Randy Ray

The house looked like any other neighborly dwelling except for the fact that it was huge, ancient, had a large iron gate at the foot of the driveway, and I think I saw a talking rat scurry past me as I walked up to knock on its formidable front door.

I was there to sign up voters on my little growing election list, and when I knocked on the door, I heard a series of loud thumps, a deep, resounding echo inside, and footsteps, before a very friendly face peeked out to see who had dared knock on his door. The man who answered the door was an aging hippie wearing a tie-dyed shirt. He asked if I’d like to come in as he filled out my forms, and I obliged because a) he didn’t appear to pose a threat, b) he was an aging hippie wearing a tie-dyed shirt, and c) in the room on the right, I could see Phantasm playing on a television screen, and thought I’d check out a few minutes of this underground 1979 horror hoot. Alas, this would turn into one of several Halloween Hidden Flicks to be devoured, but I did not know that at the time.

Phantasm is a goofy thriller in which a very strange, tall man uses a flying silver ball to attack strangers. The ball has a drill, that when attached to the head can perform routine amateur lobotomies, or eliminate, on a permanent basis, nagging headaches. I watched a few minutes while the hippie horror film fan went to get us something to drink (I assumed a soda while doubting it would be acid, or cyanide-laced Kool-Aid).

READ ON for more of this week’s Hidden Flick…

Sometimes, celluloid magic doesn’t happen for a particular film. Sometimes, the thrill of an idea pitched in a meeting never gets translated to anything of actual interest on the screen. Sometimes, the actors and script and director are all assembled, and guess what? Without a script that makes sense, or an original entertaining idea, one is left with a dud—the crazy idea about everyone turning blind, or an ecological disaster gone yawn, or yet another remake of Invasions of the Body Snatchers that just ain’t happening.

Well, sometimes a film is good old-fashioned popcorn-worthy, and not a lot can be said about its story, or substance. The thing, the MacGuffin of it all, whatever that IT may be, just works, and one sits back and enjoys the ride for two hours. This week’s Hidden Flick is a simple tale of a kidnapping, flying circus performers, an ancient monastery on a mountain range, and the daredevil spark of an actor able to pull off action-adventure.

Sky Riders, stars the rugged anti-hero James Coburn, and a beleaguered yet always interesting Robert Culp who played in a tremendously tight duo with Bill Cosby in I Spy on television way, way back in the days of innocence and rabbit-eared antennas. Culp’s wife, young son and daughter are kidnapped by a group of terrorists demanding a large ransom from the wealthy American businessman. Coburn is the ex-husband who sits by while witnessing foiled attempts by others to recapture the trio, and he’d like to just go and get them himself—sort of a simple line in the initial pitch coming to life on screen…let’s see: “Fuck this incompetence. Let ME go get them before they’re killed.”

READ ON for more on this week’s Hidden Flick: Sky Riders…

The release of David Gilmour’s DVD Live in Gdansk features the Polish Baltic Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Zbigniew Preisner, and was filmed on the Gdansk, Poland shipyards at the final show of the Pink Floyd guitarist’s 2006 solo tour in front of 50,000 fans. Perhaps, just as significant, is the fact that the DVD features the last filmed public performance of the late Floyd keyboardist, Richard Wright, who passed away on September 15, after a long career as the unsung hero of many great space rock songs.

We take a moment of silence after several suggested hidden cinematic treasures, to uncover the gold that lay buried in the film bag underneath Pink Floyd The Wall, Pulse, and even the Syd Barrett-era 30-minute jewel, Tonight Let’s All Make Love in London. This week’s Hidden Flick was once an underground classic, but the years have been kind to its eccentric magic. Indeed, we focus our light on Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii.

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There is a scene in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan where an American journalist asks a commanding officer, played by Tom Hanks, why he and his men are attempting to save the title character. Hanks as Captain Miller replies, “Anyone wanna answer that?” Ryan’s family had lost three of four sons in World War II, and the American government decided that a fourth and final death would not happen, so Hanks led a crack platoon into the heart of the war to extract the lone living Ryan son, played by Matt Damon. The film is based on a true story about eight brothers who died in the American Civil War.

I am reminded of films of the events that took place in the air on September 11, 2001, and on the ground as people waited for their loved ones to return home. Alas, unlike Ryan, this would not always occur as husbands, wives, children, relatives, friends, and co-workers were lost forever due to multiple terrorist acts of stone cold murder.

This week’s Hidden Flick is actually two films about World War II that happened from the perspective of those left at home while the horrors of battle raged on—women and children. However, the horrors of war are an equal opportunity employer; all creeds, religions, sexes, and age groups are involved. These films show what happens to the individual in society, and how life—a precious and unique gift—is torn apart, squandered, and thrown away when conflict cannot be solved by peaceful means.

READ ON for this week’s Hidden Flick double feature…

Hidden on the outskirts of town is a nether region, a place where mystery resides, a location so obscure and strange that one is tempted to call it the Twilight Zone. The area is tucked away within a seedy section of town best left unexplored. However, cars race by with their excited cinematic travelers, eager to drive through the Gates of Movie Hell. We dig a little deeper into the shadows, ponder the sights, ingest the sounds, eat a pizza slice or two, gulp a soda, catch some clips, and find that this isn’t exactly a foreign place at all, but instead, a friendly little gathering place we call the Rock ‘n’ Roll Drive-In.

Yes, an intriguing location, indeed, that is marked with an ‘X’ on our Flick map, this Drive-In has four screens with multiple features playing every night. At its central hub is a circular snack bar/munchies haven/hang out place for the ADD-addled, socially-minded sections of the crowd, and a key chill out locale for cats after a long week of dodging people, assignments, phone calls, text messages, and random responsibilities.

As usual, with most of these lingering outdoor joints, the double bills feature a weird blend, a marriage of celluloid opposites, but it is the music blaring from within the round snack bar that sets the right mood. It is someone’s mixed tape, a burned CD of favorites that veers from Elvis to Little Richard to the Clash, from the Ramones to Nirvana, from Neil Young to Wilco that nails the point home. Guitars, vocals and drums slash through the air, blended into a seamless noisey whole as Nachos, popcorn, Snickers, and ice cream are purchased and devoured while gazing at walls containing old movie posters—Night of the Living Dead rests in a sacred spot next to PHISH – IT, Rust Never Sleeps next to a Phantasm poster, and Pan’s Labyrinth is next to U2-3D imagery. Old school horror is associated with rock music, and that’s alright, mama, that’s alright with me. READ ON for more of this week’s Hidden Flick…

In between the two Godfathers, and before the great Apocalypse, stood a Conversation. And even before two cars raced each other on an open road, and later, a light saber blazed to life and slashed across the room, there was something called THX-1138. Indeed, in the early 1970s, two filmmakers—Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas—used one San Francisco film company—American Zoetrope—and one very gifted editor—Walter Murch—to craft a new method to tweak the audio waves fantastic. Murch revolutionized the way sound could be edited and showcased almost like a living character in Lucas’s first groundbreaking film THX-1138, but it would be the film that he worked on in between The Godfather and The Godfather Part II where he would exploit that technique to an even greater effect, this week’s Hidden Flick, The Conversation.

The film stars Gene Hackman as a surveillance expert who records conversations for various corporate and governmental agencies. Essentially, Hackman’s character wire-taps, bugs, and tapes by any technical means necessary. The conversation of the film’s title takes place at the beginning of the story as a couple walks in San Francisco’s Union Square while being recorded from three microphones—one held in a bag carried by a wandering off-duty cop, the others by two soloists in opposing buildings, directing their recording equipment at the couple in the square with long devices which appear, at first, to be rifles as if the two are trained snipers scoping out their hapless prey. READ ON for more on this week’s Hidden Flick…

That sense of a mission, a group adventure where having fun with legions of your friends, traveling hundreds, and sometimes thousands of miles, despite the occasional challenge, is apparent within the first notes of a rousing Runaway Jim.

The band charges into the energetic heart of the song with nary a tune up note, seamlessly segueing into My Soul. The comically appropriate new song, Water in the Sky appears both literally and figuratively as a thunderstorm for the ages is about to present one of those “occasional challenges” that the band would overcome and use to their advantage, and, in the process, solidify their place as America’s best live band as the 1990s drew to a close.

The Vermont Phab Phour used the apocalyptic atmospheric disturbances like a weirdly ethereal stage prop in this week’s Hidden Flick, Phish – Walnut Creek. The DVD, hidden away in the corners of the vast vault for 11 years, finally hits the streets in August and it’s a beautiful document of the band during one of their peak eras. I wasn’t sure what to expect, looking back at this show from July 22, 1997 at Walnut Creek Amphitheatre in Raleigh, North Carolina, or whether the film would live up to the usual Phish standards. Fortunately, what is so amazing is that it takes you back and the show plays like a surreal wayback machine to that heady period of time. All initial concern is quickly wiped away. READ ON for more of Hidden Flick…

IFC’s Dinner for Five was one of the better shows about Da Bidness in the early ’00s. Centered on the simple concept of five indie film artists (and, sometimes, old movie vets) sitting around a restaurant table, eating dinner, sipping cocktails and talking shop, the show excelled at heady information, frank dialogue, huge cigars and lots of fancy grub. All of it was caretakered by the charismatic but unobtrusive presence of Jon Favreau.

Well, Favreau can’t exactly call himself an indie outsider anymore after the summer success of Iron Man. Coming on the heels of his holiday blockbuster, Elf, a few years back, it looks like the actor/writer/director/cable T.V. dinner host has a franchise product for the ages. And that’s such a refreshing thing to say about someone like Favreau who wrote and/or directed small gems like Made, and Swingers, before conquering the industry in his own inimitable fashion. Let’s hope he doesn’t become like Sam “Evil Dead” Raimi or Christopher “Memento” Nolan who are still doing excellent work with their respective Spider-Man and Batman franchises, but seem to have lost some of that original storytelling flair that paved the way for those epic cash cow adventures. These films are, after all, based upon pretty fucking…ahem…ironclad and ancient comics that were spun from the colorful pens of their Geek Elders many moons ago. READ ON for more…

Cheese is an important part of everyone’s diet, and it certainly stands to reason that one should get their fair share of the film variety. Now, current cinematic cheese includes everything from Martin Lawrence driving his daughter across country in Disney’s College Road Trip, the Flaming Lips’ Christmas on Mars, Atonement…wait…that was for real, any movie starring Kate Hudson and Matthew McCanaHeycanIstillhaveacareer, and the legion of So I Know Who Knocked Up 40-Year Virgin Ron Burgundy’s American Pie Axe-Murderering Mother movies to enjoy after the long-delayed lobotomy.

Then we have the sci fi/fantasy/horror/big ugly cheap costumed monster variety. Back in the day—the early 1960s—Roger Corman could be relied upon to churn out low budget cheese classics which sometimes featured future superstars like Jack Nicholson. In the 1970s, we got disaster cheese from Irwin Allen like landmark sludge called Earthquake. In the ’80s, well…just about every movie made in that decade classified as cheese with synths, pastels and that dude from Grey’s Anatomy when he was just plain McDorky. The ’90s had a weird variety of cheese which included variations on early ’80s slasher films with nifty titles called Scream, Scary Movie, and So…I’m Hot, Get Over It.

This week’s selection from the hard block cheese portion of the film aisle of the celluloid supermarket next to the rotting vegetables of poor M. Night’s slowly dying career is a pure low-budget mocking of all that was cheese back in the early ’60s black-and-white heyday of the Corman era. This time, it is completely played for laughs. Our Hidden Flick is The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra and as the title indicates it is an important study of our current archaeological studies in Cadavra, Massachusetts starring Angelina Jolie, Harrison Ford, Matt Damon, Denzel Washington, and Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog. READ ON for more…

Japanese horror films have a way of getting under your skin and staying there for the entire weird ride. The films, by their very nature, are slightly different than western versions of this demented genre as the recent renaissance would indicate. And the Americans have been happily remaking them one right after the other, but something seems to be lost in translation, indeed, as the creepy qualities don’t linger quite as long.

That isn’t to say that the American take on Ring wasn’t filled with whacked-out goosebumpery, or that its legions of imitations haven’t had a scare or two, as well. However, there is something to be said about the original films, as the Japanese, for just a few dollars less, can scare the shit out of you and make that silly little walk back down your dark hallway even more daunting than it was when you weren’t suddenly hearing teeth chattering, distant whispers, and strangulated monkey yelps. No, I haven’t a clue what a “strangulated monkey yelp” sounds like, but ‘creepy’ is the right word for this week’s initial film in our Hidden Flick – Double Feature, Ju-On, which, in good ole Americanized English, translated to Buffy the Vampire playing the lead in The Grudge. READ ON for more of this week’s Hidden Flick…