I have watched True Lies many times, I’m not sure exactly how many times. It’s a crazy action movie. I’ve often thought how may people get terminated in that movie, and I don’t mean fired from a job. The flick is a killfest from start to finish. So I looked it up and the details are below.

From Dusk till Dawn is a 1996 American action horror film directed by Robert Rodriguez and written by Quentin Tarantino. It stars George Clooney, Tarantino, Harvey Keitel and Juliette Lewis. After enjoying modest success at the box office, it has since become a cult film. The film was conceived by Robert Kurtzman who hired Tarantino to write the script as his first paid writing assignment.

Santanico Pandemonium, formerly Esmeralda or Kisa, is a fictional character from the From Dusk till Dawn film series. She is the primary Queen Vampire of the “Titty Twister”, a strip club in the middle of a desolate part of Mexico. In the film series, she is portrayed by Salma Hayek and Ara Celi. The name of Santanico is based on the Mexican Nunsploitation film Satánico pandemonium. Although the original film was not very successful at the box office, the film has achieved a cult status because Hayek’s role as Santanico was generally well received by viewers.

Hercules in New York is a 1970 low-budget fantasy comedy film. It is notable for being the first feature film to star (a then-unknown) Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was about 22 years old when the film was produced. It is further notable for being one of the films that Schwarzenegger admits regretting having appeared in.

In the scene a bear escapes from the Central Park zoo. Arnie confronts the bear and the fight begins. They grapple for a while then Hercules body slams the bear. After he has the bear down Herc starts punching the furry brute and then chokes it into submission.

Clint Eastwood is a renowned actor who made great action movies.  He is also a very accomplished director. He is a very accomplished musician to boot.  He wrote a couple musical scores for movies he directed.  On top of all this he became a mountain climber for a role in a 1975 action thriller.

The film Eiger Sanction has a segment where Clint climbs the Totem Pole in Monument Valley, Arizona. When I first saw the scene I was sure a double did the climbing for Clint, but no, Clint did it all the way to the top. The Totem Pole is a pillar or rock spire found in Monument Valley. It is a highly eroded remains of a butte. It is 470 feet tall.  Clint practiced mountain climbing in the Sierra Nevada range in California. Talk about taking a role seriously.

Totem Pole.

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In what is perhaps the most memorable shot of the entire film, we find Eastwood arriving atop the Totem Pole, a very thin formation reaching several hundred feet high, to a waiting George Kennedy, who sits perilously close to the edge. The shot begins at medium length, which left me wondering if the scene was shot in a studio against a panoramic backdrop. But a short time later, all within the same shot, the camera pulls back wider and wider, becoming clear this is a helicopter shot and Eastwood and Kennedy are really atop the Totem Pole.

Apparently Kennedy and his mountain climbing props were dropped off by the helicopter, while Eastwood himself actually climbed. In reality, the Totem Pole is sacred to the Navajo tribe, and it was contractually agreed upon that permission would be granted to film in exchange for removing the pitons that had accumulated on the Pole over the years. This marked the last time anyone was allowed to climb the Totem Pole, making Eastwood the last person to scale it.

Brief list of bad horror flicks.  I thought the Amityville Horror franchise flicks were really bad.  But these appear to be a heck of a lot worse according to the reviewers.

Basket Case

In Basket Case, a baby is born with a parasitic twin. A small, evil parasitic twin the size of a basket ball. It grows out of the boy’s shoulder. The boys parents decide to save the “normal” twin by having the parasitic twin surgically removed.

Fast forward a few years and now the twins are all grown up. And like all siamese twins separated at birth, in which one twin was brutally removed from the other and thrown into the garbage to die, they dream of nothing else than revenge against the surgical team that separated them.  Murderous mayhem ensues.

Frankenhooker

“She’s hot. She’s Sexy. And she’s sutured to please.” When a mad scientist loses his girlfriend to a freak lawn mower accident he decides that the best way to get a new girlfriend is to chop up some prostitutes and make a new one out of spare parts. Stupid mysogynistic trash masquerading as a horror comedy.

Cannibal Ferox (a.k.a Make Them Die Slowly)

The subtitle of this movie is “make them die slowly” and the movie certainly lives up to its name. The mindless plot involves some Americans captured by cannibals in the Amazon. There is not much plot except a series of mutilations, eye removals, and gory torture.

Eaten Alive

Erotic Nights of the Living Dead (1979)

A Night to Dismember

A female murderer is released from an insane assylum, suposedly cured. Then the body count begins. The film is dreadful on almost every level: the sound is awful (where are the foley artists when you need them?), the cinematography is lousy, the plot and acting are D-grade. The whole mess doesn’t make sense, so the director added a narrator that valiantly tries to make sense of the movie and explain the plot to you. The movie must be seen in order to appreciate just how brilliantly awful it is.

Night of the Bloody Apes

Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) is expensive and extras are difficult to handle, besides costing money. The Inflatable Crowd Company offers the alternative – plastic, inflatable mannequins, thirty thousands of them for use in movies where a large crowd is required. The company was formed in 2002 for creating crowd scenes for the Hollywood movie Sea Biscuit. Their inflatable crowd have since appeared in over 80 feature films including many memorable ones like The King’s Speech, Frost/Nixon, American Gangster, Spiderman 3 and many more. These plastic men and women were featured in many TV shows and commercials as well.

Blow up dolls are taken from their boxes and inflated for shooting in a commercial.

The dolls are then dressed. They still don’t have faces. These along with wig, hat etc. are fitted later.

A scene on the set of the movie American Gangster with 1,500 Inflatables.

A scene on the set of the movie Cinderella Man with 11,000 Inflatables.

A scene on the set of the movie We Are Marshall with 2,400 Inflatables.

A scene on the set of the movie The Changeling with 400 Inflatables.

A scene on the set of the movie Glory Road with 4,000 Inflatables.

550 inflatable dolls getting prepared for a scene in the movie Angels & Demons.