The Red Menace is a throwback to both the hugely popular men’s adventure series of the ’70s and even older pulp fiction heroes like the Shadow and Doc Savage.  Part spy, part masked vigilante, the Menace spent the 1950s battling the rising Communist threat around the world, retiring in 1960.  The series is primarily set in the 1970s and in the first book, Red and Buried, Patrick “Podge” Becket is forced to dust off his old Red Menace alter ego and come out of his self-imposed thirteen year retirement in order to deal with an old nemesis who has resurfaced in 1972.  But in this excerpt from The Red Menace #1:  Red and Buried, we get a flashback to the younger Red Menace at the height of his commie-battling days in the Eisenhower era.

CHAPTER 4: September, 1956

The explosion launched a brilliant orange fireball into the Las Vegas night sky and rattled windows in casinos on the Arrowhead Highway two miles away.  The blast took off the roof of the guard building, launching bodies onto the driveway and lawn and firing knife-blade fragments of glass and Spanish tile through the air.

The quartet of Mafia guards charging from the main building caught the worst of the blast.  Slivers of tile ripped through soft flesh.  Guns flew from dead hands and the bodies skidded to a bloody stop on the sprawling front lawn.

The Red Menace slipped from the safety of the pool house, hopped the small wall next to the driveway and darted up the drive.

Zhadanov must have been alerted to the assault.  Not only were the grounds crawling with armed Russians but all the estate lights had been turned on.  The black cloak and mask worked best in shadow, and the Menace was clearly visible as he ran.

He heard the zing of a bullet as it whizzed by his head, heard the soft thwack as it struck the grass.  From the angle of that one shot, the Red Menace knew instinctively where the sniper would be, and he found the man crouching behind a fat chimney on the uppermost roof, a rifle with silencer peeking out around the brick. (more…)

In this excerpt from The Red Menace #1:  Red and Buried, Patrick “Podge” Becket and his partner, Dr. Thaddeus Wainwright, have entered 1972 Cuba as guests of Fidel Castro.  Becket’s high-tech security firm offers state-of-the-art gadgets to prime ministers and presidents the world over, and this is only the second time his company has agreed to supply an enemy of America.  It’s all a ruse to get Becket’s alter ego, the Red Menace, into Cuba so the United States can find out just exactly what it is the Russians, led by the Menace’s old enemy Colonel Ivan Strankov, are up to at a secret base in the jungle outside of Havana.

This is the first time the Red Menace costume has been out of mothballs in over a decade, and Podge Becket finds that maybe the cynical 1970s aren’t the place for an outfit that seemed perfectly normal in the innocent 1950s.

CHAPTER 8

Their luggage had been searched.

The practice was common in totalitarian regimes, and the only difference from country to country was whether or not the host nation wanted its guests to know about the invasion of privacy.  In this case, the Cuban government did not want Podge aware that it had riffled through his shaving kit and underwear.  Everything had been neatly removed from their bags and great care had been taken to replace each item in the precise same spot where it had been found.  But even professional snoops weren’t perfect.

A twisted collar here, a misaligned pant crease there.  To a trained eye, even one a decade out of practice, it was not difficult to see if one’s bags had been tampered with.

Podge was not worried that the official government snoops in Uganda or Cuba would find his greatest hidden prize.  No enemy ever had. (more…)

Okay, maybe not the best year ever, but easily my favorite of the years I’ve covered so far.  They should change the award to: The Academy’s Favorite Movie of the Year. Either that, or they could give out the award years later when a movie has either stood the test of time or has not.

But even then, some dumbass would do this.

The nominees:

“Forrest Gump” – The part that always confused me was he said, “She tastes like cigarettes,” like it was a bad thing.

“Four Weddings and a Funeral” – For my money, the oddball nominee at the time. I like it more now, but back then I was convinced it was only nominated because it’s British.

“Quiz Show” – I love the part when Herb Stempel cranes his neck to see what’s going on in the other soundproof booth, CLONKS his head on the glass, then checks-real-quick to make sure no one in the studio audience saw him. We saw ya, ya sponge-memoried freak.

“The Shawshank Redemption” – Great movie, saved by the studio’s rejection of the alternate ending, in which Red goes to Buxton, but can’t distinguish one hayfield from another because he’s never read a Robert Frost poem, screams in agony; meanwhile, the grocery store owner calls his P.O., who calls the fuzz, who come to Buxton, and gun him down. As life flickers from his eyes, he realizes he’s laying on a piece of volcanic glass that has no business being in a hayfield in the middle of Maine. He laughs to FADE OUT. (more…)

“Pulp Fiction” is the best movie ever. Let me explain. Actually. I don’t believe that there is a best movie ever, or even a best year ever. But when “Pulp Fiction” is on, and I watch, at some point during those 154 minutes it will dawn on me, “So, this…is the best movie ever”. I have been overheard saying this during viewings of “Jaws,” “High Plains Drifter,” “Bad News Bears,” “Casablanca,” “Goodfellas,” three different “Star Wars” movies (Yes, three — I cringe at the Ewoks, but love Luke’s ascent to badass), “Unforgiven,” “The King of Comedy,” and many others films.

“Pulp Fiction” had the feel of an event movie for college-aged kids. “Reservoir Dogs” and “True Romance” had developed cult followings in frat houses and dorm rooms everywhere, and the buzz surrounding “Pulp Fiction” strangely intensified after it won the Palme D’Or at Cannes. There aren’t many mainstream hits to be found on the list of films to win the Palme D’Or between 1990 and 2009. Some great movies, but nothing approaching the level of fun Tarantino injects into three interwoven stories of L.A.’s criminal underbelly. I don’t recall, for example, midnight showings of Jane Campion’s previous films complete with party atmosphere and booze the weekend that “The Piano” opened, at least not in Athens, Georgia. But the weekend “Pulp Fiction” opened, the Georgia Theater unspooled “Reservoir Dogs” to a raucous crowd who cheered when Tarantino’s name danced across the screen. He was more than a director, he was a rock star. His movies have continued to be events, which sometimes works against him. (more…)

At least as far as movies go, I believe the above headline to be accurate. The Best Picture nominees at the Oscars that year were Forrest Gump, Pulp Fiction, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Quiz Show, and The Shawshank Redemption. In this series, I will look back at the Best Year Ever, cleverly focusing on a different movie each week. Starting with…

The key to any great year at the movies is a great summer at the movies, and 1994 had that. I can’t personally decide which movie that summer was my favorite, so I’m starting with my wife’s favorite. My wife grew up in a small town in South Georgia. They didn’t have a movie theatre. Not that she was in the stone ages, but going to a movie was, to her, an event, not a regular occurrence. We had been dating for only about a month, when one Tuesday afternoon in December of 1991, I said, “Hey, let’s go to the movies.” Puzzled, she replied, “It’s Tuesday.”

As good a day as any, I replied, before whisking her off to see “The Last Boy Scout.”

Three years later, she was worse than me. We would watch two movies in an afternoon, three if they weren’t playing at the General Cinema theatre, with its uncomfortable red seats. Our tastes were not discriminating, we would see anything. On July 15, 1994, we went to see Disney’s Angels in the Outfield (co-starring Matthew McConaughey and Adrien Brody!), then ducked into the next auditorium to watch True Lies. My wife saw it at least ten times that summer. (more…)

Editor’s Note: After the publication of this piece we made an internal discovery that this interview was not a one-on-one interview between our writer and Quentin Tarantino, and that some of the questions attributed to “Big Hollywood” were asked by other journalists in what was a roundtable interview.
 
Upon discovering this, we temporarily removed the piece from the site until all the facts were known and a proper correction could be added.

Quentin Tarantino exploded on the world film scene in 1992 with “Reservoir Dogs,” a brutally profane yet ingeniously plotted and often funny deconstruction of the heist-film genre. He took things to a whole other level in 1994 with “Pulp Fiction,” reviving the foundering careers of superstars John Travolta and Bruce Willis while launching the star careers of Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman while winning a Best Screenplay Oscar himself. 

Yet in the 15 years since that classic, Tarantino hasn’t been able to score quite as big an impact. 1997’s “Jackie Brown” made just $39 million, while the two “Kill Bill” films scored $70 million each yet were considered hyper-violent trifles compared to what he was really capable of. And he really bottomed out with 2007’s “Death Proof,” which made up half of “Grindhouse,” a three-hour homage to the trashy drive-in films of America’s past. Its 21st-century audience didn’t get the joke and largely ignored it, earning just $27 million at the US box office.  (more…)

“Inglourious Basterds” opened this weekend. It has the potential to be satisfying for Quentin Tarantino fans. I will definitely see it. It is an “alternative history” of WWII, but despite its setting, Tarantino characterizes the movie as a “spaghetti western.” My guess is a hint of the “pulp fiction” writer Elmore Leonard will, like a super fine mist, be present in the film.

On my Facebook profile page, I dutifully filled out my personal interests. Under favorite movies I listed “anything Quentin Tarantino”; under novels I listed “anything Elmore Leonard.” What I left out under “movies” was “anything Elmore Leonard which seem like Quentin Tarantino” and vice versa. To me, they are almost indistinguishable. I have read virtually all of Leonard’s books. I just purchased today his latest, “Road Dogs.” I have seen nearly all of Tarantino’s movies. I have read or seen many of their works multiple times. I still get surprised by a Leonard movie from time to time. I recently saw “3:10 from Yuma” on TV. There was something rivetingly familiar about it. It turns out it was adapted from a 15 page short story by Leonard that I had never read. (more…)

John Nolte’s review of “Brüno,” a film I haven’t yet seen, tackles Sasha Baron Cohen’s previous film “Borat,” a film I have seen about twenty times. That being said, Nolte is dead-on in his appraisal of the film: it found favor with the left-wing elitists because it poked fun at us regular folk. But in praising “Borat,” they revealed something about themselves, something I’ve known to be true since the summer of 1994.

That was the best year for movies that I can recall. That summer alone we had “Forrest Gump,” “True Lies,” “Speed,” and everyone was eagerly awaiting the arrival of Cannes winner “Pulp Fiction.” And we also had “The Lion King.” I remember the critic for my campus newspaper, The Red & Black (Go Dawgs!), panned the film, noting that the “Circle of Life” song, sung by a gay man, was really about keeping groups of people, particularly minorities, in their place. I thought this was bizarre and brought it up with some of my classmates. (more…)

Over the weekend, I was pondering why the low budget, standard genre pic The Haunting in Connecticut (Lionsgate) has become a nifty little box office hit. The film added almost $9.5M over the weekend for a new 10-day cume of $37M, and the only conclusion I have been able to reach is that it’s all about the poster.

Creepy, right? I have not seen Haunting and will probably wait for DVD or pay cable, but that is a weird, startling, attention-grabbing image. As a movie junkie, I love good movie art. The best movie posters are evocative. They capture what a movie is all about without giving away the mystery. There are certain movie posters that instantly put me back in that theatre experiencing the film for the very first time. The best movie posters are not just promotional tools. They stand as a work of art on their own. These are my favorites, buit it is by no means a definitive list. Feel free to add your favorites (and subtract any of mine).

(more…)