Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man.

Review #2572: Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man.

Cast:

Mickey Rourke (Harley Davidson), Don Johnson (Robert Lee "Marlboro Man" Edison), Chelsea Field (Officer Virginia Slim), Tom Sizemore (Chance Wilder), Daniel Baldwin (Alexander), Vanessa Williams (Lulu Daniels), Giancarlo Esposito (Jimmy Jiles), Robert Ginty (Thom), Tia Carrere (Kimiko), Big John Studd (Jack Daniels), Julius Harris ('The Old Man' Jiles), Eloy Casados (Jose Cuervo), and Kelly Hu (Suzie) Directed by Simon Wincer.

Review: 

You're never going to believe this: a buddy biker action movie (that could also be called a "neo-Western") that wasn't a hit on release. The film was directed by one Simon Wincer, an Australian director that had done plenty of television before becoming a film guy with such movies as Snapshot (1979), D.A.R.Y.L. (1985) and Quigley Down Under (1990). The original script was written by aspiring actor Don Michael Paul that apparently took inspiration from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid [1969] (which is strange because the movie has exactly one robbery while Cassidy features multiple robberies and a failed attempt at going straight, although a "super-posse" does sound pretty prevalent in both). It soon found a deal with MGM (at the time in hell with Giancarlo Parretti in management) and a quick turnaround with Wincer and company (you might be wondering - Paul? Yes, that's correct, Paul ended up being the writer/director for Half Past Dead [2002]*). Sure, Johnson and Rourke were mostly in it to try and get out of career ruts, but they apparently had a decent time making the movie. Released on August 23, 1991 (the same week as movies such as Dead Again) with little expectations from even MGM's own president at the time with a budget of roughly $18 million, the movie made less than half of that. Wincer went on to make a string of movies that surely sound normal: Free Willy (1993), that movie with a big whale in it, Lightning Jack (1994), an ill-fated attempt at a Paul Hogan vehicle (?), Operation Dumbo Drop (1995), a movie involving an elephant in the Vietnam War (no, really), and The Phantom (1996), a comic strip movie with a big purple costumed hero.

The heroes being named after brands was, well, not trying to sell cigarettes (which suck anyway*) or motorcycles. The real movie basically starts about nearly an hour after the heist is done and it's just two folks riding around trying to make the best of the fact that one can barely shoot a gun and the other wears duct-tape boots. Rourke was there solely for the money because of a string of flops and decided that as a 39-year-old in 1991 to do, and I'm not kidding, focus his time on boxing (he wound up doing a few fights around the world before going back to acting). Meanwhile, the elder Johnson (i.e. early forties) was still hoping to branch out from being more than Crockett from Miami Vice (hey, in fairness, he was fine in A Boy and His Dog [1975]). Even with that type of freewheeling attitude, there is still a veneer of interest in watching these people meander across the screen engaging in the most predictable type of adventure imaginable because they do conjure up a smile for those who are familiar with wiseasses that should know better. It's the kind of movie for those who thought Tango & Cash (1989) or Stone Cold (1991) were sick as hell, honestly. What other movie goes around having characters spend 99 percent of the time in duct-taped boots to go along with stunts of jumping onto pools or say, a person falling off a motorcycle just so it rolls at a group of people (who naturally all jump over it at the same time)? Or arm wrestling / bar fights? 

Much like the film, there are no excuses for what I do (see, I do crib quotes) in saying that this was a pretty decent movie in basically exploring two people that don't really know what they want besides having as much as possible before, well, the ride of the grim reaper hits. It just happens to be a movie where folks decide to rob a bank threatening to foreclose their favorite bar. Sure, it doesn't have much for Field to really do opposite Johnson (Williams also gets exactly one scene that doesn't involve singing), and sure, Baldwin and Sizemore don't get that much to particularly do as the primary adversaries (one basically travels in a straight line with other black-coated dudes but you still go, "cool"), and sure, it's a movie that hinges on selling drugs *back* to the people they robbed (equal opportunity robbers that don't love addictive drugs, what a pairing) but I got a kick out of its entertainment value. When your favorite place gets trashed (or in the modern sense, bought out or turned lame) by a bunch of stooges from a bank (capital?) just because they can, yeah, I would think wish fulfillment in getting revenge sounds like a fun time for 98 minutes, quite honestly. 35 years haven't exactly elevated it all the way to a cult movie, but it is the kind of curious movie to watch get on the road to ass-kicking and a few chuckles along the way.

Overall, I give it 7 out of 10 stars.

Song of the day!

Next up: At last, a movie title worthy for this month: Freaked.

*Supposedly, Johnson had his friend Sean "Arizona Slim" Walsh (a Miami Vice script doctor) and Jay Helfert write the pool hall scene that introduces his character. Wikipedia is fairly trustworthy on select movies, but I prefer a clickable link, so who knows?

*Movie Night explicitly says that cigarettes are a shitty product in every shape or form. Hell, that goes for vaping too. 

*I really should watch Rourke in The Wrestler, I keep forgetting to do that one. A whole lot easier to justify than watching Sean Penn in Milk, that's for sure. 

Vampires (1998).

Review #2130: Vampires.

Cast: 

James Woods (Jack Crow), Daniel Baldwin (Tony Montoya), Sheryl Lee (Katrina), Tim Guinee (Father Adam Guiteau), Thomas Ian Griffith (Jan Valek), Maximilian Schell (Cardinal Alba), Mark Boone Junior (Catlin), Gregory Sierra (Father Giovanni), and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa (David Deyo) Directed by John Carpenter (#068 - Halloween (1978), #634 - Escape from New York, #712 - The Thing (1982), #732 - Escape from L.A., #1221 - Dark Star, #1298 - They Live, #1479 - Big Trouble in Little China, #1605 - Starman, #1874 - Assault on Precinct 13)

Review: 

"I got into this business to make Westerns. I didn't get into it to make horror movies. I got typecast. But once I got over that, I realized it's like John Wayne. I wrote one script for him back in the '70s. He always wanted to play heavies. He was tired of playing the good guy, but he said, 'Oh, they like me that way.' I'm like a good whore; I go where I'm pushed."

On October 30, 1998, John Carpenter's Vampires was released to the general public. The film is based on the novel Vampire$, as written by John Steakley in 1990. Years had been spent in development by Largo Development, who recruited Russell Mulcahy (most notably the director of the first two Highlander films) to try and develop it as director with apparent ideas to have Dolph Lungren serve as the star. This did not come to pass, and Carpenter was approached to do the film right as he was on the idea of retiring after production of Escape from L.A. (1996) had been less than fun to make. The writing credit for the film is lent to Don Jakoby, although there were clear re-writes by Carpenter, who had been approached of the idea to do the film to look over two screenplays - one by Jakoby and one by Dan Mazur (evidently one script involved a part set in France with a church battleground and the other involved a mall with teenagers turning into vampires). Carpenter apparently liked both and thus utilized select elements from each to go with parts from the book before having to modify it again when the budget was suddenly slashed from $80 million to $20 million at the last minute. 25 years later, it probably seems apt to look back on what Carpenter was saying when it came to being asked about the film back then, and one quote certainly could stick with you. He mused that films nowadays (read: 1998), particularly with horror films starting with stuff such as Scream (1996) seemed to have a "postmodern style" when it came to winking at the audience and that his film tried to do the opposite. In case you were wondering, Blade (1998), a film also dealing with a vampire hunter dealing having to stop some sort of ritual from being done by an evildoer vampire, was released just a few months earlier in August (to be technical, Vampires was really released a bit earlier than October in France, but do you really care about France?). As one might expect, Carpenter also composed the music for the film. Two direct-to-video sequels followed in the next couple of years, but they had no involvement from Carpenter, so nope.

Carpenter obviously thought his vampires were savage enough to seem different from those ones that seemed to brood at times. The strange thing isn't so much that Woods is the lead actor here as it is the fact that Carpenter went through a row of names and somehow thought about R. Lee Ermey (the studio felt he lacked the star power and declined the idea). Oh hell, I was fine with the film, what can I say? Granted, it obviously isn't one of Carpenter's best films (of the five features he did in the 1990s, this was apparently his only successful one with audiences, but there are folks who will tell you about giving In the Mouth of Madness (1994) or the aforementioned Escape a second look). But I like Carpenter (thank goodness we live in an age where people remember The Thing as being great rather than the rubes that hated it back then), and I like his ideas in trying to do a Western with vampires that seems more familiar with Sam Peckinpah than his general influence in Howard Hawks. In the 108-minute runtime, you might say the best way to judge the film is how one rides with the opening action sequence, because it is the one big moment with the entire cast before basically doing a rendition of The Wild Bunch. Of course, this bunch involves vampire hunters sanctioned by the Catholic Church (they are pretty good at dragging folks into the sun, so they get leeway for drinking and screwing around at night) that deal with the general rules of vampires: stakes and the sun are the one to deal with vampires that don't care for crosses or turning into bats. Where else would vampires be around but in New Mexico? At the helm is Woods, who is actually pretty amusing in overblown macho-ness. His flippant energy is entertaining to me for that element of curiosity of just who would be more dangerous, the vampire beast or being in the same room with him. Carpenter apparently let him ad-lib for a take before doing one that adhered to the script and evidently the off-color stuff was left in at times. Sure, it isn't the timeliest of off-color stuff (oh hey, never check out an actor's Twitter account), but, well, his crudity suits the film like a glove rather than coming off as schtick (if it was really schtick, he wouldn't be wearing blue jeans the whole time). His intensity is fun, what can I say? Baldwin and Lee don't exactly have as much to do in deference to the hunt besides an attempt at chemistry that is shaky (particularly since the only reason the latter is there is because of a temporary psychic link formed to the villain...by a bite on the inside thigh). Griffith doesn't have as much to say as the general threat, but he makes a fair ferocious threat in feral desires, one who sees the night every time but with the lust for more that is, well, accurate (at least to a night owl like me, anyway). Schell may have the most inevitable of all paths for the film next to Guinee, but they both do fine in varying tones against Woods in "Catholic patience". In general, the film is a road film, one that dwells a bit in conversation of where to go in weary doggedness that can only be done the same way one has seen in a Western where a man brings his folks along for the ride to possible certain death because damn it, it's their ride (of course, there is the horror stuff one thinks they will see such as a handful of vampiric terror like severed limbs, so...). It even ends on a variation, because who else could tell doomed folks to go with God before giving them a head start on an inevitable chase to death? I think, at the end, I ended up liking the film a bit more when I processed it, even if I can acknowledge that it won't be everyone's cup of tea of weary Western-soaked vampire guns-in-the-sun. If you respect Carpenter as that director of human nature in worthy entertainment, well, the film (now 25 years old) will be just right up one's alley.

Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.

Next up: Cronenberg-mania.