Streets of Fire (1984)

Streets of Fire is an odd film. It’s not quite an action film, it’s not quite a comedy film, nor exactly a musical. The whole look of the film can be called futuristic retro, but it’s also distinctly 80s (whereas The Warriors, which was also directed by Walter Hill, seemed futuristic modern, but also distinctly 70s). This movie can’t escape the fact that it was made in the 1980s in fact. While the songs performed in the movie have the sounds and feels of songs from the 1950s or 1960s, they’re all performed in front of very 1980s backdrops (neon-colored squiggles and geometric designs). The movie also seems like a point-of-reference for later films such as Big Trouble in Little China, Reality Bites (the love triangle part of the movie anyway), and Firefly/Serenity. It is never really confirmed whether the city in Streets of Fire is supposed to be New York City, especially since there aren’t many sets used, but from what little architecture is seen, you get the feeling that this is supposed to take place in a couple of small neighborhoods in NYC.

Michael Pare stars as Tom Cody, an ex-soldier/mercenary who is asked to return to town by his sister Reva after Tom’s ex-girlfriend, the popular singer Ellen Aim (Diane Lane) is kidnapped in the middle of a benefit concert by a motorcycle gang led by Willem Dafoe. Rick Moranis plays Billy Fish, Ellen’s manager and new boyfriend. Amy Madigan plays McCoy, a fellow broke ex-soldier that Tom befriends. There are also cameos by Ed Begley Jr., Bill Paxton (I swear the gap in his teeth was widened for this movie),  Elizabeth (E.G.) Daily, Robert Townsend, and Mykelti Williamson.

I would like to discuss Rick Moranis for a minute. This is probably the only film role of his that I’m aware of where he did not play a full-on nerd. Billy Fish is a little nerdy, yeah, but he’s also the jerk with all the money and an idea of the neighborhood that Ellen is hidden at. I have not seen a lot of SCTV episodes, I only watched it occasionally earlier this decade when NBC was at a loss of what to put after Conan O’Brien’s show was over, I can’t remember if this was after Greg Kinnear stopped doing his talk show.  Anyway, whenever I watched SCTV and Rick Moranis was in a skit, he was never the nerd. If anything, he played characters like Billy Fish, but who were a bit more suave (or at least thought they were suave).  I’m not sure if it was playing Louis Tully in Ghostbusters that had him typecast as a nerd for the rest of his career until he went into retirement in the 1990s (to take care of his wife who had cancer and to be with his kids). He puts out country albums occasionally under the name The Agoraphobic Cowboy. It has been widely reported that he even refused to return to the role of Louis Tully for the Ghostbusters video game that is supposed to come out this year, simply because he didn’t need the money (apparently he did pretty well for himself with the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids films).

Anyway, bickering, stuff blows up, hijinx ensue. Past Rick Moranis and Amy Madigan, I’m not exactly sure how well the comedy worked in this movie. Michael Pare was kind of stiff, and Diane Lane wasn’t given much to do anyway. Based on the type of movie this is, and the clothes that Michael Pare had to wear, you would expect a Captain Malcolm Reynolds type of hero, but Michael Pare doesn’t display the charisma or sense of humor to be able to pull it off.  If anything, it was Willem Dafoe’s ridiculous leather outfits that were the funniest. During the club break scene, he is wearing leather fisherman’s overalls with no shirt on underneath.

The ending is different for what you would expect from a love triangle consisting of Michael Pare, Rick Moranis, and Diane Lane to be.  For a movie endings in general, it is refreshing and kind of realistic. The film ends on what I’m assuming was a song written for the film, that actually became a hit song because I remember hearing it a lot of the radio when I was a kid.

Fun Fact that I just discovered while looking up IMDB links for the films mentioned in this post: Brian Yuzna & Stuart Gordon wrote Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Weird.

NoWo600Wo: What did I call my short entries again?

I had to look through my tags to remember what I called my entries with a bunch of short reviews in one post. Going back to school has caused me to have a lot of brain farts.

Domino

Oddly enough, this movie is the only one I’ve seen that is possibly a direct descendant of Orson Welles’ F for Fake. It states up front that the story may or may not be true. Written by Richard Kelly, it fucks up with the time frame, putting Domino Harvey in more modern times at a younger age than she actually was – so her father Laurence Harvey (star of the original The Manchurian Candidate) died closer to the early 90s rather than the early 70s, and her mom decided to move her to LA just because of Beverly Hills, 90210. I honestly wish that this was a better movie than it actually is because Domino Harvey was an interesting woman. But it’s overlong and overstylized. This would have been a logical follow-up for Tony Scott after True Romance came out, but in the 2000s it felt strained and oftentimes ridiculous. The only thing I learned from this movie is Mo’Nique the comedian is actually a pretty good dramatic actress.

John Carpenter’s Vampires

Although I should just say, “Fuck it, it was free,” this wasn’t that great. Perhaps a couple notches above Ghosts of Mars. It featured what I hate most in bad movies: implausible, sudden, and ultimately pointless romances – like, so sudden that you’re like, “Wait, what, huh? Since when are they a couple?” Another tacked on element: really bad and unnecesssary boner jokes. My boyfriend thinks it was James Woods’ doing, since I don’t really remember John Carpenter being much a boner joke fellow. Then again, John Carpenter didn’t write this movie. He did write the soundtrack though, which was pretty much recycled from They Live. Gone completely was the camaraderie felt between his characters in his earlier films.

Cut and Run

This epic review was originally posted on Bloody Italiana a couple of weeks ago.

Hopefully I’ll post something new here tomorrow if I’m not snowed/iced in at home.

By the way, Willie Aames was on The Today Show this morning promoting a book he co-wrote with his wife. I don’t think he got to talk about finding Jesus much. It mostly had to do with his being on Celebrity Fit Club, a recent attempted mugging on he and his family, and a really weak attempt on The Today Show’s part to tie the interview to Brad Renfro’s death yesterday. Overall, he seems to be way more chilled out than Kirk Cameron. Lately, I sometimes contemplate getting cable just so I can just watch The Weather Channel on loop in the mornings while getting ready for work. Morning television is awful.

I actually kind of ended up watching this movie twice. The first time, it was on in the background during a game of Zombie Fluxx with some friends. We figured it would be terrible. My questions from the first viewing got the best of me though and I decided to watch it a second time.

Deodato films, at least his more notorious ones, are not for everyone. They’re barely even for me. I refuse to watch House on the Edge of the Park due to how much the rape aspects have been hyped. Cannibal Holocaust is a brutal film, but it’s also probably smarter and more well made than it has any right to be. On this Anchor Bay uncut and restored DVD, Deodato fondly introduces the film, and more or less says that this is as close as he’s ever going to get to do a Cannibal Holocaust sequel. Cut and Run takes place in the Amazon, and features natives, but the similarities end there. There is no cannibalism to be found and this film is actually more close to a dumb version of Apocalypse Now.

The film has about three openings: one opens on an attack on what appears to be drug runners (although I should note that I only caught it on the second viewing, the first time, I just thought it was people working). The attack is led by Michael Berryman (the original The Hills Have Eyes, Weird Science), who seems to the primary hitman in native garb. At his call, local tribesmen and one more white dude in a short sarong follow his lead and kill all the men. Two women are pinned down with stakes through their shins and raped, and then beheaded. This happens about four and a half minutes in. You stay classy Deodato, considering these women were probably just there cos their boyfriends were. Keep calling it all a parallel to the Vietnam War all you want. It doesn’t change the fact that this movie takes place in the Amazon, not Vietnam, and this ain’t exactly Apocalypse Now. I’m not saying that rape doesn’t happen everywhere, I’m just saying there doesn’t need to be gratuitous and pointless rape scenes. We know these dudes are bad cos they just killed about two dozen people, we get the point.

Anyway, in Miami, a pretty brunette lady with a possibly fake baby is getting off a plane. She arrives at an apartment, which is being staked out by cable news reporter Fran (Lisa Blount, of John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness) and her cameraman Mark (Leonard Mann). Sometime later, they decide to check out the apartment, and find that the place has been torn apart, there is blood everywhere, the men were killed, and the lady is naked, with her throat slit, and stakes through her shins. Amidst the aftermath, they do an on-the-scene report right there, before the cops come. Mark then accuses Fran of being too cavalier about what they just witnessed. I agree, but also think that Deodato gives way too much credit to American news media in his films. I don’t particularly believe that even a cable news network would be okay with shots of dead, brutalized, bloody, crow-ridden, and decaying bodies that this movie shows. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, I was just a kid when cable news networks came about in the 1980s, and I’ve only sporadically had cable in my life. I’d say that reporters barely even do stakeouts anymore, but then there’s the enduring popularity of Dateline NBC’s To Catch a Predator.

Fran takes a picture from the dead woman’s purse. She first takes it to her informant, a strip club owner and pimp played by Eriq LaSalle (of TV’s ER). After some research she finds that not only is their boss’ missing son is in the picture, there is also a man who was a Vietnam War veteran, and was believed to have died in the Jonestown Massacre and was a right-hand man to Jim Jones. Her bosses, one of whom is played by Karen Black, approve her idea that she and Mark fly down to the Amazon to find the son and interview Horne, the presumed dead fellow.

Back to the Amazon, where we find the son, whose name is Tommy, and another man being chased through the woods. The son is played by none other than Willie Aames. Formerly of Charles in Charge, Zapped!, and currently of the Trinity Broadcasting Network’s Bible Man, a children’s show about…well, I’ve never quite figured it out. He fights demons and quotes the Bible a lot, all on an extremely low budget. I inexplicably get this channel for no reason. As punishment for not being able to afford cable I guess. Another 1980s teen heartthrob, Kirk Cameron also has a show on TBN, and along with his Australian, Sonny Bono-lookin’ co-host, is constantly telling people that they’re going to hell. But I digress. The Latino man is shot and killed, and Tommy is told to “Thank God you’re white” and is dragged back to camp, where he gets kicked a lot. He cries to his only friend Ana and says he will never stop trying to escape, and he’d rather be dead than work for this other drug runner (again, I didn’t pick up on this until the second viewing). Ana figures out a way that they can possibly escape, with the arrival of the plane that is coming that night. Guess who. A delivery comes in via plane a few moments later. Manuel, the man who brought the delivery, is allowed to rape Ana as partial payment. Ana, who has given up hope of ever getting away and was a woman who got dragged into this by her now-dead boyfriend, just looks hopeless and bored, and Tommy peeks in at one point and looks defenseless, cos he kind of sucks. After it’s over, Ana takes a shower and ol’ Tommy comes in looking apologetic. He somewhat convinces her to escape with him. While I’ll admit he’s pretty good at expressing anguish on his face, Aames’ overly earnest line delivery makes Luke Skywalker seem edgy. He is by far the worst actor in this movie.

But alas, before the plane with Fran and Mark lands that night, whilst Ana and Tommy are lighting the runway with barrel torches, the camp is attacked by Michael Berryman and the gang again. Ana and Tommy are separated in the attack, and the pilot of Fran and Mark’s plane is killed upon their landing. Of course, the crazy troopers that they are, Fran and Mark report on the aftermath and carnage the next morning, after spending the night in the woods not sleeping. They soon come across Ana. Tommy, wandering through the woods comes across his boss, tied from all limbs, and he is begging to be shot. Instead of granting his wish immediately, he waits until the boss is torn in half and is probably already dead to shoot him. Yes, this is the really gory part that got cut out and is the only piece that couldn’t be remastered. Most of the gore in this movie comes from the at least four or five beheadings I counted. And they came out looking pretty cheesy.

Fran, Mark, and Ana make their way downriver. They make another report. One of them is killed. They find Tommy, and make an attempt to rowboat to the next safe village, and are caught by the Berryman troops, who are being led by Horne. They do not know that Tommy’s dad has met up with Eriq LaSalle’s character to figure out what village they are at. His dad calls in some brigade that he meets up with once he gets to the Amazon. They soon find where his son and everyone else are being held. Horne reluctantly and bizarrely agrees to give an interview, after berating Fran for bringing the modern world and all this chaos to him and his people, which is what they were trying to escape. He agrees to the interview, but tells his right-hand man that they will be burning down the village and leaving it in the morning after killing the trio of survivors. For some odd reason, he does something totally different, and it all goes downhill from there for the cult leader and his group.

Yes, cult leader. This was something else that I didn’t catch until the second viewing. There wasn’t really any great sign of it until Horne makes his great speech, which is maybe a third of the length of any given speech that Colonel Kurtz gives in Apocalypse Now. Horne is barely seen for much of the movie. The first time I sort-of watched this, after Deodato’s intro that implied that maybe this was like Cannibal Holocaust, I questioned why all these native people were following these white men around. It’s not until our trio of final protagonists arrives to the island that it is shown that not only does he have Amazon natives as followers, but regular Latinos, and a few white people as well. They’re a purity cult of some sort. I’m not sure if I would’ve caught all this and the fact that the two groups in the beginning were drug dealers even if I watched it seriously the first time. I could blame it on holiday stress, but the fact of the matter is that this movie was completely unclear in its story and motives most of the time. Interviews in the extras reveal that the film had three competing visions – Deodato’s, the writers, and the producers. There is no clear indication that Horne was extremely charismatic or convincing, and his character is given very little screen time to convince me otherwise. The reason why I don’t know anymore than four or five characters names is that it seemed like the other characters didn’t have one. Most of the performances in this movie were uniformly dull and lacked any personality, save for Karen Black in her minor role, and Eriq LaSalle, although I couldn’t help but think of various scenes from Hollywood Shuffle whenever he was on screen. Yeah, I think this movie is kind of racist and sexist.

And I don’t understand the casting of Willie Aames at all really. There had to have been some better young male actor from minor films or TV for this role, someone with more talent, and better looking. I’ve been racking my brain, but I can’t think of anyone. Granted, this movie originally came out when I was 4 years old, so my memory of popular young TV actors from the early 1980s is limited at best.

Cut and Run isn’t a completely bad way to spend 90 minutes, but I can’t wholeheartedly recommend this movie. Anchor Bay did a bang-up job with remastering the film and it does have a catchy score by Claudio Simonetti and some beautiful shots of scenery to add to the plus column. But the rape scenes are just gratuitous and pointless, there’s kind of a ridiculous amount of racism even if one goes past LaSalle’s character, and I just can’t fully recommend it in good conscience. This type of movie is probably a breeze for your average Italian exploitation movie fan, especially if you turn your brain off, and while I’m kind of used to it myself, there are various European or Italian horror or exploitation films I can’t totally support without calling bullshit on some of the typical things they portray.

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