The Dangerous (1995)

A Japanese brother and sister duo (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa and Saemi Nakamura) with some unexplained ninjutsu expertise murder their way through the coke dealing underworld of New Orleans. Because the cops, not even the randomly named Random (Michael Paré), can’t really cope with this sort of thing, the corrupt powers that be manage to draw retired man of violence Davalos (Robert Davi) back in with one of those offers one can’t refuse.

For also unexplained reasons, Davalos isn’t just hot shit when it comes to killing people – as he proves early on in a shoot-out in a graveyard that mainly consists of everyone involved running backwards while shooting – he is also an expert in the made-up version of Japanese culture the film trades in. So teaming him up with Random makes perfect sense, and random doesn’t seem too phased by having to team up with a random (see what I did there?) thug.

On the negative side, Davalos also happens to be an old enemy of New Orleans coke kingpin Tito (Juan Fernández). Tito for his part believes his underlings are being killed by the cops – who always walk around with swords in this parallel universe New Orleans, one assumes – and hires a knife-wielding duo of killers going by Emile (John Savage) and Henri (Jim Youngs) Lautrec. I assume their brother Toulouse is out and about painting somewhere.

Various amateurishly staged action sequences occur.

If all of this sounds like a hot, overcomplicated mess, that is exactly what Rod Hewitt’s and David Winters’s The Dangerous is. A tale of crossed revenges shouldn’t be as complicated as this turns out to be, but Hewitt’s script somehow manages that feat by never explaining the things that need explaining, overexplaining what you never wanted to know, and dipping everything in a fat sauce of badly digested clichés about honour and revenge. Which somehow never leaves time for the film to actually find a way to gracefully go from one scene to the next. More often than not, this feels as if parts of the script where written after scenes had been shot, made to fit any which way.

While this does not lead to a tense, suspenseful action movie, it does provide the film with many opportunities to charm with bizarre moments. So there’s the mandatory one scene Elliott Gould cameo (this time around he’s a junkie slash projectionist and gets his cheeks grabbed by Davi in a truly awkward moment – so at least he’s working for his mortgage, or whatever else Gould needed to pay off at the time); an unhoused informant with a radar sense very useful when he’s stashed in a car trunk; the complete nonsensical “Japanese” “philosophy” generally accompanied by painful attempts of the score to “sound Japanese”; Fernández cackling maniacally and looking rather aroused when he lets the Lautrecs murder one of his underlings as a test; and so on and so forth.

All of this is enjoyable enough when you are of the disposition to find joy in the little things, and I’d even call The Dangerous a minor cheap shot action gem for this, if not for the sad fact that action direction and choreography are absolutely terrible. To add insult to injury, the action is badly edited and amateurishly filmed in a “what’s the worst angle to shoot any given moment from” kind of way, so much so that even old pros at looking interesting in shitty action sequences like most of the cast members are can’t do anything against it. Even worse, the locations – a cinema, that New Orleans graveyard including a jazz funeral, a high rise rooftop and so on – would be perfect for doing something clever and exciting with them. The filmmakers just don’t seem to be able to.

But at least, we will always have the merry ring of absurdities the non-action parts of The Dangerous churn out.

Capricorn One (1977)

Charles Brubaker (James Brolin), Peter Willis (Sam Waterston) and John Walker (O.J. Simpson) are the crew of the first manned mission to Mars. Or rather, they are supposed to be, for just before launch, a couple of gentlemen in suits drag them out of their capsule and transport them to some hidden base out in the desert.

There, the Mars project’s architect, Dr Kelloway (Hal Holbrook), explains to the men that some last minute checks on the capsule have uncovered some catastrophic material flaws that would have turned disastrous for them as well as the mission. Because there’s supposedly no true political backing for something like manned space flights anymore, Kelloway and some other powers that be have decided not to disclose the problems to anyone, but to instead fake the Mars landing. Obviously, he needs the help of the astronauts to produce this hoax.

They, on the other hand, think Kelloway and whoever is backing him have gone crazy. The scientist, however, is very quick with threatening the lives of the men’s families, so they grudgingly accede to his demands. Particularly Brubaker is only waiting on a moment or a way to somehow turn the tables, but for now, there’s a Mars landing to fake.

During the months the astronauts are involved in this, muck-raking - but not terribly successful at it - reporter Robert Caulfield (Elliott Gould) stumbles upon hints that suggest something strange is going on with the Mars project, though he can’t really figure out what kind of strangeness at all. Fortunately, the conspirators are so heavy-handed in their approach to any perceived threat, they attempt to murder him early on. Caulfield being the kind of guy he is, he is bound to see that as prove that something particularly shady is going on and will get at the truth somehow.

Peter Hyams’s Capricorn One is certainly one of the more peculiar examples of the 70s conspiracy thriller, with a plot that moves the generally at least somewhat down to Earth sub-genre not just towards the really rather implausible but the outright absurd. Attempting to understand the logistics and plans of the Mars fakers is an obvious way to traditional Lovecraftian madness, and while there’s certainly the genre-typical criticism of Power, Secrecy and their misuse, and a couple of perfect moments of paranoia, in many ways this more of a romp than any other film of its sub-genre.

I’m not complaining about that, mind you, for Hyams’s flights of fancy – sometimes even whimsy – here are generally gloriously entertaining and tend to lead to one of the director’s patented go-for-broke action sequences. Capricorn One may not be great as a deep criticism of the military-industrial complex, but absolutely makes up for it with sequences like the climactic biplane versus helicopters chase through desert and canyons. Because that scene clearly wasn’t crazy enough, the filmmakers decided to put Brolin (well, his stuntman) on the biplane’s wing while it flies loops and destroys modern helicopters. And because that’s yet still not crazy enough, the plane is piloted by a scenery chewing Telly Savalas who just pops into the film for the final act.

Particularly in Gould’s plotline, Hyams appears to have a lot of fun with just letting his actors patter through probably at least in part improvised dialogue that finds the midpoint between old Hollywood homage and sheer bizarreness and dances a merry little jig on it. Gould is, even by his standards, particularly gleeful in these sequences, so they turn into the sort of joyful little cinematic gems you can’t believe actually made it into the final cut of a film so well-made, and are all the more wonderful for it. Just watch the “I don’t like you” scene between Gould and his editor – or the bizarre flirting scenes between Gould and Karen Black – and become happy for at least the next hundred years.

That all of this actually somewhat works as a straightforward thriller as well is thanks to Hyams’s gift for the great action scene, as well as how cleverly he leaves all the weird stuff to Gould and co, whereas Brolin, Waterston and Simpson are left to play everything straight, the two plotlines only converging at the late point when a viewer has either bought into the whole thing, or, sad creature, already left the film in a huff.

Escape to Athena (1979)

Greece during World War II, shortly before the Allied invasion. Major Otto Hecht (Roger Moore with a really weird accent) is not your typical Nazi, he only plays one to get what he wants, and tries to keep victims to a minimum. Having worked as a shady art dealer before the war, what Hecht wants is to plunder the ancient treasures of Greece, as he has done with those of other countries before. For this, he’s acquired his own little collection of POWs useful in this sort of thing, like archaeologist Professor Blake (David Niven), climber and all-around athletic wonder Nat Judson (Richard Roundtree), and non-cooking cook Bruno Rotelli (Sonny Bono, but don’t worry). The plus for these guys is that they are kept on a comparatively long leash by a man who’s not going to shoot or torture them for the smallest affront. As they well should, they use this to make the Nazis’ life in Greece as difficult as possible with repeated escape attempts and small and large sabotages.

Things get even more lively when Hecht acquires stand-up comic Charlie Dane (Elliott Gould) as his new scribe (don’t ask), and Charlie’s burlesque dancing partner Dottie Del Mar (Stefanie Powers) as the woman he wishes to convince of sleeping with him. These two bring with them even more anarchic energy then the rest of Hecht’s crew, as well as contact with the Greek resistance leader Zeno (Telly Savalas). Following various acts of repression by the SS, and because there’s a submarine station that needs to be destroyed before the Allied landing, Zeno and Hecht’s crazy kids decide to simply take over the Nazi base.

Afterwards, there’s perhaps time to steal some art treasures from a nearby mountain cloister, unless there’s something more relevant to the war effort there, of course.

At times, George Pan Cosmatos’s Escape to Athena has a tone comparable to the great World War II action comedy Kelly’s Heroes. It’s never quite as brilliant, mind you, but if you can live with a less than serious approach to World War II, this is still one of the better examples of the form. Particularly the film’s first half is full of off the cuff, often clearly adlibbed, humour that can get so bizarre to border on the nonsensical. House favourite Elliott Gould has some of the best absurd non-sequitur lines here, of course (and I’m pretty sure he’s come up with them himself). Those often make little sense but are outrageously funny as the man delivers them. In the more scripted feeling bits, Moore – at the height of being James Bond – actually manages to turn an art-stealing Wehrmacht officer into so charming a rogue, I’m even perfectly willing to buy into his later changing of sides to the good guys; whereas Powers really does the traditional role of the perhaps not quite as ditzy stripper with the best of ‘em.

Even in the early and lighter parts of the film, there are moments that are perfectly honest about the actual experience of Nazi occupation and resistance work. Cosmatos portrays cruelties and senseless slaughter matter-of-factly and with no misguided attempts at squeezing humour in there as well; these are the things that happen around them while our POWs are in their private little comedy, and this comedy, for one, is not going to pretend otherwise.

As little as it’s going to pretend that developments like finding that Dottie is an expert diver perfectly fit for the business of blowing up submarines, or the bizarre show our heroes put on to distract the Nazis once it’s time to take over their base, are anything less than great, goofy fun.

Eventually, everybody does land in a somewhat harsher bit of war action than they were before in scenes of action movie mayhem that late 70s style Cosmatos handles with the expected panache. The big battle in the town’s streets and the grand finale on the mountain are particularly great. So great that it seems fair to director and characters that they are allowed to go out like they came in with some hot dance moves by Savalas and various bits of funny business.

Why this extremely entertaining, goofy but not stupid piece of filmmaking has landed on more than one list of the worst films ever made, I have no idea.

In short: Mean Johnny Barrows (1975)

Dishonourably discharged from the army after he punched out a white guy who tried to murder him with a landmine (seriously), Vietnam war hero (and former nearly football star) Johnny Barrows (Fred Williams), soon finds himself homeless on the streets of his old home town. Early on, Johnny meets Mario Racconi (Stuart Whitman), a football acquaintance who offers him a job. But it’s clearly doing dirty work for the mafia, and Johnny has his principles. But as it goes, principles can be washed away by poverty and the general shittiness of one’s surroundings, so after further travails, Johnny will eventually take on the role of a hit man for Mario’s clan during an attempt of the aggressive Da Vinces (with Roddy McDowall of all people playing the youngest son) to muscle in on their territory. Don’t worry, the Racconis are the good Mafiosi, though, who only ever made money with numbers games and fought against drugs. Insert humungous eyeroll here.

This is the first of Fred Williamson’s twenty or so direction credits, and for its first twenty minutes or so, it actually feels like a minor highpoint of blaxploitation filmmaking. Williamson shoots as well as plays Johnny’s downward movement in the first act with great strength and conviction, bringing the shittiness of the black experience to life through fine direction and a performance that expresses much of the unfairness of the character’s life without any need for speechifying. It’s still not subtle, mind you, but it’s not about subtle things. As a bonus, there’s also a short cameo by Elliott Gould in which he dresses like a lost version of The Doctor – and calls himself the Professor to boot – teaching Williamson the ins and outs of being homeless by acting really, really weird.

After that, the film unfortunately spirals pretty quickly out of control and turns into a series of, sometimes weird and awkward, sometimes pretty fun, mafia meetings where the actors seems mostly to be farting around, horrible martial arts fights, long and badly written speeches told with soulful facial expressions quite in contrast to their badness by Williamson, a couple of decent action sequences and pointless plot twists, where nothing hangs together thematically or as a narrative anymore, the film losing all momentum as well as showing little of the impressive filmmaking chops of the first act.

Night Visitor (1989)

High school student Billy (Derek Rydall), notorious teenage liar and budding voyeur, is in regular trouble with his teachers for his tardiness and his really very badly constructed and told lies. It’s all harmless teenage stuff, mind you, though Billy’s very uptight history teacher Mr Willard (Alan Garfield) would probably disagree there.

One night, while Billy is watching his new sexy next door neighbour, and prostitute, Lisa (Shannon Tweed) – who sort of encouraged him in this in a very classic type of male teen wishfulfilment in the movies – through the telescope (as you do), he realizes he isn’t watching some kinky sex stuff but rather, that her client, a man wearing robes and mask, has just murdered her. Billy tries to come to the rescue too late, yet still gets into a scuffle with the killer, who loses his mask. It is – gasp! – Mr Willard.

Mr Willard, the audience will learn via some adorable scenes of the domesticity of the crazed evil, and Billy will surmise from facts he’ll snoop out, does live a double life together with his even more insane child-like brother Stanley (Michael J. Pollard), murdering prostitutes and sometimes locking one up in the cellar for play and later ritual murder. Not surprisingly, the two are not just crazy Satanists but also raving misogynists who call their victims “furniture”, like incels born too early.

When Billy tries to convince the police, namely one Captain Crane (Richard Roundtree) and his partner, of the identity of the killer, he gets nowhere. Once poking the nose into a guy’s living room and hearing that a kid makes up lame excuses in school is apparently enough to make an actual investigation unnecessary. So it’s up to Billy and his best friend/soon girlfriend Kelly (Teresa Vander Woude) to catch themselves some Satanists. Which is very difficult indeed, since the Willards know very well what’s going on.

Eventually, Billy will at least be able to talk an old friend of his father’s, the eccentric retired policeman Ron Devereaux (Elliott Gould) into helping in the Satanist-busting project.

Clearly inspired by Fright Night but too individual to become a total rip-off of that much costlier film, Rupert Hitzig’s horror comedy Night Visitor is a nice surprise, the sort of thing you stumble upon when you think you’ve seen every decent horror flick of a given period, custom-made to teach you, in the good tradition of certain Greek philosophers, how little you really know.

Now, I don’t want to oversell the affair: this is a regional horror movie made on limited funds and typical constraints when it comes to the number of sets and locations it can put on screen, but Hitzig is a good enough director to make the most out of what he’s got. While he’s no visual poet, he does know well how to construct basic suspense scenes; from time to time, the film even hits on a genuinely unnerving moment or two. Particularly the scene in which Willard threatens Billy while they are alone in the class room, with Garfield looming behind a hysterical Billy, making threatening gestures until he cuts off two locks of the kid’s luscious 80s hair (which will not be important later on, for the Satanism here doesn’t actually seem to work), is pretty great, and not only because Garfield seems to get a giant kick out of hamming his character up to just the perfect degree. Hitzig really manages to put the power dynamic between the two into action here. There’s also a genuinely disturbing moment between the generally very silly Stanley and the newest victim in the killer duo’s basement, despite the film not going very far in the blood or the sex area.

There is, not surprisingly, much more silliness than actually horrific content in the film, but most of the silly business is very entertaining indeed. Who wouldn’t want to watch a weird Satanic killer brother couple played by these particular actors bicker like kids about murder and Satan? It’s highly entertaining business, Garfield finding the perfect point where he can ham it up extravagantly in the films weirder or sillier moments but still makes a credible threat when it comes to the more serious elements of the film. He, as well as the other more experienced cast members, also do quite a bit to make Rydall look better than he actually is, providing him with the role of the default straight man versus the craziness of the world that really helps play over his weaknesses as an actor. The whole aspect of a kid and his friends against the world also makes the character of Billy much more likeable than he should by all rights be, leaving a theoretically immensely obnoxious guy as a kid simply deserving a break from time to time.


Last but not least, there is, of course, the short but wonderful appearance of Elliott Gould as the film’s Roddy McDowall (which might be one of the weirdest sentences ever written), who is doing exactly what you think Gould will do in this kind of role – making a handful of highly eccentric acting choices that come together not into a mockery of his cheapish surroundings as it would in lesser hands, but add up to a character perfectly fitting the rest of the movie, adding another layer of joy to a surprisingly joyful enterprise of a film.

The Silent Partner (1978)

Bank teller Miles Cullen (Elliott Gould) is in the throes of a malaise very specific to old-style American white middle class people of his time. Still secure he’s going to be secure in his job and position for the rest of his life, it is exactly this security that seems to haunt him: it is obvious he believes he is doomed to spend the rest of his days doing a boring, mind-numbing job, the highlights of his life being his aquarium and ineffectively flirting with his favourite colleague Julie Carver (Susannah York), who clearly finds him terribly boring. Julie, by the way, clearly suffers from the same trouble as Miles, just that she’s actively trying to relieve her existential boredom by having an affair with their married boss. And here you thought life in the bourgeoisie was satisfying.

Miles is going to relieve his own ennui soon enough, too, in rather more radical ways than Julie. For when he accidentally stumbles upon the plan of one Harry Reikle (Christopher Plummer) to rob the bank – while dressed as Santa Clause – he doesn’t alarm his superiors but sets in motion a plan that finds him waiting on the robbery to steal most of the bank’s money in his hands himself, while handing only a fraction of it to Reikle. It’s something of an awakening for Miles; he’s clearly never felt as alive as he does now.

Unfortunately for him, when Reikle hears on the news how much he is supposed to have stolen from the bank, he rather quickly cops to the fact he had a very silent partner. Reikle isn’t the kind of guy you want to be angry at you, but the newly alive Miles turns out to have repressed quite a bit of criminal energy, as well as personal charm towards the ladies, himself, so a cat and mouse game between the two men ensues that grows increasingly violent and dangerous.

Daryl Duke’s relatively obscure Canadian tax shelter movie The Silent Partner is quite a pleasant surprise. Given the cast, you’d certainly expect this to be the showcase for the considerable talents of its two male leads it is, but it is also an effective thriller with more than just a hint of Chabrol-style pondering of the mental state of the bourgeoisie. It’s not as refined a treatment of the theme as you’d get from the French, but on the other hand, Duke’s film does work better at being thrilling and tense than most of Chabrol’s films do.

Gould’s performance is just as good as you’d expect him to be in this sort of material. He wears his usual scruffy, somewhat goofy, surface charm, and certainly keeps Miles sympathetic, but his performance also makes clear he knows exactly that Miles’s awakening isn’t all roses. As Gould portrays him, the more alive Miles is certainly more charming, more lively and more fun to watch, but Gould also makes clear that there’s an unpleasant smugness and a ruthlessness to the man now that was held in check by societal convention until he started to break these rules. I’m not sure the film always realizes this; at times, it feels as if it were treating this really rather dubious character a bit too much like its hero than just its protagonist. On the other hand, his antagonist in Plummer’s Reikle is certainly much worse – where Miles is merely callous, Reikle’s a murderous sadist; where Miles uses people in what seems a not completely conscious manner, Reikle uses them and delights in crushing them afterwards. There’s a really nasty scene where he kills his former girlfriend who has thrown in with Miles that makes this very clear. Speaking of delight, Plummer really seems to revel in the nastiness of the character, smashing places and people up, and glowering icily to great effect. Though, watching the film, I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that Reikle may very well have started out like Miles, the difference between them just being one of degrees that may very well get smaller in the coming years.

Of course, the film does end on what plays like a conventional happy end, so I suspect that’s my interpretation of the characters and not the one of the film, itself, though I wouldn’t put this sort of thing totally past scriptwriter Curtis Hanson. Apart from the rich thematic resonance of the whole film, Hanson’s script also is just a really inventive, sometimes more ruthless than you’d at first expect, example of classic American-style thriller writing, wonderfully paced, and clever in all the best meanings of that word.


I haven’t said much at all about Duke’s direction, but then, there’s really nothing spectacular about it. It’s standard, professional 70s-style work, nothing more, nothing less. But then, given the script and the performances, not trying to be too stylish or extravagant seems to me rather the right directorial choice. This is a case where the director’s job really is to show off the work of actors and writer, getting out of their way and letting them do what they do best.

In short: Busting (1974)

Keneely (Elliott Gould) and Farrel (Robert Blake) are your prototypical 70s New York low-rung vice cops, spending their time busting hookers and invading gay clubs. Not surprisingly, this is at best useless work that’ll change exactly nothing at all about any actual problems a society may have. It has made the couple cynical and slobby and frankly rather unpleasant. What they are not is corrupt, surprisingly enough, so when they pretty randomly acquire a trick book from a prostitute containing names from many a higher up on various ladders in it, they don’t heed the various attempts of their Lieutenant – himself of course following orders from above – to reign them in.

In fact, they soon aim for a rather big fish involved in drugs, prostitution and all kinds of nasty stuff, one Carl Rizzo (Allen Garfield). Of course, being the kind of guys these cops are, they don’t do much that could be called investigating, and instead spend most of the film following Rizzo around annoying him, committing minor acts of vandalism, not dissuaded by shoot-outs or huge black men (in a scene we’d call “problematic” today, I believe) beating them up.

Peter Hyams’s Busting is a highly fascinating film. For one, it works excellently as a semi-realistic portrayal of the seedy underbelly™ New York’s in 1974, picturing the places its protagonists walk through with more confusion and fascination than with loathing. It certainly sees the place as a mess, but while it doesn’t treat persons of colour, homosexuals and prostitutes well, it clearly doesn’t treat them as if they were at fault for the world they live in. In fact, there’s a surprising scene, following a raid on a gay club that is played half-comedically and features the other f-bomb from the mouth of one of our protagonists, in which two gay transvestites are humiliated by a judge in front of a whistling and laughing public where the film’s sympathies are completely on the couple’s side, giving them a dignity that is very uncommon in 70s filmmaking, and utterly convincing and heart-breaking.

Heart-breaking is one of Busting’s watchwords as a whole. Nominally, this is a comedy – and from time to time it is indeed a funny movie – but it is a crime comedy about failure, a film about two working class guys facing the realization that nothing they do actually matters in the world, and that what looks like a chance to actually change even the tiniest thing about it is just them fighting windmills like a certain Spaniard, for everyone around them has either arranged themselves with the world or has found a cosy place for themselves in it. If anyone ever asks how utter defeat looks, I’d recommend the last shot of Gould’s face.


Because this is a Peter Hyams joint, there are also three brilliant action scenes to marvel at. They are kinetic, tight, brutal, and shot in ways as clever as they are atypcial for the way action scenes are traditionally shot. Hyams arranges the action like Gould and Blake approach their roles, with an off-handed but also intelligently skewed brilliance.