Not a review, but me saying my piece about a few things.
Early last month I reviewed this film-that can be read here. It wasn't until someone casually mentioned it last night on a messageboard that I discovered there is controversy surrounding VFW. Less than 48 hours after it was viewed by myself, The Daily Beast published a piece concerning the right-wing indy studio Cinestate and one of its producers, Adam Dongahey. He is accused of sexually assaulting a 16 year old girl; even more tragic, he was a Harvey Weinstein on a lower level... harassing multiple women and otherwise being abusive-people knew of his behavior but no one stopped him for years. Until yesterday evening I never read the article in full-shame on me. Dongahey was one of the producers on VFW and multiple people charged him with forcing everyone to work 18 hour days with no overtime pay.
If that wasn't bad enough, one of the stars of VFW-Fred Williamson-was accused by multiple women of unacceptable behavior. He tried to play grab-ass with an assistant costume designer and made vulgar comments towards several women on the crew. The Hammer should realize that how he acted on set decades ago is not OK any longer. Now I feel like a dope for having seen Three the Hard Way less than a week later and never bringing up the accusations made against Williamson; I had no idea at the time. Now, this knowledge dissuading someone from seeing the movie in the future or retroactively downgrading their opinion of it... it is up to you.
Me, it is a case by case basis. Unfortunately, I will assume this sort of behavior still happens on film sets far too often... it's usually just kept secret. Now I won't have as many positive memories of VFW-and in hindsight it is the sort of motion picture to be released by a right-wing studio-but it still is silly goofy fun if you are able to divorce yourself from the troubled production. The Hammer... like I am with some directors/actors, there will be hesitation to check out more of their work. There's a reason I haven't seen much of Woody Allen, to list one example. Typically it will be referenced in the review if someone or something problematic is present.
Hopefully one day such abhorrent behavior revolving around the movie industry will be far less common. Personally, the past few days haven't been great for personal reasons I won't get into now... it wasn't news that needed to be heard at this time. Instead of viewing something last night, getting this off my chest now was the direction to go today. Unless more bad news is received today, tomorrow things should be back to normal-in fact, an uplifting film will be discussed.
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