Rock's Cheapo Theatre of the Damned

Rock, have you ever visited the site Temple of Schlock? I feel like you’d enjoy it. It’s a site dedicated to movies that are obscure, including movie ads from various cities during their sometimes limited theatrical run as well as movies with multiple titles through the years.

Actually, I should extend this to DMKS, Crumbs, Stu, Wooley, Takoma, Speling et all.

Never heard of it, but I'll check it out.

__________________
IMDb
Letterboxd

Thanks for the tip. Took a peek and definitely looks up my alley. Will have to dive deeper later.

__________________

Delivers what the title promises, with Jack Baker and his buddies extolling the virtues of having sex with white women to convince their one friend who disagrees. I understand this is something of a landmark in interracial porn, and I'm not smart enough to unpack this extremely loaded subject. I will however say that while the movie isn't exactly politically correct, I found the handling of this material much less confrontational than in some of Gregory Dark's other films that I've seen. I sought this out for the presence of Baker and Lois Ayres, who displayed some nice adversarial chemistry when they appeared together in Dark's Devil in Miss Jones diptych. Alas they share no screentime and Ayres barely has any dialogue, although Baker is pretty enjoyable, playing well off his co-stars and exhibiting strong comedic timing. Notice how he chooses the perfect moments to adjust his hat, throw a sideways glance or curl his lips into a mischievous smile.

Baker and friends make their arguments by recounting sexual encounters with white women, although the credibility of the stories seems increasingly strained as the movie progresses. When two of the friends claimed to abort a burglary because they were watching the inhabitants of the house have a lesbian threesome, I had to call bullsh_t. Also, Baker refers to himself as the "king of the pimps", but we don't see him do much pimping, and in fact he gets paid to have sex himself. I don't believe Baker's character should bear any shame in being a sex worker (and it's certainly preferable to the more malicious crimes his friends admit to), but I guess gigolos are only considered cool when played by Richard Gere in Armani suits. In any case, these stories are more compelling than the poorly articulated reservations of the one friend, whose case falls apart entirely when Baker decides to hook a brother up in the final scene. (Okay, I guess Baker does some pimping in this one scene.)

This is not a stylish affair (Dark's visual style would evolve significantly with New Wave Hookers), but the extremely catchy hip-hop/electro soundtrack makes the proceedings fairly enjoyable. If you were the type to lean on Cliff's Notes back in high school, the title track does summarize Baker's arguments fairly succinctly, while a reprise of the song with alternate lyrics highlight the speculative nature of the recollections. Were these characters meant to be unreliable narrators? Was the whole film meant to be ambiguous? Was this Dark's way of subverting the tropes he deploys? The jury's still out.

When you call your movie Beyond De Sade, one would expect that your movie would at least get to De Sade, if not go past it. This movie does no such thing. The majority of the action here is entirely vanilla, with only the introduction of a frighteningly large set of anal beads providing anything resembling kink. Our star Marilyn Chambers explains "You can't act with a fist up your butt" in a cutaway interview before we see it being used in slow motion. To paraphrase Lionel Hutz, this is as egregious a case of false advertising as The Neverending Story.

The movie is basically a half hour sexual performance by Chambers, first doing a solo act and then being joined by two female co-stars. (One of them is played by Erica Boyer, credited under a different name, in what IMDb cites as her porn debut. I didn't recognize her, as she looks quite a bit different from the sleeker, bleach blonde look she would later adopt.) The action takes place in a dark room with a bed in the middle, with Chambers and her co-stars gyrating around the space before hopping on the bed. A group of masked men watch from the shadows, who occasionally reach out to cop a feel when Chambers gets close, the reflections from the wristwatches and their flashlights puncturing the dark void of the room. This has some aesthetic similarities with Behind the Green Door, the landmark adult film that was the debut of both Chambers and the Mitchell brothers, as the earlier movie was similarly shrouded in darkness and full of disconnected images (in that case, close-ups of hairy private parts). I found this one a bit more enjoyable as it at least sketches out a bit of spatial coherence with respect to its setting, and the camera is usually pulled back enough (even when going for zooms) so that you can tell what the hell you're looking at.

All three performers briefly twirl around in flowy dresses (Chambers in red, the others in white) when they first appear. These moments arguably provide the highlights of the film if you are like me and like seeing flowy dresses shot in shadowy environments. For everybody else watching, the ****ing is probably the highlight. From what I've seen of her work, Chambers is probably not a great actress, but is certainly a very energetic performer, and if you're watching this movie for those reasons, you'll probably enjoy her work here. Personally, I greatly preferred her in Insatiable, which doesn't have a lot on its mind but is much nicer to look at and actually finds an atmosphere to match her vivacity. This one does hold some non-prurient interest in the interview segments that punctuate the proceedings, where Chambers explains what she gets out of this line of work. I enjoyed these moments, even if they were few and far in between.

Now, most people will find roughies to be entirely distasteful. I mean, it's a genre that uses sexual assault for titillation and entertainment. What right thinking person would enjoy this? But suppose, like me, you've watched enough unpleasant movies, and your brain has been sufficiently rotted by this excessive diet of sleaze, and your previous ideas of taste have been thoroughly eroded. Were you in such a state of mind, you might concede that the genre could be executed well, and you might be willing to appreciate when a movie did something differently or attempted to alleviate some of the more unpleasant aspects of the genre. In that respect, I think Zebedy Colt's Terri's Revenge! is worth a look. Our protagonist Terri Hall is married to man with whom she is deeply in love, only for him to reveal himself as the world's worst husband when he helps his buddy rape her. Traumatized, Hall takes up with a friend who too was raped by her own husband, and the two join forces to take revenge on rapists by giving them a taste of their own medicine.

Now, as far as the genre goes, the movie does deliver the goods, and the sex scenes are full of the requisite close-ups. But at the same time, the camera's gaze feels a little different than usual. Notice how it lovingly captures the bodies of the male performers, instead of highlighting their unsavoury qualities. Even the anatomical close-ups feel a bit less perfunctory. The effect is that the rape scenes feel a bit less mean-spirited than they can be in this genre. I went in with the knowledge that Colt himself was gay, so I perhaps I am reading that into the proceedings more than another viewer might. I concede that as a straight dude my attempts at a queer reading of this movie will likely be extremely dumbassed, but I'm already this far into the paragraph so you're stuck with me now. I think the casting of Hall plays into this skewing of the usual genre dynamic as well. Hall is perhaps less conventionally attractive than the average porn starlet, but I say this not to disparage her appearance (I find her interesting looking), but to note how it changes the film's energy. To the extent that Colt tries to capture her unusual beauty, he emphasizes not her femininity but her wiry musculature and stark features (accented by her high contrast make-up). There's a certain camp element to her presence, enhanced by her line deliveries (you can detect a bit of Helen Lovejoy in the way she says "Leave!"). Like in The Devil Inside Her, her unusual presence complements the film's overall tone, but I appreciated that her character is more proactive this time around.

I wouldn't say Colt entirely subverts the genre, but you can see how he brings it to a different wavelength, less interested in rubbing the audience's nose in the ugly subject matter than finding some off-kilter entertainment in the proceedings. I watched one of Colt's other roughies, The Farmer's Daughters, recently and found that one indifferently filmed and unpleasant, whereas this feels a lot more engaged and maybe a little fun (as far as these things go). Probably the most provocative element here is how Colt juxtaposes consensual and non-consensual sex, not so much to blur the lines and conflate the two as these movies tend to do, but to show how the heroines repurpose their trauma and find a sense of agency in their situation. The movie is perhaps hampered by its modest scale, as Hall's rampage only consists of two sex scenes, although I appreciate Colt's use of a newspaper montage to shortcut to some level of grandeur, and the use of exterior shots of crumbling pre-cleanup New York locations give the whole thing a nice coating of grime. It's also worth noting that Hall's revenge spree consists of female domination sex scenes, which is a nice counterpoint to the male dominant scenes that pervade the genre. (And if I'm being perfectly honest, I found them a lot more enjoyable.) The climax is a doozy, with a medieval Viking porno movie being projected while Hall seduces, only to turn the tables on him with the arrival of her friend (spoiler alert: paddling ensues). Colt matches the escalation of the concurrent sex scenes but contrasts the male dominant dynamic of the projected scene to the female dominant dynamic of Hall's revenge, as if Hall was weaponizing the misogyny of her target against him. There is a further attempt to further complicate the proceedings, but while this doesn't turn full on into Ms. 45, I appreciated the sentiment.

When Night Hunger first opens, you could be forgiven for thinking you've put on a low budget horror movie. The forest roads, the thick fog, the brooding synthesizer feel like they were pulled directly from some first wave slasher. Indeed, for at least its first third, Gerard Damiano repurposes horror movie aesthetics to give the movie a certain charge. The story follows Jerry Butler (in a non-sex role) dropping in on a roadside tavern and striking up conversation with the bartender, who tells him about a mansion owned by a mysterious, sex crazed family. Apparently, the condition is congenital, and the bartender relates to Butler stories across three generations: one from the turn of the century, one from the Prohibition era, and one from the sixties. While the anthology structure in other hands might be an easy excuse to string together unrelated footage, Damiano ties them together thematically while stretching his stylistic muscles.

The first scene has Eric Edwards dividing his attention between his wife, played by Honey Wilder, and his harem. Shot in a desaturated, sepia colour scheme, Damiano gives the scene a certain insular, chamber drama quality, and cuts it for maximum fluidity, so that the participants start to blend together. In Edwards' eyes, all his partners are interchangeable. You also have to hand it to Edwards and Wilder for being able to wring emotional resonance out of their dialogue while frenetically bumping uglies. The second sequence has Sharon Mitchell running a brothel during Prohibition, dividing her attention between the piano player who is in love with her and the endless stream of clients she leaps to service. This sequence is in black and white, which gives the proceedings a certain fatalism. Once again the character's sexual drive has undermined any basis for real emotional connection. (It's also worth noting that Mitchell looks stunning in her sleek, elegant dress, but I may be a bit biased as I have a soft spot for her.) The third segment moves the action to the sixties, with Sharon Kane playing a singer whose nymphomania has alienated the keyboardist with whom she has a relationship. This is the one segment I will dock a few points on an aesthetic level, as the costuming of Kane's band (including her headband and two dancers with leather hats) suggests a late '70s act. The music also doesn't sound like anything from the '60s, although assuming she wasn't lip syncing, Kane does have a decent singing voice. The self loathing intensifies with this segment, illustrated succinctly with a device that probably won't be everyone's cup of tea but should probably inspire a tip of the hat to Damiano's erotic imagination.

The segments cover similar thematic territory, but rather than feeling stale, Damiano uses the repetition to hammer home his theme of excessive sexual desire undermining any real chance for emotional connection. (Damiano has a number of movies that express an ambivalence towards free love, and this is very much in line with those, but the following year he made Throat... 12 Years After which has an unabashedly sex positive message strictly at odds with the worldview here.) And aside from its use of horror-adjacent aesthetics (if you replaced all the ****ing in the movie with stabbing and slashing, how different would it feel from all the cheapo horrors that were churned out in those years?), this movie has maybe the most atypical soundtrack I've heard in a porno movie. You've got Vangelis synths, pan flutes, Jaco Pastorius style bass, steel guitar and an organ doing overtime, all of which combine to give this a very distinct mood.

The movie arguably fumbles in its final stretch. The movie reveals Butler's true intentions, which seem entirely divorced from the stories we've been subjected to and fails to pay them off with any satisfaction. But at the same time, it's hard to stay too mad at the movie because it compensates with cameos from Candida Royalle and Damiano himself, who assures Royalle that her outfit is great and that "puce is one of [his] favourite colours." It's a fun scene, even if it's totally the wrong one for the movie to end on.

When I started my first full time, permanent job after graduation, like with many corporate jobs, I got to attend a bunch of orientation workshops. Most of these were pretty standard "what it's like to work at this company" sort of stuff that didn't stay with me, and to be honest, I was mostly counting the hours until I could get back to my day job. Some of these however did try to instill in us soft skills that might be useful to us in our careers. There was one pretty surreal one about dining table etiquette, insisting that things should only be passed around the table in one direction (I forget if it was clockwise or counter-clockwise, but the specifics were apparently very important) and that we should keep our hands on the edge of the table at all times, because otherwise people wouldn't know what we're doing with them. (This was generally considered the comedic highlight of the event.) But there was also one about your personal brand, which normally sounds like the vague ******** I'd hoped to leave behind in my undergraduate studies, but here was focused on fairly specific and practical advice (where to do your shopping, what to focus on in terms of alterations, etc.). I found this especially useful as at the time I dressed like shit and had no real concept of these things. But one thing did stay with me, in a not so positive way. The person running the workshop insisted that women would be perceived less seriously than men, and to compensate, a woman needed to at least be wearing a blazer in order to be taken as the equal of a man in a dress shirt and dress pants (but no blazer or suit).

This is something that came back to me as I watched Mike Nichols' Working Girl, which is essentially about this idea. The heroine looks to get ahead in business and has the smarts and gumption to do so, but because of a number of factors (primarily her gender, but also her class), she struggles to be taken seriously until she stumbles into a golden opportunity when her new boss ends up out of commission due to a skiing accident. The movie is mostly a lighthearted comedy and does not force upon the proceedings any sort of pat arc about the heroine losing her soul as she succeeds professionally, but at the same time is very astute about the extent to which she has to manage the way she presents herself in order for her gambit to work. And it's also perceptive about the way these unspoken rules place an extra burden on women. The villain of the piece is represented by the heroine's boss, who initially planned to steal her idea and pass it off as her own, but there is the suggestion that her sociopathy is arguably a survival mechanism in the ruthless corporate world. When we first meet this character, she seems to be saying all the right things to get us on her side, but the movie subtly interrogates a certain misogyny in our gaze. Nothing she says or does seems all that reassuring. But why?

Interestingly, this is set in the world of finance and was released after Wall Street and the stock market crash of 1987. Yet it seems fairly indifferent to that line of work, other than as a representation of a flashy, high-powered business world. (Were this remade now, it would likely be about tech bros in Silicon Valley. The actual industry is beside the point.) And of course, being set in that world, it features no shortage of impeccably dressed characters. But the main concern from a makeup and costuming perspective seems to be the characters' hair. The hairdos here are largely architectural wonders, defying gravity through ungodly amounts of hairspray and who knows whatever product. The heroine's transformation pointedly includes her trimming her voluminous coiffure into a more compact, business-like helmet, while the male lead's relatively unpretentious haircut suggests to us that, unlike most of the men in this movie, he might actually be a good guy.

The casting is crucial to the film's success. With respect to Melanie Griffith, Ebert cites a commonality with her roles in Body Double and Something Wild in the characters' desires for respectability. This is correct, but I think what's really key here is the way she's able to imbue some warmth into characters with hard exteriors, a quality which keeps us firmly on her side. (I think you can add her role in Fear City to this group.) As her boss, Sigourney Weaver nails a certain subtle iciness meant to keep us on her toes about her intentions, and while she's out of commission for most of the movie, makes her return by tapping into some of the physicality of her better known roles. And as the love interest, Harrison Ford, who I think sometimes doesn't get the respect he deserves as an actor, displays almost perfect comedic timing, like in a scene where he leans in to kiss Weaver and quickly leans back to avoid her embrace without missing a beat. There are also some great supporting performances, including Joan Cusack as Griffith's friend, representing the before to Griffith's after, Alec Baldwin as Griffith's dumbass boyfriend, and a certain disgraced actor in a sleazy cameo that now reads as hilariously on the nose. And of course, much credit goes to Mike Nichols for putting this all together in a sturdy, consistently engaging package, his direction so good as to be invisible.

Among its other qualities, My Lucky Stars displays one truly remarkable achievement of physics. I'm not referring to the physical feats on display, which while impressive, are comparable to things in other movies. I'm talking instead about the way it demonstrates Einstein's theory of relativity. Specifically it relates to the concept of time dilation. There's a scene here that, when I glanced at the little bar on the screen that tracks the runtime, probably runs for five minutes or so. But when I sat through it, it felt like it was eight hours long. Granted, I've sat through other movies that have managed similar accomplishments (I remember stepping out of the theatre after Avengers: Infinity War to find that a week had passed), but it's still impressive. The scene in question features the titular Lucky Stars enacting an elaborate scheme wherein the pretend to be ninjas breaking into their home so that they can tie each other up with Sibelle Hu, one of the only significant female characters in the movie. While I concede audiences in 1980s Hong Kong probably found different things funny than I do today (namely, groping), the repetition here is what really did me in, protracting the brutally unfunny proceedings to an almost cruel length.

Subsequent gags involve the Lucky Stars sexually harassing Hu in other ways, and this is an area where this movie distinguishes itself from the first film in the series, Winners and Sinners. That movie has its share of crass humour, including a scene where one of the characters thinks he's invisible and tries to get a peek at Cherie Chung while she's in the bathroom. (Needless to say, it does not go as planned.) But I think the difference is that the earlier movie has real warmth for Chung's character and gives her a somewhat moving relationship with Sammo Hung (the director and ostensible star). Hu's character is regarded with no such affection here, so the jokes play as more mean-spirited than in the earlier movie. (There is an attempt late in the movie to warm us up to her character, where Sammo looks deep in her eyes and sees his reflection, and that shot is one of the funniest in the movie. The laughs were likely not intentional.) All that being said, the Lucky Stars are reasonably engaging comedic performers and have good chemistry with each other, even if some of them (notably Richard Ng) I've found much more enjoyable elsewhere. When the movie wasn't sexually harassing Hu, I did laugh with some regularity. This is my second viewing of the film, and I probably gelled a bit better to its comedic rhythms this time around, accepting it was not the action-packed extravaganza the opening leads you to expect but rather a loosely assembled gag comedy bookended by some stunning action sequences. The movie is transparently flimsy in its narrative construction, with the heroes joining forces because for some reason they're crucial to the efforts of an international secret agent, a plot which is forgotten about for most of the runtime. It also tosses out any continuity with the previous movie. In that one, the heroes all met in the lockup. Here, they're friends from their days in the orphanage.

And of course, like me, you might be lured in by the participation of Jackie Chan, whose picture is all over the posters for this movie but is really in a third of it at most. Interestingly, his comedic abilities are downplayed (likely to hand the responsibilities for the comic relief over to the main cast), and he's presented as a steely, efficient instrument of violence. You don't need me to tell you that the action here is great, largely because (on top of his strengths of shooting and cutting action for energy and clarity), Hung understands how to maximize its visual impact, often through the use of colour. The yellow sweatsuit he sports in the climax, as well as Jackie's instantly iconic red colourblock Fila tracksuit, might look silly in other hands, but gives the proceedings an added visual punch. (The effect is present in the opening scene as well, as car chase with bright red and yellow cars.) And of course there's the reveal of Michiko Nishiwaki's intimidating physique, which gets an all too relatable reaction of awe from Sibelle Hu. The climax is set in a Japanese amusement park, which gives us a great stretch where Jackie fights his way through a spooky funhouse with staccato, horror-movie-inspired rhythms. The Japan setting likely was chosen to appeal to Jackie's fanbase in the country, but also echoes the relative state of his and Sammo's careers, with his increasing international success contrasting with Sammo's arguably lower brow, domestic focus.

So yeah, fun stuff, although your tolerance for certain kinds of humour will be tested for like half the runtime.

To be honest, I struggled with Cleopatra for the first half of its four hour runtime, finding much of the proceedings, if nice to look at, a little annoying, for lack of a better word. Only once I reached the midpoint did it start to click for me, and my problem with the earlier sections came into focus: Rex Harrison's performance as Julius Caesar. In scientific terms, he ****ing sucks. Perhaps I hold some pent up resentment from being forced to watch out of context snippets of My Fair Lady in high school while my eleventh grade English teacher did an abominable job of teaching us Pygmalion. But even without relitigating teenage grievances, I think the true measure of his performance is what he gives his costars to work with. A good actor can elevate the work of their costars. Harrison sinks them. Ostensibly madly in love with Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra, his smug, self-satisfied demeanour conveys only infatuation with himself, and makes the attraction Taylor is supposed to feel for him and the grand gestures she makes in the name of love feel inexplicable. I understand some reviews at the time were unkind to her performance, but they should have looked elsewhere.

When Caesar is killed during the Ides of March (which I guess is a spoiler, but it's also a historical event, so not really), it's less the tragedy the movie positions it as than his murderers doing everybody a huge favour. For one thing, it means the arrival of Richard Burton as Marc Antony, who becomes Cleopatra's lover for the second half of the movie. The difference between Burton and Harrison is vast and illuminating. Both have an undeniable theatricality to their performances, but where Harrison seems mostly impressed by his ability to deliver the florid dialogue he's given, Burton can imbue it with real feeling. The attraction between him and Taylor have the intensity of two lovers who were having a torrid affair offscreen and got married, divorced, remarried and re-divorced. The grand, nutty gestures they make in the name of love feel a lot more convincing, is what I'm saying. It's also worth noting that Burton plays one of the more credible scenes of drunkenness I can recall, likely because he had a lot of practice himself. The other major performance in the movie belongs to Roddy McDowall as Octavian, who has an off-kilter energy that complements the intensity of the central relationship without being overshadowed.

Speaking of grand, nutty gestures, there's a scene where Cleopatra's arrival is marked by a grandiose ceremony, including a giant sphinx brought forward through the crowd, and you look at all those extras and the elaborate sets and props that have been constructed, and it's hard not to have your breath taken away, at least a little. This was made in an era when movies could have ungodly amounts of money sunk into them and it could bear tactile rewards like this, but beyond the level of pure spectacle, I think it colours the movie pretty interestingly. I understand this was a notoriously troubled production, and scenes like Antony deciding to wage a battle on sea despite its strategic imprudence or Caesar railing against the limitations imposed on him by the Senate play like a director trying to assert his will over a production and battle with the money men. (It goes without saying the sea-set battle is one of the movie's highlights.) And in the closing stretches, the cavernous sets the characters find themselves in seem to amplify their emotions. Which is appropriate because this is a movie about characters who are larger than life and can shape history on a whim, consequences be damned. Is that a very democratic message? Absolutely not, but it does make for compelling cinema.

This movie came on my radar after listening to a recent episode of the Projection Booth podcast, and I'm glad I checked it out because it's funny, well paced and extremely likable. The title makes it sound a lot sleazier than it is, and this is one I'd actually recommend to people not normally into hardcore movies. This is what learned folks call a loop carrier, an assemblage of pre-existing sex scenes (one of which stars a clean shaven John Holmes) into an overarching narrative. It's a device that can be embarrassingly transparent, but works surprisingly well here, as the movie is less about plot than vibes, stringing together a series of loosely related vignettes with the help of an ever present rock'n'roll soundtrack and the DJ stylings of the impressively maned Johnny Legend, a rockabilly musician who later made My Breakfast with Blassie, a parody of My Dinner with Andre starring Andy Kaufman. I have yet to see that movie, but it looks to be on Tubi, the bargain bin of the streaming services (I mean that in the best possible way), so I suppose it's only a matter of time.

I understand the primary inspiration for this is American Graffiti, which I've probably only seen bits and pieces of, but I'd wager that movie contains no scenes where, I dunno, Richard Dreyfuss does a drive-by mooning, or Ron Howard participates in a nude bake-off that devolves into a pie fight. (Howard gets referenced with a radio spot for an episode of Crappy Days, where "Richie takes ex lax by mistake, right before a blind date".) To the extent that there's a plot, it concerns Serena and her friend driving around and getting up to sexy shenanigans, and Christine DeShaffer as a nymphomaniac who just escaped from a mental hospital, something Legend's DJ reports on as a public service. Both are winning presences, and I must make note of the cute little dance Serena does when picking up a hitchhiker and DeShaffer's amusingly deranged facial expressions. (The podcast episode is entirely on the money when it cites a silent comedy influence.) DeShaffer's hardcore sex scene appear to be the only one made specifically for the movie, and I appreciated that in contrast to the recycled sex scenes that punctuate the movie, hers seems conceived as primarily comedic. (Highlights include a shot of vibrators crawling across the floor and a malfunctioning record player.)

All that being said, even during some of those lulls, the movie keeps the audiovisual non sequiturs coming steadily enough that it's hard not be charmed by the whole thing. It helps when you have a host as likable as Johnny Legend, and the best of part of the movie is when he recites his "K-R-U-Z Countdown", which I wrote down in its entirety but you need to hear in his half-sung voice and see all the sight gags to get the full effect.

Words to live by.

Haven't watched Cleopatra yet, and I don't know if I really want to, but I did enjoy this article on it a lot, at least: https://www.avclub.com/only-one-movi...ted-1834847247

Where do you find these things?
I wanna watch The First X-rated Rock 'n Roll Movie!

"They're coming to get you," huh? That is not a threat to me. Hurry up, why don't you?

Oops, I said the quiet part loud.

Good read. I've been trying (though admittedly not very hard) to get a read on Joseph L. Mankiewicz for a while. His son, Ben, took over for the beloved Robert Osborne as the host of Turner Classic Movies and, while Ben is good, it took years for me to get over it and I always wondered what his bona fides were compared to someone like Osborne who had been a legitimate friend to a number of major old-school Hollywood stars.
Sad that Ben's father, Joseph, basically lost his career to Cleopatra.

Why do you want your gears stripped and your clutch popped? That's gonna be some expensive repairs. These young hot 'n nasty teenage cruisers better stay away from MY car if they know what's good for 'em!

__________________
Captain's Log
My Collection

Uh...well, I heard doing those things makes your car go faster. I guess not.

If you just switch up the colours, that could be the poster for a horror movie.