Category: 1970s

Looking up the film Frog on Prime ,I stumbled across this title that seemed worth checking out. Wildlife photographer Sam Elliott is canoeing around the island estate of the Crockett family when a mishap with some of the younger family members has him being invited up to the house where patriarch Ray Milland is celebrating his birthday. The appearance of an unusually large number of frogs portends the murder of the island’s human inhabitants by its vengeful wildlife. It’s a delightfully fun and entertaining but weird entry into the pantheon of killer animals, though I’m thrown off whenever I see Elliott without a mustache.   

Travelling from Ohio to New York City for a job interview, Jack Lemmon and his wife Sandy Dennis suffer every possibly imaginable difficulty in their travels. Most of these begin with their own incredibly poor decision making and overreliance on systems working as they should (leaving important medications and money in their checked baggage, assuming they’ll arrive on time, etc.). Because their issues originate from their own decisions, it’s difficult to be on the couple’s side when more complications arise. Their insufferable attitudes towards life in a large city and particularly Lemmon’s rigidness to his original expectations made me just want it to quickly end.

As another entry in the pantheon of killer monster films, Piranha is the tale of a school of deadly genetically altered piranhas who are accidentally released into a river, threatening a summer camp, resort, and a large number of local inhabitants. With its woodsy setting, it reminds me a lot of Grizzly though it seemed to manage the balance of horror and campiness better. It smartly includes skinny dipping teenagers, a mad scientist, abandoned governmental experimentation, and plenty of carnage. It also knows not to over-show the actual fish, instead relying on pools of blood and the imagination of the viewer.   

Jeff Bridges and Sam Waterston are a pair of cattle rustlers who find their enterprise threatened when they cross paths with rich, bored rancher Clifton James who hires a stock detective to catch the bandits. It’s mostly a film about these two dudes and their adventures as they continue to clash with the wealthy rancher. The two leads gel well together and keep the story amusing and engaging. There are plenty of oddball characters at the ranch, including Slim Pickens as the detective and Harry Dean Stanton as dim-witted hand, to give the two something to play against.

Pam Grier is glorious headlining these Blaxploitation films. Here she is the title character, a former model turned photographer who witnesses an assassination attempt on Thalmus Rasulala, the richest Black man in America. After a friend is stabbed to death, she teams up with an equally wonderful Yaphet Kotto to uncover a political conspiracy. It’s a rather fun flick that gets bonus points for including a conspiracy to bring down Black leadership in the country. It also has a great supporting cast including Ted Lange, Carl Weathers, Scatman Corothers, and the ever magnificent Eartha Kitt as an over-the-top fashion designer.