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.
Sword and sorcery, crime drama, and neo-noir thrills.
DEATHSTALKER (1983)
Back in the early 1980s, legendary B-movie producer Roger Corman figured out that Argentina would be a good filming location for some movies made on the cheap – so, as the decade went on, he proceeded to pump out ten movies that were made in the country. The first of the bunch was the sword and sorcery film Deathstalker, which turned out to be a solid hit, earning over $5 million at the box office on a budget of just $457,000. The title undoubtedly helped draw in movie-goers, because Deathstalker is one of the coolest titles I’ve ever heard. It also happens to be the name of the lead character, played by Rick Hill, and the only drawback there is that Hill was equipped with a dopey, almost Prince Valiant sort of hairdo, so the character doesn’t look as cool as his name sounds.
Directed by James Sbardellati (under the name John Watson) from a screenplay written by Howard Cohen, Deathstalker takes place in a fantasy land populated by the likes of witches, sorcerers, mutants, pig-men, imps, and ogres, not to mention scantily clad women. Times are tough, and people like Deathstalker himself have had to resort to stealing and killing to survive. When a deposed King suggests that Deathstalker should stand up to the conquering sorcerer Munkar (Bernard Erhard) and rescue the King’s abducted daughter Codille (Barbi Benton), he quickly passes on the idea – but when a witch puts it in a different way, turning the Munkar confrontation into a quest to assemble the Three Powers of Creation (the Sword of Justice, the Amulet of Life, and the Chalice of Magic), Deathstalker dives right in. As he makes his way across the land Munkar has taken, he’s joined on his quest by the thief Salmaron (Augusto Larreta), who had been cursed to live as an imp until Deathstalker crossed paths with him, and two warriors who intend to compete in the tournament Munkar is holding to choose his heir: Oghris, played by Richard Brooker (who played hockey-masked slasher Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th Part III), and the Amazonian Kaira, played by Lana Clarkson, who almost always has her breasts exposed.
Once our heroes reach Munkar’s stronghold, they participate in drunken debauchery, sword duels, and tournament fights, and have to deal with the sorcerer’s magical tricks. With a running time of just 80 minutes, the film moves along at a great pace, never going too long without some action or some gratuitous nudity – making this a shining example of an exploitation classic.
I had a fascination with sword and sorcery movies when I was a little kid, probably fuelled by my fandom for cartoons like Masters of the Universe and Thundercats, and would rent every one I came across in the local video stores. Ever since the ‘80s, the Deathstalker movies have lingered in my mind as some of the best of the bunch... but they lapsed out of my viewing rotation in the early ‘90s and I hadn’t watched them since. Coming back to Deathstalker in the 2020s, I was pleased to find that it still holds up as B-movie greatness. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of revisiting this concept and these characters – and I will definitely not let decades go by before my next viewing. Deathstalker is going to be getting regular viewings from now on.
INFERNAL AFFAIRS (2002)
Directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak from a screenplay Mak wrote with Felix Chong, the Hong Kong crime drama Infernal Affairs has a brilliant set-up, with two interesting characters at the heart of the story. Hong Kong triad boss Hon Sam (Eric Tsang) sends a young gangster named Lau Kin-ming to the police academy so Lau can be his mole inside the Hong Kong Police Force. At the same time, the Hong Kong Police Force has sent a young officer named Chan Wing-yan undercover in Hon’s organization, with Chan reporting directly back to Superintendent Wong Chi-shing (Anthony Wong). The film moves through the back story quickly, with Edison Chen and Shawn Yue playing young versions of Lau and Chan in the opening flashback – but then we jump ahead to a point where Lau and Chan have both been working their undercover jobs for a decade, with the characters being played by Andy Lau and Tony Leung.
Lau and Chan have both been very successful in their undercover lives – so much that Lau has been promoted to Senior Inspector and is thinking of going legit, while Chan worries that he has really become a criminal. A decade in, both Hon and the Hong Kong Police Force have realized that they have moles in their ranks, putting the statuses (and lives) of both Lau and Chan in jeopardy.
Obstacles are thrown at both of these characters throughout the film, with the audience rooting for both of them to make it out of their precarious situations. Problem is, the characters we’re rooting for aren’t necessarily rooting for each other...
Andrew Lau and Alan Mak did a great job of bringing this story to the screen, and it’s so compelling, it’s not surprise that not only did this movie receive direct follow-ups, but other filmmakers around the world have also made their own versions of the set-up. Infernal Affairs was remade in India as Homam, in South Korea as City of Damnation, in Japan as Double Face, and in the United States as The Departed. The Departed won Best Picture and earned Martin Scorsese his only Best Director Oscar, and it’s a remake! Admittedly, it’s a great remake (even if it takes 151 minutes to tell a story that Infernal Affairs managed to get across in 101 minutes), but that’s still a bit mind-boggling.
Hong Kong crime dramas aren’t the sort of movies I watch very often, but checking this one out is a very rewarding experience. Infernal Affairs is a great movie – and if you’ve ever seen any of its remakes, it’s well worth seeking out this original take on the material to see where it all began.
THE BEDROOM WINDOW (1987)
Steve Guttenberg is best known for his work as a comedic actor, having starred in the likes of the first four Police Academy movies and Three Men and a Baby, but he has worked across multiple genres – and in 1987, the same year that Three Men and a Baby and Police Academy 4 were released, he took the lead role in the neo-noir psychological thriller The Bedroom Window, which was written and directed by Curtis Hanson, loosely based on the novel The Witnesses by Anne Holden. It may have been a surprising choice for him at the time, but Guttenberg did a good job playing the lead in this thriller, where he plays Terry Lambert, a man who could be said to be living dangerously from the moment we meet him. That’s because he’s carrying out an affair with his boss’s wife, Sylvia (Isabelle Huppert).
Within minutes of the film beginning, Terry and Sylvia have made love in his apartment – and Sylvia has witnessed a shocking sight from his bedroom window. The sight of a young woman, Elizabeth McGovern as Denise, being assaulted by a man in the small park outside Terry’s apartment building. Sylvia puts a stop to the assault by opening the window, even though she’s completely naked. Spotting the naked woman in the window above, the attacker runs off.
Now, Terry has multiple issues to deal with. Not only does he have to hope that his boss, Paul Shenar as Collin, who sits around in his office holding a gun, doesn’t find out that he slept with his wife, but he also has interactions with the police. A co-ed was killed nearby in the city just half an hour after Sylvia stopped the assault, so Terry assumes it was the attacker and wants to help bring him to justice. So, using descriptions provided by Sylvia, he goes to the cops and pretends he was the window witness. This turns out to be a terrible decision that really shakes up his life.
Terry does help the police find the attacker, Carl Henderson (played by Brad Greenquist)... but the pursuit of justice doesn’t go as smoothly as he hopes. The police, including Carl Lumbly as Quirke and Frederick Coffin as Jessup, start to question Terry’s credibility, Sylvia starts to distance herself from him, he gets mixed up in Denise’s life... and, of course, this being a thriller, Terry and the characters around him are also in danger from Carl Henderson.
The Bedroom Window is a movie that had completely slipped by me until talk of a remake started going around in 2019 (I had missed previous reports of a remake in 2009). The remake has never made it into production, but I’m glad that those reports led me back to the original film, because Hanson made a very solid thriller with this one. The story really drew me in, and Terry Lambert is an interesting lead character; a flawed man who makes some bad choices, but wants to do the right thing. The characters around him are interesting as well, and there are some good suspense sequences along the way.
This is the sort of thriller that feels like it was made in the spirit of Alfred Hitchcock, and that’s an approach that’s always welcome as far as I’m concerned.
THE HOT SPOT (1990)
On paper, the 1990 film The Hot Spot seems to have the recipe for success. Directed by Dennis Hopper, the neo-noir film stars Don Johnson as a man who comes drifting into a small Texas town, lands a job as a used car salesman, and strikes up an affair with his boss’s wife (Virginia Madsen as Dolly Harshaw) while lusting over a younger co-worker (Jennifer Connelly as Gloria Harper), plotting – and pulling off – a bank robbery, and getting mixed up with a creepy blackmailer played by William Sadler. You also have the likes of Jerry Hardin, Charles Martin Smith, Leon Rippy, Barry Corbin, and Jack Nance in supporting roles. With all those elements in play, what could possibly go wrong?
Well, for one thing, Hopper took a story that should have played out in 90 minutes or so and dragged it out to a 130 minute running time, making the movie very difficult to sit through, even when you have Madsen chewing the scenery as a femme fatale who becomes dangerously obsessed with Johnson’s character Harry Madox and tries to force him to kill her husband. And when he refuses, she takes matters into her own hands and decides to have such intense sex with her husband that it kills him!
If the pacing didn’t make the movie feel like it was pulling itself through the desert while sweating profusely and dying of thirst, The Hot Spot could actually be pretty cool. Unfortunately, Hopper let it get away from him and was apparently feeling too self-indulgent when he was putting it together. Maybe it would have been more satisfying if I had increased the speed to 1.5.
The screenplay, written by Charles Williams and Nona Tyson, was based on Williams’ novel Hell Hath No Fury and had been floating around Hollywood in the 1960s, with Robert Mitchum being the actor who was originally intended to take the lead role. If that version had been made, it would be interesting to compare it to the one Hopper made in 1990 – but as it is, we only have this one deeply flawed and difficult to watch (at least, that was my experience) yet perfectly cast movie. The cast and set-up are so good, I feel like I’m going to be revisiting this one in hopes that I’ll enjoy it more during a future viewing.
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