On the morning after the Poseidon’s disastrous night, tugboat captain Michael Caine and sidekick Sally Field get back on board the Poseidon and find leftover survivors who were not drowned during the original movie, and then bad guy Telly Savalas puts them all in jeopardy, and then . . .
But what did we really, sincerely, expect anyway, from a movie in which Slim Pickens plays a character named “Tex”? If you can think of a single line of dialogue that Slim Pickens, as “Tex,” wouldn’t say in Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, please do not miss this movie, which will be filled with amazements and startling revelations.
Bigfoot
(Directed by Robert F. Slatzer; starring John Carradine, Joi Lansing, Lindsay Crosby; 1971)
Why, you are asking, did I decide to see Bigfoot? Why am I taking your time—time you could spend trimming your toenails and talking to your plants, telling them what nice plants they are—to review Bigfoot? What strange light in the sky, what weird whistling in my ear, what blood-soaked note tied to a rock and thrown through my window, sent me to see Bigfoot?
These are good questions. The cast alone convinced me. Let me put it as simply as I can. If you have ever wanted to see a movie starring John Carradine, Joi Lansing, Lindsay Crosby, Chris Mitchum, and Ken Maynard, then Bigfoot is almost certainly going to be your only chance. Not since Joan Crawford starred in Trog has there been such an opportunity.
Joi Lansing began her career as a model for men’s magazines. She is still startling, especially with a jumpsuit. She parachutes wearing the garment, which conceals a minidress slit to the waist, and a top that is slashed to the belt, and she runs away from Bigfoot for about five minutes in this costume, bouncing through the woods but not (for some reason) from her blouse.
No matter. There is always John Carradine. He plays a backwoods trader with a line of goods packed into the rear of his 1958 Ford station wagon. He stops at a general store run by Ken Maynard (yes, Ken Maynard) and Ken makes a phone call while standing in front of a poster from one of his old movies (Texas Gunfighter, if I remember correctly) wearing the same ten-gallon hat that’s on the poster.
“There have been a lot of strange things going on up in those hills,” he informs the sheriff, after Chris Mitchum’s girlfriend has been carried away by a half-human, half-animal creature with big feet. But the sheriff refuses to go up on the mountain after dark, and so Chris enlists his buddies in a motorcycle gang led by Lindsay Crosby (yes, Lindsay Crosby).
This is no ordinary motorcycle gang. All of its members ride identical brand-new medium-size Yamahas, which are credited in the titles to a Hollywood Yamaha agency. The gang members also wear bright-colored nylon windbreakers with pull-strings at the bottom, and they wear new knit shirts and dress loafers. The girls wear bikinis. The gang’s hairstyle is set by Lindsay Crosby’s receding ducktail.
Meanwhile, Lansing and another girl are tied to trees (saplings would be a better word) by the creatures, and then Lansing is carried off and given to Bigfoot. Bigfoot is usually shot from a camera angle between his toes, making him loom over the camera like King Kong, but when we see him straight-on he looks about five feet ten inches or eleven inches tall. He wears a shaggy costume stitched together out of old, dirty brown shag rugs.
There is an exciting chase through the woods, which is only slowed down a little by the fact that the movie has nine unidentified extras who have to file past the camera. Then Bigfoot runs into a cave. This has us hoping that Joan Crawford will appear and explain that the creature has been misunderstood (in Trog, she went into the cave with a twenty-nine-cent bunch of carrots, calling “Here, Trog?”).
But, no, a motorcyclist pulls a bundle of dynamite from his belt and throws it into the cave. No fuse, just the dynamite. Then we cut to footage apparently taken from another film, showing towers of flame. The mountain shakes. Yards below, an old Indian woman cocks her head and nods wisely at the sky. Mountain speak with big voice. Then we cut to a sound stage set decorated with trees, bushes, and a steaming pile of rocks in one corner—the remains of the cave and the mountain, too, for that matter. “Do you—think it’s dead?” Joi Lansing asks. “Nothing could live through that,” Lindsay Crosby assures her. I hope he’s right.
The Big Hit
(Directed by Che-Kirk Wong; starring Mark Wahlberg, Lou Diamond Phillips; 1998)
Hollywood used to import movie stars from overseas. Then directors. Then they remade foreign films. Now the studios import entire genres. It’s cheaper buying wholesale. The Big Hit is a Hong Kong action comedy, directed by Che-Kirk Wong (Crime Story, Hard to Die), starring an American cast, and written by Ben Ramsey, an American who has apparently done as much time in the video stores as Quentin Tarantino.
The movie has the Hong Kong spirit right down to the deadpan dialogue. Sample:
Hit Man: “If you stay with me you have to understand I’m a contract killer. I murder people for a living. Mostly bad people, but . . .”
Girl He Has Kidnapped: “I’m cool with that.”
The characters in these movies exist in a Twilight Zone where thousands of rounds of ammunition are fired, but no one ever gets shot unless the plot requires him to. The bullets have read the screenplay.
As the film opens, we meet four buddies working out in a health club. They’re played by Mark Wahlberg (of Boogie Nights), Lou Diamond Phillips, Bokeem Woodbine, and Antonio Sabato, Jr. The guys are hunks with big muscles, which we can study during a locker-room scene where they stand around bare-bottomed while discussing Woodbine’s recent discovery of masturbation, which he recommends as superior to intercourse, perhaps because it requires only one consenting adult.
Then they dress for work. They’re all garbed as utilities workers, with hard hats, toolboxes, and wide leather belts holding wrenches and flashlights. As they saunter down the street to Graeme Revell’s pumping sound track, they look like a downsized road company version of the Village People.
The plot: They attack the heavily defended high-rise stronghold of a rich pimp who has just purchased three new girls for $50,000 a head. They break in with guns blazing, and there’s an extended action sequence ending with one of the heroes diving out of an upper floor on a bungee cord, just ahead of a shattering explosion. And so on.
They kidnap Keiko (China Chow), the daughter of a rich Japanese executive. Complications ensue, and she ends up in the hands, and later the car trunk, of the leader of the hit man, named Melvin Smiley (Wahlberg). This is most likely the first movie in which the hero hit man is named Melvin Smiley. But he does smile a lot, because his weakness is, “I can’t stand the idea of people who don’t like me.” You would think a hit man would have a lot of people walking around not liking him, but not if he is a good enough shot.
Keiko falls in love with Melvin with astonishing rapidity. Sure, she tries to escape, but by the end she realizes her future lies with his. Will this complicate Melvin’s life? Not any more than it already is.
He has a black mistress (Lela Rochon), who looks at a dismembered body in their bathtub and says, “He’s kinda cute.” And he has a Jewish fiancée (Christina Applegate), who is Jewish for the sole purpose of having two Jewish parents (Elliott Gould and Lainie Kazan), so they can appear in the middle of the movie like refugees from a Woody Allen picture and provide crudely stereotyped caricatures. Gould makes crass remarks about his wife’s plastic surgery, gets drunk, and throws up on Lou Diamond Phillips, in a scene where both actors appear to be using the powers of visualization to imagine themselves in another movie.