"The White Buffalo"(1977)d/J. Lee Thompson

Tonight's entry is respectfully dedicated to Rikard,a bro with similar appreciation for the tits items in life.I'm finally getting around to this one well over a year later?Better late than never, haha.When I got dragged to see this one by my old man, a Bronson freak of great reknown the world over, I was mainly interested in seeing the titular pale bison trampling cowboys and indians alike under vengeful hooves.I didn't groove on Charlie's distinctive monotone action vibe 'til I hit double digits.For a skinny little Italian kid with a penchant for monstruous creature features like I was,producer Dino De Laurentiis' mid to late seventies stretch of bombastic animals gone awry movies was the emotional equivalent of missing Thursday and Friday from school with a fever,getting couch-based TLC from the em and pee,new toys,Nugent lps,and horror movie marathons(even though I just may have been technically healthy enough Thursday night for school on Friday,I may or may not have embellished the illness' seriousness for a few hours the next morning just to add on to the upcoming weekend.Parlaying sickness into accrued kid wealth and prolonged "me" time at age eight.And to think some skeptics have doubted my genius...).Just give me some sort of pissed off animal of significant size on a human-hating hullabaloo,and I'd eat it up with a fork,no questions asked.Tonight's entry was no different,at the time.

If there's one thing Bill Hickok(Charles Bronson) hates more than the top bunk, it's hard-charging mechanical buffalo puppets that haunt his dreams.

We meet Wild Bill Hickok(Charles Bronson) roused from the middle of his latest nightmare with guns a-blazin' towards a white bison of mythical proportions that frequently tramples through the legendary gunslinger's subconscious with the discretion of a diesel train.He's powerful opposed to such things, see, and ruinin' a feller's dreams like 'et is fixin' to get blasted, round these parts.Hickokski tracks the beast, pairing up with a cantankerous old geezer(Jack Warden) while pit stopped in a one cow town, while elsewhere, Crazy Horse(Will Sampson), the Indian, not the forty-ouncer, is having very real quandary of his own with the albino instigator, having selfishly trampled the Chief's entire village and murdered his own child just for the eff of it.Forced to repair his wounded pride and restore his tribal stature, Horse must hunt the animal himself, or forever be known as 'The Worm' to his peers, the first nation equivalent of being called a "Shirley", I'd wager.

When he's not trampling Hickok's dreams and destroying native villages under vengeful hooves, the white buffalo also enjoys long, impressionistic gallops in the snow and the music of  Lobo.

 When the men inevitably meet, they communicate through crazy sign language, despite speaking perfect English to each other at the same time, mind you, and after saving each other's lives in ambushes, respectively, they declare themselves 'blood brothers', even though both men are blindly determined to be the one to finally bag the achromatic fucker, singlehandedly.Hickok even turns down some choice western-style trim from the obligatory hooker with a heart o'gold(Kim Novak, in one of her final roles) while sharing a bed with her(!).Talk about dedication to the cause, baby.Stuart Whitman, Slim Pickens, and John Carradine all make their contrived genre cameos, while Clint Walker does a good job in a rare villainous turn.Though the beast is seemingly immortal, and powerful enough to barrel through mountainous snow and rock walls, the unlikely duo eventually fell it, with Crazy Horse riding atop and skinning it with a knife like a feathered Ahab of the West; the shabby plastic snow and less-than-believable sets pretty much serving as a final resting place, if not for the Hollywood western(Heaven's Gate would finish the job a few years later), then definitely for the horror/western/adventure.

Nevermind your healthy skepticism of my white skin.Lead me to your peyote, More-Ornate-Than-Wolves(Will Sampson).

Bronson was born Charles Buchinsky in the coal region of the Allegheny's in Pennsylvania to Polish and Lithuanian parents, changing his name to 'Bronson' during the McCarthy hearings because he thought his real name sounded 'too Russian'(!).Buffalo was his last picture for UA, a box-office dud that really signalled the end of his real creative ambitions in film, though he'd again work with director J. Lee Thompson on typical Bronson-fare titles like 10 To Midnight(1983) and The Evil That Men Do(1984), staying busy right up to his last feature, Death Wish V:The Face of Death(1994), before succumbing at the age of 81 in 2003.A real favorite of mine since my teens, Bronson's contribution to film, and the action genre in particular, is immeasurable, and really, he's great here as Hickok, a performance that's been brought to light since the film's recent re-evaluation by movie fans everywhere.On the scale, Buffalo earns two Wops, a very watchable exercise in exploitation.Check it out.

With the Great White Buffalo, they gonna make a final stand in the new, magic land.
 

King Kong(1976)d/John Guillermin

Because nothing screams originality like a REMAKE.
Nothing exceeds like excess.And no name greater personifies that word than Dino De Laurentiis,synonymous at one point with overblown,big budgeted cinematic flops.If you asked me what I thought about this first remake of the 1933 classic after first seeing it in the theaters as a six year old,I would have exuberantly rambled about its greatness exhaustively.Thirty-three years later,I have a markedly different outlook about it.It's not FX wizard Rick Baker's collaboration with Carlo "Alien" Rambaldi,it's not the star-studded cast,peppered with cult faves like John Agar,Dennis Fimple,and even Forrest J. Ackerman,and it's certainly not Jessica Lange in her introductory role as Kong's bubbleheaded hand candy.For all the publicity and hype this flick generated in its day,it just hasn't held up very well over time.Enraged simians tend to fling poop,and the finished product here smells no differently.

Jessica Lange gawks at the idea of a future sex scene with Jack Nicholson.
Petrox Oil executive,Fred Wilson(Charles Grodin) heads an expedition to an uncharted island in the South Pacific that is believed to hide a depository of oil and is hidden by a permanent low-lying cloud bank.A scruffy primate paleontologist named Jack Prescott(Jeff Bridges) stows away on the ship,busting in during a slide show to warn the crew of a seldom heard history of impending danger on the island,which according to legend is guarded by a monstrous god named Kong.His efforts land him a gig in the brig,but as he's being escorted down by Wilson's shiphands,he glimpses a liferaft afloat off the starboard bow,which,when retrieved by the oceanliner reveals an unconscious half-dressed starlet inside(my favorite kind!).When Prescott brings the dingbat around with smelling salts,it's painfully obvious the crew should have left her floating on the ocean indefinitely.Dwan(Jessica Lneag,I changed a few letters in her name to make it sound more memorable,ya know?)was on a pleasure cruise to Singapore aboard a yacht, peddling her fleshy wares to score herself a part in an upcoming movie,but was spared when she refused to stay below to screen "Deep Throat"(!)as the vessel exploded.The men try to tune out her bubbly airheaded personality and focus on her smokin' curves as they send a recon team into the fog bank towards what they think is the motherlode.

Kong gets to second base with his not-so-eager-to-please shipwrecked squeeze.
After managing to strike out on the oil gamble,fudge up the island natives' symbolic wedding rehearsal,and let Dwan get abducted by aggro Island Abos right under their noses,the rescue team arrives at the Skull Island wall too late,left to track a set of six foot wide footprints.Elsewhere on the island, Dwan is having the first date of a lifetime.Kong(Rick Baker) fluctuates back and forth from mesmerized at the blonde's natural beauty,to thoroughly disappointed that she can speak.After being screamed at,punched,and accused of male chauvenism,the poor brute probably looks forward to getting shot off a New York skyscraper already.As the ape wrestles with a giant-sized constrictor,Prescott arrives on the scene and rescues the bimbo. Wilson decides to slip the monstrous monkey a massive mickey and claim him as an advertising gimmick for the oil company.Back at the unveiling in New York,the saavy exec chains and cages the towering simian inside a mammoth gas station pump,and to add insult to injury,puts a cheesy enormous crown on his head.The things a henpecked guy'll put up with in the name of love,eh?During the glitzy reproduction of the native ceremony,the press people get too close to Dwan,and Kong abruptly breaks the fuck out like chickenpox.Cue metropolitan devastation.Before reuniting with his little bubblehead,the ape stomps New Yorkers(face it,most of 'em had it coming!),derails a train,and makes a general nuisance of himself.Once he's got Dwan,he heads for the buildings that most resemble his happy place back on Skull Island:The World Trade Center.Only happiness proves evasive due to soldiers equipped with flamethrowers and combat choppers who machinegun our tragic hairy hero until he rolls off one of the towers to the street below,leaving the New Yorkers to return to their Soho coffeehouses and Greek midotwn electronic stores.Moral of the story:Women...If they couldn't cook,we'd hunt them for their pelts.

Snubbed for a cab ride,The King of Skull Island goes bananas in the Big Apple.
Nevermind the fact that Rambaldi built a forty foot high 1.7 million dollar robot(which occupies exactly ONE MINUTE of screen time.No typo.)for this trainwreck,or that Mario Bava refused to leave Italy to helm the directorial chair(which was also turned down by Polanski and Peckinpah,and even Spielberg was considered early on),or Baker's long-time dissatisfaction with the suit's realism on camera,or seventies sex kittens Bo Derek and Britt Ekland turning down the role of Dwan,or the fact that there's more blue screen here than in a local news weather forecast segment.Just be thankful we weren't forced to endure Barbra Streisand in the female lead,as she was considered at one point in pre-production.I shudder to think upon what might have been if she had taken the role.Of the three Kongs,this one is the weakest by far,but it does have a fun cult element about it that renders it watchable.Jessica Lange probably scored herself second place on my childhood crush list because of this turn,directly behind Farrah Fawcett-Majors.Jessica,whose parents Al and Dorothy probably want to murder me for incorrectly tying their daughter to the unrelated Hope Lange, proved afterwards,she too,is a great actress,Dwan aside.King Kong Lives was the atrocious sequel with the ridiculous storyline and dated suitmation effects that nobody asked for ten years later.Don your ceremonial monkey mask,dig the voodoo drums,as they beat out a Wopsploitation score of:

The great ape plays dead to avoid thirty thousand swarming Manhattan squeegee bums.