I wish I was Annie Sprinkle.  I’ve never met anyone so honestly happy to be themselves.  Annie Sprinkle just seems so damned ecstatic to be Annie Sprinkle and she’ll bubble all over the place showing off her joy.
Annie Sprinkle’s Herstory of Porn: Reel to Real is a filmed version of her stage show of the same name, a Sprinkle-hosted examination/autobiography of her life in pornography.  Sprinkle sits in front of the screen playing clips from her films, commenting on them MST3K-style, and changing outfits with the appropriate eras.  It’s a bit like a Mark Rappaport film, but with less pathos and more penetration.
Sprinkle’s story begins in 1973 when she was a popcorn girl at a porn theater playing Deep Throat.  She soon hooked up with director Gerard Damiano, with whom she worked on several occasions (including Let My Puppets Come, which isn’t mentioned.)  Clips from several movies are shown, though we only get titles for a few.
As the film progresses, we get to see a wide variety of Sprinkle’s exploits.  See her shove a toothbrush up her anus (“I think it’s hot,” she comments.), screwing a midget, taking in a kielbasa sausage (“It really felt good, and we fed the entire cast for lunch!”), getting fisted (“We’re using Crisco as lubricant.  It’s fabulous.”), having her clit pierced (“It’s kind of like piercing a potato chip”) and vomiting on a fellow’s less-than-erect penis.  Meanwhile, she talks jubilantly about her work as set designer and her idea of her own talent  (“Sex is the easy part.. it’s the acting that’s embarrassing!”) along with her desire to create a more female-centric industry by filming an “actual orgasm” (“luckily we had lots of film in the camera”) and her displeasure with the heterosexual porn community’s lackluster response to AIDS protection organizations.
While the major portion of the film is jaw-droppingly fascinating, things taper off toward the end when she gets into her later work.  Her most recent titles (Linda/Les and Annie and Sluts and Godesses Video Workshop, among others) get a bit too much attention and the publicity ploy aspect of the whole affair starts to set in.  Still, by that time, you probably will have seen more of Sprinkle than you’ll ever want to.
Sprinkle comes off as an obscenely perky, yet intelligent, individual, but does sometimes seem a bit too full of herself.  She seems to think she was breaking new ground by becoming a female porn director with Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle, thereby ignoring the work of Roberta Findlay, who was doing the same thing years before Sprinkle was blowing Gerard Damiano for a job.  A little research and appreciation for others might have helped, but even so, Sprinkle is as good as anyone for a subject of an ego piece.  On that level, The Herstory of Porn is a winner.

Nobody tried to cash in on youth culture quite like Cannon Films, a human cinematic paper-shredder that desperately attempted to cash in on a market that wouldn’t exist ten minutes after the script was written.  No more in their sheer ignorance of pop trends evident than The Apple, a timepiece that deserves rediscovery for a new generation to stare slack-jawed in disbelief at.  A shame that such its current unavailablity on video and its lame moniker it keeping it from such a fate.
Catherine Mary Stewart (in her first role) and George Gilmour star as Bibi and Alphie, a Carpenters-esque duo who end up on an amateur night show run by the sinister Mr. Boogalow(!?), an evil looking cretin played by Vladek Sheybal.  The young singers’ sickly-sweet pop antics are overshadowed by Boogalow’s group, BIM, an over-the-top duet straight out of Xanadu.
Boogalow signs contracts with Bibi and Alphie anyway, at which point they go to hell for a musical number.  Bibi joins the BIM family, but Alphie gets the shaft, writing alone for a while and ending up with a bunch of hippies in Central Park.  Inexplicably helped by a fellow member of BIM, Bibi eventually runs off to him and has a baby.  A year later(!), Boogalow finally tracks them down, at which point God (played by Joss Ackland) shows up and drives everyone away in his floating car.
Did I mention this all takes place in 1994?  Well, it does.  A fact they keep repeating.
Golan himself directed this one, and it’s obvious he knew that the dialogue was going to bore the hell out of people, so the film doesn’t go more than five minutes without a musical number.  Fortunately, these are just as bad.  Grandiosely choreographed and hugely staged without a hint of anyone actually knowing what the hell they were doing, the strikingly similar numbers resemble a Ziggy Stardust show as directed by a third-grade dance instructor, complete with enough rotten mugging and carelessly-strewn glitter to give Brian DePalma’s Phantom of the Paradise (from which Golan obviously was influenced) a run for its money.
Nearly as entertaining as film itself is the video transfer, a who-cares-anyway pan & scan affair that features more characters talking just off-screen than on.  The lyrics, interestingly enough, are by George S. Clinton, who later went into doing scores (no words—good idea) for Austin Powers and Gotham, among others.
The title, by the way, refers to the oversized forbidden fruit offered by Bibi by BIM’s lead singer in hell during the film’s “selling point” number.  Reportedly, during its premiere at the Paramount Theater in Hollywood, audiences threw their free souvenir sountracks at the screen, causing extensive damage.

AT TWILIGHT COME THE FLESHEATERS (1998)
D: Vidkid Timo.  Jim Buck, Vidkid Timo, David J. (Watershed Productions)

You don’t have to be gay to enjoy gay porn, and in the case of this 112-minute (!) epic, it probably helps if you’re not.  Part character-driven comedy, part Night of the Living Dead parody, At Twilight Come the Flesheaters seems specifically designed to irritate those looking for a quick spurt.  Writer/director/producer Vidkid Timo stars as Digiorno, a flaming Anthony Edwards-lookalike getting together a movie party, the movie in question being a porn version of Night of the Living Dead that opens with Barbara (Timo again) giving her brother a blowjob on their mother’s grave.  Back in, er, “reality,” Digiorno pisses off a credit collector (a real woman) who yelps loudly about that “stupid fag-ass motherfucker” and posts his phone number all over New York.  Digiorno’s ex-boyfriend Elusian shows up and the two of them wander around and talk.  And talk.  And talk.  Meanwhile, Digiorno’s current boyfriend chops scallions.   After a penis piercing (in gleeful close-up) and a brief leather sequence involving a lad trapped in a cage, Elusion takes a dump and sticks in a butt-plug.  Digiorno continues to get prank calls all night, from various transvestites, leathermen and a lettuce fetishist rubbing his cock with salad tongs (“Do you like romaine?  Iceberg?”)  Back in the movie-within-the-movie, zombies attack the siblings (“He’s eating me while he fucks me!”)  and Jean Cooper looks and acts like a lost Divine character, slapping Barbara silly and finally getting killed when her daughter (who inexplicably lapses into Spanish) repeatedly stabs her with a blowdryer.  The NOTLD segments are surprisingly close to the original, and it’s a shame there’s not more of them.  The sex bits seem to be a random sampling of fetishistic gay culture (voyeurism, S&M, shaving) never stopping on one sex scene long enough to satisfy someone looking for standard porn and, in fact, the first sex scene isn’t until a full half-hour into the film.  The lead character never gets laid(!) and ends up with his life in ruins.  33 cast members and 4 animals are credited, along with a “Special thanks” to George Romero, who no doubt would be pleased that a brief clip from his film makes it into this one.

I’m a sucker for any movie about an all-girl band.  I even saw Spice World in the theater (for free, thank you very much) on the hopes that someone might do something interesting with the concept.  It’s no surprise, then, that I rushed out to see Bandits, a German film about an all-girl rock band that escapes from prison and becomes a hit once they’re on the lam.
The story follows our four heroines from their miserable prison life through their escape during a planned performance at a police dinner to their subsequent Thelma & Louise-meets-A Hard Day’s Night chase through the city, hiding from the law while occasionally popping up at random intervals for a show or to sign autographs.  It could have easily turned campy, but director von Garnier really likes these characters and gives each of them a distinct personality without submitting to caricature.
Unlike other movies that strive to be “female-centric,” (Foxfire comes to mind immediately, but there are others) Bandits doesn’t ever stoop to debasing its male characters and making them seem less than human.  The addition of a willing hostage (who joins the group in one of the film’s funniest scenes) complicates matters, but while he’s never fully developed, he’s not a walking cliché of evil male either.  Scenes between two different-gendered cops on the trail emerge as charming rather than sinister, a welcome change of pace from slap-dash Hollywood script laziness.
The four women themselves are a joy to watch, and actually have a lot of on-screen chemistry as a group.  The film never throws in gratuitous sub-plots in order to enhance the characters, choosing instead to let them go on their way and let the chips just fall.  The addition of a couple fun musical numbers keeps everything on a fairly light-hearted note, even when things threaten to get too serious.  The style of the editing and pacing works well with the content, and the movie rarely drags.
The only major problem with Bandits is the music.  An all-girl band of ex-prison mates that play relatively bland (but pleasant) alternative power-pop?  It’s not exactly the sort of stuff that would have a lot of cult potential.  If anyone decides to do an American remake of this film, instead of casting a group of average name-stars, I’d love to see this as a vehicle for The Donnas.  The movie needs a soundtrack that works with its pop-punk sensibility.

You rarely see openly Christian characters in movies, especially ones portrayed in a sympathetic light.  Other than priests and zealots, Christian characters tend to be used only to further the plot, usually in the case of some sort of religious cult.  In fact, it’s fair to say that committed Christians get more unfair treatment and stereotyping than Asians or gays.
In Black & White, Rory Cochrane plays a good Catholic cop.  He goes to church, he does the confessional thing, he gets a new partner (Gina Gershon) whose perps keep popping up dead.  It’s a welcome touch, and one that Rory Cochrane (Love & a .45, Dazed and Confused) was interesting casting for.  Unfortunately, the character comes off as so bland and lifeless you wish this guy would hurry up and get to the kingdom of heaven already.
It doesn’t really help that the movie itself it’s all that spectacular.  Gershon is at her best as the bad girl cop partner even when given lines like “You gotta decide whether you want to book me or fuck me,” especially in one stand-out scene where she shoots an ex-baseball star holding a young girl hostage right through the forehead after egging him on.  Ron Silver is his usual self as an Internal Affairs officer, and Marshall Bell makes an average sergeant.  Alison Eastwood is the only major weak link, reciting her dialogue so blandly you feel it’s a shame that she of all people was given a rare role for a woman in one of these thrillers that’s not someone’s wife, girlfriend or love interest.  Seymour Cassell pops up briefly in a relatively gratuitous strip club scene.
No, the problem here is with the lead.   It’s not Cochrane’s fault, really, that the script gives his character nothing to do and no personality to do it with.  His sudden romantic involvement with Gershon seems completely implausable due to the writer’s lack of giving him anything else to do other than pray.  We watch him go to church.  We watch him pray.  We watch him pray some more.  WE GET THE POINT, ALREADY!
So a standard thriller with a couple interesting twists is downgraded to “watch it if it’s there” level because the lead character is dull as hell.  Catholics don’t have to be boring, but Black & White isn’t going to help shatter any ideas.  Gershon fans ought to check this out, however.

Until the release of last year’s Underground, Emir Kusturica has always been a bit of an enigma in this country.  For the most part, his works have been too off-kilter for normal foreign film audiences, yet not quite bizarre enough to attract a cult following.  Now, however, Kusturica has become a bit of a critic’s darling, and his latest film is attracting more attention.  His latest film is anything but a natural follow-up to a successful art-house release—a wacky, two-and-a-quarter-hour gypsy farce.
Matko is a small-time gypsy hustler who’s always on the lookout for the big score.  He thinks he finds it a deal offered to him by a coke-snorting, grenade-juggling gangster, so he enlists the help of his father’s best friend for financial backing.  The whole deal is all a scam, however, in order for the gangster to marry of his midget sister to Matko’s teenage son.  Throw in Matko’s occasionally-dying father, his son’s love interest, a wandering folk band that ends up tied to a tree, geese galore and a woman who can remove nails from a chunk of wood with her rear end(!) and you’ve got a fairly typically quirky formula.
While the gags never really let up, there’s a sadistic undercurrent to the film that, under lesser hands, could have darkened the experience quite a bit.  One segment involves our Steve Buscemi-esque hero jumping up and down, trying to retrieve a briefcase from a dead man tied to a swinging railroad gate.  It’s to Kusturica’s credit that the scene comes off as more Chaplin than Tarantino.
The absurd length of the film is the only major detriment—a good half-hour could have easily been trimmed as the ending is set up so far in advance that you’d need to be both blind and deaf not to see it—and while the film does occasionally get sidetracked on silly sub-plots and oddball gypsy humor that doesn’t translate all that well, it’s a fairly entertaining ride while the fun lasts.  It’s also probably the only film you’ll ever see where the passage of time is acknowledged by a cutaway to a pig munching down on a car.  The critters of the title are barely present, and aren’t even acknowledged by any of the characters until the end, so those expecting a feline spectacle will be sadly disappointed.

Films involving mind games between a select group of players have always been a favorite of mine, from the family angst of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to the con game efforts of David Mamet.  While 1991’s Closet Land is noted as a high point of two-character cat-and-mouse cinema trickery, most critics ignore The Caller, an underrated little gem that comes off as a predecessor to more recent sci-fi “discover-the-plot-as-it-goes-along” epics as Cube and Dark City.
Madolyn Smith plays The Girl, who begins the movie filling up her gas tank at a self-service pump in a small, seemingly deserted town.  Finding nobody attending the counter, she leaves her money at the pump and goes home to a small cottage in the woods after first discovering an abandoned car with a ripped-up doll in the glove compartment.
Someone, of course, is watching her.  She talks to her daughter on the phone (who appears to be away at school), and opens the door nonchalantly when it’s knocked as she’s expecting company.  No big surprise here—it’s the other half of the cast, Malcolm McDowell, in the title role.  It seems his car’s broken down and he needs to use her phone.
Here’s where the fun begins.
He tells her his story and quickly calls for a tow.  She begins to point out inconsistencies in his tales and he parleys back by complimenting her on her observation skills but quickly comes up with a rational explanation.  This soon becomes a system, with him awarding her a point for each flaw she finds, allowing her the answers only if she manages to get a total of ten.
Their subsequent conversation leads to some serious of mental (and occasionally physical) combat.  Is she a killer?  Is he?  What happened to her husband?  Where is the daughter?  What’s in that oft-seen-but-never-opened hat box?
After he leaves, the film cuts to the next day, where The Girl picks up her dry cleaning only to be almost run over by McDowell again.  This leads to a harrowing ride through the mountains and, yes, more mind games and some odd sexual situations that just add to the intriguing confusion.
The ending, as the cover box promises, is a whopper, and one that seems more obvious upon second viewing.  I won’t spoil it for you (like Michael Weldon does in “The Psychotronic Video Guide”... nngh) but it does come off as a bit silly, especially if you see this after viewing Dark City.
Oddly enough, this exercise in psychological weirdness was made by Empire Pictures, not a company noted for risk-taking.  McDowell is always as fun to watch as ever, and his grins give away the fact that he really seems to be enjoying himself in a substantial part.  Smith’s performance isn’t quite the right tone to carry the film (it demands someone with more of an obvious dark side like Linda Fiorentino or Brinke Stevens) but with McDowell on screen, who cares?  It also features an uncharacteristically great score by Richard Band.
Okay, so it’s basically an overlong “Twilight Zone” episode.  Okay, so the film could have easily been about twenty minutes shorter.  Okay, so the ending is a bit on the goofy side.  The Caller is still a genuinely interesting oddball thriller, and one that deserves a re-release.  Anchor Bay?  Anyone?

 
I liked the first Candyman quite a bit.  It had decent acting, an original concept, a unique (for the time) urban setting, a memorable villain and a great score.  The second had some decent atmosphere and a memorable villain.  This is the third entry in the franchise, and the law of diminishing returns has produced… Donna D’Errico’s breasts, conveniently spending the entire picture tightly locked into a T-shirt several sizes too small.
Now, I have nothing against Donna D’Errico’s breasts.  I’m sure they’ve got great personalities.  But I never wanted to see a feature centered around them, much less one called “Candyman 3: Day of the Dead.”  I was expecting, well, the Candyman.  And while Tony Todd is back, playing some character claiming to be the title menace, it’s clearly someone else.
Donna D’Errico plays the decendant of Daniel “The Candyman” Robitaille.  She arranges for an art gallery opening for all of Robitaille’s work to be displayed in hopes of overcoming the fact that his name is entirely associated with death.  The gallery owner pressures her into—guess what!—saying “Candyman” into a mirror five times.  An actor (Corri) pops out and scares people off, but when folks start turning up dead, suspicions are cast on him.
First off, all the atmosphere built up from the first two films is dropped entirely here.  It takes place in L.A., a far departure from the moodiness of New Orleans or the slums of Chicago.  The score is bland (they couldn’t even afford to get the rights to the original?!?) and all the possibly suspenseful scenes are ruined by the Candyman himself, who now feels the need to ramble endlessly about the nature of evil and that sort of thing.
Oh yeah, and Donna D’Errico can’t act.  At all.
To be fair, Candyman 3 does have a couple good images—a bee in a lightbulb, another crawling out of the yolk of an egg to name a couple.  Nick Corri does a fine job despite the fact that his character makes little sense (he’s supposed to be a great single father to his daughter—who we only see in one scene!  Where is she with all the time he’s spending at D’Errico’s?) and the ending is at least slightly inspired.  But you have to suffer through way too much to pick out the bright spots, and fans of the series are bound to be growling is disapproval.
For fans of D’Errico’s eterally-jiggling (but never exposed) breasts only.  Inevitably, Candyman 4: Dead Space will follow, where the Candyman stalks a bunch of astronauts who say "Candyman" five times into the reflections of their space suits.

CANNIBAL! THE MUSICAL (ALFERD PACKER: THE MUSICAL) (1994)
D: "Juan Schwartz"/Trey Parker. Trey Parker, Jason McHugh, Matt Stone, Ian Bachar, Jon Hegel. (Troma)

A year before "South Park", Trey Parker’s directorial debut landed on video store shelves with barely a whimper.  A few years and a repackaging later, Cannibal! The Musical is finally attracting a well-deserved following, and fans of Parker’s later work should definately check it out.  It’s easily funnier than anything in the limp-dicked porn satire Orgazmo and the mediocre BASEketball put together.
Cannibal!, produced, directed, written by and starring Parker (under the pseunonym of “Juan Schwartz” in the actor’s guise), is the true tale of Alferd Packer, the first American to be convicted of cannibalism set to music.  Told in flashback from a reporter’s interviewing of Packer in prison, the film starts with a musical number (“Schpledoinkel,” the opening of which can be heard at the end of every “South Park” episode) as Packer joins five miners, including Matt Stone and Dian Bachar in a quest for gold in the Colorado Territory.  Their journey leads to bad weather, encounters with evil trappers, more musical numbers, American Indians played by Asians, bad jokes and energetic splatter.
Parker’s wit, while more honed on “South Park,” is in full force here, and he’s not afraid to let any joke, no matter how cheap or lame, fly through.  This may sound like a bad thing but, in fact, it does wonders for the pacing, and the cast has enough energy to make even the dumbest joke bearable.  There are, of course, a hefty sum of good bits too; the musical numbers are catchy and often hysterical, the arguments between the miners and the trappers are great, and some of the puns, while awful, come flying out of nowhere so you can’t help being caught off-guard and forced to laugh.
Cannibal! isn’t a great movie, and, upon repeated viewings, it becomes clear that there aren’t enough musical numbers and the second half tends to drag in between them, but nothing in Orgazmo can even come close to competing with the look on Jon Hegel’s face just before he launches into “Let’s Build a Snowman” or the sheer mad hilarity of the miners being accosted by an angry redneck with a pus-spurting eyesocket.  Sure, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut is a better film, but Cannibal! was done for virtually no money with little expectation that it would be any good.  It’s no wonder these guys went to bigger, though not always better, things.

THE CAT AND THE CANARY (1979)
D: Radley Metzger.  Carol Lynley, Honor Blackman, Michael Callan, Edward Fox, Wendy Hiller, Olivia Hussey, Daniel Massey, Wilfrid Hyde White, Beatrix Leahman. (First Run Features)

While mostly known for his adult films, Radley Metzger took a rare detour into a nude-free zone with this, the fifth(!) remake of John Willard’s old-fashioned dark-and-stormy-night play.  The plot is familiar territory—a group of cousins arrive at a huge castle twenty years after the death of their grandfather, Cyrus West, for the reading of the will in hopes that they will become quickly wealthy.  Standard haunted house via Agatha Christie shocks ensue.
While it’s always been played for laughs in the past, Metzger wisely chose to tune down the humor and play up the atmosphere and look of the film, always his strong point.  This is not to say that there’s no snickers to be had—twenty years before Scream“re-invented” irony, CatC has dialogue like “If this is a play, I hope I don’t have the role of first body discovered” and some moments of classic Metzger wit (“Wouldn’t you just die if it was me?” says one potential heir to another.  “Not if I was the next in line.”)
The film also sports the best cast of any Metzger outing.  Carol Lynley stars as the lead heir, who quickly befriends her American cousin (Michael Callan, most recently in Leprechaun 3).  Honor Blackman is on hand as a bitchy huntress who gets the best dialogue, and Olivia Hussey… well, Olivia Hussey mostly gets to stand around and look beautiful, but who’s complaining?  Wilfred Hyde White plays Cyrus West on film, and in the most clever segment, has dinner with the rest of the group as though he’s right there with them.
Metzger’s style is as evident here as it is in any of his erotic pictures, enough so to make you wish he’d done more in the horror field.  Cinematographer Alex Thomson (later of Labyrinth, Alien3 and Branagh’s Hamlet) does a great job, especially in a monologue by the housekeeper Mrs. Pleasant speaking about West seen through the reflection of his photo.
The pace of the film may have been a reason for its unfortunate box-office failure.  It takes over 45 minutes to get going, and things don’t exactly spin into overdrive then, either.  Perhaps the lack of Agatha Christie’s name on this better-than-average mystery film caused folks to think it might not be any good.
Still, it’s great to see this on video again.  The print used is a bit on the rough side, but it’s hard to resist a film like this that has a charm of its own.  It also features some of the most original ending credits of  any movie this side of M*A*S*H.

Intellectual, or at least original, science fiction in film has been getting a resurgence of late, with flicks like Pi, Cube, Dark City and eXistenZ somehow managing to find decent-sized releases.  Lost among these are the artier The Sticky Fingers of Time (an underseen time-travel piece with Henry Fool’s James Urbaniak) and Conceiving Ada, which comes across as part Pi, part Tron, and part BBC docu-drama.
Faridany stars as Emmy, a modern-day computer programmer whose obsession with 19th century mathemtics genius Ada Lovelace (Swinton) helps her to concoct a program that enables the two of them to interact.  It all has something to do with lingering energy and the artificial intelligence Emmy’s created for her computerized dog that serves as somewhat of a sidekick on her time-and-logic-crossing journey.  Timothy Leary communicates with Emma as her mentor only through a blue computer screen, though the effect here comes off as more Freejack than Cronenberg.
After a half-hour of Emmy’s drama with her boyfriend and the discovery that she’s pregnant, the film switches into full-on BBC mode, with Swinton narrating the story of Ada’s life, which unfolds in tepid, blandly-staged Masterpiece Theater-o-vision.  We see her meeting her husband, Charles Babbage, and her attempts to design a language for his “intuitive machine” by giving it a soul.  We see her relationship with cryptographer John Cross, and her promiscuity is treated matter-of-factly.  We hear the narration switch from Swinton to Ada as a little girl and back for no real discernable reason other than to telegraph the conclusion.  Meanwhile, Emmy realizes how much they have in common (for one thing, Karen Black plays both of their mothers) and tries to come up with a way to save her.  To disk, that is.
It’s a clever premise, and most of the cast is willing to pull it off, but it never really makes the transition from “math geek movie” to actually being something a normal human being would want to see.  The filming style, with a few brief exceptions that recall the grid patters of Tron, is really too bland for this sort of topic.  It’s great that noted computer documentarian Leeson wanted to make a film about Lovelace, and the ideas are sound, but a more frenetic or visually-oriented director would have been a better choice to helm.  The Sticky Fingers of Time wasn’t a visual feast either, but at least it had interesting characters and more than by-the-numbers plot twists.  Once you figure out the ideas Conceiving Ada throws at you within the first half-hour, it’s no trouble in figuring out the rest.
The conclusion is, well, exactly the conclusion the movie’s been obviously building up to without the least bit of twist. By that point, you’ll either be enough of a computer whiz to be fascinated or you’ll have already rewound the thing and be on your way back to the video store.  Best bet: Wait for The Sticky Fingers of Time to show up on video instead.

KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park is a definite cult flick, much sought by KISS fans and stared at in disbelief by anyone not caught up on sheer nostalgia.  It’s a product of its time, and that’s what gives it a certain negligible charm.
Detroit Rock City is essentially a remake of Rock and Roll High School by way of American Pie, but with the make up-caked hard rockers in place of the Ramones, and made about twenty years after it would have been popular.  Rif Randall’s character is split up into four teenage boys (including the twentysomething Furlong) on a quest to get tickets for a KISS concert in Detroit after one of their mothers (Shaye, nearly as amusing here as in her There’s Something About Mary turn) burns theirs up, citing KISS being the devil’s music.
Each kid, of course, has their own sub-plot.  Furlong becomes a male stripper and gets involved with Shannon Tweed, one tries to beat up little kids for their tickets, and another tries to sneak in through the back doors.  Each one involves varying degrees of slapstick humor and bland love interests (including Lyonne, who deserves better) mixed in with a seemingly endless barrage of timepieces—8-track tapes, smiley faces, comic books, ninja movies, etc.  It’s as though all there was to do in the ‘70s was simply be in the ‘70s. Nostalgia of the era is a pretty common thing these days, but movies like Dazed and Confused, Boogie Nights and Ted and Venus pull it off without having to resort to sticking in some sort of ‘70s artifact every ten seconds.
One artifact that does deserve mention is the music, and that Detroit Rock City delivers in spades.  Virtually every frame of film is complimented by period music, gleefully devoid of irony.  This, coupled with Rifkin’s frenetic pacing that keeps things moving along so quickly you won’t have time to reach for the eject button, help matters quite a bit.
Detroit Rock City is, in short, dumb as shit.  It's thoroughly unbelievable (Furlong manages to be a hit as a stripper even after vomitting on stage into a pitcher), the dialogue is poor and the characters are virtually impossible to tell apart.  It’s also occasionally funny in a desperate, lowbrow sort of way, has a fine soundtrack and features some decent acting.  You’ll hate yourself for doing it, but you’ll probably end up watching the whole thing like I did.

 
In Frederic Dannen’s “Hong Kong Babylon” (a must-have book for fans of Hong Kong action pics), Howard Hampton refers to Jet Li as “an enigma.  The camera loves him… yet he withholds himself so much he might as well be wearing a hairshirt and a cowl.” This (in my opinion) accurate observation is held up by the choice of Li’s roles in his first two exposures to American audiences in Lethal Weapon 4 and Black Mask.  In LW4, he was a pretty stereotypical villain (albeit with martial arts sequences that were the best part of the film), and in Black Mask, he played an aloof masked superhero.
Never ones to avoid the path of an oncoming Hong Kong bandwagon, Tai Seng have released this 1988 Li film. While they usually do a great presentation job on their larger American re-releases, this one seems to have been re-dumped onto video with nothing but a change in cover box from the original import release.  The tape isn’t letterboxed for one, and the subtitles are the awful white-on-white type and frequently contain entertaining translation mishaps.  When looking at the quality of the film itself, however, the lack of effort isn’t surprising.  Dragon Fight just isn’t good enough to release it with any more hype than the average Yukari Oshima vehicle.
Unlike several low-priced Hong Kong video releases that build up name value on movies the known stars are barely in (if at all), Li actually is the star.  Or, as the credits put it, the film is “Starring By JET LEE.”  Don’t worry, however.  It’s not some “Bruce Li”-type scenario.  Li plays a kung-fu showman who ends up on the run in San Francisco after being framed for the murder of a policeman.  The confusing plot also involves the mob, a fake passport ring and, natch, drug deals, but it’s all kind of under-developed , mistranslated stuff, and several sub-plots simply seem to vanish without notice.  Li, while handsome and a definite screen presence, doesn’t have the Jackie Chan-like charisma to carry a movie without a plot.
Of course, none of this matters if the action is any good.  And it’s… okay.  There are quite a few action scenes, and the whole ordeal is well-paced enough to keep you interested despite not having any clue what’s supposed to be going on, but the fighting itself is rather uninspired.  Sure, you get to see Li do his stuff, and he’s in solid form, but except for the climactic showdown where everyone gets in on the action and Li does some outstanding work with a pole, it’s relatively unmemorable.  At least Tai Seng had the decency to put this out at a reasonable sell-through price.
Is Dragon Fight worth seeing?  Sure, if you’re a fan of Li’s fighting style.  But if you just saw Black Mask and expect this to be more of the same, you’re bound to be a little disappointed.  Don’t worry, however, as the much-better Li vehicle Fist of Legend is due on video in February.
 

Timothy Busfield?  Bland dialogue and characters?  Small cast for a film shot mostly on one set?  Goofy techno-thriller that brings up a couple decent ideas only to cast them away in a sea of mediocrity?  Yes, it’s time again for another TV-movie that a home video studio has decided to release at full-price to fool unsuspecting video stores into buying under the impression that it’s a new film.  It’s even a network movie (if you can call UPN a network) so it means that everyone had a chance to avoid it the first time around.
Mediocre TV-thriller regular Busfield stars as a technology designer whose family moves into a test house he’s created.  The house has a female personality of its own, and one that constantly irritates his family.  It chooses their diet (not taking into account any personal tastes), their music (not bothering to consider that, if the house was properly soundproofed, nobody else could hear their choices anyway) and really, their entire lives.  Busfield is too busy trying to sell the concept to developers to notice the glaringly obvious bugs that any rational businessman would have at least attempted to weed out of the system.  The family’s estranged daughter shows up and the computer house distrusts her as it begins to get closer to Busfield and oddly jealous of Busfield’s wife (Dale in a performance better than the movie deserves).
All this would be fine, of course, if it led up to anything.  The pacing is way too slow to ignore the plot holes the size of Cuba, and scenes seem desperately stretched out in order to make a feature-length film instead of the mildly interesting half-hour “Twilight Zone” episode this should have been.  Why, for example, does an omniscient computer need to listen in on a phone line to hear a call?  And couldn’t it cover up the evidence of it doing so?  The disembodied voice comes off as more irritating and stupid than scary, and any bizarre psycho-sexual relations between it and Busfield are quickly dropped (this is a network movie, after all).  It’s 2001 meets The Amityville Horror, though neither zen like the former nor sleazy like the latter.
So, basically, a whole bunch of stupid characters wander around an oddly-empty and blandly-shot house with a less-than-scary female voice watching over them.  A couple sub-plots involving the daughter’s asshole boyfriend and a nice local cop (who, guess what, once dated the daughter… guess who she ends up with?) add nothing but clichés to an already-useless film.
Sorry, I’m probably going off a little bit more than I need to here, but charging full price for this crap instead of the now-common $15-$30 price range for non-cable TV fare deserves it.  If you really want to see something that would make a great double feature with the similar Busfield-starrer Strays, wait until this shows up on TV again in two to three days.  This is nothing but two hours of filler that’s served its purpose and now needs to be banished to the bowels of late-night cable forever.  I have no idea why it's rated R.