'THE YOUNG RUNAWAYS'.....TROUBLED TEENS IN TORMENT, AS VIEWED BY MIDDLE-AGED HOLLYWOOD SHLOCK MERCHANTS.....

 The Young Runaways (1968)

     Way back in the 1950's  American International, run by low budget moguls James Nicholson and Sam Arkoff, discovered an untapped, unserved demographic goldmine for their cheapo, slapped-together-in-2-weeks-or-less movies.....

         Teenagers! Millions of kids blowing their allowance money on triple-features showing at their neighborhood drive-in movie theaters. 

         And what could be more profitable than cranking out fast buck junk that let the kids see themselves depicted on screen...... as angry delinquents misunderstood by their out-of-touch parents, bullied by their teachers and other authority figures.....and sometimes turned into teenage Frankensteins and Werewolves....

         Teen Grindhouse movies were steadily ground out throughout the 1950's and into the  60's, but with few exceptions, they were produced, written and directed by middle-aged, veteran warhorses of Grade C to Grade Z cinema. (The new generation of film-school wunderkinds were only just emerging....)

         To put it bluntly, movies aimed as teens were cobbled together by cynical, cigar chomping hacks for whom teens were as alien a species to them as H.G. Wells's invading Martians. 

But that didn't stop them from exploiting teens and their problems as a fast track to boffo box-office.....

          Which brings us to the murky melodramatics of 'The Young Runaways'. Spiffed up in color and widescreen, it focuses on the issue of  upper middle class suburban kids, disaffected from their parents and school, who take off and hit the mean city streets on their own.  And hoo boy....woe is them and cue the cautionary tales.........

         For easy digestion, the three kids involved are spiffed up as well, looking as scrubbed and clean as if they wandered off from 'The Brady Bunch'.

         Sweet, adorable Shelly (Brooke Bundy), feeling unloved and ignored for by her wealthy widowed dad (Lloyd Bochner), takes a hitchhiking route to who knows where.

         Boy-next-door Dewey (Kevin Coughlin) flees home unable to deal with the repercussions of not using a condom when canoodling with his girlfriend....oops....

         Far-from-shy Deannie (Patty McCormick, still as fierce-eyed as when she played the moppet murderess of 'The Bad Seed'), flees from her bullying, braying horrorshow mom (Lynn Bari). 

      Our tormented trio end up on the streets of Chicago, where they meet their various fates as they encounter good and bad eggs.....everybody from a caring halfway house advisor (Dick Sargent) to vicious pimps and even crazier musicians.  You could easily guess for yourselves which one's most likely to end up not breathing by the end.

        But we doubt you'll have any trouble figuring out the trajectory of the film's wild card, an unstable manic car thief and draft dodger played by a young Richard Dreyfuss, honing his unique, frenzied style we'd all come to enjoy as his career progressed.....

       To give you an idea of how realistic or up-to-date this movie was about 1968 adolescence,  consider this.....the director's first film was in 1937 and screenwriter's first produced script dates back to 1950......probably the only research these guys ever did on teenagers came from watching Sally Field in 'Gidget' reruns and Shirley Temple in 'The Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer' on the late, late show.

       The film overall stinks of a flat, bland made-for-TV drama and started to make us long for AIP's long string of juvenile delinquent and biker movies. At the very least, those schockmeisters knew how to brazenly pander to their intended audience.....

       In a way, this hopelessly archaic, clueless artifact served as perfect example of the crumbling of the studio system.......with producers, directors and writers long past their prime flailing as they desperately tried to reach the exploding 'youth market'. For them, their slow march to the tar pits had already commenced....

       For curators of obscure 1960's cinema only....for most everybody else, we'd advise running in the other direction from these Runaways.

       1 star (*).   

          

        

     

        

         

          

'OPERATION KID BROTHER' ('O.K. CONNERY').....SEAN'S YOUNGER BROTHER HITCHES A RIDE ON THE BONDWAGON......

Operation Kid Brother (a.k.a. O.K. Connery) (1967)

      Given that one of this blog's sacred missions is to  seek out and unearth the strangest, craziest, most ridiculous obscure films ever made we can only ask ourselves.....

       How in the holy hell did it take us this long to get around to this one?????? 

         Really, this should've been one of the first movies, if not the first to start off BQ our long and winding pulp cinema yellow brick road.....

     In the universe of cheap, knock-off EuroSpy James Bond imitations, this film shines as the Holy Grail of loony toon faux-007 madness. 

      Italian produced (as were the bulk of the EuroSpy canon), the film doesn't merely offer Sean Connery's younger non-acting brother Neil as the....what else, younger brother of Britain's top secret agent....

      There's more!  This movie offers nothing less than a plethora of Bond movie actors in supporting roles.....Bernard Lee ('M'), Lois Maxwell (Miss Moneypenny), Adolfo Celi (Largo from 'Thunderball') Anthony Dawson (Professor Dent from 'Dr. No' and Blofeld from 'Thunderball'), and Daniela Bianchi (Tatiana from 'From Russia With Love').

        (Also wandering around the film is a character named 'Lotte' and obviously made up to look like Lotte Lenya's 'Rosa Klebb' villain.)

         And even more icing on the cake..... an Ennio Morricone score!......which starts off the main titles with the title tune 'O.K. Connery' warbled and shrieked by a singer billed as 'Khristy'......(she sounds like she'd auditioned to become one of the screaming howlers from Morricone's 'Navajo Joe' soundtrack.....)

        But now let's get down to business. How good, bad, or awful is 'Operation Kid Brother'? 

         Well, in the pantheon of euro-trashy Euro-Spies, the film's much better than most of them, not quite as good as a few others and more than fulfills its goal to provide check-your-brains-at-the-door, guilty pleasure joy. 

         Unintentionally, it's at least as funny as the  Austin Powers trilogy....but then again, those films were designed to make you laugh on purpose. 'Operation Kid Brother' doesn't have to work that hard for its giggles......it just is what what it is.....

         Connery the Younger, an Edinburgh plasterer fired for losing his tools, wasn't much of an actor,  but with a striking resemblance  to his Big Bro, he cut an imposing enough figure....lookin' good as he beat up minions and smooched the girls.  And that backup cast of beloved Bond vets turned the film into an instant one-of-a-kind.

         We won't bother explaining the usual ludicrous EuroSpy plot, involving an 'atomic nucleus' and a magnetic ray that renders all the world's metal weaponry useless.....if you're a fan of these films, you know the drill....

          Every so often though, you will see some unique screwball stuff......a remote control driverless car, a yacht crewed by beautiful Bond-ian babes, and a factory producing (don't ask) radioactive rugs, manned by blind beggars sustaining radiation burns as they work the looms. 

        (We bet Dr. NO never thought of that....._

       For all EuroSpy devotees, great, great 3 Star jollies await you. (***). 

        For MSTK-3000 fans, there's an episode devoted to the film, but chances are, given enough beer and popcorn, you could throw in your own comments just as withering.......  

HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM THE BEACHED QUILL!.....SOMEHOW, WE ALL MADE IT TO CHRISTMAS....

 Happy Holiday wishes to all BQ visitors.... from America to the whole wide world....

     It's been a horrifying, abysmal, infinitely depressing year to get through.....all thanks to one man, his minions and to his similar evil despots whom he so admires....

      But we've made it to Christmas at least.....and there are hopeful signs, glimmers of light in the dark, that bit by bit, piece by piece, he's coming apart at the seems. that the wheels are wobbling on his fascist bullet train.....and it's possible to hope and pray that the end of him may arrive way sooner than we dreamed of.....

      Meanwhile, happiest of holiday seasons to you and yours......be back with you after Christmas!

And to everybody.......

'THUNDERBALL'......HAPPY 60TH TO THE MOVIE THE WHOLE WAITED FOR.....

 Thunderball (1965)

     We're very aware that as a lifelong Bond-o-maniac, we've posted on this film previously (12/7/19). 

        But what the hey.....it's been 60 years since 'Thunderball' opened worldwide to such thunderous anticipation and box office, downtown first fun theaters had to turn themselves into grindhouses, showing the film 24 hours around the clock. 

        Yes, boys and girls.....back in the day, not only could you catch a showing of 'Thunderball' at 3 in the morning, you could stay in the theater to watch it enough times until your eyeballs had the Bond gun barrel logo permanently imprinted on them. 

         And plenty of Bondphiles did exactly that. 

         If the 1960's are too much ancient history, you might be asking us.....Really? Why all the frenzy over this one movie? What was the big deal? 

         We'll explain:  One year earlier, in December of 1964, 'Goldfinger' , the quintessential template for all the subsequent Bonds, captured the world's imagination like no other film in history.

         More rapid than Covid, the globe was infected with Bondmania. The girls! The  gadgets! The car! The creepy bad guys! And the coolest pop culture hero ever, perfectly embodied by that young Scotsman, Sean Connery. TV became flooded with Bond rip-off series, Hollywood and European studios began grinding out feature film imitations like sausages rolling off a perpetual conveyor belt. 

        We all had our fun with the many knock-offs, but the film we breathlessly awaited for, the film that kept us salivating with Bond-ian hunger, was 'Thunderball'......the 1965 Christmas present we couldn't wait to seize and wallow in a non-stop orgy of Bondgasms......

        Hundreds upon hundreds of ravenous Newspaper and TV reporters flocked around the film's shooting in the Bahamas, and world gobbled up and savored every nugget of news they could scrounge out. 

         Finally December of 1965 arrived and what was billed as the biggest, most spectacular Bond of all hit the theaters. Millions lined up in theaters from Tokyo to Berlin to Paris to Rome to New York and every other major city in the USA. 

         You might ask....was it worth it? Did the movie fulfill every glorious dream the fans had for it?

          By and large....yes. Everything we ever wanted was in place.....action, spectacle, smokin' hot girls, luxurious settings and Connery at his lethal yet casual coolest.  The red hot Bond fever that took hold of us all hit white hot temperature. 

          And then finally cooled down a bit....

          Bond films settled down to become a steady, expected part of pop culture, so the orgiastic fever surrounding 'Thunderball' finally broke after its release. Sean Connery grew weary of the intrusive attention paid to him and bowed out of Bondage after the next film, "You Only Live Twice" which, we dare say, showed signs of him looking bored while playing the role. 

          But 60 years ago, moviegoers popped their eyes over 'Thunderball' like kids who got a new puppy for Christmas. 

           Pardon us now.....time to watch it yet again as a Holiday treat....forever and always  5 stars (*****).

WEEKEND MADNESS WRAP-UP......SPECIAL"....LIKE THE WORLD HAS NEVER SEEN BEFORE!" EDITION....

 

And finally.....in the spirit of the horrific, deranged, demented Holiday season we're all suffering through.....a tale of a very MAGA Christmas....

To BQ visitors.....happiest and healthiest holidays to you all for the coming week and New Year....

To Trump voters and MAGA Zombies....remember to keep those toy and food purchases down to a bare minimum. Be prepared to submit receipts for your holiday purchases for examination by White House officials. Forward any McDonald's coupons directly to the Oval Office.

'ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER'......A MODERN DAY REVOLUTIONARY WAR.....IMAGINED AS AN EPIC COMEDY OF ERRORS AND TERRORS......

One Battle After Another (2025) 

     Nothing makes our heart beat faster than a film whose director threw caution to the wind and swung for the fences.....

     Sure, the results can be sloppy, messy, overlong, uneven in tone and sometimes even ridiculous. All part of the risk....that is, if the filmmaker's unafraid to take it. 

     But you know what?  That's how truly great movies tha stand the test of time come into this world.....flawed, but brimming with a fierce ambitious fervor, an in-your-face insistence that can't be denied or ignored.

     And that sums up 'One Battle....' written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson who took his inspiration from the Thomas Pynchon novel 'Vineland'.    

             Conceived as a sprawling epic of violent clashes between opposing forces of American zealots, Anderson lets it all play out in front of a more intimate primal story......that of a wayward father trying to reconnect with a daughter all but lost to him amid the social and political upheavals they've been sucked into. 

       Sound too heavy for words? Not at all, since PTA views these feverish melodramatics with a winking satiric eye, much like Stanley Kubrick accomplished in "Dr. Strangelove".......a dryly humorous, sly view of the war between authoritarians and those who consider it their holy mission to resist them.  

      We start some years back, where explosives expert Pat 'Rocketman' Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) blows stuff up for left wing revolutionaries 'The French 75', along side one of its guiding lights, Pat's fiery, ferocious partner Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor, in an award worthy performance.)

       Perfidia, a powerhouse force, caught the mad, mad eye of the military scourge of radicals,  Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn)  She's not above using sex as a weapon against the conflicted, sexually obsessed loon ; she escapes him to drop out of sight, leaving a hapless Pat to raise their baby daughter Willa. Some 16 years later, Pat's a drug addicted drunk couch potato but teenage Willa (Chase Infiniti) has her mother's aggressive, independent moxie and deeply resents what Pat's reduced himself to.

        The fanatical Lockjaw, now in charge of rounding up illegal immigrants, has also joined a cabal of fascist, racist American oligarchs who've dubbed themselves the Christmas Adventurers Club. Fearing this slimy bunch will revoke his membership if they discover his forbidden passion for Perfidia, he sets his gunsights on Willa. And this finally rouses Pat to save his daughter with the help of the French 75 and Willa's Karate class Sensei, who also engineers immigrant escape routes. (Benicio del Toro, as deadpan hilarious as he is in Wes Anderson's films.)

       The other renowned Anderson, Paul Thomas, keeps 'One Battle' in constant bubbling, boiling motion, with bravura filmmaking every step of the way. Everyone in the cast, from DiCaprio down to the actors with only brief screen time, all work at the very top of their game. Special mention must go to Jonny Greenwood's startling score, sometimes erupting in ear grabbing percussion when the stakes are raised. 

        On this film, we at BQ cast our vote with the consensus already arrived at by most critics.....it easily takes its place as one of the best films of the year, a must watch for all cinephiles.  5 stars (*****).