EricJ

Ah, the ever-quirky Jeffrey Combs--Stuart Gordon should have given half his paycheck to Combs, for singlehandedly making most of his movies cult-classics. (While not a Stuart Gordon pic, he's also surprisingly quirky-cult good as a Sorcerer Sub-Prime in Doctor Mordrid (1992), the same producer's strangely watchable low-rent DIY attempt to knock off Doctor Strange, during the cheapo 90's Marvel Curse days when Roger Corman was trying to do "Fantastic Four" and Golan/Globus was trying to do "Captain America": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42xdx4MZALQ ) And, of course, what would Star Trek: Enterprise and Deep Space Nine be without a strong creepily oddball dose of Jeffrey Combs complex-villain quirkiness?:

When Charles Band's Empire Pictures became "Full Moon Pictures", they lost a lot of their old VHS-store cool, but Stuart Gordon was always one of the classy B-movie surprises of the studio. (Who also made "Dolls", "The Pit & the Pendulum" and "RobotJox" surprisingly more watchable than they should have been.) Re-Animator and From Beyond were meant to be part of an H.P. Lovecraft "trilogy", but a version of "A Shadow Over Innsmouth" eventually fell through in budget/development heck. Eventually, it was picked up by a foreign company fifteen years later, and finished as Dagon (2001), also with a bit of Gordon/Lovecraft cool. A search on Amazon and Tubi should find it without difficulty.

Actually, that's not too far off: Story was, Walt was still struggling with P.L. Travers over the rights to save Mr. Banks, and wanted another whimsical Mary Norton English fantasy as backup, in case Travers' negotiations fell through. He had the Shermans write a few songs for Norton's book just in case, and as story goes, Walt liked what he heard, but was so busy, he fell asleep during the song session. The idea of this movie being a "replacement Poppins" was not lost on Ron Miller, when they had to dig up old memos during the 70's "What would Walt do?" phase--Originally, according to Richard Sherman, when the group is on the animal island, they were supposed to trick "King Leonidas" out of his amulet by putting on a music-hall show (with Tomlinson doing bad magic, the kids doing bad comedy, and Lansbury stealing the show with a music-hall song). But, "Jungle Book" was coin-of-the-realm at the Miller studio, and we got a wacky jungle-animal soccer game, instead.

I would consider that a minor complaint, compared to making Romeo's wisecracking buddy Mercutio a drug-popping party-monster black drag queen...

A search for part-time Lockdown activities has me responding to Trump meltdown-Tweets as a sort of daily MST3K Sudoku Challenge: When he responded to one latest supposed FBI "revelation" about Obamagate, he reposted the Tweet with simply "It's about time!" To which I challenge any human being of a certain age not to respond with "It's about Space! About strange people in the strangest place!" 😅

Can't beat Gene Hackman from Unforgiven (1992): "I don't deserve this...I was building a house!"

If you can find the PG-13 Theatrical cut on "snapper" DVD at the library, rent it, as it's still one of the great Oscar classics of the 80's....Or, at least, was. But Warner seems to have permanently replaced it on Blu and streaming with the R-rated "Director's Cut" (which Milos Forman hated, btw), which, although it adds more speeches for F. Murray Abraham, and an entirely cut subplot for Kenneth MacMillan, also had a jarring nude scene for Elizabeth Berridge that would've completely changed the tone of a pivotal scene in the movie, before Forman shaved the scene back to its point in the TC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUqMFHcJeKc (Screenwriter Peter Schaffer wanted Catholic sexual repression to be Abraham's psychological demon, while Forman wanted to stick to the play's idea of musical jealousy.)

We KNEW something was going on in Frostbite Falls!

Unfortunately, I'm not sure you even CAN buy the "Un-ruined" Theatrical Cut of Amadeus (1984) on video anymore, let alone DVD... And '95 would not apply to the funnier HK Chinese version of Stephen Chow's screwball Shaolin Soccer (2001), which had a few of its more idiosyncratic gags cut for time when Miramax went on its late-90's spree for hacking HK films for US dubs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua1tMm0K0W0

Tom Sawyer was autobiographical for Mark Twain, but he said he also wrote it in reaction to the moralizing book-of-virtues "sermon books" kids had to read in school, about the bad ends mischievous boys come to. Which he also occasionally parodied less subtly: https://twain.lib.virginia.edu/tomsawye/mtbadboy.html 😄

Not really, since before wartime, most were in the cities or very small towns, and those in the cities had "street gangs" of young hooligans. It wasn't until after the war that everyone moved to new housing in the suburbs, and tried to put political thoughts behind them with domestic prosperity, that caused all the kids to become restless and unfulfilled with the consumerist status quo. Oh, and those darn comic books, of course. But the films? Oh, that was the anti-trust SCOTUS decision of 1948, that forbid studios like MGM and Paramount from owning their own theaters, which left a lot of now-independent theaters--and Drive-ins, now that every teen in shop class had a cheap used car from the 30's--looking for something to show. And a new exploitation market with more theaters to show their forbidden-fruit, and a new demographic audience with money to pay for it. Parent-issues aside, RWAC seems like it wanted to turn Lindler's case into a self-destructive drama about drag-racing teens, but Dean's overacting performance made it about teens feeling all messed up inside!

Just slightly off the subject: Every time Trump--apropos of nothing except what's bothering his poor widdle head in the middle of the night--Tweets simply "OBAMAGATE!!", I can't help it: My naturally crossword-puzzle instinct for anagrams has no choice but to respond...."A BAG O' MEAT!!" 😅 (Posted with the helpful graphic of the grocer's butcher-shop special.)

Yep--Probably because 00's movies have so much money at stake for their corporate parents, they have to be slick! And important! And demographically balanced! And afraid of offending any possible audience who might not buy $10 tickets or even, gasp, laugh at their expensive stars and CGI FX. So, if the 00's Total Recall becomes a trip to China instead of a trip to Mars, or if Chucky in the '19 Child's Play has to be an Internet-connected smart-toy who was deliberately mis-programmed by a disgruntled Chinese factory employee, or the new Rollerball has to have our teen rollerblading hero fight for freedom against a Russian gangster's pirate-satellite broadcast, or if the dad in the 00's Amityville Horror has to keep launching into strobe/flash-edited artsy-montage visions of demons, or the new Medusa in the '10 Clash of the Titans has to be attractive, because that was the original story, hey, it's a new interpretation.

Try watching the 00's/10's remakes of Footloose, Fame, Total Recall and Rollerball, and get back to me.

One example of what the OP was talking about: In the Farrelly Bros' The Three Stooges (2012) pastiche, the Farrellys--who, only fifteen years before were selling themselves as the troublemaking shockster-kings of outrageously un-PC comedy with "There's Something About Mary"--had to add a PSA disclaimer scene on the end, telling kids that the original Moe never really poked Larry and Curly in the eyes, they just poked each other's eyebrows, and sound FX did the rest...So don't do this at home, kids! (And always be careful with your zipper, when dressing!) My first thought reading the headline was: Why do we love 70's and 80's movies so much? Because back then, movies that didn't cost as much to make and had to play theaters had the freedom to sell themselves to only one audience that knew what they were paying for, like teen musicals, horror or kids' movies, and didn't have corporate boardrooms worrying about inserting the Black character, the Chinese overseas-boxoffice character or the Empowered Female Kickass character, to be all things to all paying audiences, and trying to plant hints to establish a running franchise.

It's Josh Trank, the "wunderkind" indie director last promoted to direct the 2014 F4ntastic Four...'Nuff said. According to interviews--no joke--he said he got the idea for Capone in Retirement after a year or two of sitting around without work. Yeah, Capone having gone syphilis-mad in his later post-jail years is a established historical fact, and that was Trank's main interest in the movie. Interesting topic, but I'd rather see a real director do it. And if ANYONE could play Crazy Older Capone, it would be Robert DeNiro as the scarily Trump-like media-gangster, who knew how to play his Prohibition-era cult popularity to the reporters, in The Untouchables (1987): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y85IfoN19Ug You don't think anyone would even want to do another version after DeNiro retired the jersey. 😮

Oliver Reed always struck me as a sloshed, paycheck-grumpy sadist/bully (even when he tried to play "good" in Burnt Offerings), but his restrained final role in Gladiator (2000) redeemed the entire mess of a movie: And Charlton Heston, also at the end, redeemed an entire career of 70's overacting and NRA bat-assery by reminding us what he was good at in the early days--Doing Shakespeare in the Kenneth Branagh Hamlet (1996), and wiping all the other part-time Shakespeareans off the screen:

On a "We miss Obama!" Twitter discussion--about how at least ONE president knew how to be classy, nationally beloved, and prepare competently for a disease outbreak--I was joking about the fact that Grover Cleveland managed to demonstrate that a US president can be elected for two non-consecutive terms, especially if his successor in the middle screws up. (Not sure if the Constitution's since changed that, but...) However, I don't know how many would have remembered "Let's put it over, with Grover..."

"After the funeral, they didn't have enough money left for a tombstone, so they just left his head out." - Benny Hill.

On the news, or TV, you may have noticed the new Pandemic-era business "handshake" for those without gloves or sanitizers is to bump fully-clothed elbows, at a respectable social distance: We can credit this discovery to the fine work accidentally pioneered by Dr. Frederic Frahnkensteen and his fiancé...Taffeta, darling!

Oh, you'll find plenty of defenses of Ishtar and Heaven's Gate, mostly by people who never saw them in the theater--Just like you'll find defenses of Howard the Duck, Supergirl, Spies Like Us, Big Trouble in Little China, and other 80's flops whose defenders are divided between those who saw them in the theater when they were very, very young, or those who never did. I saw Ishtar in theaters in high school, when I was old enough to sense how much long, protracted physical pain this movie was (except for the improvised "auction", where they let Beatty and Hoffman actually do something funny). Not every 80's flop was Clue or The Thing.

THINK SO?? (Possibly, because, y'see, Mel possesses an actual sense of humor...) And to think "Bustin' Loose" made less money... Still, makes you want to consider a "Was 1981 an even BETTER year for 80's movies than 1982?" debate topic.

I could tell Brooks was desperately trying to make Blazing Saddles happen again, with a hornee Madeleine Kahn and a mispronounced Harvey Korman, but I sat there with jaw dropped at how Brooks could try twice as desperately and make the same R-rated doity-woids humor clunk like lead. (And let's not count the opening caveman scene that would make even most junior-high kids shake their heads and facepalm...) And yeah, Siskel pretty much nailed it with "Sour"--Even Saddles had a little old-movie-buff joy to its corny jokes. However, it is worth pointing out that the "Men in Tights" song from Robin Hood: Men in Tights is just a rewritten version of "Jews in Space": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YrzBKuv5aA I just don't want to run into Florida Man. He might try to sic his pet alligator on me, and get eaten instead.

I take it that's a The Seven Year Itch in-reference?