Rhapsodies

For the week’s selection, I went with films about pulp adventure, or more accurately films that parodied films like Indiana Jones and similar pulp films. 

The first film on my list was  J. Lee Thompson’s Firewalker, starring Chuck Norris, Lou Gossett Jr. and Melody Anderson. This tells the story of Max and Leo two down on their luck treasure hunters, who have had many adventures together. (We can tell because one of their arch nemesis shows up in the cold open)

They are hired by a beautiful woman named Patricia (Anderson) to help her find  Aztec gold in Central America. Can they find it before the villains do? 

This movie was unintentionally funny to the point of being a comedy in all but name. Strangely for eighties schlock, it was entertainingly charming with Norris and Gossett having good enough chemistry that I would be willing to watch a good version of it. 

The next film on my list was an intentional parody of the genre, Robert Zemeckis’s Romancing the Stone, starring Micheal Douglas and Kathleen Turner. 

Turner plays Joan Wilder a successful but introverted Romance Novelist. When she gets a call from her sister, Elaine (Mary Ellen Trainor) who has been kidnapped by two smugglers, Ira and Ralph (Zack Norman and Danny DeVito) who want a treasure a map that Elaine had mailed Joan. Soon Joan finds herself lost in the jungles of Columbia, running from someone far worse than Ira and Ralph (Manuel Ojeda as the terrifying Colonel Zolo). Here she meets a real roguish hero, Jack. Now that she’s finding herself trapped in one of her own stories can she survive?

This is another one of those films I’d been hearing about for years and this time I don’t feel particularly guilty about it. It was okay, with a couple of funny bits, but otherwise, my general reaction was… meh.