I’m doing a little catch-up today after getting behind in posting (and watching) my movies of the day, so this entry might be shorter than most. But really, what is there to say about Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho that hasn’t already been said? Not much. Even so, I’ll take you through a little bit of my experience watching it again for the first time in quite a while.
If you’re unfamiliar, Psycho stars Janet Leigh as Marion Crane, a woman who steals a great deal of money in a spur-of-the-moment decision. Marion drives out of town to surprise her lover with the money that could free them both from the debts keeping them apart, but a rain storm causes Marion to stop for the night at a secluded motel. Psycho also stars Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, the quiet and rather nervous young man who runs the motel. Norman seems nice, and he takes a liking to Marion, but when Marion overhears Norman’s elderly and overbearing mother yelling at Norman, it begins to become clear that there is something dark within the Bates family. If you’ve really never seen the movie and don’t know what happens after that, I certainly won’t spoil it here. Psycho is a must-watch for all people who love movies.
I’ve seen Psycho a fair number of times, and even though I hadn’t seen it in a while, many of the scenes came back to me right away. It had been long enough where I didn’t remember the specifics of the dialogue and performances though, and that’s what really struck me during this watch.
Anthony Perkins is amazing as Norman Bates. The complexity of emotions he displays in pretty much every scene is astounding. The character of Norman Bates would certainly typecast Perkins for much of his career, but what a role to be remembered for. Two scenes in particular stood out to me this time with regards to Perkins’ performance. The first is when he has a conversation with Marion in the lounge of the motel. Janet Leigh is fantastic as well, and both Marion and Norman leave the conversation as different people than we thought they were when they entered it. Then, later in the film, Norman has to speak to a private detective, and the mounting tension hidden just beneath Norman’s words and voice is incredible.
Norman has a way of unintentionally drawing people in with his quiet charm and slight naivete, and Perkins’ performance does the same to the audience. We start to feel for Norman, and that makes the twists and turns more effective when the darkness in the Bates family is revealed. Even if you know how the movie ends, and I’m sure you probably do, the characters are so well developed that the tension still works greatly.
I’ve never seen the sequels to Psycho, nor have I seen the 1998 remake. I kind of don’t want to watch any of them for different reasons, but with a movie a day to watch, I might try them out at some point.
Firecracker poster (which has little to do with what’s in the movie)
For today’s movie, I went back to Tubi to scan through some more movie posters. I was in an action mood, so I started my search browsing through their martial arts movies. I didn’t remember Tubi’s selection of martial arts movies being all that great, especially when compared to their fairly deep B-horror-movie choices, but I guess it’s been a while since I looked. I spent a decent amount of time looking through a nicely sized list of martial arts films from my favorite decades for the genre, the 70s and 80s. Once again I let the cover art speak for itself, I settled on a movie from 1981 titled Firecracker, and I might have found another fun rabbit hole to venture down with some of my upcoming movie choices.
Firecracker stars Jillian Kesner as Susanne Carter, a 6th-degree black belt in karate who travels to the Philippines on a mission. Susanne is searching for her journalist sister, Bonnie, who has gone missing while working on a story. A clue leads Susanne to a man named Chuck, a member of an organized crime group dealing in drugs and underground fights to the death. As Susanne gets closer to Chuck in an attempt to gain information about her sister, she becomes entangled in dangerous plot of drug deals gone bad, back-stabbing, and a fair amount of bloody murder. For Susanne, the only way out may be through a whole bunch of punching and kicking.
I had a lot of fun with Firecracker. It’s my kind of b-movie martial arts action. The plot is simple enough, and there are lots and lots of excuses for fight scenes to break out. And sometimes the movie doesn’t even need an excuse. Fights will sometimes just break out for no reason, and I’m not complaining.
If you’ve seen movies like Kickboxer or Bloodsport (and really, about a hundred other movies with the same formula), you’ll know mostly what to expect here. A foreigner (often American) journeys to an east/south-east Asian country, they get mixed up in some local crime, many fights are had, and it all leads up to a climactic battle with everything on the line. Firecracker even has a scene where the American (Susanne in this case) goes out into the wilderness to be trained by a wise old man. It’s classic stuff, and it’s great.
What I didn’t necessarily expect from Firecracker were some of the more brutal and bizarre scenes. To set the tone in the opening scene, we see Chuck fighting in some sort of underground competition (which we learn all about later). The fight is fun, then it takes a turn for the brutal when Chuck stabs his opponent with a spear, murdering him in a violent and bloody spectacle. Not every fight in the movie ends up that way, but there are a few gore effects throughout the movie that would fit right in with any number of b-level slasher movies.
There are some really bizarre scenes as well. Two in particular stand out to me as being either incongruous with the rest of the movie, or just plain weird considering the context of the situation. I won’t spoil them specifically, but I will give a generic description so you’ll know what I’m talking about if you watch it. The first is a scene that feels 100% like the movie was screened for producers or someone else with money, and they said the movie needed more blood and nudity. The scene happens about halfway through the movie, and it has absolutely nothing to with anything else in the story. It features a few more graphic murders, and it’s clearly an overt effort to titillate the audience with Susanne’s clothing being gradually removed as she fights against two attackers. None of the other fight scenes are like that, and it really stands out in a weird way for that reason. The other bizarre scene is a love scene later in the movie. I won’t talk about what happens, but I was just confused because it happens at a strange time for the characters. Plus, I didn’t think one of the characters felt that way to begin with. Oh yeah, and there are knives and a cat involved (sequentially, not at the same time).
So yeah, there’s some weirdness in Firecracker, but maybe that’s a good thing. It definitely helps the movie stand out, and I can’t say I’ll soon forget it. It also makes me want to check out the director’s other work. The director, Cirio H. Santiago, has directed 100 movies according to his IMDB page, and I’ve already seen that he has a few on Tubi. I might just have to check those out.
I recently discovered that the last video rental store in my area finally closed for good, and that made me a little sad. Yes, there are quicker and easier ways to rent movies these days than by going into an actual store and looking at actual boxes with actual discs inside, but I actually really enjoy doing that. I’m sure my love of video stores is based in large part on nostalgia, and I’m fine with that. I get a sense of comfort and familiarity whenever I’m walking down aisles and aisles of video boxes. But for now, it seems that’s all over. And sure, I hadn’t been to my local video store in nearly a year thanks to the pandemic, and I’m sure the pandemic was the final blow that shut the store’s doors, but still. I already miss it. So without a video store to go to, I decided to browse a local Redbox for my daily movie. The experience is nowhere close to the same thing as a video store, but I did walk away with a disc in my hand, so that’s nice.
Anyway. The reason I told that brief and sad story is because part of the experience of going to the video store for me includes picking up movies I might otherwise never choose to watch. When I was in the habit, I would go and check out one or two of the newly-released, low budget horror movies every single week. The experience is different than looking for something to rent online because the selection is going to be much more limited, and I don’t have the benefit of immediately watching a trailer to help me choose (I could use my phone to do that, but I consider that cheating). To pick a movie I would only have the box art and the movie’s brief writeup. I’ve found some gems doing that, and I’ve also found some things that are very much not gems. Using Redbox ends up giving me similar limitations in choice, so my resulting movie picks will also be similarly blind. For today, I ended up picking a movie titled I Am Lisa because of its neat cover art and its promise of a revenge movie with werewolves. It’s a fun concept, but I think the filmmakers tried to make a movie that was a bit too far beyond their means.
I Am Lisa is about a young woman, Lisa, who returns to her hometown after her grandmother passes away. The town is small enough to have a police force consisting of only the mother/son duo of Sheriff Deb and Deputy Nick. The sheriff’s daughter, Jessica, is the town bully/drug dealer, and Sheriff Deb supports her daughter in an utterly corrupt and criminal way. So when Lisa reluctantly attempts to tell the sheriff about Jessica threatening and assaulting her one day, Sheriff Deb allows Jessica, her friends, and Deputy Nick to beat Lisa nearly to death before leaving her in the woods for the local wolves to eat. If you’re thinking that things escalate quickly in I Am Lisa, you’d be right. The sheriff and her family are almost cartoonish in how despicable they are.
As you might assume, the wolves to not end up eating Lisa, but one of them does bite her. After recovering and making it to her best friend’s house without the sheriff or anyone else realizing she is still alive, Lisa discovers some changes about herself. For one thing, she heals very quickly. Also, she seems to be craving dog food and raw meat when she was previously a vegetarian. It turns out Lisa might be turning into a werewolf, and she’s having trouble controlling her anger about her attempted murder. What follows is a revenge story that spirals out of Lisa’s control as the sheriff begins to suspect what is happening.
All of that sounds pretty good, right? It does to me, and I did enjoy I Am Lisa in a lot of ways. The characterizations can be somewhat extreme in comical ways such as the sheriff who is vile and evil for no apparent reason and the deputy who firebombs a store in the middle of shopping center in broad daylight. That makes things very black-and-white as far as who to cheer for, and that makes it a light and fun movie. There is also a fair amount of comedy throughout the movie with some fun scenes like Lisa learning more about werewolves by watching movies or Lisa snacking on dog treats while shopping for raw meat. There might also be some unintended comedy with some of the reactions the characters give in certain situations. For example, Lisa’s best friend Sam is very casual and unaffected when Lisa tells her that she just murdered someone in a werewolf rage. Sam just kind of shrugs it off and goes on with her day. Maybe the comedy there was intended, but I don’t think I Am Lisa is really supposed to be that funny of a movie. I could be wrong though, and that kind of ties in to the shortcomings of the film.
Some elements of the movie don’t come across very well either through gaps in the script or by a lack of means to effectively pull off some of the action in scenes. I’m not really talking about plot holes when I say “gaps,” but there are some things that just kind of come out of nowhere or have very little in the way of context. For instance, there’s a character named Dolphus who lives in the woods, and even though we barely see him throughout the movie, he’s meant to be a main threat in the climactic scene. Who is he? I’m not sure. I mean, I know what he’s doing and I know why he is physically present in the climax, but what purpose does he serve other than to be an added threat? What are his relations to any of the other characters? I don’t know. Maybe I missed something, but yeah, I just don’t know.
Plot gaps I can shrug off just fine. So Dolphus is there. So what? It’s fine. The real issue in I Am Lisa is the action. I understand that it’s a very low budget movie, and I’m never going to be the kind of person who dismisses a movie because of the budget, but I think they needed a bit more money to execute some of the scenes they wanted. Money or ingenuity, one of the two.
I Am Lisa is described as a werewolf movie with bloody revenge, but even the simplest actions end up being shot around rather than shown. Here are a few examples. Early in the movie Lisa is driving down a road at night. What’s supposed to happen is a wolf walks out into the middle of the road and stops, and that forces Lisa to slam on the brakes as the wolf stares at her before slowly walking away. What we see though, is Lisa in what looks like a stationary car reacting to something in a shocked manner. We then cut to a tight closeup on a wolf somewhere. Then we cut back to a medium shot of Lisa in the car. It looks like Lisa and the wolf are worlds apart. This same sort of thing happens any time a real wolf is supposed to be in a scene. When Lisa gets bitten by a wolf, we only know this because Lisa says so and we see the aftermath of the bite. I don’t think we see the bite happening, and I don’t think we ever even see Lisa and the wolf in the same shot.
One more pretty egregious example is when the deputy throws a Molotov cocktail through a store window like I mentioned earlier. Deputy Nick is with his sister Jessica, and we stay focused on the two of them in a medium shot as Jessica lights the Molotov and Nick throws it off screen. We hear a sound effect of glass breaking, but we don’t cut back to see the result. We stay focused on Nick and Jessica the whole time. We do see the store burning a few minutes later, but it’s at night in the rain with only a few seconds of some okay CGI flames.
I get it, working around a budget can be difficult, especially when you have big ideas. But to me, I feel like working within the limitations you have can lead to some fantastic ingenuity and some unintended greatness when you do it right. Like, maybe ditch the firebomb scene and try to do something you can actually show to get the same result in the story. If you don’t have the budget for a wolf wrangler or a trained animal you can use with actors, maybe ditch the scene with the actual bite and show a dream sequence with flashes of wolves which is supposed to be Lisa’s dreams when she passed out from the time she was beaten up to the time she wakes up in bed. There are ways around all of it, and some of those ways can create the same or even better effects within the movie.
I don’t want to bash I Am Lisa though, because I did enjoy it for the most part. There were some good and cheesy blood effects later in the movie, and the relationship between Lisa and her best friend Sam was very entertaining. The plot is a basic revenge movie plot, and that’s something I usually enjoy. So yeah, there was a lot to like throughout the movie. If you want to see a full werewolf transformation though, you’re going to be disappointed. Again, a full fur suit for Lisa probably wasn’t in the budget, but she had some neat eye effects and her nails got real sharp. She also looked like a vampire from Buffy the Vampire Slayer by the end of the movie (with a furrowed brow makeup effect). Overall, I had fun with I Am Lisa.
Beast from Haunted Cave: Elvira’s Movie Macabre Edition (1959/2011) – A Movie A Day 2021 #21
Elvira’s Movie Macabre DVD double feature (the one I watched).
Cheesy monster movies are great, but what makes a cheesy monster movie even better? Elvira! I’ve been watching Elvira host bad horror movies for as long as I can remember, and the original Movie Macabre theme music from the 1980s is forever imprinted in my brain. The original run of Movie Macabre ended in 1986, but I still regularly watch the show on VHS, DVD, and online. The show was revived in 2010 but lasted for just under a year before going away again. Episodes from the revival of Movie Macabre, including a few unaired episodes, have been released on DVD, and I, of course, have a few of those discs. So when I was looking for my daily movie to watch, picking an Elvira episode I hadn’t seen yet was an easy decision.
The movie I chose was Beast from Haunted Cave. The film is a Roger Corman produced monster movie about a gang of thieves who concoct a seemingly unnecessarily complicated plan to steal a few gold bars. The gang consists of Alex, the leader of the group, Gypsy, who is (sort of) Alex’s woman, Byron, the comic relief, and Marty, the uh… other guy. Alex wants to rob a bank near a busy ski resort, and he has Marty set off a bomb in a local mine to draw attention (and police) away from the city while they go to work. After robbing the bank, the whole group will take a multiple-day cross-country ski trip with the ski resort’s instructor, Gil. The goal is to avoid local police by travelling into the snowy wilderness with Gil and waiting at his solitary cabin in the woods until a plane arrives to pick them up. Things don’t go according to plan though. The plane is delayed because of a snow storm, the almost-always drunk Gypsy has the hots for Gil, and the bombing of the mine has woken a spider-like beast that is following the group as they trek towards the cabin.
What ensues is a cheaply-made crime thriller with some monster horror tossed in from time to time. The filmmakers did the best they could with a low budget, which means that the beast is rarely seen, and when it is on camera, it’s usually too dark to make anything out. We’ll see a leg come into frame and grab someone, or we’ll see what might be the web-covered head of the beast bobbing around for a second, but until the finale, we don’t see much of the monster at all. So what we’re left with instead is a movie about a bunch of bank robbers who are basically holding a guy hostage even though he’s unaware of it. There is more drama than there are scares, but I still had fun with the movie.
The dialogue is campy, the acting will often make you smirk, and the writing is just cheesy enough keep you interested enough to stick around until the beast finally starts to do stuff. The only thing I really didn’t care for was the comic relief guy, Bryon. I didn’t even realize he was supposed to be funny until later in the movie, and when I did realize he was trying to be funny, he just made me a little sad. Byron does have an unusually good story arc though, one that’s bigger than a lot of the other characters, so I suppose I don’t dislike Byron. I just wish he hadn’t been so annoying in the first hour.
Beast from Haunted Cave is fun though. It’s fun to joke about, but I also just enjoy it for what it is. I will say that having Elvira pop up every once in a while with her skits and comments made the experience much more enjoyable, but I’d probably watch Beast from Haunted Cave even if I didn’t have the DVD of the Movie Macabre version.
Elvira’s bit for this movie is that she’s cutting costs for her show. After all, if Roger Corman can produce a movie like Beast from Haunted Cave for like $100, then surely Elvira can do some skits on the cheap, right? So Elvira fires nearly all of her staff and ends up having to do everything herself. Insert some bad puns and a few boob jokes, and you have another great episode of Movie Macabre. Watching this definitely made me want to build up my collection of Elvira movies.
So I was clicking around on Tubi last night looking for something to watch before going to bed, and even though I usually end up watching some cheap horror movie when I’m cruising Tubi, I ended up going down a rabbit hole of 80s action flicks. When I don’t really know or care what I’m looking for, I tend to let the cover/poster artwork make a lot of the hard decisions for me. Painted posters rank higher than posters with photos (with exceptions made for supremely cheesy photo collages), and the more outlandish and wacky the painting is, the better. After a few minutes of clicking, I stopped down on a movie with a poster featuring a trashy-looking image of a maniacal guy in a leather mask with some sort of gun with a giant, smoking barrel. The movie has an intriguingly mysterious title, Omega Syndrome, and to me, the poster promises violent 80s action. Of course I’m not completely naive, and I understand that movie posters often oversell the movies they advertise, but hey, it could be fun. Omega Syndrome ended up being kind of fun, but only in short bursts.
Omega Syndrome is about a Vietnam veteran whose daughter (played by Nicole Eggert) is kidnapped during a liquor store robbery. Frustrated with the lack of police action, the vet, Jack, enlists the help of an estranged friend and fellow veteran, Phil. The two men launch their own investigation that leads them into a white supremacists’ plot involving kidnapping, blackmail, and lots of murder.
It’s a straightforward story that could lead to some decent action, but overall the movie feels like it was made for TV. I suppose the killing, language, and subject matter might push it a bit too far to be shown on regular TV (the movie is rated R after all), but the editing, cinematography, and even the music cues all give it a very strong impression of a 1980s made-for-TV movie. It makes sense considering the director, Joseph Manduke, is primarily a television director, but it doesn’t make the movie any more enjoyable.
The poster’s promise of trashy action is never really met, and what we get instead is a fairly standard crime drama that mostly focuses on the investigation being carried out by Jack and Phil. Witnesses are tracked down and threatened, the police tell Jack to mind his own business, and eventually the culprits are tracked down which erupts in a big gun fight. Up until the final scene though, the action is sparse and underwhelming. It’s fine, but it’s also forgettable, which is really what I think about the whole movie. Fine yet forgettable.
The few things I will remember about Omega Syndrome are some of the people in it. It was fun seeing Nicole Eggert as Jack’s daughter. She didn’t do a whole lot, but she did have a nice moment where she fought back against her kidnappers. Also, Colm Meaney has a small role as a bomb maker. I know Meaney best as Chief O’Brien from Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine,but I’m always delighted when he pops up in some of the crime and action movies I’ve seen over the years.
For me though, the star of Omega Syndrome is Xander Berkeley. Berkeley’s most high-profile role was probably as John Connor’s foster father in Terminator 2, but I remember him best for multiple roles including George Mason from 24 and from one of my favorite episodes of The X-Files, “Ice.” In Omega Syndrome, Xander Berkeley plays the scummiest of the scumbags, and his performance is one for the ages. He plays his character, Yo-Yo, as a dimwit with a short and violent fuse. He has these vacant looks throughout the film that show there’s not much going on up top, but he also feels like the most dangerous person in his whole terrorist group. If I could recommend Omega Syndrome for any reason, it would be to watch Xander Berkely, filthy teeth and red face and all. He’s great.
I have a like/dislike relationship with Eli Roth’s movies. I like Eli Roth as an actor and as a person. He and I seem to have largely similar tastes when it comes to horror movies we like. I tend to thoroughly enjoy the influences Eli Roth uses when making his own films. And, I generally enjoy the ideas he has. My only real problem is that he and I have greatly different sense of humor, and Roth tends to put his own brand of humor into every one of the movies he directs. In Cabin Fever it’s the “pancakes” kid and the gun in the store that made me groan. In the Hostel movies it’s the general silliness of the gore. In The Green Inferno it’s the pot and diarrhea jokes. Those things aren’t necessarily movie killers for me, but they were all prevalent enough to leave me feeling underwhelmed by each of those movies. I think it’s about tone for me. I want those movies to be tough to watch, but they end up feeling like goofy comedies by the time it’s all over. With that in mind, I skipped Knock Knock when it came out in 2015.
But.
After seeing Ana De Armas in Knives Out late last year, I’ve become increasingly interested in seeing more of her work. Plus, I’ve been a big fan of Keanu Reeves for forever. So at this point it was two to one (Ana & Keanu vs Eli), so I decided to give Knock Knock a try. I’m almost entirely glad I did.
Knock Knock is basically a home invasion movie. Keanu Reeves plays Evan, a seemingly happily married man with a wife, two kids, and a great house. He ends up needing to stay home and work as the rest of his family goes on a weekend trip. While Evan is working late into the night, he gets a knock on the door. Standing outside, stranded in the rain, are Genesis (Izzo) and Bel (Armas). They claim that they got lost on their way to a party, and the taxi they rode in on has already left them all alone. Evan, being a nice guy with a proclivity for flirting (at least according to his wife), eventually invites the young women inside so they can dry off and wait for a car to pick them up. The atmosphere starts to get steamy pretty quickly as Genesis and Bel attempt to get closer and closer to Evan. One thing leads to another, and, a few bad decisions later, Evan can’t get rid of his guests.
From there the movie gets darker as Genesis and Bel’s intentions become more clear. Evan is harassed and terrorized, and it slowly dawns on him that he’s in a situation that will not end well for him. The only question is: how bad will it get?
I liked the movie overall, and I thought the performances from the three leads were a lot of fun. Izzo and Armas come across as sufficiently bonkers, but their actions also touch on some of the trauma they’ve experienced that might have led them to do what they’re doing. Reeves goes back and forth from desperate to furious, and he gives a great speech towards the end where all of his anger finally explodes.
I also enjoyed Eli Roth’s directing. The movie does feel sort of campy at times just because of the way it’s sometimes staged and shot, but overall it has a nicely sinister tone. Mostly. For once I thought Roth was going to make a movie without making me roll my eyes at some stupid joke, but alas, he snuck some stuff like that in right at the end. It didn’t spoil the movie for me, but it did leave the movie feeling more light-hearted than I would have liked. That’s just a personal preference though. Other people might like the dumb joke at the end. And really, the joke ending is MUCH better than the alternate ending included on the blu-ray. THAT ending would’ve spoiled everything for me.
Also, I found out that Knock Knock is actually a remake of a movie from 1977 called Death Game. I definitely need to track that down now. Colleen Camp and Sondra Locke star in Death Game, so that absolutely has me interested. Plus, Colleen Camp (who I remember best as the maid Yvette in Clue) has a cameo in Knock Knock.
So yeah, Knock Knock is good. I’m glad I finally saw it.
I was in a bit of a time crunch when I was picking a movie to watch on this day, so I started looking for something a bit shorter than the average ninety minute feature. Older genre movies can often be shorter, so I decided to watch The Devil Bat. Released in 1940, The Devil Bat stars the legendary Bela Lugosi and has a run time of a little over an hour. That was perfect.
I wasn’t sure if I’d seen The Devil Bat before, and even though some scenes seemed familiar, I really didn’t recognize large parts of the movie. So, I’m treating it as a new movie as far as my “A Movie A Day” challenge goes.
While it’s not Lugosi’s best movie, I liked The Devil Bat well enough. Lugosi stars as a mad scientist who seeks revenge on people he thinks have cheated him. His plan is to send his genetically altered giant bat to kill his enemies by using a potion that attracts the bat by scent. His plan works for a while, but of course his actions catch up to him as the police become wise to his murdering ways.
It’s a simple movie, and it gets pretty repetitive even for it’s short run time, but I enjoyed it.
Velvet Smooth (RiffTrax version) – A Movie A Day #80
I love Mystery Science Theater 3000. I started watching the show during Mike’s reign as the main host, so Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett, and Kevin Murphy became my favorite hosting trio. So naturally, I became a huge fan of RiffTrax when they started up a bunch of years ago. I go to the live shows (via theater), and I regularly watch their streaming movies and shorts online. I also regularly watch old episode of MST3K. And by “regularly,” I mean at least weekly if not more often.
If you’re not familiar with RiffTrax, it’s a site where Mike, Bill, and Kevin do comedic commentary tracks over movies and shorts where they generally riff on the content. They also have guests including former MST3K cast members do riffs. It’s one of the greatest things on the internet, and you should definitely check it out if you haven’t already: https://www.rifftrax.com/
All that said, I’ll watch anything they put out. It’s just a bonus when the movie ends up being something I’d watch without the RiffTrax crew sitting there with me. Velvet Smooth isn’t a good movie, but it is something I would absolutely watch on its own.
Velvet Smooth is the title, and it’s also the name of the lead character. Ms. Smooth is some sort of detective (I think). She’s called in by King, the leader of some sort of crime syndicate, when his criminal activities are disrupted by some other criminals. Guys in masks are going around and kicking and punching all of King’s men, so Velvet Smooth is tasked with finding out who’s behind it. Velvet gathers her small crew of kung-fu-fighting females, and the three of them start shaking down the streets.
I’ve been intrigued by the blaxploitation era for a long time, but I haven’t seen nearly enough films in the genre. Velvet Smooth isn’t the most well-made movie in that canon, but is absolutely fun to watch. The fight choreography is laughable, and that’s really the biggest draw for me. The plot and acting are fine, standard fare, but the fight scenes are glorious. People clearly miss punches and kicks only to have their opponent take a fall, assailants politely wait their turn in the background before attacking, and the interactions look like a first-time half-speed run-through rather than the final, filmed scene. I love it.
I also had to roll the movie back at one point, because I saw, for a spit-second, what I thought was a cameraman. Sure enough, in a scene fairly late in the movie, there’s a full shot of a camera guy just standing there. Other movies from the era have had similar production issues, Dolemite being a great example of having the boom mic in what seems like half the shots of the movie. But Velvet Smooth did even better and got a full-body shot of a cameraman in the film while he was holding the camera and shooting the scene. It was great.
As much fun as I had with Velvet Smooth, the RiffTrax crew helped make it even better. I know I’ll be watching this many more times in the future.
