In life nothing is more pure than the sweet science of effortlessly bad Italian filmmaking! Relentlessly pummeling the viewer with its English-as-a-third-or-fourth-language level dialogue, jabbing with its cast of faded legends, has beens, bimbos, and talentless dudes vaguely recognized from other horrid Roman roundups before finally delivering the knockout blow with a deadly combination of awful songs, punch-drunk plot, and laughably over-the-top action, movies like The Opponent easily fill the undercard of your pointless life. Continue reading “The Opponent (1988)”
Category: Drama
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947)
Elmer Gantry (1960)
Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel Prize for literature, was ripped off of a Pulitzer by the Columbia University trustees, won it for real later, declined it, wrote Babbitt, and eventually hired secretaries to play chess with him until he croaked from the effects of alcoholism. Somewhere in all this, he found time to pen what has to be regarded as the definitive novel about the nature of religion as Big Con. Continue reading “Elmer Gantry (1960)”
The Choppers (1961)
Oh, to have a dad as cool as Arch Hall, Jr! When I saw that Arch Hall, Sr. had done something like produce and write this cautionary/drive-in exploitation tale about punks who chop up cars, I knew that every kid’s dream at one time must have been to be Arch Hall, Jr. (Except for that name and the greasy hairdo.) Continue reading “The Choppers (1961)”
Wild Guitar (1962)
Arch Hall, Jr. was supposed to be some type of manufactured movie star/teen idol, but something apparently went horribly wrong in the manufacturing process. Continue reading “Wild Guitar (1962)”
Guadalcanal Diary (1943)
This was the kind of movie that as it went along I grew less and less fond of enlisting in, its emphasis on facts and detailing the chronology of the battles at Guadalcanal forcing me to retreat in the face of a withering assault on my entertainment senses. I’ve got digital cable so I’m pretty sure that if I wanted, I could hit channel 566 or so and come up with a World War II Channel where they run documentaries about the Greatest Generation twenty-four hours a day. Continue reading “Guadalcanal Diary (1943)”
Halls of Montezuma (1950)
Their names roll off my tongue far easier than they ever had a right to: Tobruk, Corregidor, Guadalcanal. And even now after all these years, sometimes late at night when the house is at its quietest and I close my eyes, all I can see are the flares lighting up the night, illuminating the hellish place (probably a studio backlot) of dirt and rock and blood where I watched a bunch of actors dig in, praying that some Axis pillbox didn’t hit the jackpot, sending a telegram to our moms and dads that began “we regret to inform you.” Continue reading “Halls of Montezuma (1950)”