As I sit down to flick the computer on, poised to press play on a few films to start the Sixth(!) Annual Allan Fish Online Film Festival (Allan Fish OFF 2022), I do so by turning the calendar, and setting, back a few decades. Assisted with my penchant of watching more genre based vehicles to relax recently, I’ve picked a few grimier New York/New Jersey centered pictures from (around) the era depicted in Sam’s debut novel, Paradise Atop the Hudson, an homage to his newfound publishing efforts. While his novel is overall bittersweet and focused, many of my picks are violent, purporting seedy underworlds and righteous killers. The first, William Lustig’s Vigilante (1982) does a multi-racial working class approximation of Death Wish, but given its sympathetic leads (Robert Forester grounds everything in near heartfelt reality) it doesn’t go as far into the right-wing fantasy of the Charles Bronson franchise. Here, a group of factory workers band together to protect their community where crime has exploded and their police force has sat idly by (how’s that for topical?). The idea of the movie supposedly came from real life, when “a group of blue collar workers in southern New Jersey had organized to fight crime in their neighborhood”, and is pretty good, Lustig regulars (Joe Spinell) abound as the nihilistic tone points the film correctly as a last ditch effort to save the tranquility that increasingly slips away.
I’d watched it alongside a collection of movies I loosely dubbed ‘Action Horror’, films that are technically of one clear-cut genre while bordering on exercises in frights, excessive gore or general depravity. Fulci’s underrated and maligned Contraband or the great LA Neo-Noir Vice Squad, where Wings Hauser’s murderous pimp, Ramrod careens through a single night as cops pursue, would be more or less the archetypes for what I was looking for, which a grimy genre maestro like Lustig could deliver (it was his first film after the raw slasher, Maniac became an underground hit after all). Of course, The Exterminator (1980) would fit wonderfully within such a classification, and is a grungy film I like a great deal. There, director James Glickenhaus crafts a mondo-vigilante movie set in and throughout New York City, the tale of a Vietnam vet who decides to sport black leather and fight the crime of the city (Mob, pimps, etc) after his buddy, and fellow former platoon member, is paralyzed on a meat hook by an aimless hood. Hell, even looking over the Hudson to New Jersey features in the action when their senator, who dabbles in pedophilia, gets his bloody comeuppance. It did gangbusters for the type and even produced a sequel, and is thankfully presented here in a grubby VHS transfer. Appropriate for the type.
Given the trope of disaster movies that came throughout the 1970’s, the blackout across New York City during the Summer of Sam 1977 became ripe for inclusion with the following years Blackout. While it’s mostly a study in tedium, truly a good idea wasted, the film becomes something of a curio as a thematic precursor to Die Hard, one of the following decades biggest and most influential blockbusters. Here, once a high-rise apartment building becomes blacked out, an anti-corporate terrorist (played by a pre-Revenge of the Nerds Robert Carradine) leads his group in to terrorize its inhabitants and do some looting. Robert Mitchum’s son James is then tasked to get inside, like Bruce Willis would years later, and pick off the assailants one by one. While the film is by no means good, the premise is an interesting take on a real situation New York City faced (the blackouts, not the, um, building takeover by terrorists), and Ray Milland chews some good scenery as a rich tenant who cares more about saving the paintings he’s collected over the years as an investment than looking after, or attempting to save, the life of his terrified wife.
Milland be damned, protecting a family member is the centerpiece to probably the best film of the bunch, 1980’s Night of the Juggler (aka New York Connection; 1980). Here, an ex-cop’s (James Brolin, at his absolute best) daughter is mistakenly kidnapped by a ghoul who intended to nab a wealthy guys kid in hopes of extracting a heavy ransom. Given such action happening in the first reel, exploitation films often slag to fill feature length, but here TV pro Richard Butler keeps the action crisp and taut, we watch Brolin anxiously chase the kidnapper around real life locales before it’s too late. If only Liam Neeson’s Taken films were this grossly entertaining and real.
Moving past the seedier side is the works of Amos Poe, who catalogued underground New York during its important bohemian years at the dawn of Punk and Basquiat. After the seminal New York punk movie, Blank Generation (1976, not to be confused with Ulli Lommel’s film of the same name and subject that came four years later) he helping birth No Wave Cinema as the Noise glitterati was developing it on record (for that you’d want to watch Downtown ’81). First there was the very good The Foreigner (1978), an existential text of wandering about the five boroughs playing like an East Coast Radio On, the great British road movie of Post-Punk. Subway Riders (1981) has a tighter narrative bent, but it’s still an abstracted approximation of Noir in glowing color as a city grows ever more prone to random murders.
Of course all these films move a few years after Paradise Atop the Hudson’s initial 1971 setting, so I started dreaming of that world as I so often do as being centered around the flicking on of radios and stereos, the sculptors of time as we meander in our homes or in our cars. Apparently filmmakers do similarly, as Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Paul Thomas Anderson’s coming-of-age Licorice Pizza used period correct music to craft their tales tied so closely to autobiographical, nostalgic readings like Sam’s novel (and from what I’ve read of James Gray’s upcoming ‘growing up in Queens during the 1980’s’ picture Armageddon Time does it as well, plus assumptions could be had that the title comes from the Clash song of the era). Starting in September 1971 as the book does, I glanced through the Billboard Hot 100 and picked a few mostly forgotten gems, singles fluctuating between the two glorious poles of Pop—absurd novelty and actual beauty—ones that stamped the waning days of summer with real joy. Plus, where else will you be exposed to Laura Lee’s forgotten masterpiece ‘Women’s Love Rights’ a song that, given recent turns in our Supreme Court, should be the song of this (or any) summer. Many of these songs, if searched on popular music streaming sites like Spotify or iTunes are absent, lost to the limitations of digital manufactured taste and the ease (laziness?) of playing single apps.
I’ll end with the usual thank you to all commentators and contributors to the sixth annual Allan Fish Online Film Festival. Remembering him is always a worthwhile, if still sad endeavor, but an endeavor made easier with each passing year by site founder Sam Juliano, who continues the reminding and rounding up of participants in the weeks leading up. It’s something I wanted to use this year as the idea behind my selections, by centering a world of picks around his book. As to me, amidst the busy burdens of life, made all the more difficult as each turbulent year ticks on, to complete a novel is an appreciation and commitment to art (and its creation) that I’m incredibly moved and inspired by. As our Allan Fish Online Film Festival continues, we mourn the passing just as we celebrate the living, and all that these lives create.
Happy watching, happy listening (watch or listen to as little or much as you’d like), and please trust my joyous anticipation for the next week of picks coming!