Finally, Black History Month is over and I can get back to talking about what matters -- dead, white character actors.
George Kennedy passed this week with little fanfare in the social media. Maybe the kids these days just don't know who he was.
No, he was not JFK's brother.
Sure, he had more than 200 television and film appearances (lots of westerns), but who can blame them? One generation of audiences knows him as Paul Newman's sidekick in 1967's Cool Hand Luke, while the next knows him as second banana to Leslie Nielsen in the 1988 comedy classic The Naked Gun: From The Files of Police Squad, which no one has been able to enjoy since the mid-1990s because convicted thief-of-his-own-stuff O.J. Simpson is in it. Kennedy also featured prominently in 1987's Creepshow 2.
The same year The Naked Gun came out, Kennedy was in another movie, which is this week's Thursday Thriller. It's called Uninvited, not to be confused with The Uninvited from 2009 or 1944.
You know how in a lot of horror movies, they do that fakeout pop scare where the girl opens the closet, and something jumps out at her, but she's relieved to find it's just a cat? My buddies at Scary Noises had some fun with this premise.
Now imagine a movie where the cat is the worst thing that could pop out of that closet and you've got Uninvited. It's no ordinary cat, though. That would be stupid. Instead, writer/director Greydon Clark crafted a tale of a cat that has a smaller, angrier cat living inside it. It was created accidentally in a lab of ill-defined purpose and it escapes. Whenever the fluffy kitty is threatened, the evil kitty crawls out of its mouth and attacks. The uglier cat is poisonous, and infects victims with throbbing skin bubbles that spring leaks, but never satisfactorily burst open. The leaky skin bubbles are fatal, it turns out.
Kennedy plays Mike Harvey, a white collar criminal who, along with his partner Walter Graham, is on his way to the Cayman Islands to retrieve their ill-gotten gains before they're both caught by the Securities Exchange Commission.
Graham has been on the cover of Forbes magazine, if that helps you understand what kind of asshole he is. He invites two bikini girls (Clare Corey and Shari Shattuck) on their Caribbean cruise, and the girls find three guys (Eric Larson, Rob Estes and Michael Holden) and the cat, and bring them along. The only reason Harvey and Graham agree is the ship's captain Rachel (Toni Hudson) has no crew to pilot the luxury yacht/getaway vessel.
Clu Gulager, the dad from Nightmare on Elm Street 2, is also in it.
Toy boats and ugly puppets figure heavily in this production, but unlike similar low-budget films in more recent years, Uninvited doesn't constantly nudge you in the ribs to let you know how clever it is being so dumb. There's a sincerity to Uninvited, as if they tried real hard to make a good movie.
Not until the third act do you see the evil kitty crawl all the way out of fluffy's mouth, and, somehow more satisfying to watch, crawl back in. Until that point, I thought it was just a head and front paws that shot out of the fluffy cat's mouth, not unlike the second set of jaws on a moray eel.
The Naked Gun streams on Hulu Plus, but Uninvited is on Shudder. Both movies gave me some good hearty laughs. Uninvited does have some effective pop scares and it's rated PG-13 so you can make your kids watch it and no one will call CPS or anything.
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