Older Gentleman robber in a new century

 THE GREY FOX (1982)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

A gentlemanly stagecoach robber, who never shot anyone during any hold up, went to jail and was released into a new century in 1901, and is trying to figure out his place in the world. Will it be as an oyster picker while staying with his sister and her disapproving husband? Probably not for long because if robbing people is all you know, then that is all there is. It is the excitement and thrill of being such a thief that encompasses the obstinate Bill Miner, a real-life train robber who became something of a folk hero. "The Grey Fox" is his story and it is one of the more elegant films about old-timers who should settle down; this Mr. Miner will do no such thing.

Richard Farnsworth, a gentlemanly actor in his own right with his trademark thick white mustache (who never cussed in a single film of his), is the old robber Bill Miner who is no codger or eccentric, and certainly not a grumpy man. He is a kind man who had a quite criminal past and can tell a stranger on a train that he is between jobs or, more accurately, that he used to rob stagecoaches. He doesn't flinch when telling the truth - he has a gleam in his eye and is merely trying to work through a revolutionary time in history. Stagecoaches have been replaced by steam trains and there are some new inventions out there like the motorcar and gizmos for peeling fruit. Horses still dominate small towns and when Bill heads for Canada, it seems the frontier west hasn't completely abandoned him - there are the aforementioned horses, mines, and general stores. There's also the nickelodeon which particularly excites him when he sees the silent film "The Great Train Robbery." Now, more than ever, he knows the rest of his days will involve train robbing. 

What is really wonderful about "The Grey Fox" (directed with complete confidence by Canadian director Philip Borsos) is that the film is as spirited about Miner's exploits as much as Miner is. This is not an elegiac look back at a criminal life nor is it a moralistic fable. It is a relaxed story told with simplicity. a leisured pace, and with a completely believable performance by Farnsworth who really looks he is from that era. Kudos to Jackie Burroughs as a feminist photographer who has an interest in opera and falls for Miner - one of the rare sweet adult relationships that feels completely genuine. Sean Sullivan provides solid support as a newspaper editor who has a certain history with Miner. It is really Farnsworth's movie all the way and he makes it poignant and sweet-natured. Every move, every sentence he utters, every twinkled smile he emits, and his recognition that he might head back to the slammer (but not for long) shows a history of the late 19th century and early 20th encapsulated in one person. An exceptional, exquisite classic.

Riffing on Pretty in Pink

 FRESH HORSES (1988)

Endured by Jerry Saravia

Just when you thought it was safe to see a cheesy romantic drama, or seemingly safe, we get one of those 1980's Ringwald movies post-"Pretty in Pink." Let's be honest: how awful could a film starring Andrew McCarthy, Molly Ringwald and Ben Stiller be? Answer: EXTREMELY. "Fresh Horses" is not unwatchable but it is tonally and visually insufferable. It is also much ado about absolutely nothing. 

Andrew McCarthy is Matt, an engineering Ohio college student who has an interest in roller coasters. I would like to have learned more about but all we get are a couple of scenes of him in front of a tiny desktop computer. He lives with his parents and is ready to marry his sweetheart (Chiara Peacock). Of course, we only sense this will be a problem because we have seen enough movies to know this guy envisions something other than this pre-planned existence. Ben Stiller is his best friend who takes him to some house in a backwoods area of Kentucky where an older guy plays pool and the woman who owns the house (Patti D'Arbanville) is just an owner, I guess, who likes to have people come around so she's not lonely? One of them is blonde-haired Jewel (Molly Ringwald) who says she is 20 years-old but she might actually be 16 and married to a scuzzbucket (Viggo Mortensen, believe it or not). 

Matt comes back to this house to see Jewel and they have sex. He loves her but you can't tell from McCarthy's minimal facial expressions (you could tell in "Pretty in Pink" in which he was in love with Ringwald). Matt cancels any future with his rich fiancee for a woman living, can we say it, on the wrong side of the tracks (this movie is practically a "Pretty in Pink" remake except it poorly mines Tennessee Williams' territory.) Southern Gothic it is not.

"Fresh Horses" is based on a two-act off-Broadway play by Larry Ketron (who wrote the screenplay), which definitely establishes Jewel as underage. In this movie, nothing is ever clear. She might be 16 but she says she's not, though friends of Jewel's husband suggests otherwise. The Kentucky house almost feels like a brothel and D'Arbanville could be a madam but it is not actually not that kind of house. When an older guy tells Matt he wants to bed Jewel, there is a fight and D'Arbanville is insulted by the mere suggestion. Hmmm, okay. The play was focused on the class system, the rich and the poor, yet all that evaporates in this movie ("Pretty in Pink" actually managed simple, perhaps archaic observations on the class system amidst its teen comedy-drama outline). Mostly we are saddled with Matt kissing those big Ringwald lips, sleeping with her in an abandoned railway station (part of the play's setting), arguing and bickering with Jewel back and forth, back and forth, and one major slap across the face. Not one moment is believable and the soundtrack has jazz saxophone music that so overwhelms every scene and every moment that all I could do was laugh. 

There was an elegance to the opening scenes of "Fresh Horses" with Stiller and McCarthy on a speedboat, and the mini-dissolves inside a house hosting an engagement party. Such elegance gives way to histrionic acting and pointless scenes of tossing marshmallows, White Castle dining and endless bickering all the way through - there are no simple conversations in this movie. I'll say this much for Ringwald's cinematic track record - it is not as mind-numbingly awful as "P.K. and the Kid."  

New recruits needed at Police Squad

 THE NAKED GUN (2025)

Or How I Wished They Dropped This Movie and did something else 

by Jerry Saravia

Heightened comic lunacy and chaos defines "The Naked Gun" movies. Hell, it defines the ZAZ (Zucker, Abraham, Zucker) comedy team who knew how to write endless jokes and visual puns based off of their knowledge of bad cinema, B movies and pop culture. The series was also defined by jokes coming at you left and right, from the foreground and the background. Sure, they were largely stupid jokes but there were also smart, clever ones that you didn't see coming. Whether it was the late Leslie Nielsen as the stupid Lt. Frank Drebin finding himself in an unrecognizable area of L.A. as he is narrating, or doing flips all around his apartment thinking someone broke in, or laughing outside a theater showing "Platoon", or mistaking a security officer for Robert De Niro, you knew that there was a sense of fun to it and you had to be fast to catch every gag. If you have seen the movies, then you know.

My main problem with the new "Naked Gun" is the casting of Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin's son - it doesn't register. Neeson can play it straight but he seems adrift in all this, and not in a justifiable, comically surefire way. He is too tall and imposing a presence. Years ago when this reboot was first floating around for a green light, the name Ed Helms came up and he would've been perfect. I certainly have no issue with Pamela Anderson being cast - she's a natural for this franchise - but she's not given enough to do. Underexposed is putting it politely. Still, I give credit where it's due and the winter log cabin getaway sequence that includes a homicidal Frosty the Snowman whom Anderson decapitates is the best joke in the film. 

Co-written by Dan Gregor, Doug Mand and Akiva Schaffer, this "Naked Gun" reboot has a few other chuckles along the way (the O.J. Simpson photo is hilarious, the "Mission: Impossible" set-up reference inside a studio is pretty damn funny, the endless coffee cups given to the detectives including when Drebin is driving made me smile) but it doesn't have enough fun with it. Some gags and one-liners are recycled from the original but it all lacks juice, a reason for being and there's no rollicking measure of anarchy. The villain played by Danny Huston is not enough of a baddie - he should be sneakily devious, deliciously evil (have we forgotten how good Ricardo Montalban was in the original? Practically a Bond villain type.) Even worse, the pacing and timing is off so that when a joke is supposed to fly, it sort of sits there and we know it has not landed. It should be faster-paced. It is no wonder that few have topped ZAZ's anarchic, spoofy humor in 40 years. Time to find new recruits at Police Squad.

Half a monster movie on the cutting room floor

 BAD MOON (1996)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

"Bad Moon" opens with severely grisly violence inside a tent where Ted and his girlfriend make love and are attacked by a werewolf. This werewolf tears her apart, killing her almost instantly, and Ted shoots it with a shotgun blowing its head off. This is terrain very far from the days of Henry Hull, Lon Chaney Jr. and it is actually closer in tone to "The Howling." Is "Bad Moon" near the quality of "The Howling" or even "An American Werewolf in London"? Most definitely not. It is a howlingly bad movie but it has undercurrents of potential that are not exploited.

Intense Michael Pare is Ted, more appropriately Uncle Ted, and he is living out of his Silver Bullet camper in the middle of the Pacific Northwest. Quick question: can anyone just live out of a camper anywhere in the woods without paying rent? Never mind. Ted calls his sister, Janet, an allegedly high-profile attorney (Mariel Hemingway), who loves her brother and invites him to stay at her home. Ted has a nephew (Mason Gamble) who loves werewolf movies! There is also a smart, alert German Shepherd named Thor (easily the best performer in the movie) who senses something animalistic in Ted. Ted had been bitten in the opening sequence and transforms into a werewolf whenever a full moon approaches. People are killed and torn apart and the blame goes to, are you ready for it, the German Shepherd. As the town sheriff says to Janet, when a dog has a taste for human blood, all bets are off and it is time to head to the pound.

The issues are tenfold with "Bad Moon." The atmosphere is almost right (though nocturnal scenes in the forest and at Janet's home are too brightly lit) and Pare and Hemingway are game for some character exploration. There's none. Our sympathies are aligned with the family and Ted yet Ted grows increasingly unsympathetic especially towards his main adversary, the dog. It is hard to fathom why Ted becomes somewhat mean - he doesn't quite relish becoming a werewolf and has handcuffs in the hopes of restraining himself. I just found it impossible to be on his side at all - his attitude becomes one of a serial killer. I almost gave up on the film when he waves at the dog who is taken to the pound.

"Bad Moon" is like a test reel of a movie, never fully fleshed out or shaped into anything resembling a movie. The sole werewolf transformation scene starts out well with practical makeup effects and then becomes silly with poor CGI effects. It is a monster movie that feels like half of it ended up on the cutting room floor. 

Perpetual anxiety underground

 EXIT 8 (2025)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Most people carry on their daily routine without thinking much about it. You march forward to your daily job by driving a car or taking the subway. What if you are stuck in a subway station and can't get out? Even worse, what if you keep repeatedly seeing the same path without ever getting to your exit? That is the endless nightmare of "Exit 8," a frequently terrifying film experience that proves to be unnerving and leaves you in a state of perpetual anxiety. 

Kazunari Ninomiya is The Lost Man, a young guy who listens to Ravel's Bolero on his phone while riding the subway, canceling the noise of a crying baby and the sole male passenger who is yelling at the mother holding the baby. After declining a couple of calls from his ex-girlfriend, she hits him with the news that she's pregnant. Our Lost Man has asthma and starts coughing as she asks him what to do. As he is walking through the subway corridor to Exit 8, he loses the phone signal and finds that the corridor is endless as he walks the same section of a corridor with the same wall ads that keep repeating. He sometimes sees an older ponytailed man walk right past him who doesn't acknowledge our confused young asthmatic. Sometimes the older man, known in the credits as the Walking Man (Yamato Kochi), appears and stands with a frozen smile looking at our Lost Man. As the Lost Man continues through the corridors, a set of instructions appear on the wall indicating that if there are any anomalies, he must turn back or he will never make it to Exit 8, the freedom exit from this nightmare.    

I cannot divulge much more about "Exit 8" (adapted from a Japanese video game by co-writer and director Genki Kawamura) because there are devilish surprises along the way. Sometimes the same corridor has unexplained anomalies like an upside down 8 on the exit sign, sometimes the lighting changes and, in one spookier-than-thou moment, the lights go out and slithering creatures can be heard and only barely seen. We also see a bunch of lockers and a photo booth along the same corridor and, in one of the scariest anomalies, a crying baby can be heard inside a locker! "Exit 8" is a sublimely thrilling exercise in terror, accentuated with humanity (a young boy frequently appears that leads to the Lost Man having benign visions of a potential future family enjoying the ocean) and with allusions to Japan's past real-life disasters (when you hear a siren at one point, you'll know immediately what it signifies). There is a fruitful morality to this tale that rises above just the frenetic experiment of pure anxiety. Make no mistake, though - if you already suffer from panic attacks or any deep anxiety, don't watch this powerful movie.  

Drive the fast car, chicks dig the car

 BLACK MOON RISING (1986)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

I should be grateful that Tommy Lee Jones' gruff demeanor did not allow him to become one of our major 1980's action heroes. On the other hand, he was the opposite of the testosterone-fueled mechanics of Schwarzenegger and Stallone and closer to the brains of a Bruce Willis-type as in "Die Hard." "Black Moon Rising" is technically more of a Michael Mann wannabe thriller like "Thief" except it is too silly and harebrained to be that. Still, Jones gives this semi-taciturn antihero a chance to be somewhat heroic and it is jolly good fun to see him try.

Tommy Lee Jones is Quint, a thief on the verge of retirement who's hired by the FBI to steal a computer disk containing vital information. Everything that can go wrong does go wrong as Quint faces some corporate minions led by Lee Ving - it is a performance that just screams EVIL with those arched eyebrows and you just know that this guy relishes violence for violence's sake. For some inexplicable reason that maybe co-writer John Carpenter is aware of, Quint is on the run from these guys and places the disk in the rear end of a supersonic car known as the Black Moon that runs at incredible speeds (a car that Buckaroo Banzai might have had a field day with)! This leads to Linda Hamilton as a master car thief working for a stolen car syndicate bigwig played with steely calmness by Robert Vaughn. The syndicate is of interest because it is inside one of two largely unoccupied skyscrapers. How will Quint get the disk when surveillance cameras are at every corner of the buildings? Will Hamilton's character who doesn't trust Vaughn assist Quint? Have you seen any movies before?

"Black Moon Rising" is an often thrilling muscle car movie with a fiery engine and a sheen to it - it is almost noirish in its deep shadows, and in some of its unsettling rooms and empty underground garages (Hamilton's home could use a little more lighting because I was afraid she was going trip over something). Although there were lost opportunities to explore some of the characters beyond cursory motivations, "Black Moon Rising" never stops for long before some high-grade action scene occurs. Quint gets into bloody bare knuckle fights, chases Hamilton who steals the Black Moon car, investigates the skyscraper's geography, climbs a suspended rope between the buildings, and always flashes his wide grin when he needs to. It is an unusual action entertainment that is nowhere near the level of  1981's "Thief" but I'll be damned if I didn't enjoy it.

Dead and Buried plot with a delightful dinner party

 ANOTHER STAKEOUT (1993)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

(Original review: 1993)

One of the few distinct pleasures of the original "Stakeout" was the finite comic timing and chemistry between Richard Dreyfuss and Emilio Estevez as cops more engaged in tomfoolery rather than gunfire. There were a lot of big laughs in the first film and some seriously violent business as well. "Another Stakeout" doesn't have enough fun with its premise of a stakeout, the Dreyfuss and Estevez chemistry is not fully exploited and the serious violent business of a a Mob witness on the run has been done to death.

Just watching the opening sequence involving an explosion filmed from a gazillion different angles (something directors Tony Scott or Michael Bay might have concocted) is enough to make one switch to another movie theater. Rosie O'Donnell always seemed miscast as a district attorney who is on a stakeout assignment with the two chatty Seattle cops, the white-haired Chris (Dreyfuss) and the mustachioed Bill (Estevez), at a lake house outside Seattle. It is breathtakingly beautiful scenery to be sure where everyone's homes have no curtains or shades (this should make for an easy stakeout). The house next door is where the Mob witness (thanklessly played by Cathy Moriarty) is hiding out. Meanwhile, we get unnecessary scenes of a cat chased by a dog (featuring an impossible point-of-view shot from the cat's anus!) and Miguel Ferrer as the most one-dimensional, generic hitman ever - why not just get any other actor to play the part instead of wasting Ferrer's time.

The dinner sequence involving Moriarty's friends, a handsome couple played by Marcia Strassman and Dennis Farina, is one for the books in terms of hilarious situations built out of bickering and bantering between O'Donnell and Dreyfuss. O'Donnell makes nauseating-looking hors d'oeuvres with penguin-shapes and an armadillo-shaped meatloaf with cereal flakes! Chris is supposed to pose as O'Donnell's husband and Bill is supposed to be their son. This whole sequence could've been built into a fiery comic engine with pratfalls and innuendoes galore. It doesn't last long until we are back to the old-hat, predictable to the core plot. There is also a scene involving Chris and Bill showing their badges to other police firing at them that is right out of "Beverly Hills Cop" and maybe even old episodes of "Car 54, Where Are You?"  

Less than 2/3 of "Another Stakeout" is enjoyable and sharply funny and the rest is mediocre claptrap. For devotees of the original "Stakeout," it is worth perusing. For others, been there one million times, done that two million more.