I Binge-watched 107 Films in 27 Days

So, I guess I should start this piece by telling you all a little something about the person writing it -that being me- and what lead to this article. I am a film school graduate who, prior to the pandemic, had been using my very expensive film school education to work a low paid job in the despatch department of a Media company. “Living the dream” some might say.

And I love film. You could even say I have a religious love of film. All film. Obviously I have my preferences and my favourites but I’ll watch pretty much anything, from the brilliant to the not so, from the good to the “so bad it’s good” and even the incompetently made worst that film has to offer. And so, as with all religion, my faith is occasionally tested. Some films have me considering apostasy, but in the end, I always manage to find my way back to the flock. Film is the closest thing I have to a religion, and the Prince Charles Cinema is my church.

When the lockdowns started in the UK over a year ago, I remained employed but furloughed for a time. During this time I actually managed to write a screenplay for a feature film, that expensive film school education should be used for something after all. It took me roughly six months to finish a complete first draft and as that draft neared completion I rushed to get it written before my anticipated return to work, a return to work that never happened. Yep, like many others, I was let go from my job during the pandemic. It sucked.

The months that immediately followed are now a bit of a blur. I had to sign up for benefits, I applied for jobs but rarely heard back and my job search in general was soul destroying. Come February I felt completely useless, I had no purpose and my sleeping routine was all out of whack. It was in that head space I decided that, to give myself purpose and an achievable target to aim for, I was going to watch all the films that I’d allowed to build up on my Amazon Prime Video watchlist. This was 60+ films at that point, and I was going to force myself watch them in as short a period of time as possible. I was going to binge watch my entire watchlist. As a veteran of many Prince Charles Cinema movie marathon nights, I decided this was the best tactic for clearing my watchlist, a prolonged movie marathon, to forget myself in one film after another, after another, after another and to briefly put aside the depression that had taken over my life since losing my job. And so I took to Facebook and posted the following:

And so it began. Exactly what I thought I’d end up writing when I typed the words “… and then I’ll probably write a blog somewhere” I don’t know. I think I wanted to write a sort of diary detailing the endurance test that I was about to put myself through. I think I wanted to write something meaningful about myself, my life and how my daily life is interwind with film. I think I wanted to write just enough about each film that at a glance my writing could be mistaken for an important piece of film criticism or film theory. Unfortunately none of that is going to be true. Watching a lot of films, even in as short a period of time as I did, really isn’t that difficult, so writing about this experience as if it’s some Herculean endurance test is a no go. I made notes about each film as I went along but didn’t really note what was happening in my day to day life at the same time so I can’t really write too much about the experience from a personal point of view. And though I watch a lot of films, I’ve never really developed a talent for reading a film, recognising the meaning behind the film or recognising the subtext revealing what the filmmakers are actually trying to say. So please don’t embark on reading this article as if it’s some sort vital exploration of the films and their meaning on par with the likes of critics and cinephiles Mark Kermode or Kim Newman. This isn’t that. These are the ramblings of an unemployed idiot who happens to love film.

Also, before I get to the discussing and “reviewing" (or what can only loosely be described as reviewing) the films, I just want to go over my self imposed ground rules and some notes. I had to watch everything on my Amazon watchlist that I hadn’t seen before, and I had to watch them in the order that they was added. The rule regarding the order that I watched the films in loosened up at one point but I’ll explain more when I come to it. I think that it may also be important to note that none of this is a paid endorsement for Amazon Prime Video. Prime Video happens to be my streaming service of choice so that’s where I built up this large watchlist of films that I wanted to view but kept putting off watching for one reason or another.

I think it’s also worth noting that I’ve been writing this more than a month after I finished binge watching the films and as such, my memories of some are somewhat foggy. Also, I have no idea why I thought watching the films was going to be the hard part, writing about them has so far been far more difficult.

“GET ON WITH IT” you maybe shouting, I know, I know, I will.

And now, the first film, Killing American Style, a film that I watched far too early in the morning and far far too sober.

Day 1

Wednesday 10th February

03:20am

1. Killing American Style

Director: Amir Shervan Country: America

How & Why: Oh god, what a way to start, this film. OK, Killing American Style is a semi famous bad movie that found its way onto my watchlist thanks to the Redlettermedia YouTube channel (the best channel on YouTube in my opinion). The guys at Redlettermedia featured this film on one of their Best of the Worst episodes, so when I later stumbled on Killing American Style on Prime Video I felt that I HAD to add it to my watchlist. Then, as time past, I eventually decided that having already watched the Redlettermedia video, I really didn’t need to watch the film itself, however, I neglected to ever remove it from my watchlist. And so here we are. I don’t want to do this but rules is rules, even if they are self imposed. So yes please Amazon, shove that garbage straight into my eyeballs.

Killing American Style isn’t as famous as other “so bad it’s entertaining” fare such as The Room or Troll 2 but I could still write paragraph after paragraph on this inept American action film. The first thing that stuck out to me after hitting play on Prime Video was that this film is rated 13+. Having seen the Redlettermedia video on this film I already had an idea of what was to come and 13+? How? With all the violence, nudity and sexual assault, how did the 13+ rating happen? The second thing that jumped out was the name Jim Brown in the credits, American Football legend turned actor Jim Brown is in this and I was all in for that reason. You briefly did it Killing American Style, you won me over, and now let’s see what else you’ve got.

Do you want to know what else it has? It has two important characters who are both named “John”. John Morgan is our main character, played by famed kickboxer Harold Diamond, a bad ass who doesn’t go looking for trouble but can handle himself when trouble finds him. And then we have John Lynch, played by, urm… John Lynch. Why do this? I get that “John” is a common name and all but now we have the hero and one of the main villains with the same name, and why oh why would an actor want his character to be named after himself when his character is a violent criminal pervert? Well, John Lynch apparently didn’t mind (to be fair to the film, on re-examination the character played by John Lynch is mostly referred to as “Lynch” but still, that is his actual name).

The film starts with John Lynch auditioning scantily clad women to dance in what first appears to be a seedy club (but in later scenes it seems to be a restaurant). The dancing is terrible and the sound design is as terrible, the whole scene is just awful and quite a flat opening to an 80s action film. Tony Stone, played by Robert Z’Dar, then turns up and pulls John Lynch away to go and stick up what looks like an ice cream truck depot. How much money is there in the ice cream truck business? Because this film tells us that there’s quite a lot, enough to kill people for. Following a gunfight, the villains get away with the ice cream truck money but Tony and John Lynch are arrested soon after when their inside man betrays them to save his own skin, turning informant.

The two men are then sent straight to maximum security prison. No due process, they don’t go to jail first to await trial, nope, a police detective deigns to send them straight to maximum security prison and it is done. I’m quite obviously no legal expert but that doesn’t seem right.

On route to the prison, the bus stops at the site of an apparent traffic accident but, oh no, it is no accident, it’s a ruse orchestrated by Tony’s Brother - who is wearing a dress - and an accomplice who Tony later refers to as “Uncle Loony”. They proceed to shoot everybody in a uniform to break Tony and John Lynch free but not without the inconvenience of Tony’s Brother, Jesse, taking a bullet to the gut for his troubles, and this is where the main story of our film can start. They’re wanted men and need to get off of streets but are now carrying a mortally wounded man. They need somewhere private where they can reorganise and hopefully get Tony’s wounded Brother the treatment he needs without visiting a hospital. “We’re going to have to find a house” says Tony, cut to: more scantily clad women as Doris - John Morgans wife - and her Sister walk through the main character’s house wearing bikinis.

It is at this point that we get one of weirdest character introductions that I remember seeing in a film. While Doris and her Sister are passing through the house in their bikinis, on their way to sunbathing apparently, they cross paths with Doris and John’s young son Brandon. Brandon swaggers into shot punching and kicking the air as he’s on his way to a kickboxing lesson and the first line that he utters is “Hi sexy Auntie”. No kid, just no, you do not speak to your auntie that way. To be fair, his auntie - whose name is either Jean or Ginny - does look pretty good her bikini but it’s still a weird line and I will have more to say about it later.

The gang arrives and takes over the house, which appears to be a mansion built on a ranch, killing a groundskeeper named Jose in the process, because they really like killing minorities it seems. Upon arriving at the house they gleefully just outright shoot Jose dead and later on I thought they’d killed a character called Dr. Fuji, a character of Japanese origin played by an actor named Joselito Rescober, but thankfully this was just a tease and Dr. Fuji survived the film.

This home invasion is bulk of the film, it’s mostly the crooks wanting to stay hidden while seeking medical attention for Jesse and attempting retrieve the ice cream truck money before going on the run.

I mentioned that Jim Brown is in this didn’t I? So about him, he plays the police detective in charge of investigating the prison break and recapturing Tony and John Lynch. We don’t see nearly as much of Jim Brown as I would have liked, in fact, we don’t all that much police work. I’d say that the police investigation is the B-story but they play such a small part in the film that it’s actually much closer to being a C-story. Their tactics are confusing, at one point a detective pretends to be a hotel employee and ends up fighting John Morgan - a weird scene that seems to only exist to give Morgan a gun. If you want a closer examination of the police investigation storyline you may need to watch the Redlettermedia video or watch the film itself (which I wouldn’t recommend), I’d go deeper but I’m already over 2000 words and I don’t want to keep writing about this film, I really don’t, but there’s oh so much more to cover still.

Back at the house the gang of crooks keep sending John Morgan out on errands on his own, the implication being that the threat of murdering his wife and child is enough to keep John Morgan in line, but why risk it? They have enough guys, why not send somebody with him for supervision. They send him out at least twice that I remember, once to fetch Dr. Fuji to help remove the bullet from Jesse’s gut and again to fetch the ice cream truck money from Tony’s mother at the hotel where he ends up choking the life out of a detective. And on the subject of Tony’s “mum”, we first see her when Tony phones her from the house to arrange the collection of the ice cream truck money, we’re introduced to this new female character and during the course of the conversation he refers to her as “mum”. The thing is, while the actress is no spring chicken she looks nowhere near old enough to be Robert Z’Dar’s mother.

And now I have to talk about something darker. Between trips out John Morgan is knocked out by Lynch, who cracks him over the back of the head with the grip of his handgun during an altercation between Morgan and Tony. Rather comically though, Lynch very obviously misses by a lot. There is a good foot of fresh air between Lynch’s hand and John Morgan’s head when he collapses to the ground “knocked out”, and the filmmakers didn’t see this or just didn’t care enough to retake it. Anyway, John Morgan spends the night incapacitated and it is while our hero is out of action that the film takes a dark turn from schlocky 80s martial arts action flick to something else. While Morgan is recovering in bed, his wife Doris decides to take a bath. Then, in a rather uncomfortable scene to watch, John Lynch sneaks into the bathroom, slowly undresses and then pulls Doris from the bath and sexually assaults her at gunpoint. To her credit, I think the actress playing Doris -Veronica Paul- does a somewhat good job from this point on portraying the trauma of a victim of violent sexual assault. The filmmakers find a way of undermining her performance though, as later, when the film erupts into violence, she is doing her damnedest to give us trauma and horror but she is often doing so while standing next to Brandon, who always looks like he’s having a great time. There is a particular frame where upon watching one of the bad guys get shot, Doris is horrified at seeing a man die but in the same shot Brandon is whooping and cheering like he just watched his favourite American sports team get a touchscooore. The tone of this film is all over the place even within a single frame.

Upon recovering, John Morgan is tasked with collecting the ice truck money. Sending John Morgan out on his own again does come back to haunt the bad guys, though, as he returns from this second errand with a handgun, taken from the policeman that he beat up. John Morgan knows that he’ll be searched upon entering the house so his tactic to counter this is to throw the gun onto the roof of his house so that he can retrieve it later and take the gang by surprise. And this is where I must circle back to “Hi sexy Auntie”. Morgan wants his son Brandon to climb on the roof to retrieve the gun for him, and he expresses that with the line “I’ve thrown a gun up on the roof, now you know I’ve taken you off that roof plenty of times. OK, so you got to go up there… and get the gun”. Now, I know suggesting changes is poor film criticism and shouldn’t be done, you should just judge the work as presented, but I can’t help myself here. If Brandon climbing on the roof and having to be taken off of the roof by his father is important to the story, why not show us? Why not introduce the character that way? So there’s that moment where Tony says “We’re going to have to find a house” and we get a cut to women in bikinis? How about instead, “We’re going to have to find a house” cut to:

Brandon climbing on the roof. Below, John Morgan walks in his yard searching for his Son, he looks up.

“Brandon, what are you doing up there? How many times have I told you not to climb on the roof? Come on, get down from there, it’s time for your kickboxing lesson.” - John Morgan

And then later, when the gun is on the roof:

“Brandon, there’s a gun on the roof, I need you to climb up there and get it.” - John Morgan

“Are you sure dad, you’re always telling me not to climb on the roof?” - Brandon

“Yes son, I’m sure.” - John Morgan

And then they have a moment together where Brandon realises that his Father trusts him, or something. Ok, it may not be perfect, but it’s a better character introduction for Brandon than “Hi sexy Auntie”, which, as a wannabe screenwriter, is the character introduction that will haunt me until my inevitable death from alcohol poisoning.

But I digress. Needless to say, Brandon gets the gun, violence ensues, bad guys are shot and there’s some kickboxing showdowns to round off the climax. Something that amused me during this section of the film was John Morgan’s bizarre method of shooting people. He occasionally sort of whips his hand up from down by his side as he shoots, as if he is actually holding a whip instead of a gun, and yet the bullets always find the target. This is despite guns usually needing to be pointed, or rather aimed, directly at the target for them to be effective (again, on re-examination I think he only does this once but it was amusing enough to stay with me).

The police do eventually turn up, by the way, and then Jim Brown’s character and John Morgan have this completely unearned moment together, as if they’ve just been through this whole ordeal together when they actually just met, like, two minutes ago.

There’s also a moment in the final act where Jose’s tearful family turns up and John Morgan gives them the ice cream truck money to make up for their patriarch being murdered. But, that’s stolen money my dude, the police are still looking for it. The cops also know that Morgan was at the hotel to collect the money from Tony’s Mother because he beat up that policeman, it’s not going to take them long to trace it back to him. I’m not sure the main character, or the filmmakers, really thought that one through.

And that was Killing American Style.

Highlights from my notes:

It was my intention to write about all of the films that I watched on day 1 of my film marathon in this article, but at more than 3000 words now, I think I should cut this short.

Also, given what I’ve written above, it may surprise you to know that I didn’t hate this film, at least not after my first viewing. It’s bad but, scenes of sexual assault aside, there are parts that are fun. It’s a stupid 80s martial arts B-movie, if that’s your cup of tea you might like it. However, after watching the Redlettermedia episode, the film itself and then having to rewatch chunks of it for the sake of writing this article, I think I’m done. I don’t want to watch or even think about this film again.

I will leave you, however, with the below exchange from the film:

“Give me the gun. Give me the gun.” - Dr. Fuji

“Can you use it?” - John Morgan

“No, but, I’m kill them, Japanese style.” - Dr. Fuji

“Doc, you go to the window, I’ll kill ‘em, American style.” - John Morgan

Aaaand Credits.