BODY AND SOUL (US - 1981) Directed by George Bowers. Written by Leon Isaac Kennedy. Cast: Leon Isaac Kennedy, Jayne Kennedy, Muhammad Ali, Peter Lawford, Michael V. Gazzo, Perry Lang, Kim Hamilton, Gilbert Lewis, Nikki Swasey, Danny Wells, Johnny Brown, Azizi Johari, Rosanne Katon, Chris Wallace, Al Denavo, Robbie Epps, J. B. Williamson, Mel Welles, DeForrest Covan, Eddie Mustafos, Ola Ray. (R, 105 mins) "I just wish you were double-jointed so you could turn around and kiss your own ass!" A minor hit for Cannon in the fall of 1981 before being generally forgotten in the ensuing decades, BODY AND SOUL was a remake of the 1947 John Garfield boxing classic retooled for Leon Isaac Kennedy and Jayne Kennedy during the brief moment in time when they were a celebrity power couple. Leon was a DJ in Cleveland and Detroit who broke into movies in the early '70s with small roles in HAMMER and MEAN JOHNNY BARROWS before scoring a huge sleeper hit with Jamaa Fanaka's 1979 prison boxing saga PENITENTIARY. Jayne was a model, actress, and sportscaster who became the first African-American woman to co-host a Sunday NFL show when she replaced Phyllis George and joined Brent Musberger on CBS' NFL TODAY in 1978. Leon and Jayne were married in 1971 and appeared together in Cirio H. Santiago's 1978 Filipino actioner DEATH FORCE (aka FIGHTING MAD), but by 1981, between Leon's success with PENITENTIARY and Jayne's high-profile presence in sports broadcasting and on magazine covers, they had enough clout to get the green light on a dream project like BODY AND SOUL--written by Leon himself--even if it was with Cannon, still finding its niche in the early days of the Golan-Globus era.
Leon stars as Leon Johnson, a gifted boxer who doesn't really take the sport very seriously until his wheelchair-bound kid sister Kelly (Nikki Swasey, who had a recurring role on DIFF'RENT STROKES as Arnold's snobby nemesis, Lisa Hayes) needs expensive treatments to battle sickle cell disease. He drops out of med school to reinvent himself as Leon "The Lover" Johnson, a flashy showoff who even seeks out Muhammad Ali--as himself--as a trainer. Ali turns him down ("Look at you, you look like a mosquito!" the Champ quips), and instead gives him one of his own entourage, grizzled old Frankie (GODFATHER PART II Oscar-nominee Michael V. Gazzo, credited as "Mike Gazzo" in one of those short-lived, mid-career name changes that never stick unless you're Laurence Fishburne--just ask Charles Sheen, Chris Walken, Don Pleasence, Brad Dillman, or Jim Brolin), to function as the Mickey to his Rocky, along with Leon's usual trainer, his goofball buddy Charles (a really terrible performance by Perry Lang). All the while, Leon falls hard for sports reporter Julie Winters (Jayne), who's assigned to cover his quick ascent in the ring and ends up engaged to him over the course of a single montage set to "With You I'm Born Again" by Billy Preston and Syreeta.
Leon and director George Bowers (THE HEARSE, MY TUTOR) lean in on the montage as a way to cut through huge chunks of story, which soon relies on an extensive checklist of every rise-fall-redemption cliche in the playbook: Leon gets seduced by the glitz and glamour, starts sleeping around, Julie catches him in a foursome (!), he's offered a too-good-to-be-true-deal by sleazy, corrupt, mob-connected promoter "Big Man" (Peter Lawford, in one of his last films), and Charles falls under the spell of drugs after one of Big Man's flunkies (Gilbert Lewis) gives him some coke and immediately gets him hooked ("Hey, man...you ever heard of freebasing?" he asks Charles in the most Afterschool Special tone imaginable). Big Man then offers Leon $200,000 to bet against himself and throw a fight, forcing him to get his priorities together, win back Julie, get Charles off drugs after they have a huge falling-out ("Give your money to your dope man for your freebase and your angel dust!"), and finally get some workout time in with Ali, who takes part in a sparring sequence with the writer/star but you can tell The Champ--who would lose his final fight and retire from the ring a month after BODY AND SOUL hit theaters--is going a little easy on him.
Just out on Blu-ray from Scorpion (because physical media is dead), BODY AND SOUL has enough overwrought elements that you almost wish it would go all-in on its heavy-handed histrionics, whether it's Charles' drug addiction ("We created monsters, Leon!") or the soap opera melodrama of Leon and Julie's up-and-down relationship. She has to put up with his ego, his female fan base who call themselves "Leon's Lovelies" and throw their panties in the ring during his fights, and then she bets it all when she mortgages her house and puts it all on him to win, forcing him to put integrity first ("I don't play with hearts the way you do!" she yells, reminding him "I bet every cent I have on my man to win!"), even though he's ostensibly only in it for his sister ("You bought into it! You became your biggest fan!"). The climactic bout, pitting Leon against Big Man's next big thing--raging psycho Ricardo "Madman" Santiago (Al Denavo), who's introduced violently hurling a baby to the ground when its diaper leaks on his lap--is one of the most ludicrously absurd boxing matches ever depicted onscreen. Santiago does about 25 things worthy of disqualification--including below-the-belt hits, a very late blow to the head after the bell, and an early version of Mike Tyson's infamous Evander Holyfield ear chomp--and yet the ref never stops the fight.
Sure, BODY AND SOUL is dumb, predictable, and formulaic as hell, but there's a scrappy energy to it amidst all the stupidity. It never goes all the way into full-on bad movie territory but takes itself just seriously enough to be sufficiently amusing in an unintentional way. Leon Isaac Kennedy--who, despite his striking resemblance to Sugar Ray Leonard and starring in several boxing movies, was not an actual boxer--would reteam with Jamaa Fanaka for 1982's PENITENTIARY II and 1987's insane PENITENTIARY III (the latter tragically MIA on DVD and Blu-ray), and would write and star in 1986's KNIGHTS OF THE CITY (featuring Smokey Robinson, an old friend from his Motown radio days and best man at his and Jayne's wedding), while staying busy in B movies like 1983's LONE WOLF MCQUADE, 1985's TOO SCARED TO SCREAM, and 1986's HOLLYWOOD VICE SQUAD. Both Leon and Jayne would retire from acting by the early '90s, with Leon becoming a minister and Jayne devoting much of her time to the charity organization Children's Miracle Network and raising awareness for endometriosis after being diagnosed with the condition in the late '80s. BODY AND SOUL didn't lead to further pairings for the celebrity couple, however: they divorced in 1982, not long after the film's release.
TOO SCARED TO SCREAM (US - 1985) Directed by Tony Lo Bianco. Written by Neal Barbera and Glenn Leopold. Cast: Mike Connors, Anne Archer, Ian McShane, Leon Isaac Kennedy, Murray Hamilton, Ruth Ford, John Heard, Carrie Nye, Maureen O'Sullivan, Chet Doherty, Ken Norris, Sully Boyar, Karen Rushmore, Val Avery, Rony Clanton, Beeson Carroll, Victoria Bass, Adrienne Howard, Harry Madsen. (R, 99 mins)
The sole feature directing effort to date from veteran character actor Tony Lo Bianco (THE FRENCH CONNECTION), TOO SCARED TO SCREAM is an obscure oddity in the '80s slasher craze in that it skews much older than expected. Sure, there's the requisite splatter and some gratuitous nudity, but in a genre focused on dead teenagers, this has an overqualified cast on the mature side, headed by Mike Connors--TV's MANNIX--who also produced with his buddy, co-star Ken Norris, and A. Kitman Ho, the latter going on to be Oliver Stone's producing partner during the director's glory days from 1986's PLATOON through 1993's HEAVEN & EARTH. At times, TOO SCARED TO SCREAM (shot in NYC in 1982 as THE DOORMAN, but shelved until the short-lived B outfit The Movie Store got it into a few theaters in early 1985) feels less like a slasher film and more like a pilot for a Connors cop show that's been spruced up with enough violence, F-bombs, and T&A to qualify for an R rating. When a high-class call girl (Victoria Bass) is stabbed to death in her Manhattan high-rise apartment, Lt. DiNardo (Connors) and his partner Frank (PENITENTIARY's Leon Isaac Kennedy, his middle name misspelled "Issac" in the credits) zero in on their prime suspect: weirdo night doorman Vincent Hardwick (Ian McShane). Hardwick certainly seems the guilty type--he's evasive with questions, randomly spouts Shakespeare like a pompous asshole, and lives with and dotes obsessively on his paralyzed, wheelchair-bound mother (Maureen O'Sullivan, Mia Farrow's mother and the original Jane to Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan, and who somehow chose this to end a long big-screen sabbatical), who can no longer speak but conveys with her eyes and worried looks that even she's creeped out by him.
A few more of the building's residents turn up dead, including a horny old woman (Ruth Ford, best known as the First Daughter opposite an Oscar-nominated Alexander Knox in 1944's WILSON) who keeps trying to booty call Hardwick in the wee hours when he's on duty; a lecherous fashion guru (Sully Boyar, of all people); and a model (Karen Rushmore) who takes the time to give herself a long, lingering nude oil rubdown before being offed (Lo Bianco had a few episodic TV directing credits under his belt, but he's definitely relishing the freedom he has here). Even though all of the murders happen on Hardwick's shifts, the evidence against him barely even qualifies as circumstantial, so DiNardo decides to take a break from busting the chops of ambitious female cop Kate Bridges (Anne Archer) by sending her in undercover as a new tenant (one of a few plot points that echo PIECES, along with one victim being dismembered and the remains compared to a jigsaw puzzle). Lo Bianco's direction is serviceable as he manages to create a few moderately tense moments and captures some vintage Times Square location shots (E.T., FIRST BLOOD, THE BURNING, and the porno I LIKE TO WATCH are on various theater marquees). He also leaves a blown Connors line in the finished film, when the star refers to McShane's Vincent Hardwick as "Mike Hardwick." Already a busy actress but still a few years from breaking out with her Oscar-nominated turn in 1987's FATAL ATTRACTION, Archer brings some charm to her role, even if her dancing skills land more on the side of Elaine Benes than FLASHDANCE. Connors more or less reprises his MANNIX persona, albeit with a few bizarre moments like when DiNardo finds the first victim's S&M-enthusiast john from the night before (Beeson Carroll) naked, hog-tied, and burned, slapping him on the ass and telling him "Don't catch cold," later quipping to Frank that "his butt looked like an ashtray at a Lucky Strike convention." Kennedy has next to nothing do, like many of the name actors who pop up in brief cameos, presumably as a result of Lo Bianco and Connors calling in some favors from friends who maybe stuck around just long enough to hit craft services: in addition to O'Sullivan and Ford, there's Carrie Nye just killing it in her one scene as a sardonic fashion designer; Murray Hamilton is a drunk, disgraced ex-cop and the older sugar daddy ex-husband of the first victim; Val Avery plays a coroner with a morbid sense of humor; and John Heard drops by as a forensic lab tech, perhaps because it was on his way to the set of C.H.U.D. They even managed to get legendary French singer Charles Aznavour to contribute the incongruous opening credits song "I'll Be There,"which also gets a more contemporary take at the end by Phyllis Hyman.
On VHS from Vestron back in the day, and just out on Blu-ray from Scorpion (because physical media is dead), TOO SCARED TO SCREAM is of little interest to anyone other than '80s slasher completists and Ian McShane superfans. Written by Neal Barbera and Glenn Leopold, a pair of '70s and '80s Saturday morning cartoon vets who also scripted Joseph Zito's much nastier 1981 cult classic THE PROWLER (Barbera's father was Hanna-Barbera's Joseph Barbera), the movie isn't very good, but the climactic plot twist does take things into an admittedly unexpected direction for the time, and is probably one of several things throughout that wouldn't fly in today's cancellation culture. As far as McShane is concerned, the future DEADWOOD star goes all in here, obviously patterning his performance on Anthony Perkins in PSYCHO. He gets to do some crazy and deranged shit, like putting on makeup, smiling at himself in the mirror, picking fights in an Irish bar, acting all twitchy, having meltdowns, and, in a scene that's worth the price of admission, force-feeding heaping forkfuls of cake to a game O'Sullivan. The Blu-ray has a couple of decent bonus features, with 82-year-old Lo Bianco and 70-year-old Kennedy on hand for newly-shot interviews, mainly reminiscing about cast members but never addressing why it took three years for the movie to be released or why no one behind the scenes knew how to spell "Isaac."
