Mickey Baker Movies

Tommy Fawkes (Oliver Platt) is a struggling stand-up comedian who has tried for years to get out from under the shadow of his father, George Fawkes (Jerry Lewis), himself a famous humorist. Tommy finally scores a showcase spot at a major resort in Las Vegas, but when opening night rolls around, Tommy's act is an unqualified disaster, with the failure made even more painful by his father's presence in the audience. In search of a fresh start, Tommy heads to Blackpool, England, where he was born and raised, to look for a new act. Hoping to buy material from local performers, Tommy auditions a large number of acts, most of whom are utterly hopeless, until he sees a hilarious vaudeville team, the Parker Brothers. Their act seems more than a bit familiar, however, and Tommy soon realizes that they're doing his father's old material. But they have every right to be doing George's schtick -- it seems George stole his act from the Parkers ages ago. What's more, the younger and more eccentric of the Parker Boys, Jack (Lee Evans), is actually Tommy's half brother, the product of a fling with a Blackpool showgirl years ago. Veering between comedy and drama, Funny Bones has more than its share of effective moments on either side of the fence, and features fine supporting performances from Oliver Reed, Leslie Caron and Harold Nicholas. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

The inimitable Vincent Price puts an interesting spin on this otherwise pedestrian witch-hunt exercise -- a rehashing of Witchfinder General (aka The Conqueror Worm) and several of Roger Corman's numerous Poe variations from the previous decade. Here Price plays Edward Whitman, a corrupt, sadistic magistrate in 16th-century Ireland who puts a quick and deadly stop to the activities of a local Druidic coven... but not before the sect's leader Oona (Elisabeth Bergner) puts a curse on him and the Whitman family line, calling up a vengeful spirit known as a "sidhee" which takes flesh in the form of an otherwise mild-mannered stable boy (Patrick Mower). As swift and violent retribution works its way through the Whitman family, so does this film snowball toward its bizarre and muddled conclusion -- made all the more confounding by rather choppy editing. Just like Conqueror Worm and half a dozen others, this was fallaciously marketed by distributor American International Pictures as yet another adaptation of the works of Edgar Allan Poe -- as if AIP hadn't kicked Poe's corpse around enough in the '60s. ~ Cavett Binion, Rovi