But as a filmmaker who gets flown to New Zealand (for scuba diving shoots) and other exotic stretches of the world (Egypt, The Arctic), he has few complaints. King misses feature films sometimes–and still has a few left in him, though little time to develop them. As a result, they are commendably above-average B-pictures the latter film is notable for a rare kindhearted role from Dennis Hopper. His last few feature films in the late 1990s ( “Catherine’s Grove,” “Road Ends”) went virtually straight-to-cable, but their shoestring budgets allowed King creative control. While some of his films have been less well-received than others, none have marred King’s diligent reputation. “Off the Wall’s” comic high points are derived from its star Harvey Waldman’s juicy real-life anecdotes.īut he’s also been a devoted, practical family man, and he was never too proud to take a job solely to put food on the table (the forgettable 1987 Pelé vehicle “Hotshot,” the second “Kickboxer” sequel starring the irascible Sasha Mitchell). The main inspiration for “Hard Choices,” for instance, was photojournalist Stephen Shames’ account of minors jailed in an adult Tennessee prison. King always had a fondness for documentaries, and of his fiction films, he still favors the ones that hew most closely to reality. What one can certainly detect is an impressive straightforwardness, a knack for telling a story cleanly, a calmness that projects his confidence in the audience to interpret his films in their own way. King cites Akira Kurosawa, Frederick Wiseman, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard as chief influences, but none of his films could be called homages to these artists. He lends the same steady hand to fast-paced erotic thrillers (“A Passion to Kill,” “Quick”) as he does to more thoughtful, ambitious works like “Forced March,” in which a B-movie actor tackles his first serious role as a real-life Hungarian Jewish poet and Holocaust victim. Since his 1977 debut, the now impossibly hard-to-find pseudo-documentary “Off the Wall,” his movies have ranged from earnest dramas about juvenile delinquents (“Hard Choices”) to deliberately junky teen exploitation outings ( “Prayer of the Rollerboys,” starring the late Corey Haim as a heroic pizza boy who saves post-apocalyptic Los Angeles from droves of Neo-Nazi rollerbladers). Now in his early 60s, King has come full circle, again devoting most of his career to non-fiction works, albeit slicker, higher-budget ones such as “Shark Week” specials for Discovery Channel and biographical films for The History Channel.īut in between 19, King directed 12 feature films (three of which he co-wrote), whose subject matters are all over the map. A history major at Stanford who later studied film at MIT with Richard Leacock (the cinéma vérité director most notable for his work on “Monterey Pop”), he spent a chunk of the early 1970s shooting scores of documentary shorts, about drifters, about Chinese poetry, about his friends. King’s origins as a filmmaker are as far removed from the Hollywood action genre as you can imagine. It’s hard to see a definitive stylistic pattern in the varied oeuvre of director/writer Rick King, the man who–you may not realize–came up with the story idea for “Point Break,” the greatest movie ever made about surfing bank robbers and the FBI agents who love them.
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