Flying Down to Rio

Flying Down to Rio

United States - 1933

Director - Thornton Freeland

Turner Home Entertainment, 1990, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 29 minutes

Last Chance Detectives

Last Chance Detectives: Mystery Lights of Navajo Mesa

United States -  1994

Director - Steven Styles

Leucadia Family Films, 1994, VHS

Run Time - 50 minutes

Great cover art by "Rodriguez". It looks like s/he did the art for several of the other videos or books though I can't confirm it with any of the images I found.

Half of the Action

Half of the Action

a.k.a. - Last Man Standing

Canada - 1987

Director - Damian Lee

VCII Home Entertainment, 1988, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 36 minutes

We recently heard from Canadian producer/director Damian Lee with another boxing movie, 1986's Busted Up. This entry came the following year and followed the same generic plot outline. I wish I could say more but the tape I have is dysfunctional. About a third of the way through the picture and audio disappear completely. The tape keeps on playing, but there's no content.

I have however noticed the distributor is one VCII, my favorite vintage VHS company. The logo is different though and so is the full name. Instead of VCII Incorporated we have "Home Video." My guess is that the VCX parent company had dropped VCII by this time and someone else picked it up under a slightly different name. Clearly VCX didn't get rid of their licenses. Now some 30 years later they're re-releasing them on DVD under the Code Red label.

Lethal Weapon

Lethal Weapon

United States - 1987

Director - Richard Donner

Warner Home Video, 1987, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 50 minutes

I've been working on an essay about buddy cops and watching a lot of movies that fit the mold. I decided to post this because it's the first VHS release of this iconic entry in the genre, and it also features another movie trope I'm interested in exploring, the 'Nam Vet.

Lunch Wagon

Lunch Wagon

United States - 1981

Director - Ernest Pintoff

Media Home Entertainment, 1982, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 28 minutes
`

In the metropolitan areas of the United States, the food truck has now become ubiquitous. The taco truck was probably the first contemporary incarnation, but you can find just about anything these days. A few blocks from my apartment in Seattle, in the parking lot of a gas station/convenience store you can get fresh sushi, while a little further down the same street, Haitian Creole is available. Although they’ve been around practically forever, this level of cultural variety is a relatively recent development. I cannot of course speak for anywhere else, but virtually all of these rolling establishments seem to have appeared in the last 10 years, most in the last five. Talk all the nonsensical ignorant trash you want about immigration, but even bigots love a curry.

Presumably intended to be just as exotic as the smorgasbord of international options now available from food trucks, Lunch Wagon unfortunately comes from an era when, as its name implies, the typical vehicular dining establishment offered a much more banal culinary experience, like hot dogs and burgers. It is also, again one can only assume, supposed to be more titillating than the average food truck of today* since its owners are two scantily clad and buxom young women (prominently advertised on the box as former playmates Pamela Bryant and Roseanne Katon.) Unfortunately both the exotic and titillating spins on the food truck premise, which might under other circumstances actually work really well together, are afterthoughts. The truck itself, painted pink and named the “Love Bites,” plays only a peripheral role in the film, serving predominantly as a vehicle (literal and figurative) for a septic stew of lounge-act comedy.

A thrilling surprise cameo by Evel Kneivel pinball!

Move it Proles!

After inheriting their lunch wagon from Dick van Patten, our two leads recruit a sexy cook and begin selling food to construction workers. By parking over a particular manhole cover however, they run afoul of a swanky white-collar criminal type who is using said manhole to gain access to a bank. With the help of freshly landed (color coordinated) boyfriends, the female trio manage to foil not only that dastardly plan but another, less dastardly but no less annoying plan by another set of cloying “comedians.”Snagged on the undercarriage of this heretofore thrilling ordeal and dragged along like week-old road kill is yet another tangentical story, this one a talent show which goes on for days and days and is notable only for an early appearance of Missing Persons whom repeatedly perform their song Mental Hopscotch.

It’s an apt metaphor for a film that jumps all over the place yet somehow still lands on a conclusion. Using a food truck as the crux of your film is clearly not a lucrative source of material. As Wheels on Meals, the only other film with a foundational food-truck demonstrates, some other element is critical (in that case incomparable kung fu.) Instead, Lunch Wagon takes its cue Loose Shoes style, from the trashy and titillating exploitation trailers that are entertaining when compressed into 3 minutes, but stretched to feature-length become a chore.

Yes, it's that good.

*Here in Washington State there are a number of drive-up coffee joints that “offer” young women in lingerie or bikinis making the coffee. I suspect these exist elsewhere in the country as well. However, the interior of food trucks in my experience are not typically attractive, sexually or otherwise. 

McGee and Me!: Skate Expectations

McGee and Me!: Skate Expectations

United States - 1990

Director - Chuck Bowman

Focus on the Family, 1990, VHS

Run Time - 30 minutes

Mary Kate & Ashley's Sleepover Party

You're Invited to Mary Kate and Ashley's Sleepover Party

United States - 1995

Dualstar Video (Warner), 1995, VHS

Run Time - 30 minutes

To those who have not experienced it, the 90's had a flavor the protected will never know.

G.I. Joe: The Movie

G.I. Joe The Movie

United States - 1987

Director - Don Jurwich

Celebrity Home Entertainment, 1995, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 33 minutes

The Barbarian

El Barbaro (The Barbarian)
a.k.a. Conquest

Italy, 1982

Director - Lucio Fulci

Platino Video, 1995, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 28 minutes

Here's an interesting one as far as distribution goes. Video Treasures circulated this tape although under the above Platino Video name, ( think "Latino") which also bears Mexican Home Video label in the bottom right corner. Funny though, the last is written in English...
In any case, Conquest, or "The Barbarian" as it is titled here, was filmed in Mexico, presaging Deathstalker 3 by 5 years or so.

Rental Store - Video Vertigo

Video Vertigo was a fairly recent, and fairly short lived store in Seattle that once carried the 1989 VHS version of the 1988 film Pumpkinhead.

Apocalypse

Apocalypse

Canada - 1998

Director - Peter Gerretsen

PPI Films, 1998, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 34 Minutes

Harking back to the fine Evangelical video prostheltization of films like my personal favorite, Years of the Beast, Apocalypse offers up Canadian flavored Tribulation. This early entry in the episodic Christploitation empire slowly accumulating like spent shell-casing around the feet of French-Canadian producer Peter Lalonde "deserves capital punishment" according to one reviewer. Later films started accumulating washed-up (read "born-again") stars like plaque, but Apocalypse features awesomely named lead character "Bronson Pearl" easily making it the "must see Christian movie of the nineties!"

Marjoe

Marjoe

United States – 1971

 Director – Sarah Kernochan and Howard Smith

RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video, 1983, VHS

Run Time – 1 hour, 25 minutes

The first impression one gets while watching Marjoe – the man, not the movie- is that you’re being conned. Marjoe the film is about the man of the same name, Marjoe Gortner, whom I was introduced to, as I suspect most people within ten or so years on either side of 30 who watch movies were, by way of Starcrash. He was in a few other choice exploitation films of the late 70’s, but the Luigi Cozzi Star Wars rip off is probably his greatest work (and Cozzi’s.) Before he entered low budget cinema however, Gortner was a Pentacostal revival preacher from the age of four.

The difficulty, if it can be called that, for it is something more akin to suspicion and contagion, is in deciphering which of Gortner’s personalities is real; the speaking in tounges version, or the turned on tie-dye version, for each seems equally genuine. True, it’s unlikely that many of us has been to a revival the likes of those seen in Marjoe, but they bear a striking resemblance to the stories, and if the conviction and feeling of the attendees is anything to go on, Gortner is both effective and affective. Gortner is as convincing in his spasmic and gesticulating Haleilujah’s as he is counting the cash afterwards and explaining the intricacies of the faith healing scam to the documentary crew. Therein lies what I suspect is the convincing factor for so many fans of Marjoe (The Academy deemed it Best Documentary, 1972); its protagonists bizarre lack of duality. There is no difference outside context.

Gortner is not at one time a preacher and at another a hippie, but at all times Marjoe. To me this is what reveals the great lie in religion, for the pious man, the mouthpiece of God, the very conduit of the Holy Spirit (and thus the source of experiential faith) is merely a skilled and practiced (and it appears, weary) man at a job. He preaches because he knows how and it is lucrative, called to it as much as a plumber is “called” to fit pipe. The devout need him to confirm their faith in God as much as his long-haired pals need him to confirm their belief that it’s a sham. And of course, Gortner needs Marjoe in order to prove that he has a moral soul. It is fortunate for us, and I assume for Gortner that he can see and point to the difference between truth and fiction. It’s even more so to those like myself who are unbelievers, that Marjoe (the man and the movie) doesn’t clearly distinguish between the two because to do otherwise would be to rely on a common, but false dichotomy. Whether or not religion or science can be empirically proven is, for most of us, irrelevant. Each exists primarily to affirm through varying methods, our desires rather than any objective reality.

 We're gonna save this here pup, show him the kingdom of the almighty and bring him to Jesus!

Image 2 from MOMA
Image 3 from Jarrett's Blog
Image 4 from Awkwardboyhero