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tbundrick
Reviews
Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway (1976)
Marcia, marcia, marcia, why is everyone so interested in her?!
A slew of movies-of-the-week appeared during the 1970's, aimed primarily at scaring teens away from: 1) underage sex 2)drugs 3) everything else Eve Plumb (Jan in THE BRADY BUNCH) is the teen runaway who ends up on the streets. The movie is maudlin, chauvinist, and downright silly. If you believe this movie, you should never leave home, do whatever your parents tell you, don't be a fool, stay in school, and just say no to drugs and everything else.....
A good triple bill of classic 1970's TV movies about the dangers of sex, drugs and free-thinking:
GO ASK ALICE, where Alice smokes weed, which leads to pills, which leads to acid....you know, that old chestnut. Bill Shatner (Captain Kirk) plays the dad......
TRIBES, where a young hippie is drafted into the Marine Corps and must erase all free-thinking. Darrin McGavin is particularly good here.
Black Christmas (1974)
Very well done horror....
As the SCTV character, Count Floyd, used to say: "Owwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww, kids that was some scary stuff, huh?".
Very scary, well done, great cast; the mood is set right from the get-go with the classic scary-movie elements all in place:
1)a holiday 2)an escaped lunatic 3)an inept police force 4)and last but not least, pretty coeds all alone in a big old house
Olivia Hussey (ROMEO AND JULIET) is very cute, and vulnerable, and Keir Dullea is a real hoot.
If the remake is half as scary as the original then pounce....
Owwwwwwwwww that's scary stuff kids!
Tyson (1995)
Good, but not great and stolen by Great Scott and Winfield
This is a made-for-TV flick about Iron Mike. As people have already commented there are several memorable and incredible performances given here. Scott is, to my mind, one of, if not the greatest American actor who lived in the last century. Along with Jason Robards, Jack Lemmon, Jimmy Cagney, and today Kevin Spacey. (Yes, I said it, Kevin ranks right up there with the all-time champs. Don't believe me? See the movie he did with Annette Benning and Chris Cooper, then watch the Kaizer Soze flick. Unfortunately it is late and titles are escaping me.....)
So Scott steals the movie cursing and arguing and screaming his lungs out. By the way, after his death, it was rumored that D'Amato had forced Iron Mike to perform oral sex on him when Mike was a young boy under Cus's tutelage. True or not, it would certainly explain a lot....Paul Winfield as Don King is a great match. His performance is much more believable here than Ving Rhames's would be several years later on in "King". Tony LoBianco is good to as Jim Jacobs who for years managed Tyson. Jacobs incidentally was a jack-of-all-trades, winning the US Handball Championship for Men, having the greatest private collection of fight films ever collected, and being an expert on comic books. Talk about your Renaisannce guys. The only weak link is Michael Jai White. He doesn't really capture the caged-animal intensity of Iron Mike during his glory years. Tyson incidentally, should really consider making a film about his own life with actors of his choosing. Overall a good effort by some extremely talented actors.