Everybody in the world seems to be familiar with the Cannonball Run movies, but no one I’ve talked to seems to have heard of the far supieror (IMHO) The Gumball Rally which came out about 5 years prior.
It had some magnificent lines…
Ferrari guy rips rear view mirror off–“The first rule of Italian driving: What’s behind does NOT matter!”
Guy on street talking to Corvette driver after he’s just broken his car in half: Words to the effect of “Hey, did you know the back of your car is missing?” Corvette guy: “No shit.”
Porsche gal to good ole boys trying to race them: “If you catch me, you can have me!” Few miles down the road, Porsche runs out of gas.
Damn, I love this movie! My favorite part is the kickoff, early morning, New York City. No traffic on the streets, and in the distance is that distinctive Ferrari whine, echoing off the tall buildings, getting louder and closer, then the red car zhwhings past a cop drinking a cup of coffee outside a news stand, and the sound dopplers away… the cop turns to the newsie and says “It’s gonna be a nice day!”
The Jaguar that never does manage to get the engine started, priceless!
Raul Julia when he was young and hot… woof!
Cannonball Run was a soulless, stupid, piece of shit ripoff that wanted to be Gumball Rally so bad it was willing to rip off large chunks with no attribution… I fart in its general direction!
A- MEN! You reminded me of the two staid English gentlemen in the Jaguar, thanks.
Beginning of race: rrrrrrrrrrrrr…rrrrrrrrrrrr…rrrrrrrrrrr
Later on in the movie: rrrrrrrr…rrrrrrr…rrrrrr
Still later in the movie: rrr…rr…r…r…urrr
Later still: rr…r…r…<click> <click>
My favorite movie is probably Big Trouble in Little China , but that of course is very far from obscure (14,092 votes). Over 100 times more obscure is a little movie called The Return of Captain Invincible (135 votes). Starring Alan Arkin, this wierd little musical comedy superhero romp is about Captain Invicible, who was a Nazi-fighting hero, but later suspected of favoring the Communists. Driven underground, he is brought back for one last mission…
When my friends and I rented this, many moons ago, we somehow missed the “musical comedy” part of the description. The first sign that we were watching something unusual was a White House meeting with the President. Someone says something he does not like and he responds
The music comes up in the background and he goes into the first song of the movie.
I personally liked it, but all my friends hated it. I have not seen it for at least 10 or 15 years, so I can’t tell you if it holds up. But I remember it.
Wild Wheels - a documentary about art cars by Harrod Blank. This movie spurred the popularity of art cars - they existed before Wild Wheels , but became more common soon after the movie was released in 1992. The cars are fascinating, and the people who make them even more so. One of my favorites is the VW bug whose body has been replaced by lacy wrought iron.
Harrod Blank’s father is Les Blank, the director of Burden of Dreams, a documentary about the making of the movie Fitzcarraldo by Werner Herzog - a production in which almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Blank really captured Herzog’s obsessive nature - most of the production problems were due to Herzog’s insistence on doing everything on location with no special effects. I’m surprised that Burden of Dreams has only 422 votes on IMDB - I thought the movie was better-known and more popular than that.
BTW, Les Blank’s office is in my home town of El Cerrito.
I realize that. Jody was the star, but Meg’s performance stuck in my mind.
Some more:
The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. The best documentary I saw last year. March of the Penguins got all the press, but the parrots beat the penguins hands down. One of the few documentaries with a surprise ending, too!
You and Me and Everyone We Know (even though it has a lot of IMDB votes, it’s very obscure: I think everyone who saw it voted for it). Really charming little slice of life film about releationships.
Hollywood Shuffle. Robert Townsend’s debut, and best film, about a black actor trying to break in to movies. Great ending.
The Pope Must Die (aka The Pope Must Diet). Robbie Coltrane is elected Pope. Nice little comedy that got poor distribution because of its title (it was made a few months after John Paul II was shot).
The Confession Costa-Gavras was one of the most political of all directors; this is a movie about political prisoners behind the Iron Curtain. Chilling and uplifting.
All These Women. A slapstick comedy. Directed by Ingemar Bergman. The result is fascinating. (BTW, the Swedish title translates to "Let’s Not Talk About All These Women). It’s about an artist who leaves a string of girlfriends in his wake.
Shame Another great Bergman film (I took a course in his movies in college and saw some that are rarely seen in the US). And it’s science fiction! A couple is caught up in a mysterious war.
Nope, the Jaguar was manned by the driving cap wearing total prat middle age crisis looking mofo–the two elderly gents drove the gorgeous Mercedes convertible–schweet!
Ooh, thought of another unknown movie, When The Wind Blows I saw a bazillion years ago… Very wrenching tale, you’re a bastard coated bastard if this movie doesn’t make you choke up at least a bit. If nukes don’t freak you out after this movie, decrease your dosage of whatever it is you’re taking!
Zeppelin
WWI commando movie, with Michael York as the nebbishy hero. Notable for me because–
Double-agent York, despite his best efforts, doesn’t manage to thwart the German raid—which fails anyway, because of technical problems! I dunno…it just seems appropriate for a World War I movie. Both sides are valiant, but everyone loses.
Return to Me
6000 votes, but I think it’s obscure enough to get an honorary mention, at least. Just a sweet movie—with David Duchovny and Carroll O’Connor. My mother and sister swear by it.
SS Doomtrooper.
A recent “Sci-Fi Channel Original.” It’s basically Wolfenstein: The Movie. It knows it’s going to be a cheesy movie, so it just decides to revel in it. A lot of fun.
The Mouse and His Child.
I loved this one as a kid. It’s freakin weird, but I like it. Think Secret of NIMH meets Toy Story meets Conan the Barbarian. Good luck finding a copy of it, though. I think the last VHS release was during the Reagan administration.
The Brave Little Toaster
…just avoids qualifying as “obscure,” by imdb votes. But still…it deserves a nod.
And I second Return to Oz, Frankenhooker, Skeleton of Cadavra and Swashbuckler. (As well as a few of the others!)
I must have seen that before I saw EVIL DEAD because I sure don’t recall Bruce Campbell in that & I’d have noticed if I’d seen ED first.
I totally enjoyed that movie- now I must see it again.
I recommend BLOOD DINER - a splatter comedy remake of HG Lewis’s BLOOD FEAST about a couple guys running a diner who continue their late uncle’s
cannabalistic rituals to revive an ancient Sumerian demon-goddess… IIRC.
As do I. We Philistines must stick together. (although The Wages of Fear is very good!)
I think Sorcerer may well be Friedkin’s masterpiece. I was one of the few who saw it in the theater in the summer of '77, based on the trailer I saw for it. It blew me away!
Unfortunately, I think the title sunk it. It was Friedkin’s next release after The Excorcist, and the supernatural connotation of the title kept people away. Who could know “Sorcerer” was the name of one of the trucks driving a load of nitro through the Amazon jungle??
Just a couple of months ago I finally broke down and bought the dvd as well as the Tangerine Dream soundtrack.
That’s another reason I love Sorcerer. It introduced me to Tangerine Dream.
How is the DVD? Good quality and worth the buy, or should I just Tivo it sometime?
Mind you, I’ll have to wait before getting it. I’ve already exceeded my quota with The Quiet Earth DVD. Damn you, Amazon, for making it soooo easy to order this shit. :o
Unfortunately, it’s not in wide screen format, and has no commentary. I read on imdb that Friedkin himself is responsible for this - he doesn’t like letterboxed presentations. The dvd was released before 16:9 TV screens, though, and there are rumors (also on imdb) that it’s going to be rereleased. I just couldn’t wait.
Spider Baby, or The Maddest Story Ever Told [1964, B&W, wr. & dir. Jack Hill]. A surprisingly well-crafted and at times well-acted American gothic horror tale, about a family cursed with a congenital and degenerative form of inheirited insanity – think “The Fall of the House of Usher” crossed with “Freaks” – whose surviving remnants, the three young-adult “children” of the last generation and a few of their older relatives, are cared for by the faithful chauffeur (Lon Chaney Jr.) in a secluded, decrepit Victorian manse. The “spider baby” is the younger daughter, who is still capable of acting and appearing (deceptively) normal, but whose growing madness takes the form of a murderous obsession with the ways spiders kill their prey. Her older brother, though, is farther gone, and has been reduced to a mute, crawling idiot and sex fiend – kinda like a more menacing Harpo Marx, only without hair, hat, harp, horn, or the ability to walk upright.
Spider-Baby has 537 votes on IMDB, so it’s fairly obscure. Bad Timing [1980; dir. Nicholas Roeg; out on Criterion DVD] stars Theresa Russell, Art Garfunkle[!] and Harvey Keitel in a taut sexual psychodrama set in Vienna, the home of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis. Russell’s character is a wild, young hussy who leads a disordered life and has problems with booze, pills and housecleaning, but it turns out it’s her uptight, bourgeois, middle-aged psychoanalyst lover who’s got the real issues. Bad Timing is about what happens when an obsessive, asymmetrical affair turns ugly, resulting in a police detective’s (Keitel) hounding the analyst with a degree of obsessive determination curiously similar to that which the analyst had brought to bear in trying to control his lover. Well worth seeking, but not recommended as a date movie.
**Bad Timing ** is also relatively obscure, with 844 votes on IMDB.
When Night is Falling
Has just over a thousand imdb votes, so it technically shouldn’t qualify…but it’s obscure enough, and it was just on Sundance last night, so I thought I’d bring it up before I forget. Beautifully presented, and a sexy, sexy movie. A great example of non-gratuitous love scenes. Check it out.
The BFG
(Or “The Big Friendly Giant”) Very British, 1989, from a story by Roald Dahl. A favorite of mine as a kid, probably to no small degree because of the…unusual last quarter of the film. Kinda the antithesis of all those kids movies and shows where children have access to a magical secret world they keep hidden from adults. I can’t say much more without completely blowing the ending, but it’s kinda like “Tom Clancy’s Chronicles of Narnia.” I always got a kick out of it as a kid. You or your younglings might, too.
I can’t remember where I first ran across this odd film, but for some reason, I really fell in love with “Mad Dog Time” (also known as “Trigger Happy”). I can’t even claim that it was a particularly good film, but I found it so odd and charming, combined with such an odd cast, that when I first saw it that I went out and bought the damn video. I still enjoy watching it from time to time.
Perhaps my favorite relative unknowns are all based on John le Carré novels, and all of them are truly outstanding:
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, 722 votes, 9.2 rating. George Smiley, played by the inestimable and insuperable Alec Guinness and supported by a truly impressive cast, searches for a mole in British Intelligence. It’s a six-hour long mini-series that ran years and years ago. Dramas don’t get much more intelligent than this.
Smiley’s People, 382 votes, 9.1 rating. Alec Guinness again reprises his role as George Smiley, who returns from retirement to settle his old score with the Soviet Intelligence meta-agent Karla (played, sans dialog and as in the previous entry, by Patrick Stewart). Amazingly, this six-hour mini is even more engrossing and captivating than the last one!
The Little Drummer Girl, 480 votes. While perhaps not quite as compelling as the previous two entries, this highly intriguing film of le Carré’s novel directed by the great George Roy Hill (The World According to Garp, The Sting, Slaughterhouse-Five, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) can boast one of the most complex and fascinating plots ever filmed. When the film came out, one critic complained that it was “nothing but plot”, to which another critic replied: “Ah, but what a plot!” (As an aside, it’s damn clear that the contributors to the IMDB on this film don’t know what they’re talking about – they missed almost everything).
Now, the final two films I’ll mention are far from obscure, but they include an actor who hasn’t received the accolades his tremendous gifts deserve: Jeremy Davies. His performance in Wim Wenders’ The Million Dollar Hotel was nothing short of brilliant. In my opinion, it was more than Oscar-worthy. He wasn’t as good in Solaris, but his casting in the role was quite adept.