Another loud voice in the Internet wilderness

Three The Hard Way

Now here is a movie that’s screaming for a remake/reboot. It’s always been a favorite query of mine to ask fellow film geeks who they would cast in this flick.  I like the idea except for one thing.  I have this fear that the idiots who run Hollywood will cast Puffy as one of the lead roles.  I’m sorry Puffy-Diddy-Doody-Whatever fans but I can’t stand him.  I’d bet money if Paramount redid this they’d cast the dudes from Jersey Shore as the three leads.  I know this sounds like blasphemy, but better The Situation than Puffy.

OK enough Haterade (with a twist of lime), let’s get back to the movie.  A group of White Supremacists come up with a way to eliminate the black race-poison the nation’s water supply with Sickle cell anemia.  Before they can set their plan into action, Jimmy (Jim Brown), Jagger (Fred Williamson) and Keyes (Jim Kelly) team up to stop them. I almost got into a fight in school once when I challenged a guy’s assertion that AIDS was a government conspiracy by saying he had “had watched Three The Hard Way too many times.”

This flick has been spoofed in such notable flicks  like I’m Gonna get You Sucka and Undercover Brother. If you’ve seen Three The Hard Way you know what I’m talking about.  There’s a lot of action scenes in this movie and some great 70’s fashions.  But the classic scene involves three dominatrices  named The Countess, The Empress, and The Princess.

After our heroes are ambushed in a car wash (don’t ask) they capture one of the would be assassins  (Sanford and Son’s Howard Platt who played Officer Hoppy), and procure the services of the lovely trio to torture the information they want out of him. I don’t want to give away much more but I will tell you this: In keeping up with the over the top style of this movie they ride three abreast on matching  color coordinated Kawasaki motorcycles up the FDR highway.  I shit you not.

Gordon Parks Jr directed this movie (he also directed Superfly!).

Warner Home Video reissued this on DVD in a great unedited (throw away those bootlegs!) Widescreen transfer along with 3 other Blaxploitation classics all on one disc! One of which will be coming up later in the list.

Guess which one shows up later on the list?

From Uncle Rodney’s school of bootlegs :

If the torture scene looks like THIS.....

And not like THIS-YOU'VE GOT A BOOTLEG!

What the hell? : During one of the action scenes Jim Brown and Fred Williamson chase after this guy who I swear has to be the fastest white man ever. There’s about a five or six block (at least) chase and Hall of Famer Brown and AFL star Williamson can’t catch this trenchcoated clown?  I know its a movie and all but it irritates me.

The Betsy

This one was on the bubble of being eliminated but I had to keep it on for three reasons

1. Kathleen Beller’s Nude scenes (Google it. It’s amazingly easy to find. Ah, the wonders of technology.)
2. Laurence Olivier’s  performance.  You could up line up ten pigs end to end and you STILL wouldn’t have half as much ham as his performance. The sight of him with his hair dyed trying to look younger in a flashback scene is PRICELESS.
3. The fact that they don’t make pictures like this anymore. I mean you do get to see stuff like this still but it’s always made for TV.  Robert Duvall, Jane Alexander, and Edward Herrmann all in one picture? And a movie based on a Harold Robbins (The Joe Eszterhas of his day) novel? I guess they all needed a new pool house and this was a quick way to get it.  Joseph Wiseman who also appears in this trainwreck once had a line in the Bond film Dr. No “Minnows pretending to be whales”. That sums this flick up in a nutshell.  But god help me, I love it.

Some of you may not know this but I’m a big movie fan. True my tastes do tend to run toward the lower end of the scale, but that’s what I like. A few years ago my boss asked me what my top ten movies were. I told her I didn’t have a top 10. Or a top twenty. There were just too many. “What about a top 100 like the AFI list?” she asked. I went home and thought about it and came up with a top 111. The reason for that is I could not come up with a number one.  I ranked them pretty randomly until I got towards the top. I picked 11 to tie at the top (Why eleven? Cause it’s my list. Go make your own).

On my facebook page I put up posters of some my favorites.  To get though my current state of writers block, I decided to list them here along with some BADAZZMOFO** style comments.  I’m gonna revise it a bit as some have fallen out of favor and newer ones (like The Hangover) have crept into my consciousness .

( ** http://badazzmofo.com  -greatest fanzine ever)

OK Here we go:

# 111 -The last five minutes of Pretty in Pink

Now I know this seems a strange choice for some of you and why the last 5 minutes? Rather than scream its my list get your own again, I’ll explain. You know there are some movies on TV that no matter what else is on you’ll stop and watch them? This is one of mine but I only watch the last 5 minutes. I’ll skip back and forth from the ballgame or whatever else I’m watching when I see this on. Now there’s a lot of good stuff in this flick like the soundtrack, and Jon Cryer’s “try a little tenderness” bit. But I prefer the end.

(SPOILER ALERT!) I’m a sucker for happy endings.  Her Rich Boy love Blaine asks Andie (Molly Ringwald) out to the prom. He then after pressure from his pal Steff  (James Spader in fine pompous asshole form) backs out.  She and her best friend Ducky (Jon Cryer) go to the prom.  Blaine (Andrew McCarthy) sees her and gets up his courage to go talk to her (but not before  telling off Steff). He  apologizes to her for how shitty he treated her and walks away.

(Originally the movie was supposed to end with Ducky and Andie becoming a couple. The test audiences weren’t having that though.)

When Ducky in a most magnanimous gesture tells her to after him and follow her feelings even an embittered cynic like me tilts his head and goes “Aww”.

Andie and Blaine make up make make out in the parking lot.  This being a John Hughes movie you of course don’t see them having sex in his Benz but you know it happens.

Just before this though, is my favorite part. Having let his longtime crush go, Ducky is left standing alone at the prom. Before you start to really feel sorry for him a buxom Blonde (Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s Kristie Swanson) looks him up and down smiling as she likes what she sees. Ducky sees her and mouths “Me? Moi?”.  She smiles and Ducky looks at her, looks at the camera, and glides screen off stage right in her direction. Why he didn’t get an Oscar for that move alone is an example of the unjustness of the Academy Awards.

Next number 110, a tale of… oh you’ll just have to wait.