The Ace Black Movie Blog

Showing posts with label Susan Clark. Show all posts

Saturday, 18 October 2025

Movie Review: City On Fire (1979)

Genre: Disaster Thriller

Director: Alvin Rakoff

Starring: Barry Newman, Susan Clark, Shelley Winters, Leslie Nielsen, Ava Gardner, Henry Fonda, James Franciscus

Running Time: 106 minutes

Synopsis: A disgruntled ex-employee sabotages an oil refinery, causing a massive firestorm that consumes the adjacent city. Mass casualties ensue, and among those caught in the flames are a heroic doctor (Barry Newman), the corrupt Mayor (Leslie Neilsen), a wealthy benefactor (Susan Clark) who has a relationship with both, a dedicated nurse (Shelley Winters), an alcoholic television news personality (Ava Gardner), her producer (James Franciscus), and the city's Fire Chief (Henry Fonda). Evacuating the main hospital becomes a focal point of rescue efforts.

What Works Well: The opening scenes are standard and inoffensive in attempting to set the context, and the set-on-fire stunt performers are excellent.

What Does Not Work As Well: This Canadian production is a dreadful attempt to join the tail end of the 1970s disaster movie parade. Almost hilariously bad but often just painful, the writing and acting are atrocious, with numerous lines of dialogue quotable as tone-deaf treasures. Leslie Neilsen unintentionally practices for his impending niche, but Henry Fonda (reciting his lines with a dead-eyed lack of conviction) and Ava Gardner (overplaying the drunken schtick) jointly win the most embarrassing prize. The production values and special effects betray a limited budget, while the final hospital evacuation sequence takes forever, and mostly features extras.

Key Quote:

Fire Chief: All it takes is one man, could be anybody... your neighbor, my neighbor... one man to destroy a city.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Tuesday, 9 February 2021

Movie Review: Porky's (1981)

A high school sex comedy, Porky's is rude, crude, essentially plotless, and hilarious.

The setting is Florida in Eisenhower's 1950s. A group of friends navigate South Beach High School, and they only have sexual high jinx in mind. Pee Wee (Dan Monahan) is desperate to lose his virginity, and his friends including Tommy (Wyatt Knight), Billy (Mark Herrier), Mickey (Roger Wilson), and Meat (Tony Ganios) are eager to help him. Looking for a good time, they head out across the county line to the rough and tumble Porky's redneck club, but only find trouble and humiliation at the hands of Porky (Chuck Mitchell) himself. Back at the school, the boys have to be satisfied spying into the girls' shower room.

Meanwhile Tim (Cyril O'Reilly) comes from a rough household and is being abused by his no-good father (Wayne Maunder). He releases his frustration on Brian (Scott Colomby), the Jewish kid in school, and the outcome is unexpected. Elsewhere, basketball coach Brackett (Boyd Gaines) is eager to seduce cheerleader coach Honeywell (Kim Cattrall), and wonders why she is nicknamed Lassie. The dour Coach Balbricker (Nancy Parsons) stands in their way.

With Mickey earning himself several more beatings at Porky's, the friends decide they have had enough and plot a revenge.

Episodic, choppy, featuring a cast of unknowns and almost no redeeming features, Porky's has all the makings of a crass low-budget disaster. It is crass and low-budget, but it clicks into a classic. A Canadian production from American writer, co-producer and director Bob Clark, Porky's expels Animal House from college back to high school and creates a new sub-genre concerned only with horny young men and their pursuit of women, often ending in disaster.

Clark demonstrates a talent for stretching every joke well past what appears to be funny, only to blow the lid off and find more laughs. The lowlights are the highlights, and they are many. The peephole scene has several sub-episodes just within the shower room, then Clark relocates it to the principal's office for a coup de gras featuring rib-cracking humour, the actors straining to keep a straight face. Brackett discovering exactly why Honeywell earned the nickname Lassie is another entry into the comedy Hall of Fame. And in a prank involving Cherry Forever (Susan Clark) teasing her services, Porky's extends bad taste to offer equal opportunity male and female nudity.

The search for any underlying warm and fuzzy themes uncovers only the flimsiest of material. Standing up to abuse, overcoming ethnic prejudice, friends looking out for each other and finding non-violent (albeit destructive) solutions are some of the extenuating concepts barely crawling out of the mayhem.

Otherwise the language is coarse and insensitive, the humour is almost always at the expense of someone's physical or emotional pain, and all the women are entirely defined as objects of lust or revulsion. In setting a new standard for low brow humour, Porky's is ridiculously successful.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Saturday, 9 November 2019

Movie Review: The Midnight Man (1974)

A convoluted low-key murder mystery, The Midnight Man is overstuffed with plot but lacks any sense of mood or relatable characters.

Released on parole after serving a prison sentence, ex-Chicago police officer Jim Slade (Burt Lancaster) accepts a position as a night watchman at Jordon College, the job arranged for him by his pal and the college's head of security Quartz Willinger (Cameron Mitchell). Jim reports to parole officer Linda Thorpe (Susan Clark), who is constantly bickering with local sheriff Jack Casey (Harris Yulin) about his deputy Virgil's goonish methods.

Slade stumbles upon a psychiatry department break-in and the theft of sensitive cassette tapes. One of the students involved is the troubled Natalie Clayborne (Catherine Bach), and soon she turns up dead. Casey arrests creepy janitor Ewing (Charles Tyner), but Slade starts his own unauthorized investigation. Natalie's boyfriend, a professor and a local artist are among the suspects, while a trio of local redneck goons start to threaten Slade. When Natalie's father Senator Phillip Clayborne (Morgan Woodward) arrives in town, the death count escalates rapidly.

An adaptation of a book by David Anthony filmed on location at Clemson University in South Carolina, The Midnight Man is co-directed, co-produced and co-written (all with Roland Kibbee) by star Burt Lancaster. Unfortunately he glides through the film in an essentially comatose state, as an almost impossible to follow plot clatters all around him.

The deep flaws are obvious throughout. Key events take place off-screen and are then verbosely explained. For the purpose of expanding the pool of suspects a multitude of individuals are introduced in snippets, creating an avalanche of indistinct characters. The result is a go-through-the-motions whodunnit crammed with creeps, with no individual rounded into anything more than a plastic representation.

Actions and motivations are eye-poppingly dreadful, from blatant police brutality to a parole officer jumping into bed with her parolee passing through professors lusting after their young students. And somehow the film takes a detour to Deliverance inspired bayou territory, a trio of inbred idiots (including Ed Lauter) complete with their own Ma Baker styled leader unleashing their version of primitive chaos on the pristine college campus town for reasons that never quite make sense.

At least the rednecks do provide a platform for the one energetic sequence in the film, as Slade bulldozes his way out of farm captivity. As for resolving the actual murder-blackmail-abuse crime fiasco, pick any suspect, they all deserve to be locked up.