A KILLER IN THE FAMILY (TV MOVIE)

Year: 1983 Cast: Robert Mitchum, James Spader, Lance Kerwin, Eric Stoltz rates: **

Google a picture of the real life sons after they were arrested... Look at their hard, calloused faces, edgy, mean, deadly... Then watch as little-dipper eyed Lance Kerwin and docile Eric Stolz play the whining, kindhearted, manipulated, vulnerable, blue-eyed sons of the father they broke out of the jail... A father who kills an entire family including a small child...

Anyhow, if KILLER IN THE FAMILY were meaner and colder, like the real life Tison family, who were rampaging white trash serial killers throughout Arizona, unlike especially the law student son played by James Spader, supposedly wanting to kill his father while on the road, then it'd be more realistic and more an exploitation piece instead of a TV-movie that's not sure who exactly the bad guys are... 

Much of the blame is laid on the dad's convict friend. Sadly, this road movie could have been really good, but Robert Mitchum was far too old to play a man with sons that could be his grandchildren... With a melting face, he has one of those ballooned stomachs that looks hard as steel from drinking and he can hardly move his old bones... Miscast, to say the least... Again, Google the real Gary Tison and see the empty shell of a human being, around forty-years old and dead to life, dead to the world...

The lawyers of his sons/crime-spree partners must have made this TV-movie to keep them from spending too much time there, despite winding up on Death Row (before given life sentences instead, because of their age). They never seem to have anything to do with the murders or anything else, pretty much, short of the opening breakout, which seemed more daring than anything else. 

Either way, while not terrible and sometimes entertaining, this was a missed opportunity... Reminds one of the horrible Death of a Centerfold TV-movie, that was soon trumped by the incredible theatrical Star 80... Too bad nothing came out to straighten out this crooked mess... There's a Straight-to-Video job starring Robert Patrick from 2017, but... The best thing to come out of this was the Warner Archives DVD with the original blue outlined cover; a collector's edition but, sadly, what's inside there is merely a forgotten curio, for good reason.

DETOUR (1945)

Year: 1945 Rating: **

Ann Savage's famous femme fatale would be the kind of classic Noir character had she entered the picture earlier on... 

Instead, during Tom Neal's story as he, a low-rent piano player, hitchhikes from New York to L.A. to see his girl who's trying to make it big in Hollywood, Savage's Phoenix AZ con-artist babbler simply kills the self-narrated road movie buzz that'd belonged more comfortably to the far more subtle and intriguing Neal... 

Her incessant bickering is annoying while their collected con (that HE'S bickered into) is so far-fetched you'll wish poor Tom did what he initially promised: Instead of thumbing the ride that'd changed his life and given Savage the chance to blackmail him, to make the whole trip across country all alone, by himself, on a pogo-stick.

 

HOMER AND EDDIE

title: HOMER AND EDDIE

year: 1989

cast: Whoopi Goldberg, James Belushi, Karen Black, John Waters

rating: **1/2

Road movies usually, no matter what, have the same thing going for them: if they get boring there's always something else up the... road. In this film, a retarded man - because of an injury where a baseball hit him on the head - takes to the highway for no other reason than his curiosity of something outside his small town, and, after getting robbed, meets his polar opposite, a streetwise black woman who, at first, seems like a funny spontaneous crook but as the film progresses we learn she has a terminal brain tumor. She enjoys not only robbing stores at gun point but eventually killing people. The goofy interplay between the duo is hard, almost impossible to take during the first half (not helped by some horrible jump-cut editing), but when the violence begins, the film gets more interesting though never realistic. Belushi's performance embodies the typical Hollywood template when dealing with the mentally-challenged, displaying selective endearingly-childlike simplicity until a sort of "alternate wisdom" occurs: teaching us how we all should be. And Whoopi is being Whoopi, for better or worse.

HEROES HAS RELOCATED

title: HEROES

year: 1977

cast: Henry Winkler, Sally Field, Harrison Ford, Val Avery, John Cassavetes, Ron Rifkin, Al Rubin

rating: **1/2

REVIEW HAS MOVED TO THE NEW SITE

RV

title: RV

year: 2006

cast: Robin Williams, Jeff Daniels

director: Barry Sonnenfeld

rating: **

Feels like a NyQuil nightmare. Plot centers on a family going on a road trip vacation in a rented RV, and the problems that arise, including another family who basically stalks them and are very vapid and simple-minded. Why? Because they're Middle Americans! Unlike NATIONAL LAMPOON'S VACATION, where the kids and wife are subjected to their dad's corny cross-country agenda, here father Robin Williams has to cater to his son's wigger/rapping lingo, his daughter's environmentalist-spouting tantrums, and his wife's "I'm An Equal Partner in this Marriage" lectures. It seems the more PC the world gets, the less a place there is for good ol' dad. This is a pretty bad film, but somewhere along the way it gets somewhat involving as Williams tries saving his job while trying to please his bratty clan and keep the RV rolling at the same time, literally.

SIX PACK

title: SIX PACK

year: 1982

cast: Kenny Rogers, Diane Lane, Erin Gray, Anthony Michael Hall, Terry Kiser, Barry Corbin

rating: **

When people think of acting it's usually how a performer speaks his or her lines. But acting is just as physical as verbal. How a person walks, runs, sits, stares in repose/reflection, is just as important as line delivery, and Kenny Rogers does it all horribly. Witnessing a fat Kenny (with an always perfectly combed shaggy dog beard) playing a car racer who every woman on earth is nuts about (including Erin Gray) hanging out with a bunch of orphaned freewheeling car thief kids (including Diane Lane and Anthony Michael Hall) is as entertaining for bad movie fans as a bad movie gets. Just sit and stare at Mr. Rogers, who fully realizes there is a camera pointing at him, and you will be thoroughly entertained on a level impossible to explain till you experience it for yourself. For those who live for cinematic torture, I recomend this highly.

BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA

year: 1974

cast: Warren Oates, Isela Vega

writer/director: Sam Peckinpah

rating: ****1/2

The bizarre journey of a loser and his guitar-playing heart-of-gold whore girlfriend, driving across Mexico to cut off the head of a (dead and buried) gigolo named Alfredo Garcia and return it for money, is offbeat like a bum is untidy. Everything makes its own sense and there's a lotta neat violence, slow-motion deaths, and best of all, Warren Oates, giving the performance of a lifetime. Isela Vega is the epitome of a supportive role, and while this isn't Sam Peckinpah's best film, through all the tortrous insanity it definitely FEELS like his most personal.

CANNONBALL

title: CANNONBALL

year: 1976

cast: David Carradine, Belinda Balaski, Robert Carradine, Bill McKinney, Sylvester Stallone, Martin Scorsese, Dick Miller

director: Paul Bartel

rating: ****

Not as beloved as Roger Corman's "Deathrace 2000", the car-race film also starring David Carradine and directed by Paul Bartel, but is, in its own way, better. No funny-violent sideplot here, just a straight-out cross-country race based on the real life (and very illegal) Cannonball Run; yes, the same one Burt Reynolds and Hal Needham would take on a few years later... but this is more raw, rough and ragged. Each group has their own quirks and motivations, allowing the viewer to care about the outcome and feel part of the action, which is pretty much non-stop. Sylvester Stallone, who played Carradine's arch-enemy in "Deathrace 2000", makes a cameo as a mobster (along with Martin Scorsese).

WHITE LINE FEVER

title: WHITE LINE FEVER

year: 1975

cast: Jan-Michael Vincent

director: Jonathan Kaplan

rating: **

If only someone whispered into director Jonathan Kaplan's ear "Lighten up buddy" while making this preachy film about the plight of independent truckers, all who have chips on their shoulders bigger than a... mack truck. Within ten minutes I was rooting for the bad guys. At least they were smiling.

TWO-LANE BLACKTOP

year: 1971

cast: James Taylor, Dennis Wilson, Warren Oates

director: Monte Hellman

rating: ****1/2

James Taylor and Dennis Wilson's non-acting doesn't matter as they're part of the car and feel as the car feels on a first-person i.e. first-vehicle narrative through America. To counter-balance the purposeful non-acting there's legendary Warren Oates, providing not only the baseline but acting as both catylist and antagonist as two cars: the Chevy (Taylor, Wilson) and the GTO (Oates) "race" cross country for pink slips; stopping along the way in various small towns for local races. Laurie Bird is a pretty, dim-bulb hitchiker whose acting's on par with Wilson more than Taylor; yet if real actors sat in Taylor, Wilson, or Bird's seats perhaps the documentary real-life aura would be gone. What we have is an ueber-realistic, organically textured, subtly spellbinding journey with one basic (if primal) objective: to keep moving.

REAL MEN

title: REAL MEN

year: 1987

cast: James Belushi, John Ritter

rating: ***

Neat odd-couple pairing of James Belushi as a tough CIA agent who does things his own way and John Ritter as a wimpy family man who can't defend his son from bullies. Belushi has to take Ritter across country (by car, for some reason) to Washington because Ritter is a dead ringer for a CIA agent who was killed and has to impersonate the agent for an exchange. Good stuff. The only real problems are the abusive way James Belushi treats John Ritter in the beginning, as Ritter's character isn't annoying enough to deserve it. There's not many big laughs, which doesn't seem to matter with road films, which have enough distractions to keep you occupied.

BOUND FOR GLORY

year: 1976

cast: David Carradine

director: Hal Ashby

rating: ***1/2

I love the late David Carradine as an actor but in many films he seems to be sort of... not trying very hard. Well this might be because he often played characters who were cool enough to NOT HAVE TO try very hard but rather to be themselves: cool dudes who can kick ass if need be. But here he's really acting and at the same time is completely natural and doesn't seem to be trying at all: but with excellent results. And that's him singing and playing the guitar, as you need to be a REAL musician to portray folk music icon Woodie Guthrie: the man who did to music what John Dillinger did to the depression. Hal Ashby in his Robert Altmaneque style of letting nature take its course allows everything to fall into place JUST RIGHT, and the film - although centering on a very political man - never gets too preachy. If it were made today, I doubt political-subtlety would prevail.

GET ON THE BUS

title: GET ON THE BUS

year: 1996

cast: Ossie Davis, Albert Hall

writer/director: Spike Lee

rating: ***1/2

I hate most Spike Lee films and I hope I'm not arrested for a "hate crime" to admit that I think he's very overrated. His "joints" seem like student films to me, and not very good ones. But this movie was great. It's not so much a road-trip as a character-study and it does both perfectly. Funny how it's slipped under the radar in the Spike canon... it's the only one I enjoy. The plot centers on a group of black men going cross country to the million-man-march and their "adventures" along the way, which consists of bickering and probing into each character's personality-traits as they all sum up a little bit of this and a little bit of that: thus defining one entire human being in the end. The final shot involving a chain falling to the ground in front of Lincoln's statue would seem forced or corny or heavy-handed, but it's brilliant.

MAC AND ME

title: MAC AND ME

year: 1988

cast: Christine Ebersole

rating: **

If product placement was a crime, MAC AND ME would be behind bars. If not for promoting McDonalds and Coca Cola to no end then for ripping off the storyline of E.T. - a space alien getting lost in the suburbs thus befriending a little boy and being pursued by government agents. But somehow, this movie isn't terrible. There is some corny magic that works like only corny magic can. And some classic horribleness that's become camp legacy: like a scene where people are break dancing in McDonalds. Even the Alien's name is a commercial. Mac. Big Mac. Get it? And when they aren't talking about McDonalds, or when they aren't INSIDE McDonalds, one of the characters is an employee and wears her McDonalds shirt with the golden arches ALWAYS VISIBLE. If you like bad movies like me, this is worth a viewing. One thing WILL surprise you: the acting ISN'T THAT horrible. 1930's-era throwback-blonde Christine Ebersole in particular.

MOTORCYCLE GANG

title: MOTORCYCLE GANG

year: 1994

cast: Carla Gugino, Gerald McRaney, Jake Busey, Richard Edson, Julia Mueller

rating: **

This is a bad made-for-TV film that's not so bad, at least the first half centering on a family consisting of a father, a mother, and a teenager daughter who - during the 1950s - move from Texas to California. On the way they run into the element that ruins the flow of the movie, and ironically it's the Motorcycle Gang, led by Jake Busey who resembles a flaky nineties surfer more than a fifties gang member and is about an intimidating as a housefly. This is where the movie hits a wall, and explodes. Sadly, once-great John Milius directed this.

CONVOY

year: 1978

cast: Kris Kristofferson, Ali McGraw, Ernest Borgnine

rating: *

After directing the brilliant anti-war film Cross of Iron, Sam Peckinpah went into a dizzy retirement, and here's what he made at his dizziest. Truckers on CB radios versus a crooked cop. This should be called "BJ and the Billy the Kid", as Kris Kristofferson stars as the rebel trucker, and his usually dependable laidback personality is boring. Ali McGraw, who was pretty bad in the brilliant Peckinpah film The Getaway, is just as bad here, but without a good story to lift her above the fray. Burt Young and Ernest Borgnine are lackluster, as is Peckinpah's signature style... full of slow-motion action and snappy edits... which is hardly visible at all. And click here for above artwork origin.