A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors - 1987

In addition to my 70s boxset marathon, I also had a Nightmare marathon.  Look for my upcoming review of Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master.  Also, here is my review for Nightmare 5.

I have to say first off, this was going against Nightmare 5 in my head.  Perhaps because they are sequels and naturally as a movie series they're all going to be judged against one another.  But, I have also always heard that Nightmare 1 and 3 are the "good ones" and that the others aren't as good.  Then, I enjoyed Nightmare 5.  Hence the fucking whatever bullshit, you get what I mean.

Nightmare 3 brings back Heather Langenkamp from the first film, returning as Nancy.  However first we follow Kristen, played by Patricia Arquette.  Kristen is being haunted by Freddy in her dreams, and gets sent off to a psyche ward for a small group of people who are all insomniacs complaining of horrible nightmares when they do sleep.  Nancy is interning at the psyche ward, and eventually they discover the source of all their nightmares is Freddy, who is coming back to claim more souls.  Kristen has the power to pull people into her dreams, and they think they can use this power to team up and beat Freddy at his own game.

The movie is a bit of a slower ride in the beginning, I'll say.  There's a lot of plot and not as much immediate horror thrills, although they are certainly there.  There's a great sequence where they use a claymation Freddy, I liked that a lot.  The little group of insomniacs are a rat pack of fun characters, each one likable and with their own "gimmick" thingy.  They have individual dream strengths they can use against Freddy, which although arguably stupid, are still fun to see.

The deaths are really good too.  There's a genuinely cringe-worthy scene where Freddy pulls out a dude's veins and controls him like a puppet with them.  That one was fucking awesome.  I have to say, at this point (and I noticed this in 5 as well) they sort of stopped following that rule of "what Freddy does to you in the dream happens to you in real life".  It happens sometimes.  But clearly at some points people are being injured or whatever, then they wake up and they're fine.

I didn't like this as much as 5 though.  It was simply a pacing thing.  5 is wall to wall horror violence and insanity.  This is perhaps more of a "movie"  in the development feel, and I'd only say it's a very small point, but I just have that preference I guess.  There is however another cool sequence in a car graveyard that has a claymation Harryhauser-esque skeleton...  Hm.  Maybe I did like this as much as 5.  I can't bring myself to rate this lower that 5.  Fine.  Here, another 4 star Nightmare entry.

The Young Graduates - 1971

Here's a movie that in some ways reminds me of Katherine.  Basically this is Katherine-lite, it's not as interesting, well shot, and it's definitely a lot more of a mess.  Although, this did come before Katherine, so ehh?  I had a bit of a 70's boxset marathon!  Fucking finally.  The Young Graduates rounds it out.

Mindy is a pretty normal 70's high school girl.  She lives with her parents, she's casually dating her guy Bill, and she's got a thing for her teacher Mr. Thompson.  She's 17, and waiting until her 18th birthday to have sex, much to the dismay of Bill.  However on her birthday night, she invites Mr. Thompson out, and the two of them end up having sex at a party.  Thompson becomes infatuated with her, Bill feels cut out, and this prompts Mindy to want to escape from it all, which she does with her friend Gretchen.

The rest of the film, we follow the two girls as they have various travels, problematic or not, on the road.  They don't have much money, but they meet up with people who are sometimes helpful, sometimes out for themselves.  Mindy and Gretchen are trying to get to Big Sur, CA.  Eventually Thompson and Bill and another dude unite and begin to track the girls, following the clues they leave.

Spoilers for the rest of this review.  Beware.  The girls are heading to Big Sur with their hippie friend Pan.  They get a ride with some bikers eventually, and bikers decide to try and rape the girls.  They beat up Pan, and the girls are drugged, but manage to escape.  They ride the bikes to Big Sur, where they find some hippie hangout, but then the cops bust it and arrest the leader, and the girls adventure is then just sort of over?  Huh?!

This movie felt like a big cop out, because like I said, in the end, nothing fucking happens?  This whole thing leads to NOWHERE.  Also, they almost get raped, they get drugged, they get abused, they get their friend beat up, they experiment, and I guess the whole point is to watch the journey and not where the journey goes, but NONE of this effects them at all.  They have a "whatever" disposition that never fades, and even after almost getting raped, they just shrug it off and keep going.

This movie is not trying to say anything bad, or good, it seems about the 70's culture.  For a movie that has a tagline "A report card on the Love Generation," what is the message?  What does the fucking report card say??  Everything is fine, nothing matters, go ahead, but also it's kinda pointless and fruitless?  So what is that like a straight C?  Maybe a C-?

There is some nudity, there is some okay music.  There are plenty of things that are bland and boring, shots of inane things taking place that will make you yell at the stupidity of them, if you're anything like me.  I didn't hate this when I watched it, but my hatred for this has since grown.  It's completely POINTLESS to watch this movie.  Literally nothing happens.

I do want to mention, Mindy bangs her teacher Thompson.  Then later they're watching a sex ed video in class and I said aloud "if this movie is about her getting pregnant, I'm going to be really mad".  Later she says to Thompson "I might be pregnant" and that plotline is dangled... But then, it's completely dropped and never mentioned again.  So...  Was she pregnant?  Does it matter?  Does ANYTHING in this fucking movie matter?!  The answer: NO.

Side note, I did the standard amount of research on the director, and I found another one of his movies.  I love the IMDb keywords list here, it's just hilarious:

The Borrowers - 1973

The Borrowers is a franchise much like Heidi, another film on the treasured 70's boxset.  Heidi, it turns out, has more adaptations of it and shit, but this is a somewhat well known of idea here, the little people living underneath the floorboards in a house.

This boxset has taken me all over the fucking place, and here's yet another random thing I'd never volunteer to see but I'm watching anyways, as the completionist I'm trying to be.  This film does have the "originality" thing going for it, as it was the first adaptation of the novel, and even won an Emmy for outstanding achievement of a kid's movie.

Ma and Pa and daughter Arrietty are about 5 inches tall, and live under the floorboards of a house out in the middle of nowhere.  Their existence is a simple one, they "borrow" whatever they need from the residence they live under, and pretty much chill, raising their daughter.  In the house they live in is an old woman, Sophie.  One day her nephew comes to visit, a young boy.  The boy eventually spots Arrietty, and that could mean trouble for their peaceful existence.

Obviously, this is going for the effects. The whole film has a lot of the older style effect to make people look small.  Using rear and front projection, as well as occasional cutting out of one piece of film and putting over another, they manage to make it look passable.  The whole thing features quite a bit of effect, and it would be fair to say it looks decent.  It had to, I mean it's the one thing they had to make look good in the movie.

I won't say I loved this.  It's not really my speed.  Despite the fact it's technically "done well" and nothing is "wrong" with it, it's just sort of there for the most part, and it's not particularly engaging.  A cool idea.  I'd still see the Japanese anime Arrietty, if I ever get around to it.  I guess I'll give it a 2.

Evel Knievel - 1971

 Here is a movie where, if it wasn't for the fact that it's in the 70s box set, I might have guessed it was from the 60s.  Cause it's lookin' pretty old. As a casual fan of stunts and stuff in general, I have heard of Evel Knievel before in my life. I think we all know of him as "someone who existed who did stunts".  This is also my first review written using voice to text on my phone.

Evel Knievel is a part biography, part fiction, part re-creation of the famous stuntman's life.  It's got a little bit of a time play thing going on, jumping forward and backward in the timeline of Knievel's life. It has a voiceover, it has re-creations of stories, and overall it tells a story of a man who pushed himself to extremities in terms of his job. Most things are not dwelled on, just touched on.  We see Evel as he meets his future wife, as he attempts his first paid stunt, and then we pretty much jump to when he's famous and he ends up injuring himself on a stunt. And then the movie pretty much ends. With lots of other random shit thrown in, and some very very untrue fiction parts.

 This phone refuses to except the word stunts. STUNTS. It puts stance, it puts just about anything else.

 Did I like this? Well I'll tell you one thing, I would've actually enjoyed a autobiography of Evel Knievel. That sounds pretty interesting to me? I don't know much about the guy, I would've enjoyed a re-creation of his life. However that was not this. This doesn't really explain much about him, his history, or for that matter where most of this movie takes place.  Too many things are touched on and never gotten back to. We see him meet his wife and take her on a bike ride where he endangers her life and he gets sent to jail, then later they're magically married with no story of what happened between. A lot of the stuff in his life is treated similarly.

Even so, parts of it were intriguing. The acting is good, the archive footage of the real Knievel is fun to watch, and the re-creations of the stunts are done well. It's gotten not a lot else to offer though. If you're not interested in just watching the stunts, this movie probably is not for you.  I'm glad that they included things about him getting injured, and there's even footage of one accident where he was almost killed. To not include this would've made sense, but to make the choice to include it was a good idea.

 It was fine. I don't know. There's not much to say about this one. I doubt I would ever tell anyone that I saw this.  Although I will say it made me interested in the real person. I wonder if there's a real movie that was done about this guy? Or if there ever will be? It seems a little late to do a movie about him now. "In 1974, he failed an attempted canyon jump across Snake River Canyon in the Skycycle X-2, a steam-powered rocket". Uhhhh, I wanna see that!! Speaking of, it's interesting to read that he lived until 2007! You would think that the guy who lives this dangerously would've died earlier.

I guess it's another basic, middle of the road 2-ish star movie.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child - 1989

I put on the Iron Maiden song that was made for this movie, and I started writing my second review for something in the Nightmare on Elm Street series.  See my review of Wes Craven's New Nightmare here.  I jumped from 7 to 5, and I am considering now jumping to 3 and reviewing The Dream Warriors next.  We'll see.

The Nightmare series was not a series I grew up with.  I think I mentioned this in my New Nightmare review.  For some reason, I think it was the quirkiness of the films, Halloween was the series I enjoyed the most.  Those half baked sequels are ones I am incredibly aware of.  Everything from possessed masks in Season of the Witch, to the latter embarrassing cult of the thorn.  I saw all the Friday the 13th movies later, and those intrigued me.  For laughs sake, I saw all the Chucky series.  But it was shortly around that time I began to be drawn towards the more obscure sequel shit, and I never really got around to Nightmare as a franchise.

I am loosely familiar with where the series goes, and as I understand, it got pretty lame at certain points.  I went into this film with no knowledge of it, and I basically rented it because the SF Public Library has little to no Nightmare films available on DVD.  Seriously, what the shit is this:

So...There are 3 copies, and one is on hold.  Yet, I can't request it?  WHY NOT?!

I didn't expect this to be good.  Let's say I expected a less than stellar follow up sequel.  I expected that, 5 films into the franchise, this would be shitty, probably have lame comedy, and would be a disaster of a flick.  And honestly, I was very surprised by just how good and innovative it was!  I was pleasantly surprised by Nightmare 5, and I don't know what the general perception is, but I found this to be a great horror flick.

This is an effects filled, extremely fast paced, awesome looking movie.  Main character Alice Johnson is back from Nightmare 4.  She was the titular Dream Master, and we gather that she bested Freddy and laid him to rest in the previous film.  However now, he's back and what's worse, he seems to be able to invade the world when she's awake as well as asleep.  Turns out she is pregnant and thus Freddy is able to get at her through her infants dreams.  Furthermore, Freddy is trying to turn the infant into the "next Freddy" by feeding it souls of people he kills.

Along for the ride is Alice's friends, coworkers, and random others who Freddy kills while he tries to get souls.  There's some cool deaths here, some original effects, and plenty to keep even the entry level fan entertained by.  I gather that at this point many fans had left the franchise, and this was also seen as a bad sequel to 3 and 4 where the series was "good".  But shit, if this is bad, I do wonder what is GOOD?  Cause this movie was not bad at all!  Fucking assholes man.  Every movie fan is an asshole.  True story.

I give this movie high marks.  Coming in randomly into the franchise, it stands out.  It didn't have too many attempts at humor, and the 80's-ness was on full display as seen in some of the costumes and in the MTV feeling wackiness that happens at times.  However, that shit was fun to watch, and way better than some bland ass slasher flick.  This is a slasher flick made to appeal to the audience, the audience being young adults.  There's a saying which fits:  "If it's too loud, you're too old".

Disconnected - 1984

Disconnected.  Is this a documentary about how I feel these days?  Is it an hour and a half interview about how emotions, inner turmoil, and constant mixed messages make me feel incredibly disconnected with life?  Cause holy shit that would be prescient.  Brian Eno makes it all better.

Disconnected is in fact a 1984 movie that's a sort of slasher, sort of thriller, sort of talky who knows, definitely amateur flick which I watched on Amazon.  It's got a cool cover on Amazon, one that made me believe it was a When a Stranger Calls / Don't Answer the Phone rip off.

Posters like this lead me to believe I have a genuine 80's fun time slasher on my hand.  And this...  Well, it is 80's, it is part fun time, and I guess it does have one kill in it?  This is the work of a school student as director, an actress with a career of only a few years, and a barely existent budget.  So, you get what you expect from this one.

Alicia is a nice enough girl, working in a video store.  Her store brings in some questionable characters, one of them being Franklin, who is interested in getting to know her.  She's also been getting weird phone calls, sometimes with no one there, sometimes with intense robotic sounds that grind into her and make her feel pain.  Also as if this is not enough, there's been a string of murders going on locally.  Could all these be connected?  Yeah, probably.

This movie does have the things that make one generally like an 80's flick.  It's got deaths, nudity, weird music, eccentric actors, minimalism, and a surreal vision to it.  I am sure it is divisive in it's watchers, and in fact I even found one review where the guy loved it and put it in the same grouping as The Room when it came to cult films.

For me, this is not exactly how I felt.  The film for sure is an interesting experiment.  Randomness is it's primary attribute, and it is essentially good, but for sure it's got a tendency to wander around unfocused, and it gives the feel that it for sure is amateur.  All that aside, for amateur, it is certainly better than one might expect.  I give it 3 stars.

Shotgun - 1989

Throw myself a bit of a change here and watch Shotgun at work.  That was my plan.  Here's a bonus short review for ya.

Shotgun is very much a rip off of Lethal Weapon, combined with the other 80's action flicks of the time.  You pair a white and black cop, make them tough badboys that don't follow the rules, and then have them go against the other officers but bottom line, They Get Results.

Eventually, white cop Jones's sister gets killed by a "beater," a guy who's been hiring local prostitutes pretty much with the idea that he wants to beat the shit out of them.  Jones gets in trouble when he beats up a undercover cop, and gets suspended.  Now he has none of those pesky police rules holding him back, but also no backup if things don't go his way....

It's meh.  The acting is okay.  The budget is extremely minimal.  Visible boom mic, pretty scant in terms of looks, but the nudity, the action, the pacing is all fine.  It's a very short and easy flick.  Probably decent if you're putting something on "in the background." It does have ridiculous music including it's own song "Shotgun Jones" which is pretty tremendous.

I would give it a decent 2 stars.  It's nothing you'll ever think about again.  Probably, without any research being done, the type of thing where SOMEONE involved did either porn or something related to porn.  I'm gonna guess that, legit, and not research.  So here's the 2 stars for that...

The Death of Richie - 1977

Well now.  I truly realized for the first time exactly how much of a mixed bag this 70's boxset was going to be last night.  I mean, let's be honest here.  Katherine was a drama, and it had a bit of what one might call "the feels".  It started me off on a foot of "who knows what's gonna happen here" with the boxset, and that was further cemented last night with Richie.

This movie begins like any other.  Some teens are out partying and doing drugs and driving, they get pulled over, and the cop agrees to let them go, but "they owe him one".  I immediately suspected a crime sort of caper flick.  But instead we follow one of the boys home.  We follow Richie home to his life and his family, his father played by Ben Gazzara.  And from there, we simply watch Richie deteriorate.

You see, not only was this a 70's stab at a drug scare film, this was a true story stab at a drug scare movie.  And honestly, it's pretty fucking dark and sad.  I will readily admit that this film, much like The New Adventures of Heidi, caught me in a mental space where I was perhaps more "open" to it than I would normally be.  I was depressed.  I was tired.  I felt like just getting drunk and passing out, or possibly smoking weed.  And given the slow development, slow burn of this, instead I sat enraptured as the events played out.

Richie is like any typical 70's kid.  He hangs out with his buddies.  He smokes weed. He doesn't get along very well with his dad. His mom is a bit over-sympathetic to him, his brother is younger and just stays out of his way.  He develops an addiction to "reds", red pills that are barbiturates.  When he's on them, he varies between laid out and unresponsive to hyper-charged and agitated.  All the things the family tries seem to work at first, but whatever circumstance happens usually leads Richie back to the drugs.  In the meantime, the relationship with his mother and father gets strained more and more.

What can I say?  Fuck.  It was dark.  Ben Gazzara and the other actors do a really good job.  The kid that played Richie was great.  Oddly enough, the actor went on to be very well known in the voice acting world, even playing the Beast in Beauty and the Beast.  The pacing is good, enough to keep us very interested.  The spiral keeps deepening, and I was very much dreading where the story might go, as we can't see a way for it to end well.

Given this is based on a true story, it makes one question if some things in the film were film flaws, or if that's how they played out in real life.  Many times, the father character has ways to try and make his son stop the drug use, and they pretty much get dropped.  He taps his phone and records drug trades.  He threatens to use drug counseling.  There's others.  Most of these are dropped, and only once does he call the cops, of course it's the one time the son isn't on drugs.  Why not call the cops one of the million other times, when it's clear he's already ON the drugs?

The end is dark.  I made a mistake, where I forgot the title of this movie, and looked at it.  I mean, come on.  The spoiler for the movie is in the TITLE of the film!  How he dies is significantly dark, and only made for a lot of fucked up shit in this family in the future, I'm sure.

So I mean, really, what is there to say?  It was a actually good, actually affecting movie.  And I could only make minor complaints, the truth was I felt a lot for the characters, and it kinda sucks that stuff like this happens.  Life huh?  Thanks movie.  I was already depressed.  Didn't need ya to make it worse.  I give it....  sigh...  I don't know.  5?  4?  4.5?

A Real American Hero - 1978

Buford Pusser.  Not exactly a house hold name, but one might be surprised at the depth of interest in this real life man.  This is a man who, legitimately, has 6 movies and one TV series based around the events of his life.  Why?  Well now that's the question.

What you have here, as told by the title, is a person who many considered a real life hero.  This was a small town sheriff who took it upon himself to bring the criminals to justice, threatening himself and his family, and risking all to end the crimes.  What I find quietly fascinating about this, is the real life person got his wife murdered, brought some criminals to justice, and then was himself later possibly murdered.  That's the fucking reality.  The fantasy is this little friendly TV movie about a person so good, so positive, that person could nary exist.

Do I sound negative?  Well, fuck, I am.  Today sucks.  This all feels pretty lame.  What the fuck am I doing, watching some TV rehash or Walking Tall on the internet?  Fucking promise I made to finish that fucking 70's boxset.

Buuuuut, the movie isn't bad.  It's not what happened in real life.  In this, Buford is a local do-good cop, who decides that he is going to stop this guy who's been making moonshine that has killed some people.  It's gonna be hard to get the guy in though, cause he's got a lot of power behind him, and Buford is just a small town sheriff without many resources.  So just like in real life, he takes it on himself and uses methods "off the book" to get at this criminal.

Brian Dennehy plays the unfortunately named Buford Pusser.  It's a masterful performance.  He's a complex, layered man in this film.  Part stereotypical "good guy," but the movie lets him have a dark edge to him, and is given some real humanity instead of being the catch-all bland good guy.

One thing I have to complain about.  The gang of bad guys, besides one very small scene of terrorizing Pusser on the road, aren't made out to be a real threat it felt like.  They are gonna ambush him in the end, and there's the road scene, but besides that, the film follows Pusser so close that we basically never see them trying to eliminate him.  We spend a ton of time following Pusser and his various good deeds that it's like, we get it, he's the good guy.  And that also means we never think for a second that he'll fail or that anything bad could possibly happen to him.

I felt like the movie did have a certain charm to it though. It felt embracive of it's era.  It also had some small heart-warming scenes of Pusser with his family.  Whether it was the film, or just me, but I had several odd thoughts during the film:
1) Isn't it weird that people used to have to shave with a straight razor?  That's honestly terrifying.  I have, in my lifetime seen the proliferation of the electric beard trimmers and razors.  These inventions and their growing popularity basically gave birth to the "perpetually short tiny beard" also known as "perma-stubble" which I sort of hate, yet one has to admit looks fucking sexy.  There's just no way anyone would have been able to do it back then.  Using scissors to trim it down to 1/4 inch?  Yeah right!  That shit would be damn near impossible.
2) Having kids used to be something everyone did.  I know that's kind of weird, but it's like, in these older movies, you would absolutely never have an older character who WASN'T a family man.  It's sort of amazing to see that difference now.

Anyways.....ummm....  It's fine, it's kind of slow, but it is also a bit charming and innocent.  I give it 3 stars, mostly for Dennehy's acting.

Stunts - 1977

I've been too lackadaisical with my reviews lately, let's face it.  I had a moment where I had a lot of money and I bought a Playstation 3 again, since my last one broke.  Yes, I bought a second Playstation 3 instead of a PS4.  Fuck it.  I have been playing some of the games on there, I have been busy.  In fact, I literally have plans every night this week except Friday.  You see, I'm cool now.

I decided that plans or not, I would watch one 70's boxset movie a night for an entire week.  Make it a theme week and drive through seven of these fuckers.  So, we'll see how this goes.  I am two down, now having watched Stunts.

Stunts plays out as again, a talky dramatic murder mystery much like yesterday's The Redeemer.  This one is a lot more talky and more of a slow film in general than Redeemer.  I will admit, early on in this review right now, I was in and out of falling asleep during the last 20 or so minutes of this.  What can I say? It was pretty fucking slow, and I was tired and very warm.

Stunts.  What a great name.  What's this movie about?  Eh, it's got stunts in it.  Call it Stunts.  You might as well just call your movie Movie.  How about Movie: The Movie.  I'm not going to google that.  I bet it's an actual movie.  I did google it.  It is a movie.  Two, actually.

Stunts isn't that bad, I don't mean to take a dump on it from the beginning.  What Stunts is, and what was pretty popular in the 70's, is an examination of a sub-culture.  Think about it, I guess it started in the 60's more so with Easy Rider.  But then you had an examination of van culture, semi-truck culture, lots more biker culture, drug culture, and with the popularity of Evel Knievel and stuff, an examination of stuntman culture.

Stunts has a stunt go wrong in the beginning of the movie.  A stuntman dangles from a helicopter, trying to attach a rope to himself.  He doesn't, and falls to his death.  The dead man's brother shows up later to investigate the death, but also to himself perform the stunt that killed his brother.  He and his small group of stuntmen get involved in the film being made.  We get some stunts, and then soon more stuntmen start dying.  Clearly something is going on.  Reporter B.J. and main stunt guy Glen are hot on the case, trying to figure it out, while in the meantime performing the stunts the film calls for.

It's pretty much exactly what you'd expect from a stunt-driven drama murder mystery.  If you guessed that it has some easy to digest characters that follow basic character patterns, you're correct!  There's the bottom line business man: the director of the film the stunt guys work on.  There's the lone wolf semi noir hero: Glen played by Robert Forster.  There's the barely developed friends/cohorts he chills with that are likable but forgettable.  The reporter B.J. is the nice and lovely reporter who's obviously gonna fall for our main dude.  Yeah.  It's thin.

The stunts are cool, and we see a good variety of them.  I do wish that they either played up the gravity of the seriousness of them, or had a bit of an explanation as to what was going on.  However, on the simple ones like car races and flips and stuff, obviously that's not necessary.

The biggest problem is that at no point does any police, investigation or anything happen.  In the movie and in the film-set, everyone is seemingly content to just let the stuntmen investigate the deaths.  In a biker movie or something, that would make sense.  It's a gang.  They're probably all shady characters.  But on a film set, with dozens of people connected to different parts of Hollywood or accounting or whatever, no that would not fly.  Eh, minor complaint.

By far not something to check out for any huge reason, it's fun enough to keep one watching I guess.  It does have some stunts in it that are fun, and the actors pull it off well.  The examination of a subculture is something I do enjoy in general.  It's an intriguing idea, and it's also fun to sort of get a glimpse into the movie making of the time.  Seeing stuff like the older cameras, the actual destruction of vehicles and stuff, brings me back to why practical effects and older ways of making films were way more hard than movies have it now.  Now ALL this shit would be CG.  Fuck y'all.  I'm gettin old.  Now I can offically say, "back in my day".  I also hate modern music.

I give Stunts....uh....2.5 again?  God.  Lotsa middle of the road movies lately.

The Squeeze - 1978

Also known as The Diamond Thieves and The Rip-Off.

Antonio Margheriti is very well known on the cult scene.  Anyone who directs a film like Cannibal Holocaust would be.  After all, that film has the best score of all time!  I kid, but the score to that film is fucking amazing, and it's worth seeing the movie just for the haunting theme song.  Like many of the Italian directors of the time, his career took random stabs at various genres.  He dabbled in crime thrillers, spaghetti westerns, comedy, straight action, and even some dramas.

I just spelled "dramas" with a z and considered leaving it. Dramaz. I mention this for no particular reason.

The Squeeze is sort of your crime caper/action flick.  Starring Lee van Cleef as the older, retiring criminal who guess what DOES ONE LAST JOB!  What?  Literally have you EVER heard of this idea happening before?  It's going to go really well right?  No complications?

Well obviously not.  "Cleef-ster" has to steal some diamonds, but then gets double crossed by the guys that hired him.  He escapes with the diamonds to his hotel room, where he plans to lay low for a while.  But he was shot in the escape, and he needs help.  Also, he's being searched for by the guys who hired him.  In the meantime, his neighbor Clarisse sees the blood he left behind, and decides to become involved....

There are some interesting turns towards the end, and long story short, this was decent.  As a crime film, it's got a personal touch and the characters are likable.  "Cleef-arino" spins a very secretive and confident bad guy.  Clarisse is played by Karen Black, who is one of my favorite actresses from the 70's.  Christ.  If you were to tell me at age 23 that later I'd have a favorite 70's actress, I would not have believed you for a minute.

The pacing was pretty great as well.  To be honest, not much really happens in the movie, and there's a lot of downtime in the middle as "The Cleef" is in hiding, the baddies don't know where he is, and Karen Black's not involved yet.  It could seem to sag, but somehow things keep moving, and the whole thing feels well handled.

I'm not going to say it's great by any means.  It's got practically nothing that makes it stand out, besides the actors.  It is instantly interchangeable with any other crime flick, and I seriously doubt I'd recommend it to anyone.  I thought of it a lot like the title.  So completely bland.  They had three, count them three names for this, and each one is as bland and middling as the next.  It's so completely middle of the road that it's almost to the point where I'd subtract a point for just that reason, but that's being too harsh.  Instead, 3 stars.