Happy Friday the 13th. If you’re the superstitious kind, you might want to avoid this list entirely, as I list thirteen random facts about “Friday the 13th.” Perhaps you might learn something new about your friendly neighborhood movie critic.
You might also be surprised to see how much of an influence “Friday the 13th” and Jason Voorhees has had on my life.
Marvel and Disney have brought movie fans far and wide some of the strong, bravest and most beautiful heroines in cinematic history. While Marvel has a pretty good track record with female heroes, the Cinematic Universe has slowly but surely introduced a long gallery of fantastic and complex bad asses, some of whom are cinematic creations, while others brought in to the flesh from the pages of the comics. These are five of my favorite beauties from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Did I miss any of your favorites? Continue reading
You have to give it to Lucille Ball. While there are countless stories about her latter years in show business and how much of a tyrant she was, she seemed to show a lot of respect for Carol Burnett. Burnett was prompted by network executives to build a big time television special. Burnett recruited Ball, who was more than happy to co-star. Burnett, an old school queen of comedy, shared the stage with Ball, another titan of comedy.
Though director Lamont Johnson’s “You’ll Like My Mother” is generally well received, I found it to be a mostly flat thriller with a lot of the attempted suspense lost in translation. “You’ll Like My Mother” is a mix of “Misery” and “Flowers in the Attic,” in where a young woman tries to reconcile with her dead husband’s family and gets much more than she bargained for. The late Patty Duke plays Fran, a very pregnant young woman who ventures in to Minnesota in the dead of winter to visit her husband’s family and perhaps make peace with them.
“Belladonna of Sadness” is an animation film from 1973 which had not been released in the US until now for multiple reasons, one most likely being due to the nudity and sex. The style of animation is reminiscent of watercolor paintings with a touch of 70s/80s anime. The film is a mix of painted images being panned across and moving parts which makes for mesmerizing visuals. The restoration looks fantastic and the attention to details put into it show the work thousand of hours spent on it brought in terms of colors, visuals, and feelings.
The consistent utterance of Dominique Swain’s character to herself of “Crap on a Cracker,” just about sums up Jim Wynorski’s latest turkey that mixes “Con Air” and “Tremor.” No doubt tailor made for airing on late night cable television, “Sharkansas Women’s Prison Massacre” is a goofy PG-13 crime thriller with a bunch of land roving sharks that apparently make their victims explode upon contact. This is the kind of movie cable television dreams of. It stars a host of gorgeous women, many of who scamper around in conveniently handy bikinis, and whose prison garb are short shorts and clinging tank tops. They also never actually have sex or drop F bombs.
Growing up in the nineties, I would watch cartoons all day long during the weekdays; hell I pulled seven hours at school and was a grade A TV junkie, so I watched a ton of television. During the cartoons, between the toy and candy commercials, there were about thirty anti-drug and alcohol PSA’s played between the hours of three and six. Hey, mock me all you want, but those PSA’s worked and worked well on me. It’s not enough that I always found the idea of drug use disgusting, but the PSA’s that would air on television scared me straight, just as they intended.