Frank's Movie Log

A stacked cast and vivid location photography elevate this story of juvenile delinquency. Stanley Baker makes a strong case for Watchlist inclusion as a Liverpool detective volun-told to take over as Juvenile Liaison Officer. David McCallum plays the requisite troubled youth. Peter Cushing turns up as the local priest. The Liverpool photography puts you on the streets of the Beatles hometown a few years before they broke big. Baker and McCallum ensure you’re never bored. The script avoids soapbox soliloquies and rations the melodramatics. A pleasant surprise.

The bizarre story of a boy who suffers a fright and loses his hair. The ghosts of two winos proffer a formula for hair growth which he botches, leading to hair that won’t stop growing. He goes from bald at breakfast to Cousin Itt by dinner. Soon he’s kidnapped by a maniacal paintbrush manufacturer and doped on yogurt while his never-ending hair serves as raw materials for paintbrush bristles. It’s the sort of dark fantasy I enjoyed as a kid and appreciate as an adult. Not a great movie, but I appreciate its refusal to talk down to its audience and the resulting dissonance. What did I just watch?

In the late 90s, everyone was championing Scream’s revival of the horror genre, citing its self-aware script, and upending of the genre tropes. But the genuine evolutionary leap occurred a year later, in Austria, with this film. Besides resuscitating the home-invasion genre, Funny Games proves more self-reflexive and layered. All while packing the nihilistic punch Scream lacked. Continue reading...

The title threw me. The marketing materials called it PG: Psycho Goreman. I get how writer-director Steven Kostanski was parodying the MPAA rating, but it backfired on me. The “PG” connotation conjured images of watered-down Amblinesque horror, pushing this off my must-see list. Turns out, I was half-right in the best possible way. Continue reading...

An entertaining—if unremarkable—tale of a young sea-monster boy who visits the surface world and discovers he can turn into a human. There’s some plot involving another sea-monster boy, a human girl, a bicycle race, and a Vespa scooter, but the film’s standout draw is the atmosphere. It does a terrific job painting a nostalgic picture of 1950s small-town Italy. It charms and packs a few belly-laughs, but, at ninety-five minutes, feels overlong.

How did I miss this off-beat 80s teen comedy that skews closer to Savage Steve Holland than John Hughes? I loved the formal rigor director Phil Joanou employs in this comedic tale of high-school dweeb Jerry Mitchell who finds himself targeted by the hulking new bully. From long takes of overlapping dialog to an always-interesting shot choice, the film proved a terrific discovery. Continue reading...

I remember seeing this when it first landed on home-video. A pair of young professionals earn an invite to their charismatic boss’s Hampton Island beach house. Upon arrival, they discover their host dead and themselves targeted for a similar fate. In the decades since, I’d forgotten how long it takes to get the pair to the beach and how few antics they employ to convince everyone their boss is still alive. Credit to Silverman and McCarthy for shining through their character’s one-dimensional behavior and salvaging what they could.

Rudy Ray Moore returns as Dolemite, a fast-talking, kung-fu fighting entertainer. Fleeing a racist Alabama sheriff (J.B. Baron, who struck me as Haley Joel Osment playing Kenny Rogers), Dolemite and crew travel to Los Angeles. There they discover a local mob goon has forced their friend Queen Bee into servitude. Despite the shoddy production (Ernie Hudson sometimes plays one of Moore’s entourage, other times it’s an obvious stand-in), Moore’s charisma and the earnest intent prove endearing.

How do you review this? A film shot in 1976 but not released until 2010, when editor Bob Murawski assembled the rediscovered footage. A film laden with casual racism but also featuring a resonant soliloquy bemoaning the Catholic Church’s culpability in turning a blind-eye to the world’s problems. A film written and directed by a nightclub crooner, yet shot on-location in Los Angeles, Palm Springs, Las Vegas, and Rome. Bear with me. Continue reading...

The opening got my hopes up. Picking up from Curse of Chucky’s post-credits tag, Alex Vincent returns as Andy, now an adult suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. We meet him on a date that, of course, doesn’t go well. Andy returns to his isolated cabin. From a secret safe, he removes Chucky, now mangled and disfigured. Chucky cracks wise about the failed date and Andy tortures him with a blowtorch. Continue reading...