Sunday, December 30, 2007

The Ghastly Ones Aren't Kidding




Andy Milligan's 1968 costume-gore schlockathonfest The Ghastly Ones is so bad it's...bad.

Just plain bad.

The sets are dimly lit. The sound is muddy. The gore is unconvincing. The dialogue is stilted. The actors are wooden.

And the gazongas are completely uninspired - not what you want for an exploitation movie whose premise is that the three couples must spend the night in "sexual harmony" in the old house on the lonely island before they get the money.

Something Weird usually unearths some good CACA but this ain't it. It took a hardened viewer four separate attempts to get through this turkey.

No coils. Avoid.

Saturday, December 29, 2007

NFL '07 - Staggering to the Finish

Last week was dreadful.

That's all I have to say at this moment.

Tonight the Patriots will cover 14 points as they make mincemeat of the Giants. Never mind Brady and Moss - it's the New England secondary that will shut down the New York passing game.

Only Eli Manning won't figure that out until they've scored twice on interceptions.


Sunday morning...

I was dead wrong about the score and mostly wrong about Manning and the New England secondary - until Hobbs picked off the lad in the fourth quarter, which led to the Death Blow.

That was the best pro game I've seen in a while. And how about that unprecedented act of generosity on the part of the NFL, allowing those of us without the NFL Network to see the game?

(Call your cable company...call your cable company... )

Right. Here are the scenarios for games that mean something:

Car -3 at TB: Bucs began resting players last week vs. San Francisco.

NO -2 at Chi: Saints blew it last week but have a teensy-weensy chance of sliding into the playoffs, so they must win.

SF +10 at Cle: Browns are in with a Tennessee loss. Win or lose here doesn't matter, and Niners have been stubborn lately.

Was -9 vs. Dal: Figure Cowboys resting people and win-and-in for Redskins and this is an easy pick.

Min +3 at Den: Vikes have very slim hope for playoffs.

SD - 8.5 at Oak: With win Chargers avoid Patriots until final round of playoffs, assuming they get that far.

Pit - 3.5 at Bal: Steelers could get that #3 spot if the Chargers lose.

Ind +6 vs. Ten: Win-and-in for Titans, Indy's all set...but I still have a problem passing up the Colts as home underdogs.

The rest:

GB +4 vs. Det: Nothing on the line, but again, hard to pass up a good team at home plus points.

KC +6.5 at NYJ: Loser gets a better draft pick, and needs it.

Phi -8 vs. Buf

Mia + 2.5 vs. Cin

Jax - 6.5 at Hou: Jags are in at #5, but I'm thinking they'll play this like a tuneup, not a gimme...

Atl -1 vs. Sea: ...as opposed to this one, where the Seahawks are going to relax.

AZ -6 vs. StL: From the "somebody has to win this" file; Cards would finish with .500 record.

Sunday, December 23, 2007

NFL '07 - Week 16

(Sunday morning update)

Hmm - already down 0-2 for the week. Talk about stumbling to the finish line...

Which is exactly what's going to happen to the Giants today in Buffalo. They are going to gag, and get shoved around by New England next week, and have to back into the playoffs. Buf + 2.5 vs. NYG.

NYJ + 8.5 at Ten: Jets hang in these games, you have to give them that.

Cle -2.5 at Cin

GB -8.5 at Chi

Ind -7 vs. Hou

Det -4.5 vs. KC

Mia +22 at NE

Oak +13 at Jax

NO -3 vs. Phi

Min - 6.5 vs. Was

AZ -10 vs. Atl

Bal +11 at Sea

TB - 5.5 at SF

SD - 8.5 vs. Den

Saturday, December 22, 2007

An Abrupt Shift

The other day I posted a diatribe in which I made some extremely rude remarks about people I know well. The remarks were based on my complete misinterpretation of a situation. Had I simply walked down the hall and asked a couple of questions the entire thing could have been cleared up in five minutes.

So I offer this apology, in this space.

Thursday, December 20, 2007

NFL '07 - Week 16

By golly. It seems as if it was only yesterday when the pro football season started. The Jets were still in the league, and everything was possible.

Now Michael Vick's in the can, Everybody Hates Belichek and the Steelers can't buy a win.

Which leads me to tonight's contest, thankfully restricted to the 187 homes that receive the NFL Network. Nothing much to choose from here, as St. Louis is a 7.5 point home 'dog against Pittsburgh. The Steelers' offensive production has been so uneven that I am hesitant to lay this amount - so I won't. Rams plus seven and a half.

Saturday Dallas is another road favorite, giving 10.5 at Carolina. The Panthers are 2-5 against the spread (according to the excellent gambling section of USA Today); however, the Panthers will still be clawing for a barely possible playoff spot.

But Dallas has even greater incentives - to ensure home field for the playoffs, and to ease Jessica Simpson's mind about poor Tony. So I'll take Dallas and lay the points.

8-8 last week; season 97-104-6

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Rooting for Dirty Laundry

The Mitchell report, released last week, told us pretty much what we'd suspected all along - that a lot of players used steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs in the last 15 years or so, the owners knew about it, and nobody did much of anything until Barry Bonds became a made-to-order fall guy.

But for me it's the last straw.

Rooting for the laundry, as Jerry Seinfeld said? Sure, that's what I've been doing, with less and less real interest each year.

After all, when a fan needs a working knowledge of contract law to follow the migrations of talent, it's fair to state that the Baseball Experience has lost some of its innocence. Am I rooting for laundry or an agent?

I certainly don't feel much kinship with fellow fans. It's more like the camaraderie inspired by being part of the same massive class-action lawsuit.

I am part of a tribe that used to root for the New York Mets, and now pulls for a corporation to make good personnel moves and hefty profits. "Hey, didja see the quarterly report?!" has replaced the excitement when a homegrown prospect makes the jump from AA to the bigs.

Following major league baseball is a lifelong habit, and it's dying hard. I won't even try to break it off cleanly; I'll listen on the radio during the summer and check the box scores.

But the Mitchell report makes it clear to me that the people who get rich off this game have nothing but contempt for the suckers who make it all possible.

Why this has taken so long is a tribute to my own nostalgic delusions and willingness to absorb endless indignities on the way to a World Series.

But no more. I will not expend one smidgen of emotion on my favorite gang of sullen multi-millionaires.

Unless, of course, the Mets get hot in September.

Sunday, December 16, 2007

The Cinema - Night of Bloody Horror, or The Film Major Dad Hopes You'll Never Rent





Night of Bloody Horror (1969) is a relentlessly rotten flick that proves once again that the most dangerous thing a young woman with a beehive hairdo can say to a supposed homicidal maniac is "Boy, you're touchy."

Gerald McRaney, an actual real actor who makes a living, and who starred in the relentlessly rotten TV series "Major Dad," plays Wesley, a skinny dork with a bad temper, a history of mental instability and no pugilistic skills.

Wes lives with his weird mother and farts around in the back yard when he isn't having psychedelic migraines and getting his caboose kicked in saloons.

When his lady friends keep turning up in bloody chunks suspicion naturally falls on Wes. It's not fair, but since Vietnam, what is?

The "action" takes the viewer from a dimly-lit bar to a dimly-lit police station, to dimly-lit house and dimly-lit apartment, with a detour to a dimly-lit beach.

The whole thing is, as the boys at Cahiers du Cinema used to say during the Golden Age of film criticism, "excitingly underexposed."

The cops don't arrest Wes, for no apparent reason. They also don't have southern accents, despite being in New Orleans. Nor do they have the New Orleans accent A.J. Liebling described in The Earl of Louisiana:

"There is a New Orleans city accent . . . associated with downtown New Orleans, particularly with the German and Irish Third Ward, that is hard to distinguish from the accent of Hoboken, Jersey City, and Astoria, Long Island, where the Al Smith inflection, extinct in Manhattan, has taken refuge. The reason, as you might expect, is that the same stocks that brought the accent to Manhattan imposed it on New Orleans."

No, these cops just sound like ordinary shlubs, and while this lack of verisimilitude would kill lesser films, "Night of Bloody Horror" survives, in part because of some excellent axe work, in part due to the psychedelic freakout scenes, and mostly because of the splendid bar scene featuring a band called "The Bored."

You have to rent this flick just to hear The Bored and witness the authentic bad Sixties dancing.

Two and a half breasts. One hand chopping. One axe in female chest. One death by long needle in confessional. Genuinely bad dancing. The excruciating music of The Bored. "Major Dad" before he gained 200 pounds and took acting lessons. Stuffed corpses. Gratuitous psychiatry. Gratuitous sideburns. Gratuitous Fu Manchu moustache on the drummer for the Bored. Fat psychiatrist in gaudy dressing gown. New Orleans cops with flat-as-a-crepe accents. Lame psychedelic special effects. Cinematographer with optic nerve damage. Short at 89 minutes.

Two and a half coils.


The Cinema - The Doll Squad Has Jiggle, Kung-Fu, but No Gazongas

As this blog ripens I will be adding brief reviews of largely-overlooked films - the sort of thing that used to be available only to people wearing raincoats, if you get my drift, but may now be obtained on DVD for viewing at home.

Which takes a lot of the fun out of the exploitation film experience, incidentally. These movies are really best viewed in a dingy theater with sticky floors, or at a drive-in. Alas, the post-modern world has no room for such old-fashioned venues.

The Doll Squad (1974) is a tame little flick from Ted V. Mikels, director of the immortal Astro-Zombies (1970). This has some of the same Magic-Marker-on-celluloid special effects, and a whole lot of jiggling (but, alas, bikini-clad) hooters, and one legitimate beast in the person of William Bagdad as "Joseph," who looks like a Cincinnati hot dog vendor on a Sterno binge.

dollsquad.jpg

More...
A secret agent goes nuts, rents an island off Venezuela, and hatches a diabolical plot to release bubonic plague, carried by extra-smart rats, unless the world meets his demands. But since he only communicates his demands to one U.S. Senator and one spy agency type, via a static-y transmission to the TV set in the senator's office and by carrier pigeon, the world does not meet his demands.

Never mind. The computer says Sabrina Kincaid and the Doll Squad are the only ones who can stop the fiend.

There are a few lively moments as Sabrina flounces from a naugahyde booth in a steakhouse to a naugahyde booth in a strip joint, putting the squad together and foiling would-be killers, but after that we have endless running around in jumpsuits and destroying the World's Stupidest Army. And without redeeming nekkidness this is tedious.

Summary: Many breasts, two of them almost naked (damn pasties); many shapely behinds, all clad; one greasy treacherous junkie; one greasy treacherous weirdo; one extraordinarily inept assassin, who first gets the cigarette lighter/flame thrower in face treatment (while seated in a naugahyde booth) and later gets the knife in eye (in the parking lot); really bad kung fu; lame villain in tight pants. One and half coils, mostly for the villain's Tom Jones impersonation and regrettable habit of putting his Chelsea boots on the coffee table, and for William Bagdad's fine slinking around the amusement park.

The film was supposedly the inspiration for "Charlie's Angels." And why not?

Better bets from this director : Astro Zombies and The Corpse Grinders.




NFL '07 - Week 15

Last week's lame 6-10 showing dropped the season to 89-96; add two more to the loss column as both early picks this week floundered.

NO -4 vs. AZ

TB -12.5 vs. Atl

Mia + 3.5 vs. Bal: The Dolphins have to win sometime. Don't they?

Buf + 5.5 at Cle: If the Browns are going to make any noise in the post-season it needs to start here and now. But I think the combination of rotten weather, Buffalo's running game and the sputtering Browns offense (not to mention the indifferent defense) make this one an Upset Special.

GB - 7.5 at StL: I don't like this line at all; terrible Rams still have a way of tightening the score late in games. Still, the disparity between the clubs is just too great.

Pit - 3.5 vs. Jax: Steelers rebound after humiliation last week.

NE -21 vs. NYJ: Hoo-boy, this should be ugly. Snow, video cams, general hatred. Is there a good parolee to operate the snow plow?

Sea -7 at Car

Ten - 3.5 at KC

Oak + 10.5 vs. Ind

SD -10 vs. Det

Dal -10 vs. Phi: Today's marquee matchup, but Eagles are slowly spinning out of control while Cowboys are just getting into their stride.

Was + 4.5 at NYG: Giants are the better team, but they have a remarkable ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and this spread is just fat enough to take the underdogs.

Min -10 vs. Chi: Been a while since the Vikes were favored this much over Da Bears. Thirty years, maybe? (Monday night)

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Family Schlock

bubba-ho-tep.jpg

Bruce Campbell as Elvis Presley and Ossie Davis as John F. Kennedy in Bubba-Ho-Tep. If you show this film to the family it could lead into an interesting and highly educational discussion of these American icons.

A recent email reads, "Patrick, please take me off your mailing list. Please."

And Ken in Amenia, N.Y. asks, "Hey, are there any drill-bit killer flicks appropriate for family viewing?"

Ken, do you see that van down the street? The one with all the aerials? They're going to answer your question.

But Ken got me thinking - are there enough trashy films available to give everybody a laugh and not get too deep into your typical "half-naked killer nun armed with large power tools defeats forces of Satan at exclusive haunted prep school" scenario?

Of course there are. I give you:

  • The entire Aztec Mummy series. These are all harmless fun - hell, the first three are practically the same movie - although the one with the lady wrestlers is dearest to my heart. All ages.
  • Any Hammer Films production of a Dracula script with Christopher Lee. These aren't any more violent than an episode of "Hot Teenage Witches and Their Vampire Boyfriends Stopping Evil With Their Exposed Midriffs and Rippling Abs, Respectively." And a great deal spookier, and with just enough decolletage from the various village maids and touring English gentlewomen to interest a 13 year old boy (and, by default, 90 percent of the adult male heterosexual population). I'd say 12 and up.
  • Bubba-Ho-Tep. How Elvis and JFK defeat an ancient - and nasty - Egyptian mummy in an East Texas nursing home. Some mild bathroom humor and a couple of creepy moments. 12 and up.
  • And this bargain DVD should really grace every home's collection: Roger Corman's Creature Movies vol. I , with three pieces of entertaining dreck from the early 1960s: The Creature From the Haunted Sea, The Beast from the Haunted Cave, and the best of the bunch, The Wasp Woman (which is not about Sharon, but could be about Greenwich). All ages.

Roger Corman's The Wasp Woman: "Okay, honey! You go ahead and run for PTO president! I'll make the Belgian waffles!"

NFL '07 - Week 15: The Early Games...of Zero Interest to Anybody Except Gamblers

Back in rotten form last week with a depressing 6-10.

This week the league geniuses offer the public not one but two meaningless games early in the week: Denver (minus one) at Houston tonight and Cincinnati (minus eight) at San Francisco Saturday.

The Broncos and Texans are technically still in the playoff hunt; the combined rosters of the Bengals and Niners can't even spell "playoff."

That the league insists on making these games showcase events means - to me - that deep down they know that a significant part of the viewing audience has money on the games.

And thus I would take the two favorites and lay the points.

Monday, December 10, 2007

The Cinema - If Only JFK Had Lived Peter Lawford Wouldn't Have Been Forced To MakeThis Film




Angels' Brigade (1979) is a real Pure-D piece of dreck that features several character actors at the end of their careers and at least as many breasts. All are fully-clad - character actors and breasts - which is a mixed blessing.

The movie, directed by Greydon Clark, also illustrates the good common sense of the old saying: "Never thrust anything that comes from a man with two last names."

The plot runs like this: After a schoolboy gets roughed up by the winner of the World's Most Obvious Drug Dealer award, his teacher decides to take action and rid the school of the scourge of illegal drugs.

So she forms a working group of concerned parents, teachers, community leaders and law enforcement officials and...

Nope. Sorry. What she does is recruit a disco singer from Las Vegas who in turn knows a whole bunch of other women who just happen to look good in jumpsuits. They buy a van and a motorcycle, steal a bunch of guns and ammo from Jim Backus and his merry band of right-wing nuts, and take it to the drug baron (Peter Lawford) and his evil Number One (Jack Palance).

Along the way they encounter Alan Hale, Pat Buttram and Arthur Godfrey (as himself).



Jack Palance: Take it easy, honey - that's my truss!



Massive jiggling. Kung fu. Peter Lawford committing modern art. Jack Palance eaten by dog. Black lady with a veritable ziggurat of hair. One of the worst songs ever recorded, "Shine Your Love." Gratuitous white people in Vegas audience clapping on the wrong beat to "Shine Your Love."

We're talking Non-Sequitur City.

One coil.






Sunday, December 9, 2007

NFL '07 - Week 14

The dog-ass Redskins up and won their game Thursday so we begin the week with one in the loss column.

The picks:

NYG +3 at Phi

Cle -3 at NYJ - The Titans - er, Jets - have been in the games recently, but I don't see them defending well against the run today.

Jax - 10.5 vs. Car: I've been getting creamed picking the Panthers and I finally figured out why. They're not very good.

Dal - 10.5 vs. Det

Mia +7 at Buf: Notice that the abbreviation for Miami is the same as "Missing in Action?" Anyway, the 'Fins have been staying in games too.

Oak +10.5 at GB

Pit +10.5 at NE: Two close calls against vastly inferior teams in the last two weeks make me think that a much better club stands a good chance of keeping this within the 10 and a half.

Ten even vs. SD: Marginally better numbers plus home field plus greater urgency equals Titans.

StL +7 at Cin

TB -3 at Hou

Sea -7 vs. AZ

Min - 8.5 at SF

KC + 6.5 at Den

Bal +9 vs. Ind

NO -3.5 vs. Atl (Monday night)

Thursday, December 6, 2007

NFL '07 - Week 14 (early game)

Last week's 10-6 got the season mark against the spread nearer the plimsoll mark, to 83-86-8.

This week, after observing the Washington meltdown vs. Buffalo, I look to the Chicago Bears (+3) to ice the Redskins for good at SnyderLand Field.

And after watching Ricky Williams last about 20 seconds in his return in the Jets-Miami "When Worlds Collide" game, I am manfully refraining from trotting out the immortal "Haiku for Ricky Williams." It would amount to kicking a stoner when he's down.

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

In Praise of Schlock, or Why Does an Adult Sit in the Dark Watching Movies About Cross-Eyed Gorillas and Hopping Chinese Vampires?

It wasn't until college that I became interested in the B movie. As a teenager my pals and I had haunted the art houses of Washington, D.C. and watched anything that held the promise of nudity, or films that had a reputation as favorites of the "Let's drop a couple of tabs, smoke a joint and smuggle in a bottle of Bacardi 151" set.

So we saw things like 2001: A Space Odyssey on the big screen at the Uptown on Connecticut Avenue, or Wild Strawberries, or midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Key Theater on Wisconsin Avenue.

But in college, majoring in cinema and English, the life-changing event came my sophomore year when the Denison University Film Society brought us Night of the Living Dead, which I saw with my buddy Steve Lander.

I had never seen anything like it. The deadpan, flat, documentary tone of the film, the relentlessly grey imagery, and those damn zombies that just kept coming - we were climbing out of our seats.

After graduation someone bought me a copy of Calvin Trillin's "American Stories," a collection of New Yorker pieces which included an account of the rise and fall of Joe Bob Briggs, drive-in movie columnist for the then Dallas Times-Herald.

Trillin's narrative was so funny I immediately tracked down "Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In," a collection of the actual reviews that eventually got the Briggs character into trouble.

And if reading about Joe Bob (in real life, a journalist named John Bloom) was amusing, the stuff published in a major American newspaper was unbelieveable.

I was especially taken by the Briggs method of summing up a film: "Two breasts. One beast. Three gallons blood. Heads roll. Two and a half stars. Joe Bob says check it out."

The next thing was to rent all the movies mentioned in "Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In," a process that took years and involved many unfortunate detours. I have now seen hundreds of low-budget films, and most of them are in fact quite awful in every way.

But some are so dreadful they transcend their limitations and become extremely peculiar works of note - in particular a group of films made in the 1980s and early 1990s, before digitized special effects ruined movies with the video-game kung fu moves and the "Oh cool, the whole room is moving around again" Crouching Matrix shtook.

I am talking about films such as Basket Case, The Evil Dead, and Frankenhooker. These movies are disgusting, full of prurient interest, and have no redeeming social value whatsoever. They are also funny and well-crafted.

And there are more of these than you'd think. My researches took me to the works of Ed Wood, which are uniformly hard to take without serious chemical stimulation, and then to the catalog of another Grade Z master, Herschell Gordon Lewis, who was much more capable than Wood. (See Lewis' The Wizard of Gore and 2,000 Maniacs!)

The "Aztec Mummy" series, three of them all featuring the same World's Longest Ancient Aztec Karaoke/Human Sacrifice scene (the fourth is the one with the lady wrestlers) are fabulously bizarre.

A video company called "Something Weird" puts out a fine line of two- and three-fers of forgotten exploitation fare, which is where I found (for example) the cross-eyed giant gorilla flick The Mighty Gorga paired with an Ed Wood-written sexploitation quickie, One Million AC/DC.

There have also been a handful of newer films that venture into the exploitation realm, most notably 2003's Bubba Ho-Tep and 2004's zombie send-up Shaun of the Dead: good schlock with a bit of a budget that makes the schlock less, well, schlocky.

And the idiotic Borat movie really is pure exploitation - of everyone involved, from the drunk college kids who are suing to people like me who plunked down their eight smackers and sat through that nekkid wrestling scene.

I just watched a restored version of Fritz Lang's M, a film that was banned, denounced and almost ruined the careers of the director and of star Peter Lorre, who had to go, first to England and then to Hollywood to escape the thing (and the Nazis).

At the time, M was pure schlock, and not seen as even remotely amusing. (Of course, life in Germany in 1931 wasn't a barrel of laughs, generally speaking.) Today, it's a classic film, and takes some subtle digs at cops, bureaucracy, and mob mentality in addition to being the first example of the "serial killer terrifies city and is caught with some fancy forensic work" scenario seen almost every night on "Law & Order" or "CSI" reruns.

So will Zombie Lake be the star attraction of a scholarly retrospective in 20 years? Probably not - but it's nice to think about it.


Style Report 12-4-07

The proto-simians who employ me have decided our second shift crew needs to be moving around all shift, inside and out. This will last until nobody answers the phone, at which point we will be instructed to never ever leave the instrument unattended.

I have decided to treat this as an opportunity to lose a few pounds and test out some layering ideas that have been percolating in my head.

The tweed sack jacket - not a Harris, but similar heft - came from eBay; shown here with a Brooks Brothers pink oxford cloth buttondown and a thrifted wool tie, Lands End cotton sweater vest, cotton pocket square from J. Press and a scarf that was donated to Space Camp by a local chiropractor.

Olive non-iron chinos from LL Bean, argyles from Joy of Socks and the Alden Pursuit Shoe form the bottom half, and a Timex Easy Reader on a strap from Central Watch complete the whole shtook.

I also had a Irish wool cap and gloves for the outside portions of my tedious but busy evening.

Parts of the ensemble could be jettisoned as necessary; I was also wearing long johns and silk sock liners, so I was perhaps a little toastier than usual.

But I was glad of the extra stuff when doing the rounds outside, at 22 degrees and a lovely, bone-chilling wind that came straight from the Arctic Circle, with brief stopovers in Saskatchewan and Buffalo.








Sunday, December 2, 2007

NFL '07 - Week 13

Well, even with Thursday's loss in the 10-point Dallas win over Green Bay, I remain sanguine.

Why? Because even at 73-81-8, I'd still be in the running if I wrote for the New York Post, where none of the alleged experts are over .500.

And because I don't bet on the games, anyway.

*****

I am up early Sunday morning, after working the swing shift, because I am a highly dedicated professional sportswriter-type.

I meant to get up.

But that doesn't excuse my nitwit neighbor, who snores like a buffalo with sleep apnea, and does so right through her radio-alarm.

And I hear all this, clear as a bell, right through the wall.

I've tried pounding on the wall. I've tried knocking on the door, but she won't answer. I've tried the property managers, but they would rather complain about my occasional enjoyment of a cigar.

So I guess it's earplugs and meditation. Silent meditation, you rat bastardette.


*****


On with the week:

NYG - 1.5 at Chi: I think Tom Coughlin has one last dose of good Catholic guilt left in the tank, and he'll pull it out here.

NYJ + 1.5 at Mia: Jets at Dolphins, or When Worlds Collide.

Cle +1 at AZ: In general I think the middle-tier AFC team on the rise is far better than the middle-tier NFC team at home any day.

Jax + 6.5 at Ind: The Colts just get by teams they should annihilate, and they always have trouble with the Jaguars.

NE -20 at Bal: All the offenses have been studying the Philly game plan against the Pats from last week, but what they should be waiting for is this week's tape, which will reveal how New England adjusts after a relatively poor showing (Monday night).

The rest:

StL -3 vs. Atl

Buf +6 at Was

Min -4 vs. Det

Ten -3.5 vs. Hou

SD -6 at KC

Phi -3 vs. Sea

Car -3 vs. SF

NO - 3.5 vs. TB

Den - 3.5 at Oak

Pit -7 vs. Cin