Photo Archive: Tank Girl (1995)

Mad Max makes macropodine merriment in the make-up box for 1995's post-apocalyptic riot-grrrl meltdown Tank Girl - and ERH has the pictures to prove it. A 'rooed up Ice-T (for 'tis the Cop Killer, above right), Malcom McDowell, Naomi Watts and Iggy Pop are all on hand to ping the titular Lori Petty from pillar to post in a film that kicks off like Jesus's Own Howitzer only to dribble away like a Supersoaker full of hot corned beef. Some nice photos though, including some crunky behind the scenes kanga-rudity (honk!)...

Photo Archive: Fritz the Cat (1972)

ERH has delved into its very bottomest drawer and dug up some, ahem, salty stills from the production notes for everyone's favourite racially explosive sex-obsessed 2D feline-hippie reefer madness aria, Fritz the Cat (1972). We hope you enjoy them, and remember - however queasy the following pics make you feel, the images we chose not to include were far, far more disturbing...

The Adventures of Ford Fairlane (1990)

Clay remains an enduring comic touchstone for each new generation and a perennial playground/YouTube favourite boasting more internet hits per day than Turkish Star Wars...

Photo Archive: The Great Boo's Up!

It's Richard Widmark's high-shelf hooch against Walter Matthau's endless supply of stagnant Yankee piss-water as ERH finds two of cinema's smoothest operators in a bit of a funk and reverting back to the loudmouth soup for some much needed succor in our downtrod dipsomaniac diptych.

Widmark has perhaps more of a claim to his bender as a broke-ass rodeo rider who's running out of options in the not-at-all-self-regardingly titled When The Legends Die - the weak sister of the early-Seventies rodeo movie boom that included Junior Bonner, JW Coop, The Honkers (!) et al - but on the other hand, Matthau has spent all day with Little League hoodlums The Bad News Bears - an outfit that makes the Wild Bunch look like a gaggle of winsome milquetoasts - so maybe we should allow him to get equally gutterballed.

Drink hearty, boys!

Monty Python & the Holy Grail - by Rail

Rooting through a bundle of dad's old gentlemen's relish magazines in the shed the other day, ERH came across this peach of an ad for the album accompaniment to Python's finest filmic foray. Pakistani milkman? Don't remember that bit...

Click pic to drastically engorge.

Like Father Like Son (1987)

 

The 'Magnificent Ambersons' of the Eighties bodyswap cycle...

 

Runaway (1984)

‘It is the future. He fought the horror of robots programmed to kill...’ Eh?

Modern Problems (1981)

...not as laugh-out-loud as the The Shining, but makes Woody Allen’s “early, funny ones” look like exercises in moral terror...

City Heat (1984)

...nonsensical, big-budget Kansas City jazz that finally consigned the term ‘Comedy-Thriller’ to that of an oxymoron...

Knightriders (1981)

... an epically weird retelling of the Camelot legend, complete with Hell’s Angels, police brutality, Madison Avenue marketing men, sexual disorientation and lashings of revved up carnage – with a few leather nuns thrown in for good measure....

Caption Comp #2: White Nights

Mikhail Baryshnikov does the decent thing after '85's twinkletoed Cold War aria White Nights - though quite what the mixing bowl is all about is anyone's guess...

Yes. Of course it is.

Feds (1988)

... Mayor Dooley and those pen-pushing Pointdexters up on Capitol Hill are soon choking on their sun-blushed huckleberry Danishes...

 

Heavy Metal (1981)

... behold a manifestation of pure, malevolent intergalactic evil that takes the bone-chilling form of a small, lime-green beach-ball...

Production Notes: Dragonslayer

 

Some nifty(ish) production notes and images from the press pack that accompanied everybody's favourite inappropriately violent, Welsh-inflected, actually-rather-decent 1981 lizard-lopping lark. Includes such 'candid' revelations from the script-wizards as, "St. George and the Dragon... everyone had heard of the legendary pair - pubs all over England are named for them - but few knew the actual story. Neither did we, but when we completed our deep-think research in the children's library, we had our movie."

Hmm...

Andrew Dice Clay in M*A*S*H*: The Evidence At Last

The ERH Wrecking Crew has never been entirely sure why it has so fervently harboured its long-held desire to see its least favourite late-Eighties bully-boy comedian’s rumoured appearance in its least favourite smug TV canned laughter-fest. Call it masochism. Call it a strange compulsion to see the yawning chasm between Alan Alda’s preening erudition and the Diceman’s elephantine comedy blunderings. Call it mental degeneracy.

But now, after years of waiting, some pan-fried nutcase has finally uploaded it onto youtube for our enduring delectation. Unfortunately Alda and Clay don’t share any facetime in this clip, but thinning porn star B.J. Hunnicutt matches the Diceman’s heavily self-medicated performance with an enviable degree of confidence and élan. A shame, as we had always envisaged Clay spewing an unending volley of pottymouthed race-hate and putting his fist through Hawkeye's pie-hole before ploughing into a 3-ball with Klinger and Hot Lips.

Oh well, looks like we’ll just have to wait 'til someone finds that ‘lost’ Bobcat Golthwait Muppet Show appearance…

Birth of a VHS Nation

Give ERH fifteen minutes and we'll give you change for a decade!

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times: the decade that sweetened the promise of atom bomb apocalypse with a dollop of Dream Topping, lent pastel golfwear a frisson of Stanley-wielding menace and, most importantly, smeared our developing consciousness with the kind of gimcrack VHS movies upon which ERH now gargles like so much magnetic Proustian backwash.

Behold the dark, glossy poetry of a world gripped by Cold War heebie-jeebies, gold-standard hooliganism and some of the very worst films ever to be produced. Look upon these works, ye Mighty, and despair...

Running Scared (1986)

... when not playing a sensual form of 1-on-1 b-ball with the local pachucos, they’re busy passive-aggressively hassling the remainder of the Windy City’s rather broadly rendered Hispanic community with extreme prejudice and seeming impunity...

Hot to Trot (1988)

... transcends its hare-brained origins and the jarring inadequacies of its execution and unfetters itself from traditional filmmaking techniques and, indeed, any form of conventionally accepted Western logic...

Production Notes: Escape From New York (1981)

From back in the days when press-packs were black and white scissors and glue jobs rather than sleek and snarling, legally aggressive iTunes downloads comes these charming homemade production notes for John Carpenter's daft 1981 actioner...

The Couch Trip (1988)

...the latest of Tinseltown’s attempts to convince us that the mentally ill are all loveable hipsters with clean hair...