Crime Flick – Missile Test

Shitty Movie Sundays: Bad, Black and Beautiful

Bad, Black and Beautiful movie poster Once upon a time, way back in the mid-1970s, some guy in Dallas, Texas, by the name of Bobby Davis, had some dollars in his pocket and a dream. That dream: to write, direct, and produce a blaxploitation flick. He roamed the lounges of Dallas, wading into a sea of nylon and leisure suits in search of the talent he would need to make his vision a reality. Days, nay, weeks, of production pass, and Davis overcomes all of the obstacles which stand in the way of auteurs the world over, and he gets his film in the can. Now, it’s official. Bobby Davis is a filmmaker, forever more. In celebration, and aware that all great artists leave the scene at their peak, he leaves his affairs in order, climbs the Reunion Tower overlooking picturesque Interstate 35E, and hurls himself into the void.

Most of that is bullshit, including Davis’s personal denouement (Reunion Tower wasn’t finished until 1978, three years after this movie’s release). But, sources on this dog of a movie are very thin. It’s known that there was a filmmaker named Bobby Davis, that he shot a film called Bad, Black and Beautiful in Dallas, and that he employed a cast and crew that, for the majority of them, had no experience before or after this film was made. If it wasn’t for the internet, this movie would exist only on crumbling VHS tapes and a handful of 35mm prints lurking in the backs of storage spaces. This is a movie that was well on its way to being lost, and it shows. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Bad, Black and Beautiful”

Shitty Movie Sundays: Angels of the City

Angels of the City VHS box 1989 was a banner year for producers Richard Pepin and Joseph Merhi. After a falling out with Ronald Gilchrist at City Lights Entertainment, the two formed PM Entertainment and began cranking out wonderfully inept direct-to-video movies. They released seven movies that first year, and distributed two more. Three of those movies were ersatz neo-noir Los Angeles thrillers featuring Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, whom older readers will remember as Freddie ‘Boom Boom’ Washington from Welcome Back, Kotter. The relationship with Hilton-Jacobs was so worthwhile, in fact, that PM tapped him to direct. Written alongside Raymond Martino and Merhi, Hilton-Jacobs helmed Angels of the City, the story of a sorority initiation gone wrong.

Kelly Galindo and Cynthia Cheston star as Cathy and Wendy, a pair of college students at an unnamed Los Angeles university that looks suspiciously like the University of Southern California. One of their professors has given the class a sort of urban anthropological assignment. Over the weekend, they are to interview someone familiar with the streets, whether that be a bus driver, a homeless person, a bartender, etc.

The girls’ spoiled boyfriends, Mick and Richie (Brian Ochse and Rusty Gray), decide to go with a street hooker, to mixed results. More on that later. The girls, meanwhile, push their task to the side, because it’s time for their sorority initiation. In order to gain admission, they have to dress up like hookers and get a hundred bucks from a John. They don’t have to seal the deal, but they do have to get the money. It’s a silly idea in a movie full of them. They could have just disappeared from campus for a couple of hours and withdrawn money from an ATM, but then we wouldn’t have a movie. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Angels of the City”

Shitty Movie Sundays: The Last of the Finest

Many, many spoilers in this trailer. Be forewarned

Ah, Orion Pictures. Before they went bankrupt in the mid-1990s, they would roll out a dozen movies a year of varying quality. The winners were flicks like The Silence of the Lambs, Bull Durham, Caddyshack, and many others. But they also sated the appetites of the shitty movie fan, giving us Cherry 2000, Malone, Remo Williams, Navy SEALs, and today’s film, alongside Davis Entertainment, The Last of the Finest. For the last thirty years the company has been a shell of itself — just another brand in the MGM/Amazon conglomerate. Never forget, though. Movie studios are temporary. Cinematic ineptitude is forever.

1990 was right around peak time for action flicks, and buddy cop flicks in particular. The formula was perfected and standardized by the Lethal Weapon films, and much of those films’ DNA is present in The Last of the Finest. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: The Last of the Finest”

Shitty Movie Sundays: Body Count (1995), aka Codename: Silencer

What a strange buddy cop flick. From a story by David A. Prior (screenplay by Henry Madden), and produced by David Winters, two of the founders of Action International Pictures, one of Shitty Movie Sundays’ favorite production companies, Body Count is a collaboration with Toei, one of the giants of Japanese cinema. The film even features one of Japan’s biggest movie stars, Sonny Chiba, as the villain. I don’t know what the suits in Japan were expecting, but I have a feeling it wasn’t a direct-to-video b-action flick where one of the most bankable stars in Japan’s history plays the bad guy opposite a pair of character actors in rare starring roles. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Body Count (1995), aka Codename: Silencer”

Shitty Movie Sundays: Larceny (2017)

Dolph Lundgren is a Shitty Movie Sundays All-Star. Hardly a year has gone by since the 1980s when he hasn’t starred or featured prominently in multiple b-action or sci-fi flicks. His most notable hiatus was 2020, when he was busy battling terminal cancer that was first diagnosed in 2015. The man is a worker, and the shitty movie fan’s experience is better for it. Oh, by the way, he’s cancer free as of 2023.

Larceny, a joint Mexican-American production from 2017, fits right into this difficult era in his oeuvre. He looks aged, is definitely slow, and has a hard time carrying an action scene. We at Missile Test were unaware of his health issues, attributing the decline in his athleticism to mere aging. Well, let us eat some crow. Any shit we’ve given him for mailing it in for the last nine years is unjustified. Anyway… Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Larceny (2017)”

Shitty Movie Sundays: Country Blue, aka On the Run

Filmmaker Jack Conrad has one of the most ruthlessly efficient filmographies one will see on IMDb. He has some unremarkable work editing and assisting a director, and then BAM! All of a sudden, in 1973, he’s writing, producing, directing, editing, and starring in Country Blue. Then it’s back into anonymity until he produced The Howling in 1980. Fin! He hasn’t been heard from since. Conrad went from being an auteur, to producing one of the most iconic horror flicks of the 1980s, and that’s it. There have been shorter film careers featured in Shitty Movie Sundays, but Conrad got a lot out of his cup of coffee. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Country Blue, aka On the Run”

Shitty Movie Sundays: Massacre Mafia Style, aka The Executioner, aka Like Father, Like Son

Lounge crooner and self-styled King of Palm Springs, Duke Mitchell, was proud of his Italian heritage. After the Godfather flicks came out, Duke had some thoughts about the movies, and about how Italian-Americans are stereotyped in this country. So, he scrimped and saved, mortgaged and hustled, and made his very own mafia flick that was violent, preachy, cheap, and played into every single one of those negative stereotypes.

Written, produced, directed by, starring, and featuring songs sung by Duke Mitchell, Massacre Mafia Style tells the story of Mimi Miceli (Mitchell, credited under his birth name, Dominico Miceli). When Mimi was a teenager, his father, crime boss Don Mimi (Lorenzo Dardado), was deported back to Sicily, and the younger Mimi accompanied him. Now, he’s a grown man and a widower with a young son. The siren call of Los Angeles is ringing in his ears, so Mimi decides to head back to the States and make a name for himself as a gangster. He recruits childhood friend Jolly Rizzo (Vic Caesar), and the two begin their ascent by kidnapping and ransoming Chucky Tripoli (Louis Zito), who is the big guy in LA. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Massacre Mafia Style, aka The Executioner, aka Like Father, Like Son”

Shitty Movie Sundays: 4GOT10, aka The Good, the Bad, and the Dead

Kudos to screenwriter Sean Ryan. The writer, whose oeuvre is full of projects found in DVD bargain bins, penned a very interesting story in the awkwardly-titled 4GOT10. Why it wasn’t titled Forgotten, I don’t know.

The movie takes many notes from Cormac McCarthy, along with various other neo-noir flicks of the era, but cribbing is no sin. Many, many low-budget action and thriller movies have passed before these eyes, and most of those don’t have as interesting a plot. Ryan does make the mistake of piling on a twist on top of a twist at the end, but I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt. Without spoiling anything, it’s such a bad storytelling decision that it had to have come from a producer. Only someone counting beans could see an emotional punch to the gut and then discard it thirty seconds later for bland, crowd pleasing chaff. Anyway… Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: 4GOT10, aka The Good, the Bad, and the Dead”

Shitty Movie Sundays: Tenement (1985), aka Game of Survival, aka Slaughter in the South Bronx

One of the best things about watching shitty movies is that it is far more likely to find a film that goes extreme compared to a Hollywood flick, or even compared to a Film with a capital ‘F.’ A good case in point is 1985’s Tenement, released under various other titles, from outsider filmmaker Roberta Findlay.

Findlay spent most of her career directing obscure exploitation films or smut, the smut usually under a male pseudonym. Late in her career she dipped her toes into more of the mainstream, her most well-known flick being Prime Evil. Having come from a world where anything could be put onto film, those sensibilities carried through into work that fell under the scrutiny of the censors at the MPAA. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Tenement (1985), aka Game of Survival, aka Slaughter in the South Bronx”

Shitty Movie Sundays: Savage Dawn

As of this writing, Lance Henriksen has 269 acting credits on IMDb. He’s one of the most recognizable character actors in Hollywood history, and his steady work is well-deserved. But, he hasn’t often gotten the chance to stretch his legs as a leading man. He’s a fine and talented actor, limited in range, but he makes up for that with steely charisma. He didn’t receive top billing in 1985’s Savage Dawn, but he was the main hero that audiences were supposed to root for and look up to.

Written and produced by Bill Milling (co-produced with Gerald Feil, who also shot the movie), with direction from Simon Nuchtern, Savage Dawn is a biker gang flick whose plot is taken from Hollywood westerns. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Savage Dawn”