by Patrick Bromley
Here's a bunch of stuff to watch this weekend. It's not like there's anything more important going on.
Teenage Cocktail (2016, dir. John Carchietta) The solo directing debut of John Carchietta (a producer on movies like
The Hills Run Red and
Wicked Lake) casts the great Fabianne Therese and Nichole Bloom as teenage girls who fall in love, start messing around with a webcam and eventually attract the attention of family man Pat Healy. Things don't go well. Shot in bright colors and scored to dreamy pop,
Teenage Cocktail is like a modern-day version of
Smooth Talk. It takes some sudden shifts that aren't always earned, but it's beautifully put together and says some interesting things about personal responsibility and naiveté in the digital age. (Watch on
Netflix)
The Wraith (1986, dir. Mike Marvin) The second half of the '80s saw a lot of teenage monster movies: teen vampires in
The Lost Boys, teen witches in
Teen Witch, teen wolves in
Teen Wolf Too. We didn't get too many teen ghost movies, which is where
The Wraith comes in. Charlie Sheen plays a motorcycle riding spirit who appears in a small town to exact revenge against an overacting Nick Cassavettes and his gang and get naked with Sherilyn Fenn, which is worth coming back from the dead for. This unofficial remake of
High Plains Drifter is really fun and entertaining but doesn't get mentioned enough in conversations about '80s genre films. After you watch it, you should check out my guest appearance on
The Projection Booth's episode on the movie. (Watch on
Netflix)
Extreme Justice (1993, dir. Mark L. Lester) This
super underrated '90s actioner stars a murderers' row of action character actors -- Scott Glenn, Lou Diamond Phillips, Chelsea Field, Yaphet Kotto, Andrew Divoff, William Lucking, Paul Ben-Victor, Stephen Root and Ed Lauter -- in a story about corrupt LA cops. It either went pretty much straight to DVD or premiered on HBO (which is where I saw it) and it's the kind of movie that had to cut down the crazy violence to avoid an NC-17. So many people get shot. I love it. I just watched
Truck Stop Women for the first time and was reminded of what an amazing genre filmmaker Mark L. Lester is: besides that movie and this one, he made
Commando and
Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw and
Firestarter and
Showdown in Little Tokyo and
Class of 1984 and a whole bunch of others. He's due for career retrospective. Maybe I'm the guy to do it (Watch on
Amazon Prime Video)
The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999, dir. Anthony Minghella) On the
podcast this week, we talked about Matt Damon getting his big break in
Good Will Hunting and becoming a huge movie star in the span of one movie. His partner Ben Affleck went a much more commercial route and went to work for Michael Bay while Damon continued to choose interesting projects like this psychological thriller based on Patricia Highsmith's novel. It's brilliantly acted from the likes of Damon, Jude Law (never better), Gwyneth Paltrow, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Cate Blanchett, it's insanely gorgeous to look at and is always tense and interesting. 1999 was an insanely good year for movies and this one stands out as one of the very best. (Watch on
Hulu)
Angel of Death (2009, dir. Paul Etheredge) My Girlfriend Zoë Bell made this movie years ago based on a character and a screenplay by Ed Brubaker. She gets stabbed in the head and survives to come back for revenge. There is nothing else you need to know because you really should have been heading over to Crackle (where this originally debuted) and pressing play as soon you read the words My Girlfriend Zoë Bell. (Watch on
Crackle)