THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY (1954)

"So long, you ancient pelican."

In the first scene we learn that John Wayne is the World's Greatest Pilot...until he accidentally kills his wife and kid in a plane wreck.  D'oh! Then we're painfully introduced to all of the passengers.  It's awesome. You got the old slut, the dorky couple, the super-in-love newlyweds, the drunk scientist and a bunch more.  They're all great.  After an eternity, the plane takes off from Hawaii to California.  Many minutes of wonderfully painful overly sentimental back stories are then told about all of the passengers until you just want vomit with glee.  I loved every cheesy second of it.  Suddenly, one of the engines explodes and punctures a gas tank! Do they have enough fuel to make it to land or are they gonna have to ditch it in the drink?!

Maybe this was considered serious stuff back in 1954, but it hasn't aged well at all. Let me give you an example: right before the engine conks out, Sidney Blackmer stands up in front of everybody and confronts another man about banging his wife, he then pulls out a gun and threatens to kill the other dude! One of the passengers (John Qualen) jumps Blackmer and disarms him. A little while later he apologizes to Qualen, so he gives his gun back!

If you like campy films as much as I do then you should watch THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY.  It's a blast!  I love this silly movie.  It is so much fun to watch.  Six Academy Award nominations and one win (Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture - Dimitri Tiomkin), a 147-minute runtime that flies by, seriously impressive cast and crew that you could research for hours, one of Pedro Gonzalez Gonzalez's first film roles, amazingly painful dialogue that I love, John Wayne as a Producer, Wally Brown looking a lot like Wallace Ford (at least to me). 

Also, I'm no film historian, but I'm pretty sure that this film, the AIRPORT films and ZERO HOUR! were the main inspirations for AIRPLANE!

I guess they spelled "missile" differently back in 1954.

RAPE SQUAD (1974)

[Update 01/11/2022: Need to redo this review completely. Fix the screenshots also.]

Four years before Michael Myers put on the coveralls in HALLOWEEN and eight years before Jason wore the hockey mask (remember he didn't do it until PART III) the rapist dude from RAPE SQUAD was wearing them both and raping and killing the shit out of women.

One night while out feeding a horse Linda is kicked in the face and then raped by a psychopath who makes her sing "Jingle Bells" while he gettin busy. She goes to the police afterward, but those lousy douchebags ain't no help. One scumbag cop even goes so far as to say "I wish that'd happen to me...I'd just lay back and enjoy it." Soon another woman is raped by the same dude. A few days later Linda goes to the police station for a line up and she meets four other women that have been violated by the rapist. They talk and decide the police are useless and form their own Rape Squad with the intention of not only catching the guy who raped them but also stopping other males from raping women or sexually harassing women.

They hand out flyers and take karate lessons and soon they're going undercover at a club where the owner is a known womanizer. He confirms the rumors when he tries to rape Linda!  So the Rape Squad bust in, kick him in the balls and trash his crib. There's a few other small adventures like this, but they still haven't stopped Jingle Bell. Even worse, he's now added murder to his list of crimes.

One evening Jingle Bell is just about to assault a broad when in pops the Rape Squad to cockblock him. He gets good and pissed and devises a evil plan to rape all five of the Rape Squad members at once!!! Well, maybe not "at once" since he only has one penis, he's not some kind of UROTSUKIDOJI-style tentacle monster, although that would have given this flaccid half boner the added excitement it needed to get fully aroused and really make some sweet fuck to the audience whether we wanted it or not. As it stands I didn't even have to use my rape whistle once.

The film starts alright with a kinda gritty rape scene, but there wasn't much nudity and it never really made the audience feel dirty and in need of a shower, plus it was too short. Finally it's time for the female revenge and they're a bunch of pussies! Jennifer, from I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, would cut these chick's dicks off in the bathtub while Thana, from MS .45, would have bludgeoned them to death with an iron then dismembered them in her bathtub! If you're going to make a movie called RAPE SQUAD you need to go all out and have chicks beating the shit out of rapists and then brutalizing the fuck out of them! Curling irons up the ass, chopping dicks off with modified blenders, forced to watch Will Smith movies...you know, extremely sadistic stuff! As it stands RS is a watchable film with some pretty funny one-liners like "Show me your wang!", but I really thought that it was going to be much nastier than it was with more revenge and less sniveling.

If you've already seen all the better female revenge movies then it's worth watching once.

I CORRUPT ALL COPS (2009)

The title is kinda funny when you think about it.

I guess HK back in the day was a really shitty place to live, hell it might still be today what the fuck do I know? Anyway we're told in an opening montage that back in the 60's and 70's over 90% of HK law enforcement was on the bribe payroll and that a huge mafia-style gang controlled everything. It even regulated how many whorehouses, gambling joints and drug dens each street could have to stop turf wars.

At the top of the ladder was police chief Lak. He controlled everything. He had a money man, Gold, who ran all the collections and dealt out the bribe payroll. Then you have Gale who is Lak's right hand man and even had a collection of 9 wives that are actually the other mafia dudes mistresses or ex-mistresses. The first half of the movie (and the best part) shows how the police run everything, then during the second half the British government creates the ICAC who's goal is to put an end to the police corruption.

The subject matter is very interesting (I would love to read a book about it), but director/writer Jing Wong (who has directed nearly a hundred movies in the last 30 years!!!) would not be my first choice to make a movie with such a rich and complex story. He does a good job, but I never felt like the film had any real soul. Another problem I had was the film never had any closure, it just ended.

Worth watching if your into Asian crime dramas, but it's nothing to get overly excited about. Great cast and performances by all, but I'd still love to see this story remade with a different director and a better script.

DEAR AMERICA: LETTERS HOME FROM VIETNAM (1987)

The premise of this film is simple: letters written by Vietnam War soldiers to their families and loved ones back home read over real life footage taken during the Vietnam War. The narrative is told from the beginning of the war until the end and helped along with various news footage and on camera interviews with soldiers in the field. It's very emotional and sickening to think about all the people killed for I'm not even sure what.

It starts out really powerful (and features some great music), but it started losing me a little over halfway through. I don't know why, but it seemed like it was losing steam. Still it's a good film and definitely worth watching, but it could have used a little more structure and a narrator.

The most powerful and saddest letter was the one left at the Vietnam Memorial written by a mother to her son who died 15 years earlier. It's hard to listen to without tearing up.