My notes refer to our main character, Rick, as “the early-70s version of the man-child.” He has impulse-control problems. He’s well-known in his small Saskatchewan town, and doesn’t want to move to a bigger town because nobody would know him there. He envisions himself as the Marshall of his little town, even dressing the part. Rick doesn’t get along great with local law enforcement. He punches people, he sleeps with a lot of women, and he is the star player on his municipal hockey team.

Best thing I can say about this 1973 movie is that the on-ice camerawork is solid.

Rick’s buddy is married. His buddy’s wife wants the buddy to move to another town to get better vocational training so they can have a better life, but the buddy is resistant because that other town doesn’t have a hockey team.

Did I mention that Rick sleeps around? Loretta is his steady girlfriend, but he sleeps with his boss’s daughter on the regular. He also sleeps with a woman a few towns over who called the cops on him when he twisted her arm.

The buddy reminds Rick that in a courtroom, that’s called assault. But lest you think this movie is progressive for its time, he then offers this advice: “One way to handle a woman … first you gotta strip her down … you take her and you lay her across your knees and you give her a real hard whack … you see, what that does, it gets her blood rushing to her ass, and it gets her hotter than hell. And you just screw the beejeezees out of her and she’s 100% again.”

Loretta asks why Rick doesn’t propose to her. He says that if they get married, one day some woman would be wavin’ her tits in his face, and he would sleep with her. And he couldn’t do that to Loretta, he loves her too much. That’s not a word-for-word quote, but it’s pretty darn close. They have this conversation in the showers after some skating and puck work.

My favorite moment in the movie is toward the end, where there is a tense standoff between Rick and some local policemen. Loretta is trying to talk Rick into acting sensibly. A man on a tractor slowly drives across the street in the middle of the standoff. “Rick, Loretta,” he says, nodding to them. They nod back. After he passes, the movie resumes.

The plot of the movie is the consequences of Rick’s actions slowly catching up to him, and his (poor) reaction to that. The movie is called Paperback Hero, and I believe it’s named for a piece of the only notable song on the soundtrack, Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind.” I’m going to quote the relevant stanza, which will also tell you how the movie ends:


If I could read your mind, love
What a tale your thoughts could tell
Just like a paperback novel
The kind the drugstore sells
When you reach the part where the heartaches come
The hero would be me
But heroes often fail
And you won’t read that book again
Because the ending’s just too hard to take

The CMP 7 Remote-only show will be on Saturday, July 18, at 7 PM EDT (and again at 9 PM EDT) on Zoom.

It will feature six categories that we didn’t have room to cram into the larger April 18 show, plus one from that show chosen via Facebook poll.

It begins with seven previews, two of which are for the movie I’m about to watch. Thirteen minutes later, the movie actually starts.

Our main character is named James Kirk, but takes care to explain that he isn’t that James Kirk, rather his parents were big fans.

Five minutes of James popping into a scene, running into something, telling his computer, “No — still coming in too hot. Let’s try again,” and vanishing.

Five.

Minutes.

At one point, his suit starts to smoke. The computer reminds him that it’s an outdated model of time suit. That is the only consequence.

“Getting better. Try again.” Various years flash across the scene, as James “time jumps” between indistinguishable eras. At the end, he asks the computer how many time jumps it took to calibrate. “106,” the computer says. “Only felt like about ten,” James says, but I beg to differ. I felt those 106 time jumps in my soul.

There was a virus and it made people violent and stupid. And also somehow James’ wife was killed. And there is a bit with an alternate reality version of him replacing his boss. But just one more time jump, and he can fix it!

Wildly incoherent.

The effects are inconsistent. Some of them are very nice, and others made me wince because they’re so rudimentary.

Solar radiation — from the sun — made the virus harmless. Or did it? The President weighs in. And the head of NASA. There are a lot of random authority figures popping in and out of this movie. Police officers. A psychiatrist.

Did I mention “Wildly incoherent”?

James is good at changing the past, but bad at changing it in ways that he wants. He finds himself showing up just a little bit too late to save his wife’s life. Why does that keep happening? The computer is the one who controls the time jumps, and it has its own ideas of how to fix the time stream. It also scolds James for taking time to eat a piece of discarded pizza from a box sitting on a random hotel room bed. James’ opinion: “there’s always time for pizza.”

Finally, a sentiment I agree with.

At the end of the movie, James has everything fixed. And it only took 186 time jumps! Well … there is one little thing that he could correct….

Which is why the movie is called 187 Times.

Amy didn’t watch the movie, but her comment was “You know how shooting a sitting duck is unsporting? Well in this case, the duck is falling-down-drunk, wing draped over a bottle of Wild Turkey.”

Before watching The Invincible Six, Amy had a nice rant about the superlatives in the titles of these movies. They’re all “Invincible” this and “Undefeatable” that, and really what she wants is to sit down and watch a movie about something more realistic, like The Statistically-Significant Six. That probably would have been a more entertaining movie.

This movie starts with a failed jewel robbery at the Royal Tehran Hilton. The thieves who escape end up getting together with some other assorted criminals, and traversing Iran in a Jeep. On the way, they run across a village that is under assault from bandits in the hills. They attempt to defeat these bandits, for reasons more selfish than altruistic.

Think Ocean’s Eleven crossed with The Magnificent Seven with every drop of entertainment surgically removed from the film. Even noted Iranian beauty Elke Sommer doesn’t really help.

Additionally, my copy of this movie was mastered from (probably) VHS badly. Besides the occasional VCR shimmer, which is acceptable if not ideal, roughly every 90 seconds the film freezes for a few seconds. That one I can’t blame on the filmmakers, and I’m hoping that every movie I bought from [REDACTED] isn’t like that. But this did surpass Attack of the Beast Creatures as the movie with the most timecode breaks when I tried to clip from it. 207!

It’s always a special moment when you stumble across a movie that has been written and directed by the same person, and that person has essentially no other imdb credits. Let us take a moment, and toast to Glen Gruner and Skid Kid, preferably with a name-brand RC Cola.

Union, Missouri, has a crime problem. There is a group of hoodlums terrorizing the town. Luckily, a pair of boots show up in the middle of the road one day, and local teen Scooter Spielberg finds them.

When he wears the boots, Scooter becomes The Skid Kid, able to move at high speed in a truly low-tech stop-motion fashion. He sits with his legs extended and “glides” “smoothly” across the ground. It feels like at least half the movie is The Skid Kid scooting across the ground in stop motion.

The Skid Kid fights the hoodlums. He gets into an argument with his girlfriend. He befriends the son of a local police officer. He dodges the FBI agents who want to capture him and steal his boots (and are weirdly obsessed with the idea that he might be related to the director Steven Spielberg). He watches a local BMX meet (which starts off with toddlers on Big Wheels). He fights a random “Oriental” that one of the hoodlums knows. He saves a dummy drunk person from being “hit” by a “nearby” train. He wears a safety helmet. He refuels his boots with a can of RC Cola (the cheap generic stuff causes them to misfire).

The leader of the hoodlums goes out and kills a random policeman. Oh no, it’s the father of the kid that The Skid Kid befriended! There is a long funeral procession followed by a short funeral. The Skid Kid beats up the leader of the hoodlums, and turns him in to the police for the reward money.

Scooter uses the reward money to buy a Camaro, and gives up being The Skid Kid so that he and his girlfriend can go off to Los Angeles and “lay low.” Besides, the boots need to be retreaded.

All this in 70 minutes.