Tag: maria conchita alonso

Actor’s Spotlight: Nate’s Top Ten Bill Paxton Performances

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Bill Paxton was one of those guys who could be the most affable dude in the room, the friendliest guy on the block and without warning, at the drop of a hat turn the energy of his performance around 180 degrees into something dark and dangerous before the audience even had a chance to react. A boisterous, scene stealing, standup guy and just as talented in the director’s chair as he was in front of the camera, this guy was one of cinema’s greatest treasures. Here are my top ten personal favourites of his many excellent performances!

10. Wayne Caraway in Nathan Morlando’s Mean Dreams

This indie drama was one of his last films before passing and one of the most terrifying, despicable characters he’s ever played. Caraway is a corrupt county sheriff who is running drugs as a side hustle and letting his daughter (Sophie Nélisse) become collateral damage in the process. He’s volcanically unpredictable, heinously abusive and frequently very violent, especially towards the kids around him. It’s an arresting portrayal of renegade small town law gone bad to the bone and he relishes every rotten mannerism and brooding, misanthropic gesture.

9. Bokky in Traveller

This is an obscure little indie focused on the lives of the descendants of Irish Gypsy ‘Travellers’ in the states, making their living as con artists. Paxton’s charming Bokky is a seasoned pro who mentors a young rookie (Mark Wahlberg) with roots in the community, both eventually finding themselves in over their head. It’s a quaint, eccentric caper flick that showcases a niche society you don’t often get to hear too much about.

8. Dale ‘Hurricane’ Dixon in Carl Franklin’s One False Move

Dale lives up to his name, a bull in a china shop of a small town sheriff played expertly by Paxton as extremely warm and welcoming at first, until we see a dangerous core smouldering just under the salt of the earth exterior, brought out by a violent, twist laden crime narrative that lets no character off the hook.

7. Earl in Baltasur Kormákur’s 2 Guns

A spectacularly corrupt CIA agent in a Panama hat, Earl is out to get back a stolen slush fund that somehow ended up in the hands of the cartel and then the film’s two heroes (Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg). He isn’t just the pursue and retrieve type of fellow though, he relishes his power and has a nasty sadistic streak that comes out in ruthless Russian roulette torture bouts he puts his captives through. A cheerfully psychotic, scene stealing villain, Bill has a lot of fun and banters around with the rest of the cast nicely.

6. Hank in Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan

Just a small town dude who finds a whole whack of stolen money, things spiral out of control for him, his girlfriend (Bridget Fonda) and dullard brother (Billy Bob Thornton) in this brutal, icy and brilliant morality play of a thriller. Paxton always excelled at showing the dark side of seemingly harmless characters and this is no exception, giving the old saying ‘money is the root of all evil’ a run for *it’s* money.

5. Jerry Lambert in Stephen Hopkins’ Predator 2

This is a fucking great film and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Lambert is the spitfire rookie in Danny Glover’s impossibly badass squad of tactical street cops, which include familiar faces like Ruben Blades and Maria Conchita Alonso. This being an 80’s action flick, Paxton gives his trademark lovably obnoxious and inexhaustibly verbose energy and is a terrific addition to an already packed cast.

4. Brock Lovett in James Cameron’s Titanic

Brock is one of the characters who only exists in the present and sort of anchors the historical facts with his presence. Paxton gives this scruffy treasure hunter a laid back yet determined edge and rocks a pirate hoop earring awesomely.

3. Dad Meiks in Bill Paxton’s Frailty

This was his feature directing debut and what a film it is. A sort of Southern Gothic horror whodunit, he gives an absolutely haunting, harrowing turn as a loving father who gradually begins to lose his marbles and display murderous tendencies. He plays the horrific elements straight and frankly, making his curve into madness hit all the harder.

2. Private William Hudson in James Cameron’s Aliens

“Game over man!!” Paxton made that hilarious line and many others iconic in this portrayal of the ultimate badass who has the ultimate nervous breakdown when danger shows up and ultimately actually fights pretty damn impressively and redeems himself for freaking out like a little bitch earlier on. He’s also riotous comic relief and gets all the best moments.

1. Severen in Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark

One in a pack of roving vampires, Severen is undoubtably the most rambunctious and bloodthirsty of the pack, an unpredictable wild card who murders humans on a cheerful whim and always has a quip ready before blasting someone’s face off. In a career full of rowdy behaviour and off the wall performances this one stands out as the most impressive sustainment of energy for a feature length running time I’ve ever seen.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more!

-Nate Hill

B Movie Glory: El Muerto aka The Dead One

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

So imagine The Crow but like… based around Aztec/Day of the dead style mythology and starring Fez from That 70’s Show as a young man brought back from the dead as a supernatural zombie. Sounds to random to actually exist, right? Well it’s out there, it’s called The Dead One in some regions and El Muerto in others and… it’s something. I can’t quite say that as a compliment because it’s so goddamn low budget and cheesy, but I will say that a valiant effort is made, there’s a lot of heart behind it, plus some terrific actors having fun too.

Unfortunately Wilmer Valderrama will forever and always be known as Fez no matter what else he does and will never live that character down, but he does his best to be dark, smouldering and edgy here as Diego De La Muerte, who is killed in a car crash one night and resurrected as a badass monster with face paint and superpowers by the Mayan god of death. He’s marked as a boy in an opening flashback by a spooky Old Indian shaman (the great Billy Drago, who passed a few days ago) but what he doesn’t read in the fine print is that the God basically owns his soul and commands his every move once he’s undead. This leads to a fight for freedom and the love of his life (Angie Cepeda) who he left behind.

Soon the God manifests in reality as a creepy old witch type thing (again played by Drago, really outdoing himself with the scenery chewing here, as he was always famous for) and he has to fight the thing as well as evade a suspicious county Sheriff played by the legendary Michael Parks, who is also no longer with us. Other appearances are noted from Tony Plana as a priest, Joel David Moore’s as his best friend and the iconic Maria Conchita Alonso.

Man I really want to recommend this because I’m a lot more generous than most with this type of fare but I can’t because it’s essentially a pretty fucking awful film, not gonna lie. Shoddy special effects, cheesy dialogue, cheap looking cinematography, this one has it all. But hey, if you give it a go you’ll always be able to say that you saw a movie where Fez from That 70’s Show plays an Aztec zombie, so there’s that. Plus the thing is kinda fun in its own lovable horror flick way. It’s based on some cult comic series which I’ve never read but if anyone has, let me know how this holds up against the source material.

-Nate Hill

The Running Man

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

The Running Man is some silly ass shit, but it’s done with so much adorable enthusiasm, blinding 80’s neon and deafening ultra violence that it kinda wins you over. Plus it has one humdinger of a villain who, lets face it, gives the film most of its personality. Based on a Stephen King novel (albeit under his sheepish Bachman pseudonym), this takes place in one of those austere, glumly lit fascist hellscapes where there’s rubble everywhere, helicopters relentlessly thrum overhead and humanity has devolved to its worst. This is set in the year 2019 and although they undershot the level of depravity they imagined we’d sink to at this point, they sure as fuck weren’t far off the mark. Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as Ben Richards, a military man who is framed for heinous war crimes and forced to compete in the world’s most popular game show, a sadistic tournament called The Running Man where convicts are hunted down on live television by paid pro wrestler looking freak shows. This is all masterminded by an egotistical sociopath called Killian, played by real life former game show host Richard Dawson in what has to be one of the most inspired pieces of casting out there. It’s fun watching Ahnuld and slightly less athletic pal Yaphet Kotto get saddled with hilarious spandex onesies and shunted down a luge course from hell where they’re faced with such looming monsters as Subzero, Buzzsaw and Dynamo, who Arnie naturally begins dispatching in clever, gruesome ways followed by those obligatory one liners. It’s not a thoughtful film and the dystopian nightmare it establishes at the outset is never established on nor explored, mostly we just get sound, fury, profanity and extreme carnage as the game plays out about as loudly as any could get. The production design is so 80’s you could stick it in a time capsule, from dancing chicks with perms to synth music to Jesse Ventura himself in full roid-rage mode. Dawson is the soul of it all though and it wouldn’t be the same film without him, he steals the show as the ultimate evil ringmaster and has charisma that makes you laugh and want to knock his teeth down his throat in the same instance. Not the best of 80’s Arnie, but a fun, hectic ride through futuristic sci-fi.

-Nate Hill

Rob Zombie’s The Lords Of Salem

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Rob Zombie’s output has been hallmarked by a series of grungy, profane exploitation throwbacks with in your face violence and a loud, mean grind-house aesthetic. As much as I love *that* sensibility (I’m a hardcore fan of his films), what makes The Lords Of Salem so special is that he tries something different than he’s used to, ditches the comfort blanket of Manson-esque killers and brash, lewd dialogue in favour of mood, atmosphere and the kind of pacing you’d find in early 70’s fright flicks that valued aura over gore. This shows that although pretty much married to his trademark style (the third Firefly Family film is in production as we speak), he knows how to branch out successfully and has made a fantastic piece of slow burn horror with Salem. Set both during the infamous witch trials and in the present day, it focuses on quiet, introverted radio DJ Heidi Hawthorne (Sheri Moon Zombie). Now, if you’ve seen Sheri in the Firefly films you’ll know that the words ‘quiet’ and ‘introverted’ are a far cry from what she’s used to, but she’s brilliant here as a damaged recovering addict haunted by devilish forces. Plagued by sinister neighbours (Patricia Quinn, Dee Wallace and a freaky Judy Geeson), hallucinatory visions of evil and a mysterious music album mailed right to her radio station, it soon becomes clear that the demons of the past have come back to haunt Salem and have chosen her as a dark avatar. Zombie lovingly casts his films with carefully chosen icons of 60’s and 70’s genre cinema, and as such we get the likes of Ken Foree, Richard Lynch, Richard Fancy, Udo Kier, Maria Conchita Alonso, Michael Berryman, Sid Haig and more. Stealing the show is electric blue eyed Meg Foster in a blood freezing turn as Margaret Morgan, leader of the original Salem coven generations before. Foster hails from stuff like John Carpenter’s They Live, The live action Masters Of The Universe and recently Showtime’s Twin Peaks: The Return, but she’s absolutely terrifying and almost unrecognizable here as a freaky old hell hag with a raspy voice and gruesome saggy tits, truly a memorable villain. This is a film that takes its time building up to outright horror, alternating between dimly lit, spooky scenes from the original trials and the mounting tension of present day, including a subplot where an investigative scholar (Bruce Davison) tries to unearth evil and warn Heidi before it’s too late. Jarringly surreal visuals abound here, from neon palettes to a grandiose nightmare sequence involving a demon baby and some seriously strange architecture. It all builds to a searing finale that some may find to over the top or garish, but fits the story and ends the tale on a feverish note of hellish commotion, colour saturation and horrific spectacle that plays like Ken Russell by way of Dario Argento with a dash of David Lynch at his craziest. This is my favourite film in Zombie’s career so far, for its mood, unique visual language and rhythmic pacing, but also for his willingness to blast through the cobwebs of uncharted stylistic territory and bring forth well wrought, fresh artistic style and a damn great horror film too.

-Nate Hill

B Movie Glory: Dark Moon Rising 

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review


You want a romantic werewolf flick that rises above the vomitus of Twilight and gives you nostalgic pangs for stuff like The Howling and Bad Moon? Dark Moon Rising is your ticket, and proves that you don’t need heaps of PG-13 gloss, mopey teen bottom feeder ‘actors’ and a vacuous script to make a young adult oriented horror film. This one is admittedly low budget and feels just south of finished in spots, but it’s well crafted, made with love and bereft of CGI. The story couldn’t be simpler: a small town girl (Ginny Weirick), her stern Sheriff father (Chris Mulkey) and the new boy in town (Chris Delvecchio) who just happens to be a werewolf. Young love is always just a stone’s throw away from danger, which arrives in the form of the boy’s dangerous, monstrous father Bender (Max Ryan) who also happens to be a werewolf. You can imagine how it goes: steamy New Mexico supernatural melodrama with a few buckets of gore tossed in and a handful of super cool genre actors. Sid Haig, Lin Shaye and Maria Conchita Alonso have wonderful extended cameos, but the standout is Billy Drago, a staple villain actor who gets to do something different here. Blessed with a reptilian visage that just demands evil behaviour from him, he’s given a sympathetic detective role here, a heartbroken lawman on the hunt for Bender to appease personal anguish. The makeup and prosthetics are terrific, retro latex nightmares that made me miss the good old days before I was born when every horror flick had to rely on the ingenuity of a hardworking team of gorehounds. Despite a few weird pacing issues (tighter editing would have been appreciated), this one is a little indie horror well worth your time. 

-Nate Hill

Predator 2

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review


-Nate Hill-
Predator 2 is a gem of a film, and don’t let anyone ever try and convince you otherwise. It’s just so different and so much crazier than the first that I think people had a knee jerk ‘wtf’ reaction and panned it. It’s tough to top the sheer bombastic overdrive of the first one, which is considered a classic, but if anything the sequel switched the nitrous dial past maximum and blasts off into the stratosphere of excessive R rated chaos, an impressive feat. It also switches settings, from the sweaty jungles of South America to the equally sweaty and opulent grime of the urban jungle, namely Los Angeles of the future, bursting at the seams with so many over the top criminals and hectic, delirious violence that by the time the Predators show up they not only fit in, but seem relatively sane compared to everyone else. Seriously, every human character in this film is a coked up tornado of cartoonish energy and brashness it’s hard to keep up unless you’ve hoovered up a few rails yourself prior to sitting down and popping in the blu ray (the blu ray of this is wicked by the way, gorgeous transfer). So get this: Danny Glover, before he got too old for this shit, basically serves as a renegade SuperCop in this hellhole of a metropolis, waging all out war on loads of feral gang members and degenerates, constantly leaned on by the obligatory pain in the ass of a police commissioner (Robert Davi, god bless his republican ass) and backed up by a team of state of the art badasses, including Aliens’s Bill Paxton, who gets all the best lines and delivers them with the gusto the material deserves. He’s also backed by Ruben Blades and tough girl Maria Conchita Alonso, whose appearance and scenes with Paxton call to mind him and Jannette Goldstein side by side in Aliens, or is that just the fanboy in me having an aneurysm? Together they achieve 80’s action movie squad goals by messily wiping out as much of the criminal faction in the city as they can, including weird Rastafarian crime lord King Willie (Calvin Lockhart, spooky as all hell), until something else comes along. Something they can’t see, hear, or easily empty clips at whilst cheerfully spewing profanity. The predators have branched out, and this time there’s more than one, giving their inherent tactical nature a whole new twist. So who better to take on these extraterrestrial game wardens? Glover of course, who positively froths at the mouth. You know you’re overacting when Gary Busey has to keep up with you, and he does his loony best as some hush hush Fed who has been keeping tabs on the Preds for sometime, and has big notions of taking them down. It’s all in good fun, with jaw dropping, spectacularly brutal set pieces, violence that would not go over well these days (the 80’s didn’t give a fuck, man) and a seriously chaotic vibe humming through the whole breathless ordeal. I’d even be so bold as to say that this is the better of the two Predator films, upon getting all misty eyed and craving a rewatch after writing this. Go ahead, shame, me. It’s just too great of a flick to be as under appreciated as it is. Oh, and watch for a sly cameo from another otherworldly baddie late in the third act. 

B Movie Glory with Nate: For Which He Stands

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

  
For Which He Stands is a lean, mean, nasty crime drama and cautionary fable about the dangers of pride and ego, and the spiralling disaster ones life can turn into when these qualities within the human nature go unchecked. It’s also a shamelessly slimy B movie treat featuring a tough as nails lead performance from William Forsythe as Johnny Rochetti, a small time Vegas casino mogul who runs afoul of some extremely dangerous South American criminals. He plays the role like Liotta from Goodfellas crossed with Bronson from Death Wish, an initial belligerent cockiness wiped promptly out of his personality by the very real danger stalking him, replaced by a reckless calm and willingness to get his hands dirty to defend his loved ones. One night, a Latin scumbag causes a raucous in his casino by violently threatening a girl. Johnny has a reflex reaction to defend her, and inadvertently kills the prick. This makes him a local hero, but also paints a huge target on his back for the Colombian cartel, who his deceased quarry had connections with. He’s forced to leave his wife (Maria Conchita Alonso) and contend with the dangerous criminal forces aiming to eliminate him. There’s some truly freaky cartel baddies here, including Andrew Divoff in a cameo as a gravel voiced psycho, and Robert Davi in a fire so,e turn as Carlito Escalara, a ruthless assassin hell bent on destroying Johnny. He’s got some legendary villain roles in over the years, and this one is among the nastiest, and best. Johnny’s only help comes from an intrepid federal agent (Ernie Hudson) and a D.A. (John Ashton’s). It’s Forsythe’s show though, and his transformation from untouchable big shot to caged animal on the run to eventual pistol packing hero is fun to watch. The atmosphere is pure crime cinema, told almost like a dark fairy tale that just happens to be set in Vegas. This one is positively buried in obscurity though, I had to seek out a screener VHS copy of a dusty corner of Amazon to get my hands on it. Good luck.