Worth Mentioning - And He's Off to the Rodeo

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.

The precursor to Dukes of Hazzard, an Oscar contender, action, and Stephen King.

MOONRUNNERS (1975)

The Dukes of Hazzard was a popular TV show that ran from 1979 into 1985, ending up at a total of seven seasons and 145 episodes, and not only is it still fondly remembered today, it has also received several follow-ups over the years, including a widely released theatrical feature that came along (and recast the characters) twenty years after the show went off the air. It's a show that I used to enjoy watching when I was a young kid, and one I'm revisiting now decades later... and while revisiting it, I discovered that there was a piece of Dukes history that I had previously been completely unaware of. The fact that the show's creator Gy Waldron based it on a movie he had written and directed earlier in the '70s.

That film is Moonrunners, and if you're familiar with The Dukes of Hazzard you'll notice that Waldron had several of the show's elements already in place when he made this movie, starting with the vocal presence of Waylon Jennings as the narrator / Balladeer who comments on events and introduces characters.

Kiel Martin and James Mitchum star as cousins Bobby Lee (named after General Robert E. Lee) and Grady Hagg, who run moonshine for their uncle Jesse (Arthur Hunnicutt) in a 1955 Chevy they refer to as Traveller, which was the name of General Lee's horse. On The Dukes of Hazzard, Bo and Luke Duke ran moonshine for their uncle Jesse in a 1969 Dodge they called The General Lee. The Haggs also go to a bar called the Boar's Nest, as the Dukes did, and have a buddy named Cooter. The Cooter here is played by Bill Gribble and is one of Grady's fellow stock car racers at the local track.

The Haggs are used to running into trouble, Bobby Lee is already in probation when the film begins and spends a month in jail for another offense during the first 10 minutes, but the trouble that the film centers on arises thanks to a competing moonshiner, bar and brothel owner Jake Rainey (George Ellis), who has ties to the mob and wants Jesse to either join up with him or get out of the moonshine business. The Hagg family has been in that business for over 200 years, they're not just going to quit now, even if they are up against Rainey, the mob, and the law. The law being represented by Sheriff Rosco Coltrane (Bruce Atkins), who is in Rainey's pocket.

In the midst of this, Bobby Lee also manages to find time to romance a new female acquaintance - Chris Forbes as Beth Ann Eubanks, first introduced leaning over to look under the hood of her car. This is a great moment, as the Balladeer describes Bobby Lee's situation. Just out of jail, he's walking down the side of the road and "He had 7 dollars in his pocket, a guitar, an apple, and he's free. Now, what else does he need?" The shot pulls back to show Beth Ann and her car. "And there it was."

Grady has sexual partners rather than love interests, and one of his regulars happens to be Rainey's wife Reba (Joan Blackman).

If you're a fan of The Dukes of Hazzard, this precursor is fun to watch, to see where that show began and to hear the Balladeer narrate an adventure that's similar to the sort the Dukes were getting up to all the time. It isn't the show that followed, but it's good in its own right. It also has a great down-home country feeling to it, and I enjoyed spending the running time soaking in that atmosphere.

And as you'd hope, as it should, it has multiple car chases in it.

RUNNING ON EMPTY (1988)

Director Sidney Lumet's Running on Empty was an awards contender when it was released in 1988, earning multiple Golden Globes nominations, a best screenplay Academy Awards nomination for writer Naomi Foner (mother of Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal), and a best supporting actor nomination for River Phoenix, the one time he was nominated for an Oscar during his too-short career. Despite all that, it's not a movie I've heard referenced much, if at all, over the years. I can kind of understand how it could fade away, as it's nothing spectacular or groundbreaking. But it is an interesting drama that's still well worth checking out thirty-one years after its release.

Phoenix plays Danny Pope, and the actors he's "supporting" are the ones playing his parents, Artie and Annie - actors I know primarily for their television work, Taxi's Judd Hirsch and Chicago Hope's Christine Lahti. By the time the film catches up with them, Artie and Annie have been on the run for almost 20 years, wanted by the FBI for bombing a napalm factory at the height of the Vietnam War and accidentally injuring a janitor who worked at the factory but wasn't supposed to be there when the bomb went off. For all these years Artie and Annie have been moving from town to town across the U.S. with Danny and their younger son Harry (Jonas Abry), never staying anywhere for too long before moving on to a different place and taking on new identities.

Problem is, Danny is now reaching the end of high school and his musical talent puts him in contention to Juilliard. Not only that, but he has fallen in love with a local girl named Lorna (Martha Plimpton, who really had been dating Phoenix for a few years at this point, ever since they were in The Mosquito Coast together). So Danny has some tough decisions to make - does he break away from his parents and try to build a life for himself, or does he remain trapped in the life he has always known, of constantly being on the run.

Phoenix earned his Oscar nomination with some strong emotional scenes (not quite as strong as the scenes he was given to work with in the earlier Stand by Me, but up there), and Hirsch and Lahti also did some great work in here.

At one point, a former associate of Artie and Annie's shows up to try to woo Annie away from her husband and talk Artie into robbing a bank with him, and when the credits rolled I was blown away to see that this weirdo character was played by L.M. Kit Carson, a Texas-based writer best known to me for being the man who wrote The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.

This was a very good movie, and I'm glad I finally watched it.

PEPPERMINT (2018)

When I first took notice of actress Jennifer Garner in movies and TV shows, she was an action star. She was the lead in the spy series Alias, which I watched every episode of, and on the big screen she was Marvel Comics character Elektra in both the Daredevil movie and her own solo film. Then Garner shifted gears, focusing so heavily on romantic comedies and family friendly projects that when she signed on to star in the revenge film Peppermint it momentarily seemed to be like an out-of-character choice... and then I remembered, Garner used to do action all the time. This was basically her returning to her roots.

Directed by Pierre Morel from a screenplay by Chad St. John, Peppermint is the umpteenth variation on Death Wish, with Garner playing Riley North, a suburban mom whose world crumbles when her husband and young daughter are killed by gang members in a drive-by shooting. This gang has bought itself some major connections, so the shooters escape justice and Riley has to take it upon herself to make sure the guilty are punished. After spending five years learning how to fight, she robs a gun store and goes on a mission of revenge, destroying the gang member by member and taking out some corrupt authority figures along the way.

The questionably titled Peppermint (why name the movie after the type of ice cream Riley's daughter had in hand when she was killed?) is as simple, straightforward, and predictable as it gets, which makes it a perfectly serviceable action flick. Garner gets to beat up some baddies and shoot a whole bunch of them, and proves that she is still quite capable of kicking ass more than a decade after Alias went off the air.

SLEEPWALKERS (1992)

Literary master of horror Stephen King and Critters 2 director Mick Garris began a long and prolific working relationship with the 1992 film Sleepwalkers, which got a good amount of attention at the time of its release because this wasn't just the umpteenth adaptation of a King novel or short story. This one was special. This was the first story King ever wrote specifically for the screen; his first original screenplay.

The concept certainly is original. Brian Krause and Alice Krige star as Charles and Mary Brady, a seemingly human mother and son who are actually shapeshifting creatures called sleepwalkers, which the film tells us might have been the inspiration for the vampire legend. These creatures feed not on the blood of their victims, but on their life force. Wearing the guise of a handsome young man, Charles is the one who goes out into the world to seduce virginal females and suck the life force out of them. He then transfers some this energy to Mary through sexual intercourse. They turn into their monster selves, purple light fills the room, and the song "Sleep Walk" by Santo & Johnny can usually be heard playing in the house. The transfer doesn't happen all at once, it's gradual, which means mom and son have to have quite a passionate and active sex life just to survive.

The latest virginal target is Indiana high school student / movie theatre employee Tanya Robertson (Mädchen Amick), and she seems to have energy to spare given how she dances around to The Contours' "Do You Love Me" while cleaning up the theatre lobby in her first scene. Charles's endeavor to sap her life force doesn't go smoothly, though, and things are further complicated by the sleepwalkers' mortal enemies: cats. The scratch of a cat can be deadly to a sleepwalker, can even cause them to burst into flame.

King is known for scaring the hell out of people, but he can also get goofy as hell from time to time. A prime example of this is his own (and only) directorial effort, Maximum Overdrive. Sleepwalkers gets pretty goofy itself, featuring a lot of comedic moments (it can be amusing to see how the sleepwalkers react to the sight of cats), Charles demonstrating the ability to make a classic Trans Am turn invisible and morph into a classic Mustang, and death by corn cob... That corn cob doesn't get shoved down someone's throat, either. That would be the sensible way to use one as a weapon. It gets stabbed into a person's back.

Due to the weirdness and the silly tone, Sleepwalkers ended up being more of an interesting oddity to me, it has never been a horror movie that I have liked very much but it has elements that have come to mind frequently over the 25+ years since I first watched it. The one thing that has stuck with me the most is the song a police officer sings while entertaining himself: "Here comes Johnny with his pecker in his hand, he's a one ball man and he's off to the rodeo."

Sleepwalkers is also notable for the cameos in it. King shows up, as he occasionally would, and so do fellow masters of horror John Landis, Joe Dante, Clive Barker, and Tobe Hooper. Plus there's an uncredited Mark Hamill, whose scene takes place in Bodega Bay, California - popular for being the setting of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.