Crime Flick – Page 2 – Missile Test

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 “Massacre Mafia Style, aka The Executioner, aka Like Father, Like Son”

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 “4GOT10, aka The Good, the Bad, and the Dead”

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 “Tenement (1985), aka Game of Survival, aka Slaughter in the South Bronx”

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 “Savage Dawn”

Castle Falls

Dolph Lundgren is amongst the most reliable action movie stars to grace the pages of Shitty Movie Sundays. Nary a year has gone by since the 1990s when he hasn’t starred in some low budget b-action fare. Sometimes, he even directs.

Castle Falls, from 2021, sees Lundgren helm a screenplay from Andrew Knauer, whose biggest splash in Hollywood was penning Arnold Schwarzeneggar’s comeback film, The Last Stand.

Lundgren takes the rare second billing in this flick, playing a prison guard named Richard Ericson. Top billing goes to Scott Adkins, playing an MMA fighter named Mike Wade, who has aged out of the sport, and is left dead broke and homeless in Alabama. Continue reading “Castle Falls”

The Hellcats (1968), or, The Heck Kittens

“You’ve seen the guys. Now here are the psycho mad mamas who ride with them. They’re The Hellcats!”

So says the trailer to The Hellcats, the 1968 film from writer (with Tony Huston) and director Robert F. Slatzer. The trailer promises a biker gang flick along the lines of The Wild Angels, only with ladies in the lead. Well, that’s a lie, invented to trick unsuspecting would-be viewers into seeing this dog. There are women bikers in this movie, sure, but it’s an equitable relationship with the men in the biker gang. That makes it unique in this subgenre, where women are usually relegated to the role of property, but a lie, nevertheless. It’s not the first misleading trailer for a film ever made, and it won’t be the last. Continue reading “The Hellcats (1968), or, The Heck Kittens”

Wrecker (2022)

Outsider filmmakers with a dream are the best kinds of filmmakers. These are the folks who get it into their heads to make a movie regardless of massive obstacles. All the things that make filmmaking difficult are mere challenges to overcome, annoyances to bypass. What requires a small army to get done in Hollywood, they do themselves. Of course, the final product betrays the humble nature of these movies, even when they are 127 minutes of bombastic insanity.

Bryan Brooks had a very limited career in film before 2022’s Wrecker, appearing in a handful of shorts and doing some work as a grip. If the internet is to be believed, Brooks had an epiphany while he was pinned beneath an 800-pound crab pot on a boat in the Bering Sea. After his shipmates lifted the cage and his lungs took in precious lifegiving air, Brooks took stock of his life and decided that filmmaking was his life’s calling. What followed was a decade of painstaking study of the craft of film before he unleashed his talents on the moviegoing public. It’s almost a superhero origin story. I don’t care if any of it is true. A little mythmaking in the b-movie movie industry never hurt anyone. Continue reading “Wrecker (2022)”

Money Plane

One would think that professional wrestlers are tailormade action stars. They are athletic, charismatic, decent at improv, and willing to do just about anything to put on a good show. Also, one of the most important weapons in a wrestler’s arsenal is the ability to play a character. These men and women spend months or years crafting characters to which roaring crowds respond, either favorably, in the case of faces, or with gleeful jeers, in the case of heels. These are people who know how to work crowds, but remove the crowds, leaving nothing but cameras and crew, and the vast majority of wrestlers turned actor seem a bit lost. Continue reading “Money Plane”

The Guy from Harlem

You know how in movies, sometimes, there will be another movie shown on a television in the background, or one of the characters will be watching it? It’s common for these prop movies to be old public domain flicks, or, if the director is feeling particularly ambitious, something cobbled together just for that movie. Think Angels with Filthy Souls from Home Alone. That wasn’t a real old noir flick that Kevin was watching on the TV. It was a fake, a part of the scenery, a piece of cinematic cliché meant to set the mood.

Today’s shitty movie, The Guy from Harlem, has that same kind of feel. It feels like a deliberate attempt to fake a bad 1970s blaxploitation flick. The print that’s available for streaming, as of this writing, is a transfer from a badly worn 35mm print. Pops and scratches abound, the color is as washed as I’ve ever seen in an old film, and there are many, many missing frames. It feels readymade as a movie within a movie, only it was a legitimate production. Barely. Continue reading “The Guy from Harlem”

Future Zone

John Tucker (David Carradine), the toughest and deadliest C.O.P. (Civilian Operated Police) is back in action, in Future Zone, the 1990 sequel to Future Force. This movie does away with explaining the lore, so some background from the first film is in order.

In the near future crime has become so rampant that government operated police forces have been disbanded, replaced by a civilian equivalent that has more in common with old west bounty hunters than proper law enforcement. These COPs (this movie drops the ‘S’ from the acronym) carry six shooters and dress like bikers. Tucker is the biggest badass of them all, blithely informing criminals that they have the right to die, just before he shoots them in the chest. He also has a power glove that shoots rays of lightning from its fingers. But, like the first film, it’s such a deus ex machina that writer/director David A. Prior keeps it mostly out of sight. Continue reading “Future Zone”