The End (1978) Burt Reynolds

I took a class in high school called "Death & Dying". I don't know what year it was, but VCR's were just beginning to take over and we were going to finish the class by watching a movie about death. I think the teacher wanted to get Woody Allen's Love & Death but it was out, so he got The End. We had to get permission slips signed to see an R rated movie. I was eighteen and got to sign my own.

Directed by and starring Burt Reynolds as a shady real estate dealer diagnosed with an incurable blood disease. He has three months to a year to live. His doctor (Norman Fell) tells him his death will be painful so he immediately sets out to kill himself. After seeing his elderly parents (Myrna Loy and Pat O'Brien) and raiding their medicine cabinet, he wakes up in a mental hospital where fellow patient Dom DeLuise, having already killed his father, agrees to help Reynolds end his life.

With Sally Field, Carl Reiner, Kristy McNichol, Joanne Woodward, Robby Benson, and Strother Martin among others. 

It picked up halfway through when Dom DeLuise appears. Much of the humor goes back and forth between Burt Reynolds' overwrought reaction to his diagnosis and people trying to cheer him up. 

When girlfriend Sally Field tells him that she feels that something she did caused his illness, he said, "You don't give someone a blood disease. That's a gift from God," which is pretty mild movie blasphemy. Might give you the feel for this. It's not a realistic dramedy. Becomes slightly serious when he talks to his daughter and imagines her reaction to his death but that doesn't last long.

Burt Reynolds drives a lovely Jaguar XKE (E Type) convertible. 

The teacher could have rented almost anything. Most movies are about death. We could have watched a war movie, a Bruce Lee movie, James Bond, especially On Her Majesty's Secret Service. The Third Man. Almost anything with a dog. I would say The Seventh Seal but it was in a classroom and you'd have to read subtitles from across the room.

Free on Tubi and Pluto. 

The Naked Jungle (1954)

Eleanor Parker travels into the jungles of South America in 1901, married by proxy to belligerent 30ish Charlston Heston. Wealthy but isolated, Heston is enraged to learn that his wife had been married before, a widow and not a virgin. This was important to him because, he makes it clear, he was an incel and had never known the touch of a woman. 

"I told you, I was 19 when I came out here," he says. "Before that, I had no time for women. Afterwards... in the jungle they have a name for the man who goes into the native villages at night. No one calls me by that name. You said I didn't know anything about women. You were right, madam. I know nothing about women. Nothing at all."

I'm a little surprised this was in a movie in 1954.  He's in no hurry to consummate their marriage.  

I might have been nine or ten when saw this on TV. My attention span being what it was, I couldn't have paid attention to the weird sex drama that drags on for a full hour. Only the last 30 minutes interested me with the millions of man-eating army ants devouring everything in their path. 

"You've both gone mad!" William Conrad says when the couple decides to stay and battle the ants. "You're up against a monster twenty miles long and two miles wide! Forty square miles of agonizing death! You can't stop it!"

The ant stuff was only half an hour and it still seemed slow. 

Technicolor. Most of it filmed in a studio, much of it in front of rear screen projections. 

They didn't treat the Indians well at all.

Free on Movie Hub and Prime video. $3.99 on Apple TV, and Fandango at Home. 

One Man Jury (1978)

Not much to say. Quite bad. Jack Palance as tough L.A. detective who botches every arrest by violating everyone's rights so his cases keep getting thrown out. He becomes so infuriated, he murders a guy. That took almost an hour. Then the Mafia murders a few people. They strangle a weirdly helpless boxer. 

It was an ugly time. Bad clothes, big stupid-looking cars. Palance drives a Ford Granada.

With Chris Mitchum, Robert Mitchum's son. 

Palance's fellow Ukrainian Mike Mazurki has one scene.

Movieland.tv seems to be back, but now it's called Movie Hub. No telling how long it will last. There were a couple glitches which made it clear the movie was from a VHS tape.

Someone else's "Melania" review

The guy on the right in the picture above is director Brett Ratner who fled to Israel after being accused of several sexual assaults during the #MeToo era. He hadn't worked in years before directing the "documentary" Melania.

Jeffrey St Clair on Counterpunch.com:

Here’s my review of “Melania”, written, like Norman Mailer’s infamous review of Waiting for Godot, without having seen it: Melania Trump is one of the world’s most boring people. There’s nothing the least interesting about her. She’s not even evil enough to waste time condemning. Her fleshy photo shoots lack the faintest hint of eroticism. Even the great Helmut Newton would have failed to coax any intimation of suggestiveness or carnality out of her stiff posture and bland, expressionless visage. Her entire adult life, she seems to have willingly played the role of a walking mannequin. Which made her the perfect match for Trump, of course, who views wives, like he views everything else, as acquisitions, objects for display. But is that the real her? Only her mani-pedicurist knows for sure. The lone memorable thing she’s ever done is wear that Zara jacket with the faux graffiti reading, “I Really Don’t Care, Do You?” when she was forced to a migrant children’s detention “camp” in Texas. Now, that was a little punk, a little spark of rebellion. But then she almost immediately reverted to her drone-like essence, which she has scrupulously maintained ever since.

In Cold Blood (1967)

Based on the book by Truman Capote about the murder of the Clutter family in Holcolmb, Kansas, in 1959 by Dick Hickock (Scott Wilson) and Perry Smith (Robert Blake).

Capote's "nonfiction novel" was full of deep background, especially about Perry Smith, the childhood abuse he suffered at the hands of his father and the nuns running an orphanage his father placed him in. 

I hadn't seen the movie in years and I had forgotten there was so much exposition. In the first few minutes we learn that Smith hates nuns (for pretty good reason), fantasizes about being a singer, had his legs injured in a motorcycle accident and has a childish belief in his ability to find buried treasure with the help of treasure maps he got somewhere. At one point, he mentions The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a movie Blake appeared in as a child.

All Dick Hickock had was a head injury from a car accident which changed his face and his personality and I guess was partly responsible for the extent of his criminality.

One of the things that stood out to me was Dick Hickock signing a letter to Perry Smith "Love, Dick", and calling him "honey" which still seems odd to me.

There were two more recent movies, Capote (2005) and Infamous (2006), which covered much the same ground, focusing on Capote researching and writing the book and his relationship with the murderers. 

I read the book when I was in high school. At the time, I had more sympathy, at least for Perry Smith. The book gave me an antipathy for nuns. My mother, I later learned, knew a guy in high school in the 1940's, who was prone to fits of rage. He had been abused by nuns in an orphanage. Among other things, the Brides of Christ would hold his head underwater. 

Stars Robert Blake, Scott Wilson and John Forsythe. With Will Geer (TV's Grandpa Walton) as the prosecutor. Teddy Eccles as the child hitchhiker and '30's B western star Raymond Hatton as his grandfather. 

Directed by Richard Brooks.

Filmed in the Clutter family home just eight years after they were murdered there.

My Side of the Mountain (1969)

You know the kid who was hitchhiking with his grandfather and got picked up by mass murderers Dick Hickock and Perry Smith in In Cold Blood (1967)? The same kid stars in this movie about a child who runs away from home to live alone in the woods. My teacher read the novel to the class when I was in the fourth grade. I guess there was some suspense where he does some rock climbing alone so the slightest fall could mean slow agonizing death. Human life was dirt cheap in those days and schools thought nothing of encouraging that sort of thing. 

Nature is horrible, just horrible. He was safer in In Cold Blood climbing into the car with the murderers. In this movie, the kid is befriended by two wildly irresponsible adults who know he's living out there alone but don't call the police.

But it's stupid to be bothered by the unwise actions a fictional Canadian child. I doubt any kids did things like this because they watched the movie or had the book forcibly read to them. There were, however, two morons who found In Cold Blood inspirational, so they murdered a couple who were walking on the beach in Oregon.

The little fellow in this movie, Ted Eccles, had a long list of credits. Just a year later, he played a victim of Ma Barker's gang in Bloody Mama. He went on to work as a director and executive producer and to work in movie advertising. 

With Theodore Bickel, Tudi Wiggins, and Paul Hebert.

The Prowler (1981)

Now I'm ashamed of that stuff I wrote before, that slasher movies weren't that bad, that the non-murder scenes tended to be sort of relaxed and laid back. I watched a YouTube video listing horror movies of the '80's that critics just couldn't appreciate at the time, and this was one of them. It was on Tubi so I turned it on.

I guess the gore effects were impressive if you're impressed by that sort of thing, but the movie in general wasn't much. A fellow came home from World War Two and killed his former girlfriend who broke up with him by mail. Thirty-five years later, his old uniform still fits. He starts murdering college kids using a bayonet and a pitchfork. With Lawrence Tierney. Farley Granger appears briefly. Gore effects by Tom Savini. 

Directed by Joseph Zito (Friday the Thirteenth: The Final Chapter, Missing in Action, Invasion, USA).

Kiefer Sutherland and Timothy Busfield

I wondered what was wrong with Kiefer Sutherland arrested for assaulting an Uber driver. He was released on $50 thousand bail. Now they're reporting that the driver ignored Sutherland's repeated requests that he stop and let him out. So, yeah, I'm probably on Sutherland's side now. Cops are investigating whether there was a language barrier between them.

Then there's Timothy Busfield. He was only arrested a week ago but his wife, Melissa Gilbert, is reportedly losing friends for not instantly denouncing him. He was accused of inappropriately touching a couple of child actors. The two boys were twins who played the same character in a TV show on which Busfield was executive producer and director of several episodes.

Busfield was being held in jail before trial, but his attorneys went back to the judge and pointed out that the child actors' father was a disbarred attorney who pleaded guilty to defrauding 1,500 homeowners of millions of dollars, their mother was overheard vowing revenge on Busfield after the little fellows were replaced by another actor and a camera operator heard the parents telling the kids to hug adults on the set including Busfield. Warner Bros. ordered an independent investigation of the allegations and found no corroborating evidence.

The judge ordered Busfield released from jail. He can leave the state, go back to New York where he has a home apparently. He just needs to show up for the trial and not be around children without supervision.

Brit pleads for shorter movies

A British critic interviewed on the BBC railed against increasing movie running times. She said she sat in the audience thinking like an editor, noting what stuff could have been shortened or cut out completely. The interviewer suggested that movies were getting longer to compete with streaming video, but she blamed directors. They have too much power and make movies longer and longer out of some ego thing. She longed for days when studios kept them under control.

The critic A.S. Hamrah's review of The Irishman in 2019 noted that the movie was three and a half hours long. Hamrah has a morbid hatred for television of any kind. He saw the Scorsese movie in a theater and said he'd have been happy to sit there watching for a couple more hours. He said that it was people watching it on Netflix who complained that it was too long. He thought it was because admirers of streaming video were used to watching things in 45 minute chunks. 

I say give them what they want. Make forty-five minute movies, save a fortune and give other people a chance. You could make two or three times as many movies. And watch two or three times as many.

There's a channel on broadcast TV that kept showing old 1950's dramas and westerns like Trackdown, Have Gun Will Travel, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and others, and they were great, all half hour shows, originally 25 minutes not counting commercials. I think now they've been cut down to 22 minutes. That seems extremely short for anything but a sit-com, but I didn't find myself wishing they had dragged on for another half hour. 

There were 1950's AIP horror movies I watched on TV in the middle of the night in the '70s. I was in junior high school. Watched such movies as The Day the World Ended and Attack of the Crab Monsters, and I never noticed how short they were, only an hour long. In the '50's, they'd release them as double features so you'd get two hours of movie if you paid to see them in a theater.

But now, after years and years of being shamed for watching TV, people like Hamrah want me to feel like an idiot for not wanting to sit on a couch for four hours watching people murder each other.

I've wondered what the natural running time for a movie is, how long they would be if they didn't have to make it worth your while to go to a theater. Movies were fairly short before they had to compete with radio and TV. B movies were short because they were intended as the second feature in a double feature.

The intertitles in silent movies were often narration rather than dialogue which allowed them to move quickly. They could explain people's motives without ponderous character development. This "show don't tell" nonsense is killing us.

The Whisperer in Darkness (2011) H.P. Lovecraft

Presented by the H.P Lovecraft Historical Socierty. I've never read anything by Lovecraft and have just a vague impression of his work, but this movie was praised for being true to its source material. In black & white, set in the '30's. 

Albert Wilmarth (Matt Foyer), a professor of folklore studies, travels to the backwoods of Vermont to meet a farmer who's convinced that his place is being visited in the night by intelligent crab-like creatures. 

In one scene, we see the difficulty serious academics can have debating crackpots. Wilmarth appears on radio debating Charles Fort (Andrew Leman) and doesn't do well.

The movie looked beautiful and captured how disturbing the country can be to city people, out there with no police, ambulance service or witnesses. 

Free on Tubi. Available on Prime Video and Hoopla. 

Blown Away (1993)

I've been watching anti-Corey Feldman videos on YouTube for some reason. I think I knew who Feldman was since he was eight or ten. Saw him on America Tonight and a syndicated sitcom called Madame's Place. Later, he was one of the kids on a Little League team on an episode of Cheers. Saw him in Gremlins. He became a teen idol of sorts later and got worse and worse as an adult. 

Anyway, it inspired me to turn on Blown Away, free on Tubi, a made-for-HBO movie. Rich girl thinks her father murdered her late mother and wants Corey Haim to help kill him. More a sex movie than a murder movie. I found Corey Haim's rather graphic sex scenes disturbing after the alleged abuse he suffered not that many years earlier. Feldman plays his degenerate brother.

This was made three years before Never Too Late in which Haim appeared with Cloris Leachman. Reportedly, Leachman told him that his smile was cute but he was using it too much and that he should practice keeping his mouth closed. I've only seen him in a couple of things. I watched a few minutes of License to Drive and he was always breathing through his mouth. I assumed he thought it was cute. Blown Away was ostensibly a thriller so he didn't smile much and I was pleasantly surprised at how much he breathed through his nose.