Bomb, Bomb, Bomb: Partners, Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen, When Time Ran Out

BOMB, BOMB, BOMB: PARTNERS, CHARLIE CHAN AND THE CURSE OF THE DRAGON QUEEN, WHEN TIME RAN OUT

I could only make it through about 30 minutes of Partners and that’s more than enough for at least about 10 lifetimes, I’d say. I gave up on the picture for good around the fourth time star Ryan O’Neal uttered the epithet faggot. Yeah, Partners basically plays Cruising for laughs. Ha-ha, funny … about as funny as punching somebody’s mother in the face.

I consider Partners the absolute worst film from 1982, at least among the 70 or so films that I have seen thus far in my 42 years on this planet. It supplanted Amityville II: The Possession, a lovely little number incorporating blood, vomit, incest, matricide and patricide, fratricide and sororicide, and demonic possession. Never mind Inchon, a $46 million Korean War epic that bombed mightily at the box office with only a $5.2 million return. Never mind Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which features one of the least likable lead characters (Dr. Dan Challis) and lead performances (Tom Atkins) in recent memory. Believe it or not, Partners beats those other films in sheer unpleasantness.

Did longtime TV director James Burrows use Partners for his audition for Will and Grace? I seriously doubt it, because Partners is one of the nastiest pieces of work I have ever seen. Burrows has directed more than 1,000 TV episodes, including 237 Cheers and 75 Taxi and 32 Frasier. Thankfully, Burrows stuck with television after Partners.

Early in the picture, O’Neal asks his boss how he got stuck partnering up (literally) with gay records clerk Kerwin (John Hurt) to infiltrate and investigate a series of murders in the Los Angeles gay community. Anyway, Chief Wilkins (Kenneth McMillan) tells our matinee idol, “Because you’re a good cop, a real good cop. And because of your cute ass.” Maybe that’s how O’Neal himself got the gig. O’Neal certainly dressed up for the part, wearing a ridiculous tank top and then a leather garb in just the portion I watched before saying Roberto Duran on Partners.

— As I sit here before this keyboard and ponder my next direction, I consider how I endured all 95 minutes or so of Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen, another great big smelly turd from the early ’80s like the ones mentioned about three paragraphs up.

When folks express this incredible nostalgia for the ’80s, undoubtedly it’s not Charlie Chan or Partners or Inchon, for that matter, they’re nostalgic about, because they SUCK in the immortal words of Al from Caddyshack. Then again, if I have learned anything over the years writing about movies or music online, it’s that somewhere in this great big world there’s a cult following Howard the Duck or Halloween III, for example, and they just might flame you for not cherishing their cult object in the same way they do.

Charlie Chan asks us to believe Peter Ustinov (1921-2004), Richard Hatch (1945-2017), and Angie Dickerson as characters of Asian descent. Sure, I believe the Englishman Ustinov as fictional Belgian detective Hercule Poirot (a character he played six times, including features Death on the Nile, Evil Under the Sun, and Appointment with Death) and Roman emperor Nero in Quo Vadis, but I call it more of a stretch to consider him as Chan in 2020, nearly 40 years after the film was made. It’s even worse for both Hatch and Dickerson.

Charlie Chan features plenty of the broadest comedy and frenzied overacting by a rather distinguished cast that also includes Lee Grant, Brian Keith, Roddy McDowall, Rachel Roberts, and Michelle Pfeiffer early in her career. Hatch plays Chan’s fumbling bumbling stumbling grandson Lee Chan Jr. and I’ve watched so many films lately with fumbling stumbling bumbling would-be detectives that I now grumble and rumble when I see them on the screen. I’m thankful my Grandma never behaved like the one played by Grant in Charlie Chan. Keith’s police chief says ‘Goddamn’ about 50 times. McDowall and Roberts play Grant’s domestic helpers, Gillespie and Mrs. Dangers respectively, but they both provide little help to Charlie Chan since they are both in the grand tradition of melodramatic domestic help in the movies; Mrs. Dangers calls to mind Patsy Kelly’s frantic maid in The Gorilla. Pfeiffer could have dialed the perkiness down a notch or few and still have saved enough for the rest of her career. Nearly all of these characters are cringeworthy.

— When Time Ran Out came out Mar. 28, 1980 and it eventually fell about $16 million short of making its $20 million production budget back at the American box office.

Later that year, on July 2, Airplane parodied Airport specifically and disaster movies in general, and became one of the biggest hits of the summer and the entire calendar year.

The failure of When Time Ran Out and the success of Airplane signaled the end of the disaster movie, at least in the form that dominated the first half of the seventies with The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake, and Towering Inferno and then dribbled out pure unadulterated dreck the final half of that decade like The Swarm, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, and Meteor. Since I mentioned Meteor, I also have to mention Avalanche, which provided disaster footage recycled in Meteor as if being in one disaster of a disaster movie just simply was not enough.

Master of disaster Irwin Allen (1916-91) produced at least half the films mentioned in the paragraph right above this one and he even stepped in the director’s chair for the turkey bombs The Swarm and Beyond the Poseidon Adventure. Allen called on Rollercoaster director James Goldstone for When Time Ran Out, which features the required number of old time movie stars, hot commodities, and fledgling character actors. When Time Ran Out should have been called Take the Money and Run, though Woody Allen and Steve Miller already used it for a comedy (1969) and a hit song (1976).

We have William Holden (1918-81), Paul Newman (1925-2008), Jacqueline Bisset, Ernest Borgnine (1917-2012), James Franciscus (1934-91), Burgess Meredith (1907-97), Red Buttons (1919-2006), Barbara Carrera, Pat Morita (1932-2005), Veronica Hamel, Edward Albert (1951-2006), and Alex Karras (1935-2012), as well as a volcano, a tidal wave, etc.

Seemingly half of the cast takes part in a glorified soap opera before the molten lava really begins to flow and they have to repeat business from Beyond the Poseidon and seemingly every other disaster movie of the era. Here’s that glorified soap opera: Holden proposes to Bisset very early in the movie and she turns him down because she’s in love with Newman, who’s not the marrying kind and anyway he does not seem to much care for Bisset but maybe he’s just masking his true feelings toward her with standard male bluster. Franciscus is married to Hamel but he’s fooling around with half-brother Albert’s significant other Carrera. Just wait, it gets better, Albert does not know that he’s Franciscus’ half-brother … and Holden and Hamel are sleeping together. I think I just about nailed it down and you’re right if you’re thinking all that seems like too much plot for such a dimwitted movie.

You’re also right that I hated these characters and their miserable lives, and rooted for the volcano to wipe them all out.

Especially Franciscus, who takes chronic disbelief in the face of impending disaster to new lows in When Time Ran Out. Unfortunately, an incredibly shoddy special effect leads to an incredibly unsatisfying death for Franciscus’ character. We crave to see him bite the dust or eat molten lava in spectacular fashion, and what we get is just plain laughable.

Of course, just plain laughable describes about 99 percent of When Time Ran Out.

Believe it or not, costume designer Paul Zastupnevich earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Costume Design and went against winner Tess, The Elephant Man, My Brilliant Career, and Somewhere in Time, all of them period films where the look of the film itself becomes another important character.

Yeah, I hope the 1981 Oscar broadcast used a shot of Newman in his utterly ridiculous Urban Cowboy garb.

Zastupnevich received a nomination for the same award two years before for his edgy, state-of-the-art costume work on The Swarm, beekeeper outfits. The Agatha Christie Hercule Poirot period murder mystery Death on the Nile won the prize.

I hate to say it, but time ran out on this review because I don’t want to consider When Time Ran Out any longer than I already have.

Partners No stars; Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen 1/2*; When Time Ran Out *

Class of 1984 (1982)

CLASS OF 1984

CLASS OF 1984 (1982) Three-and-a-half stars

Given its exploitation film content including gore, nudity, profanity, sex, and violence, CLASS OF 1984 will not be shown to new teachers or substitute teachers any school year soon.

Not that it should, but a little independent research never hurt anybody.

I don’t remember, though, if I first watched CLASS OF 1984 during or after my three years as substitute teacher in the late 00s. However, I do remember that it made a strong impact with its story of how an idealistic music teacher eventually gives into the dark side and murders his most unruly students at an inner city high school. It’s definitely the movie to see after DANGEROUS MINDS, LEAN ON ME, all that feel good uplifting claptrap.

Watching CLASS OF 1984 again in a decade since I substituted, it still brings on memories of the little punks who threatened violence, who said they would sue, who just ran their mouths incessantly, and who made getting through another day feel like an endurance contest from Hell. For every good student, it often seemed like there were two or three or twenty bad ones in every class. “I would love to punch you in the face,” one junior high student said. “Go ahead, give it your best shot,” the substitute teacher said. Thankfully, not every day substitute teaching was quite like that.

In that spirit, though, we return to our regularly scheduled review of CLASS OF 1984.

Be warned: This is a rough little movie, a nasty piece of work at times, but if you can make it through scenes like the biology teacher’s murdered rabbits and the rape of the music teacher’s wife, this 1982 update on the 1955 classic BLACKBOARD JUNGLE does have its merits.

The performances help lift this film above mere exploitation trash: Perry King as the music teacher, Roddy McDowall as the biology teacher, Timothy Van Patten as every teacher’s worst nightmare, and Michael J. Fox (in an early role) as one of the good students.

King makes for a likable protagonist and takes us from one end of the picture to the next. We are behind him every step of the way, and that’s critical during the film’s violent final act as enough has become more than enough for this music teacher. Those damn punks go too far, far enough for at least a couple exploitation films. Roger Ebert called the climax a cross between THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME and BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS.

McDowall (1928-98) had a knack for supporting performances that almost steal a movie away from their nominal stars, and he displays that knack here in CLASS OF 1984, especially when he cracks and teaches his biology class by gunpoint. I bet you’ll remember how many chambers are in the human heart with a gun pointed at you, and I also bet that Richard Kiley (from BLACKBOARD JUNGLE) wishes he could have got a scene like that after the punks in his film had their way with his favorite jazz records. Damn kids, damn punks.

[Review resumed about two weeks later.]

To work properly, this genre requires a repugnant piece of work going up against the hero and Van Patten certainly provides that as teenage antagonist Peter Stegman. Audiences have been known to cheer his demise. Stegman’s personality profile on Villains Wiki, “A totally violent, sadistic, ruthless and mentally unstable teenager. He will hurt anyone who he thinks is threatening his authority over the school, or he will also kill them with no remorse or regrets.” In a different movie, Stegman’s piano-playing ability would have been exploited for a different kind of feel-good ending, not one where you feel good the bastard’s dead.

You can see why Fox became a superstar, even in a supporting performance.

CLASS OF 1984 director Mark L. Lester also directed TRUCK STOP WOMEN, WHITE HOUSE MADNESS, BOBBIE JO AND THE OUTLAW, GOLD OF THE AMAZON WOMEN, ROLLER BOOGIE, FIRESTARTER, and COMMANDO. Now, that’s some filmography and I’ll say that it’s close (real close) between CLASS OF 1984 and COMMANDO for his best work.

A movie like this needs a proper soundtrack.

Nearly two decades before AMERICAN GRAFFITI, BLACKBOARD JUNGLE made waves with its use of Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock.” What an opener!

Alice Cooper provides “I Am the Future” for CLASS OF 1984. Mr. Cooper has the ideal credentials for scoring a teenage rebellion pic: specifically “I’m Eighteen,” “School’s Out,” and “Teenage Lament ‘74” from his glory days. As far as mid-period solo Alice standards go, “I Am the Future” does not quite measure up against 1980’s “Clones” and 1983’s “I Love America,” but it still far surpasses Alice’s late 80s and early 90s hair metal period.

CLASS OF 1984 belongs to a branch of entertainment that includes such notables as not only BLACKBOARD JUNGLE but also BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, OVER THE EDGE, ROCK ‘N’ ROLL HIGH SCHOOL, RIVER’S EDGE, and PUMP UP THE VOLUME, as well as the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video.

Fright Night (1985)

FRIGHT NIGHT

FRIGHT NIGHT (1985) Three-and-a-half stars

In a not-at-all shocking revelation, Crispin Glover admitted that he did FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE FINAL CHAPTER (1984) because he needed the money and that he does not think much of the slasher film genre overall.

“I’ve only seen two of those films, I saw the original film [FRIDAY THE 13TH] and the one that I’m in,” Glover told Yahoo! Movies. “I remember when I saw the original one, not too long before it I’d seen the original TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, and when I saw the first FRIDAY THE 13TH, I thought, ‘Well, this is extremely derivative.'”

Not sure what Glover thinks of FRIGHT NIGHT, but surely he can relate to the dialogue from horror movie host Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall) after he’s fired by that darn TV station wrapped up in demographics and ratings.

“I have just been fired because nobody wants to see vampire killers anymore, or vampires either. Apparently, all they want to see are demented madmen running around in ski-masks, hacking up young virgins.”

FRIGHT NIGHT gives us vampires and vampire killers, and it’s one of the best examples from a decade of horror movies that successfully mixed horror and comedy. That’s part of a grand tradition that started with all them Universal classics in the 1930s.

FRIGHT NIGHT both pays tribute to classic horror movies of the variety that we’d see on late night TV and updates them for contemporary audiences and mores, taking in the rising expectations for special effects and our increased demand for gore and nudity. Richard Edlund, whose previous credits include RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK and GHOSTBUSTERS, delivers the gore effect goods late on in FRIGHT NIGHT and Chris Sarandon’s head vampire Jerry Dandridge is both a charming ladies killer and a nasty piece of work. He’s not one of them pretty boy puss vampires that we have seen in such bastardizations of the genre as TWILIGHT and DRACULA 2000.

The name Peter Vincent itself descends from actors Peter Cushing and Vincent Price, who are symbolic of the horror movies obviously loved by director and screenwriter Tom Holland. Cushing slayed Dracula several times in Hammer films, as he played Van Helsing in HORROR OF DRACULA, DRACULA A.D. 1972, THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA, THE BRIDES OF DRACULA, and THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES. He should not be mistaken for Christopher Lee, who played Dracula so many times that a Hollywood traffic cop once pulled over the actor and asked him if he should be out in the daylight.

I wonder if Cushing (1913-94) and Price (1911-93) saw FRIGHT NIGHT and what they made of both the film and the Peter Vincent character. (McDowall said that he used “The Cowardly Lion” from THE WIZARD OF OZ as his inspiration for Peter Vincent. As a guest at one of McDowall’s parties, Price said FRIGHT NIGHT was wonderful and McDowall gave a wonderful performance.)

McDowall’s Vincent is one of those characters that elevate a film. Fortunately, there’s a few more memorable characters in FRIGHT NIGHT.

William Ragsdale plays our bright-eyed high school protagonist Charley Brewster who just might be Peter Vincent’s biggest fan. He never misses a “Fright Night” episode. Mr. Brewster encounters great difficulty getting anybody to believe him that his next-door neighbor, the charming and good-looking Jerry, is a vampire. Everybody thinks it’s just a byproduct of Charley’s overactive imagination only made worse by horror movies.

Peter ultimately believes Charley and the old washed-up actor becomes a real-life vampire hunter, paired up with the horror movie fanatic. They believe in each other.

Amanda Bearse is Charley’s girlfriend and Jerry’s target for his vampire bride, since she resembles the lady in that painting on his wall or Bearse’s Amy is the reincarnation of Jerry’s long-lost love. Stephen Geoffreys, who looked like he was Jack Nicholson’s son, almost steals every scene that he’s in as Evil Ed, Charley’s friend.

FRIGHT NIGHT has made a lasting impression on me. I first watched it as part of a horror movie marathon during a friend’s slumber party. It was the film that I remembered most fondly and it stuck with me for several years before watching it again.

Laserblast (1978)

LASERBLAST (1978) Two-and-a-half stars

LASERBLAST is a clunky piece of low-budget junk, but it is not without its charms.

For example, LASERBLAST takes a pot shot at STAR WARS, literally when our teenage protagonist Billy Duncan (Kim Milford) blows up a STAR WARS billboard on the side of the road with his laser cannon. It blows up real good. For that matter, just about everything blows up real good in LASERBLAST.

We’ll get back to that later.

For now, however, I’d like to touch on a couple of the contemporaneous pot shots taken at JAWS.

THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION, which came out a few months after JAWS in 1975, has Sheriff Jeff Jones (Alan Hale Jr.) say over the CB radio of the spider, “You ever see the movie JAWS? It makes that shark look like a goldfish!”

THE HILLS HAVE EYES includes a ripped poster of JAWS.

ORCA: THE KILLER WHALE has a killer whale kill a great white shark early on in the proceedings.

Coincidentally, both THE HILLS HAVE EYES and ORCA were released on the same day (July 22) in 1977.

Anyway, back to LASERBLAST, a quickie exploitation picture made to cash in on the teenybopper science fiction craze between STAR WARS movies. It later became known for being one of the worst movies ever made, especially after Mystery Science Theater 3000 lampooned LASERBLAST in a 1996 episode.

I feel almost bad for giving a mixed review to LASERBLAST, especially after writing positive reviews for THE KILLING OF SATAN, TROLL 2, THE TERROR OF TINY TOWN, and PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE. Almost. Believe it or not, all four of those other films have a higher IMDb rating than LASERBLAST.

LASERBLAST surrenders itself to filler scenes that just scream out TACKY SEVENTIES. It feels like a bloated production even at 80-85 minutes.

David W. Allen (1944-99) worked on 48 films in visual effects or puppetry or stop motion animation over nearly a 30-year career. His notable credits include FLESH GORDON, THE HOWLING, CAVEMAN, Q: THE WINGED SERPENT, THE STUFF, WILLOW, and GHOSTBUSTERS II.

Allen’s alien stop motion work in LASERBLAST received better reviews than any other aspect of the film.

Unfortunately, the stop motion aliens do not have more screen time in LASERBLAST.

Milford is not exactly playing the greatest hero in the history of cinema. For example, he’s the first and only hero ever to be picked on by screen nerd extraordinaire Eddie Deezen; both Milford and Deezen made their screen debuts in LASERBLAST. Milford (1951-88) became known for his work in the musicals “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” He plays most of the movie without a shirt.

Let’s face it, Billy Duncan has a bad, bad, bad life: His mother always seems to be going to Acapulco, his girlfriend’s grandpa freaks out on him and runs poor, poor Billy off, two dope-smoking cops love writing up Billy for speeding tickets, and Chuck (Mike Bobenko) and Froggy (Deezen) bully him. Froggy, by the way, has seen STAR WARS five times, according to one of the dope-smoking deputies (played by veteran character actor Dennis Burkley in the early stages of his career).

Billy’s life changes for the better when he finds that darn laser cannon in the desert. As it says on the poster, Billy was a kid who got pushed around then he found the power.

Billy, of course, uses the laser cannon to blow up a bunch of stuff real good before the stop-motion aliens come for him.

One car blows up about five times in LASERBLAST. They give us just about every conceivable angle.

Yes, it’s that kind of a movie.

Keenan Wynn and Roddy McDowall (his last name spelled “McDowell” in the credits) make glorified cameo appearances.

LASERBLAST is bad enough that McDowall’s Peter Vincent could have played it on the TV series “Fright Night” featured in FRIGHT NIGHT.

On the bright side, LASERBLAST is considerably better than “The Star Wars Holiday Special,” which has gone down in history as the biggest STAR WARS rip-off of them all.