Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong all but eviscerate what remains of their Up In Smoke credibility with this 1984, er, adaptation of Dumas. Suffice to say that the period Parisian setting allows for, ho ho, cross-dressing, painful double-entendres (a villain called "Fuckaire"), and rock-bottom one-liners: "That's the Marquis du Hicky! He's a tri-sexual!" "A tri-sexual?" "Yes, he'll try anything!" Ugh.
Like something director/star Clint Eastwood and his trusty Malpaso production company knocked off in a weekend, Blood Work is a soulless chunk of Dirty Harryology. Yet again playing the geriatric-but-noble card, Clint is former FBI profiler Terry McCaleb, who's brought out of retirement to catch a nasty serial killer who once gave him a heart attack (don't ask!).
George Romero's ecological thriller from 1973 combines the social awareness of his zombie trilogy with horror that's much more effective because it's much more believable: when a biochemical weapon is accidentally released in a small Pennsylvania town, it sends the inhabitants insane, so the military are sent in to mop up. Genuinely unforgettable.
Remember the '80s, when Dan Aykroyd comedies were event movies? This 1988 stinker brings back plenty of bad memories, with Aykroyd playing a mental patient masquerading as a radio talk-show shrink. Not even co-stars Walter Matthau and Charles Grodin can wring a laugh from this wretched relic.
A slew of queasy 1960s anxieties get refracted through the camp superspy persona of oversexed karate-chopping polymath Derek Flint (James Coburn, fantastically deadpan). Our Man Flint sees him tackle a trio of, gasp, pinko scientists who can control the planet's weather, while In Like Flint pits him against a devious group of demented feminists. Funny, knowing, and yet unsettling at the same time.
Ulu Grosbard's sombre noir revolves around the infamous Black Dahlia murder that gripped 1940s Los Angeles. With Roberts De Niro and Duvall excellent as brothers caught up in the case—respectively, a repressed but ambitious priest, and a hardbitten homicide cop who suspects his sibling knows more than he should—it aims for a dark, sweeping resonance pitched somewhere between Chinatown and L.A. Confidential.
Beloved spoof western which follows Jane Fonda's eponymous heroine, a schoolmarm-turned-outlaw, as she hires Lee Marvin's washed-up drunken gunslinger to stand against the lethal, tinnosed varmint (Marvin again) who killed her father. Never quite as funny as it thinks, but Marvin is sharp as a razor.
