ACT OF VENGEANCE (1986) ** ½

Charles Bronson stars as a union worker who represents coal miners in this made for HBO drama based on a true story.   When eighty men lose their lives in a mining accident, the union president (Wilford Brimley) doesn’t do a damned thing to help.  Bronson gets fed up with his bullshit and decides to run against him in the next election.  Brimley knows everyone is going to vote for Chuck, so he rigs the election.  Bronson finds out and sets out to expose Wilford, who then puts a hit out on Chuck and his family. 

Chuck doesn’t have his trademark mustache in this one, which is the tip-off he’s really acting in a serious movie.  Because of that, Act of Vengeance lacks the fun of a Death Wish 3 or a 10 to Midnight.  Despite that, the strong supporting cast keeps you watching.  In addition to Brimley, who plays a solid heavy, we have Ellen Burstyn (as Bronson’s faithful wife), Hoyt Axton (Brimley’s crooked cohort), Ellen Barkin (Axton’s daughter), and a young Keanu Reeves (whose name is misspelled in the credits).  It’s pretty amusing seeing Reeves in this, mostly because his Bill and Ted co-star, Alex Winter starred alongside Bronson in Death Wish 3 the year before.   

Director John Mackenzie is best known for The Long Good Friday, but he’s a legend to me for directing Apaches, a demented PSA about the dangers of children playing on abandoned farm equipment.  I readily admit that union dramas aren’t my cup of tea.  Usually, the only way to get me to watch one of these is if you have someone like Stallone (F.I.S.T.), Nicholson (Hoffa), or DeNiro (The Irishman) in them.  Luckily for me, the presence of Charles Bronson made it worth a look.   

Act of Vengeance is watchable for the most part.  Bronson’s compelling performance keeps you invested for an act and a half.  However, things start to slide once the focus shifts to the gunmen Brimley hires to take out Bronson.  These sections just aren’t as dramatically involving and feel more like a cheap true crime reenactment than anything.  On the other hand, this movie answers the age-old question:  Who would win in a contest between Paul Kersey and John Wick?  Because of that, it gets a marginal recommendation. 

Brimley gets the best line of the movie when he says, “I don’t care who you pray to or if you’re a Catholic, Methodist, or a Republican!”   

AKA:  Local 323.  AKA:  Act of Vengeance… A True Story.

MOONSHINE COUNTY EXPRESS (1977) ** ½

An old moonshiner is murdered, and his still is blown sky-high.  In his will, he leaves his daughters (Susan Howard, Claudia Jennings, and Maureen McCormick) his secret stash of Prohibition Era whiskey.  It’s then up to the ladies to sell off the lucrative hooch before their greedy competitor (William Conrad), who also happens to be the one who murdered their pappy, gets wind of it.  They then turn to a hotshot race car driver (John Saxon) to help run the shine, avoid the cops, and get revenge. 

Moonshine County Express is a moderately effective hicksploitation drive-in flick that features a couple of decent car chases and/or wrecks.  It’s really nothing more than an assemblage of the genre’s usual action beats and cliches, but it at least has the benefit of a great cast.  Saxon is cool as a cucumber as the likeable Good Ol’ Boy romancing the foxy Howard.  Conrad makes for a suitable villain for this sort of thing, and in the film’s most bizarre scene, he hires a prostitute to help him explore his fisherman fetish.  While the quality overall is a bit spotty, I still maintain that any movie in which Claudia Jennings and Maureen McCormick play sexy white trash sisters is A-OK in my book. 

Though directed with assurance by Gus (The Sidehackers) Trikonis, Moonshine County Express feels like a first draft in search of a polished screenplay.  Someone really needed to punch up the weak one-liners and define the characters a little more sharply.  While the finale is fine, it pales next to the likes of the classics of the genre.  That said, I’m a sucker for a good moonshine running movie, and this one gets the job done, albeit in unremarkable fashion.  If you’re like me, and you’re a fan of the genre and/or cast (there are bits by Dub Taylor, Jeff Corey, and Candice Rialson), you’ll certainly take a shine to it.

Jennings and Saxon later appeared together in David Cronenberg’s Fast Company.

AKA:  Shine.  AKA:  County Express.  AKA:  Moonshine Express.  AKA:  Blood Whiskey.

THE BEST OF DORIS WISHMAN (2021) ***

The Best of Doris Wishman is a celebration of the smut movie pioneer’s work.  It is a hodgepodge of movie trailers (Hideout in the Sun, Nude on the Moon, Gentlemen Prefer Nature Girls, Blaze Starr Goes Nudist, The Sex Perils of Paulette, Bad Girls Go to Hell, Another Day, Another Man, My Brother’s Wife, A Taste of Flesh, Indecent Desires, Too Much Too Often, The Amazing Transplant, Love Toy, Keyholes are for Peeping, Deadly Weapons, Double Agent 73, and The Immoral Three) and musical interludes from her films (such as Diary of a Nudist, Blaze Starr Goes Nudist, Indecent Desires, and Deadly Weapons) that almost play like mini-music videos.  In addition to the DVD, there’s also a bonus CD, which is essentially just an audio version of the DVD.  It’s not exactly a must-have, but I’m glad that Something Weird and Modern Harmonic is really taking up the cause to preserve music from old exploitation movies.  Some of these rarities would be forgotten if it hadn’t been for their efforts, and for that, we should be thankful. 

The Best of Doris Wishman offers a nice sampling of her work.  Most of the eras of her career are touched upon, from nudie movies to roughies to her gonzo exploitation films.  I just wish it had been a bit more exhaustive as there’s no mention of her magnum opus, Let Me Die a Woman or her attempt at an ‘80s slasher, A Night to Dismember.   

The DVD runs seventy-six minutes, but strangely, only forty are devoted to Wishman.  The rest of the time is spent on ads for Modern Harmonic’s other vinyl releases like Something Weird’s Greatest Hits CD (which in itself is highly recommended), The Doll Squad, Mr. Peter’s Pets, Pacific Northwest Fuzz Box, Missile to the Moon, She Demons, Psychedelicsex Kicks, Pacific Northwest Jukebox, Girl in Gold Boots, The Party Girls, It’s a Revolution Mother, Dracula (The Dirty Old Man), and Something Weird’s Spookshow Spectacular a Go-Go.  I’m not knocking it as I have enjoyed every CD I’ve bought from Modern Harmonic.  However, I kind of wish the DVD was a wall-to-wall trailer compilation.  The musical interludes are fine (as is the rare audio of Wishman on the set), but I was kind of hoping the DVD would be more than a mere visual accompaniment to the CD.  Even with my reservations, this is still a treat for Wishman fans.  

RESISTANCE (2003) **

Bill Paxton stars as an American fighter pilot whose plane is shot down over Belgium during WWII.  A boy finds him and brings him to the home of Julia Ormond, whose husband (Philippe Volter) is part of the Belgian resistance against the Nazis.  While hiding him from the clutches of the Germans, she and Paxton grow close and eventually fall in love.  Naturally, her jealous husband learns about her betrayal and sells them out to the Nazis.

Resistance is an unapologetically schmaltzy and well-intentioned period drama.  Just as U-571 was a throwback to the old Men on a Mission actioners, this is a retooling of the war-torn romance films of the Golden Age of Hollywood.  (The resistance leaders are so cliche that they would look right at home in Top Secret!)  All of this is relatively low key, predictable, and a tad forgettable, but at least it moves at an agreeable pace and doesn’t get bogged down with a lot of unnecessary subplots like a lot of similar romance dramas. 

In fact, the pacing is a bit too fast as the film enters the homestretch.  The ending is so rushed that it almost feels like it was the victim of reshoots.  The fact that major plot points are delivered via exposition by two minor supporting characters at the very end is especially odd and ends the movie on an unsatisfying note.  

I guess the main stumbling block is that there isn’t a whole lot of sparks between Ormond and Paxton.  In their separate scenes with other actors they are quite good.  However, their romantic sequences are lacking passion and kind of fizzle out before they can even gather any momentum.  Plus, the kid who acts as a surrogate son to the couple will grate on your nerves pretty quick.  It’s enough to make Resistance awfully resistible.  

U-571 (2000) ***

U-571 is a good, old-fashioned throwback to the WWII “Men on a Mission” movies that used to play non-stop on TBS back in the day.  It was also riding the coattails of a couple of then-current trends.  It’s a submarine movie like Crimson Tide, a boat-sinking movie starring Bill Paxton like Titanic, and the stuff with the seasoned veteran of the team being killed off halfway through is a lot like Executive Decision.   

During WWII, the Americans intercept a transmission that a German U-Boat is left off the coast in less than ship shape condition.  Paxton leads a team of men to intercept the ship posing as German mechanics so they can steal an Enigma coding device onboard the vessel which may be the key to turning the tide of the war.  Things do not go as planned and the men find themselves stranded aboard an enemy vessel fighting for their lives. 

The cast is solid, through and through.  We have Matthew McConaughey as the wet-behind-the-ears officer who isn’t ready to lead his men, Paxton as his hardass mentor, and Harvey Keitel as his trusty right-hand man.  As good as McConaughey and Paxton are, it’s Keitel who gets the best scene where he gives McConaughey a much-needed pep talk.  Heck, even Jon Bon Jovi is pretty good in this.   

The action and suspense is handled with efficiency by journeyman director Jonathan Mostow.  It’s not as good as his other films like Breakdown and Terminator 3, but it's an absorbing and entertaining war thriller all the same.  While it never quite kicks into overdrive, it has a number of effective sequences.  There are also more submarine movie cliches than you can shake a stick at, so fans of WWII sub action will be sure to enjoy it. 

The movie got a lot of flack at the time of release because it was in fact the English who recovered the Enigma coding device and not us Americans.  If you are a stickler for history, you might find all this hard to swallow.  If, however, you just want a gripping, entertaining war flick with a reliable cast, U-571 will fit the bill. 

FRIED BARRY (2021) ** ½

Barry (Gary Green) is a junkie who walks out on his family, shoots some heroin, and gets abducted by aliens.  They experiment on him and send him back home a little worse for wear.  He then stumbles around Cape Town getting into various (mostly sexual) misadventures.   

Fried Barry starts off like a cross between Requiem for a Dream and Fire in the Sky.  There are also moments that might make you think of Liquid Sky and Species 2 too.  If you can’t already tell, all of this is wildly uneven.  There are some really great stretches here that are immediately followed by some head-scratching sequences.  However, if you can make it through the weak patches, you’ll be rewarded with some truly oddball stuff.  The episodic nature of the whole thing may turn some viewers off, but it has enough weirdness here that it’s hard to completely dismiss. 

Everything is filmed in one of those newfangled styles I like to call “Carpenter Chic”.  The camerawork, music, and even the font used in the title sequence is very much inspired by John Carpenter.  That doesn’t quite enhance the overall experience, but I like it when filmmakers wear their influences on their sleeves. 

Fried Barry doesn’t quite click, but it certainly has some memorable set pieces and moments.  My favorite bit was the scene where he bangs a hooker who immediately goes into labor and gives birth, much to her pimp’s confusion.  There’s also an intermission that looks like something out of 2001, and an ending that, incredibly enough, blatantly rips off E.T.  Even though much of this is overly familiar, the film does manage to blaze a few new trails.  I mean we’ve seen plenty of alien anal probes before.  This flick gives us what might be the screen’s first penile probe.  So, it has that going for it. 

Fried Barry is based on a short film, which I haven’t seen.  If I had to guess, I’d say that writer/director Ryan Kruger took what he could from the short and just kept adding more quirky scenes at random till he got to a feature length running time.  Because of that, it plays more like a mix tape of ‘80s pop culture influences funneled into a druggie hang-out movie.  It’s often slipshod and messy, but I’ll be damned if parts of it don’t work.  I can’t quite recommend it, but I’m curious to see what Kruger will do next. 

SAKURA KILLERS (1987) ***

I’ve been having pretty good luck here lately watching any old movie that I randomly stumble upon on Tubi.  Sakura Killers kept the hot streak going.  The opening is great.  It features Ninjas attacking an office building, crawling up the wall like a Wacky Wall Walker, and stealing a vital videotape. (Beta, no less!)  Then, the action switches over to Chuck Connors practicing his golf game on his ranch.  The Ninjas try to sneak up on him, but little do they know he keeps a shotgun in his golf bag for occasions such as these, and he blows them away.   

What makes Connors’ character great in this is that he almost always is seen wearing a Brooklyn Dodgers hat and jacket.  If you’re a fan of the man, you’ll know that he really played for the team back in the day.  I’m not sure if we are supposed to believe he’s playing himself, but I’d like to think so.  He’s only referred to as “The Colonel”, so I guess anything is possible.  Then again, if that were true, he would’ve been packing a rifle in his golf bag instead of a shotgun, seeing as he is The Rifleman and all.   

Anyway, Chuck sends these two guys who look like the Sam’s Club version of Michael Dudikoff and Steve James from the American Ninja movies to recover the tape.  Whenever they hit a plot dead end, they call Chuck back at the ranch.  Basically, it’s all edited together like a Godfrey Ho cut-and-paste Ninja movie except it’s got Chuck Connors instead of Richard Harrison.  That is to say, it’s pretty awesome.  

Sakura Killers is packed with laugh-a-minute action for the first half-hour or so.  In that time, we get a homoerotic training montage. an ‘80s aerobicizing montage, and a Ninja training montage.  I must admit, the laughs get a bit sparser as the movie goes along.  The film especially lacks inspiration once Connors is sidelined from the action (although he does occasionally pop up to reiterate plot points and remind the audience who is top billed).  That said, there’s plenty of amusing bits along the way to make this a treat for fans of Ninja cinema.   

Such treats include a scene where our heroes inexplicably turn into Ninjas wearing gold and silver devil masks and defeat a henchman by slamming his balls into a tree trunk.  I think the best part though was the finale in which the villainous Ninja travels underground just like Bugs Bunny!  Then in the midst of battle, he uses Ninja Scarecrows (!!!) to confuse our heroes.  No matter what the film’s shortcomings may be, any picture that features a villain using Ninja Scarecrows is OK in my book.