Editorial Product Review: :This time-capsule film from 1971 is a perfect example of having one's cake and eating it, too. Written and directed by filmmaker Tom Laughlin--and starring him in the title role--Billy Jack concerns a half-white, half-Indian karate expert who protects a free school built on principles of pacifism by kicking hell out of pesky rednecks. The story actually embraces that tension between Billy Jack's way of doing things and that of the school's founder (Delores Taylor), but their tension doesn't ...
Editorial Product Review: :Cheech & Chong's first cannabis comedy is also their best, a souvenir from the more carefree days before 'Just Say No,' when people did not feel so defensive about inhaling. In 1978, the prevailing spirit was more like 'Just Say Blow.' Even New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael liked it (the movie, that is), adding that it was 'an exploitation slapstick comedy, rather than a family picture, such as Blazing Saddles or High Anxiety--which means that it's dirtier, wilder, ...
Editorial Product Review: :Angie Dickinson stars as a bank-robbing matriarch in this 1974 Roger Corman production, often described as a knock-off of Bonnie and Clyde. (As if that makes any difference regarding the worth of the film--which is pretty good.) Set in Great Depression-era Texas, the story finds Dickinson's desirable and poor character driven to crime, along with her two daughters (Susan Sennett, Robbie Lee), all of whom use sex to distract or drive men into culpability. The film, directed by Steve ...
Editorial Product Review: :The greatest women-in-prison film ever made, Caged Heat takes the traditional sex-and-violence formula of gorgeous babes behind bars, gratuitous nudity, and degradation at the hands of beastly guards and a corrupt system, and transforms it into rebel burst of grrrl power. Jonathan Demme's directorial debut, made for Roger Corman's New World Pictures in the glory days of 1970s drive-in moviemaking, wedges his message of empowerment in between the showers and the shock treatments. Russ Meyer alumnus Erica Gavin stars ...
Editorial Product Review: :Director Jack Hill, a protégé of the original schlockmeister, Roger Corman, knew his way around a low budget and a shocking subject. Women-in-prison films were nothing new in 1971, but The Big Doll House had it all--sex, violence, nudity, a sadistic guard, and a sexually frustrated warden--and served it up with an abundance of cheapjack energy and tongue-in-cheek humor. The beauty of Hill's movies lay in the way they could appeal not only to the hordes who would go ...
Editorial Product Review: :Pam Grier and Sid Haig stole the show in Jack Hill's Filipino-women-in-prison hit The Big Doll House, and they pretty much power this superior action-packed semi-sequel as a South American Bonnie-and-Clyde team. The revolutionaries with mercenary hearts decide to liberate the inmates of a jungle women's prison at the urging of their lonely army of single men. All the conventions are there--scantily clad women, a deranged warden (so evil he kicks a puppy in his first scene!), catfights, the ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:Two cool guys head out on motorcycles in search of... well, America, but they'll settle for sex and drugs and rock & roll. There's plenty of each as Captain America (Peter Fonda) and paranoid Billy (Dennis Hopper) encounter a commune, convert a small-town drunk (Jack Nicholson) to the Grin Reefer, pick up two pretty lilies of the alley, Karen Black and Toni Basil (who hit the pop charts in the '80s--check out 'Mickey'), and get shot for ...
Editorial Product Review: :This time-capsule film from 1971 is a perfect example of having one's cake and eating it, too. Written and directed by filmmaker Tom Laughlin--and starring him in the title role--Billy Jack concerns a half-white, half-Indian karate expert who protects a free school built on principles of pacifism by kicking hell out of pesky rednecks. The story actually embraces that tension between Billy Jack's way of doing things and that of the school's founder (Delores Taylor), but their tension doesn't ...
Editorial Product Review: :This time-capsule film from 1971 is a perfect example of having one's cake and eating it, too. Written and directed by filmmaker Tom Laughlin--and starring him in the title role--Billy Jack concerns a half-white, half-Indian karate expert who protects a free school built on principles of pacifism by kicking hell out of pesky rednecks. The story actually embraces that tension between Billy Jack's way of doing things and that of the school's founder (Delores Taylor), but their tension doesn't ...
Editorial Product Review: :This time-capsule film from 1971 is a perfect example of having one's cake and eating it, too. Written and directed by filmmaker Tom Laughlin--and starring him in the title role--Billy Jack concerns a half-white, half-Indian karate expert who protects a free school built on principles of pacifism by kicking hell out of pesky rednecks. The story actually embraces that tension between Billy Jack's way of doing things and that of the school's founder (Delores Taylor), but their tension doesn't ...
Usually we're fans of Logitech's gaming mice, but its highest-end G9 Laser Mouse is expensive, overly complex, and lacks the ergonomic thought we've come to expect. If you like to brag about dot-per-inch limits, perhaps the G9's 3,200dpi laser will be enough to sell you, but for the price, we expect the design to match.
Small and light enough for a shirt pocket, Samsung's Helix YX-M1 is a one-stop audio entertainment center with an XM radio, a digital music player, and room for 50 hours of tunes, but it comes up short on battery life.