You know what else I hadn’t seen in a while that wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be? DARKMAN II: THE RETURN OF DURANT. You know what I’d never seen before that I actually liked? DARKMAN III: DIE DARKMAN DIE.
By the way, does anybody happen to know what the first DTV sequel was? I was hoping there would be some article somewhere about the history of DTV, or a list of DTV sequels, but I can’t find anything.
Darkman’s still trying to fix that liquid skin problem, and this time he forms a partnership with one of the doctors who did the experimental surgery on him in the first place. She wants to try out a new technique to rewire his nerves so he has feeling again, and he agrees to be her guinea pig on the condition that he can borrow her top of the line DNA sequencer for his skin project. Both end up getting what they want: the equipment helps him “break the 99 minute barrier” (again – they seem to have forgotten he already did it in part 2) and she rewires his nerves to a remote control device because actually she works for a crazy steroid dealer (Jeff Fahey) who’s pissed off because Darkman stole a bunch of his money and now he wants to study him to find out how he gets his super darkstrength.
DIE DARKMAN, DIE has the same director as part 2 but this time it’s written by Colleary and Werb, the guys who wrote DEATH WISH V: THE FACE OF DEATH and FACE/OFF. Come to think of it these guys are obsessed with faces and masks. Colleary even wrote an episode of the new Alfred Hitchcock Presents about a woman who has plastic surgery to look like someone else and Werb was a writer on THE MASK. Weird. But the point is they are pretty good writers and went beyond the DTV call of duty on this one.
The majority of DTV sequels (and DTV in general) is pretty bland and predictable. Usually it’s just a cheap rehash of the first one, not alot of ideas, not alot of exciting moments, not much happens. But DARKMAN III has all kinds of shit: Darkman being forced to run an “obstacle course” that involves blowing up a car and running across oil barrels that explode and fly like rockets as people shoot at him, Darkman having to remove an implant from his brain using plyers, even Darkman disguising himself just to show up at the villain’s daughter’s school play so she won’t be sad. They came up with all kinds of funny ideas and clever angles on the DARKMAN concept. (more…)
We thought Larry Drake’s sadistic, finger-collecting crime lord Robert G. Durant was killed when Darkman caused his helicopter to explode, but actually he survived, in a coma, his gang secretly keeping him on life support in his mansion. Also we thought Darkman was a big screen hero played by Liam Neeson, turns out he’s on video and played by Arnold Vosloo.
THE RETURN OF DURANT is a pioneering DTV sequel, one of the earliest examples of the artform, and also the beginning of Sam Raimi expanding his Renaissance Pictures empire by executive producing a bunch of other people’s shit instead of just making EVIL DEAD movies. If nothing else this movie was a training ground for sidekicks in future Raimi productions – Vosloo would be Lance Henriksen’s in HARD TARGET and female lead Renee O’Connor would be Xena’s.
Darkman #2 continues his shadowy outcast existence, now operating from an underground lab. He enters through manholes and can move around beneath the city with a high-speed vehicle that drives on the subway tracks. He uses his strength to beat up criminals, steals their cash and uses it to buy lab equipment. Then one day while perusing the medical journals he reads about a guy working on a liquid skin very similar to his. The headline even mentions that it’s light resistant, so I guess the 99 minute problem is well known in the medical research community. Well, lucky coincidence, this other skin doctor lives and works in the neighborhood. Unlucky coincidence: his lab is in a big power plant that the recently-revived-from-his-coma Durant needs in order to build some laser weapons. So Westlake and the other guy form a partnership and improve their skin formula, but since this doctor doesn’t give in to the muscling by Durant’s men they end up killing him. (more…)
I believe you’re all familiar with the director Sam Raimi. You know – kind of a smart ass, wears a tie, master of energetic camerawork, loves the Three Stooges. These days I guess people just think of him as the guy who did the three Spider-man pictures. Nerds curse his name because although the first two touched their hearts and moved their souls the third one was kind of dumb and had a part where he did an evil dance, and apparently in the comic book it is made very clear that the whole point of the Spider-man character is that he would never do an evil dance like that. The Punisher or Blade maybe would do one under the influence of sorcery or an alien ray, but Spider-man – never. So even if Sam Raimi did direct THE EVIL DEAD, EVIL DEAD 2, ARMY OF DARKNESS, SPIDER-MAN, SPIDER-MAN 2, THE QUICK AND THE DEAD and A SIMPLE PLAN it doesn’t matter, that’s all moot now, like Michael Richards’ comedy after he used the n word.
But with this review we gotta transport ourselves back to the early 1990 when Raimi was an underdog, a cult director who had done two drive-in masterpieces and one disowned comedy, and here he was trying to break into the post-BATMAN studio game with a movie that was big budget for him but small compared to the movies it was gonna be held up against. It’s kind of like a comic book movie: a super hero origin story, with music by Danny Elfman, and with ‘man’ in the hero’s name. It’s also kind of a horror movie: he’s a mad scientist and a burnt up Phantom of the Opera type freak whose scarring turns him crazy and murderous. But mostly I think it’s like an action movie: it has R-rated violence, he’s getting revenge one-by-one on the criminals who wronged him, there’s explosions and stunts, and one of the screenwriters is Chuck Pfarrer, the ex-Navy SEAL who wrote NAVY SEALS and HARD TARGET.
Future Academy Award nominee Liam Neeson plays Dr. Peyton Westlake, a scientist working on a liquid skin substitute for burn victims. When his girlfriend (future Academy Award winner Frances McDormand) discovers proof that her sleazy boss (Logie award winner Colin Friels) is making bribes Westlake gets caught in the crossfire and a gang of criminals blows up his lab with him inside. Everybody thinks he’s dead but his burnt near-corpse winds up a John Doe in a hospital where the doctors take the liberty of giving him an experimental surgery that severes his nerve endings so he won’t feel the burns. The only negative side effects are that he has lost the sense of touch and that he has very sensitive emotions that can cause him to fly into a blind rage with an adrenaline rush that gives him the strength of ten men. Otherwise everything is fine. (more…)
In this 1994 MOST DANGEROUS GAME ripoff, Ice-T plays a homeless man hired by a bunch of rich assholes supposedly to be their guide on a hunting trip, but actually to be their prey. Because the second deadliest prey is man, the first deadliest is Ice-T. (I wonder if Predator knows about this yet?)
The movie doesn’t really offer any backstory for why Ice-T is tough enough to survive this hunting expedition (SPOILER), he’s just Ice-T. He’s not an ex-soldier or ex-cop or trained in the Orient or anything. In fact it’s the reverse: he’s a regular guy and almost all of the people he kills are ex-CIA.
I gotta warn you this is a little on the cheesy side. It’s not exactly great action, and some key moments are bogged down by bad decisions like having Ice’s one-liner clearly recorded in a studio and looped in so it takes you out of the moment. But it’s still enjoyable to watch because it’s such a simple, classic setup and it’s an all star cast. Hunting Ice are no less than Gary (PREDATOR 2) Busey, John C. (ON DEADLY GROUND) McGinley, Charles S. (BLACK DOG) Dutton, F. Murray (SCARFACE) Abraham, and their sicko leader, Rutger (BLIND JUSTICE) Hauer. Then there’s some guy named William McNamara as Abraham’s babyfaced son, and for most of the movie that is the entire cast. So not a bad ensemble.
Busey gets to be crazy Busey, in fact he has a pretty incredible monologue about his fucked up childhood that makes the idea of his character being a CIA psychologist even funnier. McGinley also gets to do the type of over-the-top acting that makes him so enjoyable. And the movie has a great use for Dutton – at first we see him as a volunteer at a street mission supposedly trying to help Ice-T out. It’s pretty standard for a guy like that to secretly be evil, but this is Charles S. Dutton we’re talking about. He’s Roc. He drove GET ON THE BUS. He’s in RUDY. Even when the guy goes into space, like in ALIEN 3, you know he’s still playing a great inspirational dude who gives tough love and makes righeous speeches. That’s exactly who he seems to be at the beginning of this, so it’s actually kind of surprising when all the sudden he’s talking about choosing Ice-T as his prey due to his breeding and musculature. Talking about him like he’s a horse or a piece of meat. This movie is kind of fucked up! And Dutton has the best death, laying on the ground mumbling about plans for the next expedition right after having his legs blown clean off. (more…)
Mickey Rourke may not have won the Oscar, but he did get something even more precious: the honor of inspiring me to finally write a review of DOUBLE TEAM after mentioning it a million times over the years. Congratulations Mickey, you did it.
I’ve talked to alot of people who are going back and rediscovering Mickey Rourke performances after seeing THE WRESTLER. They rent BARFLY, maybe 9 1/2 WEEKS, ANGEL HEART, JOHNNY HANDSOME, THE POPE OF GREENWICH VILLAGE. I was thinking about that and suddenly it occurred to me that I don’t hear anybody talking about a little picture I am very fond of but haven’t seen in many years, one with a cover that says VAN DAMME – RODMAN – ROURKE. So I rented it in preparation for a post-Oscars celebration.
Well, poor Mickey didn’t get the Oscar, but who needs an Oscar when you can say ‘I WAS IN DOUBLE TEAM, MOTHERFUCKER’? I mean, which would YOU rather have? Okay, I guess most of you probaly said the Oscar, but what would your second choice be?
Anyway I love this movie. It joins STONE COLD in an elite category of highly enjoyable action movies that combine serious action chops, high energy, a way above average number-of-explosions-to-minutes-of-screen-time ratio, a stupid story, a great actor playing the villain and a goofy performance by a ridiculously dressed flash-in-the-pan professional athlete turned non-actor.
Jean-Claude Van Damme plays P. Jack Quinn, a secret agent involved in the attempted assassination of Stavros (Rourke), a former agency asset. It turns out Stavros has his little boy there, the kid gets shot, and Quinn must be avenged. (Come to think of it, this movie could be told from Rourke’s point of view and he would be the good guy.) (more…)
With all the discussion of the FRIDAY THE 13TH remake I haven’t seen and new DVDs of the first three in the original series, I got to thinking about a project I never finished. Two Halloweens ago I re-watched the entire FRIDAY THE 13TH series and was writing reviews of each one. Unfortunately before I finished I came up with this stupid idea of writing one review that would treat the entire series as one long movie. That was a failure and I think I deleted that file and then abandoned the reviews I had been writing.
So unfortunately I didn’t finish up with part 8 or get to my thoughts on JASON GOES TO HELL, but I figured I should put this unfinished piece up because it does a pretty good job of explaining something that’s been coming up alot lately: why I love those early ones even though they’re not on the level of a HALLOWEEN or a TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE. I’ve seen alot of remake reviews saying that it doesn’t matter that it (allegedly) sucks because the originals are no good either. I disagree, so consider this my rebuttal.
SYNOPSIS: Upon the reopening of Camp Crystal Lake – a summer camp with a past so troubled it’s better known as Camp Blood – the new camp counselors (Kevin Bacon, et al) are murdered in increasingly gruesome ways. The killer turns out to be Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer), a sweater-wearing fruitcake still upset because her son Jason drowned there years ago and then she had to murder people and then they closed the camp but now it re-opened so she got confused and thought the new counselors were the old counselors so she killed them. So one of the counselors chops her head off. But then a new set of counselors come and it turns out that Jason is actually alive and grown up and he lives in a weird shack in the woods with a shrine to his mother and he’s pissed off because her head got chopped off so he kills people for revenge. So an aspiring child psychologist puts on the dead mother’s sweater and pretends to be her to trick him and then she stabs him, etc. Then all the sudden it’s in 3-D and Jason gets back up and kills some more people. Some more people show up and some bikers and Jason puts on a hockey mask and then they hang him. But then little Corey Feldman is there and some other people and there’s deaths so Corey gives himself a terrible hair cut and tries to freak out Jason and stabs him in the head with a machete and then Jason trips and impales his own head and dies. Then it skips ahead 15 years, Corey Feldman (played by some other dude) is grown up and living in a halfway house with some other maniacs and he’s haunted by Jason, who is alive again. But then it turns out it’s just some asshole pretending to be Jason, so they kill him. But just to be sure, Corey Feldman (now played by yet another guy) digs up Jason’s corpse and he’s gonna burn it but it’s struck by lightning so it comes back to life and kills some more people so they chain that fucker up and throw him back into the lake where he belongs. But then a psychic accidentally uses her powers to bring him back to life and then fight him and then throw him back into the lake where an electrical accident brings him back to life again and he gets on a teen cruise ship where he bores everybody for 90 minutes before going to New York, fighting some silly punk rockers and turning into a little boy. But then he’s an adult in the woods again and gets killed by a SWAT team so a guy eats his heart and then he goes from body to body killing people and a bounty hunter you’ve never heard of before suddenly knows all this magical shit for killing Jason so he turns back into Jason and then some big goofy rubber hands pull him into Hell where he fights Freddy. Then it skips forward hundreds of years (Kubrick style) and Jason is unfrozen in space where he kills people and turns into a cyborg, etc. The end. OR IS IT? (more…)
Okay, now I got the sequel: ANY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE. (And thanks for the Friday the 13th comments. Word in my inbox is 10 negative to 2 positive. That’s 7% lower than on Rotten Tomatoes.)
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