The Spectrum Files: Vice Squad

 

As a kid, it's no secret that I was impressionable.  Back then at 9 years old, even though I knew movies were an art form, they still struck me as probably more real than they should have in terms of emotional affect.  To this day, I get a feeling from them, an electrical arc that may be positive or negative, despite my being more up to date with the fact that it's fiction. 

As Frani reminds me, "It's not real".  I get that.  But art still has the power to disturb.  Sometimes, as Rob Zombie said, "It's not safe."  Especially in my case.  Even at 53, I have films on my AVOID, or at least PUT ON HOLD list, because I know some of the events that may take place in the film.  Despite knowing it's a performance, I don't feel psychically prepared for what I know will unfold on screen.  So I wait. 

Anyhoo, while watching Spectrum (my film school at age 9-10), I caught a trailer for Gary Sherman's Vice Squad.  There was a character in there that the trailer did such a great job of making him the personification of evil, that I had to see the film to make sure he got his just desserts.  Mind you, he wasn't a monster, not a creature, not a demon, not even a masked serial killer, per se. 

He was a pimp.  A pimp named Ramrod. 

The trailer gave you just enough of his pure unrefined evil to make you shudder.  An evil magnified by the performance of one Wings Hauser, father of Cole. The offspring known to many as Rip on the overblown television county fair known as Yellowstone. (Rest in peace, sir, we lost Wings recently.  He did leave an interesting body of work.)

Ramrod's path of destruction leads the Hollywood Vice Unit, lead by one Gary Swanson.  This is a role where he displays degrees of empathy, and a vicious prioritization of job over humanity that when put together lead to a good illustration of his dichotomy.  Ramrod becomes his night's agenda, as he brutally beats to death future MTV Veejay Nina Blackwood at the film's outset.  Ramrod's a wily one, escaping incarceration at one point to continue his murderous trail of mayhem through the night.  He ends up attempting to seduce and take into his pimpdom a prostitute named "Princess", a single mother trying make some sort of life.  Little does he know Princess is wired up. That leads to the beginning of the manhunt.

The role of Princess is played by the former Mrs. Kurt Russell and she's incredible.  People talk about what kind of hell Stanley Kubrick put Shelley Duvall through, a sort of psychological torture.  Well, Sherman puts Mrs. Hubley through a physical nightmare and her performance is hard to forget.  It's a shame low-budget sleaze faire like Vice Squad suffers from poor dialogue and even worse acting from supporting characters, because Season Hubley's performance is sad, tortured, angry, rebellious, strong and sympathetic; deserving of acknowledgement, if not hardware. 

The Neon 80's is beautifully shot by one John Alcott, veteran of many Stanely Kubrick films, and with that pedigree, a few others one would be surprised he did.  This is some great nighttime shooting,  like low budget Michael Mann.  The action sequences pack intensity and speed, the stuntwork looks like people engaging in dangerous activity instead of stunts.  Pretty convincing stuff; the film works. 

As a kid, I probably shouldn't have been watching this sex and violence riddled affair, but it wasn't the first, and certainly wouldn't be the last. Outside of a few uncomfortable scenes, not a lot stuck with me other than the anticipation of seeing it.  But the payoff is still locked in my mind. 

And yes, it is worth it. 

Samhain Project ‘24: Ghost Story

Cannon Films once produced a movie with Vincent Price, John Carradine, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, and titled The House of the Long Shadows. They were trying to create an ultra all star horror film, but really it ended up being a comedy of sorts.  I guess Menachem Golan wanted to put together the Universal Monsters, but, you know, there is a reason they're known as the UNIVERSAL monsters. 

In a reversal of fortune here, mainstream old Hollywood legends Fred Astaire, Melvin Douglas, John Houseman, And Douglas Fairbanks Junior star in a fantastic horror adaptation of Peter Straub’s classic novel. A 1981 Halloween adjacent movie that aired on Spectrum !

John Irving’s somewhat classy Ghost Story.

 

Secrets have a way of coming back to destroy people. Literally in real life, the buried truth can be a nightmare. And in works of fiction, it can be murder and hell on earth. 

Alice Krige is absolutely terrifying in certain  early parts of this film as she arrives to seduce a pair of twins then kill one. These young men (both played by genre vet Craig Wasson) bear a connection to our primary cast.  These four men who call themselves The Chowder Society (our 4 cinematic legends) have a long history together that may have some buried darkness. 

But do you believe in ghosts?  The film has a deliberate slow pace but has plenty of grasping shocks. Those stunning moments, with the help of make up stalwart Dick Smith,  peppered throughout its unnerving crawling pace, make it a horror film that deserves to be remembered. 

And maybe reevaluated.

It should be remembered not just for its amazing cast, but for a truly creepy and excellently told ghost story, as the title does indicate.  

Samhain Project '24: The Children

1980's The Children is one bizarre excursion into cinema.  As the film opens, you have a couple of gomers who work for a nuclear plant arguing about how much attention they should be paying to a pressurization issue.  

I'd say more. 

Later on, we have a bus full of kids singing 99 Bottles and a weird Hail to the Bus Driver tune before driving through what appears to be a giant mustard fart cloud.  Now, the only thing weirder than this movie is probably the community it takes place in.  It seems to have two cops and a population of about 12 people who have massive homes and plots of land.  

Strange dead ends hang in the atmosphere.  For example, once shit starts hitting the fans, we have two people signed up to monitor a road block who are never accounted for again.   A heartbroken waitress, teary-eyed and miserable, heads home in the dark, stood up by her ride, (who in all fairness has some serious shit to do) and is also never heard from for the rest of the film.  Weird.

   

What's happening is our Mustard Fart Cloud kids are now bullet-proof black-fingernailed, smokey-eyed weirdos who want to hug everybody so they can cook them alive.  This is a low- budget film, however, so you have to grade on a curve.  I will say Gil Rogers as the sheriff does pull his weight.  Harry Manfredini works the score here, and it sounds like he's doing a rough draft of his superior Friday the 13th score, mixed with Bernard Herrman's Psycho elements.  I forget the director's name already.  It's that sloppy.

1980 had a plethora of low budget horror, but where The Children sets itself apart is it isn't a slasher film.  It's kind of a zombie film in an odd way.  The residents of this small town are made short work of by our bus riders, not a big deal with only 12 members of the community.  All of them either assholes or perverts, so who could blame the tykes anyway.  

I must warn you, despite the factors that make this seem like light horror fare for one to enjoy on a Saturday Night, (like my sisters and I tried to do in 1981 on Spectrum) there's a heavy few jaw droppers in here that give genuine weight to the affairs and kind of take the wind out of the sails of the "fun horror giggles".

That being said, is The Children a good movie?

No. 

Is it worth watching?  Based on its complete and utter bizarreness, definitely.  Happy Halloween!!

Spectrum: Tangerine Dream

 

What caused me to fall in love with the haunting music of Tangerine Dream was a trailer I saw for William Friedkin’s Sorcerer on Spectrum. Now many of you have heard this music used in other trailers for films that the music never appeared in.  "Betrayal" is a standby used by many for years to punctuate the drama of the film they were trying to sell in a trailer. 

Tangerine Dream's music is a synthesizer driven soundscape very similar to what John Carpenter creates for his films, and even more so, his Lost Themes albums. I own several Tangerine Dream albums including the soundtracks for Sorcerer and Thief, and some of their own commercially released LPs. 

Their music is infinitely unique and definitely lends itself to films, to images, to facial expressions,  to the works of many great artists. I mean, even in a film like Miracle Mile which has a different tone than many of the other films that Tangerine Dream's music has graced, the Dream makes it work . Miracle Mile is a soundtrack that I own and adore, but has a magic quite different, yet equally as powerful as their other works.

But I’ll never forget the power in that trailer for Sorcerer on Spectrum. It’s a fantastic film.  I’ve seen it several times to this day.  But Watching that two minute trailer, hearing that haunting music accompanying those images and those facial expressions and not knowing at all what was happening,  I was transfixed before having even seen it.

Sorcerer is a great movie and I highly recommend anyone see it.  Is it horror? No, but yes. Is it action? No, but yes. Is it crime? 

No, but yes.

   

William Friedkin may have made The Exorcist, The French Connection, and  To Live and Die in LA, but the one movie of his that has a cult following, however deserves much more, is indeed Sorcerer, which was based on Arnaud’s book The Wages of Fear . 

If it wasn’t for Spectrum, I may have never discovered this film, Tangerine Dream, or the depths of Billy Friedkin . 

The Spectrum Files : Shock Waves. (Samhain Project addendum)

 

When I was 9 years old I didn't know a zombie from a Byrd.  I came home one afternoon from school and flipped on Spectrum to see what was on, and the channel was between features.  I sat there in the falling afternoon sun and viewed the trailer for the Ken Weiderhorn fim Shock Waves.  

Between the eerie Richard Einhorn synthesizer score, and the images of the walking dead emerging from the waters of the Florida coast, I was kinda creeped out.  I hadn't seen Night of the Living Dead or Dawn of the Dead yet, so the whole thing seemed alien and made me uncomfortable.

 

The cast is led by a very young Brooke Adams, who most of you would know from the Philip Kaufman Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and The Dead Zone, among many others.  Horror legends Peter Cushing, very late in a career that began back in the gothic Hammer Horror days, and one time Dracula John Carradine lead the way.  Carradine's career dates back to the 40's so there's a pedigree of sorts here.  From what I've read, neither cinematic icon worked very long on set but were paid fairly well for short hours, and they didn't phone in their performances at all.  Both gentlemen brought it 100 percent, and considering that the budget on this film floated somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000, they probably could have gotten away with sleepwalking through it. 

Regardless, the images of what I would learn later to be morons running from goggled Nazi SS underwater zombies trained to murder, were unsettling for sure. These things were wandering around under the waters of the Florida coasts without emitting so much as a bubble, and raised up out of the water in a very unnatural way.  Richard Einhorns swirling score added an essence of creepiness that had to work on whatever grindhouse audiences would have seen it during its 1977 run, because it sure as hell was working on me.  I stood on our living room carpet, completely entranced in fear.  I probably couldn't have run from one of those soggy, water-logged Nazi goons if I wanted to.

And this was the goddamn trailer!

Oddly enough, the film was rated PG.  These zombies didn't eat people.  They were trained to kill in warfare for the Nazis.  So no blood and guts.  

Still, this makes a good Halloween view, if only for its creepiness.  So toss it in the Samhain Project file while you're at it.

It was pretty cool to see Joe Bob Briggs bring this movie up over my Thanksgiving break while watching his Lucio Fulci retrospective.  Of course he was referring to the ridiculous zombie versus shark scene that takes place in the movie zombie or zombie 2 or zombie flesh eaters.  Whatever you wanna call it, 

In other words Fulci’s underwater zombies concept was beaten to the punch by two years by Ken Weiderhorn who would go on to direct Return of the Living Dead Part 2.  

Shock waves was a low key groundbreaker. 

Samhain Project 3: Visiting Hours

Today's Project is also a Spectrum File!  As seen above, it ran in prime time even.  

Visiting Hours landed on screens right during the Slasher craze of the early 80's, but really, when it comes down to it, doesn't qualify, even though it was marketed as such.  The film is definitely horror, but a bit too complex and socially aware to be a generic slasher flick. 

At the outset our heroine, Oscar winner and Whore of Babylon from Damien: Omen II, Lee Grant, is a television journalist who happens to run a controversial interview that her boss, William Shatner (!) doesn't feel comfortable airing because it points out domestic violence and quite overtly.  This interview triggers a psychopath who dabbles in right wing extremism when not taking out his hatred of his mother (how dare she defend herself against her shitass husband!) on young women that he encounters in the wild.  He pulls a home invasion on Grant's home, putting her in the hospital, a facility he returns to off and on in pursuit of his failed victim.  And, I guess, to pluck a few replacement victims to bide his time.

A primary ancillary target in the film, (used to illustrate his methods of releasing his urges), that he takes home to victimize, may have the best line of the film when she asks him (after seeing his collection of letters forcing his racist beliefs on whoever will read) "Do You want to live in the world by yourself?"

That's a good question for all right-wing extremists, really. But I digress.

Lee Grant, who is actually pretty exceptional (which should come as no surprise) given the material, befriends a nurse played by Linda Purl (once the main squeeze of one Arthur Fonzarelli late in the run of Happy Days) who unfortunately finds herself caught in the midst of this maniac's violence and bloodshed.

 

 Oh, and by the way?  This maniac?  None other than Michael Ironside, villain extraordinaire.  We shall all remember him from Scanners, Total Recall (See you at the party, Richter!!) among many others.  The man plays a bent and hateful person, just on the brink of exploding as well as anyone in Hollywood history.  He rounds out a damn good cast for a "slasher" film of the early 80's and helps it rise above the competition of the time.  Visiting Hours, for its era, presents questions about how extreme people get the way they are, and get so easily sparked to violent reactionary behavior.   

The film has an unpredictability created by not only having familiar (and talented) faces in the primary cast, but the breakneck speed of setting changes causes a disorientation for the viewer that makes suspense the end result. 

I highly recommend this long forgotten cult film, and think Halloween is a great time to discover it. 

Samhain Project 3: (With a touch of Spectrum) Wolfen

 

 Wolfen is an interesting piece of The Spectrum era.  I think I was the only member of my household who finished the movie back then.  Everyone else was bored, if I remember properly.  It's an odd exercise.

Wolfen is a pretty good illustration of late 70's/early 80's New York as much of the city's best and worst is shown with terrific cinematography throughout the film by DP Gerry Fisher (Exorcist III, Highlander, Ninth Configuration) the dude’s a legend.   This is a horror film which was conceived by author Whitley Streiber (of Communion and The Oncoming Superstorm fame) and fleshed out into a screenplay by a couple other scribes.   It seems a high society land developer is murdered along with his wife and body man in the wee hours of a celebratory morning.  There must have been a new project approval to pad the billions.

For some reason, a law enforcement group is brought in that specializes in indigenous terrorism (led by Diane Venora) and partnered up with the NYPD.   More of the same murders, gruesome for sure, with great practical effects occur,  but this time it's among the city's derelict. Of course, no one seems concerned except our Hercule Poirot, legendary Albert Finney, and the coroner, a fantastic Gregory Hines, who is responsible for more than a couple laugh-out-loud moments. 

Due to odd forensics, a local wildlife professor is brought in, wonderfully cast with a young Tom Noonan.  For those that don't know, Noonan's career is unheralded, but contains such diverse and wonderful roles as Frances Dollarhyde in Manhunter, (far superior to Red Dragon, the quasi-remake) a soulful Frankenstein's monster in Fred Dekker's The Monster Squad, and lastly the eerie Mr. Ulman in Ti West's cracking House of the Devil. 

The chase is now on for answers and stopping the murders.  Local native Americans are among the suspects, including a young Edward James Olmos.  But not everything is as it seems. 

The script can be a bit of a slog, (that may be because this is the only narrative film directed by a chap generally used for documentaries, Michael Wadleigh, he of Woodstock fame) but Noonan and particularly Hines help that move along.  A great score with early work by James Horner, who had 12 days to complete the pieces, is a boon to the film as well. 

I am lucky enough to have found a great print in one of those 4 pack DVD bundles sold at a generally low cost from Warner Brothers.  

Is this a Halloween Scary Film?  Probably not, but it's intriguing nonetheless.

 

Samhain Project 2 : Dead & Buried. (also a Spectrum File)

In 1981 the quasi-zombie film Dead and Buried was released (and it did skate across my beloved pay channel Spectrum) to little fan fare and little box office return.  Guillermo Del Toro is a huge fan, and that is testified to here, and that may have led to a spark that grew into the flame that is its current cult following. 

The original negative is purported to be destroyed, says director Gary Sherman (Vice Squad) but Blue Underground, purveyor of low budget horror and "other" types of films (nudge, wink) has taken a couple of shots at restoring it.  I have the first take, a numbered boutique edition, which while not looking terrible, and sounding great, has apparently been bypassed by the company's own recent 4k blu ray.  Word is due to the lost camera negative, it'll never look like it once did due to the degraded source material, but reviews claim the new one looks great. 

I rarely double-dip, so I'll settle for my 12 year old DVD edition. 

My wife and editor, and I sat down for this rather scratchy, non-subtitled edition for this year's Samhain Project and were not disappointed.  The film has a creepy atmosphere, really solid acting, particularly from James Farentino and Jack Albertson, in what was the latter's last performance.  (Mr. Albertson played Charlie Buckets' lazy-ass grandpa in Willie Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.) He's much weirder and more sinister here, with a penchant for big band tunes, and a deep, DEEP love for being a coroner. 

This number is as much a mystery as it is a horror film, and has great gore effects that are early work from maestro Stan Winston.  Although there's a terrible gag halfway through the film that I’ve read Mr. Winston did not do, and it's not hard to tell what it is to the discerning horror viewer.  We have An early performance from the late Lisa Blount (from John Carpenter's tremendous Prince of Darkness), as well as Robert Englund and Melody Anderson.

There's even a sniff of some found-footage type action in the film, that just adds to the already dread-laden and creepy tone.  The score is excellent, eerie stuff and on the new blu-ray it's included as a third disc. 

Something is jacked-up in Potter's Bluff, and it's a spooky, and often sad path to the knowledge of what it is.

The Spectrum Files: Blood Beach

As a kid, quicksand scared the shit out of me.  Afternoon movies showed the stuff was everywhere-the jungle, the forest, backyards of houses of evil, some poorly maintained bathrooms- literally everywhere. 

Just the idea of being slowly pulled under something disgusting, knowing that at some point, you'd either suffocate or drown (depending on its viscosity) was a living nightmare to me as a young boy.

Seriously, I dreamed of this shite.  A lot.  I even thought my Kenosha backyard on Lichter Road may have some, especially after it rained.  I would tread softly.

So, early in the afternoon of a fall summer 1981 day, Spectrum aired Blood Beach,  a film about people disappearing under the sand on a California beach.  Producers were given the right to use the tagline, "Just When You Thought it Was Safe to Go Back to the Water, You Can't Get To it!".  (aping the Jaws 2 slogan) They probably thought they'd sell tickets on that broo-ha-ha alone.  

As a 10 year old, due to this quicksand silliness, this movie bugged me a bit.  The adults in the room laughed their asses off at both the movie and my reaction to it.  Despite the heroic presences of Burt Young and John Saxon.  The former was Rocky Balboa's irritating brother-in-law Paulie, the latter fought the corruption of Han's Island alongside Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon.  (He was also in the Joe Don Baker MST3K victim Mitchell and a detective in both Black Christmas as well as Nightmare on Elm Street).

So, they gotta win, right?

 Well, you'd find it wasn't quicksand under Blood Beach, but a mutant creature pulling people through the sand from underground.  So my mind could be taken off the quicksand, but it was quickly concerned that there may be a Kenosha creature under my house, just planning to pull me and my family under to our dooms.  

Run to the driveway, don't walk, guys!

The Spectrum Files: The Boogeyman

 

Uli Lommel was supposed to be a prodigy of some sort.  Working as a protege to world famous German auteur Werner Fassbender, it looked like he was off to a running start with the particularly disturbing, but respected The Tenderness of the Wolves.  This was a not so exact telling of the perverse child killer in Germany known as the Vampire of Dusseldorf, a story done much more effectively by Fritz Lang with M starring Peter Lorre. He had connections to Andy Warhol and the art scene.  Why he decided to become a slasher film-maker is beyond me. 

Effective as Lommel's  Wolves was, it didn't launch a major career, and several disturbing moments of it still linger in my mind, thanks to Spectrum.  (Film school it may have been, its sneaky intentions weren't always pure).

By the late 90's/early 2000's Lommel had been conscripted by Lionsgate to make a series of direct to DVD loose attachments to real life serial killers, of which I could only make it halfway through part of one.  Look!  It's David Hess!!  And what the fuck is P!nk doing the theme music for it for?  (These are questions someone needs to address as soon as possible).

Somewhere along the line in the late 70's, he made a slasher film that gained audience attention (and eventually a cult following) because it rode Carpenter's train.  That train grew its 350,000$ budget into 25,000,000 at the box office. This little trifle was known as "The Boogeyman".  It starts with sex, two children being treated as annoyances, then abused, then eventually a grisly murder.  A mirror captures the antagonist's death that comes as a response to his actions.  

Jump forward years later, one of these two unfortunate kids is now mute, the other living a normal life.  Being that this script is convoluted and stupid, during a psychiatrist-suggested visit to the childhood home, the previously mentioned mirror is shattered in one of the films actual scary moments. 

And of course fragments of a murderers spirit are carried  by the shards. And the slashing begins by this captured ghost; it’s like a twisted version of a furniture commercial; one for the ghost of Jason Voorhees less creative younger brother.  On occasion, people get Exorcist-style possessed by the mirror bits, and there's even a house bearing a more than passing resemblance to the Amityville dutch colonial making a ridiculous and unnecessary appearance here.

Now, as a nine year old, this movie scared the shits out of me (as always, "shits" is intentionally plural).  It affected me in such a way that I thought the very existence of evil was imprinted on every frame, like the fictional murderous movie by George Melies referenced in the faux documentary Fury of the Demon.  It scared me that much.

For some reason at this time in my life, my mom, claiming otherwise, took a shine to slashers.  I tried to warn her not to watch this one, as my experience with it had me hiding behind my sister's couch the previous summer.  

This film did have a particularly effective synth-score (a la Carpenter) that haunted me a bit, especially an opening sting just as the title card is appearing on screen.  So, Mom is watching this movie, despite a warning from me as intense as any old man's in any horror movie from the 30's to now.  I have a haunting memory of lying in bed on a Sunday Night, jaunted awake by that sting from the very beginning I described.  I lay there, eyes open in the dark, clutching for my dog Ginger, in spite of myself, visualizing what I had seen months before.  

Thanks, Mom

Thanks, Uli.

The Spectrum Files : Long Weekend

 

     As I have stated before, Spectrum was my film school, or at the very least, submersion into cinema.  I've credited the programmer as being some sort of genius.  The first-run films obviously were what sold the subscriptions, but many, many films they broadcast became cult classics and legendary pieces of cinema in the present day. Spectrum: Ahead of the competitors known as SelectTV, ONTV, and ahead of its time.

     In this case, we're venturing into Oz-ploitation.

     For those not in the know, that's a term for horror films made in the 70's in Australia, and Spectrum exposed me to more than one.  Patrick, The Last Wave, Razorback, etc.   But the one that hit home was actually not just Oz-ploitation, but Nature Run Amok.  Two genres in one.  This film was remade a few years back with a different title, but since Jim Caviezel was the star, I refuse to discuss here. What a massive disappointment of a human being he turned out to be.  Damn fine actor, but a weird Ted Nugent homo-sapien.  Join the James Woods cult, I guess.   Plenty of room.

     I may be immature in this sense, and will probably get over it, because Frequency and Count of Monte Cristo are brilliant, and he wasn't the only person involved in those movies' film making process, so I'll grow up.  Give me a minute.

     Anyway, Long Weekend features a youngish married couple who decide to get away from it all, and do some outdoorsy attempts at bonding which they fail miserably at, because they totally despise each other.   Let's be honest.  They're complete twat waffles, as well.  So they take their tempers and hatred for each other out on their surroundings, a gorgeous woodsy soundscape that doesn't deserve their desecration and pollution and bullshit.  So, naturally, it bites back. 

     So, if the woods, animals and creatures who have suffered abuse fight back, has nature truly run amok? 

     As a youngster, not ensconced in understanding, they were victims of animals who lost their shit.  You know, Jaws, Grizzly, Kingdom of the Spiders, ad infinitum?  As the sun dipped under the horizon outside like a cruller into my mom's Maxwell House, I sat there in my parent's living room compelled, and then horrified at the abrupt and FINAL ending. 

    But I know now that people are turds.  And sometimes we reap what we sow. 

    This movie is available now from Synapse films, distributors of some truly awesome cult classic horror, and some scuzzy shit you probably want to avoid.  I only know that from the catalog. 

     Anyways, you can react two ways to this film.  Depressed is one.  Feeling better about yourself as a person is the other.

     

The Spectrum Files: The Wanderers

In the late 70's and early 80's it seemed that movies involving street gangs were kinda in.  Walter Hill's The Warriors raked in box office cash (while inciting riots), The Outsiders had everybody talking, and Boulevard Nights was quite popular as well.  Something about that us vs. them mentality of these films must have tapped into America's zeitgeist at the time. I myself was too young to tie anything together in that regard.

And then there was The Wanderers. 

What can I say about Philip Kaufman's take on Richard Price's novel?   A lot.  As a kid I liked it for reasons that it really doesn't hold up for now.  The "tough talking" kids battling over territory, the wise-crack humor, the street battles?  As a 10 year old, I guess these things may seem attractive, but I feel almost embarrassed at the fact that these plot points (particularly in this film) were what drew me to it.  Those elements now seem juvenile.  They aren't so cool anymore. Not even close.

In reality, what's good about the film now differs greatly.

Other films, (American Graffiti and Grease, in particular) show a strange similarity with The Wanderers regarding the late 50's and early 60's.  The commonality is these hyperkinetic, fast-talking,  annoying teenagers with what seem to be boundless energy and limitless stupidity.  Due to these common denominators, I'm led to believe people that acted like that were somehow the era's norm.  That shit would have driven me insane.  I may have been forced to deal Ritalin on the street corner to quell the loudness of my schoolmates.  Of course these films' young Category 5 morons hung around brutish sleepy-eyed Lords of Flatbush look-a-likes that pretended to have a grip on things, but were really just as dumb (and scared) as the hang-abouts running circles around them.

The Wanderers is a bizarre film indeed.  It takes place in1963 New York, and in this particular neighborhood all of the kids appear to be members of different gangs as opposed to cliques, and none of them get along.  Besides the titular gang whose members are all of Italian descent, there's the bizarre Baldies, the all-Asian Wongs, and a final gang comprised of the neighborhood's African American representatives, the Del Bombers.  It is a bit of a cartoonish separation of sorts, but by films end, there seems to be a peace brought about by familiarity that actually works despite the insanity.

This stylistic exclamation of visual differences (shown in even-more neon exaggeration in The Warriors) was one of the things that drew me to it as a kid.  Did I want to be in a comic book gang or something?  God, I hope not.

There's one more gang that I will refer to in a separate paragraph.  When these guys, known as The DuckyBoys, are on screen the film takes a creepy, if not disturbing tone.  This gang is huge, and seems to be comprised of child molesters in training.  They take things to a level the rest of the "kids" in this film are hesitant to go to, and for good reason.  That level is awful, violent, and laced with sadism.  The DuckyBoys send out an aura of cult-like violence that seems to cast them in almost a boogeyman light for the rest of the gangs in the film.  They are indeed frightening.

Oddly, I don't really remember the DuckyBoys from the Spectrum days.  It was only in a recent re-watching that I was taken aback by these DuckyBoy sequences and found them to be the most striking of the film. 

Much of the dialogue, especially early on in the film is racist, vile, and stupid, much like most of the principals.  Sadly, it is probably representative of the era and the location, and I'm sure the filmmakers are aware of this.  It doesn't come across as a message, but a recording.  Make no mistake, The Wanderers are young, dumb, and lack the ability to function as human beings.  Their development of that much-needed quality, a degree of maturity, is what the movie is about.  In my recent viewing, I wondered what the hell I ever saw in most of these low-lifes as an adolescent.  I really did.

The performances in this movie are excellent by all involved.  The cast was comprised mostly of then-unknowns, but Kaufman picked the right crew to lead this film.  Ken Wahl is excellent in his film debut as the leader of The Wanderers.  He was a good-looking youngster with screen presence and toughness, but had no trouble conveying his character being in over his head.  Also outstanding is a young actor named Tony Ganios as Perry, a quiet but pivotal character.  His performance is subtle, often intimidating, and vulnerable.  Perry quietly often proves to be more of a leader than Wahl's Richie, but never tries to subvert The Wanderers.

There's really not a sour note in any of the acting in the film.  Early on, the energy level of a few characters make it difficult to concentrate, but it comes together nicely if you can get through the early maelstrom twisting across the screen.  When I was a ten year old, I found myself liking Ken Wahl's character a lot.  37 years later, it was Ganios' Perry that struck me as the most interesting and satisfying of the film.

The conflicts, battles, and spastic energy of the film and its characters is what kept me hooked multiple times as a youngster.  All that seems superfluous now, as the The Wanderers sudden growing realization that the world is shifting becomes something I didn't notice back then, but gives the movie its current existing power.  Their world is changing hard, violently, and without patience.  It will not wait for The Wanderers, and it's both beautiful, sad, and often powerful to see how all the different members of the gang face that knowledge.

It's amazing how times changed for me too.  Many years ago,  (after an older sister almost blocked my viewing due to a just-after-the-Orion Pictures-production-logo interlude between Wahl's Richie and his girl) I absorbed a truly strange, kinetic, sometimes confusing, and often violent film and really dug The Wanderers a lot.

I do now, too.  Just for completely different reasons.

The Spectrum Files: Cleveland Smith

Often during pauses between Spectrum's features, there would be short films. Some of them innocuous, others surprisingly disturbing, others heralding an era that Spectrum could have no way of knowing they were previewing.

Everyone by now is aware that Sam Raimi came out of Michigan in the late 70's, friends in tow, and embarked slowly but surely on the pathway to becoming a Hollywood legend.  The films he's responsible for are the first Spider-Man trilogy, Drag Me to Hell, and Oz, the Great and Powerful, not to mention the cult trilogy that spawned a successful television series, Evil Dead.  Many of the friends of his that I mentioned still work in the business in one form or another. The most famous of which is probably Bruce Campbell, an actor who worked his way up from B-films to supporting roles in A-list pics, to eventually becoming a small screen icon with a taste for occasionally directing.

Some of Raimi's friends made a short film way back when that starred Campbell (and Raimi as a nazi) called Cleveland Smith, Bounty Hunter, a parody of the hugely famous Raiders of the Lost Ark.  One evening, while I was bouncing around the tube, Spectrum dropped Cleveland Smith.  Somehow these enterprising youngsters had managed to get their short little film broadcast on television.  Michigan, as you know, isn't far from Wisconsin and Illinois, so its not logistically impossible that this would happen, but it spells out how entrepreneurial these young men were in attempting to get their material out there to be seen.  Especially during the 3-year long intensive blitz to get the original Evil Dead made and distributed.

I had forgotten Smith a long time ago, but during my Bruce Campbell hero-worship phase of 25 years ago, little flashes of recognition bubbled up in my consciousness that I couldn't quite get a handle on in my memory.  It was eventually clarified and confirmed when I read Campbell's hilarious autobiography, If Chins Could Kill, springing me to a website on Campbell that mentioned the film in detail.


Spectrum.  Film School for Wisconsin Youngsters, and heralds of the cinematic future.

For Your viewing pleasure, Cleveland Smith, Bounty Hunter.


 "Oh, Dear God, a towering Oak!"

Halloween II on Lichter Road

John Carpenter's Halloween was literally the only film to give me nightmares.  The first time I saw it, sometime in 1981, was an HBO airing on a miniscule black and white Admiral Television.   I watched with my sister Randee in a tiny Racine, Wisconsin apartment she shared with another sister, Dee.  Imagine that, subscribing to HBO and watching it on a 9 inch black and white screen.

Scared the shits out of me nonetheless.  And that is plural "shits".

The second time was on the floor of our family's Lichter Road homestead, lying terrified next to my sister Linda as my future brother-in-law whispered from the shadows that Haddonfield, Illinois was not far from Kenosha, Wisconsin.

To me, the original Halloween, (and I know I'm one of gajillions who think this way) is the epoch of horror, and the icing is its perfection in seasonal viewing at this time of year.  It's tone personified.  It's not gory, it's intense and just plain scary.

Everyone in the world should remember a bullet-riddled Michael Myers falling out of an upper middle class balcony in that Haddonfield, Illinois on October 31, 1978.  Only to have gotten up and walked away as his demented psychiatrist looked on with an empty revolver.  I was mortified.

After all, Illinois wasn't very far from Wisconsin, said my caffeine and sugar encased imagination.  Don echoed that sentiment a short few months later from those affore-mentioned shadows.

Needless to say, I could not wait to find out what happened next.  I needed to know.

So in the fall of 82, in a two page spread in the Spectrum guide, there it was.  The featured film on the month.  Halloween II!!

To this day, I love the film.  I love how, taking a page from Bride of Frankenstein,  it picks up immediately after the climax of the original...it gives it some air of intensity. Director Rick Rosenthal claims to this day that he wanted to keep the suspense and tone of the original going for the sequel, but it was Carpenter who did recuts to implement more gore and graphic violence into the film to keep pace with the nasty slashers that followed in the seminal film's wake and became box office gold.

I don't know if that's true or not, (I hope not) but I will admit the sequel has a mean-spiritedness that seems unneccesary.  That needle in the eye!  Lance Guest slipping in a pool of blood!  Poor Alice!  All she did was wonder what the hell Mrs. Elrod's problem was!  What a random murder, Michael, geez.

All of this kind of caught me offguard as an 11 year old watching alone.

Anyhoo, the film affected me, just not as much as the first.  Because It had things that bugged me, even as a kid.  I thought the mask was weird and stupid until I learned years later that the mask was the original, worse for wear, from the first film and that I was actually stupid.

Myers walked in this one like he shit his pants.  As a kid, I queried, Would Michael care if he shit his pants?  Did he visit the bathroom?  Was the toilet afraid?  Now I'm thinking of Michael, Jason, and Freddy freshening up in front of a public bathroom mirror together.

I told you I was stupid.

40 years later Halloween is back on the big screen, with direct involvement from John Carpenter for the first time since Halloween III in 1982, and it is an amazing film.  The new one skips Halloween II entirely and acts as a direct sequel to the first, but there's an extended sequence that is an obvious homage to it that should keep the fans happy, if their memories are sharp.

Ham anyone?

The Spectrum Files: Johnny Got His Gun

I'm no big fan of guns, that's not a mystery to anyone that knows me, because my lizard brain has a hard time detangling them from warfare.

In the winter of 1988, all the long-hairs in my Central Wisconsin High School were jacked to the moon because it happened.

Metallica crossed over.

With the single "One", the Bay-area four piece thrash outfit had gone from headbanger cult band to a chart-topping rock act.  This opened the door to hearing the type of hard-rock on mainstream radio that most people wouldn't think possible.  It was a watershed moment.  That overshadowed the true accomplishments of the song, however.  The structure of "One" is based on the concept of a man who goes to war and loses all of his limbs, his eyesight, and his hearing.  He lays in a complete void wanting nothing but release.  In all reality, it is pretty impossible to imagine a worse fate.  The concept is mirrored by the story "Johnny Got His Gun" and subsequent film, both of which the band claimed to have never heard of when they composed the piece.

On a warm Saturday afternoon in the summer of 1982, Spectrum aired the 1973 film written and directed by the since-legendary Dalton Trumbo.  Trumbo was played to Oscar-nominated effect by the actor Bryan Cranston, in a film about the man and his membership of the group known as The Hollywood Ten, blacklisted for their alleged ties to communism.  Trumbo's gifts were such that he was allowed to work in the industry behind closed doors, uncredited.

At the outset of Johnny Got His Gun, I thought it was another visualization of war, like many I'd seen previously.  That is, until its descent into hell began.  The lead character, Joe Bonham, goes off to fight, eagerly hoping to defend his country in World War I before his fate befalls him.  When he awakes in his black and white nightmare, only his dreams (in full color) are a release from his nightmarish existence.

The film's final scene is a bleak and uncompromising vision of awfulness in its cold honesty.  As a 10 year old, it was an ice bath that accomplished its goal.  It disturbed me to my core.  A long-standing fear of mine is confinement, like being buried alive.  This young man's situation probably wasn't much different from it.  It was some of the scariest shit I've ever seen.  An allegory of my worst fears thrown onto the screen as some sort of punishment for patriotism.  I wanted nothing more but to help this young man pull free from the bonds of an impossible quagmire of unrepentant misery and was helpless to do so.  I knew it was fictional, but not impossible.   Hence my unease, my reluctance to forget it.  While many friends were watching movies painting war as action films, I'd not look at those movies the same way after Johnny Got His Gun.

Regardless, over time, the movie had settled under dust in my memory sharing time with other problems, and was dragged back into the sunlight by Metallica's video.  The clip used footage from the movie as a backdrop for performance shots of the band playing their instruments in an empty warehouse setting.  All of what that movie had to share was brought back in excruciating revival,  firing off receptors of recall.

And I welcomed it.

Sometimes we need a reminder of what the viciousness of man can do, even if we don't necessarily want it.  But then again, in years since, art hasn't been necessary to provide that reminder.

It's been said that Jimmy Carter demanded all of his state department members view this film before beginning their work.  Perhaps it is time to resume that practice, and maybe have a few other people in government positions view it as well.

War is hell, but lessons can be learned in a much easier way than experiencing it for yourself.  Johnny Got His Gun is among the best teachers film has to offer.

The Spectrum Files: Altered States

Spectrum was important for peppering my film growth.  It was like film school to me, albeit I was only in about the 4th grade. My film experience before we subscribed consisted of TV-edited car chase movies and the occasional sci-fi epic.  We borrowed a boat-anchor VCR a few times which peppered in the infrequent Cheech & Chong or Bruce Lee flick, but there wasn't much there but a slightly dusted blank slate as a film history for this boy.  While Spectrum broadcast first-run films just off their theatrical jaunt, it believed in variety and most importantly films of historical importance, despite their audience size or box office cume.  As I stated in the explanation of this blog series, whoever ran the show down there at Spectrum was ahead of their time.  Some of the fairly recent movies it peddled at the time of the subscription, are now deeply regarded as cult classics.

Ken Russell's Altered States was fresh off of its theatrical run, but nonetheless fit into the pretentious art-film mind-funk category just as easily.   A very young William Hurt plays a scientist who decides to dabble in sensory depravation in a quest for exploring the depths of the human subconscious and manages to drive himself a few versions of crazy in the process.  Lots of psycho-medi-babble is bandied about by various actors-as-scientists, and I'm quite sure I remember Hurt being one of those driven men of groundbreaking ignoring warnings by his peers!  At the time up-and-comer (and red-haired Jacqueline Kennedy look-a-like) Blair Brown played Hurt's put-upon lifemate in this inordinately weird opus, and I seem to remember her suffering at the altar of near-subservience, a character trait very common for females of the genre in this era.

William Hurt is now a frequent supporting actor, but his punch is still felt.  His uber-bastard "Thunderbolt" Ross is one of the great baddies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and he plays the role with great relish, having lost none of the power he possessed as an actor over 30 years ago.  The character he plays in Altered States doesn't seem far from the type of scientific mega-geeks Ross torments with regularity in the name of the government and national defense in the MCU.  But I digress.  

Much like many films in the Spectrum playbook, at 10, I wasn't prepared for the route I'd be heading down.  I was blasted with psychedelic and often disturbing quasi-religious imagery that I was in no way prepared for.  The special effects were up to the task in adding the required punch to what I was receiving to my young and not completely formed psyche.  If Mr. Hurt's character was victim, I was a goddamn innocent bystander.

The seeds for future films like Jacob's Ladder and The Doors were sown here, and it is obviously a movie designed to get under your skin and it does so successfully.  Mind you, at the age I was, I was probably processing about 20% of what was happening, and understanding even less, but was still affected and wanted what was happening to Hurt's character to stop.  Didn't anyone else in the room see my head snapping to the left and the right during the most obvious scenes, looking for an explanation or at the very least to be armed with a way to deal with it?

To hell with it, I was probably watching it alone anyway.  That still isn't clear, but I did truly give myself whiplash anyway.  A smarter boy would have simply run from the room.  (once, and I'm not sure what prompted it, a friend, the quirky Neil,  said to me: "I never run from a room" with a straight face, no hint of irony, humor, or even malice.  It was one of the most hilariously glorious moments of my life) Those moments from Altered States, so easily avoided had I the gumption to do what the heroic and obviously suffering-for-all-of-us Neil never stooped to doing,  are vividly implanted in my memory.

Altered States may not be a horror film by definition, but it sure as hell felt like one, and it was one of hell of a mark-leaving introduction to the class, edge, and nasty of the still undervalued William Hurt. (and the stubborn deer-in-the-headlights movie watching I subjected myself to.)

The Spectrum Files: Halloween Hijinks: He Knows You're Alone (On Lichter Road)

  Halloween Hijinks

Somewhere in the family photo archives is a genuine artifact of boundless joy.  Two of my sisters and two of my brothers sitting on the living room sofa with pillows covering the lower portions of their faces, eyes piercing whatever may have been in front of them.

Which was the divide between the sofa and the television.

They were terrified.  A moment of high tension where the only thing missing was someone jumping in the room and screaming at the top of their lungs, resulting in much noise and defecated garments.  My mother took this snapshot, circa 1982, as the family for some reason was enthralled by a horrible slasher film from that glorified era,  He Knows You're Alone.

This little known gem features the big screen (for better or worse) debut of one Tom Hanks, which he pontificates about here:



Spectrum, who as I've stated could bring the highest of quality films into your home, also could swing the crap stick. This was one of those incidents, but the whole family (and assorted friends who were there on this hilarious Saturday evening) remembers it quite well.  My mom loves to tell the tale of the fear running rampant on the sofa that night.

He Knows You're Alone was another Halloween rip-off, but apparently had enough juice to scare the shit out of four young adults, and who knows who else was present in our humble abode.  Shot in 1980 on a low budget, it came and went in the cascading wave of movies that were either made as homages or direct attempts to profit off others' art in the horror genre.  It was lucky enough to feature a young Tom Hanks, who unlike many stars who had their starts in slasher or teen sex romps (Renee Zellwegger and Johnny Depp, I'm talking to you) loves to tell the story of the movie and apparently isn't ashamed of it in the least. 

See the video above for proof:  "KNIFE RACK!!"

A search and rescue mission for the legendary snapshot my mom lensed is underway, and if unearthed, shall be posted here for posterity's sake.

The Spectrum Files: Powers Boothe & Southern Comfort

This is the one I missed the boat on.  Every night "Southern Comfort" aired during the month Spectrum carried it, we weren't home.  If memory serves me right, it was only shown about 3 or 4 times to begin with.  Due to the description in the guide that showed up in our mailbox on a monthly basis, and the trailers that ran between the features on Spectrum, it was a movie I desperately wanted to see.

It would be many years before I found it on a $5.99 DVD shelf in a Shopko kiosk. It is now, somewhat ironically, one of my more valuable films.

I was terrified of Powers Boothe, star of Southern Comfort, during this era due to the horrifying Emmy-winning performance as the piece-of-crap, murderous demagogue Jim Jones in the TV biopic, "The Guyana Tragedy".  The concept of one person's ability to get a group of people to knowingly do themselves in with only his influence scared the bejesus out of me.  He would ironically and eventually become one of my favorite screen stars.

In "Southern Comfort", the 1980 Walter Hill-directed drama, Powers' character with Keith Carradine in tow, was the closest thing to a good guy in the movie.  A branch of the Louisiana National Guard winds up at the whims of mother nature and revenge-seeking cajuns in the swamp due to the idiotic behavior of one of the group's lesser brains.  A lot of 80's stalwarts, including Fred Ward, Alan Autry (one-time Green Bay Packers quarterback named Carlos Brown before taking on his original surname), Peter Coyote, and T.K. Carter, among others appear alongside Boothe for a ride down the drain of a soggy, gray corner of hell.

This film is bleak and disturbing, and I have never been able to take my eyes off of it.  Most of the characters are difficult to root for, and their pursuers really cannot be blamed for their reaction to the principals' stupidity.  Another example of interlopers jacking with the strength of an unknown and often unseen adversary.  In that respect, this film could easily be seen as a Vietnam allegory.

Powers Boothe just passed away this week, and I'm not ashamed to admit I wept.   He had a long and varied career that deserved more than the recognition it got, and I watched closely the whole way.  Aside from the Emmy I mentioned earlier he didn't garner much hardware, but he was always a bright spot in a dark sky.  Through the 80's he was also brilliant in Walter Hill's Extreme Prejudice,  as well as The Emerald Forest, and as the lead in HBO's series Philip Marlowe, Private Eye.  In the 90's he brought up the bar on films where it would normally be low.  His supporting turn in Rapid Fire gave a young Brandon Lee a much needed anchor, and his tuxedoed terrorist's acerbic wit and quick menace brought Sudden Death much higher than it deserved to go.  (However there is that moment, played straight for some reason, where Jean-Claude Van Damme fights a Pittsburgh Penguin mascot, but I won't go there.)  I'm not going to describe his Curly Bill Brosius in Tombstone.  I want you to go in unprepared for the sting.  It's that damn good.

He spent the 2000s on both the large and small screen.  He and fellow Texans Matthew McConaughey and Bill Paxton were the trifecta that gave Frailty it's grim but electric atmosphere.  To this day I regard that one as one of the most underrated horror films of all.  (And by the way, God Rest Bill Paxton, another of my favorites that I will wax nostalgic about here soon.)  Boothe's Senator Rourke in Sin City has a paranormal malevolence to it not really seen previously from Powers.   His turn on Deadwood as Cy Tolliver is just amazing work.  I've been told he was terrific on shows I've not seen like 24 and Nashville, but I don't doubt the accounts for a second. No one could ever say he wasn't always straight 100 at all times.

If I had to make a list of my favorite actors, Mr. Boothe would surely be on it.  His imposing presence and rumble-of-God voice made him a great villain, but there was a softness he could sell at the right times you could believe in.   I'm going to miss him, but I luckily have a stack of his work to look back on, as I did last week when I watched Southern Comfort for the 28th time.   Part of me still wants revenge on the cinema demons that kept me from seeing it way back when.

God Rest you,  Powers Boothe.  And thank you.

The Spectrum Files: Sharky's Machine

When I was a boy, most of my schoolmates at Somers Elementary School wanted to be firemen or policemen.  I think I remember one tow-headed youngster wanted to be an astronaut. Another friend wanted to be a wide receiver, but only if he played for the Green Bay Packers. 

Not me, friends. 

I wanted to be a stuntman.

One evening of thousands in the Will household, I was sitting Indian-style with my bowl of ice cream in front of an action masterpiece being watched by my namesake.  I remember there was a particular movie where Burt Reynolds or some other 70’s stalwart was thrown from a moving car, rolled to his knee and fired 5 shots from a somehow functioning pistol.  

I remarked to my dad that, wow, Burt Reynolds was some tough customer for managing all that obviously incredible physical activity. 

“Well, Robby,” he said with his trademark grin, “That wasn’t Burt.”

“What?!” I shrieked incredulously, “Of course it was!,” I continued, like the complete idiot I was,  “I just saw him do that!”

My dad went on to explain the intricacies of movie magic.  How stuntmen made the movie stars look good, and editing finished the job.  I was both disappointed in Burt and excited as hell for ugly people like myself.  After all, you can get a job not only in the movies, but throwing yourself around like a lunatic.

Heck, that’s what I do 15 hours a day anyway, I remarked to myself.

Imagine.  In my way of thinking, put on some padding and learn how to fall right, and you can get paid for being 8 years old!  Holy Crap! My dad also explained that it only looked like Burt Reynolds, Peter Fonda, and Barry Newman were driving those muscle cars.  Stuntmen did that shit for them too!  What a magical world we live in!!  A job jumping off roofs, faked fisticuffs, and pushing the limits of the greatest cars known to man!!

For a job!!  A career even!!

“That’s what I’m gonna do!” I thought to myself.  From the age of 8 until I tore my first muscle, I decided I was going to be a stuntman.  I was already known around the house for not only running around on the knuckles of my feet, inducing cringes from the masses, but leaping off furniture, sliding down stairs, and climbing shit outside, just to jump back down off of it.  I even provided my own sound effects to go with it.  I’m sure in my 8 year old mind, I began to wonder where those noises came from, and if I could pull double duty as a stunt-sound effects wizard.  I often stole dialogue from my favorite movies for the shadow boxing that took place in the back yard. This was pre-martial arts, so I began to think I could fight the baddest of movie bad guys. Heck, if stuntmen did the falling and driving the cars, I’m sure someone threw their punches too!!!

As a side note, Incidentally, as a younger kid there was a short film about stuntmen with a butt-kicker of a finale that my mom would always let me know was on. (For some reason, this brief thing aired in afternoons on occasion in The Midwest.)  It was hosted, I believe, by a celebrity like Steve McQueen or Robert Blake. I don't know, it's there and it's gone.  I've searched for hours over periods of years looking online for it, and damn if I can't find it.

Anyway, I became a stunt production designer in my own back yard.  Antenna towers became skyscrapers.  Picnic tables were stand-ins for boats.  The sandbox became quicksand. The AC unit was battlefield cover. Every surface and mildly large object also became something to be shot, punched, kicked, or blown off of, screaming to my imaginary (and tiny-distanced) doom. 

My imagination was my best friend for the moment, but someday, I was going to be stupid enough to drive a car off of a cliff. 

A few years later, after dad had passed, my dream of being a stuntman stayed.  One Saturday evening Spectrum aired Sharky’s Machine.  Another opus from Mr. Reynolds.  The movie has a bit of a cult following today.  It’s not among the most famous of Burt’s oeuvre, though it’s definitely one of his better films.  However, it may have the greatest stunt ever pulled off in a Burt Reynolds movie. 

Dar Robinson’s jump.

Dar Robinson was, and is still seen as, the greatest movie stuntman in history.   In “Sharky’s Machine” he doubles for the villain, who after being shot by Reynolds’ titular Sharky, goes out the window of the 220 foot high Atlanta Regency Hotel and drops down.

To this day, the highest live fall used in a film from a building. For some reason, they only used the part where Dar goes through the window initially, and then it cuts to a dummy for the rest of the fall.   He still made the drop though, and that is pure-cane insane. (He had previously bested that for the movie “Highpoint”, where he dropped 770 feet.  That, however, was off the CN Tower in Canada).

As far as Sharky's Machine goes, wow!.... As a kid, I thought that was the coolest thing ever, crashing through a window and dropping that far?  Dang!  (Yes, I thought the word “Dang” in my head).

After a lull in the action-movie intake, that film rekindled my love of the work of the stuntmen.  

Sadly Dar Robinson was tragically killed, not on a movie set, but in a motorcycle accident.  The world is cruel sometimes. 

In another show of the world’s cruelty, I never became a stuntman.   Though I have pulled some pretty cool stunts in my life.