Posts

Showing posts from October 27, 2019

Review: Zapped!

Smart high school student Scott Baio gets involved in an explosion at the school science lab, which leaves him with newfound special powers: Telekinesis. Enter opportunistic best friend Willie Aames who sees dollar signs in his bud’s special powers. Felice Schachter plays a geeky girl clearly crushing on Baio, Heather Thomas is the school hottie, Scatman Crothers the alcoholic sports coach. A pre- “Charles in Charge” team-up of Scott Baio and Willie ‘Bibleman’ Aames, idols for teen girls of the 80s, this 1982 film from Robert J. Rosenthal (whose only other directing effort was a previous comedy called “Malibu Beach” ) and his co-writer Bruce Rubin (who wrote “Blood Rage” after this and…that’s about it) has a bit of a cult following. One of the few 80s sex comedies I’d yet to see, it proved to be a massive disappointment. It’s stupid, boring, and aside from some clearly post-production nudity, closer to one of those goofy Disney comedies Kurt Russell made early in his career

Review: Beyond the Mat

Filmmaker and wrestling fan Barry Blaustein may have annoyed those in the industry by focussing on a lot of the negative aspects to wrestling with this 1999 documentary. However, as someone who watched WWF/E from 1986-1993 and 2006 to the present, I’ve gotta say, negative aspects or not, this is fascinating, sad, and pretty damn accurate. This review will mostly be from the POV of a wrestling fan, but hopefully it won’t be entirely useless to those non-fans strangely curious enough to click on a review of the film as well. I obviously wasn’t watching wrestling when this film was shot and released but I knew enough of the then-current talent to get by and certainly knew about the older wrestlers it focuses on. I had also seen “Wrestling With Shadows” and the awful “Wrestlemania IX” , as Bret Hart was my favourite wrestler at the time I’d stopped watching – and still is my all-time favourite today. Seriously, I’m still pissed about the ending to “WM IX” (I also disagree with the Sc