Here’s a piece I did back in January that I think is still fun for Halloween month because it comes with a shocking find, a 90s monster movie that’s actually worth a look! Listen on YouTube or scroll down to read.

I watched four movies yesterday. They were all on Starz, they were all made in the 90s, and they were either produced or distributed by Trimark, which was a sort of classier Cannon Pictures. But they still made enough noir pictures in the 90s that their logo actually appears to contain Venetian blinds.

I had never heard of any of these movies, and I’m trying to use my Starz membership because I paid for a year of it for $12.

That’s why I even started this podcast: I was challenged to find enough content on Starz by my husband, and I’m trying to save money on streaming services, which is an addiction of mine. So, let’s go. Am I going to make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear with this podcast? It’s not looking good.

Separate Lives (1995)

The first movie—and this is the worst of the four I watched—is called Separate Lives. It stars Linda Hamilton and Jim Belushi.

Linda Hamilton plays a psychiatrist who has multiple personalities because she witnessed her mother kill her stepfather, and then herself, 20 years before. But now a witness to that event has been found, and it may have been a murder. No, now the witness has been shot, and Linda wakes up the next morning in different clothes and finds a gun in a drawer in her house.

So she hires one of her students, Jim Belushi, to follow her around with a video camera to see what she does at night before she turns into a pumpkin.

She is Lauren in the daytime. She’s demure and soft-spoken. Then she becomes Lena at night, dresses up skanky, goes to the club, and has a boyfriend who is English and puts on a Cockney accent, I believe. He beats up Jim Belushi for following Lena, who pretends not to know who he is and pushes him down the stairs.

Now we need to get her ex-husband in on the deal to watch her. He goes to her house and gets pushed down the stairs by Lena. Lena goes out on the town and comes back as Lauren to find that her ex-husband has been murdered in her house.

She and Jim are both suspects, but there are a ton of suspects. Did I mention that Jim Belushi’s character has quit being a cop and become a student who wants to become a psychiatrist, and that he’s Lauren’s student?

That’s why she hired him. And the reason he stopped being a cop is that his wife killed herself. He has a daughter who’s about 13, who’s wise beyond her years, played by Elizabeth Moss. Since it’s Elizabeth Moss, who now is the highest-profile person in this film and probably the best actor, we have to put her on the list of suspects.

Lauren has a father who was divorced from her mother at the time of her mother’s death, so he’s a suspect, too. And in a brilliant act of stunt casting, they have Vera Miles, who played Lila Crane, the sister of Marion Crane, in Psycho—another movie in which a murderer had multiple personalities.

There’s nothing I can say about how implausible all of this is.

I will say that when they go to the club, there’s some bad dancing from Linda that almost equals Al Pacino in Cruising. And they didn’t do enough with Vera Miles in this story.

I knew who the killer was the first time I saw this person, but it took the rest of the movie for that to be revealed to everyone else. And that’s not because I’m smart. It’s because this movie is dumb.

“You have no right to push me down the stairs!”

“I’ve got the right because I’ve lost my mind!”

Okay, second movie. This is the one I thought would be the worst, but it wasn’t. It was called Deadfall.

Deadfall (1993)

They put Nicolas Cage up on the thumbnail, but he’s really a supporting character. He’s as annoying as he can possibly be, even for Nicolas Cage, which I’m not going to waste a lot of time talking about. I would like to give you my thoughts on Nicolas Cage at some other time.

But this movie was directed by his brother Christopher and is a perfect example of more money than sense. Since it came out in 1993, it has attained a cult status for Nicolas Cage’s performance.

But this cast is stacked. It’s got Michael Biehn as a con man working with his father, played by James Coburn, who also has a twin brother that Michael Biehn’s character didn’t know about until he accidentally kills his father during the con they’re putting on.

You’ll immediately guess the twist in this movie. I mean, it kind of didn’t go exactly the way I thought it would, so points for that. And now he’s got to follow his father’s dying clue that his brother took the cake. And he definitely did. And the pie.

He’s got to go to California and find this twin uncle. His uncle’s henchman is Nicolas Cage. There’s also an appearance by Charlie Sheen in this movie.

They’re doing something here. People think this is a failed drama, but it’s really a failed comedy.

It’s not funny, but you can tell they were trying to be funny. And then, when there were sort of production problems with the film, apparently Val Kilmer was supposed to play Nicolas Cage’s part. I wish that had happened and that they had been secret twins.

I think they tried to do a comedy and then did a reverse Tommy Wiseau. When it didn’t work as a comedy, they said it was a drama noir, and everybody just takes it as that.

But there are too many just bizarre references to other movies in this movie. You’ve got an Apocalypse Now thing with a ceiling fan. You’ve got Charlie Sheen doing some kind of The Hustler thing, and he does this weird monologue about Mark Twain. The end of the movie turns into Strangers on a Train, and you’ve got Angus Scrimm, the Tall Man from Phantasm, playing some kind of Bond villain with golden garden shears on his hand.

If that doesn’t convince you that this is a comedy, I don’t know what will.

But nobody told Michael Biehn that it was a comedy. Also, he does unconvincing narration over almost the whole film, sounding as unhappy as Harrison Ford in Blade Runner. Michael Biehn just seems embarrassed. He thinks he’s in a drama.

It’s not a drama. Moving on.

Montana (1998)

I thought this would be the best movie I saw yesterday, at the time that I saw it. But then I found something else. Both of these next two movies could be classified as hidden gems, and they couldn’t be more different.

Number two on my list is a gangster movie called Montana, starring the ever-wonderful Stanley Tucci and Kyra Sedgwick as star-crossed lovers who are—I don’t know—hitmen, bagmen? I don’t know what you call them. They’re working for an organization that’s not the big-M Mafia, but it is an organized crime syndicate.

So it has dark humor. All the bad guys are hanging out in what looks like a library most of the time, playing some sort of poker that’s also Russian roulette.

They don’t like each other. This is not a big F-family. This is coworkers.

I think this movie may be an extended metaphor about a toxic workplace, quitting your job, and getting close to your coworkers while you’re there.

Philip Seymour Hoffman—P.S., hush, pish-posh—is the Prince Machiavelli of the group. He stays in the office and tries to turn the boss against our protagonists, Tucci and Sedgwick.

And the boss isn’t criminally underused. Robbie Coltrane does almost nothing funny. He’s just scary, and most of his scenes take place in an office, except when he’s menacing his trafficked girlfriend, who doesn’t want to be there. She’s played by Robin Tunney, whom I mostly remember more fondly from The Craft. Not that she was a good character; she was in a bad situation, though, so it’s hard to say that I enjoyed her work in this film. Although she did get back at the people who had hurt her. Spoiler!

Stanley Tucci wants out of the organization at any cost. There’s an opportunity to do this when some money goes missing. It would have been laundered through the person who showed up in the credits as the end credit—the end man, who would be a guest star if this weren’t a movie—none other than John Ritter.

He’s got everybody in a Jack Tripper situation here, because the money is missing, and it would have been laundered through his part of the organization, which is a cult/self-help guru and bookseller. Just a whole different kind of sleaze, much more interesting than Robbie Coltrane’s part. I probably would have watched a whole movie about that character.

But I did love John Ritter, as I’m sure most people did.

Oh, what can I say? This did not activate my social anxiety the way most Mafia movies do, because I came to care about Stanley Tucci, Kyra Sedgwick, and Robin Tunney.

I think that’s partly because this movie was pretty well written. It was directed by a woman, which was unusual in the 90s, and it seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle of all the crime movies that came out during that decade.

But Montana, if you can catch it, please do. It ends with a great, empowering female song that I remember as being sort of one of those little fair hits for Leaf Clover.

And that kind of sets the tone for the ending.

Metamorphosis: The Alien Factor (1990)

Moving on to the inevitable conclusion, I thought I had found an Italian horror movie from 1990 called Metamorphosis. I was going to show it to my husband because we’re always up for a crappy Italian horror movie. This one used to be on one of those Mill Creek box sets.

It was in the public domain, so I saw it on Starz and thought, “Oh, they’ve done a better copy of this now!”

But it’s a different horror movie with scientists, also from 1990, called Metamorphosis: The Alien Factor, which I think is also Alien Factor, a title of another—maybe one of those 70s Don Dohler movies. I don’t know. All of this is confusing.

Let me get to the point.

This is a must-see monster movie. I mean, this is one of the best modern monster movies.

They’re in New Jersey, where all your monster movies should be. It’s all shot in a warehouse.

There’s a scientist who’s trying to work for the government to test some creatures. They have these ugly little, different kinds of puppets living in this lab. They’re pretty gnarly, and the scientists think it’s alien DNA. But after everything happens, it comes out—and this is right at the beginning, I’m not spoiling anything—that it might have been created on Earth.

So this guy working in the lab has a girlfriend who works there, and she keeps distracting him. He gets bitten by one of the creatures.

And then it gets gross. They pour sulfuric acid on his hand to try to kill it. These people are poor scientists. It travels up his veins, and he starts turning into—I don’t know what. Some disgusting, big old thing with no arms and two legs, and it shoots tentacles out.

There are practical effects. There’s stop motion. There’s puppets.

There’s a security guard who gets killed, and he has two teenage daughters. One is a bimbo, and the other is a computer genius. Somebody saw Night of the Comet and said, “I want to see those two girls in a Troma movie,” and they made this.

So half the movie is a flashback, where you get up to the point where the scary government shit guys come to try to stop this thing.

Then the last third is very suspenseful: running around the building, the government guys beating everyone up, the monster killing people, and the two girls trying to stop it.

It’s just a great time. Very disgusting, some intentional humor. I can’t recommend this movie enough.

Metamorphosis: The Alien Factor.

So that’s where we are today for movies right here on Starz from the 90s, produced by Trimark, that I’d never heard of.

And I want you to check them out in that order.

Have a good Sunday!