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Category: Movies and TV

Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 3: Why Can’t Anyone (Except Darwyn Cooke) Get Him Right?

Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 3: Why Can’t Anyone (Except Darwyn Cooke) Get Him Right?

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Payback (Paramount Pictures, February 5, 1999

In the first two installments of this series, we looked at the master criminal known as Parker, and at his creator, Richard Stark, the pseudonym Donald E. Westlake used when writing spare and stark but hard-hitting prose.

Now let’s look at some of the many attempts to bring Parker to a wider audience.

The novels are extremely popular with a segment of the population, and so studios and directors have come calling from time to time, with attempts to adapt the character and his stories to film.

But they never quite get Parker right.

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Emergency! – Randolph Mantooth Passes Away at 80

Emergency! – Randolph Mantooth Passes Away at 80

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I am in the midst of my annual re-listen to Tony Hillerman’s Leaphorn and Chee Navajo Tribal Police mysteries. I have yet to tire of those (I do NOT include his daughter Anne’s continuations. Because they’re terrible and I quit reading them. You should need more qualification than your last name, to continue somebody else’s terrific series).

Anywhoo…I also decided to re-watch season one of Dark Winds, which I had some issues with. But then I saw that Randy DeRoy Mantooth passed away, and I decided to write about him a bit.

Randolph Mantooth was co-lead on Emergency!, which aired 131 episodes from 1972-1979. For kids of the seventies, this and Adam-12, were the foundations of a life-long love of police and medical dramas. They even had a bit of crossover.

First with Tubi, then RokuTV, I started re-watching Emergency! earlier this year. I did the first three seasons and moved on to other shows. Though I just watched the season four kickoff and immediately recognized Hall of Fame running back Larry Csonka.

Emergency! featured Julie London, a popular torch singer from the fifties and sixties, as well as musician Bobby Troup. And man, Robert Fuller had soap opera good looks. They handled the hospital side of the medical drama. But the show was really about paramedics Mantooth and Kevin Tighe.

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A Decisive Argument for Physical Media

A Decisive Argument for Physical Media

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It was six years ago. Six years. Do you remember? Do you remember the lockdown summer of 2020?

Things may have been easing up by then where you were, but here in California the ball was just getting rolling. Ah, the joys of living on the Golden State’s cutting edge! Half your income goes for bandages and blood transfusions. (I’ll spare you the story of my fourth-grade year in an “open,” chart-your-own-course California classroom, where I didn’t learn any math but did listen to a lot of Cheech and Chong records.)

Rough as COVID was, though, we got through it, one way or another. Never were our books, our music, our television shows and movies more important to us. They became more than mere diversions; often they were literally lifelines anchoring us to a sanity that we felt we were floating farther away from each day. (Sometimes I was amazed that the whole social and economic life of the United States was put on hold just so I could get caught up on The Mandalorian.)

All of this came back to me just last week, when I got the email that I wait for every June or July, the one announcing the annual Criterion 50 percent off sale at Barnes and Noble. Criterion, as I’m sure you know and if you don’t, you should, is “dedicated to gathering the greatest films from around the world and publishing them in editions of the highest technical quality, with supplemental features that enhance the appreciation of the art of film.” For movies, Criterions are the gold standard of physical media.

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It’s Not That Deep – Silliness in Entertainment

It’s Not That Deep – Silliness in Entertainment

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Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

Good afterevenmorn, Readers!

I’m here to do something angsty, teenage me would be horrified by – defending “bad” entertainment. You know the ones – bad movies that are just a fun time to sit through, even if the only thing they have going for them is epic fight choreography, pulpy books with lead characters whose names are alliterations, and who rock their way through the pages with naught but their wry grins and cheesy one-liners. Video games that attempt a story, but fall short and yet are still really fun to play by virtue of their mechanics or visuals. All these “bad” movies, books and games, if done right, can actually be just what the doctor ordered.

Sometimes you need RPGs that inexplicably change direction to wallop the bad guys. Sometimes you need heroes with flowing locks and bare chests. Sometimes you need the weirdly gravelly-voiced maniac with a gun fetish who saves the day. Entertainment does not need to be deep. Sometimes, the exact thing it needs to be is silly — “Bad.”

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: A Terrific Little Noir – After Dark My Sweet

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: A Terrific Little Noir – After Dark My Sweet

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“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.”

— Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

1990 was quite the year for hardboiled and Noir on the big screen. Pacific Heights (Michael Keaton) came in as the 41st highest grossing movie of the year, with Revenge (based on the novella from the uber-talented James Harrison) was 83rd. Those are both solid Noirs.

At 107th was The Two Jakes – the long-delayed sequel to Chinatown. At 109th was Miami Blues, with Fred Ward as Charles Willeford’s Hoke Mosely. I’ve read the books several times, but not seen the movie.

The 135th highest grossing movie is probably second only to The Maltese Falcon in the harboiled genre for me. It’s the Coen Brothers’ Miller’s Crossing. Starring the tastefully-last named Gabriel Byrne! At 155th is a remake of a Bogart flick, Desperate Hours. Mickey Rourke delivered a pretty good Noir.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Ten Things I Think I Think (Gat Edition)

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Ten Things I Think I Think (Gat Edition)

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“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.”

— Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

I don’t think I’ve done a Ten Things I Think I Think, for A (Black) Gat in the Hand. Huh. I guess we can rectify that today.

As I write this, all 2,000+ books which I own are boxed up. They will be moving to the house I close on later this week. They made up 55 boxes of books. There’s a loft that will be my writing room/home office, with bookcases spread out across a few other rooms.

It’s weird not being able to grab a book to read, or look something up. I feel like I’m in a book version of homelessness. Definitely strange. So, I think:

1 – PHILIP MARLOWE HAS STAR POWER

Philip Marlowe was born in 1939, when Raymond Chandler cobbled together parts from short stories featuring other detectives (I’m not exaggerating, I believe he used he word ‘cannibalized’), and wrote The Big Sleep. Marlowe novels were used for movies starring The Falcon, and Mike Shayne. But the character of Marlowe has compelled some big Hollywood names to play him. Such as Dick Powell, Humphrey Bogart, James Garner, Elliot Gould, Robert Mitchum, Powers Boothe, James Caan, and Liam Neeson.

These are heavyweight male stars playing a character often from decades before.  For the most part they’re good, though I definitely like them to varying degrees. Sam Spade, Race Williams, The Continental Op: similar big names in hardboiled fiction don’t have nearly the ongoing screen impact of Philip Marlowe. I ruminated on various Marlowe incarnations here.

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Uh-oh: The Bride!

Uh-oh: The Bride!

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Sue Granquist, Black Gate’s own incomparable Goth Chick, died not quite seven months ago, and the hole she left here is impossible to fill. I don’t know about you, but my Thursdays just haven’t been the same.

Sue’s beat was horror in all of its manifestations (well, maybe not all of them — I never remember her saying anything about politics), and she was especially keen on horror movies and television shows. Next to her husband Terry, the genre was the great love of her life.

Sue was always up to date; the avant-garde held no surprises for her, but she was really passionate about the good old stuff. Karloff and Lugosi, Jekyll and Hyde, the Mummy and the Wolfman, all those late-night or Saturday afternoon, black and white television terrors that begin with the little airplane circling the Universal globe — those classics put her in her happy place, if a fog-shrouded moor or cobwebbed crypt are places that foster happiness. For Sue, they were.

The Goth Chick was especially attentive to any new versions of those old stories and characters; any new Mummy or Dracula or Wolfman movie drew her instant attention, and her attitude was always a finely-balanced blend of hope and skepticism, at once generous and jaded. She was prepared to like anything if it was good, but she always had a torch and pitchfork at hand to storm the castle of the shoddy or slapdash.

Which brings us to the most recent “updating” or “reimagining” of one of the Universal Studios classics, The Bride!, writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaall’s take on the 1935 Boris Karloff-Elsa Lanchester Bride of Frankenstein.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Marvel Goes Noir. And NAILS It!!!

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Marvel Goes Noir. And NAILS It!!!

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“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.”
– Raymond Chandler

Spider-Noir is the best thing to happen to Marvel streaming since…well, Daredevil: Born Again. So yeah, not that long ago. I’ve only watched the first three – of eight – episodes so far. Because this is too good to binge. It should be savored. It may not be everybody’s cup of tea, but I LOVE that it’s an homage to hardboiled Pulp and Noir. Which you might know I blog about once in awhile…

No spoilers here (if I can help it). I just wanna talk about the Noir vibe a bit. I’ll do a full blown post after I watch it all (and when some spoilers will be okay). These folks absolutely know their source material. And I’m talking about Pulp, not Marvel.

A little Spider-Man Noir history first. The character appeared in a short comic book run in 2009, which I had certainly never heard of. But I’m not a comic book guy.

Then, back in 2018, the first of the animated Spider-Verse movies came out, with Miles Morales as the main Spider-Man. In the same scene with Spider-Ham (he still cracks me up), Peter and Miles meet a Nicholas Cage-voiced Spider-Man Noir. He has a few scenes after that.

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Fauxnan the Barbarian, Part Three

Fauxnan the Barbarian, Part Three

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A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell (Troma Entertainment, 1990)

A veritable cornucopia of dodgy barbarian and barbarian-adjacent movies that I have never watched before, and will probably never watch again. Enjoy Parts One and Two here and here.

A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell (1990) – USA

I can’t help thinking that this one must have disappointed many a randy teenager when they smuggled it out of the video store, only to learn that ‘nymphoid’ doesn’t mean the same as ‘nymphomaniac,’ and were instead subjected to a good hour of aimless wandering before even a glimpse of prehistoric knockers was on the cards.

This is another quick buck-maker from the Troma crew, who surely saw a return on their meagre investment thanks to the aforementioned teen suckers, but it really doesn’t feel like a Troma flick. There’s no sign of the inventive weirdness or inappropriate humour to be found in the usual Kaufman joint; it’s all replaced by a dull story in which the last woman on Earth after the apocalypse, (Linda Corwin) has to contend with wandering gangs of bestial chads, while trying to avoid larger critters in the form of daft-looking dinosaurs.

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Thundarr the Barbarian: Demon Dogs and Lords of Light

Thundarr the Barbarian: Demon Dogs and Lords of Light

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Thundarr the Barbarian (Ruby-Spears Productions/ABC, October 4, 1980 – October 31, 1981)

Thundarr the Barbarian (21 episodes; 1980-81)

Created by Steve Gerber (Howard the Duck; The Defenders).

The look of the main characters was designed by Alex Toth. After he was unavailable to continue working on the series, Jack “King” Kirby was brought in, at the recommendation of Gerber and Mark Evanier (who would later write a biography of Kirby). Kirby designed the look of most of the villains and supporting characters.

What is it?

What is it?? Lords of Light, it’s awesome, is what it is!

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