Last week, I had the honour of representing JoBlo once again at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. This was my second year covering the festival, and I have to say, going to Austin has always been special to me. I remember, as a film fan in the ’90s and 2000s, reading the early days of film news coverage on the original websites and always being impressed by how many of my favorite writers came from Austin. It seemed like the film nerd capital of the world, yet I never actually made it out to Austin until relatively late in my career. Of course, the town never disappoints, as it’s a party-hardy city if ever there was one (I ate lots of BBQ and drank lots of whiskey, that’s for sure).

Another thing about Austin is how hardcore the movie fans are, with the screenings I attended at SXSW being some of the more raucous in recent memory. I still have a few reviews to catch up on, but I managed to catch most of the big titles (read my reviews HERE), and I wanted to highlight five of my favourites from the fest.

Monitor:

I’m actually surprised no distributor has picked this one up yet, as it feels like the kind of horror flick that could turn into a big franchise for an upstart distributor. It’s a slasher movie for the digital age, with a group of streaming video moderators who find themselves targeted by a malevolent presence that travels via streaming video. It’s produced by the people behind the Smile franchise, and I still think it’s only a matter of time before someone picks this up for theaters.

Hokum:

This is Neon’s big horror movie for the summer, with it directed by acclaimed Irish helmer Damian McCarthy. While I don’t think I would call this one really scary, it’s still a beautifully crafted ghost story, anchored by a superb performance by the great Adam Scott, who’s having a much-deserved moment in the sun with Severance.

Obsession:

Of all the movies I caught at SXSW, this feels like the one that has the most potential to become a major hit. Focus is giving it a wide release in May, and it absolutely slayed the audience I saw it with. It’s the story of a lovestruck lad who makes a wish that proves to be a nightmare for everyone it touches. Obsession has loads of gore, some pitch-black dark comedy, but also a provocative storyline that will no doubt prompt much discussion.

Power Ballad:

A few of my fellow critics at SXSW were ribbing me a bit for my love of John Carney’s Power Ballad, but what can I say? I’m a sucker for Carney’s movies (Once and Sing Street are my favourites), and to me this is one of his best. Paul Rudd is at his absolute best as a singer who finds one of his compositions stolen by a pop star. It comes out this summer from Lionsgate, and I hope it’s a hit.

Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice:

I saved the best for last. I’m a sucker for action movies, and director BenDavid Grabinski made a great one, with James Marsden showing serious action chops opposite Vince Vaughn in a double role. This actually hits Hulu on Friday, which is a shame, as it’s the kind of movie that deserves to make $100 million in theaters. Such is our time, I guess.

Which one of these movies are you most hyped to see? Let us know in the comments.

The post SXSW: What Were The Best Movies We Saw At The Fest? appeared first on JoBlo.

Here at JoBlo, we were saddened to hear that the iconic Chuck Norris had passed away. He seemed like one of those larger-than-life guys that was going to be around forever, so to hear that he had died was a gut punch for many of us who grew up in the eighties and were such big fans of his work. Having been born in ’81 myself, Chuck Norris was always an iconic presence. I remember the first movie of his that I ever saw was Firewalker on the Canadian HBO – First Choice – mainly because it was one of the only movies of his from back then that wasn’t R-rated, so it aired on TV in the afternoon. Of course, it was far from his finest work (it’s actually awful), but it was a gateway movie.

It was during the nineties that, as a keen karate student, I started watching all of his movies on cable. Fox, in particular, often aired his movies on Saturday afternoons, which is where I first saw heavily edited versions of Missing in Action, Invasion U.S.A., The Delta Force and others. TBS also kept me well fed with Norris vehicles, with movies like Forced Vengeance, Silent Rage, Hero and the Terror, and others. I also remember a lot of his movies would show up in the cheap bins at department stores when they were re-issued on cheap tapes, so I had copies of Lone Wolf McQuade, Code of Silence and the Delta Force movies recorded at SLP in my library. At the same time, his TV series, Walker: Texas Ranger, was in full swing, but it was never my jam (I find nineties action TV shows haven’t stood the test of time like eighties ones).

Of course, many of his films are undeniably cheesy, but I also stand by a few of them (as outlined in this list), with Code of Silence – to me – being far and away his best movie. But what do you think? Take our poll and let us know!

The post Poll: What’s Your Favorite Chuck Norris Movie? appeared first on JoBlo.

The teaser trailer for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Three has finally given us a glimpse at how one of modern cinema’s most ambitious trilogies might wrap up, and it got me thinking about just how rare it is for a trilogy to truly stick the landing.

You come out swinging with a terrific first film, raise the stakes with the second, and then suddenly you’re staring down the hardest part of all: delivering a finale that tops what came before. That’s no small feat. But every now and then, a trilogy actually pulls it off. So let’s take a look at three trilogies that absolutely stuck the landing, and three that, well, probably should have quit while they were ahead.

Nailed It: War for the Planet of the Apes

As a massive fan of the Planet of the Apes franchise, I was more than a little apprehensive when it was announced that the series would be rebooted with Rise of the Planet of the Apes. CG apes? Come on. Even Tim Burton’s misguided reboot at least had Rick Baker’s incredible makeup and prosthetics going for it.

But Rise worked, and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes raised the bar considerably. It would have been easy for the trilogy to stumble at the finish line, but War for the Planet of the Apes was a genuine triumph, anchored by Andy Serkis’ extraordinary performance as Caesar. Yes, the franchise continued with Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, but Rise, Dawn, and War form a remarkably satisfying trilogy and a near-perfect arc for Caesar.

Blew It: Spider-Man 3

Sam Raimi clearly had a story he wanted to tell with Spider-Man 3, but the studio had other ideas, namely, “more villains.” Specifically, Venom. Sure, the character was (and still is) a fan favourite, but he never quite fit within Raimi’s world, and it shows.

With Sandman (Thomas Haden Church), Venom (Topher Grace), and the New Goblin (James Franco) all competing for screen time, the result was an overcrowded narrative that never had a chance of reaching the heights of the first two films. And the less said about Emo Peter Parker, the better.

Nailed It: Toy Story 3

Toy Story 3 arrived eleven years after Toy Story 2, and at the time, it was easy to wonder if Pixar was simply going back to the well for an easy cash grab. Instead, the studio delivered a sequel that stands as one of the all-time great animated movies, not to mention emotionally wrecking an entire generation.

That incinerator scene? My God. It has no business hitting as hard as it does, but that’s exactly why the movie works so well. And then there’s the ending: a now-grown-up Andy passing his toys on to the next generation. It wasn’t just closure for Woody, Buzz, and the gang; it was closure for the audience who grew up with them. Sure, Toy Story 4 came along later, and Toy Story 5 is on the way, but let’s be honest: this was the perfect ending.

Blew It: Blade: Trinity

Some trilogies go out with a bang… and then there’s whatever the hell Blade: Trinity was.

After two movies of being the coolest motherf***er in the room, Blade suddenly finds himself playing second fiddle to Ryan Reynolds and Jessica Biel in his own movie. It feels less like a finale and more like a backdoor pilot for a spin-off nobody was asking for.

Following Stephen Norrington’s kick-ass original and Guillermo del Toro’s stylish sequel, the third film is strangely bland by comparison. And then there’s the behind-the-scenes drama: Wesley Snipes reportedly refused to interact with the cast and crew, communicating only with writer/director David S. Goyer via Post-it notes, which he signed “Blade.”

Oh, and Dracula is the villain. You’d think that would be cool.

It’s not.

Nailed It: The Return of the King

Now we come to the gold standard of trilogy finales. The Return of the King is that rare threequel that delivers on absolutely everything: massive battles, emotional payoffs, and character arcs that had been building steadily across the previous two films. It’s all here, and it all lands.

Watching this at a midnight screening back in 2003 remains one of my all-time favourite moviegoing memories. We laughed, we cheered, we cried, and there’s never really been anything else like it. People love to joke about the multiple endings, but honestly, after spending nearly twelve hours in Middle-earth, that extended goodbye was far from indulgent. It was earned.

Blew It: The Godfather: Part III

Let’s get this out of the way: I don’t think The Godfather: Part III is a bad movie. It just happens to be a follow-up to two of the greatest films ever made, which is an impossible position to be put in.

Even at its best, the film struggles to escape the shadow of its predecessors. It does bring Michael Corleone’s story to a tragic, fitting conclusion, but Francis Ford Coppola himself has described it as more of an epilogue than a true finale. It helps to think of it that way, but it also makes it feel less grand than what came before.

There are also some notable missteps. Robert Duvall’s absence as Tom Hagen is deeply felt, and then there’s Sofia Coppola as Michael’s daughter. I don’t want to be too harsh, but it’s immediately clear that her performance can’t quite stand alongside the acting heavyweights surrounding her.

—

Trilogies are a gamble. You can build something incredible over two films, and then completely fumble it at the finish line. Or, if everything clicks, you deliver something that sticks with audiences for decades. Now it’s Dune: Part Three’s turn. No pressure, Denis. Let us know your favourite — and least favourite — trilogy finales in the comments.

The post Three Trilogies That Nailed the Ending… And Three That Completely Blew It appeared first on JoBlo.

Depending on when you grew up, Chuck Norris can take many forms. For Boomers, he was the fuzzy-chested, lightning-quick martial artist; for the Grunge era, he was Walker in Walker, Texas Ranger, his electric blue eyes squinting against the sun as he walked tall with swagger. For millennials and older Gen Z brood, Norris was a meme machine, a cinematic myth that punched holes in the sky and could kill a man simply by looking at him. As the memes grew, so did Norris’ legend, creating a living god among humankind, albeit with a tongue-in-cheek approach to comedy.

While legends never die, Chuck Norris passed away on Friday at 86 after a brief hospitalization. Still, while the flesh is retired, the epic saga of Chuck Norris lives on in spirit, and through an endless scroll of hilarious memes that lend to Norris’ mysticism and cache in a community of film lovers and martial arts enthusiasts who remember his power, precision, and knack for never using stunt doubles in his movies, unless those stunt doubles were there to perform the crying parts.

To celebrate Norris’ influence on meme culture, we’ve collected some of our favorite Chuck Norris memes from across the internet, and invite you to share your own in the comments. Help us build a collection of memes that honor the man, the myth, the warrior who was born on the 69th day of the year.

Also, keep in mind that the resolution for some of these memes can get iffy, but it’s likely because they were “of a time,” and harnessing the power of Chuck Norris is challenging for anyone or anything.

What are some of your favorite Chuck Norris facts, memes, or jokes? Feel free to share them in the comments section below!

The post Post your favorite Chuck Norris memes here! appeared first on JoBlo.

When it comes to tackling the legend of King Arthur on the silver screen, none even come close to touching John Boorman’s Excalibur. Released in 1981, this lavish depiction of King Arthur and Camelot has stood the test of time as the definitive version of the story, despite so many challengers to the throne. Some include First Knight, a more romantic version of the story marred by an unconvincing performance by Richard Gere as Lancelot; the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced King Arthur, which removes all the magic from the story; and Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. None match Boorman’s movie.

A Dark, Adult Fantasy Ahead of Its Time

Given its status as a classic, it’s surprising that it took so long for the film to hit 4K disc, with it having been licensed by Warner Bros. to Arrow Video, who’ve given it a lavish new edition with tons of bells and whistles. For those who may not have seen Excalibur, the film tells the story of Arthur and Camelot’s rise and fall, taking a distinctly adult look at the medieval fantasy genre, which predicted a trend that would later become commonplace with Game of Thrones. Excaliburpresents the medieval era as dark, muddy, and ultra-violent, with the film earning a well-deserved R rating the year it came out.

The late Nigel Terry, who never really had a role that lived up to this one, convincingly plays Arthur from a boy to an older man, while Nicolas Clay and Cherie Lunghi play Lancelot and Guinevere, with much of the film focusing on their illicit romance. None went on to much fame after Excalibur, but several members of the cast went on to superstardom. A young Helen Mirren plays the film’s villain, the sorceress Morgana, while Liam Neeson has an early role as Sir Gawain, who loses a jousting duel to Lancelot in one of the film’s most exciting sequences. And then there’s a young Gabriel Byrne as Arthur’s father, Uther, while Patrick Stewart once again proves he hasn’t really aged in forty years as Guinevere’s father.

Nicol Williamson’s Legendary Merlin

Best of all is Nicol Williamson as Merlin, with him playing the role as alternately funny, menacing, and compassionate. Acclaimed as one of the greatest actors of his era, Williamson struggled with some demons off-screen, never really getting a chance to show what he was capable of on the big screen, with this being the most notable exception.

4K Transfer and Audio: Faithful to the Original Vision

Fans have been waiting for a 4K release of Excalibur since the format began, and Arrow has delivered a transfer that’s highly faithful to the film’s intended, somewhat soft look. Don’t go in expecting Excalibur to look razor-sharp—it was highly stylized for its era, and Arrow gives us a faithful representation.

The audio mix is a similar story, as the film, despite its scale, was originally mixed in mono. It was eventually upgraded to 5.1 in the DVD/Blu-ray era, so Arrow has given us both options. To me, the mono mix is the way to go, with the film’s soundtrack having been impeccably crafted, with the score a mix of Trevor Jones compositions and classical selections from Wagner, Carl Orff, and more.

Packed Extras Worth the Upgrade

The extras are, as usual for Arrow, well chosen. The film has three commentary tracks, including one by John Boorman, who also sits for a new interview with his son, Charley, who memorably plays Mordred. The real gem is a vintage, nearly hour-long documentary from 1981 about the making of the film, directed by none other than Neil Jordan, who, within a few years, would become an iconic director in his own right. He also sits for a contemporary interview about his time on the set.

There’s also a more recent “Behind the Movie” featurette with 2016 interviews from some of the surviving cast members, including Liam Neeson, Helen Mirren, and Patrick Stewart (by then all three of the film’s leads had passed away). Most interestingly is the inclusion of the “TV Cut,” which was actually aired on HBO frequently in the early eighties, as there was a rule back then that they couldn’t show R-rated movies during the day. As such, they would show this PG version during the daytime, and the R-rated version at night.

Final Verdict

If you’re a fan of Excalibur, this set is a no-brainer (buy it HERE). While the price tag is a bit hefty, with Arrow you always get what you pay for. Highly recommended.

The post Excalibur: John Boorman’s Arthurian Classic Gets the 4K it Deserves appeared first on JoBlo.

Theodore

Some cliche somewhere said that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words.’ This has proven to be the case for me and especially when it comes to fan art. I have always sought out great fan art and have wanted to share it with as many people as possible. “Awesome Art” is the outlet for that passion. In this column, I will showcase the kick-ass artwork of some great artists, with the hopes that these artists get the attention they deserve. That’s the aim. If you have any questions or comments, or even suggestions of art or other great artists, feel free to contact me at any time at theodorebond@joblo.com.

12 Angry Men by Marc Lafon

Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Rafal Rolo

Bride of Frankenstein by Chris Koehler

Casablana by Carles Ganya

Citizen Kane by Martin Ansin

Lawrence of Arabia by Angora

Mr. Smith Goes To Washington by Mark Levy

Rear Window by Laurent Durieux

Singin’ in the Rain by Anthony Bikowski

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs by Simon Fairhurst

The Sound of Music by Aurelio Lorenzo

To Kill a Mockingbird by Mike O’B

The Wizard of Oz by Steve De La mare

The post Awesome Art’s Tribute to The Golden Age Of Hollywood with Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Rear Window, Singin’ In The Rain, The Wizard of Oz appeared first on JoBlo.

And just like that, another icon is gone. Like probably most of you reading this article, I was sad to read earlier this morning that one of the biggest legends of eighties action cinema, Chuck Norris, has passed away. Indeed, to many of us, Norris seemed indestructible (hence why “Chuck Norris Facts” became a thing), but like all of us, he couldn’t beat Father Time. That said, he lived a long, robust life and was kicking ass as recently as his eighty-sixth birthday—only just over a week ago.

With that in mind, a lot of us are going to be marathoning Chuck Norris movies this weekend. While many of his films have a reputation for being B-movies, some of them are really good and might actually surprise you.

Lone Wolf McQuade (1983)

While Norris had already made a bunch of hit movies by this point, Lone Wolf McQuade was the first really high-end Chuck Norris flick. It was important in a lot of ways. For one thing, his role as a Texas Ranger here was a rough draft for what would eventually become Walker: Texas Ranger, which is still the show most people remember him for. But in this one, Chuck wears a beard for the first time, and he was rarely seen without it afterward.

In this, Norris’s title character faces off with gunrunners led by David Carradine, and in the end, he’s pitted against the former Kung Fu star in a mano-a-mano fight (the movie works hard to convince us Carradine would have a prayer against Norris). While a bit overwrought (the soundtrack hilariously echoes Ennio Morricone’s Sergio Leone scores), it’s entertaining and iconic.

Missing in Action (1984)

This was the movie that kicked off Norris’s run of films with Cannon. In it, he plays Braddock, a former POW in Vietnam who goes back into the jungle to rescue MIA soldiers, tapping into the popular belief at the time that American prisoners of war were still captive in Vietnam. It beat Rambo: First Blood Part II to theaters, although many still say it was a rip-off, as Cannon reportedly got hold of a leaked copy of the Rambo II script and rushed out a knockoff.

Norris is cool as the defiant, tough Braddock, with the movie followed by a prequel (which was actually shot first and is pretty boring) and a crudely made sequel. This is by far the best of the three.

Invasion USA (1985)

While many will say The Delta Force is Chuck Norris’s best Cannon movie, I’ve always found that one a little cringe-worthy and long-winded in a contemporary context (it also takes way too long for the action to kick in). Don’t get me wrong—it’s worth watching—but the best Norris Cannon movie, by a long shot, is Invasion USA.

They gave Norris a killer budget, and it has some amazing action set pieces, with the mall shootout being a classic. Norris is like a heroic Jason Voorhees in the way he silently stalks and wipes out invading Russian soldiers who make the mistake of trying to take over America on Chuck Norris’s watch. It also famously helped inspire the Romanian Revolution (look up that wild story).

This was also followed by a pretty good spin-off, Avenging Force, but Norris bowed out of that one, with Michael Dudikoff taking over.

Code of Silence (1985)

For my money, this is by far the best movie Norris ever made. Freed from the budgetary shackles of Cannon, Norris made this studio film for Orion, and it’s a cracking police thriller with a surprisingly modern storyline.

In it, he plays a Chicago cop who refuses to back up a fellow officer embroiled in a racially motivated killing. On his own, he’s left with no support in his war against a drug lord, played by a menacing Henry Silva. The film features some killer action, with Andrew Davis directing this before Above the Law, Under Siege, and The Fugitive.

The fight sequence on top of the L train is a classic, as is a scene where he has to take on a pool hall full of tough guys. It also surrounds him with a great cast of Chicago character actors, including Dennis Farina as his loyal partner and John Mahoney. The movie was one of his biggest hits, but sadly it would be the last time Norris worked with a mainstream studio, as he became locked into a long-term Cannon contract.

Sidekicks (1992)

As a kid studying martial arts, I absolutely loved this movie and deeply related to it. In it, the late Jonathan Brandis plays a bullied boy who fantasizes about kicking ass alongside Norris, who encourages him in his training and helps him stand up to bullies.

In the finale, Brandis, at a martial arts competition and needing an adult partner, actually convinces the real Norris to participate—and he proves to be just as encouraging in real life as he was in the fantasy sequences.

From what I know about Norris’s interactions with fans, that’s pretty close to who he actually was in real life. He always disliked bullies (he famously turned down the role of Kreese in The Karate Kid because he found the character repellent) and wanted to be seen as a positive role model.

Which Chuck Norris movie is your favorite? Let us know in the comments.

The post Best Chuck Norris Movies: Five of the late bearded one’s best appeared first on JoBlo.

Michael

Who doesn’t love a good conspiracy theory?  Don’t worry, we’re only talking movies here.

Whether it’s Jar Jar Binks being secretly a Sith Lord, John Mason in The Rock is actually 007, oreven, my personal favorite, Kevin McCalister grows up to be Jigsaw, we could fall down the rabbit hole for days. But what about the theory of Shutter Island being a secret government mind control facility? Have you heard this one yet? Edward “Teddy” Daniels sure has.  However, the truth is much uglier, and it’s laid out before your very eyes in the first moments of the film, in subliminal clues you didn’t even catch.

In this article, we’re taking the ferry over to figure out exactly what’s going on. We’re decoding the hints you completely missed, discussing the harsh realities of one hell of a role-playing game, and explaining why the bleakest plot twist of the 2010s is NOT a cop out. All to arrive at one final, soul-crushing question: 

“Which would be worse? To live as a monster, or to die as a good man?” 

Let’s set the scene, shall we?  The fog breaks to reveal a ferry. You hear the ominous pounding of the waves before you ever see them. A hopelessly seasick U.S. Marshal is staring into a grimy bathroom mirror, splashing water on his face to wash away a dream that, though he doesn’t know it, he’s already walking through. We know from the jump the moment Martin Scorsese sets us down on Shutter Island, that something is horribly, fundamentally wrong.

In the majority of thrillers, the key to the mystery is carefully concealed until the big reveal in the third act. The film tricks you into thinking you’re one step ahead before blindfolding you and pointing you in the direction of the nearest cliff. It’s like hiding an ace up a sleeve until the final act when they reveal it and then yell “gotcha, bitch!”.  In Shutter Island, however, the ace is right in front of your eyes the entire time. The film shoves the brutal, heart-breaking truth right in front of our nose from the opening shot. It beats us into submission to the point that we’re locked inside this tortured mind, willing to do anything but see that magic trick revealed. We are shown all the pieces of the puzzle in the first 10 minutes. But, we’re too blind to see them.

When the flick hit theaters in early 2010, audiences expected some creepy asylum mystery which was tonally different from Scorsese’s previous film, The Departed. The film was released in theaters in 2010 as just another creepy asylum thriller. Sure, that’s what we got, but what people also received was a lesson in psychological horror. A puzzle of off-screen symbolism. 

THE FEBRUARY DUMPING GROUND

Now let’s travel back to the beginning of 2010 and reality. Paramount Pictures had a big problem. At least, this is what the Hollywood trades knew for certain back then. Martin Scorsese’s hotly anticipated thriller, intended to be released in October 2009, in the heart of awards season, was being held over until February 2010.

We all follow the film business, right?  It’s February. That’s the graveyard shift. The place where studios go to dump movies they can no longer spend money on advertising. Paramount made the claim that they didn’t have the money in the budget for 2009 to mount an Oscar campaign, but no one bought that. Everyone immediately assumed the worst. The speculation was that Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio had finally created a massive, expensive failure. The speculation was that it was going to be bloated and confusing.

But once the film actually hit theaters, it subverted all of those preconceptions. It wasn’t a watered down, awards-season drama. It was a brash, pulpy, grade-B genre film done to perfection. It showed the world that Scorsese could craft a chilling atmospheric horror film as easily as a crime saga. It grossed over $294 million dollars and featured one of the most stunning plot reveals of its time that altered how you viewed the entire picture the second time around. 

THE GREATEST ROLE-PLAYING GAME EVER MASTERMINDED

So, let’s start with the biggest rumors. No, Shutter Island is not a government mind control facility and no, there are no evil doctors  who get to U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and successfully brainwash him by the end of the film. The reality is much more painful and personal. DiCaprio’s Teddy Daniels is actually Andrew Laeddis: the very sick, extremely violent Patient 67, who murdered his wife after she had drowned their three little children in the lake behind their picturesque farmhouse.

How about Teddy’s lavish, hard-boiled investigation into the island’s dark secrets? Never actually happened. It was a game, a game of extreme, incredibly elaborate make-believe. And the entire thing was scripted by Dr. Cawley and Teddy’s partner Chuck, who is actually Teddy’s head psychiatrist, Dr. Sheehan. They believe, with enough radical empathy and boundary-pushing therapy, they can actually cure Andrew of his violent delusions. They’re putting their careers on the line to save his life, and quite honestly the most sympathetic characters in Andrew’s life.

On the other side of the coin, we have the Warden and Dr. Naehring. They think that men like Andrew are too far gone and should be gotten rid of. They’re like the new-old school of psychiatry. They want to tie up the violent ones and to drug them until they become zombies. And if that doesn’t work, they would much rather shove an ice pick through their eye sockets and call it a day. The board of overseers is on Cawley’s back because they want Andrew lobotomized. He’s too much of a risk to have around the other employees.

All of this is a high-stakes game of the emperor’s new clothes, if you will, for Cawley and Sheehan. They have to allow Andrew to live out his fantasy of being a federal marshal until it implodes in on itself. They have to allow him to follow through on his crackpot theories until he comes to a literal brick wall. There’s no other way to get him to confront the nightmare of his situation. 

THE MARK RUFFALO MASTERCLASS IN DECEPTION 

Once you know the rules of the game, it’s an absolute must that you rewatch Mark Ruffalo’s performance as Chuck. Initially, he’s a generic, slightly awkward cop sidekick. On the second go round, you realize he’s delivering one of the most incredible, understated performances of his career.

Look at him in the initial scenes. They have to give their guns to the deputy warden and he can’t even get his out of the holster. He’s inept. Even Teddy gives him an odd look. Why would a federal marshal not be able to unholster his gun? Because the dude most likely has never held one before.  

Every word Chuck speaks to Teddy is scripted. He asks loaded questions. He questions Teddy’s reactions to specific evidence. When Teddy breaks into a paranoid tirade about Nazi experimentation and mind control, Chuck does not tell him that he is insane. He encourages the madness. He tells Teddy that his conclusions are sound. He is gently nudging his patient through the labyrinth. Ruffalo manages to play a cop impersonator while conveying the authentic worry of a doctor witnessing his most cherished patient descend into madness. It’s phenomenal acting masquerading right there in the open. 

FIRE, WATER, AND THE INVISIBLE CLUES

Scorsese filled the film with subtle, almost subliminal visual reminders that you’re seeing the world from a diseased brain. Here’s an interesting little tidbit. This was actually going to be directed by David Fincher with Brad Pitt as the lead at one time before Scorsese was brought on board. But it’s hard to imagine anyone but Scorsese dealing with the sheer psycho visual burden. Along with his ace cinematographer Robert Richardson, Scorsese also shows you that even the weather itself is deceiving you.

The most overt visual clue in the film is the contrast between fire and water. Fire is the absolute visualization of Andrew’s delusion. Whenever Teddy is around fire, he has a grand hallucination. This includes lighting matches in the dark cellblock, or even sitting by the warm fire in the sea cave with the imposter Rachel Solando. This even includes the time he blows up Dr. Cawley’s car to create a diversion. Fire fuels his delusion and gives him visions of his deceased wife Dolores. The flames make him feel like a hero.

Water, however, is the truth. The undeniable truth. Water is what his ailing wife used to kill his children. It makes Andrew physically ill, uncomfortable and wildly anxious throughout the movie. The film opens with him arrives on the island in the middle of a massive storm. You could say his trauma is literally raining on him. It rains when the truth gets too real.

Scorsese loads the movie with intentional continuity mistakes to demonstrate that Teddy’s sense of reality is totally screwed. There’s a genius and now famous moment where Teddy is questioning a female patient in the cafeteria. She wants a glass of water. In one shot she brings a totally empty hand to her mouth and drinks from a nonexistent glass. In the next shot, there’s a real glass on the table in front of her. We don’t notice it the first time because we’re just as insane as Teddy is at that moment. Andrew’s subconscious excluded the glass of water from his sight because water is his greatest trauma. His brain simply refuses to see it.

There are many other visual clues pointing towards Andrew’s truth hiding in plain sight.  We already discussed the ferry ride in the opening, but also in this scene, Andrew, or rather, Teddy seems to have misplaced his cigarettes.  He is then given one by Chuck.  It’s subtle, but just shows he is indeed a patient and wouldn’t have access to a pack of smokes. 

There are other scenes where guards appear to be nervous around him, and even some who appear to be uninterested in finding this Rachel Solando chick he made up.  Hell, even in scenes when Teddy and Chuck are interviewing the patients, we see guards in the background and out of focus. In that same scene, they interview Bridget Kearns, a woman who killed her husband with an axe…the very woman drinking the invisible glass.  When asked about Dr. Sheehan, she freezes, takes a quick glance, and responds with “he’s nice and not hard on the eyes, as my mother would say.”  Chuck gives a slight smirk.  While the reaction initially hints at something she doesn’t want to reveal, the reality is that she’s flirting with Chuck, aka, Dr. Sheehan right to his face.  

While continuing their investigation, we meet up with Dr. Nahering, played by the wonderful Max von Sydow.  He mentions how men like him are his specialty and even notes his “outstanding defense mechanisms.”  It’s not just a throwaway line, but a wider meaning to the film itself.  Throughout the course, everyone is trying to bring him back to reality, yet he refuses to let go of his character.  Everyone knows who Teddy actually is, but he believes Andrew Laeddis is a separate patient who killed his wife, Dolores, in a fire.  At the end of the second act, Chuck says he found the intake file on Laeddis, yet Teddy refuses to look at it.  Subconsciously, this file would show his true identity and shatter his delusion.

And what would a great role-playing game be without costumes.  Ever notice Teddy’s trench coat?  It’s a little too big, wouldn’t you say?  That’s because it was never his to begin with, just another prop for his character. However, he is provided a hospital gown half-way through, where he wears it for the remainder of the film. 

THE GHOSTS OF DACHAU AND THE BURDEN OF HISTORY 

You simply cannot discuss Shutter Island without discussing the long shadow of World War II. Andrew is a veteran who participated in the liberation of the Dachau death camp. The flashbacks of the war are some of the most ghastly, graphic scenes Scorsese has ever committed to celluloid. We see bodies frozen in the snow. We see the shocking moment when the American soldiers line up the German guards and shoot them in cold blood.

These are real memories. Andrew actually is a veteran with PTSD. It’s just that his PTSD causes him to lose himself in the trauma of the Holocaust, in order to distract himself from his personal trauma at home. It’s easier for him to get lost in a holocaust than in the fact that he failed to save his own kids from his bipolar wife.

Those bodies in Dachau? When he dreams about them, there’s a little girl. She looks up at him and asks him why he did not save her. The little girl isn’t a random victim of the Holocaust. She’s his daughter, Rachel. His mind is inserting the image of his dead daughter into his war memories because he can’t cope with what happened at the lake house. He tells himself he’s a bad person because he shot German soldiers. He uses that historical guilt to cover up the unbearable guilt of ignoring his wife’s severe mental illness until it was too late. 

THE WARD C DESCENT AND THE GEORGE NOYCE REALITY CHECK

As Teddy breaks into Ward C, the film moves from a gothic whodunit to psychological horror. Ward C is where the more violent, brutal offenders are kept. Scorsese films this segment as an actual journey into hell. Teddy moves down an ominous, decaying stone staircase into a dungeon illuminated by matches. He is literally moving down into the darkest recesses of his own mind.

This is when he encounters George Noyce. Noyce is a paranoid, battered inmate in a cell who Teddy is convinced is a victim of the island’s illicit lobotomies. He is completely oblivious to the gaping plot hole staring him right in the face. If Noyce was actually a high-profile victim of a huge government conspiracy, the sinister doctors wouldn’t just leave him in an ordinary cell where a meddling U.S. Marshall could so easily gain access to him.

Noyce is real. However, Teddy’s paranoid delusions cause him to interpret everything the man says in the worst possible way. Noyce is trying to tell Teddy that the doctors are playing along with his delusion to help him heal. He is telling Teddy that the entire play is staged for his benefit. Noyce is in Ward C because a few weeks ago Teddy nearly killed him for calling him Andrew. Noyce knows what’s going on. But Teddy’s delusion is so paranoid and so strong that he interprets a blatant attempt at warning by a terrified fellow inmate as proof of a conspiracy against him. Noyce tells him that he is in a maze, and Teddy assumes that he is talking about a government conspiracy. 

THE SEA CAVE AND THE FAKE DOCTOR 

Teddy finally manages to break out of the hospital’s campus and makes his way down the rocky shores, where he takes refuge in a sea cave. Here he encounters a woman who says she is the real Rachel Solando, and Patricia Clarkson phenomenal here. She says everything Teddy longs to hear. She confirms his paranoia. She says the psychotropic medication is in the food. She says the doctors are making people into ghosts for the Cold War.

This is the final gauntlet thrown to the audience. The Patricia Clarkson character is completely imaginary. A fabrication of Andrew’s starving, sleep deprived, and withdrawing from drugs and alcohol brain. She is sitting in front of a giant fire, which we have learned is the spark for his hallucinations. She is there to confirm his biases. His brain invents an off the rails doctor to nudge him over the edge and attack the lighthouse. His illness is pushing back against the treatment. His “outstanding defense mechanisms” are doing everything in their power to preserve the fantasy. 

THE WARDEN’S DARK TRUTH

The last time Teddy is driven to the lighthouse, he is in a Jeep with the Warden, played by Ted Levine with a growling, menacing presence that is fear-inducing. The sequence in the car between Teddy and the Warden is the pivotal moment of the whole film. In the car, the Warden delivers a frightening monologue, in which he declares that “God likes violence” and that if Teddy bit out his eye, he would “squish your head in the fuckin’ pavement.”

The Warden isn’t speaking to U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels. The Warden is speaking to the violent, murderous Patient 67. The Warden knows Andrew is a killer. He knows Andrew is highly trained and incredibly dangerous. He is basically daring Andrew to drop the act and show his true colors. The Warden represents the harsh, unforgiving reality of Andrew’s violent nature. It is a reality that Andrew is desperately trying to outrun by pretending to be a noble hero of the law. 

THE LIGHTHOUSE CONFRONTATION

And so, after all that clever setup, we get to the lighthouse. The place Teddy thinks they’re illegally performing the lobotomies. He swims through icy waters, knocks out a guard, takes his rifle, and kicks down the door. But there are no gurneys. There are no Nazi doctors. There’s just Dr. Cawley, sitting quietly at a desk, waiting for him. And when Dr. Cawley pulls out the whiteboard and starts doing the anagrams, the movie takes away the safety net entirely. He demonstrates that Edward Daniels is an exact anagram for Andrew Laeddis. He demonstrates that Rachel Solando is an exact anagram for Dolores Chanal, his wife’s maiden name.

This destroys Andrew’s delusion in the moment. The experiment succeeds. Cawley makes him look at pictures of his dead children. He makes Andrew remember the lake. He makes Andrew remember dragging their corpses out of the water and laying them down on the grass. He makes Andrew remember his sick wife asking him to liberate her. He makes him remember putting the barrel into her stomach and pulling the trigger. The dam breaks. The agony flows. Andrew utterly disintegrates into the weight of his now returned memory. The therapy completely succeeds. 

CHOOSING TO DIE A GOOD MAN

The tragedy of the film is revealed the next morning, as this is the sequence which generates the arguments. Andrew is calmly sitting on the stone steps of the hospital grounds with Dr. Sheehan. He smokes a cigarette. He calls his doctor Chuck. He says they have to get off this rock before the doctors get to them. He sounds like Teddy Daniels again.

Dr. Sheehan looks utterly defeated. He shoots a devastatingly sad non-verbal acknowledgement to Dr. Cawley across the courtyard. The doctors know that the experiment didn’t work. Andrew retreated back into his fantasy world. The board of overseers has won. The orderlies come to take him to get the ice pick lobotomy. But, Andrew isn’t done yet. He has one last, most devastating, blow of the entire film. He calmly looks at Dr. Sheehan and asks, “Which would be worse? To live as a monster, or to die as a good man?”

That didn’t happen. The treatment worked. Andrew’s mind is perfectly clear. He has full understanding of who he is. He has full understanding of what he has done to his wife. He has full understanding that his children are gone forever because of his own negligence. But he can’t live with that guilt. He cannot live with the thought of spending the rest of his life haunted by the memory of his murdered children and the wife he failed to save.

Rather than spend the rest of his days bearing the indelible stains of Andrew Laeddis, he decided to end it. He chose to make believe. He chose to make believe he was Teddy Daniels once more, knowing the result would be his own lobotomy. He chose to give up his mind. He chose to let the surgical instruments scrub out the inside of his head. He chose to do so because he’d rather be dead in his mind as a hero, a federal marshal, than spend the rest of his life knowing he was a villain. He stood up. He walked out with the orderlies. He didn’t resist. He walked willingly to his own lobotomy.

This is absolutely not a film about an eerie mental institution or government experiments in mind control. Like the greatest thrillers of the ’50s, it is a layered, shattering exploration of grief and trauma, posing a deeply human and deeply terrifying question: How far will the human mind go in attempting to numb itself from the painful truth?

Andrew Laeddis was a smart, competent man, and he constructed a brilliant, complex mental prison to keep himself from his own horrific inadequacies. He created a whole universe where he was the hero trying to solve a murder, not the villain who committed one. The real tragedy of the film isn’t that the sinister doctors finally got him. The tragedy is that he finally saw the full truth, and decided that the darkness of complete delusion was preferable to the blinding, painful glare of the real world.

It is Scorsese at the very height of his psychological game. He takes one of the greatest narrative swipes of the rug from under your feet ever, one that isn’t just designed to shock for the sake of shocking, but one that emotionally guts you and leaves you feeling hollow.

The post Shutter Island Explained: The Soul-Crushing Truth You Missed appeared first on JoBlo.

The Dates are Set

Marketing for Avengers: Doomsday started late last year with a couple of teasers released with James Cameron’s Avatar: Fire and Ash. The teaser trailers and the teaser poster declared December 18 as the release date (complete with a timer counting down with each teaser). Then, last week, the trailer for the much-anticipated Dune: Part Three dropped with its own teaser posters. Dune: Part Three would also advertise December 18 as its release date. While both Marvel Studios and Warner Bros. locked down the date quite some time, the marketing somewhat seals everything for the time being. Now, release dates can always change and the promos can always be revised, but if both movies hold firm…could we have another Barbenheimer on our hands?

Avengers: Dunesday

If we do have another Barbenheimer, the nickname is obvious enough that it’s pretty much already set by Robert Downey Jr. and Timothée Chalamet. Avengers: Dunesday is sure to be a good competitor to the Barbenheimer phenomenon as both are big sci-fi franchises with large fanbases. When Barbie was announced, it sounded like a cash grab, a la Battleship, but when Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach had their names attached, it aroused more curiosity as it turned out to be something more (complete with getting recognized for awards season). So, the Hasbro property not only had the Barbie toy fans, but moviegoers were now wondering what the film was really going to be. Then, you have Oppenheimer, which really had only one true appeal as a summer movie, and that’s Christopher Nolan. Oppenheimer would have been more at home as a late-year awards contender as a talky historical drama with very little action, but Nolan is associated with grand blockbuster movies. Additionally, he continued his love with the 70 mm IMAX format for Oppenheimer, which gave the film additional appeal. So, Nolan fans and cinema lovers would lovingly flock to Oppenheimer.

With Avengers: Dunesday, you have two franchise entries whose past installments have already raked in a large amount of dough. The first Dune from Denis Villeneuve had to struggle harder as it came out around the time of the pandemic, but Dune: Part Two would be released when theaters were back to full operation and the film would end its run with $715 million globally. Additionally, Dune: Part Two ended on a note that wasn’t exactly a cliffhanger, but an open end, which had fans of the movies and books alike anticipating the follow-up chapter.

For the MCU, the Avengers have been reliable moneymakers. However, with every entry, all the movies that came before it have received some pretty positive receptions on average. After Avengers: Endgame, a debate rages on amongst fans on whether the recent phase of movies were of quality, but the movie-going public has not turned out as often as they used to with earlier solo films. Despite exceptions like Spider-Man: No Way Home and Deadpool and Wolverine, the Marvel Universe hasn’t been as consistent with success and movies like The Fantastic Four: First Steps would be discussed as possibilities of the studio finding its footing once again.

Avengers is sure to be a massive hit despite the overall reception of the MCU, but one thing’s for sure: Dune: Part Three will have a slight advantage with exclusive IMAX screenings. Dune was shot with IMAX cameras and secured at least three weeks on the format. The brand saw a huge uptick in business recently, thanks to films like Sinners and F1. The premium format has a premium charge, which may help Dune earn more money despite Avengers playing in adjacent premium screens. IMAX is the one that is establishing its reputation with its giant screen and picture quality. However, Avengers: Doomsday will eventually take advantage of the IMAX screens later on, so sales have the potential to boost.

While the memes won’t be nearly as fun as Barbenheimer since those two films are as far from each other in terms of tone as you can get, sci-fi and action fans will be having an amazing Christmas this year with these two epic franchise titles to choose from.

The post Will Avengers: Dunesday be the next Barbenheimer? appeared first on JoBlo.

Tyler

“Don’t you blame the movies. Movies don’t create psychos. Movies make psychos more creative.”

That’s the core idea behind Scream, a film that started as a spec script and ended up reshaping the entire horror genre. But how did it happen?

• Why did Wes Craven initially turn down directing?
• Which real-life serial killer inspired the story?
• And how did the filmmakers finally get the Weinsteins off their back?

Let’s take a look at what happened to Scream.

The Script That Shook Hollywood

In 1994, Kevin Williamson was a young screenwriter who had just sold his first script, Teaching Mrs. Tingle. Instead of slowing down, he immediately set out to write something new. His inspiration came from an ABC News Turning Point episode about serial killer Danny Rolling. The story unsettled him so much that it sparked nightmares… and ultimately, a screenplay.

Williamson wrote the first draft in just three days. Originally titled Scary Movie, the script drew inspiration from classic slashers like:

• Halloween
• Prom Night
• Friday the 13th

These franchises had fallen out of favor with audiences, and Williamson wanted to both celebrate and critique them. At the same time, he explored media fears around violence and its influence on young viewers.

At his agent’s request, he toned down the most extreme gore (removing severed limbs and intestines), but the script still packed a punch.

The story followed Sidney Prescott as a mysterious killer targets her friends—taunting victims with horror trivia before striking. It all built to one of the most shocking twists in horror history.

The Bidding War

Scary Movie triggered a massive bidding war. Studios involved included:

• Morgan Creek
• Universal
• Paramount
• Even Oliver Stone

Miramax ultimately secured the script for around $400,000–$500,000, despite offering less than competitors, on one key condition: immediate production. Williamson agreed, fearing the script might otherwise sit on a shelf.

Early Changes (and Studio Pressure)

Once Miramax came onboard, notes followed. Bob Weinstein wanted more frequent kills, leading to the addition of the principal’s death, a scene that also helped isolate the main characters during the finale.

Another memorable moment, Tatum’s garage death, was enhanced by a suggestion from Williamson’s assistant: the now-iconic dog door.

Wes Craven Almost Didn’t Direct

Wes Craven initially turned down Scream. It wasn’t studio pressure that changed his mind, it was a fan at a convention. Their interaction convinced him to take the job.

So yes, fan conversations can literally change film history.

The Birth of Ghostface

The script described the killer’s costume as a cheap Halloween outfit. During a location scout, the team discovered what would become the Ghostface mask. Originally called the “Peanut-Eyed Ghost,” the mask was owned by Fun World. The production briefly tried to recreate it without paying, but nothing looked as good as the original.

Craven shot with the real mask anyway and thankfully got approval later. Fun World licensed it for just $100 and a credit. That decision would later make them a fortune.

Casting Surprises

Drew Barrymore was originally cast as Sidney Prescott, but she had a different idea: What if she played the opening victim instead? That decision changed everything. Like Janet Leigh in Psycho, Barrymore’s early death shocked audiences and became one of the film’s defining moments.

The role of Sidney ultimately went to Neve Campbell, who impressed producers with her strength and physical presence.

Other cast members included:

• Skeet Ulrich
• Matthew Lillard
• Jamie Kennedy
• Rose McGowan
• David Arquette

For Gale Weathers, producers wanted a recognizable name. Courteney Cox, then starring in Friends, had to convince Craven she could handle the role. She did. And she nailed it.

The Voice of Ghostface

Roger L. Jackson performed Ghostface’s voice on set. Originally, he was meant to be replaced in post-production, but Craven loved his performance so much that they kept it. Jackson stayed off-camera, watching actors on a monitor while delivering lines live, without ever interacting with them directly. That separation helped heighten tension in performances.

Filming Challenges

Santa Rosa, California was chosen as the filming location, using real houses instead of sets. The high school scenes had to be relocated after a local school board rejected the production due to violence concerns, adding $300,000 to the budget.

The opening scene alone took an entire week to shoot.

Meanwhile, the Weinsteins weren’t impressed with early footage. They criticized the mask and pushed for changes. Craven responded by secretly editing the opening sequence with editor Patrick Lussier and sending it to Bob Weinstein. It worked. Weinstein loved it and backed off, giving the filmmakers more creative freedom (and more money).

A Brutal Finale

The final sequence at Stu’s house lasted 42 minutes onscreen and took 21 nights to shoot. It was intense. Notable incidents included:

• Skeet Ulrich being accidentally stabbed for real
• A stunt performer nearly falling during a van sequence
• Cast members being told to tone it down after scaring Courteney Cox

The crew even made shirts that read: “I survived Scene 118.”

Behind-the-Scenes Shakeups

Cinematographer Mark Irwin was replaced late in production due to technical issues with anamorphic lenses, including focus problems. Peter Deming stepped in and would continue working with Craven on future entries.

From Scary Movie to Scream

The title change came after filming wrapped. Bob Weinstein worried audiences would interpret Scary Movie as a straight comedy. The new title: Scream. There was a lawsuit from Sony (due to Screamers), but it was settled out of court.

Fighting for an R Rating

The MPAA initially resisted giving the film an R rating, calling it too intense. Craven’s solution? He argued the film was a satire, a spoof. That reframing worked.

Release and Legacy

Scream opened on December 20, 1996, earning $6 million in its first weekend. At first, it looked like a flop. But word of mouth turned it all around. The film:

• Increased its box office week after week
• Reached $173 million worldwide
• Became a cultural phenomenon

Critics were mixed at the time, praising its meta commentary but criticizing its violence. Over time, however, Scream has been re-evaluated as a masterpiece.

The Impact

Few films have reshaped a genre the way Scream did. It revived the slasher film, influenced a generation of horror, and became a cornerstone of pop culture. Without it, horror in the late ’90s and beyond would look very different.

And that… is what happened to Scream.

A couple of previous episodes of this show can be seen below. For more, check out the JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel—and don’t forget to subscribe!

The post Why Scream Almost Didn’t Happen (And How It Became Iconic) appeared first on JoBlo.

It’s July 20, 1969. Families across the world gather around the nearest television they can find to witness what may be the greatest accomplishment in the history of humankind. Eyes are glued to the screen, taking in every moment—the wonder, the amazement, the sheer impossibility of it all. A literal out-of-this-world experience. And somehow, every Earthling with a television has a front-row seat.

Thanks to the brave men and women whose hard work and determination made this possible. Thanks to the technology that carried them there. So yes—thank you, rockets, and thank you, cameras, for letting the whole world see it.

The whole thing feels so cinematic. Like you’re watching a Stanley Kubrick movie.

After all, Kubrick had already given audiences some incredibly convincing space imagery in 2001: A Space Odyssey. He even had connections to NASA, which later allowed him to use one of its specialized lenses while filming Barry Lyndon. Then there are the supposed clues that people claim he left behind in The Shining. Not to mention the dark, dirty themes of power and secrecy people see in Eyes Wide Shut.

And if we’re already going down this rabbit hole, then let’s just say it: Stanley Kubrick died 666 days before January 1, 2001.

Now, I’m not exactly sure what that means… but according to the internet, it must mean something.

Or maybe—just maybe—Stanley Kubrick’s work is so unbelievably brilliant that the only way our puny little monkey minds can process it is by turning it into mythology. Talent so extraordinary that it generates conspiracy theories. In a world that often feels corrupt and dishonest, it becomes easier and easier to believe almost anything.

And that’s how many people have come to the conclusion that master filmmaker Stanley Kubrick helped fake the moon landing.

The Basic Theory

So let’s go over the basics.

The theory claims that the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 was faked and secretly filmed with the help of Stanley Kubrick. But why Kubrick?

Because he had just released 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film featuring incredibly realistic depictions of outer space, only one year before the Apollo 11 mission. The timing lines up, and the visuals still hold up. Those scenes from 2001 still look better than a lot of the silly moon movies we get today.

According to the conspiracy, NASA recruited Kubrick because he had already proven he could create revolutionary space imagery while also striving for scientific realism. He had the talent, the obsessive attention to detail, and access to the most advanced filmmaking technology of the era.

In other words, if you were going to fake the moon landing, Stanley Kubrick might be the perfect guy for the job.

Almost too perfect.

Barry Lyndon and the NASA Lens

After failing to get his massive Napoleon biopic off the ground, Kubrick shifted his focus to another historical epic: Barry Lyndon.

Released in 1975—just a few years after the moon landing, just saying—the film was praised, like so many Kubrick films, for its extraordinary cinematography. I mean, just look at that lighting. How did he do it?

Well, this time Kubrick had a new cinematic weapon in his arsenal: a lens.

Not just any camera lens, but a special ultra-fast lens originally designed by NASA for low-light photography. These lenses were developed for photographing the far side of the moon during the Apollo missions.

And for some reason, NASA allowed Stanley Kubrick to use one.

Kubrick used the lens to film parts of Barry Lyndon, especially the now-famous candlelit scenes. No studio lights. No tricks. Just candle flames illuminating the frame.

The result? Some of the most beautiful images ever captured on film—all made possible by technology that came from NASA.

Why the Theory Sticks

The reason this theory has stuck around for so long is because, on the surface, it doesn’t feel completely impossible.

Hollywood, the space program, the military, and the government have all worked together—sometimes openly, sometimes in secret—for a variety of reasons: education, experimentation, propaganda, and wartime projects. History has shown us that governments and powerful institutions are certainly capable of secretive, and sometimes sinister, actions.

But the real question is this: would Stanley Kubrick have participated in something like that?

For me, the strongest evidence that this whole story is nonsense comes from someone who knew Kubrick better than almost anyone—his daughter, Vivian Kubrick.

She worked closely with her father on numerous projects and was incredibly close to him. Vivian understood his character, his values, his beliefs, and the things he deeply cared about. She has repeatedly said that her father would never have taken part in a deception of that magnitude. He would never knowingly betray the truth.

But of course, the mystery never ends there.

Because the counterargument is always the same: what if he was forced? What if he was threatened?

And that’s where the theory takes its most fascinating turn.

If Kubrick had been forced to fake the moon landing, what would his only option be to reveal the truth without endangering himself or his family?

Well, according to believers, the most Kubrickian answer would be simple: he would hide the truth inside his films, burying it beneath symbolism, imagery, and carefully planted clues—a cinematic confession, or maybe even an apology.

Which naturally leads us to the film conspiracy theorists love the most…

The Shining as Confession

Of course, we have to mention the infamous documentary Room 237, which explores a number of theories about Kubrick and his true intentions while making The Shining.

One of the most popular interpretations suggests that Kubrick used the film as a kind of confession, secretly revealing the truth about the moon landing through clues and symbols scattered throughout the movie.

The most famous example is Danny Torrance wearing an Apollo 11 sweater.

Then there’s the mysterious hotel room number 237, which is suspiciously close to the roughly 237,000 miles between Earth and the moon. Some people claim the carpet patterns resemble launch pads. Others point to the presence of Tang—every astronaut’s favorite powdered orange drink. Some even insist one of the hotel guests looks strangely similar to John F. Kennedy, the president who initiated the Apollo program.

And yes, there’s even some straight-up satanic imagery in the mix, because of course there is.

And once you get that deep into conspiracy land, somebody’s going to suggest that aliens are really demons from Hell—and that maybe that’s what we found on the moon.

So… there’s that too.

These are just a few of the “clues” believers point to. Most scholars, critics, and skeptics argue that these interpretations are simply examples of extreme symbolic overreading. But once you learn about these alleged clues, it becomes very hard not to see them—and almost impossible to watch The Shining the same way again.

Which, honestly, is not necessarily a bad thing.

Kubrick as Prophet

Kubrick always seemed to be trying to tell us something.

His films can be experienced on multiple levels, and conspiracy-minded viewers have had a field day with that fact for decades. A Clockwork Orange gets read as MK-Ultra commentary. Full Metal Jacket supposedly contains clues about who really killed Kennedy. Eyes Wide Shut is often framed as a warning about elite corruption and Epstein-like abuse long before that sort of thing entered mainstream public discourse. You could even make that argument about Lolita, if you wanted.

Even early Kubrick films feel like warnings about bureaucracy, violence, and bloodthirsty leadership—Paths of Glory, Spartacus, and, most blatantly, Dr. Strangelove.

And speaking of Dr. Strangelove, it brushes up against real-world history by echoing the shadowy legacy of Operation Paperclip—the secret U.S. government program that brought former Nazi scientists to America after World War II to work with NASA and other military projects.

So when people start connecting Kubrick to government secrets, you can at least understand how the dots begin to form.

The Reputation That Fuels the Fire

Kubrick’s legendary reputation only adds rocket fuel to the theory.

He was notorious for perfectionism, obsessing over every detail in every frame of every film. He embraced technical innovations whenever possible. He was intensely private. He rarely ventured too far from home—which is one reason Full Metal Jacket was shot in England. He was known to be unusually cautious when it came to safety, travel, and health.

To some, that behavior reads as the habits of a man in hiding. A man fearful for his life. A man being watched. A man making sure he never let the truth slip out.

Maybe a NASA assassin—a “Nas-sassin,” if you will—was lurking around every corner, just waiting to strike.

And then there’s his death, which came not long after he finished Eyes Wide Shut—a film many believe was altered after he died.

So who knows what else he was trying to tell us?

Why Fake It?

But let’s step back for a second.

Why fake the moon landing in the first place?

Today it sounds ridiculous. But you have to remember the context of the late 1960s. The United States was deep in the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and a major part of that conflict was the Space Race. Reaching the moon wasn’t just about science. It was about national pride, technological dominance, and proving which superpower was truly on top.

Planting a flag on the moon would be the ultimate symbol of superiority—a power move so massive it would be nearly impossible to top.

But what if the United States couldn’t meet the deadline? What if the technology simply wasn’t ready?

In that scenario, America risked looking weak, embarrassed, even inferior in the eyes of its greatest rival. And when nations feel that kind of pressure, desperate times can lead to desperate ideas.

So maybe—just maybe—somebody thought faking it would be the easiest solution. Boost morale. Scare the Soviets. Kick off a new Space Age.

All they would have to do is beam the footage into every living room on Earth and burn the image into our collective consciousness.

A kind of global A Clockwork Orange brainwashing.

My Monkey Brain Has Questions

Now look—I’m not saying I don’t believe the moon landing happened.

And I’m not not saying that I don’t don’t don’t believe it either.

I’m just saying my monkey brain has monkey questions.

Because none of this makes any sense to me anymore.

But then again, life rarely does.

Maybe life itself is just one big Stanley Kubrick movie. Confusing. Mysterious. Slightly terrifying. But still beautiful.

So yeah… somebody please explain this to my monkey brain.

How exactly did we get up there?

Sure, the movement of the flag looks strange. The shadows seem odd. The absence of stars raises questions that feel hard to explain. But more than anything, it’s the feeling people get while watching the footage—that strange, uncanny reaction where our primal monkey brains start whispering that something is off. That humans shouldn’t be up there, and that if they were, it shouldn’t look like that.

But then again… how would we know what it’s supposed to look like?

Most of us have never been anywhere near the moon.

If the moon even really exists.

And if I’m being honest, I don’t have enough faith in my own eyes—or my own government—to fully trust either one.

Watching History Like It’s a Movie

We live in a culture deeply shaped by movies. For more than a century, film has helped us imagine the impossible and make sense of the world. Many of us instinctively process reality through a cinematic lens.

At the same time, we live in an era where institutions that were once trusted have repeatedly been exposed as corrupt, or at the very least dishonest.

So when something as monumental as the moon landing appears on a television screen, it’s almost inevitable that some people will start wondering:

Are we watching history?
Or are we watching a Stanley Kubrick movie?

Kubrick’s films often leave us with unanswered questions. And maybe because of Kubrick, we’ve started to look at the real world the same way.

We search for symbols. We hunt for hidden meanings. We stare at strange images that both amaze and unsettle us.

And once you start looking at the world through that lens, the questions never stop.

Why did NASA erase the original raw moon landing tapes?
Why did the astronauts look so strange when they returned?
Why did Buzz Aldrin supposedly tell a little girl that we didn’t go to the moon?
Why does some of the footage look like it has a green-screen glitch?
Why does flipping “Neil A. Armstrong” backward spell “ALIEN”?
Why is there what looks like an Eyes Wide Shut mask on Mars?
And what the hell is that giant baby doing floating in space?

Because once Kubrick gets inside your head… everything starts to feel like a Stanley Kubrick movie.

The post Why do people think Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landing? appeared first on JoBlo.

Jessica

The 80s were a time when country music and a type of hero born of the good ol boy class that came into his own. This could be seen in shows like The Dukes of Hazzard, BJ and The Bear, as well as movies like Any Which Way But Loose and Smokey and the Bandit. They were a time of what would be considered fun action films and TV. Again, this was personified in shows where usually no one got seriously hurt, like The A-Team. The bad guys went to the same shooting school as your friendly neighborhood Stormtroopers. But, one TV show that would personify this “nobody better get hurt” adventure series was The Fall Guy.  

The series was designed as a vehicle for star Lee Majors, who had become a household name thanks to The Six Million Dollar Man, but struggled to find a worthy follow-up. This would be it, with him playing Colt Seavers, a likeable stuntman who supplements his income in an interesting way: he moonlights as a bounty hunter. For Majors, this would be a passion project, with him even singing the theme song. The show became a major hit, with Majors riding a second wave of fame while his gorgeous co-star, Heather Thomas, would become one of the biggest pin-ups of the 80s. The show has just been given the big-screen treatment, with Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt starring in the well-received remake (read our review here), so now it’s time to pay tribute to the original show.

How did The Fall Guy get made?

The Fall Guy came to be in probably one of the most bizarre ways a TV show would happen. And yet…for those who grew up with the series and that epic theme song, it makes complete sense.

Glen Larson, a name Gone But Not Forgotten viewers should recognize, was one of the gods of 80s television. He was hanging out with a friend of his named David Somerville who just happened to be a member of a music group named The Diamonds.  Somerville had written a theme song for a project about stuntmen called “The Ballad of the Unknown Stuntman,” which he was humming and singing. Larson heard him and asked his friend what it was. He had Somerville perform the whole song. Based on that song, Larson had an idea for a TV series.

Armed with Somerville and literally no script, Larson went in to pitch the idea of a show to ABC. The pitch consisted of Larson and Somerville singing the song. Lo and behold, that was enough for them, and the show got the greenlight. It’s as crazy as some scenarios Colt Seavers would wind up in.

Larson’s idea became a series that would give viewers exactly what was promised: crazy stunts and behind-the-scenes of what it was like making Hollywood action films. But consistently doing that for an hour a week would get really expensive and exhausting. So the lead character of our Fall Guy, Colt Seavers, would have a gig between his stunt jobs as a bounty hunter for bail jumpers, a scenario the film dropped for some reason. This concept would keep a level of action still going and allow Colt to use his stuntman abilities and training while dealing with this other dangerous line of work.

Where is The Fall Guy cast now?

The Fall Guy wasn’t a deep premise, but it was a hell of a lot of fun. And this was helped along in spades by casting Lee Majors as Colt Seavers. Majors had a history with Glenn Larson thanks to his work in Six Million Dollar Man. Lee was likable, had a glimmer in his eye, and was not from bionics this time. He had been around stuntmen and the industry for a while. He had a good ol boy charm, which was something that would work years later when he was cast in the role he seemed born for, Bruce Campbell’s father in Ash vs Evil Dead.

Majors would do many of his stunts in the series besides singing the theme song. He also directed some episodes and produced the series. A number of the guest stars who would show up or cameo were friends of Majors who had been around a while by this point in his career in numerous TV and film roles, several which were based in the Western genre.  

The Fall Guy definitely lent itself to this sort of “Redneck Cinema” genre, which was growing in popularity in the late 70s and early 80s, and Major’s western resume helped greatly with that mystique. It was something Larson would bring to the small screen in other series like The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo, BJ and the Bear, and, to some extent, Simon and Simon.

Majors is still working in both TV and film, most notably in the previously mentioned Ash vs Evil Dead where he gave as great a chin as Bruce Campbell on screen.  

Douglas Barr played Howie Munson, the naïve and lovable sidekick for Colt. Howie loved the ladies and would try his hand at being a stuntman alongside Colt and Jody, using his many failed attempts at degrees in college to help out when needed. Barr’s charming smile, good looks, and loveable personality made him a great foil for Major’s, and there was a great chemistry there.  

Barr had already been in a few TV series and films at this point. He’d go on to co-star alongside David Rappaport in the fantastic tv series called The Wizard as his bodyguard and partner. He’s since become more known for writing and directing TV movies like the Hallmark Channel’s Notes from the Heart Healer and Taking a Chance on Love. He’s also become a winery owner with the snazzily named Hollywood and Vine Cellars.

Heather Thomas played Jody, the stunt woman who helped keep Howie in line and was Colt’s right hand. Thomas was a stunning actress whose poster wound up on the wall of a LOT of 80s teenage boys. She appeared in several TV series in guest roles and some great cult films like Zapped alongside Scott Baio. But my favourites were the Fred Olen Ray-directed Cyclone opposite a very young Jeffrey Combs and Red Blooded American Girl, where she starred alongside Kim Coates, Christopher Plummer, and Andrew Stevens.

Thomas’s time in Hollywood wasn’t an easy one though, and she’s talked about the struggles that happened while she was more in the public eye.  Stalking became a life-threatening issue when one of Thomas’s stalkers came to her house and climbed a fence while brandishing a knife. Thomas did return to acting though and also became a writer, penning the book called Trophies.  

Jo Ann Pflug would star for the first season as Big Jack, Colt’s bondswoman boss. Pflug was in many TV roles, TV films, and feature films.  But I’ll always remember her as the fast-talking Louise Harper from The Night Strangler.

Markie Post would take over the bail woman role as Terri Shannon for all but the series’ last season. Post was a staple on TV throughout the 80s and had a massive career, with her most well-known role being Christine from Night Court. In fact, her commitment to being on The Fall Guy prevented her from joining Night Court until its third season. Sadly, she would pass away at the young age of 70 in 2021 after a long battle with cancer.

But, we can’t recite the cast of The Fall Guy without mentioning its most iconic character…and that’s Colt’s GMC Pick-Up. Many who owned the toy car version of this baby would have it race alongside the other famous vehicles of the 80s like KITT, the A-TEAM Van, and, of course, the General Lee.  The 1980’s was a magical time to be a car geek. The truck was a GMC K 2500 with some additions. They did many stunts and jumps with the trucks. Eventually, GMC would modify the pickups to help cut down on the number of them being trashed during stunts.

The Fall Guy would become a major, pun not intended, hit for ABC thanks to a great mix of comedy, action, and a massive guest star list. As said, Lee Majors got many friends to show up in the series. Just in the pilot alone, Lou Rawls would play Country Joe. And when you have a guy with a voice like Lou Rawls, you have to find someone with an equally unique voice to play the villain harassing him. That role went to Percy Rodrigues, the voice of over 100 movie trailers. When you heard that voice coming onto a trailer you knew you were in for something terrifying. From Jaws to The Exorcist, Rodriguez’s voice was always involved.  

Besides Rawls and Rodrigues, Delta Burke would appear as a waitress, and Lara Parker was a very unhappy resident in town. Terry Kiser (Bernie from Weekend at Bernie’s) was Jody’s director. Eddie Albert, another staple from film and TV played Big John, the child hit and runner in a villainous turn.  

James Coburn played himself, and so did Farrah Fawcett. Farrah’s appearance almost didn’t happen. In reality, she and Majors were getting divorced, and it was playing out across many tabloids and in the news. Her friends had asked her not to do the cameo, which was a really sweet moment where you could see the affection the actors still had for each other. But Farrah wanted to show the world that she and Majors weren’t at each other’s throats as the headlines would have you believe. So she did the cameo, which lends itself to the line Majors sings in the theme song (“I’ve been seen with Farrah”).

The guest stars and brief appearances over the show’s run were MASSIVE. Here’s a short sampling. Richard Kiel, Milton Berle, Linda Evans, Vincent Schiavelli, Lou Ferrigno, Tom Selleck, Heather Locklear, Richard Burton, Roy Rogers, Lindsay Wagner and many more. Much like Dukes of Hazzard, some country music performers like Johnny Lee, Mickey Gilley, Dottie West, Ray Stevens, and Charlie Daniels would be a part of the show.

But my favourite episode of The Fall Guy had to be the one that aired on October 31st, 1984…with the original title called October the 31st.  This episode sees Colt, Howie, and Jody all at a supposedly haunted mansion alongside Elvira and John Carradine.  But John isn’t the only Carradine here as his sons David, Keith, and Robert are also in the episode.  This episode would be followed up the following year with October the 32nd, which would have Elvira return where Colt and company are filming a horror film and dealing with an escaped mental patient.  This would see Doug McClure return as well as Schiavelli, and would also co-star Vernon Wells.

As I said previously, there were toy cars of Colt’s truck in different sizes and an airplane. The merchandise was huge, with things like lunchboxes, action figures, t-shirts, and a board game. 

Overseas, the show was also a hit, with Fall Guy Annuals produced in the UK, which was something done for series like Doctor Who. If you want to see the original Fall Guy series, you can order it on Amazon Prime.

Is the movie a fitting tribute?

The answer to the question of if Fall Guy should return has already been answered. Ryan Gosling stars in a big-budget remake feature film called The Fall Guy, with him playing Colt Seavers who in this isn’t a bounty hunter for bail jumpers but is simply a stuntman. The Jody here, played by Emily Blunt, isn’t his assistant but the film director of the project he’s working on and who also happens to be his ex-girlfriend. There’s no Howie around, but the Lee Majors does have a role in the film, which follows Colt as he tries to find the missing leading man of the movie, Tom Ryder, played by Aaron Taylor Johnson, before Jody’s film is shut down.

The movie is a great time with a funny and charming cast and lots of explosions and crazy stunts…which is exactly what The Fall Guy should be. It’s an amped-up peek into Hollywood. But more than that, it gives the guys and gals who risk their lives for our entertainment a spotlight that’s been well-deserved for a long time. And here’s hoping that with a film like this most assuredly being a hit, it will inspire the Oscars to give us a best Stunt Person award FINALLY. Check out our EIC Chris Bumbray’s review HERE!

The post The Fall Guy (1981-86): What happened to the TV show that spawned the movie? appeared first on JoBlo.

Jessica

The 70s were a time when television would seem to try anything at least once.  Science Fiction was one of the main genres where this was very true.  Thanks to the success of series like Star Trek, and Lost in Space there was a deluge of, off beat and actually good genre TV (as we explored on last week’s Land of the Lost episode). Typically it was with some sort of toy tie-in or angle to get children to watch and/or buy something.   And just wait until Star Wars happened.

But, the early 70s would find a new kind of hero to grab the hearts and minds of kids across the country and he’d bring with him some of the coolest toys around. Because, he was literally made up of metal and plastic himself.  

The Six Million Dollar Man would jump into television history with a premise that was brilliant, cutting edge, and perfect TV fodder.  It would also make a heartthrob and icon out of a guy named Lee Majors. Who would eventually play the father to our lord and savior Ash Williams…but that’s another show.

On this episode of Gone But Not Forgotten, we have the technology and capability to make the first episode all about The Six Million Dollar Man.  This will be that episode!

The Six Million Dollar Man actually started as a novel named Cyborg and no this has no connection to Jean Claude Van Dams’s 1989 cinematic masterpiece.  Cyborg was written by Martin Caidin and was followed fairly closely by the eventual TV series.  In the book Steve Austin is an astronaut who is horribly maimed after an plane crash from which he somehow survives.  After the accident Dr. Rudy Wells, a master of high-tech bionics who works with the Office of Strategic Operations, along with Oscar Goldman, one of the high ups at the OSO, put Steve back together again.

The book veers from what would happen in the TV series somewhat, with Austin having some “interesting” augmentations like a radio in his rib, a removable eyeball with a camera in it and a finger that can shoot poison darts.  

While yes, there is a lot to poke fun at here, the book doesn’t shy away from the more serious aspects of Steve Austin’s resurrection as it were.  When he realizes how injured he is, he tries to kill himself. He hates, basically being made into an indentured servant in order to payback the costs for his new body and abilities.  But Steve would wind up accepting his new enhancements and becoming a more willing and happy to participate spy and agent for the OSO.  

The Cyborg book series would actually continue on, while the Six Million Dollar Man TV series was airing. But, it would not actually follow the storyline of the show.  The world of the novels was far different with a total of three books following the original.

The Six Million Dollar Man was a made for TV movie of the week which would be used as a jumping off pilot that aired on ABC on March 7^th 1973.  In the pilot episode, as in the novel, Steve Austin is injured during an accident that nearly kills him.  He loses his right arm and both legs and is blinded in his left eye.  

Austin is put back together by Rudy Wells for the OSO. In this first film there are some definite differences from what would later be associated with the series.  There were actually three made for TV movies that preceded the show and the first had some notable cast differences and characters.  The biggest would be the lack of Oscar Goldman played by Richard Anderson.  In the TV movie,  the character who is in charge of the OSO is Oliver Spencer was played by the always awesome Darren McGavin.  

Also in this version Rudy Wells would be played by TV character staple Martin Balsam.  The character of Rudy would change over the course of the films and series three times.  First with Balsam, then Alan Oppenheimer and Martin E Brooks.  The iconic sound effects wouldn’t be a part of this first entry into the series either.   

The TV movie was a ratings smash and was followed by two more TV films that same year.  The 2^nd film, airing in October, would give us Oscar and Alan Oppenheimer as Rudy 2.0.  This would also see the introduction of the OSI.  

In November the 3^rd made for TV movie would air.  As said, these original films would be edited to two parters and added to the series run with some additional content.  The titles for the made for TV films would be: 

The Six Million Dollar Man

The Moon And the Desert

Wine, Women and War

The Solid Gold Kidnapping

The official first episode of The Six Million Dollar Man would air on January 18^th 1974.  The series would follow Austin as he would go on missions for the OSI and would be filled with spy work and rescues along with some interesting surprises along the way.  

Of note, the 2^nd film was written by TV legend Glen A Larson.

The Six Million Dollar Man season 1 would quickly introduce the familiar sound effects and special effects that fans are familiar with.  You know the ones.  Slow motion fast running, the eyeball thing, the bionics thing, and the all-important intro where Oscar tells us that “We can rebuild him.  We have the technology.  We can make him better than he was.  Better, stronger, faster.” 

It’s interesting to note, the first voice you hear during that opening narration is actually producer Harve Bennett saying “Steve Austin, astronaut.  A man barely alive.” Bennett worked in the TV industry for YEARS and would be responsible or involved with some of the classics of TV world with the likes of Mod Squad and a number of made for TV movies under his belt.  He’d go on to bring to the big screen one of the best sci-fi movies of all time. Certainly the best Star Trek film ever made The Wrath of Khan in 1982.

Along with Bennett’s future connection to Star Trek, The Six Million Dollar Man would have connections throughout the genre and also get some major accolades.  The first TV movie would be nominated for a Hugo Award.  Some of the writers throughout the series would include D.C. Fontana, Peter Allan Fields, Mark Frost, and Kenneth Johnson.

Kenneth Johnson would be one of the shows producers and is the man behind a few shows we’ve showcased here on Gone But Not Forgotten.  But as a writer and producer on The Six Million Dollar Man, Johnson would contribute one of the biggest pieces of the series history. When he introduced Jaime Sommers in season two’s 2 parter The Bionic Woman.  

Jaime would become a love interest for Steve. Lee Majors would actually sing the love theme for the duo called Sweet Jaime in multiple episodes just like he’d sing the theme for The Fall Guy a few years later. Who would share a similar tragic fate which would lead to her becoming said Bionic Woman. When a sky diving accident nearly kills the tennis player, Janie goes through the same procedure as Austin.  Jaime would become a returning character on the show after supposedly dying in part 2 of the storyline which would also include Steve proposing to Jaime.  

I don’t want to go too far into the world of The Bionic Woman as well…she got her own series and deserves her own episode…so keep an EYE out for that.

Needless to say, Jaime Sommers would become a major player in the franchise and other bionic characters, both good and bad, would become part of the lore.  One of the more interesting of these would be Barney, the 7 Million Dollar Man.  Barney is played by actor Monte Markham, who ironically was who the producers originally wanted to play Steve Austin before Lee Majors won the role.  

Some other standouts from the series episodes are of course…the fembots.  The creepy robot wiring revealed faces of these things are just…well…creepy.  The fembots were part of a recurring group of robots who would fight both Steve and Jaime over the course of the series. 

One of the most well known, insane, and neat episodes from the show though are “The Secret of Bigfoot” written by yet again Kenneth Johnson.  This episode has Steve taking on Bigfoot. Interesting fact he was played this first time by the legendary Andre The Giant. The design and look of Bigfoot in this is pretty awesome and more than a little scary for a kid. The story involves Bigfoot, Aliens, and earthquakes.  It’s a fan favorite and there’s lots of reasons why… But, you only really need to remember Andre The Giant is Bigfoot and that should be enough. The episode was so popular that a hilarious homage of it was on The Venture Brothers.

Bigfoot would return again the following season in The Return of Bigfoot. This would actually be a crossover event with The Bionic Woman that season. Butt instead of Andre The Giant, Ted Cassidy would take over the role of Bigfoot AKA Sasquatch.  

Lee Majors real life wife and fellow TV icon the late Farrah Fawcett would appear in a number of episodes of the show as different characters.  While Steve and Jaime were the bionic power couple that didn’t stop Steve or Jaime for that matter finding other love interests.  But we always knew they’d end up together eventually.

Lee Majors was, before being cast as Steve Austin, really known for westerns.  He had a major role in the series The Big Valley and had done turns in Gunsmoke and other TV series and films.  But it was really The Six Million Dollar Man that made him into the pop culture icon and TV legend he is today.  Majors is still acting and even got nominated for a Saturn award for his co-starring role as Bruce Campbell’s daddy in Ash Vs Evil Dead, I mean who else could have done it? Right?

Lindsay Wagner would play Jaime Sommer. Wagner, like Majors, had done some film work, most notably in The Paper Chase, and several TV guest roles before bringing Jaime to life.  

Richard Anderson who portrayed Oscar Goldman had a ton of films under his belt before becoming part of the OSI, at one point appearing on an episode of The Big Valley with Majors.  But, it would be as Oscar Goldman that he’d be best known for, playing the boss of the bionic crew who himself had a heart of gold.

The show would have a list of guest stars a mile long of familiar faces and massive talent.  Besides the aforementioned Farrah Fawcett and dueling Bigfoots there would be John Saxon, William Shatner, George Foreman, Sonny Bono, Erik Estrada, and Greg Evigan just to name a few.  Glory in the 70s kids, it was a magic time.

The Six Million Dollar Man would last for a total of 5 seasons.  In that run it would become a massive hit and would release some of the greatest toys ever.  

Maskatron was a sort of meshing of all the robot nemesis in the show and came with faces you could switch including Oscar and Steve.  I think this other face is supposed to be John Saxons but I’m not sure.  You could pop his head off.  The Steve Austin doll is just freaking neat and had an eye you could look through like a telescope and a removable arm plate.  There are different versions of him with different bionic abilities. Bigfoot got his own toy as well which could pop open his chest to show all of his electronics inside.  Oscar got his own toy which came with…rather oddly…an exploding briefcase.

There were playsets and even extra bionic parts for Steve which you could buy and pop off his legs and put on. There were vehicles too as well as a Play Doh set.  Basically The Six Million Dollar Man knew how to make some bank when it came to the kids.  Books, records, comics, you name it you could probably find Steve Austin on it.

The series would end in 1978 but it actually sort of didn’t.  Flash forward to 1987 and NBC brought back together Steve and Jamie for The Return of the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman.  It was quite the family affair with Lee Majors the II, Majors son, playing an OSI Agent, but funnily enough not Steve Austin’s son in the TV Movie.  That role went to Tom Schanley who, in a continuing wave of bad luck for the Austin’s, gets nearly killed in a crash and has bionics added to his body just like his father.  The film had a pretty decent budget of nearly 5 million dollars. It was actually a possible pilot for a new series focusing on Steve’s newly bionic son Michael.   Martin Landau played the lead villain who was part of a new group called Fortress.

While the series never materialized the TV film was a big enough hit to get another one made.  Bionic Showdown: The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman was released in 1989 and would see production moved to Canada. But, also joining the bionic family is a gal by the name of Sandra Bullock.  Yep, that’s right Sandra Bullock.  Once again, this was another attempt at a new series, this time with a newly bionic woman in the guise of Bullock’s character Kate.  But, as the previous film, there wasn’t enough interest in producing a full series.  But also like the last film there was enough to do one more TV movie.

Bionic Ever After aired in 1994 and follows the dual proposal of marriage from Showdown with Steve and Jaime planning on getting married. But, of course there’s always some sort of hostage situation to put a wrench into the works.  Also Jaime’s bionics are failing, and she needs an upgrade.  This would be the last of the bionic films. Wagner mandated that she and Majors get married in this one or she wouldn’t do it.  Also a nice bit of trivia, this aired on CBS which means The Six Million Dollar Man has appeared on all three of what used to be the major networks of the day.  Just as one more aside, I honestly thought this one was filmed in Canada too, but it appears it was South Carolina.  I bring this up because the also awesome Geordie Johnson plays one of the main bad guys here.  So yes, Dracula and Klaus from Dracula the Series were two of the last villains to take on Steve Austin.

Bionic Ever After was a nice ending for two of TV’s unique and greatest heroes who deserved their happy ending.  The Six Million Dollar Man has never been remade or retooled.  Not to say no one hasn’t tried.  Mark Whalberg has been ready to take on the Six BILLION Dollar Man for a while now, Kevin Smith’s failed screenplay was adapted to a great comic series, but there has been no traction on the property for years. So the feature film version of Steve Austin has yet to take flight and crash as would need to happen.  

Honestly, I’m sort of glad.  Lee Majors was great in this role and this type of series, one with aliens, robots, and spy tech really can’t be replicated today without someone doing it to just mock it or wink at the camera.  The Six Million Dollar Man relied on a good and fun story that just happened to have a neat gimmick.  It was entertaining but also well written with characters that you cared about.  It was a natural progression from shows like Star Trek and Batman.  Technology that could be, and now actually is, shown helping people.  It was great for younger and older viewers which is why it was able to be as big a hit as it was and still be a favorite for fans today.  

The series was released on DVD and is now available to stream on Peacock and it looks great.  If you’ve never checked out The Six Million Dollar Man, I highly recommend it.  Lee Majors created a likable and fantastic character in Steve Austin.  Yes, he was a rugged type but he also had a heart and cared about the people he loved.  He was funny and charming and made a fantastic toy.  It’s one of those roles that would be hard to replicate or recast.  I just can’t see it.  So yes, sometimes you can’t make it better or stronger.  Sometimes it’s perfect just the way it is.

The post The Six Million Dollar Man (1973-1978): Gone But Not Forgotten appeared first on JoBlo.

I actually had the privilege — the opportunity, the blessing — to see Paul Dano work up close.

Years ago, I was an extra on Richard Linklater’s Fast Food Nation. You probably remember me as the out-of-focus high school student who sets his backpack down by a tree in the background. Yeah, that was me.

This was before Paul Dano was the Paul Dano.

While we were shooting Fast Food Nation, surrounded by a bunch of young extras trying to make it through the day, I noticed this one guy wandering around the set. To me, he looked like just another weird, quiet, awkward kid — shy, withdrawn, maybe a little angsty — trying to survive the long hours like the rest of us.

Then Linklater called action.

The cameras started rolling.

And suddenly I realized something: that awkward teenager who had been drifting around all day wasn’t an extra at all.

He was acting in the scene.

And he was so convincing that I genuinely thought he was just some troubled kid who had accidentally wandered onto the set.

In a strange way, that has kind of been Paul Dano’s entire career.

He just wanders in… and quietly takes over.

From the very beginning, Paul Dano has been something of an arthouse darling. He carries himself like an old soul — calm voice, gentle demeanor, thoughtful presence. Yet he has a remarkable talent for portraying characters drowning in anxiety, insecurity, rage, or confusion, while somehow still comforting the audience with a strange tenderness.

He’s worked with some of the greatest filmmakers alive today. He moves easily between intimate independent films and massive modern blockbusters. Over the years, he’s built a reputation as one of the most thoughtful, focused actors working in cinema today.

Dano is also a serious movie nerd — someone deeply knowledgeable about film history who approaches every role as a craft rather than a career move.

Which is why it felt so bizarre when Quentin Tarantino suddenly took a swing at Paul Dano’s acting.

During a podcast interview discussing There Will Be Blood, Tarantino publicly criticized Dano’s performance in the film, calling it the movie’s “big flaw” and describing the actor as weak compared to Daniel Day-Lewis. The comments ignited one of those classic internet film-nerd debates that still lingers today.

Was Tarantino right?

Is Paul Dano actually weak… or is he one of the strongest actors working today?

And how did Hollywood respond to such a bizarre opinion?

More importantly, how did Paul Dano get to where he is today?

What films shaped his reputation?

And while we’re asking questions… when the hell is The Batman Part II coming out?

In other words:

What the f*ck happened to Paul Dano?

To understand that, we need to start at the beginning.

Paul Dano was born in New York in 1984 and first gained attention at a young age with a haunting performance in the indie drama L.I.E. Critics immediately noticed this strange, talented kid who seemed completely comfortable leaning into silence, awkwardness, and emotional vulnerability.

Throughout the early 2000s, he began popping up in memorable supporting roles in films such as The Girl Next Door, The Emperor’s Club, Taking Lives, episodes of The Sopranos, and The Ballad of Jack and Rose, where he worked for the first time with Daniel Day-Lewis.

He also appeared in Richard Linklater’s fast-food satire Fast Food Nation, where I first witnessed him quietly stealing scenes.

But the film that truly put Paul Dano on the map was Little Miss Sunshine.

In the film, Dano plays a silent teenager going through a Nietzsche phase. For much of the movie, he communicates only through facial expressions and body language, holding his own alongside an incredible ensemble cast.

Then comes his explosive emotional breakdown — one of the most powerful moments in the film.

That moment perfectly captures Paul Dano’s acting style:

Long stretches of cinematic silence… followed by emotional dynamite.

Around that time, he also appeared in the gangster drama Weapons and then landed one of the most intimidating acting challenges imaginable: starring opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood.

Day-Lewis reportedly threw bowling balls during rehearsals and physically shoved Dano around while filming.

Yet somehow Dano held his own.

His portrayal of the preacher Eli Sunday becomes the perfect contrast to Day-Lewis’s oil tycoon Daniel Plainview. His voice cracks, shrieks, and trembles with desperation — a man torn between faith, ambition, and insecurity.

It’s a haunting performance that has stayed with audiences ever since.

Apparently, people even offer Paul milkshakes because of that film.

Unfortunately, he has to refuse them due to lactose intolerance.

Over the next decade, Dano moved effortlessly between studio productions and experimental indie films.

He appeared in Light and Sufferer, Gigantic, The Good Heart, The Extra Man, and briefly in the Tom Cruise action film Knight and Day. He even showed up in a few scenes of Looper.

He worked with Ang Lee on Taking Woodstock and delivered a memorable performance in the slow-burning western Meek’s Cutoff. His face and presence seem to belong naturally to period pieces, lending authenticity to historical settings.

He also appeared in 12 Years a Slave and even helped ground the chaotic sci-fi western Cowboys & Aliens.

Another standout performance came in For Ellen, where he plays a struggling musician trying to reconnect with his daughter.

Then there was Ruby Sparks, where he portrays a writer who literally brings his dream woman to life — a quirky romantic comedy that slowly transforms into something darker.

Then came Prisoners.

Dano initially hesitated to take the role because he knew the character would be emotionally brutal to play.

But the opportunity to work with Denis Villeneuve and such a powerful script proved impossible to refuse.

In the film, Dano barely speaks. His body is twisted with fear and confusion, creating a deeply unsettling presence that fuels the film’s tension.

For a method-style actor, inhabiting such darkness can be exhausting — which is why Dano has said he needed to switch the character off as soon as the cameras stopped rolling.

In Love & Mercy, Dano portrayed a young Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, presenting the musician as a fragile genius struggling under immense creative pressure. Though many predicted awards recognition, Dano ultimately received only a Golden Globe nomination.

Then his career took a wonderfully bizarre turn.

He teamed up with the directing duo known as The Daniels for Swiss Army Man, where he befriends a farting corpse played by Daniel Radcliffe.

Yes, that is an actual movie.

And somehow it works.

He later collaborated with Bong Joon-ho in Okja, starred in the prison drama Escape at Dannemora, and eventually stepped behind the camera himself to direct Wildlife, a quiet but devastating drama starring Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal.

The film proved something important: Paul Dano is not chasing fame.

He is chasing craft.

Then came his biggest mainstream role yet: The Riddler in The Batman.

Initially, many fans were skeptical about the casting. Dano seemed like an unusual choice for the iconic villain.

But he reimagined the character entirely, drawing inspiration from the Zodiac Killer rather than previous comic book portrayals.

The result was a chilling performance that left audiences unsure of what he might do next.

Dano even wrote a six-issue comic series titled The Riddler: Year One.

At the same time, he appeared as Steven Spielberg’s father in The Fabelmans, preparing for the role by studying Spielberg’s personal home videos and family archives.

Then came the Tarantino controversy.

During a podcast appearance, Quentin Tarantino criticized Dano’s performance in There Will Be Blood, calling him weak and claiming the role failed to match Daniel Day-Lewis’s intensity.

Hollywood quickly rallied to Dano’s defense. Filmmakers and actors such as Ben Stiller, Matt Reeves, George Clooney, and Ethan Hawke praised his talent and dismissed the criticism.

Dano himself responded calmly, saying he appreciated the support and felt no need to defend himself.

Ironically, Tarantino’s criticism only sparked a wave of admiration for Dano across the industry.

So what the hell happened to Paul Dano?

Nothing.

And that’s the best possible answer.

He simply continues doing what he has always done: choosing unusual roles, collaborating with visionary filmmakers, and quietly delivering some of the most memorable performances of his generation.

Paul Dano didn’t disappear.

He just kept getting better.

And honestly?

Cinema needs more actors like him.

The post WTF Happened to Paul Dano? appeared first on JoBlo.

Knight Moves (1992) arrived at exactly the right time for almost everyone… well, maybe not U.S. audiences. It gave rising star Christopher Lambert a showcase at the height of his American popularity, paired him with his then-wife Diane Lane, and delivered director Carl Schenkel his biggest commercial hit. And yet, more than 30 years later, the film has mostly disappeared. It’s rarely available on streaming. Physical media copies are hard to find. So what happened?

Did it blur the line too finely between an erotic thriller and a giallo, missing both audiences? Was the acting too stiff for mainstream viewers? Should American audiences have received the longer international cut? The answers are subjective, but the film itself is far more interesting than its reputation suggests.

What we got with Knight Moves is a strange, stylish hybrid: part early ’90s erotic thriller, part 1970s Italian giallo. It’s fun, sleazy, dramatic, and almost certainly the black sheep of Christopher Lambert’s career.

Check, and checkmate.

Not That Knight Moves

No, not the Bob Seger song. Not the 1975 Gene Hackman neo-noir. This is the 1992 chess murder thriller starring Christopher Lambert, and it’s far more fascinating than most people remember.

When Knight Moves was released, Lambert was still at his U.S. peak. The Highlander sequels were still being made (this film landed between parts 2 and 3), and he still had Fortress, Gunmen, and Mortal Kombat ahead of him.

Though he’d been acting since 1979 and was already huge overseas, Lambert broke into the American market with Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984), a box office hit that earned three Oscar nominations. A year later came Highlander, cementing his pop culture status. (Though let’s be honest, if you were 10 years old in 1995, you might argue his most important role was Raiden.)

Lambert was more versatile than he gets credit for. Yes, he made genre favorites like Highlander, Fortress, and Mortal Kombat. But he also tackled drama (The Sicilian, To Kill a Priest), comedy (Why Me?), and yes, sleazy thrillers like this one. And in 1992, this was absolutely his movie.

A Cast Before They Were Icons

Lambert’s star power dwarfed much of the supporting cast at the time.

• Daniel Baldwin plays the angry half of the good cop/bad cop duo—and briefly feels like a possible suspect.
• Tom Skerritt brings veteran presence, though by 1992 he wasn’t overshadowing anyone.
• Diane Lane, married to Lambert at the time, was still years away from her Oscar nomination and leading-lady peak.
• Katharine Isabelle, now horror royalty (Ginger Snaps, Freddy vs. Jason, Hannibal), appears here as a child prodigy somehow playing Super Mario Bros. 3 on a PC, where it absolutely did not exist.

Behind the camera, director Carl Schenkel would never have a bigger hit. Screenwriter Brad Mirman debuted here and later collaborated with Lambert five more times, including Highlander III and the underrated Resurrection (arguably Lambert’s best pure genre film).

But the most interesting thing about Knight Moves isn’t the cast.

It’s that the movie is secretly a giallo wearing the mask of an erotic thriller.

A Giallo Disguised as a ’90s Erotic Thriller

On the surface, the setup screams early ’90s thriller:

• A troubled male protagonist with a dark past
• Multiple romantic entanglements
• A series of murders
• The hero as a prime suspect

But look closer and you’ll see something else entirely: a throwback to Dario Argento-style Italian giallo and early Brian De Palma.

The Black-and-White Opening

The film opens in black and white with chess-themed title cards. Two boys play chess as ominous music swells, blended with car crash sounds for extra unease.

One boy stabs the other’s hand with a pen after losing.

We’re told the unstable child must stay away from chess. His father calls him crazy. His mother attempts suicide. The boy calmly retrieves his chessboard and pours himself milk.

If you stumbled into this cold, you’d assume you were watching a lost 1970s Italian thriller:

• Stylized black-and-white opening? Check.
• Childhood trauma setting up a future killer? Check.
• A time jump meant to misdirect the audience? Check, check, and check.

Sleaze, Style, and De Palma Energy

Once we hit the present, the sleaze arrives quickly.

Lambert’s character, Peter Sanderson, visits his lover for a late-night rendezvous. Shortly after, she’s murdered in a bizarrely convoluted sequence:

• A distorted voice calls.
• A flashbulb pops.
• She’s found staged in bed with a slashed wrist.
• A cryptic message appears on the wall.

It feels like someone fed an AI a stack of classic giallo scripts and early ’90s thrillers, and I mean that lovingly.

The film slowly introduces potential suspects:

• Sanderson himself
• The hot-headed cop (Baldwin)
• The blind chess mentor
• Rival players
• The psychologist who assigns Diane Lane’s character to the case

Visually, the influence of De Palma shows up in:

• Top-down camera angles (notably in the sauna scene)
• Stylized tournament sequences
• Carefully choreographed suspense shots

Meanwhile, the black gloves, staged murders, trauma-driven motive, and misdirection scream Italian giallo.

Performance Issues and the International Cut

There is a longer international version that restores extended dialogue and backstory, especially regarding Sanderson’s past and his wife.

Would it fix everything? Not entirely.

Some performances feel stiff. These are talented actors, so the uneven moments likely fall on direction rather than ability. That’s unfortunate, because visually the film often looks fantastic.

Interestingly, Lambert and Diane Lane, married in real life, have surprisingly little on-screen chemistry. You’d expect more spark, but they mostly play their parts straight.

The Killer Reveal: Pure Giallo Logic

The second major murder leans fully into Italian influence:

• A disfigured red-herring suspect
• Black gloves
• A signature method
• A thematic connection to childhood trauma

The film even follows the classic giallo rule:
The killer’s identity is shown before the Scooby-Doo-style unmasking.

It’s not Sanderson. Not his blind mentor. Not Baldwin’s cop. Not even the awkward psychologist. It’s the helpful chess IT guy introduced around the 38-minute mark.

We probably should’ve suspected him when he managed to install Mario on a PC.

He even helps the investigation at one point, a classic genre move.

Box Office and Legacy

Knight Moves grossed $31.5 million worldwide, almost entirely from international markets where Lambert remained a major draw.

In the United States, it barely registered, earning roughly half a million dollars in limited release and finishing 15th in its opening weekend. That explains its disappearance. But it deserves rediscovery.

This is exactly the kind of film begging for a boutique 4K restoration from a label like Vinegar Syndrome.

Final Thoughts: The Best Giallo Italy Never Made

Yes, Knight Moves borrows heavily from better-known films. Yes, it blends genres awkwardly. Yes, it’s messy. But it copies with love.

It’s mean. It’s sexy. It’s stylish. It’s a strange love letter to the kind of Italian thrillers America mostly missed in the late ’70s and ’80s.

It may be the black sheep of Christopher Lambert’s career, but it’s also one of the best giallos Italy never made. Checkmate.

A couple of the previous episodes of The Black Sheep can be seen at the bottom of this article. To see more, head over to the JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!

The post Knight Moves (1992): The Erotic Thriller That’s Secretly a Giallo appeared first on JoBlo.

When Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans heard the beloved series was getting a reboot with Sarah Michelle Gellar ready to sharpen her stakes for another dance with the undead, the collective gasp of surprise was deafening. It’s been more than two decades since Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and its spinoff series, Angel, starring David Boreanaz as the smoldering vampire detective (of sorts), prowled the streets of Sunnydale beneath a full moon, creating more than enough space for people to crave a revival. Yes, the Buffyverse continued in comic book form thanks to Dark Horse Comics, but as you know, a live-action reunion hits different. For an IP as monumental and formative as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, nothing short of a tried-and-true live-action revival will do. So, when Hulu announced its passing on the highly anticipated Buffy reboot, elation quickly turned into torches and pitchforks. Did Hulu make a mistake by canceling plans to reboot the series? Yes. Yes, they did.

What was Gellar and Zhao’s vision?

Before I get up on my soapbox, let’s press rewind on this situation.

Sarah Michelle Gellar recently told People that she never thought she’d return to Sunnydale. However, four years ago, Eternals and Hamnet director Chloé Zhao, a self-proclaimed Buffy superfan, approached Gellar about continuing the slayer’s story, and Gellar quickly discovered she could not say no. The Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot, titled New Sunnydale, was designed as a continuation of the original world rather than a straightforward remake. While Gellar would have starred in the new show, the focus would be on a new, 16-year-old “Chosen One” named Nova, played by Star Wars: Skeleton Crew stand-out Ryan Kiera Armstrong. While talking about the setup, Gellar said the story would “bring back characters from the previous show” while making room for new stories and characters. Buffy Summers would act as a specter of Sunnydale of mentor to Nova, much like Rupert Giles (Anthony Head) did for Buffy in the original series, with Sunnydale becoming something of a tourist destination for folks hoping to catch a glimpse of the town’s vampire population.

Chloé Zhao shot the pilot, which carried a lighter tone than the later seasons of the original series. Unfortunately, after reviewing the pilot, Hulu decided to pass on what Zhao and Gellar had worked so hard to produce. To twist the ornate knife even more, Hulu informed Gellar about the show’s cancellation just as she was about to address a room full of fans at this year’s SXSW celebration. Gellar, completely blindsided by Hulu’s decision, broke the news to eager fans, both in person and in an online address.

“The dialogue flew off the tongue,” Gellar told People in an exclusive interview. “When I was on set, it was craziness. It was like, ‘Oh, we’re here. We’re doing this.’ I loved the duality that we had this new, younger slayer who was where Buffy was when the show started, and then we would pick up with where Buffy was now.” Gellar added, “And I’d like to use this moment also to say that Ryan Kiera Armstrong is a superstar. I’m gutted that no one will see her as a slayer.”

Who’s to blame for this mess?

So, what happened?

According to Gellar, it was one person who killed the project. “We had an executive on our show who was not only not a fan of the original, but was proud to constantly remind us that he had never seen the entirety of the series and how it wasn’t for him,” Gellar told People. “That’s very hard when you’re taking a property that is as beloved as Buffy, not just to the world, but to me and Chloé. So that tells you the uphill battle that we had been fighting since day one, when your executive is literally proud to tell you that he didn’t watch it,” Gellar added.

Are you f***ing kidding me? One sour apple in the bunch ruined the revival for all of us? I call shenanigans!

Ranting while out of depth

I’m not an executive, and I don’t know what it takes to get a show like this up and running. Still, I am a fan, and I can read the tea leaves. I find it challenging to believe that Chloé Zhao, together with Sarah Michelle Gellar, would have produced a bogus vision for this project. One of the hardest parts about building a successful reboot is finding creative forces who believe in the project. You want people with a clear vision of what a continuation of a beloved series can be. Gellar is a given, but Zhao is an incredibly talented, Oscar-winning director (Nomadland) with Buffy love flowing through her veins. Let me ask: Who would you rather be calling the shots for this project? Her, or some executive who never finished watching the original series?

What’s more important? Passion for the characters and honoring the legacy, or selling t-shirts? Shareholders will tell you the project’s marketability is paramount, but as fans, we know what truly matters. Stepping back from the money side of things (again, that’s not my wheelhouse), how do you let an opportunity to revive the Buffyverse slip through your fingers while the GOAT, Sarah Michelle Gellar, is on board? Oh, Hulu’s still interested in exploring the Buffy property with other projects? You had one! You had the one! Who’s to say that Gellar will still be interested once you discover a new path?

Remember to breathe

Okay, let’s take a breath. In. Out. Ahhh. I’m not saying someone else can’t come up with a killer idea to reboot the Buffyverse, but I firmly believe Gellar and Zhao should have had the chance to reintroduce the series. Unlike many people, I enjoyed Zhao’s Eternals a great deal, and Hamnet is easily one of 2025’s best films. Applying her visual style and emotional camerawork with Buffy is something I’d like to see. I realize this is not conducive to the people in charge of all the money, but I’d rather the passionate people do their thing and fail than have an out-of-touch executive who wants something more streamlined and accessible.

There’s a chance that all is not lost. Another Buffy reboot could come along. But what will morale look like? Will Gellar be on board? It’s not like she doesn’t have other significant opportunities coming her way. Could Buffy get the animated treatment like the newly announced Firefly reboot? That could be fun. Still, the stars were aligned! Sunnydale was about to get a new slayer! Buffy Summers was ready to take her to school! Way to go, Hulu! I hope the pilot leaks!

The post Why passing on Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot was a mistake appeared first on JoBlo.

Cody

There may be entries in the A Nightmare on Elm Street that are technically “better,” with A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare being the two that get the most love beyond the original film, but Renny Harlin’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master is actually my favorite of the sequels to watch because I find it to be the most purely entertaining of the bunch.

Sure, the script was tossed together by multiple writers and the movie was made in such a rush that it was filming with FX units before a main unit director had even been hired… but the resulting film is a blast. The ‘80s MTV style is at its peak, it’s packed with cool dream sequences, and we get to see a lot of Robert Englund’s Freddy Krueger at his most powerful and maniacal.

Most movies lose a good amount of scenes on the way to the finished form, and since The Dream Master was made at warp speed with a script that was constantly changing, it’s no surprise to hear that a lot of moments were deleted from this one. That’s why we have put together a video that digs into those lost scenes – and you can check it out in the embed above, or on the JoBlo Horror YouTube channel.

Information

Freddy Krueger almost had even more nightmares in store. In this deep dive, we explore the lost and deleted scenes from A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988) one of the most popular entries in the legendary horror franchise. While the film became a huge box office success and helped cement Freddy Krueger as a pop culture icon, several sequences were cut, altered, or lost during production and editing. These missing moments could have changed the tone of the film and expanded some of the characters’ stories. In this video we break down:

• Deleted and lost scenes from The Dream Master
• Behind-the-scenes production changes
• Freddy Krueger moments that didn’t make the final cut
• How the edits shaped the final version of the movie

Are you a fan of A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, and do you think any of these lost scenes should have been included in the final cut? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

The post A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master – The Lost Freddy Scenes You Never Saw! appeared first on JoBlo.

What do you do when you’ve had huge success with a movie about a Marvel Comics vampire hunter? For the makers of Blade, the answer was obvious: get Guillermo del Toro to direct a sequel that’s darker, weirder, and maybe somewhat cooler, even though Morbius had to be written out. The film goes deeper into horror territory while introducing a disturbing and disgusting new breed of vampire. Enemies have to team up. Familiar faces return, but can they be trusted? And will Blade ever get laid? Let’s cut this sucker open and find out what happened to Blade II.

Development

Screenwriter David S. Goyer teamed up with star Wesley Snipes, producer Peter Frankfurt, and director Stephen Norrington to bring the Marvel adaptation Blade to the screen. The story of a badass vampire hunter went over well with the audience and was a hit for distributor New Line Cinema. Made on a budget of forty-five million, the film earned over one hundred and thirty-one million at the box office.

Goyer had always envisioned a trilogy – and with box office like that, it was almost guaranteed that he would have the chance to make his trilogy. But that doesn’t mean Blade II would be the sequel he always had in mind.

Some of the ideas Goyer had involved time travel and a vampire apocalypse, along with the introduction of allies from the comics, like Hannibal King. But those early story ideas were scrapped, and Hannibal King got pushed into the third movie. Goyer’s back-up idea was to have Blade fight Morbius, a Marvel character who became a pseudo-vampire by conducting scientific experiments on himself. But Marvel wouldn’t let him use Morbius.

So he came up with a story that would involve a different sort of scientifically created vampire.

Story

Blade II tells us that, contrary to what the first movie led us to believe, Blade’s mentor Whistler is not dead. He turned into a vampire and has been held captive by bloodsuckers in Europe for the last year. After a long search, Blade catches up with Whistler in Prague, rescuing him and curing his vampirism.

Just as Whistler is settling in with Blade and his new sidekick Scud, another group of vampires shows up at their hideout… not to attack, but to ask for their help. They claim that the vampire virus has mutated, creating new creatures called Reapers, though we’ll later find out that the Reaper strain was created in a lab. These monsters can infect vampires and humans alike with their bites, and they’re led by Jared Nomak, who has a vendetta against regular bloodsuckers, especially the Nosferatu-like vampire overlord Eli Damaskinos.

An elite group of vampires called the Bloodpack has been assembled and trained to fight Blade… but now they need to team up with him to wipe out the Reapers before their infection spreads. So we have Blade working with vampires to fight even worse vampires. But all is not as it seems.

Finding a Director

The cool visual style Norrington brought to the first movie had been a key component in its success. But apparently, Norrington wasn’t interested in coming back for a sequel, which was fine with Goyer and Frankfurt because they had a different director in mind from the start. They wanted Blade II to have more of a horror edge, to be more suspenseful and scarier than its predecessor. And they thought the perfect director to bring the horror and scares would be Guillermo del Toro.

If you’ve ever wondered why nearly four years passed between the first two Blade movies, this was a big part of the delay: New Line Cinema was hesitant to sign off on the idea of del Toro directing Blade II. At the time, he was seen as an arthouse director. He had made the lower-budgeted genre movies Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone – and while he tried to work in the studio system with Mimic, it hadn’t been a good experience. None of his movies had been fast-paced or action-packed, so New Line saw no indication that he could be a good action director.

Del Toro was a fan of the first movie and even thought it was underrated, but it also took a while for him to agree to work on the sequel. He had never been interested in making a sequel to somebody else’s movie before. So when Goyer sent him the script, he just gave him some notes. Then Goyer integrated those notes and sent him the new draft. Del Toro gave him some more helpful suggestions. Goyer did more revisions – and the third time the script was sent to del Toro, he agreed to direct the film, if New Line would have him. It wasn’t until Wesley Snipes said he wanted del Toro to make the movie that New Line went along with the idea.

Del Toro’s Vision

Del Toro told Fangoria that he signed on for Blade II because he was “very curious about trying to do a new type of vampire that takes away the sympathetic, charming angle we’ve become so familiar with in the post-Anne Rice era. I wanted to do a completely unglamorous type of vampire, like a bottom feeder, and treat it almost like an animal.”

After making the deeply personal The Devil’s Backbone, he also wanted to work on “something light that would not demand enormous amounts of emotional investment, just like a joyride. I was completely drained and wanted to go into an amusement park, and that’s what this is.”

He was ready to prove that he was capable of directing action. And he wanted to challenge himself, because this was the first time he’d be directing a script he didn’t write: the challenge of executing someone else’s imagination. With his stories, he always relied on atmosphere, making things that were slow-moving and eerie. Goyer had written a fast-paced script, and del Toro would have to deliver a fast movie, one that would include edgy, nasty moments like the first one but wouldn’t go too far with the violence. As he put it, “We’re trying to make things fun. Whatever violence exists in the movie exists on a comic book or cartoon level.”

He wanted to bring a heightened, comic book style to every aspect of the film, from the violence to the visuals. His goal was for the imagery in Blade II to be one hundred percent comic book style – and to achieve that, he brought in comic book artists Mike Mignola, Tim Bradstreet, and Wayne Barlowe to draw designs. Barlowe was the one who came up with the look of the Reapers, which were then brought to life by legendary effects artist Steve Johnson. These things have chins that split open to reveal tentacle-suckers, they inject victims with a neurotoxin, and they’re more difficult to kill than the average vampire: their hearts are encased in bone, and they’re immune to silver and garlic.

Cast

Blade II was the first time Wesley Snipes came back to play one of his characters in a sequel. For this one, he was interested in playing a Blade that had become more comfortable with his half-vampire nature and had loosened up a bit. He even changed up the character’s fighting style, making him faster and less focused on traditional martial arts moves and poses, to reflect how comfortable he had become.

Asked why he enjoyed playing Blade so much, he explained, “He has all the freedoms of a bad guy without the restrains of a good guy, and that’s always fun to play. The opportunity to wear the costume and the outfits and be in a genre movie, at the same time doing martial arts – that’s very appealing to me. And that he is a kind of short-on-words, big-on-action type of guy is very appealing to me too. I’m much more verbose than he is, and more of a wuss.”

Snipes was also happy that the sequel would be an ensemble mission movie, with the set-up drawing comparisons to The Dirty Dozen or The Guns of Navarone, but with vampires. He felt it was a better approach to have Blade take on a number of different villains, rather than having just one villain try to live up to the first movie’s Deacon Frost.

A great cast was assembled around Snipes. Starting with Kris Kristofferson, who was surprised to have the chance to play Whistler again. He thought the guy was dead. Norman Reedus plays Scud, the young man who has been working with Blade in Whistler’s absence and is highly suspicious of Whistler when he returns.

The Bloodpack consists of Danny John-Jules as Asad; martial arts movie legend Donnie Yen – who was, unfortunately, given very little to do – as Snowman; Daz Crawford as a hammer-wielding vampire called Lighthammer; Marit Velle Kile as Lighthammer’s significant other Verlaine; Tony Curran as Priest, who doesn’t like any vampires that aren’t purebloods; del Toro regular Ron Perlman as Reinhardt, who gives Blade a hard time and gets an explosive device stuck on his head in response; Matt Schulze, who had a minor role as a different character in the first movie, as Chupa; and Leonor Varela as Nyssa, daughter of the ancient Eli Damaskinos, who’s played by Thomas Kretschmann.

Nyssa is the one Blade is really able to connect with – and their connection was even deeper in early drafts of the script. While Blade II was in pre-production, Goyer spoke with RevolutionSF and teased “Blade gets laid” in the sequel. Blade and Nyssa were supposed to be a romantic pairing, but that didn’t make it into the finished film.

Villain

Played by Luke Goss, Jared Nomak is the danger at the heart of the story. The Reaper infection can’t be allowed to spread… but Nomak isn’t the clear-cut “big bad,” either. As the story goes on, you find out how he became this monster and come to understand why he’s doing what he’s doing. It’s a Guillermo del Toro movie, so it’s no surprise to have a sympathetic monster somewhere in the mix.

Production

When a director doesn’t have action experience, they’ll often hand all of the action off to a second unit director. But del Toro won New Line over so much, they let him direct everything. From dialogue scenes to action sequences and even minor inserts, del Toro shot it all. And he proved that he was up for the challenge. He brought the darker, more suspenseful moments Goyer and Frankfurt hoped he would – and he also proved to be an awesome action director. There are impressive fight scenes throughout the movie, with Blade taking on a whole lot of vampires and Reapers. The scene where he battles Damaskinos goons after being reinvigorated in a blood bath is especially cool, along with, of course, the final fight between Blade and Nomak.

Release and Legacy

Blade II filmed in the Czech Republic from March 12th to July 2nd, 2001, aiming for release the following year. While the first movie came out at the end of summer in 1998, the sequel was scheduled to reach theatres on March 22, 2002. That would have been a negative sign for some. March was seen as something of a dumping ground for lesser movies around that time. But New Line Cinema had success releasing the franchise-starting horror movie Final Destination in March of 2000, so why not try putting a Blade movie out in that month?

It turned out to be a great decision.

Made on a budget of 54 million dollars, Blade II surpassed the first movie at the box office, pulling in a worldwide total of over 154 million. It was enough to get the third film in the trilogy on the fast track to production – and since that movie didn’t do as well when it was released in 2004, Blade II remains the highest-grossing film in the franchise.

Conclusion

Moviegoers wanted to see more of Blade, and del Toro gave them more in one of the best sequels fans could have possibly hoped for. Goyer and Norrington made this look easy with the ‘98 film, and del Toro did the same with the sequel… but when you see how Goyer himself fumbled the trilogy capper Blade: Trinity, it becomes clear: this Blade business wasn’t as simple as it seemed.

Guillermo del Toro wasn’t the obvious choice to direct the Blade sequel, but he turned out to be the perfect choice.

The post What Happened to Blade II: The Darker, Weirder Sequel That Worked appeared first on JoBlo.

Cody

Another St. Patrick’s Day is upon us, and that means it’s time for a marathon of Leprechaun movies! We here at Arrow in the Head decided to go back over the whole Leprechaun franchise to rank them from worst to first, and the Leprechaun Movies Ranked list can be seen below. Check it out and let us know how you would rank the movies!

LEPRECHAUN: ORIGINS (2014)

This is appalling. Director Zach Lipovsky, writer Harris Wilkinson, and WWE Studios were given the chance to make a new Leprechaun movie, they cast a professional wrestler (Dylan “Hornswoggle” Postl) as the title character, and then they just churned out a dull monster movie. I don’t know how anyone involved thought this was a good idea (“You know what we should do? Take everything people liked about Leprechaun and remove it!”) or how Leprechaun: Origins made it through production. The story follows Americans backpacking through Ireland and running across a leprechaun, who is just a hideous creature with no personality. It’s not even fun to watch this thing pick people off. There’s nothing interesting to be found in this movie, although there is some curiosity factor in seeing one of the most wrongheaded reboots ever made. Unfortunately, you have to sacrifice some of your time to do so. (Good thing the 90 minute running time is padded out with 12 minutes of end credits.)

LEPRECHAUN IN THE HOOD (2000)

Around 2000, there was a surge of low-budget horror movies set “in the hood”. Full Moon was in on it, and the Leprechaun franchise joined the trend as well. Directed by Rob Spera, who got help from four other writers in crafting the story and script, Leprechaun in the Hood has its charms. You get Ice-T as a record producer who gained success with the help of a flute he stole from the leprechaun. You get the leprechaun smoking weed, rapping, and mesmerizing a trio of “fly girls”. And of course, you get him killing people while trying to get his flute back from the rap group that has stolen it from Ice-T’s character. (Called Mack Daddy O’Nassas because he was a pimp who “owned asses”.) This one ranks lower just because it doesn’t feel as fun as some of the other entries, despite the weed and the rapping.

LEPRECHAUN BACK 2 THA HOOD (2003)

Writer/director Steven Ayromlooi wanted to make a Spring Break Leprechaun movie, but Lionsgate wanted to send the character Back 2 Tha Hood. Well, at least this repetition is more tolerable than going Back 2 Space would be. This sequel has better production value than the previous Hood entry, some cool action moments, and fun elements like bullets laced with clover and a magic battle between the leprechaun and a fortune teller. On the downside, the characters aren’t very interesting, so it bogs down whenever we have to watch them interact. We get the leprechaun hitting a bong, but he doesn’t give us another rap sequence… which I’m sure was disappointing to fans of the first Hood film. This may be the last time we’ll ever see Warwick Davis starring in a Leprechaun movie, which is a shame. He seemed to have a lot more Lep left in him, but they let the franchise go dormant for too long.

LEPRECHAUN 4 (1996)

Leprechaun 3 director Brian Trenchard-Smith returned to direct Leprechaun 4, which is not on the level of his previous contribution to the series. The fact that it’s set in space isn’t the problem, it’s fitting that the Leprechaun movies helped start one of the most amusing franchise trends. The problem is, it feels like Dennis Pratt just wrote it as a generic Aliens knock-off and then replaced the alien with the leprechaun. He lives on a random planet and is referred to as an alien. At least he’s still obsessed with wealth and power. This movie does get incredibly strange as the leprechaun wipes out a bunch of soldiers and the medical staff on a spaceship, so it has that going for it. This seems to be a love it or hate it entry: it gets too ridiculous for some viewers, while others enjoy that it’s packed with jaw-dropping nonsense.

LEPRECHAUN RETURNS (2018)

The leprechaun is a different character in every Leprechaun movie, they all just happened to be played by Warwick Davis. Until Leprechaun Returns, which brings back the leprechaun from the original. Ironically, the first direct sequel is also the first sequel Davis opted not to come back for. So this returning leprechaun is played by Linden Porco, who does a good job, it’s just difficult for anyone to come close to what Davis did. Directed by Steven Kostanski, Leprechaun Returns is an entertaining sequel with an amusing, clever script by Suzanne Keilly – who recently wrote a fun Slumber Party Massacre movie as well. The story finds the leprechaun accidentally being unleashed by a group of sorority girls and proceeding to kill them and their friends one-by-one. Nice and simple. Mark Holton reprises the role of Ozzie from the original film, and the heroine is the daughter of Jennifer Aniston’s character.

LEPRECHAUN (1993)

Some horror franchises start out dead serious and slide into silliness. That’s not the case with Leprechaun. Future entries would definitely be sillier, but this concept was ridiculous from the start. Written and directed by Mark Jones, Leprechaun is about a single father and his daughter moving into a fixer-upper home in North Dakota… and quickly realizing there was a leprechaun trapped in the basement and a pot of gold coins the previous owner brought back from Ireland (after stealing it from the leprechaun) stashed nearby. The leprechaun wants his gold back, and is willing to kill people in nasty ways to retrieve it. Jones tries to make moments genuinely unnerving, but while Warwick Davis turns in a hell of a performance and the leprechaun is hideous, he’s still wearing a funny outfit, tossing out one-liners, and getting distracted because he’s compelled to polish shoes. He’s also up against some goofball characters, including Pee-wee’s Big Adenture‘s Mark Holton as a fellow named Ozzie Jones, who’s unlucky enough to have swallowed one of the gold coins, and a rather annoying heroine played by pre-Friends Jennifer Aniston.

LEPRECHAUN 3 (1995)

The idea behind Leprechaun 3, which was directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith from a script by David DuBos, was a really smart one. You have a horror villain who’s obsessed with collecting riches, so what better setting could there be for one of his sequels than Las Vegas? Of course, the movie only had to budget to film in Vegas for one day (the interiors were shot in Los Angeles), but Trenchard-Smith made the most of it. While the leprechaun causes trouble for people who work at a casino, including a terrible magician and a croupier played by genre regular Caroline Williams, we also learn that leprechaunism is an infectious disease when the lead (played by John Gatins, who would go on to earn an Oscar nomination for writing Flight) starts to turn into a leprechaun himself. This was one of the better, most well-crafted entries in the franchise. And you get to see what a handful of leprechaun poop looks like.

LEPRECHAUN 2 (1994)

Every one thousand years, a leprechaun can claim a human bride, and in Leprechaun 2 an evil leprechaun has his mind set on a young woman named Bridget (Shevonne Durkin). With the help of his drunken uncle Morty (Sandy Baron), Bridget’s boyfriend Cody (Charlie Heath) desperately tries to save his love from life with a leprechaun. Directed by Rodman Flender and written by Turi Meyer and Al Septién, this sequel is a step up from its predecessor. It’s quick and fun, with a good sense of humor and very entertaining performance from Baron. It also brings a welcome new addition to the Leprechaun mythology, saying a captured leprechaun has to grant its captor three wishes. Of course, those wishes don’t always work out for the person making them. Warwick Davis was given better material to work with, including a great sequence in which he and Morty have a drinking contest. This one also earns points for being set on St. Patrick’s Day.

The post Leprechaun Movies Ranked appeared first on JoBlo.

EJ

In 1996, action star Jean-Claude Van Damme stepped behind the camera for the very first time. After nearly a decade of high-flying spinning kicks, underground tournaments, and splits as far as the eye can see, Van Damme directed a film that attempted to feel epic — something mythic, global, and steeped in martial arts tradition. That film was The Quest. But, for many audiences, it may have felt…familiar. Because nearly eight years earlier, Van Damme had exploded onto the international stage with Bloodsport — a film about a Western fighter traveling to Asia to compete in a secret tournament called the Kumite. Later, in The Quest, he was once again playing a Western fighter traveling to Asia to compete in a secret martial arts tournament — this time called the Ghang-gheng.

So what exactly was The Quest?

A spiritual successor?
A remake in disguise?
Let’s go back to 1996. Shall we?

Today, we find out: What Happened to The Quest?

A Martial Arts Odyssey

Jean-Claude Van Damme got his start in B-movies from Cannon Films. Dating back to a blink-and-you ’ll-miss-it appearance in the first Breakin’. But one Cannon movie would catapult Van Damme into becoming the new hot action star of the 80s. He starred as a real-life full-contact fighter.

Bloodsport was based on the life of the real Frank Dux. And he and Van Damme had naturally formed a good working partnership with that film. For Van Damme, the concept of an underground fighting tournament stuck with him. While he had something like Lionheart — a film that took him through another kind of fighting circuit — Van Damme had a vision for an international martial arts contest film like Bloodsport, but on a grander, global scale.

Bloodsport had all of the puzzle pieces that Van Damme wanted to preserve for The Quest. In that film, Van Damme played a fighter representing America. He travels to an exotic land for a tournament that is rumored to exist. All the other participants in the tournament have travelled from around the world and are trained in a unique fighting style from their home countries. The fighters compete for a priceless artifact. And the final opponent is the classic archetype of a hulking, unbeatable goliath, someone who could make the muscular, nimble Van Damme look like an underdog.

The Quest began as an ambitious idea for the Muscles from Brussels star. It wasn’t just another fight movie, but a passion project he intended to make as a statement piece and, in the late 90s, a kind of farewell to the martial arts genre that made him a star. In a candid interview with the French publication, Libération, Van Damme would bluntly reveal, “I really wanted to quit before [The Quest]. I was fed up. With Hollywood. With life. With people. With money.” He continued, “Now I’m starting different things. [The Quest] is a farewell to my earlier films, with a bit more scope and story.”

Around the time that Van Damme made Street Fighter, his drug habits and personal problems were pretty well-known in Hollywood circles — especially with his behavior behind the scenes on Street Fighter. So it’s understandable that he may have had enough of the celebrity machine and was thinking of possibly going all-out for one final big project, which would in turn serve as a tribute and a celebration of his breakout in Bloodsport.

The Journey to The Quest

Van Damme aimed to create a film blending the “secret tournament” concept along with the epic sweep of classic adventure films — he himself would even refer to his passion project as “the Ben-Hur of martial arts films.” The story evolved from an earlier screenplay tied to Bloodsport lore. That screenplay was something Martial artist Frank Dux had claimed that he and Van Damme had written in 1991, titled The Kumite: Enter the New Dragon, which formed the basis of what eventually became The Quest.

Unfortunately, the pair would butt heads in a heated conflict, though no real kicks were thrown. Dux had taken Van Damme to court in a legal battle over writing credit and payments that he says the Bloodsport star had owed to him. The trial was actually covered by CourtTV, and footage from the court case can currently be seen on YouTube, including over an hour of Dux’s testimony as he took the stand, courtesy of the Martial Arts Enterprises FIGHTCON channel. Ultimately, Dux would win a story credit through the Writers Guild of America, and when you watch the film, his name is right alongside Van Damme’s. However, Steven Klein and Paul Mones are credited as writing the script.

The project was originally developed at Epic Productions under the working title Enter the New Dragon in the early 1990s. Moshe Diamant (Van Damme’s longtime producer) would lead development there, aiming to start filming around 1993 for a Christmas 1994 release — but financial troubles at Epic would delay everything.

Diamant lost control of the project at Epic following a power struggle with the French financiers, so it shifted to his newly founded company, Signature Films. There, the movie was rebranded as The Quest and presented at the 1993 Cannes Film Market.

Despite being a personal project for Van Damme, he initially didn’t intend to direct the film. Instead, he was interested in collaborating with Andrei Konchalovsky. Konchalovsky’s resume included critically beloved movies like Uncle Vanya and Runaway Train. However, he’s also worked on more commercial films, such as Homer and Eddie and Tango & Cash. Discussions for Konchalovsky to helm The Quest would never take shape. Van Damme invited his former collaborator, Sheldon Lettich, to co-direct the film, but Lettich would opt out, and Van Damme would take on the directing duties himself.

He would also bring along second-unit director Peter MacDonald and cinematographer David Gribble to help mold the film after he became impressed by their work on Nowhere to Run, a movie that held back on the action and showcased Van Damme in a more dramatic light.

Van Damme in the Director’s Seat

Van Damme envisioned The Quest as an epic throwback adventure — something closer to a swashbuckling classic than a gritty 80s fight film. The 1920s setting. The globe-trotting adventure. The mystical tournament. It was bigger in scope than Bloodsport. Despite the obvious parallels, The Quest does its damnedest to secure its own identity. The 1920s period setting gives this film a more pulp-adventure tone — almost like an Indiana Jones martial-arts spin-off. Additionally, instead of Van Damme taking center stage, the movie features a more ensemble cast, including Roger Moore as Lord Edgar Dobbs. Dobbs is a charming arms dealer and gambler who adds a playful tone. This was a major get for Van Damme, having a former James Bond in his directorial debut.

And finally, the fights in this movie are more theatrical and choreographed, leaning into spectacle rather than raw brutality. The Quest sports a PG-13 rating. It’s apparent that Van Damme wanted this film to be enjoyed by a wider audience, and so the violence is significantly toned down. There isn’t an overwhelming amount of blood or protruding bones like Bloodsport proudly displayed.

Unfortunately, for Van Damme, the production would almost be as bad as the one for Street Fighter. According to Roger Moore (who had later voiced his displeasure with working on the film), the shoot was poorly organized. Van Damme’s frequent lateness and pressure to finish on time became so severe that crew members were asked to work extra hours without pay, angering many and nearly causing a strike on set.

Moore and some others believed Van Damme was out of his depth as a director, with Peter MacDonald carrying much of the practical filmmaking load. Fight coordinator Steven Lambert had creative tensions with Van Damme, especially over how fights should play out and which moves to showcase — including debates over the star’s signature spin kicks.

The Grand Tournament

After an ambitious vision proved to be a very difficult thing to accomplish for a first-time director, The Quest didn’t turn out to be a complete disaster. There are shades of an epic there, but the budget, which Van Damme claimed to be $12 million, didn’t allow room for the movie to breathe, and large set pieces, like a planned major horseback battle, had to be cut out of the film.

The movie is still a fun watch, even if the grand adventure Van Damme had intended turned out to be rushed. The first half is well-paced and gives us an epic, global scope, with sequences on the high seas and exotic locales. Our ensemble comes together like an adventure movie should — as we join our hero on his odyssey and he encounters colorful characters along the way.

It’s the tournament portion in the second half where Van Damme shifts all focus to the fighting. Van Damme (perhaps unintentionally) broke the mold of the usual story beats. When sports films tell the story of a tournament, they highlight several important matches, then show the rest in a montage. Hell, it’s how we get one of the greatest montages ever with Stan Bush’s “Fight to Survive” blasting in Bloodsport. With The Quest, Van Damme does something bold and opts to show the whole tournament in its entirety. However, given its 95-minute runtime, all the fights, with 16 combatants in total, last barely a minute each. But, to be fair, we do get some pretty thrilling fights in that time frame. Highlights include a Capoeira fighter and a Kung Fu fighter using animal styles.

The Quest performed modestly at the box office, grossing around $57.4 million worldwide. While it has its parallels to Bloodsport, just a year prior, the Mortal Kombat movie would hit the big screen and score big with fans, capturing the fun intensity of the video games. In an age when Mortal Kombat infused Hollywood action with more Asian influence, coupled with Jackie Chan’s big crossover into America with the release of Rumble in the Bronx. The genre was getting redefined. Although The Quest featured a lot of that, Van Damme’s style looked to be on the way out.

The Quest still has the potential to be the epic Van Damme envisioned. While it didn’t get to be completely realized, it’s still a nice tribute of a past era of adventure and action.

The post WTF Happened to The Quest? Van Damme directed this?! appeared first on JoBlo.

Tyler

The idea of a virus coming along and wiping out 99% of the population isn’t exactly the most difficult thing to imagine these days. In fact, it hits pretty close to home. But the ’90s were a different time, and films needed more than just intriguing plots. They needed movie stars. And you couldn’t get much bigger than Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt.

But which actor did the casting director have to convince director Terry Gilliam was right for the role? Who had to be replaced shortly after filming their first scenes? And why did a gerbil waste an entire shooting day?

Let’s go back in time and find out what happened to 12 Monkeys.

The Surprising Origin of 12 Monkeys

There’s really nothing quite like a Terry Gilliam picture. From Time Bandits to Brazil, Gilliam has always had a completely unique voice, creating films unlike anything else in cinema. But surprisingly, 12 Monkeys didn’t originate from Gilliam’s imagination.

The story actually comes from the French short film La Jetée by Chris Marker, which also deals with time travel and an attempt to save the world. Calling it a “short film,” however, might be generous. La Jetée is mostly made up of black-and-white still images, with only a single brief sequence of moving footage.

Producer Robert Kosberg asked Marker for permission to pitch an adaptation to Universal Pictures. The studio bought the rights and hired David and Janet Peoples to write the script.

The writers were nervous about adapting La Jetée, since they viewed it as a perfect film. Instead of remaking it directly, they chose to take its core ideas and build an entirely new story around them.

Terry Gilliam Takes the Helm

At the time, Terry Gilliam was preparing an adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities when producer Charles Roven approached him about directing 12 Monkeys. Roven believed Gilliam’s unconventional storytelling style made him the perfect director for the film’s nonlinear narrative.

Gilliam was hesitant at first. He didn’t want to be a hired gun on someone else’s project. But the script intrigued him enough to sign on, even though he believed the story was so complicated it might never actually get made.

Originally, Gilliam wanted Nick Nolte and Jeff Bridges for the lead roles. Universal disagreed. The studio suggested Nicolas Cage and Tom Cruise, but Gilliam rejected both choices. Instead, he became interested in Bruce Willis, whom he had met while casting for The Fisher King. Universal liked the idea. Willis was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood and could help guarantee box-office success.

Ironically, to deliver what many consider the greatest performance of his career, Willis had to take a major pay cut. Because he really wanted to work with Gilliam, Willis essentially worked for almost nothing upfront, choosing instead to earn his salary through backend profits.

Gilliam didn’t want Bruce Willis the action star. He wanted Bruce Willis the actor.

Casting Brad Pitt as Jeffrey Goines

Gilliam also had great confidence in Madeleine Stowe, whom he had met while casting A Tale of Two Cities. He believed she would be perfect as Dr. Kathryn Railly, the psychiatrist who acts as the audience’s surrogate throughout the story.

But the most surprising casting choice came with Brad Pitt. Casting director Marjorie Simkin had to convince Gilliam that Pitt was right for the role of Jeffrey Goines. At the time he was cast, Pitt wasn’t quite the megastar we know today. But during production and before the film’s release, he suddenly exploded in popularity thanks to films like Interview with the Vampire, Legends of the Fall, and Se7en. By the time 12 Monkeys hit theaters, Pitt was a full-blown movie star.

His performance in the film is wildly eccentric and stands out in his entire filmography. Even though he doesn’t have a huge amount of screen time, every moment leaves an impression.

Gilliam even took Pitt’s cigarettes away during filming, which resulted in the actor’s nervous energy and rapid-fire speech patterns seen in the movie.

The Complicated Story of 12 Monkeys

The story itself is famously complex. In the year 2035, a deadly virus has wiped out 99% of humanity, forcing the survivors to live underground while animals reclaim the surface.

Prisoner James Cole is offered a pardon if he travels back in time to 1996 to gather information about the virus. But time travel isn’t an exact science.

Cole ends up jumping through different time periods, and the constant disorientation slowly fractures his mind. Along the way he seeks help from psychiatrist Dr. Kathryn Railly, who eventually joins him on his mission.

It’s the kind of story that often requires multiple viewings to fully grasp.

Filming on a Tight Budget

Despite the film’s ambitious concept, the budget was kept relatively small: about $29 million.

Universal allowed Gilliam final cut, but only under strict conditions: the film had to receive an R rating and could not exceed two hours and fifteen minutes.

Filming took place in Philadelphia and Baltimore from February through May of 1995.

As you might expect from a high-concept sci-fi film directed by an uncompromising auteur, the shoot was anything but smooth.

The Gerbil That Stopped Production

At one point Gilliam envisioned a shot involving a hamster (or gerbil) running in a ball next to Bruce Willis while he sat inside a strange contraption. It sounded simple enough. But the animal refused to cooperate.

What should have taken five minutes ended up consuming an entire day of filming.

That’s the price you sometimes pay when working with a director who has a very specific vision.

Recasting Young James Cole

Another challenge came during the airport flashback scene, which required 500 extras and an extremely tight shooting schedule.

Gilliam originally cast a young actor to play young James Cole, chosen mainly for his striking eyes. But after filming began, Gilliam realized he had made a mistake. Thankfully, a producer had already prepared a backup actor, who stepped in and completed the role.

Stress on Set

The set of 12 Monkeys was often tense. Crew members struggled with the demanding schedule and the complexity of Gilliam’s ideas. At one point, Gilliam even told the producers they might want to replace him with another director.

The film’s futuristic sets were built from everyday objects, reflecting what survivors might realistically cobble together while living underground.

To save money, the production frequently reused sets, filming in abandoned warehouses and modifying them for different scenes.

Even the weather caused problems. Baltimore turned out to be too warm for scenes set in the frozen future, forcing the crew to bring in fake snow.

The Infamous TV Ball Prop

One of the most impressive props in the movie was the TV Ball, a massive spherical structure covered in television screens that resembled something like a Death Star made of monitors. It looked incredible on camera. Unfortunately, it was also a nightmare to operate.

The hydraulics frequently failed, and the device broke down during countless takes. It quickly became infamous among the crew.

Terry Gilliam’s Horseback Accident

Perhaps the scariest moment during production happened away from the set. To relieve stress, Gilliam would often go horseback riding. During one ride, the horse suddenly bucked him off and nearly trampled him.

Thankfully, Gilliam escaped with only cuts and bruises. He returned to work a little shaken, worried the accident might affect his creative vision. But he pushed through.

Delivering the Film Early

Despite all the chaos, Gilliam accomplished something extremely rare in filmmaking: He delivered 12 Monkeys one week early and under budget.

Release and Box Office Success

12 Monkeys premiered on December 29, 1995. The film earned nearly $170 million worldwide, an enormous success considering its modest budget.

Critics and audiences responded positively, and the film currently holds an 88% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

The Lawsuit Over the Set Design

In February 1996, architect Lebbeus Woods filed a lawsuit against Universal. He claimed one of the film’s set designs closely resembled his project “Neomechanical Tower (Upper Chamber)” and had been used without permission. When the images were compared side by side, the similarities were difficult to ignore.

Woods ultimately won the lawsuit. Universal faced the possibility of removing the scenes entirely. Instead, Woods accepted a six-figure settlement, allowing the scenes to remain in the film.

Brad Pitt’s Oscar Nomination

Brad Pitt’s unusual performance paid off. He received his first Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

Costume designer Julie Weiss also received a nomination.

Neither ultimately won, but the recognition helped cement the film’s reputation.

Bruce Willis’ Underrated Performance

In hindsight, Bruce Willis may have delivered the best performance of his career in 12 Monkeys. It was a complete departure from the tough-guy roles audiences associated with him. Instead, he portrayed a deeply vulnerable and psychologically fractured character.

It remains one of the most unique performances in his filmography.

The Film’s Legacy

Over time, 12 Monkeys has become one of the most celebrated entries in Terry Gilliam’s filmography.

The movie even inspired a television series adaptation in the 2010s on the Syfy Channel, starring Aaron Stanford and Amanda Schull, which ran for four seasons.

More recently, Arrow Video released a highly praised 4K restoration, packed with special features exploring the film’s production.

Why 12 Monkeys Still Matters

More than 30 years later, 12 Monkeys remains a fascinating and ambitious exploration of dystopia, time travel, and fate.

It offers a version of time travel that feels gritty and unsettling, one that doesn’t rely on a DeLorean or flashy science-fiction spectacle.

With standout performances from Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, it’s easy to see why the film continues to resonate with audiences today.

And that, my friends, is what happened to 12 Monkeys.

A couple of previous episodes of this show can be seen below. For more, check out the JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel—and don’t forget to subscribe!

The post The Untold Story of 12 Monkeys: Terry Gilliam’s Time-Travel Masterpiece appeared first on JoBlo.

Chris

THE STORY: A corrupt American cop (Michael Douglas) and his partner (Andy Garcia) wind-up in Japan after a prisoner exchange gone awry. With their former captive cutting a swath through the local Yakuza in an attempt to establish himself as the new Tokyo boss, the cops are forced into an uneasy alliance with a by-the-book local police inspector (Ken Takakura).

THE PLAYERS: Starring: Michael Douglas, Andy García, Ken Takakura, Kate Capshaw and Yusaku Matsuda. Directed by Ridley Scott. Music by Hans Zimmer.

THE HISTORY: Michael Douglas was riding high in 1989. Following his Oscar-win for Wall Street, and Fatal Attraction’s boffo box office, his was considered one of the most bankable actors in Hollywood. Opting for a rare action role, grittier and more hard-edged than his turns in Romancing the Stone and The Jewel of the Nile, Douglas, with his Fatal Attraction producers Stanley Jaffe and Sherry Lansing (who would soon run Paramount Pictures), hired Ridley Scott, then on a career downswing following Legend and Someone to Watch Over Me, to helm this stylish East-meets-West thriller, which would shoot on-location in Japan.

I remember when Ridley showed us the first cut of the movie it was about two hours and forty minutes, and it was extraordinary… But, this was his first cut, and so we all new that he was going to go in and make the film under two hours. I mean, the texture of the movie, the performances, the visuals, the sound, we were thrilled. Then, Ridley called us back, I dunno, four weeks later and showed us a movie that was an hour and fifty minutes long. We looked at him and asked, “what did you do,” and he said, what do you mean “what did I do?” “You took out all the good stuff, why did you make it this?” He said, “but I had to,” and he DID have to, to make it under two hours he had to take out some of the texture and some of the finest scenes in the movie. So, we said, “just make it the right length, it doesn’t have to be under two hours, just make it the right length.” (note- the final cut runs 125 minutes) – Sherry Lansing (BLACK RAIN DVD).

Despite critical acclaim and Douglas’s star-power, Black Rain was only a modest hit upon its release in the fall of 1989. It grossed $46 million, decent enough numbers for the era, but it wound-up grossing far less than comparable action movies of the time, although worldwide it was a solid hit, grossing an additional $88 million, while it also became a hot rental on the VHS market.

Nowadays, Black Rain remains popular among aficionados of eighties action cinema, with it remaining Michael Douglas’s one real attempt to make an action-movie on par with what Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger were doing at the time. Sandwiched between Douglas’s more well-known vehicles, with Basic Instinct another giant hit just a few years later, and coming along at a fallow time in Ridley Scott’s career, it remains a movie rarely discussed in examinations of either’s career.

WHY IT’S GREAT: Black Rain is an eighties gem for many reasons. For one thing, Michael Douglas aces his anti-hero part. While introducing him by staging a motorcycle race is maybe trying a bit too hard to establish him as a sexy rebel, it’s notable that his character, Nick Conklin, is allowed to be sleazy and imperfect. He’s under investigation for being on-the-take, and while, with another actor in the lead, he’d eventually be vindicated, we learn early-on that Nick is in-fact guilty. He’s also shown to be a racist, making derogatory comments about the Japanese, and often screwing up his own investigation with a mixture of ego and fool-headedness, all of which eventually gets his partner, played by the great Andy Garcia, killed.

I remember when the picture first came out, there was a very influential critics who called it a racist film because of how it depicted the Japanese. This really bothered me, so I called him up and asked him, “have you ever been to Japan?” Silence..”no.” “Then what do you think you’re talking about?” Then a few weeks later, it gets nominated for best foreign film in Japan. A very respected critic said, “well, this is the best Japanese film I’ve seen this year,” so it was a real compliment to Ridley. – Michael Douglas (BLACK RAIN DVD)

Lest you think he’s unlikable, Douglas makes Nick three-dimensional, to the point that even if we know he’s not too far removed from the baddies he chases, he’s essentially a good man, and his evolution is convincing. His relationship with Ken Takakura’s more honorable Japanese cop, himself a victim of the rigid class system in Japan, is touching. Douglas initially treats him like a joke, but he comes to realize Takakura (who’s one of the biggest stars in Japanese history – on the level of someone like Chow Yun-Fat in Hong Kong) is truly on his side, and an honorable man.

Meanwhile, Yusaku Matsuda’s bad guy is among the scarier ones of the eighties, sporting a crazed look and sense of sadism. Matsuda was, unbeknownst to the filmmakers and Douglas, terminally ill at the time. He apparently knew it would be his last role, and he put everything he had into it. Likewise, Ridley Scott, who one might assume would phone-in what, to him, might seem like a routine assignment, infuses Black Rain with oodles of style. His vision of Tokyo seems almost as futuristic as the Los Angeles of Black Rain, and his eye, matched with Jan De Bont’s cinematography and Hans Zimmer’s amazing, hard-edged score, makes this one of the most impeccably made action films of the era.

BEST SCENE: In cop movies, the younger, more inexperienced partner is always going to die. Even as a child watching Black Rain, I had seen enough of these movies to know Andy Garcia was doomed. As an action-junkie you almost look forward to the partner dying, because it’ll kick the hero into high gear. But, Garcia is so damn likable and charismatic, singing Ray Charles with Takakura (who apparently loved Garcia off-screen) and busting Douglas’s balls that you want him to pull through. All of this makes his eventual death all the more hard-hitting, with it being, in the annals of action movie murder, one of the most sadistic.

SEE IT: Black Rain is easily available on DVD/Blu-ray (I actually have it on HD-DVD), streaming, iTunes, Amazon and more.

You know, people always ask me in my career, what’s your favorite movie. And I have to say, Black Rain is right up there for the unique qualities of the movie, the execution across the board… – Michael Douglas (BLACK RAIN DVD)

PARTING SHOT: Black Rain is another entry into this column that many of you may remember having seen when it came out. If it’s been awhile, I urge you to check it out again, as it holds up really well. And to those younger readers who may have never heard of it, do you like Ridley Scott and Hans Zimmer? If yes, boy oh boy will you love this.

The post Black Rain: The Most Underrated Ridley Scott Movie? appeared first on JoBlo.

It’s Oscar night, and all eyes are on Hollywood to see who’s going to win the Oscars tonight. A few weeks ago, we ran a poll, the results of which were very tight between One Battle After Another and Sinners, with Paul Thomas Anderson’s film winning 486 votes to Sinners’ 464. The Golden Schmoes were similar, with Sinners narrowly winning Best Film over One Battle After Another.

But when we consider which film is going to join the ranks of all-time Best Picture winners, it’s a good time to look back at the winners of the last twenty years to determine what really stands the test of time. Some of the winners are pretty outrageous, with Paul Haggis’s Crash largely considered one of the worst movies to ever win Best Picture. Another head-scratcher is The Artist, an award that was largely due to the hand of Harvey Weinstein, who for a solid twenty-year period dominated the Oscars with his movies — whether they deserved to win or not. How else do you explain the solid (but not Best Picture-worthy) The King’s Speech winning over David Fincher’s now-classic The Social Network?

Green Book is another one that proved to be controversial, so much so that it briefly contributed to a real backlash against the Academy, which hit a fever pitch during the COVID years and beyond. However, there have been some winners that are rightly considered classics now, such as Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, Ben Affleck’s Argo, and of course Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.

As such, we want you, dear reader, to take the poll below and let us know which Best Picture winner from the last twenty years you think is the best. Take the poll, and then, if you feel like it, add your comments in the talkbacks. We look forward to hearing from you.

The post Poll: What’s the Best Oscar Winner of the last 20 years? appeared first on JoBlo.

Eric

With the death of director William Friedkin sending shockwaves through the film world, as everyone pays tribute to his classics The French Connection and The Exorcist, now is a good time to look back at one of his most underrated movies, the 1977 classic action thriller Sorcerer!

The 1970s were probably the last decade when the film industry had many honest-to-goodness auteurs. Directors who made movies on their own terms without compromises; not just the ones making little indie art films, but the guys in charge of sizable projects with the backing of major studios. Filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Brian De Palma came of age during this era, and were responsible for movies that would resonate for decades. Another name you can add to that list is William Friedkin, who during that period made two instant classics and one misunderstood masterpiece. 

The classics are obvious: in a span of three years, Friedkin made The French Connection and The Exorcist, movies that respectively are prime candidates for Best Cop Film Ever and Best Horror Movie ever… You all can debate that in the comments… The French Connection won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director, making Friedkin one of the hottest filmmakers in the business. The Exorcist became one of the biggest box office champs of all time and won two Oscars of its own, subsequently making Friedkin a God… Well, in his own mind anyway. 

Coming off two such respected and successful movies could make any director feel invincible, and Friedkin was a man who by his own admission believed his own hype. When it came time to follow those two movies, Friedkin would ultimately decide on SORCERER, a fairly low-budget suspense film that he thought would be easy enough to squeeze in before delving into a much larger project. But fate had a much different plan for Friedkin, transforming his low-budget movie into an expensive and exhausting undertaking. 

Buckle up because the road ahead is very rocky; Hold on tight and find out WTF Happened to this movie!

Sorcerer was based on the 1950 novel “The Wages of Fear” by French author George Arnaud, which was subsequently turned into a 1952 movie of the same name by legendary director Henri-Georges Clouzot. Both tell the tale of four desperate men who are tasked with driving trucks filled with unstable explosives through dangerous terrain in order to help stop an oil field fire. One wrong turn, one big bump, the nitroglycerine gets rattled too much, kaboom – everyone’s dead. Friedkin was an admirer of both the book and film, and intended to make a far grittier version than Clouzot, a movie that would be nearly as cynical as he was. Friedkin has always maintained it’s not actually a remake of the movie, but just another adaptation of the book, but he still went to Clouzot to get his blessing for the update, which was granted. 

Friedkin initially intended his version to be a reasonably small movie, a side project that he could make cheaply and quickly before embarking on a sci-fi epic called “The Devil’s Triangle,” about the legendary Bermuda Triangle. Safe to say things did not work out that way, and “The Devil’s Triangle” never happened – mostly because Steven Spielberg made Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which allegedly contained many similar concepts. 

After spending four months working on his Wages of Fear script with The Wild Bunch writer Walon Green, Friedkin was ready to make the movie he thought would be a major part of his legacy, the big one people would remember him by. Heading to the Dominican Republic, where the weather and conditions would turn out to be wholly unpredictable, Friedkin’s $2.5 million movie eventually expanded to $12 million before finally consuming approximately $22 million – needless to say, a very expensive project in 1976, even more than his peer Steven Spielberg ultimately spent on Close Encounters. In fact, the budget eventually became so bloated that it took two studios to co-produce it, Universal and Paramount.

Friedkin was interested in making “Wages of Fear” his own in some key ways; the most dramatic change being the four lead characters, depicted as decent men in Clozot’s movie but who Friedkin sought to make highly flawed, morally corrupt individuals – one character literally describes our protagonist as “a real piece of shit”. Transporting the dangerous nitro would be a journey of redemption, even though we see from the film’s first act that they are killers and thieves. Then and now, Friedkin has never been interested in traditional movie heroes. Furthermore, he saw Sorcerer as a metaphor for the world at large, in which strangers who don’t like each other have to find a way to work together; otherwise, everything will explode. A timeless theme, to be sure.

Another key change, obviously, would be the title. Apparently, one working title was “Ballbreaker,” and another was, appropriately, “Dynamite.” But while doing research in South America, Friedkin saw trucks with names crudely painted on the doors. Two such vehicles were called “Sorcerer” and “Lazarus.” Inspired, Friedkin named his two trucks in the movie the same, even if the audience never really gets a clear look at the writing. Friedkin also found a metaphor in the title, saying a “sorcerer in an evil wizard, and in this case, the evil wizard is fate,” further hammering home the idea that these men’s destinies are completely out of their hands. 

For the lead character of Jackie Scanlon, a crook from New Jersey hiding out in a South American village, Friedkin envisioned Steve McQueen. McQueen actually loved the script and wanted to do it, but he had just married Ali MacGraw and didn’t want to leave her in the States while he was away for three months shooting the movie. McQueen asked Friedkin if he could write a role for MacGraw so she could accompany him to the Dominican Republic – a request Friedkin scoffed at. After McQueen tried and failed to get her attached as an associate producer, the actor dropped out of the film. Other names like Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman and Robert Mitchum were tossed around, but ultimately the role went to Roy Scheider, who had previously worked with Friedkin on The French Connection. Their relationship had gone a little frosty because Scheider had wanted to play the role of Father Karras in The Exorcist and was denied. Still, he was coming off Spielberg’s blockbuster Jaws and seemed like a bankable leading man to that film’s studio, Universal.

The other three primary actors (Bruno Cremer, Amidou, and Francisco Rabal) were not household names in the U.S., and the studio was concerned the lack of star power would hurt the movie, but Friedkin forged ahead, convinced it wouldn’t matter. He believed people would see the film just because his name was on it. At one point he even told the studio they should change the actors’ names for the release to sound more American, an idea that never got off the ground. 

Standing in for the movie’s remote Colombia setting, most of Sorcerer was shot in the jungles of the Dominican Republic, where the crew literally had to make their own roads to film the truck-driving scenes. It was beyond hot and uncomfortable, and throughout the production many people – Friedkin included – fell ill with malaria or dysentery. Some crew members were sent back to America because they were suspected drug users, which the local governments would not tolerate, so to avoid winding up in prison, they simply fled back to the states and had to be replaced. 

And if the crew wasn’t sick or evading jail time, they were being canned. Already known for a volatile personality that earned him the nickname “Hurricane Billy”, Friedkin was in full dictator mode out in the jungle, routinely firing people left and right, including production managers, teamsters, stunt people and anyone else who rubbed him the wrong way, even his own longtime line producer. His first cinematographer, Dick Bush, was replaced during production because Friedkin was not pleased with his work. He even got into it with Roy Scheider, even though they got along well during French Connection. Scheider would later joke he was the only person Friedkin could not fire because he was the leading man, and said the famously-troubled Jaws production was a picnic compared to Sorcerer. 

Considerable challenges came when shooting the film’s most incredible sequences, where the nitro-carrying trucks have to cross a rickety rope bridge over a raging river. The initial river chosen in the Dominican Republic was nixed because it was bone dry due to a drought in the country. The production decided to move to Mexico, where they found a river that looked appropriately intimidating. However, after the bridge was constructed, the water began to dry up, and the river became no more than a trickle. Perhaps the production was cursed? To compensate, Friedkin had to fake the river by pumping thousands of gallons of water into it, while also utilizing rain machines and hoses to create the powerful storm. The shaking and swaying of the bridge was achieved by placing hydraulic mechanisms underneath to simulate its flimsy nature, and oftentimes the trucks themselves were attached to the bridge in order to keep them from slipping off. Even so, they did fall into the river, many times, once while Friedkin was inside the cab. The actors were often actually driving the trucks, or at least steering them, and somehow none of them were ever seriously hurt. The two bridge scenes together, lasting about 12 minutes in the film, took several months to complete and chewed up around $3 million of the movie’s growing cost.

Another of the movie’s key moments is when the trucks arrive at a gigantic fallen tree that’s blocking their route; the only solution to use some of the nitro and blast the thing to smithereens. The production hit a snag when it turned out they didn’t have nearly enough explosives on hand to actually put a sizable dent in the tree, so Friedkin called a disreputable associate of his from New York to help. “Marvin the Torch” was an arsonist who blew up buildings for people looking to collect the insurance money, and although he was supposedly retired from this questionable line of work, he still flew to the Dominican Republic armed with a couple of suitcases filled with quote-unquote “beauty supplies.” At the end of the day, Marvin detonated the tree, the explosion was spectacular, and “the Torch” was back on a plane a day or so later. 

After filming on the movie was complete – a shoot that lasted somewhere in the crazy neighborhood of ten months – editing began, which at least according to Friedkin went fairly smoothly. But the studios were nervous, unsure if they had just tossed over $20 million into a flaming oil well. After some execs from Universal saw an early cut, they summoned Friedkin to a meeting to discuss. Friedkin brought writer Walon Green and his editor Bud Smith to the meeting, instructing them to just stare blankly at the suits as they read over their notes, but not to nod or agree with anything they said. Friedkin himself ordered a bottle of vodka and began drinking straight from the bottle during the meeting, eventually falling on the floor. The aim was to disorient the executives so much that they would just leave them alone, which is pretty much exactly what happened. Friedkin had final cut on Sorcerer, and was intent on crafting the masterpiece he had pictured from the start. 

To score the film, Friedkin hired German electronic group Tangerine Dream, who he’d seen play a concert in Germany years earlier. Friedkin was mesmerized by their music and asked if they’d be interested in scoring his next movie. He eventually sent them the script for Sorcerer and wanted them to write the score based only on the pages; in fact, they finished the score and sent him the tapes while he was still shooting the film. In an unusual creative decision, Friedkin and his editor eventually cut the movie to match the eerie and surreal score.

Sorcerer was released in theaters in June 1977; the studios stood by the movie and rolled it out with fanfare. But almost immediately it was clear that Friedkin’s big gamble would not pay off. The reviews were tough, and the box office was even tougher. This was the summer of Star Wars, released just a month earlier and well on its way to becoming cultural phenomenon. Audiences wanted to bask in the brilliant space fantasy world created by George Lucas, not sit in a truck filled with nitroglycerine with guys who hardly spoke. As moviegoers kept returning to see the galactic heroes defeat the oppressive Empire, Friedkin’s band of sweaty criminals was essentially ignored.

Some theorized that the title could have been an issue: a movie called Sorcerer from the director of The Exorcist implied a supernatural picture, but when it became clear that wasn’t the case, audiences were turned off. And aside from Scheider, a complete lack of familiar faces in the cast didn’t help. Whatever the reason, Sorcerer’s time in theaters was even rougher than the roads traveled in the movie — it couldn’t even compete with Exorcist II: The Heretic, director John Boorman’s dodgy sequel to Friedkin’s own massive hit. Ultimately Sorcerer only grossed about $9 million that summer and was quickly chased from theaters that wanted more screens for Star Wars, which ironically cost around half of Sorcerer’s budget. Money Into Light has an interesting piece about how the movie was brutally cut down in the international version, with it also being renamed The Wages of Fear.

The box office disaster also chased away Friedkin; the director exiled himself to France to lick his wounds while pondering what went wrong. After living and acting like a God for a few years, he came crashing back down to Earth, correctly guessing there were plenty of people glad to see him taken down a few notches. And while he’s reached some high notes since, with movies like To Live and Die in L.A., and Killer Joe, Friedkin’s career seemed to take a nitro-blast in the guts after the experience of Sorcerer. 

Of course, in the years after its theatrical failure, Sorcerer has undergone something of a reevaluation, as time has been very kind to it. Now, many movie fans appreciate the suspenseful, unnerving, masterfully-produced thriller that it is. Friedkin says it’s still the movie he’s most proud of, and it was certainly the most difficult to make. People like Stephen King and Quentin Tarantino rank it among the greatest movies ever made, and it’s being rediscovered all the time. When put together with The French Connection and The Exorcist, Sorcerer completes a three-movie streak from a man at the very top of his game. Fittingly, the making of Sorcerer was nearly as torturous and harrowing as the events it depicts, and maybe even more fittingly, it was not appreciated for how impressively it accomplished its job. But after a very grueling start, it’s now recognized for being a true gem; perhaps that was its destiny all along.

The post WTF Happened to Sorcerer (1977)? appeared first on JoBlo.

The road to movie history is often paved with last-minute panic. Actors drop out, directors second-guess their choices, and studios scramble to fix a problem before the cameras must stop rolling. Every so often, that chaos leads to a bit of movie magic, when a replacement actor steps in and ends up defining the entire film.

The most famous example is Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future. Eric Stoltz was originally cast as Marty McFly and even filmed for several weeks before the filmmakers realized he just wasn’t right for the role. Fox stepped in, and the rest is Hollywood history. It’s now impossible to imagine anyone else in the part.

But that’s far from the only time a last-minute casting switch changed a movie for the better. Here are five other notable recasts (among many) that arguably saved their movies.

Viggo Mortensen replaced Stuart Townsend in The Lord of the Rings

Stuart Townsend spent months training and rehearsing to play Aragorn in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, but just days before filming began, the filmmakers decided the actor looked too young for the role and made the difficult call to replace him.

Enter Viggo Mortensen. With virtually no time to prepare, Mortensen stepped into the production and immediately won over the cast and crew. He threw himself into the role, performed many of his own stunts, and impressed legendary swordmaster Bob Anderson so much that he later called Mortensen “the best swordsman I’ve ever trained.“

Ironically, it wouldn’t be the only time Townsend lost out on a major franchise role. Years later, he was cast as Fandral in Kenneth Branagh’s Thor, only to be replaced by Josh Dallas, who was later replaced himself by Zachary Levi in subsequent Marvel films.

Michelle Pfeiffer replaced Annette Bening in Batman Returns

Many actresses have slipped into Catwoman’s claws over the decades, but few have done it as memorably as Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns. Bringing a seductive edge and a dangerous unpredictability to Selina Kyle—along with that unforgettable stitched-leather costume—Pfeiffer delivered what many fans (myself included) still consider the definitive big-screen Catwoman. But she wasn’t Tim Burton’s first choice.

Annette Bening was originally cast in the role. Fresh off the success of The Grifters, which earned her an Academy Award nomination, Bening seemed like a natural fit for Burton’s twisted Gotham. However, she was forced to step away from the film due to pregnancy, leaving the door open for Pfeiffer, who had already been eyeing the role.

“As a young girl, I was completely obsessed with Catwoman. When I heard that Tim was making the film and Catwoman had already been cast, I was devastated,” Pfeiffer said. “At the time, it was Annette Bening. Then she became pregnant. The rest is history. I remember telling Tim halfway through the script that I’d do the film, that’s how excited I was.“

Gene Wilder replaced Gig Young in Blazing Saddles

Gene Wilder was absolutely iconic as the Waco Kid in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles, but he wasn’t originally cast in the role. In fact, Brooks initially told Wilder he was too young for the part. Wilder insisted he could pull it off, but Brooks wouldn’t budge.

Instead, Brooks looked elsewhere. One of the actors he approached was John Wayne, who reportedly loved the script but ultimately felt it was far too dirty for his screen persona. The role eventually went to Gig Young, the Academy Award–winning actor from They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

Unfortunately, Young was battling severe alcoholism and was going through withdrawal during filming, which quickly caused problems on set.

“We draped Gig Young’s legs over and hung him upside down. And he started to talk and he started shaking,” Brooks recalled. “I said, ‘This guy’s giving me a lot. He is giving plenty. He’s giving me the old alky shake. Great.’ And then it got serious, because the shaking never stopped, and green stuff started spewing out of his mouth and nose, and he started screaming. And, I said, ‘That’s the last time I’ll ever cast anybody who really is that person.’ If you want an alcoholic, don’t cast an alcoholic… Anyway, poor Gig Young, it was the first shot on Friday, nine in the morning, and an ambulance came and took him away. I had no movie.“

With production suddenly in jeopardy, Brooks called Wilder. The actor jumped on a plane and arrived on set shortly afterward to take over the role, and the result is comedy history.

Ed Harris replaced Dennis Hopper in The Truman Show

Dennis Hopper was originally cast as Christof in The Truman Show, but those dreaded creative differences quickly surfaced. After just two days of shooting, the actor was fired. Hopper later explained what happened: “Scott Rudin, the producer, had made an agreement with the director that … He didn’t want me to do the part, and if he didn’t like what I did after the first day’s dailies then he would fire me. And they fired me.“

Despite seemingly anticipating the possibility of replacing one of their key actors, the producers didn’t have anyone lined up to step into the role. Several actors were considered, but many passed, and the situation reportedly became so uncertain that shutting down production was briefly discussed.

Eventually, Ed Harris stepped in, taking over the role with only a few days’ notice. He may have briefly worried the producers when he floated an unusual idea for the character—suggesting that Christof might have a hunchback—but any concerns quickly vanished once the cameras rolled.

In the end, Harris proved to be the perfect counterbalance to Jim Carrey’s Truman, playing the calm, godlike architect who had controlled Truman’s life since birth. The performance earned Harris an Academy Award nomination.

Martin Sheen replaced Harvey Keitel in Apocalypse Now

Martin Sheen famously gave everything he had to playing Captain Willard in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, enduring a notoriously brutal production that included a mental breakdown and even a near-fatal heart attack while filming in the Philippines. But if you’ve read the title of this article, you already know he wasn’t the original actor. Harvey Keitel had been cast in the role after Coppola was impressed by his performance in Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets.

However, after just a few days of shooting, Coppola began to feel that Keitel wasn’t the right fit for the character, later saying that the actor “found it difficult to play him as a passive onlooker.“

“I could see [Keitel] was very uncomfortable about conditions in the jungle,” Coppola is quoted as saying. “And I thought, Not only do I think he’s wrong casting, but what’s it going to be like for six months in these difficult conditions in the jungle for a city guy who’s afraid of it? I just decided to make this tough decision.“

However, in a 2021 interview, Keitel pushed back on at least one part of that narrative. “I believe in the book on the making of the movie they said Harvey Keitel didn’t like the jungle; didn’t want to stay in the jungle,” he said. “Well, Harvey Keitel spent three years in the United States Marine Corps in the jungle.“

Sheen may not have known exactly what he was getting into when he stepped in to replace Keitel, but his performance ultimately became one of the defining elements of Coppola’s war epic, a haunting portrayal of a man slowly descending into the heart of darkness.

—

Of course, these are just a handful of the many last-minute recasts that ended up working out for the best. What are some of your favourite last-minute recasts? Let us know in the comments.

The post Last Minute Recasts That Saved the Movie appeared first on JoBlo.

Theodore

Some cliché somewhere said that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words.’ This has proven to be the case for me, especially when it comes to fan art. I have always sought out great fan art and have wanted to share it with as many people as possible. “Awesome Art” is the outlet for that passion. In this column, I will showcase the kick-ass artwork of some great artists, hoping these artists get the attention they deserve. That’s the aim. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for art or other great artists, feel free to contact me at any time at theodorebond@joblo.com.

This week’s Awesome Art focuses on the winners of our 2025 Golden Schmoes Awards!

Avatar: Fire and Ash by Julien Rico Jr

F1 by Haley Turnbull

KPop Demon Hunters by Victor Barreto

Marty Supreme by Shelby Morning

Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning by Christopher Scott

One Battle After Another by Alessandro Montalto

Predator: Badlands by Metro

Sinners by Edgar Ascensão

Superman by Jorge Teles-Cygnar

Thunderbolts* by John Dunn

Weapons by Aleks Phoenix

The post Awesome Art’s Best of the 2025 Golden Schmoes with KPop Demon Hunters, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, Sinners, Weapons appeared first on JoBlo.

Last month, I was devastated to hear the news that actor Robert Carradine had passed away at the age of 71. Not only had I grown up watching him in repeat viewings of the films in the Revenge of the Nerds franchise and other movies I would catch him in along the way, but he had just recently launched the Party Nerds Pop-Cast podcast with his friend Richard Gabai, and I was a weekly viewer of the show for five months straight, having fun catching up with Richard and Bobby every week… And now, Bobby’s gone. To pay tribute, I have revisited several entries on his filmography and put together a list of what I think are some of the Best Robert Carradine Movies.

Here we go:

THE COWBOYS (1972)

Robert didn’t intend to follow his father, John Carradine, and his brothers David and Keith into the acting world. He wanted to be a race car driver. But then came The Cowboys, a Western starring the legendary John Wayne as a rancher who needs drovers for a 400-mile cattle drive – and circumstances force him to recruit a group of local schoolboys for the job. David had been offered the villain role, but turned it down (probably for the best; the role went to Bruce Dern, who was already getting typecast as psychos, and this role didn’t help him change that perception). He then told his little brother Bobby that he should audition for a schoolboy role because he had “everything to gain, and nothing to lose.” Robert auditioned and landed the role of Slim Honeycutt.

Wayne knew it was a risk to share the screen with a bunch of youngsters, but ended up feeling that working on The Cowboys was the best experience of his life… even if he had to chew out the inexperienced but opinionated Robert Carradine and reduce him to tears one day. Directed by Mark Rydell from a script by Irving Ravetch, Harriet Frank Jr., and William Dale Jennings that was based on Jennings’ 1971 novel, The Cowboys is a great Western that mixes an Old West cattle drive epic with amusing coming-of-age moments, some intense sequences, and emotional scenes that will tug on your heartstrings. Roscoe Lee Browne also turns in a great performance as Jebediah Nightlinger, the cook that accompanies Wayne and the kids on the drive.

The Cowboys was such a hit that it spawned a TV series follow-up in 1974, with Robert Carradine and A Martinez reprising their roles. But ABC bungled the development of the show and it only lasted for 12 episodes. These days, it’s disappointingly difficult to find.

COMING HOME (1978)

There’s not enough Robert Carradine in this movie for my liking, but it had to make the list because it’s the only movie he was in to earn a Best Picture nomination. It lost that honor to Annie Hall, but did take home the gold in three of the eight categories it was nominated in: Best Actor (Jon Voight), Best Actress (Jane Fonda), and Best Original Screenplay (Waldo Salt, Robert C. Jones, and Nancy Dowd).

This was the first film from Fonda’s production company, IPC Films, and was inspired by her friendship with paraplegic Vietnam War veteran Ron Kovic (whose story was told in Born on the Fourth of July). Set in 1968, the film, directed by Hal Ashby, sees Fonda playing a military wife who volunteers at a Veterans Administration hospital while her husband (Bruce Dern) is serving in Vietnam. During her time at the hospital, she falls for and starts having an affair with paraplegic veteran Luke Martin (Voight). Heartbreak and tragedy ensue.

Carradine plays Bill Munson, a veteran with PTSD who has a tragic side story of his own. This was always an emotionally impactful film, but the circumstances of Carradine’s own death have made his character’s story in Coming Home even more difficult to watch. He did great work in the role, though, and that’s something to celebrate.

BLACKOUT (1978)

Castle Residence is a 27-story apartment building in New York City. It’s home to people from all walks of life, and to most of the characters we’ll come to meet in this film: a pregnant woman due to give birth, an elderly woman caring for her husband, a magician with a beagle, a grumpy old rich man… there’s even a Greek wedding party happening on the 27th floor. Elsewhere, a group of dangerous criminals are loaded into a Department of Corrections truck, being transferred from a mental hospital to prison. One member of the group is Christie (Robert Carradine), a guy who likes to express his hatred of big businesses by blowing them up.

A severe storm hits the city, causing the titular blackout. Worlds collide when a couple of bikers do some tricky driving in front of the DoC truck and cause it to crash right in front of Castle Residence. The criminals exit the truck and decide to go into the apartment building. A spree of violence, robbery, rape, and arson follows, with Christie proving to be particularly dangerous. Menacingly calm and judgmental, he interrogates residents and condemns their lifestyles. He calls credit card users “leeches” and “parasites,” accuses the magician of exploiting his dog, and remarks that “Mother Nature has no place for the sick and the weak” when encountering a man dependent on a breathing machine.

Officer Dan Evans (Jim Mitchum) finds the wrecked transfer truck and the dead officers within and decides to check out Castle Residence. It’s up to him, and a few sidekicks he gathers along the way, to help the troubled citizens within the building and stop the criminals. This is a pretty interesting drive-in movie with a cool set-up (the random careless bikers aside) and a good cast. In addition to the actors mentioned, you also get June Allyson and Ray Milland as Castle Residence residents.

THE LONG RIDERS (1980)

“You want David, you’ll take Keith, you’ll get Bobby.” That’s the joke Robert Carradine would tell about having brothers who were actors, but in the 1980 Western The Long Riders, you get all three of the Carradine brothers sharing the screen.

Directed by Walter Hill from a script by Bill Bryden, Steven Phillip Smith, Stacy Keach, and James Keach, the film tells the story of the real-life outlaws that made up the James-Younger Gang, and one of its big selling points was that four sets of actual brothers were cast to play the four sets of brothers in the story. So you get the Keach brothers as Frank and Jesse James, Dennis and Randy Quaid as Ed and Clell Miller, Christopher and Nicholas Guest as Charlie and Robert Ford, and David, Keith, and Robert Carradine as Cole, Jim, and Bob Younger.

Robert was one part of a large ensemble here, and when it comes to Carradines, it’s David who gets the most screen time (including a knife fight with James Remar) – but it’s one hell of a strong ensemble to be part of, Robert is present for most of the running time, and The Long Riders is another great movie from Walter Hill, the man who brought us classics like The Warriors, 48 Hrs., Streets of Fire, and more. Hill has gone on to cast Keith Carradine a few more times.

THE BIG RED ONE (1980)

Born in 1912, Samuel Fuller started out working as a crime reporter when he was still a teenager, then got into writing pulp novels and screenplays, earning his first credit on a movie in 1936. When World War II broke out, he enlisted in the United States Army, where he was assigned as an infantryman to the 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division. That meant he saw a whole lot of fighting in a variety of locations: Africa, Sicily, Normandy, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, and Germany. He was present at the liberation of a concentration camp in Falkenau. He reached the rank of corporal and was awarded the Silver Star, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, and Combat Infantryman Badge. All that, and there was only a two-year gap in his film writing credits during the years the U.S. was in the war (although a four-year gap followed). By the late ‘50s, Fuller was already planning to direct a film based on his personal experiences in World War II… but getting it into production turned out to be a twenty-year ordeal, due to studio issues.

When The Big Red One (which is the nickname for the 1st Infantry Division) finally started filming, Fuller chose Robert Carradine to play the character based on himself, young writer Private Zab, and to deliver the film’s narration. Lee Marvin stars as Possum, who was a Private when he served in World War I. By November of 1942, he’s a Sergeant, leading a squad of infantrymen into battle. This squad includes Carradine’s Zab, plus characters played by Mark Hamill, Bobby Di Cicco, and Kelly Ward. The theatrical cut of the film has a running time of 113 minutes and follows the 1st Infantry Division through a series of battles in the places Fuller himself fought, ending at the Falkenau concentration camp. It’s an action-packed movie, written with the tone of an old man who had seen some hellish things in his life and could no longer be fazed by much of anything.

The Big Red One wasn’t exactly what Fuller wanted it to be. His rough cut was four hours, he got it down to two hours, then the distributor made him cut it down to 113 minutes. Still, it’s one of the best war movies ever made – and if you want to see more of Fuller’s cinematic take on his own experience, there’s a “reconstruction cut” that adds nearly 50 minutes to the running time.

TAG: THE ASSASSINATION GAME (1982)

Four years after playing Michael Myers in the original Halloween and one year after he co-wrote the sci-fi action classic Escape from New York (both of those projects being collaborations with John Carpenter), Nick Castle made his feature directorial debut with TAG: The Assassination Game. Some describe this movie as an action comedy, others call it a college campus thriller, and the fact is that it has a little bit of everything. There is action and comedy, there are thrills, and there’s even a bit of romance between characters played by Robert Carradine and Linda Hamilton. Castle tends to present their interactions in film noir style, complete with a recreation of the “you know how to whistle” scene from the 1944 film noir To Have and Have Not, with Hamilton and Carradine in place of Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart.

The Assassination Game is being played by students on this particular college campus, and it’s just like it sounds. The idea is that each participant is pretending to be an assassin. They’re given the names of other participants and sent out to “assassinate” them with suction cup dart guns. The reigning champion is Loren Gersh (future Re-Animator star Bruce Abbott) – and when he’s taken out of the game in a ridiculous way, he has a complete mental breakdown and decides to hunt down his opponents with a real gun. While Gersh is knocking students off with real bullets, his biggest competitor, Susan Swayze (Hamilton) is racking up the “kills” with her dart gun, putting them on a collision course for climactic action. While heading for the championship, Swayze is also falling for fellow student Alex Marsh (Carradine), who works for the school paper and has introduced himself to her under the guise of covering this Assassination Game the campus has gotten swept up in.

Naming two major characters who get referred to by their last names such similar names as Gersh and Marsh was an odd choice in the writing process, but who am I to question Nick Castle? He made this an entertaining hodge-podge of genres.

WAVELENGTH (1983)

In the late 1970s, writer/director Mike Gray came up with an idea for a science fiction movie he wanted to make. He had it set up at Warner Bros., but then Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out and the studio scrapped Gray’s project because they felt it was too similar to Spielberg’s movie. A few years went by, and Gray managed to secure $1.5 million to film Wavelength independently… and found himself in a race against another Spielberg movie, E.T. The Wavelength team was hoping to get their movie released before Spielberg’s, but it took so long to finish the special effects that Gray’s movie came out more than a year after E.T. charmed the world – and seems to have been released directly into obscurity. One of the few times it has been referenced since then was when fans accused John Carpenter’s 1984 film Starman of stealing a space ship shot from Wavelength.

The film begins with musician Bobby Sinclaire (Robert Carradine) meeting a woman named Iris Longacre (Cherie Currie) in a bar and embarking on a relationship with her. When Bobby takes Iris back to his home, she hears strange noises emanating from a nearby military installation. Turns out, Iris is a twin, which makes her more sensitive to the telepathic messages being sent out by the alien beings that are held captive in the military base. Bobby and Iris set out to help these child-like creatures get back home.

Wavelength is an odd one, but it’s also a really good movie with a cool score, courtesy of Tangerine Dream. It deserved to get more attention than it has been given over the decades.

REVENGE OF THE NERDS (1984)

It may be the greatest accomplishment of Robert Carradine’s career that he’s best remembered for being a nerd, because the guy wasn’t a nerd until he landed the role of Lewis Skolnick in the 1984 comedy classic Revenge of the Nerds. He was a Carradine! He was a race car driver, a motorcycle enthusiast, a musician, and had dated Jamie Lee Curtis and Melanie Griffith. Before this movie, he was mostly playing cowboys, soldiers, football players, and cool dudes. (See him in The Pom Pom Girls, or as the hippie who has a threesome in Massacre at Central High.) And then he turned in the most iconic nerd performance of all time.

Directed by Jeff Kanew from a script assembled by Steve Zacharias, Jeff Buhai, Tim Metcalfe, and Miguel Tejada-Flores, Revenge of the Nerds tells the timeless and heartwarming story of outsiders standing up for themselves against oppressors, advocating for acceptance and self-pride. Like pretty much every ‘80s comedy, there are rough edges and elements that haven’t aged well, but it still holds up as a really funny movie populated with likeable characters.

Not only did Carradine return for all of the sequels – Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise (1987), Revenge of the Nerds III: The Next Generation (1992), and Revenge of the Nerds IV: Nerds in Love (1994) – but he also teamed with co-star Curtis Armstrong to host a reality competition show called King of the Nerds, which ran for three seasons, from 2013 to 2015. In 1988, his nerd notoriety earned him a role in the Disney special Totally Minnie, where his character (named Maxwell Dwebb) gets a makeover from the animated mouse.

NUMBER ONE WITH A BULLET (1987)

The buddy cop action comedy Number One with a Bullet was one of the many cool movies made by the legendary company Cannon in the 1980s, and one that they fumbled on their way to their demise. One week before the buddy cop classic Lethal Weapon reached theatres, Cannon dumped their buddy cop movie onto 228 screens, allowing it to sputter out with less than $411,000 at the box office. Sure, this isn’t up there with the likes of 48 Hrs. or Lethal Weapon in the quality department, but it deserved better.

The film was directed by Jack Smight from a script that was crafted by Gail Morgan Hickman, Andrew Kurtzman, Rob Riley, and James Belushi. When he was working on the script, Belushi was also intended to co-star in the film – and it’s still clear in the finished film that the character of Nick Barzack, played by Robert Carradine, was meant to be Belushi. He feels very much like a Belushi character: he’s an irreverent fellow who lives on junk food (when he’s not eating raw steak) and beer (which he disguises as bottles of Coca-Cola), is always messing with the love life of his clean-cut, healthy-eating partner Frank Hazeltine (Billy Dee Williams), dodges calls from his mother (Doris Roberts), and basically stalks his ex-wife Teresa (Valerie Bertinelli). Despite the fact that Barzack’s behavior is appalling, we’re supposed to root for him, even when he wins back Teresa, who should be staying far away from him.

Barzack and Hazeltine are a pair of Los Angeles cops who are working to bring down a drug-running criminal kingpin – and while that endeavor takes up a lot of screen time and leads to plenty of action sequences, including one where a helicopter gunner opens fire on the small plane our heroes are in, and another where assassins in semi trucks attempt to smash Hazeltine in a junk yard, none of that is as interesting as watching Carradine play Barzack, a very unpleasant hero.

I SAW WHAT YOU DID (1988)

In 1965, producer/director William Castle brought us a cool little horror thriller called I Saw What You Did, about a pair of teenage girls who make prank phone calls to random people to say, “I saw what you did, and I know who you are.” Unfortunately for them, one of their prank victims happens to be a man who just murdered his wife, so they end up in serious danger. 23 years later, Universal Television decided to produce a TV movie remake of I Saw What You Did for CBS – and when you’re making a horror thriller involving phone calls, of course you would turn to director Fred Walton, who made the classic When a Stranger Calls in 1979.

While the set-up is the same, with Shawnee Smith and Tammy Lauren playing teen girls who make the bad decision to start making prank calls, screenwriter Cynthia Cidre switched up some of the details and wrote her own characters. Robert Carradine plays musician Adrian Lancer, who’s losing his mind and seeing hallucinations. When his girlfriend turns down his marriage proposal, he murders her – and then the kids call him up and say, “I saw what you did, and I know who you are.” So, he sets out to commit some more murders. Along the way, Bobby got to share some more scenes with his brother David, who plays Adrian’s concerned brother Stephen. The movie is a solid thriller, with the younger Carradine giving a good, off-kilter performance.

I have to note that Robert Carradine also gave a great psycho performance in one segment (the best segment) of the 1993 John Carpenter / Tobe Hooper horror anthology Body Bags, which paved the way for two more Carradine / Carpenter collaborations: Escape from L.A. (1996) and Ghosts of Mars (2001).

As you can see, I’m particularly fond of the work Carradine did in the ’70s and ’80s, but he continued working steadily through the ’90s and all the way up to the weeks before he passed away. Some examples: The Player, The Tommyknockers, ER, Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, Humanoids from the Deep, NYPD Blue, The Practice, Nash Bridges, Monte Walsh, Timecop: The Berlin Decision, Tooth and Nail, Jesse Stone: Benefit of the Doubt, Sharktopus vs. Pteracuda; Mommy, I Didn’t Do It; The Night They Came Home, and more. The man racked up 150 screen acting credits.

You can spot him in Django Unchained, a movie that would have made it onto this list if not for the fact that he’s only on screen for a few seconds (which is especially disappointing when you take into account the fact that Quentin Tarantino originally envisioned Carradine playing Clarence in True Romance). He had such a likeable screen presence, he could even make something like The Kid with X-ray Eyes unexpectedly easy to watch.

For the generation after mine, I have to give an honorable mention to the Lizzie McGuire TV show and its follow-up feature film. I have never watched the show, but the amount of people who know Carradine best for playing Lizzie’s dad Sam McGuire is right up there with the number of people who know him best as Lewis Skolnick. At attempt was made to revive the series in 2019, and it’s a shame that it fell apart over creative differences.

Robert Carradine was a great actor, and it’s a bummer that he’s no longer with us. His work will continue to endure, and there are a lot of projects on his list of 150 credits that I will keep going back to again and again. (And there are still some first-time viewings to take in as well.)

What are some of your picks for the best Robert Carradine movies? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

The post King of the Nerds: Some of the Best Robert Carradine Movies appeared first on JoBlo.

Cody

A new era of the Friday the 13th franchise is about to begin, with Linda Cardellini having been officially cast as Pamela Voorhees in the Peacock streaming series Crystal Lake and the rights holders actively working on a new movie. As we sit in this space between eras, we still have the classic movies to watch over and over again. So let’s take a look at this Friday the 13th Movies Ranked list!

While this list is all in good fun, I have to admit that I found it to be surprisingly difficult to put together. That’s because the Friday the 13th franchise is my favorite of all franchises and I love every one of these films. Ranking them was like trying to rank my major internal organs. Some may work better than others, but I need them all! I struggled to decide which order to put them in, and ended up listing them based on which ones I would most like to watch at any given time. So here they are, listed from “Yes, put that movie on right now!” to “Sure, okay, let’s watch it.” Check it out, then let us know how you would rank the movies by leaving a comment below.

FRIDAY THE 13TH PART III (1982)

The Jason everyone knows is born here. This is where he gets his iconic hockey mask, and he wears it while taking out a group of youths vacationing at a cabin on the edge of Crystal Lake. Part 2 director Steve Miner returned for this one and managed to make it creepy while also packing it with gimmicks meant to be seen in 3D on the big screen – and you ever have the chance to see Friday the 13th Part III in 3D, go for it. It’s an awesome experience. Especially when you get to watch the hulking, hockey masked Jason (Richard Brooker) engage the final girl in one of the best chases of the franchise. A 13 minute sequence that goes all over the cabin property.

FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980)

Directed by Sean S. Cunningham, the original Friday the 13th has achieved classic status – and yet somehow it still doesn’t get enough respect or credit for how effectively creepy it is. A low budget but well crafted production, it delivers a dark-yet-fun atmosphere, an unnerving back story, an incredible score, amazing special effects (courtesy of Tom Savini), and an unforgettable performance by Betsy Palmer. Palmer shows up late in the film as a grieving mother out to avenge her young son, who drowned at Camp Crystal Lake more than twenty years earlier because the counselors weren’t paying attention. The new counselors didn’t have anything to do with it, but they pay the price.

FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE FINAL CHAPTER (1984)

A family living in a house out in the woods. A group of young people renting the house right across from them. And Jason Voorhees (Ted White this time) lurking nearby, waiting to strike. Director Joseph Zito brought a very dark atmosphere to this film, and yet it’s also a whole lot of fun, featuring some of the best, most likeable young characters in the entire series. (Plus some wild dancing from Crispin Glover.) Tom Savini believed “The Final Chapter” subtitle and returned to supply the bloodshed for Jason’s send-off. The kills are brutal, even the ones that are cut quickly, and the showiest of all is reserved for Jason himself. Jason is legitimately scary in this film, but a clever young boy named Tommy Jarvis figures out how to defeat the monster. For now.

FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VI: JASON LIVES (1986)

Tasked with bringing Jason Voorhees back from the dead, writer/director Tom McLoughlin looked to the Universal Monsters era for inspiration and resurrected Jason Frankenstein-style, with a well-placed lightning bolt. Jason rises from his grave a bit rotten but stronger than ever, just in time for the re-opening of Camp Crystal Lake. As returning adversary Tommy Jarvis tries to stop Jason, McLoughlin treats the viewer to fun characters, humorous lines and situations, cool stunts, great cinematography, and a rock ‘n roll soundtrack. Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (which shows the title and subtitle the other way around in the title sequence, so it’s Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI) pushes the comedy further than any of the previous movies, but it works because Jason himself (CJ Graham) is never the butt of the joke. McLoughlin found a way to bring fresh energy to the franchise while still keeping it in the woods.

FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2 (1981)

Friday the 13th Part 2 (not Part II, as they didn’t get fancy with the Roman numerals until later) is so good, it’s easy to overlook the fact that it’s built on a very odd decision: the one to make Jason Voorhees, the drowned child whose mother was out for vengeance in the first movie, the killer this time around. This isn’t the Jason who would become a pop culture icon. This is a backwoods fellow who wears a sack on his head (with Steve Dash being the man under the sack). But he’s also a terrifying killer who slashes his way through a new batch of counselors. Director Steve Miner did a great job of replicating the tone of the first movie, and the film features one of the best heroines in the franchise: child psychologist Ginny Fields, who comes up with a clever way of stopping Jason in his tracks.

FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VII: THE NEW BLOOD (1988)

When Paramount couldn’t secure a deal with New Line Cinema to make Freddy vs. Jason, they shifted gears and made a sequel that is basically Jason vs. Carrie. You have the same set-up as The Final Chapter, partying youths in a house across from a family home, but this time the family home is occupied by a troubled girl with telekinetic abilities. Like Tommy in Jason Lives, that girl (named Tina) accidentally resurrects Jason, then has to deal with the consequences. And when it comes time for their showdown, Tina uses her telekinesis to dish out quite a beating to the hockey masked slasher. It’s pretty awesome. Kane Hodder made his Jason debut in this film, and director / FX artist John Carl Beuchler gave him a great rotten look.

FRIDAY THE 13TH: A NEW BEGINNING (1985)

After years of psychiatric treatments, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter hero Tommy Jarvis arrives at Pinehurst Halfway House… and soon a killer in a hockey mask starts picking off the staff of the halfway house, the troubled youths staying there, and people in the surrounding area. The identity of the killer is meant to be a mystery, but it’s pretty hard to miss the clues. Directed by Danny Steinmann, A New Beginning has a bad reputation, but it’s still a lot of fun. Jason (Tom Morga and Johnny Hock) may only be present in Tommy’s hallucinations, but we still get a hockey masked killer who acts just like him. The characters are ridiculous, the movie is extremely sleazy, but that’s all just part of its charm.

FREDDY VS. JASON (2003)

After a long trip through development hell, Freddy vs. Jason finally reached theatres in 2003, with director Ronny Yu bringing the concept to the screen with great style. Robert Englund reprises the role of Nightmare on Elm Street franchise dream stalker Freddy Krueger, who uses the image of Mrs. Voorhees to encourage Jason Voorhees (Ken Kirzinger) to rise from Hell and head over to his old haunt of Elm Street to commit murder and stir up fear. Fear that will allow Freddy to return to the dreams of the Elm Street kids. But when Jason overstays his welcome and claims too many victims on Elm Street, the slashers clash. Fights take place in both the dream world and at Camp Crystal Lake, and the climactic battle is a glorious bloodbath.

FRIDAY THE 13TH (2009)

Ideas from the first four Friday the 13th films were mixed together for this reboot, a collaboration between Paramount and New Line Cinema. Derek Mears plays a Jason Voorhees who is faster and more intense than ever before. He’s wearing a sack on his head when we first see him, and later in the film he acquires a hockey mask. The set-up is the same as we’ve seen multiple times: Jason slashes his way through a bunch of youths who are vacationing at a house near Crystal Lake. The movie also draws from the end of Part 2 for its most controversial element: when Jason crosses paths with a young woman who resembles his mother, he locks her up in his mine shaft lair instead of killing her. Some fans think it’s a logical extension of what we saw in Part 2, other fans hate it.

FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VIII: JASON TAKES MANHATTAN (1989)

The Paramount era came to an end with Jason Takes Manhattan, which underwhelmed at the box office when movie-goers saw that it didn’t really deliver on the promise of the title. Jason (Kane Hodder) spends most of the film on a cruise ship that’s on its way to Manhattan, knocking off youths who are on board for a senior trip. When they do reach their destination, Manhattan is mostly played by Vancouver alleyways. But there is a great moment where we see Jason standing in the middle of Times Square. Part VIII also disappoints with a spacey heroine who’s always tripping, since director Rob Hedden wanted to work in some Elm Street-esque elements. The movie is fun, but you can see why Paramount gave up.

JASON GOES TO HELL: THE FINAL FRIDAY (1993)

The franchise moved to New Line Cinema with this installment, and director Adam Marcus set out to deliver a film that would be very different from any of its predecessors. He certainly accomplished that. Jason Goes to Hell starts off with Jason Voorhees (Kane Hodder) being blasted to pieces by the FBI… then spends the rest of the movie possessing people, starting with the coroner who is compelled to eat his heart. Jason’s spirit moves from body to body as he seeks out family members we never heard of before, because this movie creates its own mythology. “Through a Voorhees was he born, through a Voorhees may he be reborn, and only by the hands of a Voorhees will he die.” How can he die? By being stabbed with a magic dagger that sends him straight to Hell.

JASON X (2002)

While Freddy vs. Jason was making its way through development hell, director James Isaac decided to make another Friday the 13th sequel – one that would be set in the future to avoid causing continuity issues with the Freddy crossover. So a frozen Jason (Kane Hodder) gets blasted into space in the year 2455, and once he thaws out it’s business as usual because the ship he’s on happens to be inhabited by a bunch of youngsters. Plus some Marines, but those aren’t a problem. The cyborg causes him more trouble, but once his body gets blasted apart he just gets a new one, thanks to nanotechnology. Jason is upgraded into Uber Jason! Jason X is extremely goofy, and highly entertaining when you’re in the mood for absurdity.

Obligatory Mention: SWEET REVENGE (2025)

Now that we’ve covered the feature films, we have to mention that writer/director Mike P. Nelson’s short film Sweet Revenge was released in 2025, giving us our first official piece of live-action Friday the 13th content in sixteen years. Building off the traditional “Jason kills people on a trip to the lake” set-up, Nelson drops some wild ideas into his 15 minute short, including a heroine that returns from the dead… for some reason. Please don’t tell me “cursed lake water” is resurrecting people, because I hate that idea and feel that it takes away something special from Jason. Whatever the case, the short has its moments and a cool kill involving a boat motor. Stuntman Schuyler White did a fine job as Jason for the most part, although he doesn’t quite have the right build for the character and former Jason performer Kane Hodder would not appreciate that he’s shown holding his machete in his left hand. The biggest issue is the mask. The rights holders, possibly for copyright reasons, have decided to redesign Jason’s iconic hockey mask, which always had 31 holes before and now only has 13 holes. That could work, but so far, there’s just something off about it. The size, the texture. It doesn’t look right. There are some shots of it that look okay, but there are also shots of it that look horrible. This thing needs some tweaks done to it before we see it again. Sweet Revenge is not the triumphant return fans have been waiting for, but it was a fun way to let people know that Jason Voorhees is making a comeback.

The post Friday the 13th Movies Ranked: Jason at his best (and worst) appeared first on JoBlo.

The Naked Gun and David Zucker

Last year’s reboot of The Naked Gun franchise was rightfully a heavy concern for every fan of the series before its release. The original movies are comedy classics, and while there have been other successful broad comedy parodies (like Austin Powers, Scary Movie or Hot Shots!), the ZAZ (Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker) brand of humor feels like a very delicate thing that even David Zucker himself couldn’t seem to duplicate with later works.

2025’s The Naked Gun had some good recipes in place. Liam Neeson was a fan favorite for a reboot casting choice for a long time, thanks to his appearance on Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s show with Warwick Davis, Life’s Too Short. Then, he worked with Seth MacFarlane, who was attached to the helm the movie for a while before The Lonely Island’s Akiva Schaffer took on the duties. However, MacFarlane would stay on as a producer. Whether or not you like MacFarlane’s or Schaffer’s past works, you can tell they took their positions on the film seriously with, themselves, being huge fans of the original movies, and tried their hardest to honor the originals.

High School High

For the most part, 2025’s The Naked Gun seemed to have been successful. That is to say, it didn’t crash and burn. Most of the reactions were pretty positive. People were commenting on how much they laughed, also understanding that it emulated the originals while trying to be its own kind of movie. But I submit to you — whether or not the recent Naked Gun satisfied you or came up short for you, there’s actually a Naked Gun-esque movie from David Zucker that came out in 1996 that could scratch that very spoof itch. High School High with Jon Lovitz, while not as revolutionary as Airplane! or the original Naked Gun movies, is the Best David Zucker Movie You Never Saw!

What’s it about?

High School High is a teacher-savior satire. You know, those movies where an idealistic teacher is sent to a rough, inner-city school where the kids are dangerous, but the teacher eventually gets through to them and helps bring out their accomplishments. The sub-genre has been the subject of dramas like Lean On Me and Dangerous Minds, or action movies like The Principal, The Substitute and Only the Strong, or even other comedies like Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit. Dangerous Minds was the latest to have been released, just one year prior.

This may have been David Zucker’s last parody movie before returning to the sub-genre with Scary Movie 3. Even if he didn’t get his brother, Jerry, or Jim Abrahams back, Zucker did have Pat Proft and Robert LoCash (who are also alums of The Naked Gun franchise) join him in writing this movie. Zucker would only serve as a writer and producer, but Hart Bochner…that’s right…Ellis from Die Hard, would step in as director. Bochner was coming off of directing PCU and he was someone who understood his assignment well. His directing is nearly identical to Zucker’s with the way he sells the humor. His shot composition, his timing and the comedic performances he gets from the cast is almost seamless.

What makes it good?

You may have remembered the advertisements from the 90s and probably thought it looked fun but cheesy (like other attempted spoofs from the time — I’m looking at you, Fatal Instinct). I had even seen it at the theater back then and thought it had some good gags, but mostly run-of-the-mill. However, on a recent rewatch, it surprisingly held up better than I remember. Perhaps it’s because the new Naked Gun had me yearn for a similar-type of movie, but I was surprised at how much I found it to be a good spiritual successor this time around.

Jon Lovitz wasn’t particularly a box office draw after his run on SNL (however, his animated series, The Critic, is an excellent companion show to The Simpsons), but if you couldn’t have Leslie Nielsen in the main role, he’s a great substitute (no pun intended). Lovitz is different enough that you can avoid Frank Drebin comparisons, but there are definitely shades of Drebin in there. Lovitz is a little too silly to emulate Nielsen’s perfectly dry, dramatic delivery, but he made his character his own, even if I could pinpoint some jokes that I feel were written with Nielsen in mind. His romantic interest, played by Tia Carrere, is also a great choice, as she’s shown some good comedic chops in Wayne’s World and even in a little-known action comedy called Hollow Point (starring Karate Kid Part III‘s Thomas Ian Griffith). Here, she does a little more than the usual romantic interest as she’s involved in the plot and she even gets to shine on a lot more of the physical comedy than you may expect.

You have a great supporting cast with a young Mekhi Phifer flexing his comedic abilities and Guillermo Diaz, who broke out later with Half-Baked, gets to do a lot of fun stuff as a supposedly tough drug dealer getting put in a lot of wacky situations. And Nurse Ratched herself, Louise Fletcher, is a perfect foil to Lovitz’s character as she continually gets annoyed by his antics.

The humor is on point. It doesn’t reach the heights of Naked Gun, but damn if it doesn’t sport some jokes that feel like the tasty leftovers from those movies. The score from Ira Newborn even carries over the same style of music that Naked Gun featured, which made some of the action scenes feel very familiar. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was previously cut music from the past Zucker movies.

Where can you watch it?

I’ve seen High School High make the rotation on streaming services every now and then. Right now, it doesn’t seem to be streaming on any service in particular. Not even Tubi, but maybe something Tubi-adjacent. So, you may have to rent it. But honestly, I think it’s worth a rental. The movie needs more attention and if you’re yearning for some classic Zucker comedy that pokes fun at stereotypes (especially since that’s the angle that the new Scary Movie is taking), High School High is a good recommendation.

The post Remember High School High? It’s the Best David Zucker Movie You Never Saw appeared first on JoBlo.

Kier

What do you get when you cross the charming, nostalgic, and witty tone of a John Hughes movie with themes of bullying, teenage self-harm, and cold-blooded murder? Well, that’s easy. You get Heathers (1989), a movie that feels like Sixteen Candles meets True Romance meets Natural Born Killers, yet somehow blends those influences into something completely original.

But what most people don’t know is that the making of this movie was much darker than anything a studio film set should ever endure. From casting drama to on-set romances and even disturbing crimes involving members of the cast, today, we’re going to break down just what happened to Heathers.

The Story of Heathers

For those of you who haven’t seen this iconic film, Heathers follows Veronica Sawyer (played by Winona Ryder), a sixteen-year-old girl with a knack for forging handwriting who spends her time surrounded by the most popular—and cruel—girls in school: the Heathers.

When a mysterious and edgy new student named J.D. (Christian Slater) arrives in town, the two quickly bond. Before long, J.D. begins leading Veronica down a dark path as the pair embark on a violent spree targeting the worst people in their high school.

The Darker Original Script

The screenplay was written by Daniel Waters, who was essentially making his screenwriting debut. Waters was inspired by the wave of John Hughes-style teen films dominating the 1980s, but he wanted to create something darker, meaner, and more morbid, a sharp contrast to the optimistic teen dramas of the era.

In the finished film, Veronica and J.D. ultimately clash over their beliefs. Veronica realizes she doesn’t want to punish her classmates through murder, while J.D. becomes increasingly violent and unhinged.

However, Waters’ original script was far darker. The writer described his early draft as “much longer” and “apocalyptic.” Considering how dark the final film already is, that’s saying something.

Studios certainly thought so. Many refused to touch the project, especially during a time when the United States was experiencing a teen suicide crisis, making the script’s harsh tone and themes particularly risky.

The Studio That Took a Chance

You might think Waters would soften the script to sell it. He didn’t. Instead, he kept pitching it until someone, anyone, would take a chance on it. Eventually, New World Pictures stepped in. The studio understood what Waters was trying to do and agreed to produce the film. But there was a catch.

New World only offered a $3 million budget, far less than Waters believed the film needed. As a result, he scaled the script down to match the budget, and that’s how we ended up with the slightly more restrained version audiences know today.

One major change involved the ending. In Waters’ original script, J.D. successfully blows up the high school, and the film ends with Veronica attending prom in the afterlife alongside the dead students.

The studio immediately rejected that ending and forced a more restrained conclusion.

Casting the Film

With the script approved, Michael Lehmann was brought in to direct, and casting began in 1988. Initially, Justine Bateman was considered for the role of Veronica. When she turned it down, Jennifer Connelly became the top choice. Despite being the casting team’s dream pick, Connelly ultimately didn’t take the role. Instead, it went to 16-year-old Winona Ryder, whose career was already gaining momentum after playing Lydia in Beetlejuice.

Ironically, Ryder’s agent reportedly begged her not to take the role, fearing it would damage her career. History proved otherwise.

Originally, Ryder was expected to star opposite Brad Pitt, who auditioned for J.D. However, the casting director reportedly found Pitt too charming and warm for the role. Instead, the part went to the edgier Christian Slater.

The three Heathers were played by Kim Walker, Lisanne Falk, and Shannen Doherty – and yes, every one of their characters is actually named Heather.

On-Set Relationships and Controversies

At the time of filming, Christian Slater and Kim Walker were dating. In theory, working on a movie with your partner sounds ideal. In reality, it quickly became messy. Slater, who was 19 during production, reportedly spent increasing amounts of time with his co-star Winona Ryder, eventually developing a relationship with her and leaving Walker mid-production.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the most troubling situation on set.

During filming, it was discovered that a crew member in his 40s was involved in an inappropriate relationship with an underage extra. The situation reportedly came to light after Shannen Doherty confronted him directly on set. Despite the seriousness of the allegation, the crew member was never arrested, and Doherty instead gained a reputation in the press for being “difficult” and “bitchy.”

It’s a disturbing irony that a prom in Hell was considered too dark for the movie, yet multiple inappropriate relationships during production weren’t treated with the same concern.

Production Troubles

The production itself was chaotic. With a limited budget and constant pressure to stay on schedule, the film wrapped after just 33 days of shooting, leaving several scenes and pieces of coverage incomplete.

Part of the problem was that Winona Ryder was still underage, meaning child labor laws restricted how many hours she could work each day.

The rushed schedule created significant stress for the cast and crew. Cinematographer Francis Kenny later described the production as extremely challenging. On the very first day of filming, strong winds knocked over a lighting rig, damaging a set piece and immediately putting the crew behind schedule.

Studio Interference in Post-Production

After filming wrapped, the chaos continued in the editing room. New World Pictures began reviewing the footage and pushing the filmmakers to tone down the film’s darkness. Themes of suicide, school violence, and bullying made the studio nervous, and executives worried the movie would be impossible to market. Scenes were trimmed and adjustments were made to make the film slightly lighter in tone, while still trying to preserve its unique identity.

Even after these changes, the studio remained uncertain about the film. Ultimately, New World quietly released Heathers in March 1989 with minimal marketing support.

The result? A disappointing $1 million box office return.

Critical Response

Critics had mixed reactions. The Washington Post famously called the movie “the nastiest, cruelest fun you can have without actually having to study law or gird leather products,” adding that “If movies were food, Heathers would be a cynic’s chocolate binge.”

Film critic Roger Ebert gave the movie 2.5 out of 4 stars, describing it as “a morbid comedy about peer pressure in high school.”

While critics were divided, audiences began to appreciate the film’s brutal honesty and dark sense of humor.

From Box Office Bomb to Cult Classic

Over time, Heathers experienced a dramatic transformation.

What started as a box office failure slowly became a home-video favorite in the early 1990s. Eventually, it earned recognition as one of the most iconic cult classics of its era.

Today, the film is celebrated for:

• Its razor-sharp writing
• Its stylish, grungy aesthetic
• Its fearless approach to dark subject matter

Despite the troubled production, the film found its audience.

Sequel Plans That Never Happened

In 2009, Winona Ryder revealed that she had discussed the possibility of a sequel. The proposed film would have followed an adult Veronica struggling with visions of her dead classmates and possibly J.D., again played by Christian Slater.

In one version of the idea, Veronica would work as a page for a presidential candidate named Heather, potentially played by Meryl Streep. The story reportedly would have ended with Veronica assassinating her.

It sounds wild, and honestly kind of fascinating, but director Michael Lehmann later clarified that while ideas existed, there were no concrete plans to make the sequel.

The Legacy of Heathers

The story didn’t end there.

In 2010, Heathers was adapted into a stage musical, which became popular with theater audiences. Then in 2018, the property was rebooted as a television series, updating the story for modern times. However, many fans felt it lacked the sharp edge that made the original film special.

And that’s basically what happened to Heathers. The movie arrived at a time when critics didn’t fully embrace it, the writer believed it wasn’t pushed far enough, and the cast and crew endured a rushed and difficult production. Yet somehow, through all of that chaos, the film survived and eventually became something truly special.

Today, Heathers remains a cult classic with unforgettable performances, bold style, and a wicked sense of humor for fans of the dark and macabre.

The post The Chaotic Making of Heathers: Casting Drama, Studio Panic, and a Cult Classic appeared first on JoBlo.