Turner's Picture Palace: August 2025

 

It’s been a full year since the last time I did a movie column, but I’m trying my best to get off my butt and post more frequently, so here we go.

As I mentioned in my Jonathan Kaplan post, I did a ‘70s movie class over the summer. For many months before, I pretty much exclusively watched movies from that glorious decade. After the class ended at the end of July, I decided to turn my focus to the ‘80s and ‘90s. Have I regretted it? Not at all. It’s been fun reconnecting with the period I spent frequently in video stores, both working in and as a customer.

But mostly I tried to get to movies I had not seen before. Another aspect of the class was rewatching many movies I had seen several or many times before. Bring on the “new” movies!

Have You Forgotten: One movie that I thought I had seen before was Brown’s Requiem (1998), adapted quite well from James Ellroy’s 1981 book by screenwriter and first-time director Jason Freeland. Michael Rooker is terrific as Fritz Brown, an alcoholic former cop who has found a comfortable living repossessing cars but also runs a half-assed private detective agency. He comes alive at the bequest of one “Fat Dog” Baker (Will Sasso, who contributes one of many brilliant performances int the movie) to watch over his sister, Jane (Selma Blair, who also in 1998 before her Cruel Intentions breakthrough in 1999 played Girl Mike Hits on #1 in Can’t Hardly Wait). Such a great cast: Kevin Corrigan, Brion James (who died in 1999), Brad Dourif, Barry Newman, Christopher Meloni, Harold Gould, Jennifer Coolidge and more.

Brown’s Requiem came out a year after L.A. Confidential, Curtis Hanson’s massively successful, award-winning, etc., etc. Ellroy adaptation. I’m sure I was interested, but maybe I had a hard time tracking down Brown’s Requiem back then. It’s currently only available on a DVD released in 2000. Fortunately, Freeland was able to record a commentary with Rooker for the DVD. They talk about their disagreement over how much of Ellroy’s exact wording and dialogue from the book to use. From their discussion, it’s apparent that the veteran Rooker got his way often. Indeed, one of the highlights of the movie is Rooker’s voice over, in which he fully inhabits the losing, boozing, fighting spirit of Fritz Brown.

Interestingly, Freeland, who won awards for Brown’s Requiem from the Fort Lauderdale Film Festival and Portugal’s Festróia-Tróia International Film Festival, apparently identified a little too much with Fritz Brown. In 1999, in an interview with the Baltimore Sun, when he was in town to show Brown’s Requiem at the Maryland Film Festival, Freeland said, "I was at this point where finally I was getting a chance to direct a film, which was what I wanted to do for so long in my life, since I was 18 years old. I kept holding that out as what will make me happy. And I started to see that it wasn't the case. …I wasn't enjoying it,” he said about the editing process. "I really saw how much I identified with him." He stopped drinking while finishing Brown's Requiem.

Freeland would make only one more movie, 2008’s downbeat Garden Party, which is somewhat engaging (thanks in part to a confident, sexy performance by Vinessa Shaw)  but comes off kind of like a CW update of Melrose Place in a sleazy, stoned, flip phone-era (so cheap you could just hand them out to any homeless wannabe pop stars) LA setting and ends unsatisfyingly. These days, Freeland, who got his start making informercials for the Psychic Friends Network (yep, the one with Dionne Warwick), is CEO of California Psychics, a Los Angeles-based organization whose slogan is The Joy of Certainty.

Let There be Zane: Another 1998 movie I completely missed was I Woke Up Early the Day I Died. There seems to be some foreign releases (legitimate?) of the movie on DVD along with bootleg versions, but I was able to find it in good quality on the Internet Archive. I had a lot of fun watching the movie, but I think I appreciate most of all the audacity of making this wordless movie boasting an Ed Wood script, starring post-Titanic Billy Zane (who also produced and contributed “music design”) and featuring a range and level of celebrities and actors not seen since the days of ‘70s disaster movies. I kept waiting for George Kennedy to show up.

Granted, in the ‘90s, Ed was Everywhere; however, just making this movie a reality seems impressive: a very optimistic endeavor. Maybe it was just a foolish idea, but while the finished project failed to connect with audiences and critics at the time,  and seems to be utterly and unjustly forgotten, it has a wild energy and creativity that is undeniable and worth holding on to in these decidedly dark days.

Zane stars at The Thief, who escapes from a mental institution dressed as a female nurse and goes on a stealing, murdering binge before ultimately losing the money and then desperately trying to regain it. Along the way he meets the likes of Tippi Hedren, Ron Perlman, Maila Nurmi, John Ritter, Christina Ricci, Bud Cort, Eartha Kitt, Dana Gould, Tara Reid, Karen Black, and many others. Sandra Bernhard is fantastic in her role as stripper Sandy Sands. Only about a year out from the end of USA’s Reel Wild Cinema, she’s a perfect fit for the role and the movie. After coming off the stage topless, she smokes a joint, gives another dancer stink eye, and then slaps another dancer’s bare ass. I snickered when I read J. Hoberman’s Village Voice review of I Woke Up Early when he describes Bernhard being “allowed to do a striptease.” Hoberman’s review was at least mildly positive while the New York Times called it “sad and misguided and boring.”

The fabulous Ed Wood blog, Dead 2 Rights, dug up all kinds of interesting information about the movie and interviewed director Aris Iliopulos in 2014. Adding more context to Bernhard’s part in the movie, Iliopulos says she insisted on heavy metal music playing while she danced, and filming for the scene took place in the Ambassador Hotel, where Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. “It was little bit too much,” he added. Ha! One of my other favorite parts in the interview is the director’s memories of Karen Black, who he says, for her closeup in the movie, was remembering a young man she met who was going to Vietnam and wasn’t likely to come back home alive.

Chicago native Zane, 32 when the movie came out, was incredibly fun as the demented Thief. An interview with him in the (Arlington Heights, Ill.) Daily Herald in January 1998 claimed producers of the I Woke Up Early were thinking about shooting the movie in the Chicago area. While promoting the movie at the Toronto International Film Festival during Christmas time 1998, Zane got drunk on cheap  champagne at a party for the movie and missed his press conference and interviews the next day. The Toronto Star described it this way: “Great party, terrible movie.”

Also in August, I watched Zane in 1991’s Femme Fatale, which I described in my notes as “another bad movie that was enjoyable to watch” – lots of those actually this month (I’m looking at you, Death Wish 3 [1985], Inferno [aka Desert Heat,1999], Necromancer [1988], Prime Target [1991, more on that] and Blindside [1987]). Colin Firth stars in the movie, and on the surface seems like an unlikely choice in a slightly seedy thriller, but he does quite well  despite the not always fantastic storyline. Zane fits into a noir-tinged movie more (see Dead Calm, This World, Then the Fireworks, etc.) and is cool and humorous often as Elijah. He goes around shirtless mostly and says things like, “He’s from England, so keep it down, right.” Meanwhile his real-life sister, Lisa Zane, is the object of mystery and alleged possessor of multiple personalities in the movie who splits after marrying Firth.

El Salvador native Andre R. Guttfreund directed Femme Fatale and was not happy that Republic Pictures released the movie straight to video as an erotic thriller in the United States (it played theaters in England). There was nothing erotic about his movie, Guttfreund said to the Seattle Times in June 1991, “It’s really an old-fashioned romance about unconditional love. It’s Orpheus in search of Eurydice. Aren’t video renters going to feel ripped off when they see it?”

More Kaplan Connections: After writing about Pamela Ludwig in Over the Edge, I was curious to see her in something else I had not seen before, and that brought me to Rush Week (1989). I was a dumbass and bought this movie twice on Blu-ray after selling the first one on eBay without watching it. Ludwig plays a college newspaper reporter who starts looking into a series of murders taking place during, you know, rush week. She’s charming and confident, and she would have made a great Nancy Drew. Ludwig helps make up for some of the movie’s dumber aspects, mainly any scenes with the frat boys together. The Dickies perform in costume for a monster-themed party and that by itself is almost worth buying it twice.

Truck Turner himself, Issac Hayes, sent me in search of more Ike, and somehow I landed on the previously mentioned Prime Target, my first David Heavener movie, but certainly it will not be my last – though not any of recent vintage, to clarify (see below). It all starts with him doing a country rap song in the opening and then, as cop John Bloodstone, burning a kidnapper to death with a blow torch. I mean, shit, c’mon, damn. Hayes, unfortunately, has a lame role and is forgettable. Tony Curtis is hilarious as the gangster Bloodstone is transporting to jail, and the movie also features Robert Reed, Andrew Robinson, Don Stroud, and Jenilee Harrison, who also was in Curse III: Blood Sacrifice in 1991, which I unfortunately also watched in 2025.

In addition to starring in the movie and singing all the songs, Heavener wrote, directed, and produced the movie. He’s still active, and in July 2024 in the Greenville Daily Advocate (Ohio) announced a “red carpet premiere” for something called The Last Evangelist, which airs on his own David Heavener TV, “End Times Prophecy Channel of Truth.” The plot is described thusly: “The Last Evangelist is a crime drama set in the near future where unregistered churches have been ruled illegal. Just like Saul on the road to Damascus, when Agent Rhodes’ spiritual eyes are opened, he turns against the government system to challenge the Antichrist’s tactics.” Uh-huh.

At the Movies: A great month in the theaters for me, led by Weapons (2025), which was excellent and scary and funnier than I expected. Amy Madigan is magnificently frightening in the movie, and in fact, I dreamed about her several weeks later in costume, but instead of being her face, it was my old high school assistant principal’s.

Also terrific was She Rides Shotgun (2025), which was violent, realistic, and seemed to capture the ‘20s lawlessness law exactly right. Ana Sophia Heger is heartbreakingly great from the moment we meet her waiting in a tree after school for her mom. John Carroll Lynch was awesome in Ballard on Amazon Prime, one of my favorite shows of the summer, and is a very different, and very disturbing, kind of cop in She Rides Shotgun.

Ethan Cohen’ s second collaboration with wife Tricia Cooke, Honey Don’t (2025), got many negative reviews, but it provided a very satisfying Friday night at the theater for me. The quirky detective setup is frankly something for which I’m nearly always in the mood, and Margaret Qualley is a badass in it. I do agree with the Chicago Tribune, which calls Qualley “kind of a latter-day lesbian Phillip Marlowe from Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye,” that the movie could have used more badass: “more vibes and less plot.”

The Naked Gun (2025) made me smile and laugh frequently as I watched. I enjoyed it a lot. Loved Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson together. Watching this and The Last Showgirl (2024) made me realize I have underestimated Pamela Anderson. Excellent in both very different roles.