 Alone with jack
Without Warning.(1980)
Coming across like a mixture of Last of the Summer Wine meets Predator ,but instead of a conveyor belt of out of work sitcom actors from British television,we have instead a bunch of down on there luck tough guy actors from the 1960s waiting to be rediscovered,for a new audience...But instead of a bunch of grumpy old men having hilarious misadventures and hijinks,we have a bunch of miserable old men fighting an alien with the help of some flying killer starfish...it's a real who's who of actors who have probably seen the inside of one two many whiskey bottles in there hey day... leading the axis of misery is Jack Palance*as Joe Taylor, following him is Martin Landau,Neville Brand and Ralph Meeker ( who really does sound drunk,but unfortunately he had suffered a stroke in 1980). Cameron Mitchell*is on hand also,then again he seemed to be in every low budget movie during the 1980s...It can't be any coincidence that *Kevin Peter Hall*was the alien in this and Predator,seeing as there very similar stories...Of course it's all fairly hokey but it's fun hokum,and it's always good seeing David Caruso getting his comupence by an Alien...
Alone in the Dark*(1982).
Back by popular demand,Jack Parlance and Martin Landau,team up as psychopath mental patients who manage to escape there hospital cells,(although you would think that a maximum security hospital,which relies on electricity for it's security, would have a back up plan in case of a power cut,I mean who is running these prisons,did Group 4 Security have the contract for this and Smith's Grove Sanitarium back in the day... Donald Pleasence is Dr Leo Bain,the total opposite to his Sam Loomis alter ego, where as Loomis was a gun toting rather shouty doctor,Bain has a more relaxed attitude to curing his patients....in other words he seems to do very little apart from spout new age nonsense and smoke a dope pipe... Unusually for an 80s slasher the killer's are much more sympathetic and three dimensional than there counterparts...That's probably because you have some fairly respectable actors instead of some nameless actor hacking his or her way through the cast...Jack Sholder directs probably one of the better slashers from this period, although it has a fairly low gore score,it makes up for it with a witty and intelligent script...also nothing beats seeing Jack Palance going into the night club after punching out the guy on the door,to the sound of the Sick ****s....
__________________ Always forgive your enemies, nothing annoys them so much.. |