Black Heat (1975) is an Al Adamson film, and is, as the title clearly indicates, blacksploitation, but has fewer black cast members and black culture than is typical in the genre. IMDB also lists it as The Girl's Hotel and The Murder Gang. The feature commentary, which was otherwise pretty mundane, explains this. The original idea was for a titty flick actioner for the drive-in market to be called Girl's Hotel, but the Blacksploitation market, which was mainly large indoor theaters in Metropolitan centers was too large to ignore, so they shot two act one reels, the first for Black Heat, stressing the black cop hero, and the second Girl's motel with much more nudity and simulated sex than Black Heat. It was thought that the foreign market didn't care about the black theme, and was more interested in action than sex, so they released Black Heat under the title The Murder Gang, marketing it as a cops and robbers film. IT was successful in all three markets, even with a largely unknown cast and a rather weak plot.

Three girls, a piano bar entertainer, a TV reporter, and a compulsive gambler all live in the same hotel, which is also a hotbed of illegal gambling, prostitution, and who knows what else. Our hero, Timothy Brown, is boyfriend of reporter Tanya Boyd. His partner is boyfriend of the gambler, Jana Bellan. The owners of the hotel hope to extort Bellan into giving them currier information from the securities company where she works. The money is to be used to buy guns, to exchange for Coke. A rather nasty black career criminal is the brains behind the entire operation.

In the Black Heat version, we bet breasts and buns from Boyd, but the deleted scenes that must have been in Girl's Hotel have breast exposure from Bellan in two different sex scenes. The quality of this 4/3 transfer is not good, and the deleted scenes are much worse. IMDB readers have this at 5.7, but with only 6 votes. I found it barely adequate exploitation fare, so C-.

XX/XY (2002):

This is going to make a great DVD (street: July 29th). The movie is one of those too-honest-to-be-entertaining looks at the foolish sexual choices of whiny young adults. It opened to mixed reviews and a complete lack of an audience. In fact, it is still playing now in a handful of theaters across the country.

XX/XY is caught in the inevitable Indy dilemma. Indy filmmakers like to think that the difference between their films and Hollywood formula pictures is that the Indy people can reach in and try to find the truth about characters and situations. That is all well and good, and they should do this. But what does the filmmaker do when the characters are selfish, immature, uninteresting, shallow and whiny? You see the problem? If you want to make a truthful movie about real people that you really wouldn't want to hang around with, it is going to result in the audience spending two hours with people they really don't like. That can be very effective filmmaking, but it surely isn't the road to commercial success.

That's exactly the situation with this film. The characters feel authentic. They fail to develop over the years, but that is also authentic, since so many of us do that in real life. The dialogue is authentic as well. The problem is that these are really not characters you would want to spend any time with. It's a genuine movie, but it has an entertainment value of zero, and I can't imagine why anyone would want to see it. 

The essence:

At a campus mixer, a predatory male asks a woman to go to bed with him almost as soon as he meets her. She not only agrees, but asks that her roommate be allowed to join in. The guy figures he's in hog heaven, but when they all start doing the deed, it gets really uncomfortable. This uneasiness sets the stage for the interaction that will mark their relationships through college and then, in the second half of the film, about ten years later as they hook up again after years of separation.

Hollywood films may tend toward being phony, but the rule of thumb in commercial filmmaking is that you can't ever sacrifice entertainment value for honesty, because entertainment fills the seats in the theaters, thus allowing  filmmakers to make a profit, thus allowing them to make more films. This, on the other hand, is an honest film which will get some good reviews but fill no seats at all, thus forcing the filmmaker to go scratching around for enough money to make his next film. It played at Sundance. It will make a small arthouse run, then go to video.

The lead character in this film, Coles, ends up in advertising after a stab at filmmaking, making "art-house movies no one will ever see".  Crude no-budget films on digital video. Like this one.

So why will it be a great DVD? Maya Stange, an Australian actress, does a lot of nudity, and she looks mah-velous. Great body. I had only a poor quality DIVX bootleg to work with, but here's a preview.

• Maya Stange
• Bonus: here is Stange in an Aussie movie, including a near-frontal in the last one. Caps by Oz.(1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Big City Blues (1999):

OK, I'll describe a film, you tell me which one it is.

Two hit men are driving along in a car, headed for a job. Instead of discussing murder and gangster stuff, they are discussing real estate, settling down with a family, fast food and religion. One of the hit men is played by an actor who used to be the biggest box office star in Hollywood, and is now making a comeback. Later in the movie, two of the main characters are captured by homosexual perverts who bind them in S&M devices.

Your guess?

No, Pulp Fiction is wrong. The movie is the immortal "Big City Blues", and the former mega star isn't John Travolta, but Burt Reynolds. This proves, one again, that if there were no Quentin Tarantino, we would have to invent him.

You've read many reviews where the reviewer said the movie was almost unwatchable, right? Usually the reviewer was speaking figuratively. But not this time. This movie is unwatchable. Literally. It is so dark that you can't tell what is going on, and three times it literally goes black. I'm guessing that they mishandled the negative or shot it wrong, or something, and then tried to cover it up with some additional dialogue where the characters notice that the lights went out.

Frankly, however, I think the film would be incomprehensible even if you could see what was going on. Some of the scenes don't seem to have anything to do with the other scenes. In other words, this is a really, really, bad movie. Really bad. Think about "From Hell It Came", "Leonard, Part 6", and those Count Yorga movies from Mexico. Think about the fact that if all other movies were like this, Kevin Costner would win best director every year.

Not to mention best actor.

I had to give the film an F, only because our system doesn't allow anything lower unless Jeff Fahey is in the film. I wish they had snuck Jeff into a scene, just so I could have reached deeper into the alphabet. On the other hand, the English alphabet only has 26 letters. I would have had to brush up my Russian.

Tuna managed to skirt around the Fahey rule when he reviewed the film. He gave it an "F-". IMDb viewers rate it 2.6/10 which is abysmal, but it also means some people rated it higher than the minimum, which is hard for me to believe. Three people rated it 10/10, which had to be the director's family, or maybe some stoners just goofin' on the IMDb.

Georgina Cates was the best thing about the movie, and she got naked. If it had been in better light, without all the crazy blue and red mood lighting, that could have been enough for me to forgive the movie quality. Well, at least you can tell it's a woman. I guess that Georgina was hoping that if she wore a crazy wig in really funky lighting nobody would recognize her in this movie, and if she had used a pseudonym, she might have pulled it off.

• Georgina Cates (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Yesterday's Updates:

(the encyclopedia wasn't working right yesterday)

• Updated volumes: Emmanuelle Seigner, Kristin Scott Thomas
• New volumes: Barbara Windsor, Marisa Tomei, Marie-France Pisier, De'Ann Power

Other crap:

• Disney and the case of the missing breasts -  one thing about the internet - you can't sneak much past it
• MTV Movie Awards - best actor? Nic Cage? Adrien Brody? Jack Nicholson? No. Eminem, who else? Best actress? Kirsten Dunst, "Spider-Man". That's credible.
• remember topless superstar Samantha Fox - she's now in the German version of Celebrity Boxing She did OK, losing on points to a top-notch athlete who is four inches taller and ten years younger.
• SkyNews says Baghdad Bob is still alive
• a Madonna, Kaballah, a bicycle - lethal combination
• Richard Chamberlain admits he's gay. Whoa! There's a shocker, eh? My little world is turned upside down. Next you're gonna tell me Harvey Fierstein is gay. Here's Chamberlain on the cover of a Dr Kildare book
• Baptists say Jim Carrey was getting paid $20 million to squat down and poop on the Holy Bible. I think this parody site is written by the same people who do whitehouse.org
• The Movie Juice review of Bruce Almighty is guest-written by God. Alll-mighty then!
• Saddam's daughters seek asylum and employment in England. Their job qualifications? Well, their favorite hobby was driving around in a Mercedes with pals, shouting insults at poor countrymen. I guess they could be movie critics, or Tory back-benchers.
• ya gotta love The Sun. The Top 10 viral e-mails and bouncing breasts. Letterman should hire these guys. It's like the top 10 body parts or Van Pattens (the #1 answer was Dick)
• perfect hindsight - some of the stupidest things ever said about the future
• naked protestors demonstrate against the G-8 summit.
• a few years back, a cliché gag introduction on those "roast" shows was "and now here's __________ , he's a new kind of comedian - he isn't funny". In the same vein, England has a new kind of nudist - they are fully clothed.

   

   

  
   

Here are the latest movie reviews available at scoopy.com.

• The yellow asterisks indicate that I wrote the review, and am deluded into thinking it includes humor.
• If there is a white asterisk, it means that there isn't any significant humor, but I inexplicably determined there might be something else of interest.
• A blue asterisk indicates the review is written by Tuna (or Lawdog or Junior or C2000 or Realist or ICMS or Mick Locke, or somebody else besides me)
• If there is no asterisk, I wrote it, but am too ashamed to admit it.

Another batch of Simandl goodies...

Empire of Ash
Lloyd Simandl action series made during the late 1980s in British Columbia. Simandl's proto-lesbian named Baalca is played by Michele Chiponski (Middle Age Crazy) and later by one-timer Nancy Pataki.

• Michele Chiponski: partial breasts and buns in very revealing outfit.
• Nancy Pataki: full dorsal nudity getting a full body massage (but when she gets up she appears to be wearing a thong).

Chained Heat II (1993)
Technically Lloyd Simandl's first 'czechploitation' as it was his first of many low budget exploitation films made in the Czech Republic. Along with American actresses Kim Kates and hefmag bunny Kari Whitman (who amazingly keeps her clothes on), the local cellmates are played by czech actresses Lucie Benesova (as Lucie Benes) and Marketa Hrubesova (who could have stole the film had she got naked).

• Kimberley Kates: full frontal in shower.
• Lucie Benesova: full frontal in shower with Kim.
• Kari Whitman: upskirt only.
• Marketa Hrubesova: bra-less pokies.

Sleeping Dogs (1997)
One of Simandl's first czechploitation sci-fi's. Some of the scenes have been used as stock footage for countless of his later movies.

• Heather Hanson: Canadian actress showing some bra-less pokies.

Sins of the Realm (2003) (Asian edition)
The latest Simandl UK release "Chained Sinners: Medieval Fleshpots" is missing all scenes of the naked princesses getting strangled, flogged, and branded with a red hot iron. With a saucy title like that you expect a few iron maidens and perhaps a burning at the stake. These caps are from the uncut Asian edition available at amazon.co.jp

• Vladimira Kopal: pokies getting strangled.
• Lucie Vondracek: bare back getting flogged (possible body double).
• Various: topless getting branded.

Other recent Simandl czech babes:

• Petra Kulikova: topless love scene in "Lethal Target" (2000).
• Dana Sedlakova: bra-less pokies giving Kim Dawson a full body massage in "Lethal Target".
• Vladimira Kopal: topless in far left getting ready for lesbian threesone in "Last Stand" (2000).
• Katerina Brozova: dreaded fully-clothed lesbian threesome in "Last Stand".

Bonus stuff:

• Kimberley Kates: full frontal gyno-cam stepping out the shower in "Armstrong" (1998)
• Marketa Hrubesova: full frontal in the softcore adaption of the opera "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk" (1992). (1, 2, 3, 4)

Here is Spanish actress Irene Visedo, she currently stars in the hit spanish TV Serie "Cuéntame", that is something like "the Wonder Years". Some people may remember her from the excellent movie "The Devil's Backbone" that was directed by Guillermo del Toro. Here she is showing her breasts in scenes from "La Mujer de mi Vida".