This guy. A familiar face from 100 different genre films. Dick Miller. You mightn't know his name but you'll recognise him and you'll smile when you do. Rarely in a film for longer than a scene or two before violently dying but he always makes his mark. Started in Hollywood in 1955 and slowly carved out a nice little niche for himself. 59 years later in 2014 he even had a documentary made about him. That Guy Dick Miller. It's a lovely tribute to a well loved actor.
He's been blown away by a Teutonic cyborg. Smoked weed with Carol Hathaway in a Chicago emergency room. Hounded by evil little beasts on not 1 but 2 occasions. He's been in forgotten Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese classics and the worst type of 1950's B-Movies. Been a muse to directors like Roger Corman Robert Zemeckis, Fred Olen Ray and Joe Dante. Been chomped by piranhas and sentient venus fly traps. Taught a baby faced Tom Cruise to play football and been zapped by evil shopping centre robots. He's delivered militarized toy robots to kids and been part of the holodeck in Star Trek. He's been hunted by Crockett and Tubbs and shredded by Demon Knights. Westerns, horrors, sci-fi, mob movies, exploitation, sexploitation he's done it all. The supporting king of genre movie scene. Check out his 59 year long career here.
Greatest hits
The Terminator. The gunshop dude. "You can't do that!" Gets an iconic death in an iconic scene in an iconic movie.
Gremlins 1 & 2. Murray Futterman, the war veteran who thinks the gremlins are out to get him. The part most people will recognise him from. Mostly because he actually survived
Small Soldiers. His 12th collaboration with director Joe Dante sees him play Joe the delivery guy. A man who unwittingly reigns chaos on a small town. A criminally underrated film.
Previous heroes
Veronica Cartwright
Edie McClurg
Barry Shabaka Henley
Raymond Cruz
Reg E.Cathey
Elizabeth McGovern
John Amos
Bruce Greenwood
Mary McDonnell
Gerald McSorley
John Rothman
Margo Martindale
Kurtwood Smith
Paula Malcolmson
Luis Guzman
David Morse
Linda Hunt
Keith David
Zeljko Ivanek
Fiona Shaw
Xander Berkeley
Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa
C.C.H Pounder
William Forsythe
Beth Grant
Sven-Ole Thorsen
Regina King
Ric Young
Mark Rolston
Illeana Douglas
Jeanette Goldstein
Al Leong
Allan Graf
Bill Nunn
Thomas Rosales Jr
No comments:
Post a Comment