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The In Crowd

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  • Title: The In Crowd (2000)
  • IMDb: link

Throwback Tuesday takes us back to the year 2000. The 90s and early 2000s saw a glut of erotic thrillers including Wild Things, Poison Ivy, and Embrace of the Vampire. Susan Ward starred in a handful of these: Poison Ivy: The New Seduction, Wild Things 2, and The In Crowd (which did get a theatrical release after a bit of trimming got its R-rating slashed down to PG-13). Although none of these would be classified as good movies, it’s the last of these for which I remember the actress far more than her later roles Sunset Beach or Make It or Break It. And she’s really the only reason to check back in with the film 25 years later.

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Escape to Witch Mountain

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  • Title: Escape to Witch Mountain
  • IMDb: link

Throwback Tuesday takes us back 50 years to the Disney adaptation of Alexander H. Key’s novel. The film, which whitewashes the protagonists and tones down the violence for a younger audience, is an odd tale of two orphans (Kim Richards and Ike Eisenmann) with paranormal powers who are adopted by rich industrialist Aristotle Bolt (Ray Milland) obsessed with the subject. Bolt’s interest in them causes the pair to flee to a spot known for bizarre phenomena called Witch Mountain. Eventually revealed to be extraterrestrial witches, the two kids are reunited with their people at the end of the film flying back into space.

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The Fantastic Four

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  • Title: The Fantastic Four (1994)
  • IMDb: link

After holding onto the movie rights for nearly a decade, and with the clock ticking down, German producer Bernd Eichinger reached to Roger Corman to produce a super-hero film on the cheap for only $1,000,000. With only a month of shooting, but several months of post-production, the film seemed to be ready for Labor Day 1993, until it wasn’t. Parties disagree whether the film was ever meant to see the light of day, or simply as leverage to keep the rights in Eichinger’s hands, but either way the film was pulled and never release theatrically. And so the stories began about The Fantastic Four movie that never was. And yet, speaking before Fantastic Four: The First Steps hits theaters, one could make a case that it’s better, or at least certainly not worse, than any of the FF films that did get released over the next 30 years.

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Small Soldiers

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  • Title: Small Soldiers
  • IMDb: link

Originally intended to be  slightly edgier teenage fair until the studio decided to make it more fan friendly during production in order to cash-in on promotional tie-ins, 1998’s Small Soldiers became a mix of those two concepts leading to a lukewarm reaction by both critics and moviegoers. You can certainly see director Joe Dante struggling to serve both masters, especially given how much of the film was shot prior to the imposed change in direction.

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Commando

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  • Title: Commando
  • IMDb: link

Throwback Tuesday takes us back 40 years to perhaps the most Schwarzenegger movie Arnold Schwarzenegger ever made. More than 20 years before Taken, Schwarzenegger stars as retired Special Forces Colonel John Matrix. After a precredit sequence showing several other former soldiers killed, and a goofy credit montage showing Matrix living it up in the woods as a stay-at-home dad, Matrix’s daughter Jenny (Alyssa Milano) is kidnapped by an old enemy (Dan Hedaya) and an old friend (Vernon Wells) who plan to blackmail Matrix into committing an assassination. Matrix, however, has other ideas and begins killing his way back to his daughter.

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