Last Woman on Earth (Roger Corman, 1960)

Screenplay by Robert Towne who also acts in the movie.

The camera slowly pans across a still, tastefully posed photo of a naked lady during the opening credits. Then they plunge right into a cockfighting scene. 

"I fail to see the point of two animals clawing each other to death..." the soon-to-be last woman on Earth says foreshadowing things to come. 

Her husband is a compulsive gambler and corrupt businessman from New York. They're on vacation in Puerto Rico. They go Scuba diving with their lawyer and, while they were underwater, everyone dies in a mysterious apocalypse. The story becomes a love triangle.

 

Only three speaking roles. The actors were in their 30's, giving youngsters in the audience a glimpse of how grown-ups carry on.

 

Available on Tubi. According to their listing, it was colorized, but the movie was filmed in color. Either they did a lousy job colorizing one of the black and white prints they made for television in the '60's, or it was from a faded color print.

Mickey Kuhn

I missed news that former child actor Mickey Kuhn died at age 90 in November last year. He played Beau Wilkes in Gone with the Wind and was the last surviving member of the credited cast.

Kuhn reunited with Vivian Leigh in Streetcar Named Desire. He played a sailor who helps Blanche onto the streetcar.

I mentioned him in March of last year. I said that there was still time to make a sequel to Gone with the Wind with the original cast. Mickey Kuhn's character was born in 1863, so, at age 90, the movie would be set in 1953. It wouldn't have to cost much in this age of digital video, but they'd sue you.

Lawman (1971)

There was an old TV western, Trackdown, starring Robert Culp. Reportedly, it was intended as a western version of Dragnet, but I couldn't see it. Dragnet was a police procedural and they didn't really have procedures in the old west. 

In Lawman, Burt Lancaster plays a Lawman who pursues some cowboys who got drunk and shot up a town accidentally killing a by-stander. Perhaps a bit Dragnet-like in that he was after guys who weren't complete monsters. It would probably be manslaughter or depraved indifference murder. He assures a former girlfriend that nothing that bad would happen to them if they went to trial. Burt Lancaster even had a Joe Friday-like scene where he lectures disapproving townsfolk about law and they all back down without saying a word.

There's another scene where Burt Lancaster explains that he's a Lawman, and that means he kills people. Which reminded me a Swedish detective show where someone lectures Wallander that shooting people is a requirement of the job, although he didn't shoot people all the time. 

Cowboys getting drunk and firing their guns was a common thing in westerns. This is the first one I've seen where they killed anyone. 

With Ralph Waite one year before The Waltons, Richard Jordan, Robert Ryan as the town marshal, J.D. Cannon, John Hillerman, Robert Duvall and Lee J. Cobb appearing for the first time without a hair piece.

I was in high school before home video had taken over. An English teacher taught a film class before there were that many movies available on video. We watched Battleship Potempkin on 16mm and Lawman on video. It didn't have a place in movie history, but it was pretty good.

The main thing I remember was a kid in class who didn't understand why the Lawman couldn't just shoot the guns out of people's hands rather than killing them. He wasn't hip to the gritty, realistic modern western.  

I didn't look for the disclaimer saying no animals were harmed. They had a couple of dead horses, one being eaten by coyotes and they had a cattle branding scene.

Directed by Englishman Michael Winner who also directed some Charles Bronson movies among other things. 

Wild Things (1998)

Matt Dillon as a popular Florida high school guidance counselor accused of raping two of his students, one wealthy, the other a swamp girl who had been spent some time in juvenile detention. Bill Murray as the lawyer who defends him. But that was just the beginning. Becomes more and more complex. I won't give it away. A lot more sex and nudity than I expected. Kevin Bacon as an abusive police detective has a shower scene that showed more of his nakedness than he agreed to in his contract.

Violent but not absurdly so.

According to Wikipedia, Kevin Bacon said the script was the trashiest thing he ever read but "Every few pages, there was another surprise."

Keep watching the end credits to see a few scenes clarifying the plot.

With Neve Campbell, Theresa Russell and Denise Richards, with Robert Wagner as the understandably  outraged father.

I saw it free on Tubi, but I think it may be leaving.

True crime documentary?

Even the title was sort of off. Yancy McCord: The Killer That Arizona Forgot About. Shouldn't it have been "The Killer Arizona Forgot" or "The Killer Arizona Forgot About" if you think the word "about" is important there.

I clicked on it. I'm not into true crime stuff. I knew it wasn't 60 Minutes, but I thought it might be interesting.

It seemed to be a true crime thing made by a competent film crew who knew nothing about journalism. They were investigating the mass murder of a woman and her six children that happened in a town of fewer than 180 people in 1961. It was a ghost town now. They managed to find a few people with third-hand knowledge of the murders, and they somehow found the presumed murderer, Yancy McCord living under an assumed name. 

I don't know if this is a spoiler, but it turned out it was a Blair Witch Project thing, about people who didn't quite know what they were doing launching an investigation with unfortunate results. People on IMDb said they enjoyed it once they knew it was fake.

The actors all had long lists of credits. 

Apparently available on "Plex". I saw it on a different channel that appeared on my Roku without my knowkedge or consent. There were only a handful of things on it, so I deleted it. It was free, whatever it was.

An hour and a half long. It might have been better and more plausible if it had been 45 minutes, like they were hoping it would be a pilot for a true crime series.

Red 11 (Robert Rodriguez, 2018)

Set in a lab where paid subjects are used to test drugs for pharmaceutical companies. Director Robert Rodriguez was a human test subject in one of these places to make the $7,000 to produce his first feature, El Mariachi, in 1993.

Rodriguez made this movie, Red 11, to show that you can still make a movie for $7,000. It tells the story of a guy who tried and failed to make a movie for $7,000 and now has a Mexican cartel after him for not paying back the $7,000 he and his partner borrowed from them.

So there are two important lessons here.

Combines elements of El Mariachi and Rodriguez's student film, "Bedhead".

As I understood it, El Mariachi was made for $7,500, $7,100 of which went for 16mm film and lab costs. Since Red 11 was filmed on a camcorder, he should have made it for $400 if he wanted to recreate the feat of making the first movie, about $800 adjusting for inflation.

Free on Tubi. 

Formerly unwatchable colorized movies

It turns out that not every black & white movie was a great work of art. I was against colorization like all right-thinking people. Once the controversy passed, I was able to admit that the colorization of the first season of Gilligan's Island was an improvement.

Now I've stumbled upon several 1930's B westerns on TUBI. They star a young John Wayne. They colorized them, adjusted the sound which made them easier to understand but also made them sound dubbed, and they added non-diegetic music which those old low budget movies never had. 

I forced myself to sit through one of them in its original form on another streaming channel. Colorization was a vast improvement. The foreground didn't blend in with the background. They colorized the blood and made shooting a gun out of someone's hand seem less innocuous. 

One, Randy Rides Alone (1934) starts with John Wayne walking into a bar that was littered with dead bodies. The player piano is still going. There's no one left alive. You don't see that every day. Wayne is arrested for killing them. He escapes from jail and, while fleeing the posse, he stumbled upon the gang of killers who accept him as a new member.

I'm not sure if the movies were really more watchable or if I was just distracted by the colorization and my doubts about their music choices.

I still don't know what to make of the French New Wave's admiration for American B movies.

Other titles include Stolen Goods (1934), An Innocent Man (1933), and Cold Vengeance (1935) and West of the Divide (1934).

The Old Way, Nicolas Cage, 2023

Westerns have always been cheap, violent and cliche. I should either quit watching them or stop complaining. There were so many of them on TV when I was a kid. I liked movie violence, but they had such stupid-looking guns. And clothes. And they lived in ugly, ugly towns.

This movie, The Old Way, had a scene they have in all westerns now. There's an isolated farmhouse. Some strangers ride up on horses. They seem polite at first. Then they kill everybody.

Contrast that with the movie Bad Company (1972). A band of juvenile delinquents cross into Kansas planning to become western outlaws. They try to appear polite and non-threatening, too, when they approach a farm, but it's because the farmer is about to kill them with a shotgun. Later, in desperation, the boys try to steal a chicken from another farm. A 12-year-old takes a pie cooling on a window sill and is gunned down by a farmer. He dropped the pie anyway when the man shot him. The farmer killed a child to save his pie plate.

In this movie, criminals kill Nicolas Cage's wife (Kerry Knuppe) while he's walking their daughter (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) to school. It didn't make sense. The young fellow leading the gang (Noah Le Gros) passed Nicolas Cage on the road. Toward the end----I'm not sure how much I'm giving away---the guy reveals that, years earlier, Cage killed his father in front of him when he was a child (played by Everett Blunck). He murdered Cage's wife so he would follow them somewhere and he could kill him. Why didn't he just kill him when he saw him with his daughter? Maybe I missed it. Even if there's was no reason for it, it wasn't the worst thing about the movie.

Nicolas Cage underplayed it as a soulless killer who had finally settled down with his wife. He teaches his preteen daughter western skills as they pursue the killers. 

According to IMDb, the armorer on the film was the same young woman who worked on the movie Rust. She's awaiting trial for the accident on the set of that movie. The website says that she was nearly thrown off this movie because of unsafe practices.

It took me a while to recognize Clint Howard. He's gotten old. It has been over 50 years since Gentle Ben.

There was a time when they did western remakes of Japanese samurai movies. That ran its course, but I'll bet they could find some other foreign historical genre to plagiarize and reinvigorate the American western.

Available on Hulu.