If you blinked, you probably missed any coverage of the death of George P. Cosmatos last week. Cosmatos had a somewhat less than distinguished career as a director, helming films that will never get a sniff of the National Film Registry. For example:
Rambo: First Blood Part II - Also known by its more grammatically correct title, Second Blood. One of many Cosmatos efforts I've seen in the theater. On this particular occasion, I was accompanied by an opening night crowd of howling rednecks, any one of whom would make Ted Nugent look like Gore Vidal.
Leviathan - I have grandiose plans to host a double feature screening of this and Deep Rising (thereby keeping alive my fantasy of an undersea encounter with Meg Foster and Famke Janssen). Say what you want about this, it beats the hell out of DeepStar Six. Or Sphere, for that matter.
Cobra - For those of you who don't remember the kind of action movies we had to deal with in the 1980s, watch Cobra (you are also directed to go read Ruthless Reviews' Guide to 80s Action).
But I will always hold a special place in my baboon heart for Cosmatos because he made the film that was the subject of my first ever Film Threat column: Of Unknown Origin:
The movie’s subtext is not hidden from viewers (Hughes bangs a copy of Moby Dick on the wall at one point). But "Of Unknown Origin" can also be viewed, for those of us working on a thesis, as an allegory to the futility we all feel in our daily lives. The unholy triumvirate of work, school, and relationships all lead to feelings of helplessness, which can cause even the most buttoned-down of us to lash out. Bart Hughes is as buttoned down as they come, and by the end of the movie he has turned his beloved brownstone into a death maze, driven nails through a baseball bat, and crossed the line into Ahab-like obsessive psychosis.
I guess you could say I owe my career (such as it is) to George. I'd prefer that you didn't, however. Legal reasons.
"The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against the teaching of evolution are nothing more, at bottom, than conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters."
-- H. L. Mencken, "Homo Neanderthalensis" (commentary on the Scopes trial), The Baltimore Evening Sun, June 29, 1955.