Shameless Self Expression

Jim Brown plays the title police captain an ex-Green Beret whose parents (who had mob connections!) are killed in a car bomb explosion. Slaughter does everything he can to find out what happened and who is responsible. This has him getting in the way of an investigation by the Treasury Department, headed by a racist Cameron Mitchell. Mitchell isn’t happy for the intrusion, but nonetheless offers Slaughter a deal: Be charged with murder (Slaughter kills a mob guy), or co-operate with the Treasury Department. Slaughter, not being an idiot, takes the second option. Mitchell pairs Slaughter up with fellow agents Don Gordon and Marlene Clark to track down mobsters Hoffo (Rip Torn) and his grandfatherly employer Felice (Norman Alfe), believed to be behind the hit. Stella Stevens plays the surly Hoffo’s girlfriend, whom Felice arranges to seduce Slaughter. Robert Phillips plays the henchman you know is set to get punched all over the face. Jim Brown’s career actually started before ...

Set in a harsh, gone-to-seed post-apocalyptic Earth, Kate Bosworth and Tyler Hoechlin play a couple who aren’t quite on the same page anymore. However, they’ll need to work together in order to get themselves to safety at Bosworth’s parents place across country. Domestic disharmony will have to wait to be sorted out, whilst they have graver matters at hand. There are feral gangs and all kinds of creeps looking to nab them and do who knows what to them. Lance Riddick plays a family man who takes the couple in at one point, whilst David Dastmalchian plays a bleached psycho creep. I like a good post-apocalyptic movie, but this 2018 film from writer-director Mike P. Nelson (based on his own short film) is more of a frustrating near-miss. Its borderline “The Divide” -esque bleak tone is a plus, but there’s just enough wrong here to keep this one from entirely satisfying. The performances for one thing, are crucially under par. Character actor Lance Riddick has a rare miss and is s...

Quite astonishing 2017 documentary from director Christopher S. Rech offers up a disgusting and shameful display of clearly very dodgy police procedure. It’s the story of ‘White Boy Rick’, AKA Richard Wershe, Jr., a teenage drug dealer who has over the years become infamous due to references in Kid Rock songs and the like. However, I only vaguely knew the name ‘White Boy Rick’, nothing about his story. What I found in this ‘stranger than fiction’ documentary horrified me. Detroit teen Wershe Jr. was clearly no angel, he was indeed quite a successful drug dealer at a young age, with his father also a criminal of some note. In the mid-to-late 80s, 17 year-old Wershe Jr. was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison for a mere drug crime (carrying 8 kg of coke is nothing to sneeze at, however) due to a then mandatory life sentence law in Detroit that has since been dispensed with. Decades later, whilst every other of the offenders under this law had since been releas...