We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
BULLIES (1986)
For more than thirty-five years, I have been haunted by images I saw in a movie that my older brother was watching one day in the late 1980s. I didn’t know the title of the movie, the actors, no information that could easily lead me back to it. But I remembered a scenario. A father is being held captive in a villain’s stronghold, some kind of compound that resembled a junkyard with a water tower in it. A son raids the compound to rescue his dad – and during the action sequence, a gun-wielding bad guy goes up on the water tower, which our hero brings crashing down. We think that’s it for that particular bad guy... but then he pops up for one last moment of violence at the end, with debris sticking out of his face. All of this stuck with me. But when I wanted to go back and watch the movie again in the ‘90s, I didn’t know how to find it. I didn’t know what it was, and my brother didn’t remember, either. I went through the entire action and thriller sections of a massive book of movie reviews, reading the plot descriptions in an effort to find the movie. I didn’t find it. I made posts online describing what I remembered from the movie. Nobody knew what it was.
Now, thanks to Joe Bob Briggs, I finally know what that movie was. It was a thriller called Bullies, from Prom Night and Humongous director Paul Lynch – and I have finally seen it again. I was led back to it because I’ve been going through the Joe Bob archives, and he hosted the movie on his The Movie Channel show back on December 23, 1988. (Which is not the date when I saw it, because my family didn't have The Movie Channel at that time.)
I had no idea Bullies was the movie I had spent decades wondering about when I put it on, but I was intrigued because, as I said, it was a thriller from the director of Prom Night and Humongous. Unfortunately, I can’t say I was particularly impressed by the film for the majority of its 96 minute running time. It has an interesting set-up, but never manages to be as engaging as it could have been.
The story crafted by John Sheppard and Bryan McCann begins with an elderly couple being run off the road and killed by a group of small town rednecks. Their nephew Clay Morris (Stephen Hunter) inherits their home and the local market they owned, so he moves to this small town with his new wife Jenny (Janet Laine Green) and teen stepson Matt (Jonathan Crombie), who has taken Clay’s last name along with his mom despite the fact that he and Clay don’t have much of a connection at all. It doesn’t take them long to run afoul of those rednecks, the Cullen family – who are quite wealthy, having sold property to a ski resort, but you couldn’t tell it from the way they live. The men of the Cullen family – Bill Croft as Ben, Bernie Coulson as Jimmy, Adrien Dorval as Judd, and William Nunn as Jonah – are indeed bullies who like to spend their days giving the locals a hard time.
While the Morris and Cullen families are becoming enemies, Matt finds a mentor in Will Crow (Dehl Berti), a Native American who teaches him not only to spearfish but also throw spears. There is payoff to all of this, but not as much as you might expect. Matt also finds a love interest... and it’s the worst one possible, because it’s Becky Cullen (Olivia d’Abo), the only non-bully member of the Cullen clan. Which causes even more trouble between the two families.
Eventually, Jenny is assaulted in the Morris home, and things don’t go well for Clay when he goes out for revenge. He ends up being held captive – so Matt has to infiltrate the compound and save him. And as this climactic sequence played out, I started to wonder... is this the movie I’ve been looking for since the ‘80s? Pieces were fitting together. A father held captive. A son infiltrating a compound that resembles a junk yard to rescue him. If a water tower got involved, I would know... and then one of the Cullen jerks went up a ladder to a water tower. And Matt brought it down. Bullies was the movie I had been thinking about for years! Sure enough, the villain who came down with the water tower did pop up for one last violent moment – and this is where my memory and reality were two separate images. I had always remembered that this guy came back with a piece of metal sticking out of his nose. Instead, he comes back with a chunk of glass sticking out of his face. But, close enough for an image I glimpsed once (and it only lasts for a second or two) when I was a child thirty-five years ago.
Now that I’ve found Bullies and have a copy of it, it’s still not a movie I’m going to be watching regularly. But I probably won’t wait thirty-five years before I have another viewing of it.
Q: THE WINGED SERPENT (1982) – hosted by Joe Bob Briggs on The Last Drive-in
On the first episode of the weekly edition of the Shudder series The Last Drive-in with Joe Bob Briggs, legendary drive-in movie critic Joe Bob negatively compared the film C.H.U.D. to writer/director Larry Cohen’s Q: The Winged Serpent – so it’s quite fitting that on the second episode of the show, Joe Bob was able to show the movie he prefers over C.H.U.D. In fact, he describes Q as one of his favorite movies of all time, the best movie in history about a flying Aztec lizard, and one of the most original monsters flicks / police procedurals ever made. He also counts Cohen as one of his favorite directors, and the man had quite a career, working in the entertainment industry for several decades. Sadly, Cohen was no longer around by the time this episode aired, as it first reached Shudder on April 5, 2019, and Cohen had just passed away on March 23rd of that year. That’s why this episode ended up being dedicated to his memory.
Before Joe Bob gets around to introducing the movie, he talks a bit about a courtesy move that everyone should make when they go to the drive-in: if you show up late, turn off your headlights as you enter the lot so you don’t disturb the people watching the movie. He also does some complaining about ‘gluten free’ food items, gluten free enchiladas, and gluten-obsessed terrorists. Major “old man shakes his fist at the clouds” vibes. Then we can get on with the movie, which Joe Bob gives a perfect rating of 4 stars.
The winged serpent in the film is Quetzalcoatl, an Aztec god that has resurfaced in 1980s New York City, drawn there by worshipers that are willingly offering themselves up to the deity. Now Q is nesting in the top of the Chrysler Building and flying around the city, snatching up people it finds up in its territory, like construction workers, rooftop sunbathers, and the window washer at the Empire State Building.
Q is a fun movie with some cool special effects and a great cast, including Michael Moriarty (who carries a scene that happens to be one of Joe Bob’s favorite scenes in the history of the world), David Carradine, and Richard Roundtree. During his hosting segments, Joe Bob mentions that Larry Cohen movies are instantly recognizable due to the look and feel of them, as well as the dialogue. He names It’s Alive as his second favorite Cohen flick and says he likes the filmmaker’s work so much because a Cohen movie is never boring, he always keeps things eventful. He drops in some trivia about the cast, like the fact that Cohen went on to work with Moriarty several more times (on The Stuff, A Return to Salem’s Lot, It’s Alive 3, and Masters of Horror: Pick Me Up), the window cleaner that gets chomped at the beginning was actually the window cleaner at the Empire State building, and Cohen and Carradine were Army buddies. Carradine agreed to be in this film before he knew it was a monster movie, and wasn’t thrilled to find out he was going to be facing off with a giant creature. He loves that Cohen was from the Bronx, so he knew how to shoot New York, back in a time when the city was grittier and more photogenic.
Cohen had been gearing up to direct a movie called I, the Jury, but he ran into issues and dropped out of that film. Still wanting to give the crew he had hired something to work on, he wrote Q in six days and they proceeded to shoot the movie in two weeks. When we see characters firing weapons at the top of the Chrysler Building, the actors actually were firing blanks at the top of the building, with spent shells showering down on the people walking on the sidewalks below. Cohen didn’t hire the effects artists who created the monster until after the film was in the can; they had to drop the thing into footage that had already been shot.
Joe Bob celebrates the great writing, the great acting, and the fact that Cohen took an idea that was not credible and made it credible. He wishes there had been a sequel... but there never was. Instead, we got C.H.U.D., the 1998 Godzilla, and the South Korean movie The Host, all of which Joe Bob considers to be rip-offs of Q.
After the movie, Darcy the Mail Girl brings over some viewer mail that strikes up a conversation about Houston, Texas cheerleaders, a barbecue bikini pool party, a fired cheer coach, and the fact that Darcy went to a Carolina Panthers cheer clinic.
SOCIETY (1989) – hosted by Joe Bob Briggs on The Last Drive-in
Joe Bob showed Q: The Winged Serpent in a double feature with the absolute insanity that is known as Society – or, as Joe Bob calls it, one of the best movies ever made about disgusting, filthy rich people having sex orgies in Beverly Hills and the best movie ever made about carnivorous, underground sex cults disguised as nuclear families and lawyers. It’s another film that gets a perfect, 4 star rating from him. Directed by Brian Yuzna from a screenplay by his Bride of Re-Animator collaborators Rick Fry and Woody Keith, Society centers on Beverly Hills high schooler Billy Whitney (played by Billy Warlock), who fears that the people around him are not who or what they seem... and he’s very right to be afraid, because the people around him are up to some weird stuff.
Darcy has been to the Playboy Mansion and has attended parties at the FeldMansion (that’s Corey Feldman’s place), and not even she has seen this sort of stuff in real life. Joe Bob believes Society is underrated – but even though it didn’t make any impact in the United States when it was released, it’s apparently worshipped as a work of art in Europe. Joe Bob felt they needed to show the movie because America was going through another of its Puritan phases, and they needed to put a screening out Society out there to shake things up.
Of course, the movie can only get rolling after Joe Bob goes on a rant that’s inspired by the fact that Under Armour didn’t want their employees charging their strip club business lunches on their corporate credit card. Joe Bob was briefly involved in broadcast radio, so he’s aware that every important meeting was at a strip club. He knew female business women who were experts in closing deals at strip clubs – and while businesses may think such clubs are demeaning to women, the strippers working there would probably disagree. As far as Joe Bob is concerned, taking a client to a strip club is not that different from taking them to a Cirque du Soleil show.
During the movie, Joe Bob says Billy is one of the smarter horror protagonists we’ve ever seen. He gives some background on select cast members, like Billy Warlock, who’s the son of stuntman Dick Warlock and worked on soap operas and Baywatch; Devin DeVasquez, who was a Playboy Playmate, won Star Search, and dated Sylvester Stallone and Prince; and Heidi Kozak... and while Joe Bob acknowledges that Kozak was in Slumber Party Massacre II, he somehow fails to mention that she was in Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood. Warlock said he didn’t understand the plot while working on the movie, he didn’t know what was going on in the story, and when he brought this up to Yuzna, the director said it didn’t matter that he didn’t understand what was happening. Joe Bob goes over Yuzna’s career and says this was his rebound from missing out on being able to work on Honey, I Shrunk the Kids with his frequent collaborator Stuart Gordon and losing a Dan O’Bannon project called The Men. Since Yuzna worked with Clint Howard, there’s a tangent about Darcy’s love of Clint Howard. Joe Bob’s favorite Clint Howard movie is Evilspeak, Darcy’s is Ice Cream Man. Another piece of trivia is that writer Woody Keith grew up in Beverly Hills and based some of the characters on people he knew in real life, which is troubling. There’s some talk about filming locations, and Joe Bob rightfully names this movie as special effects artist Screaming Mad George’s masterpiece.
The double feature episode wraps up with a viewer mail question about Joe Bob’s books, all of which are out of print and really need to get a new run.
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