A driving visionary

H.B. Halicki was a man who really wanted to make a superior car movie. He directed, wrote, produced, and starred in the original (and vastly better than the remake) Gone in 60 Seconds, and did his character's stunt driving while at it. He also owned many of the vehicles used in the filming.

The result is half endearing low-budget filmmaking without much of a script, and half amazing chase sequences. Halicki was injured twice while driving. You can see that cars were something the crew was passionate about, and in a movie like this you don't need much else.

Driver, Detective, Player and Connection

Thus are called the four main characters in Walter Hill's The Driver. They are bare-bones archetypes and the film doesn't really need lengthy explanations of motivations or background. The action sequences do the title proud: there's lots of driving and it's suitably exciting. Thankfully CGI wasn't available yet.

Very different action movies

Green Zone could almost be a prequel to the Bourne series, showing what David Webb was like before he volunteered to become Jason Bourne. Paul Greengrass' direction is similar, Matt Damon plays the protagonist again, and they even got John Powell to score it and Christopher Rouse to edit it. It's a solid action thriller even though the idea of there being no WMDs to be found is hardly surprising in 2010. Some of the characters are based on real people and many members of Bourne's... I mean Roy Miller's team are actual veterans, not actors.

The Warriors is anything but realistic, but highly entertaining. Somehow I had avoided seeing it until now. It's an urban fantasy about one heroic gang versus a hundred others, populated by a cast of (mostly) unknowns, and executed perfectly to this specification.

Theme-free day

You can surely draw a connection between High Plains Drifter and Spellbound, but it would be too loose to count for anything.

Drifter is a film where Eastwood finally plays a man with no name. In the Dollars Trilogy he actually had a name or nickname in every movie. I'm not sure if it is a great western, but it's an interesting one (you don't often see a town remade into a personal hell). The writer Ernest Tidyman also had a hand in Shaft and The French Connection - not a bad way to start your 1970s.

Spellbound is frankly implausible. But it has Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck, Hitch regular Leo G. Carroll (six films), a Dalí-designed dream sequence, and some clever touches by the director, so it is far from a waste of time. Both Bergman and Peck would return.

Private parts destroyed: 2

Next up was a sleazy 70s day with the triple bill of Chato's Land, Coffy, and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.

Chato's Land is the first film where Charles Bronson and director Michael Winner worked together - later they would do Death Wish. Bronson was middle-aged before he got famous, and in this movie he was 51 but still extremely buff. It has a simple revenge plot: half-breed Chato kills in self-defense, runs from the posse, and when this posse kills his friend and rapes his woman Chato kills every motherfucker in the desert. One rapist gets his balls burned and does not survive the experience. Jack Palance plays the morally ambiguous leader of the posse.

Coffy is a blaxploitation classic. Voluptuous knockout Pam Grier is a nurse whose young sister is ruined by drugs, so it's revenge time again by any means necessary. This is the film which teaches you to hide razorblades in your afro, just in case. All sympathetic characters get hurt (not that there are many) and all bad guys are colorful stereotypes and suitably rotten. This time the genital destruction is carried out with a shotgun.

Alfredo Garcia features a tremendous performance by Warren Oates as Bennie, who goes looking for the titular head. Everything is dirty and sweaty, and occasional moments of peace are guaranteed to not last. Bennie gets truly deranged towards the film's conclusion and bad people meet bad ends. Some good people also meet bad ends. Sam Peckinpah delivers again. I don't remember any nuts getting specifically smashed, although it might have happened in one hail of bullets or another.

Good times throughout!