This Traffic Is Killer

 

They don't make 'em like they used to.

The "'em" in this case is obviously made-for-TV movies. We have LOTS, but there's something about the way 1970s America gave us these overly ambitious, incredibly dramatic and perfectly timed for commercial breaks features that just has an incredible charm. 

Quick Plot: It's a busy July 4th on the titular California Interstate 5. On this particular holiday in 1976, a 39-car pileup will take the lives of 14 motorists. 

These are their stories.

Well, about a dozen of those involved IN said pile-up. After an incredibly impressive opening stunt on par with the opening of Final Destination 2, Smash-Up On Interstate 5 turns the clock back 48 hours to tell us just how we got here, zooming in a few of the drivers who will meet some dramatic fate. It's a very '70s disaster movie collection that includes:

- June (Harriet Nelson) and Al (Buddy Ebsen), an adorable elderly couple trying to make the most out of June's impending cancer

- a gang of bikers who try to assault -

- Erica (Vera Miles), a later-in-life divorcee trying to find her way and stumbling upon a ridiculously romantic doctor-turned-trucker 

- Penny and Pete, a runaway couple who hitch a ride with Lee before turning a gun on him but killing -

- a baby-faced Tommy Lee Jones as Officer Hutton, who widows his young wife just as she gives birth the to child he'll never meet

- his brother-in-law and sergeant Sam (Robert Conrad), who wants to marry nurse Laureen (Donna Mills), who refuses to do so because Sam could die on the road and leave her a widow like her sister

Got all that? 

Based on the novel Expressway, Smash-Up On Interstate 5 feels unusual today, but probably fit quite well in the epic disaster era of its time. It's a star-studded ensemble piece that culminates in a giant action sequence and a surprising body count. To call director John Llewellyn Moxey a television veteran is like saying Cal Ripken Jr. had good attendance. This is a man whose career spanned four decades, including The Night Stalker and EIGHTEEN episodes of Murder, She Wrote. Not all heroes make it to the big screen.

But they can still wear capes

In truth, I'm not really sure what Smash-Up is trying to do as a movie. There's a certain kind of human discovery in getting to know a variety of strangers whose lives will be fundamentally changed (and maybe even ended) in just a matter of hours by a sheer mechanical accident. The day-to-day, how-we-got-here works better for some stories than others. I would have happily watched a full movie centered on June and Al navigating their relationship in the face of disease, while the troubled-runaway-meets-even-more-troubled-murderer did little for me (and this is technically a horror blog). 

So why even write about it here, you might ask? Well, the odds are somewhat higher that I'll meet my fate at the hands of a bad driver than masked machete-wielding supernaturally gifted maniac, so on that front, Smash-Up IS scary. And you know what? So is being a middle-aged divorcee fighting off the advances of Herb Edelman.

High Points

Seriously, Ebsen and Nelson are so touching as a couple with decades of love and the knowledge that things are about to end. It makes you understand why this kind of storytelling was so popular. When it works, it really, really works

Low Points

Maybe it's just the current state of the country, but the cop stuff (which takes up a significant amount of screentime) is far less interesting than the rest. Even the sheer manipulation of a woman giving birth while her dutiful policeman husband is gunned down summoned more of an eyeroll than frown

Lessons Learned

They don't teach screaming in lamaz

Nothing brings a couple back together like a smash-up!

Never accept a ride from Bad Ronald, even if you're fully armed

The Winning Line

[upon hearing hubby Al tapping out some Chopin on the piano] "You played that the first time we made love!"

I knew Buddy Ebsen was talented, but the ability to play a nocturne while having sex? That's coordination!

Rent/Bury/Buy

Smash-Up On Interstate 5 is far from a classic, but I found it quite entertaining. It's currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

Welcome to Prime Time

  

If you know me even slightly, you knew this was coming. 

3% on Rotten Tomatoes? "Overwhelming dislike" cited on MetaCrtici?

Obviously, it would take an alien invasion to keep me away.

Quick Plot: Will Radford tirelessly works for the Department of Homeland Security, spending his days randomly Google Earthing and zooming in on civilizations to listen to their private conversations. The same way a lot of us distract ourselves with social media during the work day, Will kills his time by spying on his children: soon-to-be mom Faith and son Dave, who has some moral qualms with the way his father violates all personal liberties. 

Will's incredibly immoral professional behavior pays off when hungry aliens land with a bang. What are they hungry for, you might ask? The same thing Will consumes every day: data.

That's right, these creatures from another world have come to ours to invade our data centers.

[demands crossover with Eddington now] 

We all knew that a reckoning of how we killed time during the height of COVID-19 was coming. Me? I ate too much Domino's cheesy bread and watched toxic levels of America's Next Top Model. Gal Gadot? The Imagine video should haunt her past the time those Wonder Woman residuals run dry.

Rich Lee made War of the Worlds.

Considering the infamous radio play mania of War of the Worlds's history, making a Zoom-style adaptation in the internet age makes perfect sense. On paper, this is a good idea.

But good ideas require good execution. 

Or moderately acceptable levels of execution. 

Or lazy intern-levels.

I don't know how much lower I can go: this is a bad, bad movie. I'm almost willing to give the performances a pass because I have to wonder if they thought they were just killing a Friday night with a friend's read-through, the same way a lot of us connected with our pals via Jackbox games. There's no way Clark Gregg (as the corrupt FBI director) and Eva Longoria (as "Sandra NASA", because that's how our government operative saves his contacts) gave these performances thinking they were being recorded, right???

I just hope they were paid generously in Amazon gift cards.

So, that's the other reason War of the Worlds is picking up so much justified internet hatred. This is an Amazon commercial. A terrible, fairly inept 90 minute (plus some commercials because even an Amazon commercial needs ad revenue) Amazon commercial. Guess who saves the world? An Amazon driver, by way of his Amazon drone. 

No, I'm not kidding. 

High Points

This isn't coming for Spielberg, but for what War of the Worlds is, the effects are mostly fine

Low Points

This movie ends on a thumbs up tweet from Joe Rogan. AND it's a commercial that...has commercials. We're living in a dark, dark timeline

Lessons Learned (and illustrated through Ice Cube's best acting moments)

$1000 Amazon gift card beats free internet for one year (providing you have access to internet to use said Amazon gift card)

Top secret military installations don't allow thumb drives, though they do grant personal access to Facebook

Prime Air is the future of delivery

Rent/Bury/Buy

It's hard to be responsible for anyone giving an Amazon original commercial their eyeballs and data. Also, this is a terrible movie. AND YET. Terrible movie completists will not NOT be entertained by this mess. It's a moral quandary.

Different Places

Let's get one thing straight: Vampire In Vegas is not the same movie as Vegas Vampires, though both are about vampires that are in Vegas (or Vegas vampires, you might even say). 

Vampire In Vegas, which I watched on Peacock, has a 2.8 out of 10 rating on IMDB. Having watched Vampire In Vegas and put together this far too long writeup below, I can pretty safely say that 2.8 is a fair score. 

So...how bad can the even LOWER rated Vegas Vampires possibly be? 

And what does it say about me that my new top goal of the summer is to watch it because I NEED TO KNOW.

But that's a story for another day.

Quick Plot (of Vampire In Vegas, not Vegas Vampires): We open with what feels like a 20 minute narrative monologue by Tony Todd. I get it: you've probably (hopefully) spent most of your budget on locking down one of the genre's best voices, so why not lean in on your greatest strength?

Well, maybe because you still need compelling writing when it goes on...and on...and on.

Eventually, we get action in the form of B-roll footage for a tourism commercial selling the perks of Las Vegas. It's one of the more visually aggressive credits sequences I've survived. What starts as panning over popular landmarks quickly turns into unreasonable zoom-in and zoom-outs on the same landmarks. It's upsetting. It kind of hurts. But then there's a brief shot of a cat, and what do you know? I'm suddenly back on board.

No wonder why this is .4 points higher than Vegas Vampires, which, I have to assume, does not include a cat, much less a shot of Tony Todd holding said cat.

And now, a quick rundown of our players (of which there are way, way too many):

- Tony Todd as a vampire who as noted above, in one scene, holds a cat

- The cat. The cat only has one scene. No wonder why this couldn't crack a 3

- A lady scientist charged with developing a sun-blocking serum for Tony Todd vampire 

- The lady scientist's cleavage

- A pair of campers who witness a lot of self-combustion as lady doctor tests out serums in the Vegas desert. If you're thinking, "what are their names and should we invest any energy in learning more?", I'm here to tell you, "No."

- A male detective whose thing is bowties

- A lady detective whose wardrobe, I warn you, may lead me into a 1000+word essay on why men should not..just, should not

- The lady detective's cleavage

- Renfield! In this case, Tony Todd's campaign manager because what more could a 300 year old vampire want but the US presidency?

- An engaged couple who rudely have their morning sex run late as the groom's friends wait outside to drive him to their camping trip

- His terrible aughts bro friends who are actually going to take him to Vegas for a full bachelor party hell

- A lady vampire 

- The lady vampire's cleavage

- The lady vampire's torso

- A vampire doorman 

This is a LOT of characters for a very, very bad film. There's also such a messy story at play that I beg your forgiveness with my very confused summary. I won't even try to call out a single character's name. I'm already doing a lot of work here, and considering this movie's opening credits assaulted me, I feel like I owe it very little. 

At some point, our characters end up in one place: a vampire night club.

It's a strip joint where no one actually takes off their clothes, possibly because the budget couldn't afford it. One stripper dressed as a naughty schoolgirl gives a speedy lapdance, rushes through her lines in the style of the Micromachine Man, grabs a pencil and notebook out of her skirt to land a punchline and hurls it off to the side so quickly that I'm convinced this woman was charging the production by the minute. 

I haven't even gotten to the homemade CGI or incredibly confusing rules about vampirism that this movie seems to change every time a new character shows up. At one point, our hero (it takes a really long time to figure out we have one) drinks a vial of Tony Todd's blood, sprouts vampire bat wings, and can teleport across town...in broad daylight. Is that a thing? 

Vegas Vampires is directed by Jim Wynorski, a legend of low budget cinema who made everything from the underrated Chopping Mall to CobraGator and dozens--seriously, dozens--of movies with some variation of "breast" in the title. A sampling:

Despite helming something called The Hills Have Thighs, I think, and this is purely conjecture, that this man likes boobs. Not that you actually SEE any naked boobs in Vampire In Vegas. Just cleavage. Cleavage pushed up higher than the high heels that our lady detective wears on the job...while hiking through the desert to investigate a homicide. 

This is a movie universe where a powerful vampire who survived three centuries is ultimately bested by a skinny dude with a tree branch. I shouldn't expect much. At least I get the exact closing line I hoped for when I saw the title:

High Points

We will never have another Tony Todd, and while I'm a little sad to think of him bringing his classically trained skills to this mess, it's never a bad thing to see him onscreen

Low Points

Picking the worst thing about a very bad movie isn't easy, but you know what? You've got legendary Tony Todd and you dress him in a Kmart Dracula Halloween costume? That's cruel

Lessons Learned

One does not smoke LSD

O-negative blood is very rare, and that's why city blood bank facilities keep their limited selection stored at unregulated room temperature in shoddy ziplock bags

Doorman 101 curriculum does not overlap with Vampire Doorman 101 Curriculum

Careful where you lean in a laboratory. Some are equipped with exposed high voltage indoor fences

Rent/Bury/Buy

As you might guess by the dissertation I've now written on Vampire In Vegas, I found far more to this movie than I ever expected. Folks: it's reallllllly bad. Bad in that way that demands a LOT of introspection. 

What am I doing with my life?

What's the Opposite of an "Urban" Legend?

As someone born in 1982 who therefore spent the bulk of filmgoing in the '90s, it's fascinating to see the current pendulum swing on genre cinema of that era. I had a big moment of reevaluation when I revisited Disturbing Behavior, and ever since then, I've found myself not just charmed, but sometimes surprisingly impressed by movies that I as a surely teenager wrote off 20+ years ago. Would Campfire Tales, a rare anthology, have the same effect?

Spoiler alert: no.

Quick Plot: After a quick teaser starring Amy Smart and vampire James Marsden (not a vampire in the story, just a human celebrity vampire who doesn't age) as a couple encountering the urban legendary hook man, we meet our storytellers: two young couples with very familiar faces drunkenly speeding late at night. They crash in the woods, start a fire, and indulge in their titular routine. 

The first tale follows a pair of newlyweds on an RV trip through the woods. A mysterious mechanic stops by and warns them of a murderer on the loose, but they brush that away as the ravings of a mad man. Naturally, they soon find themselves mysteriously out of gas. Rick (Ron Livingston, savoring the chance to push a Long Island accent on innocent cinema goers) discovers the mechanic brutally murdered, and tries to get back in time to warn his wife. Things don't end well.

Up next is a standard chat room PSA about being catfished before we used the term 'catfish.' A young girl is excited to be left home alone with her dog (don't get attached) and soccer ball, but she makes the mistake of telling her online pal. Things...don't end well.

Last up is the saga of an aimless motorcyclist (Glenn Quinn) who runs into mechanical trouble just outside the sprawling horse farm of a beautiful, mute young woman who's adequate enough at charades for them to quickly fall in love. The only thing standing between them is her abusive father and choker necklace. Things, you know, end as they do.

Back to the campfire, our youths are finally found and - 

you know.

Campfire Tales was made right before Scream exploded the market for mostly mediocre teen slashers. On that front, I can appreciate its almost old school charm. Urban Legend would do a better job of this a few years later, but Campfire Tales is still watchable. The stories move quickly. They have to, since there's not much to any of them. 

The first is the best, probably because Livingston and Jennifer MacDonald carry it well and it moves at such a brisk pace. The second goes the other route: it can't be more than 20 minutes, but the story just doesn't really move in one direction. It ends on a classic urban legend beat, but takes such a convoluted route there that I can't imagine anyone caring. Then again, I spent the entire thing telling myself, "you know they're gonna kill the dog and spare the kid," so in fairness, that might have been my own problem. The haunted farmhouse has a little bit of poetry to its soul. That doesn't mean it's good...just that it clearly tried. 

Directed by the trio of Matt Cooper, Martin Kunert, and David Semel and written by a slightly different trio of Kunert, Cooper, and Eric Manes, Campfire Tales is probably most interesting as a taste of the '90s seasoned by a heaping tablespoon of before-they-were-famous stars. It's fine. Never scary and not particularly funny, but considering how few horror anthologies the '90s gave us, it's an interesting relic.

High Points

Anthologies should fundamentally be about comeuppance, making the final reveal of Campfire Tales feel very right

Low Points

The more I think about that poorly paced second segment AND the fact that it ended with a lovable golden retriever massacred, the angrier I get at everything

Lessons Learned

Don't promise M&Ms before you've evaluated your surroundings

Crows only squawk at night if stirred

Everyone needs to learn what it means to be free, which is the kind of thing someone with a broken down motorcycle would say

Rent/Bury/Buy

There's a particular nostalgia people of a certain get now when we think back to the '90s, and Campfire Tales, with its dial-up tech and choker fashion, will certainly fuel it with Diet Snapple. This isn't a very good movie, but the stories are short, and the wraparound has a rewarding payoff. Watch it on Peacock if the mood strikes.