One of the saddest things about cutting the cable cord was not being able to watch El Rey on a regular basis as they had quite an eclectic line-up of movies.  Bus Driver was part of a morning block I recorded that includes two Shaw Brothers Kung Fu flicks I hope to review very soon. 

Bus Driver is a fun and surprising low budget actioner that is a real sleeper.  The only names in the cast are Robert Forster, who plays a general, and Michael Bailey (The Hills Have Eyes remake) Smith as the villainess’ right-hand man.  It’s kind of like a roadside variation of a Die Hard clone.  Instead of the wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time guy being a cop, it’s a bus driver.  There’s also an element of First Blood too as the hero everyone assumes to be just an ordinary citizen happens to be a former super soldier with a deadly skill set. 

Said bus driver (Steve Daron) is hauling a bunch of disciplinary problems around in a school bus on a field trip.  When the bus gets a flat tire, they go to a nearby ranch for help.  Naturally, that’s where a mess of drug dealers are hiding out.  When the kids uncover their stash, the leader (Holly Elissa) orders her goons to kill them.  Of course, the only one who can save the day is the seemingly unremarkable bus driver who unbeknownst to everyone used to be a kick-ass soldier before he started driving buses. 

Daron underplays the hero role and is a bit one-note, but that only helps to perfectly set up his character.  Once he starts to kick ass, he does start to have something of a screen presence, but not much.  Elissa’s villainess character is well done though as she proves to be an interesting foil for Daron.  Unfortunately, Forster only appears in the end as the Col. Trautman-like character in a scene that looks like it was intended to set up a sequel (which I would totally be down for).  It’s Steven Chase who steals the movie though, giving a fun performance as the foulmouthed chaperone “Gooch”.  We also get a great turn by Olivia Alexander as the sexy slut of the group who sexts everyone topless pics of herself and engages in a completely gratuitous but totally awesome sex scene. 

This scene just serves to underline that Bus Driver isn’t meant to be taken seriously for a second.  It also wastes no time getting down to the nitty gritty, which is greatly appreciated.  It’s only 75 minutes long, and it only takes about 15 of them before the boobies, bullets, and blood starts flying.  Director Brian Herzlinger does a nice job on the action scenes given the budgetary restraints.  I especially liked the sequences that rewind and fast forward so the audience can see just how resourceful our hero can be.

I thought Herzlinger’s name sounded familiar, so I looked him up on IMDb.  I was shocked to find out he’s the guy who made that My Date with Drew movie where he basically stalked Drew Barrymore.  As it turns out he also … uh… directed My Truth:  The Rape of the Two Coreys.  I haven’t seen those two movies, but if Bus Driver is any indication, Herzlinger should probably stick to making fun action-comedies like this one.

Like its main character, Bus Driver doesn’t look like much, but it’s got it where it counts.  Beyond its unassuming exterior lies a fun little B picture with a sense of humor.  It knows exactly what it is and how to get the job done.  You have to respect that.

CLEANING OUT THE DVR: CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE (2016) ***

Okay, so we’re only about a week away from the annual 31 Days of Horror-Ween festivities where I watch nothing but horror movies for a month straight, followed by November’s Halloween Hangover where I watch all the horror movies I didn’t get to watch in October.  When I started the Al Adamson marathon in August, I thought that would carry me over into October, but as it turned out, I was able to finish earlier than expected.  I could start the 31 Days celebration a week early, but I figured I would instead take the time to do a little fall cleaning and watch as many movies from my DVR as I can before the end of September.  Since there are a few horror flicks sitting in the DVR, I may save them for later and watch some of them as part of the 31 Days marathon if and when I have a chance to squeeze in an extra movie or two.  For now, I’m going try to declutter all the films that have been sitting in my DVR for the past three years or so (over 170 hours’ worth, to be more precise).

First up is Central Intelligence.  I think I added this when I had a free preview of HBO (the date on the DVR said April 25, 2017).  Usually whenever we got a free preview of something, I would just tape as many movies as I could and come back and watch them later, even if it wasn’t something I was particularly interested in.  Central Intelligence kind of falls into that category.  I mean, I would watch it, but I wouldn’t necessarily pay to see it, so it made sense to put it on the DVR during a free preview.

Kevin Hart stars as an accountant who peaked in high school.  When he was a teenager, he witnessed a fat kid being bullied and tried to help him.  Twenty years go by, and that kid has now transformed into Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who friends Hart on Facebook and suggests they go out for drinks.  Turns out he’s a rogue CIA agent who needs Hart’s accounting skills to stop an online transaction between a shadowy hacker and a terrorist group.  Predictable action-comedy hijinks ensue. 

Central Intelligence is exactly the movie you think it’s going to be.  There are no surprises here as the film follows a cliched action-comedy formula that has already been done several times over several decades.  That isn’t exactly a bad thing, especially when the leads have so much chemistry together and the laughs are there. 

Obviously, the action will not be mistaken for The Raid.  However, director Rawson Marshall (Dodgeball:  A True Underdog Story) Thurber injects just enough humor into the scenarios to make it work.  I mean, if you ever wanted to see The Rock get punched by a motorcycle, or use a banana as a deadly weapon, here’s your chance.  The humor doesn’t always hit the mark (the cameos vary in degrees of success), but it’s hard not to like any movie in which The Rock threatens to rip out someone’s throat “like Patrick Swayze in Roadhouse”. 

The film’s strong suit is the interplay between The Rock and Kevin Hart.  You can tell they are just having a ball playing off of one another and their repartee is just funny enough to make you forget about all the cliches (it’s another one of those high school reunion movies) and predictable plot points (like the true identity of the villain).  I also have to give the poster props for having the tagline:  “Saving the world takes a little Hart and a big Johnson”, easily the best tagline since The Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio’s “It’s not his nose that grows!”

All involved clearly had a blast working with one another as Hart and The Rock later went on to star in two Jumanji movies together and Thurber and The Rock went on to team up for Skyscraper and the upcoming Red Notice.

THE WORLD OF THE VAMPIRES (1961) ***

It was kind of interesting to compare and contrast The World of the Vampires with the other Mexican Vampire movie I watched the other day, The Invasion of the Vampires.  Both manage to shake up the traditional vampire lore by making up their own weird rules, which is kind of ballsy and fun.  While the overall quality of Invasion was all over the place, it still managed to crank out a handful of striking and impressive visuals.  World, on the other hand, is more consistent in its approach and embraces the B-level production design (the familiar cobweb-strewn Churubusco Azteca Studios sets are trotted out yet again), which makes everything go down much smoother.

The evil Count Subotai (Guillermo Murray) rises from the grave and sacrifices a woman on his altar.  He then vows revenge on the Colman clan who originally killed him a hundred years ago.  He sets his sights on turning the latest Colman descendent, Leonor (Erna Martha Bauman, who was also in The Invasion of the Vampires) into a bloodsucker.  It’s then up to a scientist of music and the occult named Rudolph (Mauricio Garces) to stop the Count from putting the bite on her. 

Murray isn’t particularly great as the Count.  (He’s no German Robles, I’ll tell you that.)  He often looks perplexed and the giant cartoonish fangs they give him to wear don’t exactly help.  However, he looks at home playing weird skull-encrusted pianos and ordering around a bunch of zombies with Paper Mache faces, so he has that going for him.

The most fun aspect of The World of the Vampires is how it incorporates music into the vampire legend.  The character of Rudolph is a great twist on the typical Van Helsing character.  Music is his forte, and he’s perfected a theory of how the particular arrangement of musical notes can affect his surroundings.  There’s a great scene where he attends a dinner party and plays a song that could “wake the dead” that ends with the Count mysteriously appearing in the living room.  Conversely, when he plays a song that vampires hate, it drives the big-eared, wild-eyed vampire minions mad.  Who needs holy water when you can just tickle the ivories? 

Another departure from the usual vampire lore is the fact that when you are bitten by a vampire, you turn into… a werewolf?!?  One way that the vampires keep with tradition is the fact that they can be killed with a stake through the heart.  You would think that knowing this, the Count wouldn’t have installed a giant pit filled with sharp stakes at the bottom, right in the middle of his lair.  I mean it was only a matter of time before someone slipped and was impaled by them.  I don’t know what they’re smoking down there south of the Rio Grande, but it is of the high-grade available-only-with-photo-I.D. variety.

Whereas there were moments in Invasion that felt like a Mario Bava movie, World is content to evoke the look of an old Universal horror programmer.  (The scenes with the vampire’s brides are clearly cribbing from the 1931 version of Dracula.)  Even with the crummy masks, shitty half-assed werewolves, and silly bats, it proves to be more engaging and fun, despite not reaching the atmospheric heights of The Invasion of the Vampires.  One thing is for sure, The World of the Vampires isn’t your typical tired old retread.

THE INVASION OF THE VAMPIRES (1965) ** ½

A small town is plagued by a rash of unexplained murders.  An investigator of the supernatural named Dr. Ulysses (Rafael del Rio) arrives on the scene and asserts it is the work of Count Frankenhausen (Carlos Agosti), a bloodthirsty vampire.  It doesn’t take long before the good doctor falls for the virginal Brunhilda (Erna Martha Bauman).  Naturally, Brunhilda is the vampire’s next target and Dr. Ulysses sets out to watch her back and protect her neck. 

The Invasion of the Vampires is an interesting yet uneven South of the Border horror flick that suffers from a severe whiplash of quality.  There are moments here of pure cinematic beauty that are almost immediately undermined by an unyielding onslaught of boring exposition and soap opera theatrics.  Despite that, fans of Mexican horror movies are probably apt to ride out the rough passages in order to get to the good stuff. 

The episodic feel adds to the overall patchiness of the film.  Not even the humorously atrocious dubbing can save the interminable dialogue scenes.  These long, dull stretches will have your eyelids lowering in no time.  On the plus side, the vampire stuff is strong enough to almost singlehandedly save it.  The sequences where a vampire woman takes a stroll through the fog and walks into a lake would look at home in a Mario Bava picture.  If B movie cheesiness is more your taste, the hero’s fight with a giant bat will certainly fit the bill. 

If you manage to tough it out through the dull spots, you will be rewarded with a pretty neat twist ending, that I for one didn’t see coming.  Some purists may cry foul since it flies in the face of the traditionally accepted vampire lore.  For this horror movie junkie, it just looked so cool visually that I couldn’t help but go with it.  It’s not quite enough to save the flick, but it should be enough to leave a lingering impression on you long after you see it. 

OF CHICANA BLOOD (1974) ***

Maria is a rebellious Chicana teenager who emulates her American counterparts, much to her father’s chagrin.  His restaurant is failing, and his sons try to help in their own way.  Raul is going to college to become a doctor, although that won’t help matters here and now.  Meanwhile, brother Juan turns to a life of crime and gets mixed up with an American gang.  To make ends meet, Raul begins wrestling at night, but keeps things a secret because he knows his father would not approve.   

Of Chicana Blood obviously has a lot to say about racial equality and economic disparity, and its messages are just as timely today as when it was made.  Luckily, it isn’t too heavy handed or preachy as it often finds the right balance of drama and comedy.  I especially liked the family’s cantankerous godmother who sneaks out and paints anti-gringo graffiti.

I know I probably should’ve sworn off Hurricane Ramirez movies after the dreadful Hurricane Ramirez and the Black Nun, but this one is a marked improvement in every regard.  While humorous, it lacks the sitcom-style gags and plot predicaments that film had in favor of well-rounded characters and a genuine good-natured message.  (It helped I was able to watch this one with subtitles.)  The dramatic meat of the story is surprisingly rich, and the ending winds up being rather sad and depressing too.

At first, all this feels like it’s going to be another bait and switch because you don’t hear hide nor hair of Hurricane Ramirez for the first half of the movie.  Stick with it though, because there’s a reason for the slow build-up.  You see, Of Chicana Blood is actually… the origin story of Hurricane Ramirez!  That’s right, it’s Hurricane Ramirez Begins!

It’s really cool to see Hurricane getting his start, even if many of the wrestling scenes are kind of rote.  At least the final showdown between Hurricane and Golden Bull (who also happens to be Maria’s lout ex-boyfriend) has a little kick to it, thanks to the drama that has built up between the two opponents.  I also liked the one wrestler known as “The Mathematician” who has a bunch of numbers on his mask, although that’s really the extent of his gimmick. 

I’m always a little tougher on the Lucha Libre flicks that don’t have horror, sci-fi, or fantasy elements to begin with.  However, while it doles out its message earnestly, Of Chicana Blood does get kind of dull in places, especially when no one is wrestling.  Still, I’m surprised I liked it as much as I did, considering how inconsistent these later Hurricane Ramirez movies have been.  I also admired the stealthy way they took a seemingly innocent family drama and turned it into a Mexican wrestling origin movie.  This is easily the best Hurricane flick since the original. 

SON OF VHS DELIRIUM (2019) *** ½

Son of VHS Delirium is the third part in the Drive-In Delirium spin-off series that focuses solely on VHS trailers.  The very first image you see is a woman’s soapy butt, which is a sure sign of the quality to come.  That butt is part of a promo for an Australian company called Video Classics, which I’m not familiar with, but who are responsible for all the trailers and promos in the collection.  With a butt like that, the company deserves to be on the Forbes 500. 

This was on the same disc as Drive-In Delirium:  With a Vengeance as a bonus feature.  I may have been a little disappointed by the lack of horror titles on that installment, but this one more than makes up for it.  Here’s the complete rundown on the trailers included:  Beyond Evil, Superstition, Maniac, Evil Dead, Sweet Sixteen, Mutant, Vampyres (“WARNING:  This Film Contains Scenes That May Shock or Offend”), Torso, Amityville 3-D, The Dead Zone, Tattoo, and To Kill a Clown.  From there, things become sort of a hodgepodge with trailers for Fort Apache, The Bronx, The Bounty, Caged Heat, The Retrievers, Raw Force, Conan the Destroyer, Loving Couples, Splitz, Hollywood High, Gas Pump Girls, Hot T-Shirts, Gosh!, The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood, Charlotte’s Web (which feels really out of place, especially following a Happy Hooker movie, but oh well), Follow the Sun, Master of the Game, Flying High, The Keeper, and The Intruder Within.

It’s in the last half-hour the collection really gets into gear.  After a Video Classics promo (that includes clips from Flash Gordon and King Kong, among others) we get an awesome commercial for Movies at Midnight, which looks like an ad for a Playboy Channel type of deal.  Then there are tons of fun trailers for ‘70s skin flicks like Secrets of a Super Stud, Sweet Savage, The Yum Yum Girls, Girls at the Gynecologist (which has a great gimmick where the girls’ name and age flashes on screen), Mustang:  The House That Joe Built, Incoming Freshmen, French Nympho, Spermula, Flesh Gordon, Diary of a Space Virgin (AKA:  The Girl from Starship Venus), Fairy Tales, Fantasm (“Filmed in Hollywood by Australians!”), Fantasm Comes Again, and Love You (which is oddly enough, narrated by a W.C. Fields imitator).  

This is certainly the best of the VHS Delirium collections.  In fact, this is the first time in the Drive-In Delirium line where the bonus feature outshone the main attraction.  I for one can’t wait to see what they have up their sleeve next time around. 

DRIVE-IN DELIRIUM: WITH A VENGEANCE (2019) ***

Drive-In Delirium:  With a Vengeance is the fifth in the series of trailer compilations from Umbrella Entertainment.  The focus this time is on the action genre, although there are more than a few horror, sci-fi, and exploitation trailers sprinkled about.  While it still packs plenty of bang for your buck, I have to say it is my least favorite in the series so far.

Things kick off with a run of ‘70s Blaxploitation trailers (Shaft, Super Fly, Hammer) before branching off into trailers for the Dirty Harry and French Connection series.  Icons like Steve McQueen (Bullitt. Le Mans, The Getaway), Michael Caine (Get Carter, The Eagle Has Landed, The Italian Job), and Sylvester Stallone (Cobra and Lock Up) are well-represented.  I also enjoyed the trailers that were narrated by their directors (Sam Fuller’s Underworld, U.S.A. and Burt Reynolds’ Gator), a trend that should make a comeback.

After a short intermission that includes commercials for Kool-Aid (starring The Monkees) and KISS dolls, the second half begins with trailers for ‘60s adventures (Sword of Sherwood Forest, The Colossus of Rhodes, The Pirates of Blood River).  From there we get a taste of pulpy actioners (The Vengeance of She, The Million Eyes of Su-Muru, The Castle of Fu Manchu), Ninja flicks (Kill and Kill Again, Enter the Ninja, and Revenge of the Ninja), and a lot of Spaghetti westerns (including The Dollars Trilogy, a couple of Django movies, and Navajo Joe).  Finally, the collection concludes with a long run of Sci-Fi movies from the ‘70s (The Omega Man, The People That Time Forgot, Time After Time) and ‘80s (Star Trek 2:  The Wrath of Khan, Dune, The Last Starfighter).

Just because I can’t quite rank this collection as high as some of the other installments in the Drive-In Delirium series, don’t think that there aren’t some great trailers here because there are some truly memorable ones.  It’s just that the valleys are more prevalent than the peaks.  I mean at nearly six-and-a-half hours, it’s a given the overall quality would be uneven.  Sure, many of the films featured probably aren’t considered your typical drive-in fare (Serpico, The Long Good Friday, Best Seller), but there are still enough sleazy thrills (Savage Streets, Naked Vengeance, Tenement) here to justify the title.