Mystery Collection Disc 43

Bail Out (orig. W.B., Blue and the Bean), 1989, color, “video,” Max Kleven (dir. & writer), David Hasselhoff (star and producer), Linda Blair, Tony Brubaker, Thomas Rosales Jr., John Vernon, Gregory Scott Cummins, Wayne Montario. 1:27.

We start with a thoroughly misanthropic bail bondsman, who drives his classic car to his mistress’s (I guess), has a quickie, then drives to work in a serious beater. Shortly we’re introduced to the three guys he relies on—for as little money as possible—to make sure bailed folks show up. One’s David Hasselhoff (W.B., which stands for Whitebread) back story unknown; one’s a former pro football player; one’s Hispanic with no apparent means of support. After seeing how clever they are individually, we see them in action together.

The person in question is a beautiful young heiress arrested because she was driving with her boyfriend in a car with 40 pounds of cocaine in the trunk. She says he was just some guy she met at a bar. She’s also supposedly disinherited. Anyway, the plot starts there, goes through several kidnappings, a number of drug lords, a demand for $5 million, the street price of the seized drugs, to her father (whose companies were pretty clearly being used to transport and store the cocaine), lots of shootings, and…well, it’s silly to try to keep up with the action. Let’s just say they—very definitely “they” (the trio and the young woman) conspire to get a better payday than the bail bondsman had in mind.

As a cable TV movie (my assumption: too cheaply done for a real movie, too much nudity—including the manager of a hot-sheet motel who greets renters in the altogether—for network TV: turns out I was wrong, it was a “direct to VHS” job), it’s—well, it’s Hasselhoff. It’s amusing (if you discount all the shootings, but they all seem to be bad guys, although in this case it’s hard to tell who the good guys would be). It is a long way from classic cinema. Oh, and it includes the assumption by various Hispanics that nobody in LA can understand Spanish. The quartet (the daughter and the three operatives) make an amusing group. What more can I say? Charitably, taking it as a so-bad-it’s-good action comedy, $1.25.

The Night They Took Miss Beautiful, 1977, color, TV movie. Robert Michael Lewis (dir.), Gary Collins, Chuck Connors, Henry Gibson, Victoria Principal, Gregory Sierra, Phil Silvers, Sheree North, Stella Stevens. 1:40 [1:37]

See, this is what happens when you take a three-month break from watching old movies. As I was thinking about doing this writeup, I thought “I could be really silly and suggest that this mediocre TV-movie was in the Mystery Collection, not some collection selling the presence of Name actors.” Ah, but here it is: in the Mystery Collection. (It was pretty clear it was a TV movie before going to IMDB.)

The biggest mystery is why the collection of mostly-TV stars you can see in the summary took part in this exercise in poor low-budget “drama.” I guess money is the answer.

The plot, such as it is. We start in the Miss Beautiful beauty pageant, where emcee Phil Silvers tells bad jokes, introduces the five semifinalists who will be flown via seaplane to the site of the final contest (huh?), and does the worst job of singing a bad beauty pageant closing song I’ve ever endured. Then we get the incredibly old prop-job seaplane, with two “cleaners” being left at the plane by ground personnel who take them at their word that they’ll walk back to the Miami tower. Then the contestants and emcee and a couple of other people—including one pilot who’s “dead-heading it” on a charter flight to pick up his next flight—are in the plane, it takes off, and the cleaners hijack it.

They’re a little but incredibly crazed group who just want $5 million and a ride to Nicaragua, and so far they’ve only killed one copilot. What they get, though, thanks to Feds who take over from the airport’s security, is an attempt to wipe them completely off the face of the earth—contestants and other hostages included—because (ahem) the government was using a cheapo charter flight and one of the contestants to smuggle a cigar case (one cigar tube) full of incredibly deadly virus that would kill all of Florida if it escaped to a “friendly nation” that works on antidotes to such viruses. (OK, that’s a spoiler, but it comes out very early in the movie and you can’t really spoil a flick like this.) Anyway, first attempt to bomb them all to oblivion fails because the radio messages aren’t coming from the hideout (an abandoned base in the Florida Keys, I think) but from a boat…and the job of blasting them so thoroughly that the virus is completely destroyed is done so well that the government folks can and do rescue the hijacker who was in the boat, and who of course tells them where the hostages actually are.

Oh, never mind. We get forced beauty pageantry. We get various stupidity. We finally get a touch of heroism by flying a seaplane straight into the sea. And I say “there’s 97 minutes I’ll never get back.”

Awful awful awful. A waste of good talent. I could commend the scenery, but they managed to shoot it so cheaply that you don’t see much. If only for the talent, I’ll give it $0.50.

Mysteries, 1978, color. Paul de Lussanet (dir.), Rutger Hauer, Sylvia Kristel, David Rappaport, Rita Tushingham, Marina de Graaf. 1:28.

A stranger comes to town…

That’s one of the classic beginnings for any plot, and I’m tempted to summarize this flick with the line above followed by:

…the stranger dies.

That’s a little cryptic, but so is this movie. Technically, it’s not quite the end of the plot, as the little person (“the midget,” David Rappaport) who narrates much of it winds up defacing one of the two (or three) women who (apparently) drove the stranger to his end (somehow). The stranger is an agronomist: that much is clear, and it’s the only clear thing about him.

For what it’s worth, this is an (apparently faithful?) adaptation of a novel by the same name by Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun. So there’s that. It’s filmed entirely on the Isle of Man.

Sorry, but I really can’t summarize this one. Either the print is flawed or the color is deliberately somewhat artistic and sometimes oversaturated. It’s moody, it’s odd, it’s…well, it was good enough to keep me watching through the whole thing, so even though I end up no wiser or more satisfied than when I began, I’ll give it $1.00.

Corrupt (orig. l’assassino dei poliziotti, also Copkiller or Order of Death). 1983 (sleeve says 1977, IMDB says filmed in 1981), color. Roberto Faenza (dir.), Harvey Keitel, John Lydon, Leonard Mann, Nicole Garcia, Sylvia Sidney. Ennio Morricone (composer). 1:57 (1:33).

I see that the last post on a disc’s worth of movies was in June 2014—and here it is January 2015. That’s the power of OA investigation: I’ve only watched four movies in seven months instead of the usual one a week.

Or, actually, make that 3.3 movies—because I was unwilling to waste another hour on this piece of crap after struggling through the first half hour of perhaps the worst Morricone score I can ever image hearing (“highlighted” by an awful repeated “country” song set to a classic Tchaikovsky melody) and a plot that—if I could make sense of it—was just terrible people doing terrible things, partly while wearing badges.

I guess it’s about a series of cop killings in New York, with the cops all on the drug squad (I guess?), with a detective who has two apartments and an apparent second identity (but with no attempt at disguise—the sleeve says he’s leading a double life as a drug dealer, but that doesn’t show up in the first half hour), and with a young lunatic (Lydon of the Sex Pistols, in apparently—and deservedly—his only acting role) with an extreme British accent who claims to be American and says he’s the killer, which he apparently isn’t. Or is. I dunno. Perhaps all is revealed later in the movie. He gets locked up and tortured by this detective (Keitel).

And, well, I just couldn’t. I didn’t give a damn what happened to Keitel. I didn’t give a damn what happened to Lydon. I never wanted to hear that song again or more of Morricone’s “here’s a sting because this bit of film matters!” score. A cheapo Italian flick. No rating.

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