Die Hard: Elegy To A Badman

"There is a difference between not liking one's brother, and not caring when some Irish flatfoot drops him out of a window..." ERH very rarely dares dip beneath the barnacled Plimsoll Line that is the YouTube comments box, but was much taken by this ribald summation of the Die Hard I/III split! The Gruber brothers have it all - suavity, sophistication, beaucoup weapons training, killer accents and an endless raft of disposable Eurotrash goons. Now they have their own motivationally-suspect music video too.

'Where are my detonators?'

Indeed.

Good-Bye Cruel World (1983)

...a ‘Sex in the City’ for LA bottom-feeders...

Dead Heat (1988)

... the plot involves Mortis getting turned into a zombie early doors and motoring around Santa Monica in a soft-top Caddy with Doug and some blonde doxy they’ve picked up til it’s time for a bonkers shoot out in a disused warehouse - we think you know the drill by now...

Soul Man (1986)

It might have held a mournful beat on a rusty tin lid in pre-bellum Mississippi, but to politically correct mid-Eighties audiences Soul Man must have sounded more like the Banana Boat Song ...

Downtown (1990)

Anthony Edwards and  Forest Whittaker police a precinct of downtown Philadelphia that looks uniformly like Robocop has broken up the video shoot for Lionel Ritchie’s ill-advised rap foray, ‘Rock around the Glock’...

RGB: The Chevy Chase Show (1993)

Was there ever an episode of 'Larry Sanders' in which an unprepared Hank had to hastily fill in for the truant Larry? No? Well, ERH's much-abused Shit You Could Have Found On Youtube Quite Easily By Yourself Desk is back to bring you the next best thing with a tantalisingly bleak clip from VHS leviathan Chevy Chase's short-lived but legendarily sketchy chat show. Best buckle up, as it's a bumpy ride...

Film File: Silkwood (1983)

The ERH Proper Film Desk breaks off it's eternal milky lunch long enough to dig up some archived bumf from 1983's Silkwood, including an article on the making of the film published in the Village Voice...

Photo Archive: The Great Muppet Caper (1981)

'Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the Muppet in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent. '
                                                                                                      Sigmund Freud
 

The Muppets' second big-screen blitz didn't have the cracked charm of 1979's The Muppet Movie or the staying power of their later literary adaptations, but it did have Kermit cycling through Regent's Park in a scene of towering somehow-wrongness that chills ERH's bones to this day, as well as the sensual delights of 'Miss Piggy's Fantasy' - a sequence that has led many men-of-a-certain-age to place La Porca alongside Julie Newmar's Catwoman, Betty Rubble and Wilma Deering off 'Buck Rogers' in the distant, hallowed halls of their sexual awakening.

Click through for more 'Muppet mayhem'...

Genre Specific: 'Japanoia!'

Genre Specific - the wheel within the wheel that is cinematic convention - runs the rule over the tiny canon of films that tapped into the Eighties American nightmare of Japanese global domination. Read on...

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.