Friday the 13th Watch: Friday the 13th (1980)

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Watched:  02/13/2026

Format:  Amazon  

Viewing:  Second - but first since I was a kid

Director:  Sean S. Cunningham

So, when I was a very young kid, my friends who lived near us had (a) a VCR and (b) a sister in high school who rented Rated-R movies.  So, yeah, I saw this when I was 7 or 8.  I am pretty sure I saw it again in middle school, because I very much remember Betsy Palmer going murdery.  

I've never been a huge fan of horror movies where the main attraction is "the kills", and that's absolutely what this movie is.  It's just a lot of set-up (some might say too much set-up) and then people getting murdered by surprise.  

Sure, we get some set-up at the beginning of Camp Crystal Lake being a bad place where bad things happen, but the characters seem unaware of any of that mythology.  They're just going to the toilet and getting murdered there.  

Then, Betsy Palmer shows up as Jason's mom and blows the @#$%ing doors off for the last 1/4th of the movie.  She's great.  And, in fact, the last quarter of the movie is really good, which is how we got something like 9 sequels.  

Technically, I find the movie kind of interesting.  It's *so* voyeuristic, and effectively so, it's been spoofed and borrowed from, etc... to where you really can't do this anymore.  I think this would really speak to De Palma and kinda shows up in Body Double four years later.  Plus, there's some interesting editing - that shot of Alice's face over the lake is nifty.  

You can kind of see the line from Black Christmas to Halloween to Friday the 13th, and I'll argue, this movie does start feeling like a xerox of a xerox by this point.  ALl of the movies have a murderer sneaking around and unsuspecting young folks getting picked off.  And I can't say why this feels un-scary in comparison.  Black Christmas is *upsetting*.  Halloween works like a charm, in part because of Laurie Strode - and this movie just doesn't have that.  Sure, Kevin Bacon appears, but he's also dead pretty quick by comparison.  And we don't spend much time with our final girl (Adrienne King).

The version I watched was restored and looks better than any version I've seen previously.  It's really weird to see a movie of this vintage that is so clearly a B-movie shot on a shoe string with some occasionally iffy acting now looking as clean as anything new.  

I don't know the actual history of the box office or anything on this movie or this series.  I just wasn't watching horror during the period where these were coming out left and right and have no real nostalgia for these movies.  But I might watch the first few.  I've seen them!  I just don't really recall a lot.   But I think Jason doesn't even get the mask til the 3rd movie.  We'll see!

Noir Watch: Illegal (1955)

Watched:  02/13/2026

Format:  DVD

Viewing:  First

Director:  Lewis Allen

First, this movie has a terrible title.  I think we can all agree on that.

Second, this movie has amazing design for the titles.  Never mind that they don't fit the mood of the movie.

I feel like Joe Dante would approve.

Edward G. Robinson, the most surprising of leading men til Danny DeVito's star rose unexpectedly in the 1990's, plays a District Attorney for The City.  He's such a cracker jack, he tries his own cases, until one day he accidentally sends DeForest Kelly to the chair. 

The City does not mess around with swift justice.  Like, Edward G. Robinson only has time for dinner after the trial and already Kelly is a dead man walking.  Though Robinson finds out really as fast as one is like to do, he calls the prison just as the lights flicker.

Anyway - disgraced, Robinson quits his job and spirals into drink.  At the bottom of his lowly state he's recruited by a mob boss who wants an attorney on his side, but Robinson knows that once this guy gets his hooks in you, you're stuck forever and declines.  But after he gets involved in an embezzling case, he finds he's accidentally involved with the crook. 

As DA, he was mentoring Nina Foch who he's tried to not get romantic eyes for, pushing her to his investigator.  And Jayne Mansfield shows up as a plucky piano player (famously, she could very much play the piano and other instruments).  

Involved with the gangster, Robinson's desire to win cases takes over and he doesn't care much who he's getting off the hook, or what insane theatrics he needs to perform to win the case.  And the theatrics are insane, indeed.  

He's beating the pants off the DA with such frequency, they begin to suspect there's a mole and look at Foch, who is actually going to Robinson to chastise him for working for the devil.

SPOILERS

Turns out Robinson's investigator pal is also teamed up with the mob.  When his now-wife finds, Foch, that out, he may murder her to keep her quiet, and, cornered, she shoots him dead.  Now that's noir, baby!  

Robinson has to defend her, and things start spilling out.

Look, this wasn't my favorite movie.  I wasn't overly enamored of Foch, who comes off as a stiff.  It's pretty clear Mansfield is there because the studio knew this about Foch (see the above poster).  

In the end Robinson dies so that the Breen Office could be satisfied.  But all he was doing was his job - look,, winning a case is how this works.  And I get that we want a story about a good man who becomes corrupt, and how that could happen - and his last act of heroism (he is dying from an assassin's bullet in the last scene as he gets Foch off the hook).  But it just never feels as epic as the movie thinks it is.

And I get that they were trying to do something cute with the name "Illegal", but it's kind of indicative of how this movie works.  You can see what they're doing, but it's just not that exciting.

Robinson is watchable enough to carry the movie, but, yeah, this was just not my thing.  

Finland Watch: Sisu (2022)

Watched:  02/11/2026

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  Jalmari Helander

My mother's parents were both from Finland.*  So, growing up, I heard and saw the word "sisu" here and there.  Occasionally I'd see it printed on something, and upon trying to understand what it was, never really put it together.  It's funny, because Sisu (2022) starts by saying the term is "untranslatable", and then spends the runtime of the movie showing instead of telling.  And if you still don't get it by movie's end, ain't no one going to be able to help you.

It will not hurt to Google "Finland in WWII" for a quick synopsis of the rotten position Finland was in before, during and after WWII.  As a nation bordering the Soviet Union, who had tried to claim Finland almost immediately after the Communist take-over, After The Winter War of 1939-1940, Finland lost swaths of land but was not annexed.  Finland sided with the Nazis for several years of the war against the USSR, seeing an alliance as a chance to get the land back.  

In the end, they switched teams, forming an alliance with the Soviets and purging the Nazis from Finland (especially Lapland).  

But that's just the backdrop.

The movie is extraordinarily simple.  A former Finnish soldier, who lost everything (family, home, etc...) during the war with the USSR, has turned his back on people and World War II raging around him.  During the war, he was known as "The Immortal" - seemingly unstoppable and unkillable, and racking up a massive body count.  While war rages around him, he's out in Lapland digging for gold and hanging with his dog.

While riding his horse back to civilization with a coupleof bags of gold, he passes Nazis going back to Germany, the tail end of the Nazi occupation, and leaving with everything behind them burning.  Being Nazis, they begin to mess with our hero, and... then it's mostly a Tom and Jerry cartoon, with Aatami (Jorma Tommila) - aka: The Immortal - killing a whole lot of Nazis and liberating a truckload of comfort women, who are happy to join in on this revenge thing.

It falls in line with a John Wick sort of movie, where a plot is a pretext for action sequences, and the stakes never really get higher or lower than survival on either side.  And, as this movie is 85% blowing up National Socialists, it's hard to dislike.  

The "sisu" in question is Aatami's drive to wipe the map of every last one of these bastards, paired with his endurance to withstand their assaults.  

I was a big fan of Rare Exports when I finally saw it, and Jalmari Helander, the writer/director here, is the same brain behind this movie and its sequel.  He knows how to do *a lot* with what he has on hand - like... Lapland.  He also isn't afraid to swing for the fences with extremes, making most horror movies look tame in comparison to the havoc wrought by Aatami.  

The movie is a bit of a cathartic cartoon, and that's okay.  If the worst thing that happens out of this is we all learn the word "sisu" and embrace the concept, we're none the worse off.

 

*my grandfather was actually from the border of Finland and Sweden and spoke only Swedish until he immigrated to the U.S. and landed in a Finnish community.  In the US he learned both Finnish and English.  And married my Finnish grandmother.  It's also worth noting, my mother was a very late addition to the family, and my grandparents were born between 1898 and 1908, so everything was very old school with them.

The Cosmic "Mean Girls" Stars "Stranded on a Tropical Isle Movie" Connection

and no one ever saw these actors ever, ever again

When walking out of the theater for Send Help, the recent Rachel McAdams thriller directed by Sam Raimi, I confessed to CB that this movie had striking similarities to a recent Hallmark movie I'd watched, which starred Lacey Chabert.  In early January, I'd seen Lost in Paradise.  

Both movies feature someone in the corporate world landing on a tropical island where they kind of discover their true selves.  

I utterly forgot about the Rachel McAdams/ Lacey Chabert Mean Girls connection, perhaps because of the aforementioned Rachel McAdams face-blindness.  

Anyway, here's a whole article on the odd coincidence.  Heavy on the spoilers.  (Thanks, Paul!)

Chabert Watch: What If God Were The Sun? (2007)

Watched:  02/07/2026

Format:  Disc

Viewing:  First

Director:  Stephen Tolkin

We're still working our way through the Chabert-a-Tron 3000, and this checks another box.  I think I've only found one more movie was released on disc, so after that... who knows?

A pre-Hallmark Chabert had such a weird career.  Maybe all actors have an odd, bumpy start, but this movie was made in the thick of the period where Chabert was doing a lot of roles in scrappy indie movies you've never heard of, but then she was getting good work in smaller movies like Reach For Me which feel like they're at least trying to do something a bit more meaningful.  

I'm not really familiar with the Lifetime Network oeuvre, but this movie is much more in line with Reach For Me than it is, say, Be My Baby or The Pleasure Drivers.  And, it's another one of Chabert's movies where she works with one of the greats.  This time, her co-star is Gena Rowlands.

The six degrees of separation with Chabert is bananas.

Wise Noir Watch: Born to Kill (1947)

Watched:  02/07/2026

Format:  DVD

Viewing:  Unknown

Director:  Robert Wise

In the world of film noir, there's movies that are a bit gritty, and then there's movies like Born to Kill (1947) that look around at the shadier movies and say "hold my beer".  

First - we don't talk enough about Claire Trevor.  Stunningly good actor who has been largely forgotten by non-classic film buffs, but who won an Academy Award the year after this movie for her remarkable role in Key Largo.  Trevor didn't just work in noir, but in noir - she's one of the most active women of the genre, and is who you give a role to when you know the character is going to get extreme and you need for them to still feel like someone you might know in real life.  She's also fantastic in Murder, My Sweet, Raw Deal, Dead End, and you might know her from Stagecoach.    

Here, she plays a woman seeking a divorce in classic 1940's fashion - by going to Reno for six weeks and then being granted her divorce.  As she's planning her return home, her neighbor is murdered by a jealous boyfriend, played by Lawrence Tierney.*  She doesn't know it was him, but she stumbles on the bodies but doesn't call the cops - wanting to stay out of whatever happened and just get home.

Welsh Watch: How Green Was My Valley (1941)

Watched:  02/07/2026

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  John Ford

Pondering how many Maureen O'Hara movies I'd actually seen, I noted I'd never seen How Green Was My Valley (1941), a massive Academy Award winner than got Best Picture the year Citizen Kane was nominated.  It's funny as not much changes with the Academy - a deeply sentimental movie with some good social points and dripping with nostalgia beat out a technical and narrative achievement that trades weepy for chilling.  

Based on a popular 1939 novel, the movie retains the approach, like a memoir detailing the various incidents and threads that shape the decline of a mining community in Southern Wales presumably in the late 19th Century.  In addition to O'Hara as the sister in a family with five brothers, the movie's focal point and narrator is a very young Roddy McDowall, who slowly loses his innocence and idyllic youth.  We also have Walter Pidgeon as a pastor at the church, Donald Crisp as the father navigating the changes - sometimes well, sometimes less well.  And there's an army of people you'll recognize from The Quiet Man, part of Ford's company of players.  

First Watch: The Parent Trap (1961)

Watched:  02/05/2026

Format:  Disney+

Viewing:  First

Director:  David Swift

So, The Parent Trap (1961) is one of those movies that gets so heavily referenced, I figured I was good skipping it.  Twins (Hayley Mills and Hayley Mills) are separated at birth, one goes with Mom (a radiant Maureen O'Hara) and one goes with Dad (Brian Keith) - and neither is supposed to know the other exists.  For reasons.

Kids meet at camp, figure out they're sisters, and swap places for a bit til it's time to reveal who they are and force their parents back together.  Wackiness ensues.  

After we finished The Muppet Show special on Disney+, the menu offered up this movie, and I mentioned I'd never seen it, and Jamie insisted.  I mean, it was not exactly a hard sell.  I'll watch Maureen O'Hara read the dictionary.

Anyhoo, my impression of the plot was largely right.  What I wasn't prepared for is the kind of dark sense of humor the movie has, and that it's even a little bawdy at times - for a live-action Disney movie from 1961.  It's really funny.

Yeah, I really liked The Parent Trap.  Who knew?

Up All Night Watch: Assault of the Party Nerds (1989) & Assault of the Party Nerds 2 (1995)

Watched:  01/17 and 02/04/2026

Format:  YouTube - Up All Night

Viewing:  First/ First

Director:  Richard Gabai

Rhonda Shear is back with an all-new version of her 90's show Up All Night, now playing on YouTube.  

Look, I'm not going to discuss these two movies.  They're B movies from jump, and proud of it.  One is a Revenge of the Nerds knock-off, and one is a movie about our lead/ director as now a private detective.

Of note - Linnea Quigley appears in both movies.  Troy Donahue appears in the first.  Burt Ward, Rhonda Shear appear in the second.

While both movies are exactly the stunning material you're used to from Up All Night, the Rhonda-starring Up All Night bumpers are the highlight.  Richard Gambai appears with both movies, but he and Rhonda do a bit of a retrospective and talk about their 90's glory days.  It's kind of interesting to hear about working in the fringes during that period.  

If the show seems like it's trying to figure itself out - in all fairness, Up All Night was also reinventing itself constantly over its 8 year run.  So it's just kind of whatever it needs to be at any given time.

Happy Birthday, Ida Lupino

Happy birthday, Ida Lupino, born this day in 1918.

She's actually British born, but fine, Google robot.

Western Watch: How The West Was Won (1962)

Watched:  02/02/2026

Format:  Disc

Viewing:  First

Directors:  John Ford - Henry Hathaway - George Marshall

The word that leaps to mind watching How The West Was Won (1962) is "spectacle".  Really, I'm not sure I've ever seen anything else quite like it.  

It's a movie with an overture and intermission and exit music.  Its runtime is almost three hours.  There are three big directors!

It was shot for Cinerama - one of two movies ever shot in the format.  It's intended to be a nigh-immersive experience, with three sync'd 35mm projectors running in unison against a curved screen that surrounds you at about 140 degrees.  

Raimi Watch: Send Help (2026)

Watched:  02/02/2026

Format:  Alamo

Viewing:  First

Director:  Sam Raimi

So, two things before we get started.

1.  Back in college, my movie buddy was CB.  We went to film school together back in the day and saw lots and lots of movies together.  Turns out, CB now lives very close to me, and for the first time in decades we were taking in a genre movie like it was the mid-90's all over again.  (I saw Dead Alive with CB, for example).  Shout out to CB!

2.  I have Rachel McAdams face blindness.  It's a serious condition.  Jamie thinks it's a funny game to ask me occasionally who that person is on TV or in an ad or whatever, and I never know who she is.  I have no idea why.  She's a perfectly lovely woman, but if I was the witness when she committed a crime, she'd get off scot free.  Sure, I'll recognize her here, but when she's in her next movie trailer, Jamie will ask me again who that actress is, and I will have no idea.

This is also the third movie I've seen inside of a month that was about getting marooned on an island.  January 4th, we watched a Hallmark movie, Lost in Paradise and last week we watched A Game of Death.  Love an unintentional theme.  

If you've seen the trailer, you know what this movie is about.

Amazon Watch: The Wrecking Crew (2026)

Watched:  01/31/2026

Format:  Amazon Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  Angel Manuel Soto

So, I was a fan of The Expanse, and I saw Frankie Adams - who played Martian Gunnery Sergeant Roberta Draper on the show - was in a new action movie with Jason Mamoa and Dave Bautista.  So, despite some negative stuff I'd seen online, I put on The Wrecking Crew (2026).  

Positives:  

• it does have Frankie Adams
• there's some bits about Hawaiian culture I didn't know
• you get to see Hawaii

Negatives:  

• this movie is terrible

80's Regret Sci-Fi Watch: Millennium (1989)

this is a movie about Cheryl Ladd's hair

Watched:  01/30/2026

Format:  YouTube

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Michael Anderson

So, in 1989, I was 14 and just started high school.  During the summer, at B. Dalton I'd picked up some Starlog-type magazine that had gone all-in on how we should all go see Millennium (1989) upon its release.  I knew who Kris Kristofferson was (I'm from Texas, he's from Brownsville), but not Cheryl Ladd, who was coming off a run of TV shows, etc... that I didn't watch.  She was a thing, but not so much of a thing to those of us exiting middle-school.

The magazine pitched the movie as a dystopian sci-fi epic with a robot, and, hey...  I was sold.  

flight attendant hair

Also, in high school one meets new people, and free from the shackles of knowing me in middle school, a lovely girl and I met, and decided to go on "a date".  What I now get in 2026 that I did not get in 1989:  I guess this girl really wanted to go out with me, because there was no way in hell she wanted to see this dumb-ass movie.*

Catherine O'Hara Merges With The Infinite

I don't know what it says about me that of the famous people whose passing I regularly note, this is maybe the third that genuinely upset me.  Like, tears, and whatnot.  

Doesn't everyone love Catherine O'Hara?

Part of that SCTV crew who went on to do some of the most meaningful work in media of the last fifty years, O'Hara has been everywhere, from Home Alone to Beetlejuice to, most recently, The Studio, to her masterful, beautiful turn as Moira Rose in eighty episodes of Schitt's Creek.  And, of course, all of her roles in the ensemble of Christopher Guest's movies, like A Mighty Wind and Waiting for Guffman.  

Absolutely one of my favorite performers, I am shocked and saddened that she's gone.

Anyway, the other two were David Bowie and Stan Lee.  

Wise Watch: Criminal Court (1946)

Watched:  01/29/2026

Format:  A shady Russian website

Viewing:  First

Director:  Robert Wise

I have to assume this 62 minutes flick was a B-movie in the classic sense.  The term originated not to mean a cheesy movie, but the way movies *used* to work was that you would basically pay to enter the theater any time that night, and there would be the feature movie, or A-movie.  But there would also be cartoons, newsreels, etc...  and a B-movie.  And that generally meant a cheaper feature film that was not as full of stars, big sets, etc...  And usually it had a shorter run-time.  Some of those B-movies were very popular, after all - people were still trying to make something good.*

This movie feels almost like it should be part of a series, but it's not.  There are characters who we just know as "types", so the familiarity makes it feel like you've just walked in during the first Season 2 episode of an ongoing show.  The flick stars Tom Conway as a Matlock-like defense attorney who is prone to in-court antics that would more likely land him in jail than get his clients exonerated.  In fact, to prove one guy is not a credible witness, he fakes a breakdown and wields a revolver in court, threatening people.

Unless that's an approved method on the bar exam.  You lawyers let me know.

Chabert Watch: Be My Baby (2007)

Watched:  01/29/2026

Format:  Disc

Viewing:  First

Director:  Bryce Olson

One of the worst movies I've ever seen.  

Just amazing.

I found this disc for cheap a couple weeks back and have been putting this off because the reviews were not kind.  And for a long time, I was fine avoiding it, because it looked awful.  But here we are.

Be My Baby (2007) wants to be a particular kind of comedy about stunted adulthood and the world's most this-would-never-work scam.  It's entirely misanthropic til its confusing and unearned ending, and I cannot fathom how this got funding if someone didn't just have rich parents.

The script is a trainwreck starting with the concept.  The issues continue with the look and sound of the film - all very "student film" with awkward set-ups and occasional room echoes, etc... which do the movie no favors.  Completely flat lighting, etc.. Wooden acting.  Every take feels like "we're gonna get this in two takes and then we have to move on."  A product of a low-rent production.  Fine.  I've seen way worse.

But, my god, the actual story....

I don't know what was going on in Los Angeles from about 1995-2015, but the belief in the baseline shittiness of humanity that drives the whole premise of so many of these low budget movies is absolutely wild.

Wise Watch: A Game of Death (1945)

Watched:  01/27/2026

Format:  YouTube

Viewing:  First

Director:  Robert Wise

Technically I should have watched The Body Snatcher (1945) next in my Robert Wise movie marathon, but I just watched that in April, so I'm going to save it for October.  It's a solid horror entry, so let's do that in the spooky season.

So, instead, I found A Game of Death (1945) on YouTube.*

Minimal surprises here, really.  It's an adaptation of the Richard Connell short story The Most Dangerous Game, which might as well be called "the most frequently adapted/ riffed upon/ re-done plot in movies".  

A wartime-era movie, it stars people who were not part of the war effort, and the only familiar face was Audrey Long, who will also be in the movie again in two movies when we hit Born to Kill.  Our lead is John Loder, who, honestly I simply don't recognize, but he's in Now, Voyager, so.  

I give Robert Wise and RKO a lot of credit here.  They don't shy away from the implications of the film, or how psychotic everything is, even if they give our villain an out - that he's suffering some sort of mental instability since he got crosswise with a Cape Buffalo that bonked him on the head.**

But the vibe of the movie is dark from the start as we watch a ship get tricked into wrecking itself, and swiftly realize it was intentional, everyone else is dead, and what our hero has walked into.  And what plans our villain (Edgar Barrier) has for the stranded woman once he offs her brother.  

The two servants are appropriately creepy, Gene Roth playing the cruel German henchman and Hollywood utility player Noble Johnson.  

The hunt sequence makes excellent use of someone's jungle sets, and Wise puts the camera behind the hunted in some visually striking sequences.  

All in all, the movie is fine.  It feels smarter than you'd expect here and there - allowing our hero to never be an idiot or be more than a step behind the audience and what it knows, and maybe a few steps ahead.  

The one thing I'd say that could have been hilarious would have been if when the villain gives our hero a knife before sending him into the jungle, if dude would have stabbed the baddie right there and proclaimed himself the winner.   I honestly don't know why he didn't.  

*I now have a policy of "it's fine" if I watch a movie on YouTube that has been uploaded by someone unofficial.  Look, the studios are refusing to make a lot of movies available via legitimate means, which means they've abandoned both the movies and the audience for those movies.  If they want money, they need to stop letting accountants drive decisions regarding access.  They can put the movie on YouTube as easily as MovieFiend668 or whatever

**I just recently watched a YouTube on how dangerous Cape Buffalo are - and they're responsible for an absurd number of human deaths each year.

Chabert Freeze Watch: All of My Heart (2015)

Watched:  01/24/206

Format:  Hallmark

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Peter DeLuise

I am logging everything.  Normally I wouldn't have mentioned this re-watch, but this is what we put on while we were waiting to see if we were going to lose power on Saturday night.  

As your foremost Chabert movie expert, this is definitely one of the better written parts she's been given at Hallmark, and she works very well with co-star Brennan Elliot.  

If you're worried you're about to lose power and need to put something on while you panic mildly, this is perfectly fine.

Noir Watch: Shield for Murder (1954)

Watched:  01/26/2026

Format:  TCM Noir Alley

Viewing:  First

Directors:  Edmond O'Brien and Howard W. Koch

This movie has some really interesting stuff, and maybe exploits some of the actual issues cops deal with for entertainment and shock value.  It's not the best movie - it drags in some places and feels like it's stretching to reach feature length once you kind of see where all of this is going.  But thematically, it's right there in the mix with the darker noir films.

Police detective Barney Nolan (Edmond O'Brien) kills a man in an alley and takes a stack of money off of him - $25,000 (roughly $300K in 2025 dollars).  He tells his pal and fellow cop Mark (John Agar - the ex Mr. Shirley Temple) that he was trying to bring in the bookmaker, but things got messy and shots were fired.

Soon after, Barney is picking up his young girlfriend, Patty (Marla English) and showing her a model home he says he'll buy.  Meanwhile, he hides the money beneath the house.

A pair of Private Eyes, thugs from the gangster who the money belonged to, start snooping around.  And a witness comes forward who saw everything, and Barney can't have that.

The movie has a scene with a platinum blonde Carolyn Jones as a bar fly.  

The basic gist of the film is a character study of a cop who has always been a good guy, but he's worn down by everything he's seen, and the knowledge he'll never get ahead while the crooks run around with $25,000.  How far will he go for his slice of the pie?  And how crazy will it make him?

As Eddie Muller hinted at during the intro, it just doesn't seem like Edmond O'Brien is anyone's favorite - and I'm probably in agreement.  He's not a bad actor, he's just not a favorite, but he's in enough noir films, he starred in two of three I watched this weekend.  Clearly this movie meant a lot to him, and he directs himself just fine here.  But never has it been more clear that a star was twice the age of the woman he's paired with and with so little chemistry.  It's just hard to buy.

There are some dynamite sequences, like a brutal sequence where we realize how far gone O'Brien is when he's cornered by the detectives in an Italian restaurant.  And a shoot-out at an indoor pool.

Anyhoo, I've seen that poster above for years and never came across the movie itself, so it's a delight to finally watch the thing.