Crazy Joe (1974)
I actually watched this a while back, but have been putting off talking about it because I'm writing a longer review on it. It's taking me longer than I like, so I'm just going to lump
Crazy Joe with the rest of these films. Obviously made because of the success of
The Godfather (1972),
Crazy Joe is a melting pot of the exploitative genre. The director, Carlo Lizzani, and a few of the Italian actors in the film, leave the fingerprints of the Italian
Poliziotteschi genre on
Crazy Joe, while the casting of Fred Williamson brings to recalls
Black Caesar (1971) and the blaxplostation genre, and the film, especially the soundtrack, is aware of this.
Starring Peter Boyle as the titular renegade mobster "Crazy Joe' Gallo, the film is less of a character study of a complex man, but rather a collection of newspaper headlines cut out and pasted into a script. The movie sort of works, filming on location in the dirty, gritty New York of the 1970s definitely gives it an authentic feel, (
Crazy Joe was shot and released in the middle of the Second Colombo War, where bodies were still hitting the streets of New York as a result of Gallo's rebellion and assassination) but you feel like more could have been gotten out of someone like Peter Boyle playing the lead.
Crazy Joe has never been released on video in the U.S., and the only reason I scored a copy is because I was lucky enough to find a region less bootleg on ebay on the cheap. If you can procure a copy, I definitely recommend
Crazy Joe to any fan of the gangster genre. I'll hopefully be posting my extended review soon.
RATING:
Shot Caller (2017)
I was really blown away by
Shot Caller. I've been juggling watching this and
Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017) together as a prison double feature. Well, I only ended up having time for
Shot Caller (hopefully I'll catch
Cell Block 99 tonight), but I was hardly disappointed. Gritty, raw, and a clear indictment of the prison system, the frightening thing about
Shot Caller is how that situation could potentially happen to anyone. For those unfamiliar with the plot, stock broker Jacob Harlon (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) goes to prison after a manslaughter DUI charge. Being his only way to survive, Harlon falls in with a skin head prison gang (Jeffrey Donovan and especially Jon Bernthal are great in these roles) for protection. Little by little he becomes more and more associated with the gang; what first becomes simply passing drugs across prison soon turns into targeted shankings and brawling during prison riots. Harlon, who went into prison a regular guy, transforms into a tattooed thug.
RATING:
Southbound (2015)
If you're in the market for an under the radar anthology horror, there are worse roads to take than
Southbound. Some of the stories clearly fall flat, but there's enough there to keep you interested, though not coming back for more.
RATING:
47 Meters Down (2017)
I wasn't expecting much from
47 Meters Down, but I gotta say, this is just a by the numbers, shark movie, coasting off the success of
The Shallows (2016). Basically one of those movies where you can guess the entire story out of the trailer. I really can't recommend this one; you've seen this movie before and chances are it was better the first time you saw it.
RATING: