The Golden Child (1986)
The Golden Child is said to have been originally conceived of as a more serious adventure, intended to star Mel Gibson, but those plans fell through. When Eddie Murphy (Beverly Hills Cop, Trading Places) became available,...
Author: Vincent Leo
Vacancy (2007)
David (Wilson) and Amy (Beckinsale) are a bitterly bickering couple whose marriage is on the skids, detouring down a windy rural road for hours, completely lost. When car troubles force them off the road, they have...
Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992)
The gang is back, and once again, the youngest of the McCallister family, Kevin (Culkin, Uncle Buck), is separated when his family goes on vacation in Miami (how does one lose the only member of...
The Hitcher (1986)
The mad hitchhiker film didn’t start with The Hitcher, but that didn’t stop it from leaving an indelible mark on the subgenre. Prior to its release, there had been 1947’s The Devil Thumbs a Ride, the...
The Game (1997)
You have to concede at least a certain brilliance to any consciously manipulative film in which a man looks into the eyes of a puppet, only for the puppet (represented by a dummy, a...
Grindhouse (2007)
The term “grindhouse” is attributed to a style of films that were regularly churned out in the 1970s that were predicated on delivering exploitative, sensationalist subject matter in order to entertain a defined audience...
88 Minutes (2007)
Al Pacino plays a Seattle college professor and part-time FBI forensic psychiatry expert, Jack Gramm, who made a name for himself as the chief witness for the prosecution in the death penalty case against...
Payback (1999)
Two small time thieves named Val (Henry, Star Trek: Insurrection) and Porter (Gibson, Lethal Weapon 4) put the moves on a Chinese gang to steal $140,000. They are supposed to split it evenly, but Val needs the money...
A Fistful of Dollars (1964)
Although not the creator of the sub-genre of film known as the “Spaghetti Western” (Westerns produced primarily in Italy), Sergio Leone made (arguably) the best three of them, collectively known as the “Dollars trilogy”,...
Full Metal Jacket (1987)
Full Metal Jacket is Stanley Kubrick’s (A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey) film version of former Marine Gustav Hasford’s semi-autobiographical novel, “The Short-Timers” (1979). Hasford also contributed to the screenplay, although the film version is...