Night Shift

Henry Winkler is probably universally remembered as the Fonz from the TV show Happy Days, although he's had a long career both acting and being an executive producer on TV shows. He didn't make that many movies, and certainly didn't get much chance to star in movies. One where he did was Night Shift.

We don't see Winkler at first. Instead, there's an establishing scene of a guy being chased through Manhattan by a couple of criminals of some sort. He thinks he's escaped, only to find out they made it to his apartment first and have waylaid him, throwing him out the window to his death.

It's only the following day that we see Winkler. He plays Chuck Lumley, who works at the morgue, a job he's taken largely because he couldn't handle the pressure of his previous job as an investment consultant at one of the Manhattan brokerage firms. The man who died in the opening scene was a pimp, and the two guys who killed him were higher up the underworld ladder and expected to get their cut from all the pimps in the area. Showing up to ID the pimp's body is Belinda (Shelley Long), one of the pimp's prostitutes, who for some reason thinks Chuck looks familiar.

Chuck wants as little hassle in his life as possible, both professionally and personally. He's got a fiancée in Charlotte (Gina Hecht), but he seems to be going along with the engagement just to make her and her parents happy. He doesn't even seem to care much when he gets moved to the night shift to make room for a relative of the boss. However, it puts Chuck on the same shift as Bill "Blaze" Blazejowksi (Michael Keaton), a smooth operator who always seems to have some angle that's probably a scam. He can also be incredibly annoying, much to Chuck's consternation.

Anyhow, the reason Belinda thought Chuck looked familiar is because she lives in the same apartment building as him. With her pimp dead, she's started taking clients up to her place, which seems risky although the alternatives without a pimp might be risker. And when she gets arrested over the Thanksgiving holiday, she doesn't have a pimp to bail her out. So she places her one phone call to... Chuck! Needless to see Charlotte and her parents are none too pleased.

Belinda's arrest gives Bill a ridiculous idea: since he's already using the morgue hearse for illicit purposes, and they're on the night shift where nobody's going to notice anything anyway, why not use the morgue resources to help out Belinda and her pimpless friends? Bill can be a kinda-sorta pimp to them, while Chuck can start using those skills as a financial advisor again by investing the money the prostitutes are making from their tricks so they'll have something left over after their beauty has faded, much like Gena Rowlands in Gloria.

Naturally, you'd think the guys who killed the previous pimps are going to figure out what's going on and come after Chuck and Bill. And sure enough, that happens for the movie's climax. But not until there's also the standard-issue romantic storyline of Chuck and Belinda developing feelings for each other.

Night Shift was directed by Ron Howard, and is a movie that has a lot of heart and is fairly charming for a movie with a pretty adult storyline. However, the movie is not without its flaws, and I think that's mostly down to the script. I don't think it's particularly realistic. But worse is that the writers made Michael Keaton's character way too annoying. Now, part of the humor is supposed to be that the character annoys poor Chuck. But he annoys us, too.

There's a lot in Night Shift that would go on to bigger things: Ron Howard as a director; Michael Keaton on the big screen and Shelley Long on the small screen; and one of Burt Bacharach's songs, "That's What Friends are For". But Night Shift is the place to see them all at the beginning.

Ronny Howard, Mad Scientist

One night each December, TCM honors a bunch of people who weren't necessarily well-enough known, or had enough films, to do a traditional programming tribute. Last year, that included producer/director Bert I. Gordon, who died in March 2023 aged 100. Gordon was known for schlocky but fun low-budget scifi and horror. The movie TCM selected in Gordon's honor was emblematic of this: Village of the Giants.

The movie opens with an establishing sequence of a bunch of teens joyriding out in the middle of nowhere on a rainy night, the sort of scene that gives the impression the this is the sort of movie conceived with the idea of playing to the drive-in crowd where teens would make out. The group is led by Fred (Jeff Bridges in a very early role) and includes three of his male friends (including Mickey Rooney's son Tim), and each of their girlfriends. This being a rainy night, the road is washed out, and the teens, having gone off the road because of the weather, have to walk to town to try to get help.

Meanwhie, in town, Mike (Tommy Kirk) is with his girlfriend Nancy, along with best friend Horsey (Johnny Crawford) and his girlfriend, while kinda-sorta babysitting his kid brother, nicknamed Genius (that's Ron Howard when he was still going by Ronny) because he likes to play with one of those toy chemistry sets that were a bigger thing back in the 1960s than today. Genius acts like he knows what he's doing, although that's not that certain. He creates some new-to-him compound without being quite sure how he did it. Because of the substance's properties, Genius gives it the highly scientific name "Goo".

And then some of the Goo gets spilled and a couple of animals eat it up, with the result that they're subjected to horrendously bad special effects which make them giant animals, because that's one of the most original plot devices known to sci-fi movies.

Fred and his friends show up and find the oversized animals, which gives Fred an idea. He'd like the secret of the stuff, because there's a lot of money to be made in such a substance. Eventually, he and his friends are able to get one of the test tubes which presumably contains the Goo, and abscond with it to the theater where they holed up because they couldn't find any other place to stay.

And then, they do another terribly stupid thing: they decide to experiment on themselves by ingesting the Goo. You can guess what happens, and that, impressed with their new height, decide to take over the village, leading Mike and Horsey to come up with a way to outwit the giants.

Village of the Giants is the sort of movie that is objectively terrible, with a dumb and unoriginal plot, bad acting, and lousy special effects. But it all adds up to turn the movie into one of those films that's so bad it's good. Part of it, I think is the fact that there are a couple of famous people here (Bridges and Howard definitely, along with Crawford if you've seen The Rifleman) in what was decidedly not their finest hour. Part of it is that despite the unoriginality, it's also quite unintentionally funny.

So definitely watch Village of the Giants if you get the chance. The original, not what Mystery Science Theater 3000 did to it.

Cocoon

I can't recall the last time Cocoon showed up on FXM. It's been on TCM a couple of times, and I recorded it the last time it showed up. But it's finally on the FXM schedule, having gotten an airing today and on again tomorrow morning at 11:10 AM. So I sat down to watch it and do a review on it here.

Wilford Brimley plays Ben Luckett, who lives at a senior citizens' community together with his wife Mary (Maureen Stapleton) and several of his more recent friends. Ben being a bit younger (in real life Brimley was 20-25 years younger than most of the other retiree co-stars), he can still drive at least for the time being, and is somewhat more independent, as opposed, say, to the Lefkowitzes, Bernie (Jack Gilford) and Rosie (Herta Ware), the latter of whom has some form of dementia.

While a lot of people are doing the standard old-fart group activities that the retirement home puts on, Ben breaks in to the unoccupied home next door, which has a nice pool house that nobody is going to notice him and his friends using. These friends are unmarried Art (Don Ameche), and Joe Finley (Hume Cronyn), married to Alma (Cronyn's real-life wife Jessica Tandy).

Meanwhile, at the marina nearby, Jack Bonner (Steve Guttenberg) is running a struggling charter boat business. He's lucky to be able to pay off his dockage fees, but other than that, he's had a terrible string of bad luck. So how does all of this come together?

One day, Walter (Brian Dennehy) shows up along with friends including Kitty (Raquel Welch's daughter Tahnee) and Pillsbury (Tyrone Power Jr., although he's really the third or fourth member of the acting family with that name, since "Tyrone Power Sr." was a silent film star and there was one before that). They offer Jack a substantial sum of money in exchange for exclusive use of the boat for the next month. They also show up over at the unoccupied home, looking to rent that for a month, too.

This puts a crimp in the plans of Ben and his friends, who might not be able to use the pool any longer. They decide that they'll still go in when they see Walter and his friends go out on the boat; that way they know they'll have the pool for a while. As for Walter's group, they go scuba diving and bring up what look like large shells that have been lying on the sea floor for who knows how long, bring them on the boat, and then store them in the pool.

This last bit, unsurprisingly, gives the three old men a bit of pause, but they still go into the pool even with these rocks or whatever they are in the pool. They find out after getting out of the pool that they feel much younger -- and hornier -- with all sorts of similar anti-aging effects. Ben had failed the eyesight portion of his license renewal but now passes with flying colors, while Joe finds that his terminal cancer is suddenly in remission.

This should be good news, but there are consequences that aren't entirely positive, such as when Joe starts flirting with other women and it threatens to break up his marriage to Alma, whom he loves dearly.

As for that pool, it turns out that Walter and his friends are aliens, which we first learn when Jack is watching Kitty undress through a small hole in the boat. She doesn't just undress; she takes off her skin, revealing a bright light/pure energy being that obviously throws Jack for a loop. The big surprise is that the aliens don't seem to be afraid of Jack when he finds this out. Nor do they seem afraid of all the old people when Walter finds Ben and his friends in it.

As for those rocks or shells, they're actually the titular cocoons. Walter and his friends had led an expeditionary force from another star system millennia ago, but were forced to leave, putting their friends in these cocoons and depositing them at the bottom of the sea until they could return. (You'd think 10,000 years of geological processes might have done something to the cocoons, but apparently not.) Walter is back to retrieve his friends, and filled the pool with some sort of life force energy that would keep the cocoons and the beings in them alive until they can get back to the spaceship, where they'll live out their immortal days until the heat death of the universe.

But there's a limited amount of life force in that pool, and the energy revitalizing Ben and friends and making them young again ultimately saps all of that energy, making it no longer a fountain of youth and even resulting in the deaths of one of the beings, this being the first death Walter has experienced personally. It's that bit of emotion that leads Walter to accept Ben's sincere apology as well as Ben's offer to help put the remaining cocoons back on the sea floor until Walter can come one more time to retrieve them. In exchange, Walter offers to take Ben and his friends on the spaceship where they can be eternally young and a useful part of some alien society. But will they be willing to leave everything they know behind, and can they even escape?

Cocoon for much of the first half seems like a light silly science fiction fantasy, but with the draining of the life force in the pool it really turns into something thought-provoking and interesting. Of course the idea of not having to grow old and decrepit like Rose is appealing, but most of the time we don't really think about the consequences of an action like that. The material is handled well, and the performances of all these older actors getting another chance at a third act in life are reasonably good, even if Don Ameche's Oscar really seems more like a career award.

Cocoon is absolutely worth a watch, and I was surprised to see that it seems to be out of print on DVD. It does, however, seem to be available on Amazon streaming if you don't have FXM.