Posts Tagged ‘Seagalogy’

Kill Switch

Tuesday, August 12th, 2008

Well, shit. I’ve had this review done, but I was letting it sit and simmer or something. Or being too lazy to send it in. But now poor Isaac Hayes has died, so I better address that. Black Moses isn’t shown on the cover or in the trailer for this upcoming Steven Seagal DTV event, and that’s fair because he’s barely in it. But Hayes does in fact appear in a few scenes as “Coroner.” Seagal’s homicide detective character is buddies with Isaac, so Isaac is pretty liberal with letting him check the dead bodies for clues. I call him Isaac because that appears to be his name – Seagal’s character refers to him as “Is” (or “Eyes”). My theory was that Hayes was playing himself and that this is what he’s been doing in Memphis since quitting that snot-nosed cartoon you guys are so fanatic about. But maybe not.

At the time I thought it was cool to see Isaac Hayes in a Seagal movie. He did so many types of B-movies, from TRUCK TURNER to UNCLE SAM, it was about time he showed up in a Seagal picture. But now it’s kind of sad because really he doesn’t do anything in the movie, it’s too bad they didn’t give him a better role. I hope Seagal at least got out the guitar on set and got Isaac to sing “Walk On By” or something.

Damn, tough weekend. Rest in peace Duke of New York, A-#1, Isaac Hayes. You too Bernie Mac, even though you’re not in KILL SWITCH (which is probaly for the best.)

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As most of you know, I wrote this book about the films of Steven Seagal, now available in bookstores. If you haven’t read it, it’s pretty good. You know that stupid book about how powerful Chuck Norris’s beard is and how big his dick is and all that? My book is that book’s opposite. It will be there standing in the shadows when that book exhales its last breath, and it will not shed a tear. All the Chuck Norris book will see is a glimmer, and then it will be dead. (more…)

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The Onion Movie

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

I know what you’re thinking. THE ONION MOVIE? Are you fucking kidding me? They’ve run out of ’70s slasher movies, TV series, action figures, video games and board games to turn into movies, now they’re moving on to the fucking produce department? Well to be fair onions are a vegetable with a rich history. In Caananite Bronze Age settlements, traces of onion remains were found dating back to 5000 BC. There is Biblical evidence (specifically the Book of Numbers) indicating that onions were grown in Ancient Egypt. In fact, to the ancient Egyptians (SPOILER) their concentric rings represented eternal life. So I think with a visionary artistic team behind the camera and a decent budget an onion movie could be a real eye-opener. Unfortunately this movie has nothing to do with vegetables at all, it is based on that websight The Onion with the fake news articles and the movie reviews and what not.

I watch more direct-to-video crap than the average citizen, but even I usually draw the line at direct-to-video comedy. If MEET THE SPARTANS can get a theatrical release and you can’t then I’m not sure I trust you, even if a renowned institution such as a National Lampoon’s or an American Pie Presents is willing to put its name on the line on your behalf. In this case The Onion is only putting its name on the line due to contractual obligation. Some of their former editors wrote this thing back in 2003 but they and the directors disowned it years ago and it was sitting on the shelf until recently when somebody was moving some boxes around trying to find some of their old yearbooks or something and their ass bumped it off the shelf and it lands in stores Tuesday.

I’m no expert on laughs or satirical newspapers but as it happens I *am* an expert on Steven Seagal, who appears in the picture in the role of “Cock Puncher.” The format is a copy of sketch comedy movies like KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE and AMAZON WOMEN ON THE MOON, mostly taking the form of an Onion TV news broadcast but also branching off into skits taking place in the homes of the people watching the show or behind the scenes at their news headquarters, etc. COCK PUNCHER is a new Steven Seagal movie we see advertised and it becomes a plot point when the head anchor has a fight with the corporation that owns The Onion over whether to report on unrest in Central Asia or on the phenomenon of “Cock Puncher Mania.” Then Cock Puncher somehow becomes a real person who shows up at the end to rescue the news from terrorists (long story). (more…)

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Pistol Whipped

Friday, February 29th, 2008

This April marks (for death) the 20th anniversary of ABOVE THE LAW. Can you believe we’re that old? Two decades since Steven Seagal’s debut, arriving on the action movie scene fully-formed, already a star, already with his iconic look (well, he didn’t have the ponytail quite yet), already with his shadowy CIA past, his intense knowledge of Asian tradition, and his drive to take on the corrupt and throw them through panes of glass.

Alot has stayed the same in those 20 years, but alot has changed. He got bigger. His movies got bigger (UNDER SIEGE), then smaller (THE PATRIOT). He moved from the big screen to the DVD. By my way of thinking he’s gone through three major periods of his career and is now late in the DTV Era.

It’s been years since he’s gotten good reviews or mainstream respect (opening weekend of 2001’s EXIT WOUNDS to be exact), but that hardly matters. I’ve rarely met a Seagal-critic who could even name the movies he was trying to make fun of. What did matter was when Seagal started to disappoint his actual audience. Movies like OUT OF REACH were patched together with obvious voice and stunt doubles subbing for Seagal, SUBMERGED and ATTACK FORCE were sci-fi movies rejiggered to remove the mutants and aliens, leaving their stories muddled and incoherent. The last straw might’ve been last year’s FLIGHT OF FURY, where the producers tricked Seagal into making a movie with a script they’d already used for Michael Dudikoff’s BLACK THUNDER. Worse than that it’s built around Seagal flying jets, even though the audience will never forget he’s sitting in front of a green screen and not flying the jet in that stock footage. Shouldn’t he be throwing guys through windows? (more…)

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Urban Justice

Saturday, October 20th, 2007

URBAN JUSTICE
starring Steven Seagal

PREAMBLE

You know, there are movies, and then there are Steven Seagal movies. And you know what else? There are Steven Seagal movies, and then there are direct-to-video Steven Seagal movies. Seagal has made 13 DTV movies since his last theatrical, HALF PAST DEAD, came out in 2002. In 2003, 2006 and 2007 he was able to release three movies a year. For 2008 he already has three in progress. In 2005 he actually did four. So this is a guy who shows up in your video store almost as often as the seasons change. Which makes his DTV Era a god damn force of nature. Almost.

Personally I think he’s had a hell of a DTV run, putting his weird mark on all kinds of adventures for his secret agent, mercenary, freelance covert ops and Yale professor of archaeology characters. The movies he’s made are not always as competent as those made by Jean-Claude Van Damme and Wesley Snipes, but they are almost always more interesting and unusual.

Unfortunately, part of what makes them unusual is a turnoff for alot of people, because it’s the weird stuff that was not intended, the goofy mistakes and shortcuts that come from low budgets, tight schedules and conflicting ideas from too many producers. For example there’s the weird voice doubles. Seagal doesn’t have time or doesn’t get paid to come back and loop lines, so patches of dialogue here and there are dubbed in some other dude’s voice. This was done most hilariously in OUT OF REACH, where we heard letters to his penpal read in voiceover by some random dude. (more…)

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Tribute to Filmmaker John Flynn

Monday, April 9th, 2007

Last night I was reading Harry’s GRINDHOUSE review and was taken off guard by his reference to John Flynn having died this week. I can’t find any news articles or obituaries, but the source of this news seems to be the people at The Grindhouse Film Festival who have reported that Mr. Flynn died in his sleep on Wednesday.

Flynn is not a director that has been intensely studied, you’re not gonna find a whole lot of information on him (although Shock Cinema did an interview with him a couple years ago.) I really know nothing about John Flynn the man, but since I’m very fond of three of his movies in particular Moriarty asked me to write up a little something.

Mr. Flynn’s most famous movie, the one every one of you should see, and my number one “FOR GOD’S SAKE WOULD YOU PEOPLE PLEASE PUT THIS OUT ON DVD?” pick since POINT BLANK came out is ROLLING THUNDER. Written by Paul Schrader, this movie is in the vein of TAXI DRIVER if it was a little more of a straight ahead revenge movie. William Devane plays a Vietnam vet who comes home to a hero’s welcome, but becomes very distant and feels nobody understands him. Things get worse when he gets robbed and loses his hand to a garbage disposal. He definitely has more to complain about than John Rambo in FIRST BLOOD. So later there is revenge.

I don’t really know a way to describe the plot without making it sound cheaper and dumber than it really is. This was one of the first movies to deal with Vietnam vets coming home to find that things just aren’t the same anymore, a theme that is unfortunately still pretty potent today. But that’s just one level. More importantly, it works as pure badass cinema. And that’s just about my favorite thing in movies: a real effective tough guy film that underneath also has something to say about the world. (more…)

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Flight of Fury

Sunday, February 18th, 2007

FLIGHT OF FURY
Starring Steven Seagal
co-written by Steven Seagal

Well, it pains me to admit it guys, but Steven Seagal may be in a small rut here, at least movie-wise. Everyone knows his heart is in playin the blues right now, yet between guitar solos he’s still poppin out 3 movies a year. I’m definitely not counting my man out yet, especially with him directing PRINCE OF PISTOLS still a possibility. But after MERCENARY FOR JUSTICE, SHADOW MAN, ATTACK FORCE and now FLIGHT OF FURY all in a row, I feel like he’s not at his highest potential of achievement right now. Somebody forwarded me his tour rider for some reason (somehow people got the idea I was obsessed with Steven Seagal) and I noticed he’s drinking Red Bull, not his own Steven Seagal Lightning Bolt energy drink. So that might be part of the problem.

Don’t get me wrong, these movies all have their moments, and they almost always seem a little more interesting the second time I watch them. But most human beings aren’t that dedicated, so I have no choice but to recommend FLIGHT OF FURY (which comes out this Tuesday) only to serious Seagalogists like myself, and then only for educational purposes. This only has traces of the various Seagals we love, such as the badass from OUT FOR JUSTICE, the holy warrior from ON DEADLY GROUND and the crazy weirdo swordsman from BELLY OF THE BEAST, OUT OF REACH, etc.

That said, there are a number of things he mixes up here to keep things fresh. While it starts typically with him escaping some kind of government plot to wipe his mind, we soon find out that he’s the world’s best Stealth pilot. I might have to go through my files but off the top of my head I’m pretty sure we’ve never seen Seagal fly a plane before – the closest we’ve seen was getting sucked out of a plane and plummeting to his apparent death in EXECUTIVE DECISION. Which in my opinion doesn’t count. (He did fly a helicopter in BLACK DAWN though.) Anyway, this is the first time we get to see Seagal in the RIGHT STUFF style slo-mo pilot stroll towards the camera. (more…)

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Attack Force

Thursday, December 14th, 2006

ATTACK FORCE is Steven Seagal’s latest, where he takes on a bunch of sexy people given super powers by an experimental military drug. But until recently it was listed on IMDb as HARVESTER, where he takes on a bunch of aliens. After I savaged the last one, SHADOW MAN, I got a nice email from Seagal’s co-writer Joe Halpin, who I found very humble and down to earth. Having his ear for a minute I didn’t want to be rude and bury him in an avalanche of questions, but I couldn’t resist asking if this HARVESTER movie would really end up being about aliens, or if they would chicken out like they did with the “biological mutants” that ended up not being in SUBMERGED.

His answer: “Who knows.” He explained that they had shot it both ways. It could be about aliens, it could be about European mobsters, the studio and Seagal would have to come to an agreement in post-production. This of course brings up alot more questions (the main one being “Shouldn’t you decide on the premise before shooting the movie?”) but it also gives a huge amount of insight into how Seagal’s DTV movies end up the way they do. I mean, if they don’t even know who he’s fighting until after they’re done, no wonder they end up with these weird overdubbed lines, randomly dropped story threads, etc.

To no one’s surprise, they went with European mobsters. But actually I don’t think they hacked up the movie as much as I had figured before hand. These mobsters are treated pretty much as aliens (or actually vampires) – their eyes do a weird CGI effect, they have super strength for throwing people through walls, they use weird high tech weapons. It seems like they mostly left them as is, but changed the explanation for their powers. (And probaly cut out some bad CGI space ship shots here or there.) (more…)

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Shadow Man

Monday, June 19th, 2006

SHADOW MAN, I’m sorry to say, is the most boring movie Seagal has made so far. At least on my first viewing. To be fair, both THE FOREIGNER and THE PATRIOT seemed alot more fun the second time I watched them. In some ways maybe Seagal movies are like operas, you gotta understand the plot first before you can appreciate all the pageantry. But still, this is not one of my favorites.

(No, I’ve never seen an opera before, I’m just guessin.)

When they first announced this one it was called SHADOWS ON THE SUN, and it was supposedly gonna be something very different for Seagal, a drama where he’s a doctor working at a clinic in post World War II Japan. Now the movie comes out and it is not anything new for Seagal, he is not a doctor and he’s not in Japan or the past. The box says he has to save his kidnapped daughter AND stop a deadly virus, an exciting double whammy plot. But again, what we receive is not quite what we were promised. His daughter does get kidnapped, but by some lady that’s actually trying to protect her (don’t ask me to explain because I don’t really get it), and there is a deadly virus, only he just has to hide the blueprints from everybody. It’s not out there yet. He’s not gonna get to go up in a helicopter and toss it in the water like he did with the suitcase bomb in BLACK DAWN.

Why is the movie called SHADOW MAN? Good question. But it’s a question with no answer, like those riddles the zen guys collect. They don’t call him a Shadow Man in the movie. Nobody says “first you see a shadow, then you’re dead.” He’s just the usual ex-CIA aikido instructor type and his name is Jack. There is one thing that’s unusual though. He apparently runs a Fortune 500 company. I don’t know which one, or what this has to do with anything, but that’s what the CIA guys say in part of the movie. At least I think they’re talking about him, because I’m not sure who else they could be talking about. (more…)

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My Review of The Steven Seagal Blues Band at the Tractor Tavern in Seattle

Saturday, May 27th, 2006

I’m not about to start writing concert reviews, but I think the Steven Seagal Blues Band tour is worth an explanation. From the moment I first heard about the show to the second I got there, I really had no clue what the hell was gonna happen. And I had many discussions with people about who was gonna show up, if anybody. Wouldn’t it just be young people going to laugh at him? Would it be embarassing? Would he have to break a dude’s wrist and throw him through a window? Or pull a decorative lasso or samurai sword off the wall and go to work? I even had an elaborate notion of how he could bring along a stuntman to pose as a heckler, then do a couple moves on the guy and throw him through sugar glass. That would be one hell of a show.

I know because of stevenseagal.net that there are some crazy female fans whose Seagal fandom is purely about lust. But the internet is a worldwide medium. The question is how many of these women there really are in the world and how many are within driving distance of Seattle. I figured 1 or 2 tops, probaly none. But I figured wrong.

The show sold out, and there were people outside with signs begging for extra tickets. It was a mostly older crowd inside. Lots of grey hair, also lots of bald heads and tattoos. Some tough guys, some ponytails, some nerdy old guys in leather jackets. I wondered if anybody was a serious blues fan. Was anyone here to genuinely examine his chops? There was a pack of crew-cutted frat boys hooting in the back, some young hipster types here and there, possibly for ironic purposes, possibly for Seagalogical study. Probaly more men than women but not much, seemed like lots of husbands and wives. Mostly white people, but all races were represented. I noticed a decent percentage of Native Americans, and a woman wearing a fringed jacket with beadwork like Seagal wears in ON DEADLY GROUND. That made my day. I figured if there was ever a Seagalogy convention you’d be seeing alot of those. (more…)

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Mercenary for Justice

Monday, April 17th, 2006

Hello, my name is Vern and I am currently rated one of North America’s top three or four practicing Seagalogists, as well as one of the top two Verns on google. I am the man to come to for the inside dope on every new Seagal picture. However for the last one, BLACK DAWN, the guy who gets me the early screeners fell through and I had to rent it after it hit the shelves just like anybody else. No big deal, I can take my lumps, but there’s a few guys out there – I remember Fat Paul was one of them, and a few others – they’re asking me if I can hook them up with the early review. And as someone who strives for excellence, I got no choice but to come through.

I missed my screener for MERCENARY FOR JUSTICE too but I managed to score the actual DVD just 48 hours before they hit the streets, and I’m here to share my preliminary findings. It’s an Easter miracle.

MERCENARY FOR JUSTICE is the most convoluted Seagal picture in a while. Seagal, obviously, plays a mercenary (for justice) and his best friend Radio Jones (no relation to Cuba Gooding Jr.) has convinced him against his better judgment to take a gig fighting against the French in a small island nation in southern Africa. They’ve been hired by the two main villains of the movie, and for the first time in a long time they got actors I like (and have heard of) to play the heavies. First of all you got “CIA Dirty Deeds Man” Dresham, played by Luke Goss. I don’t have to explain to Ain’t It Cool Newsies who Luke Goss is, because we all loved him as Jared Nomak in BLADE II.

The more impressive casting coup though is Roger Guenveur Smith. You might not know who that is but you’d probaly recognize him. He’s in six Spike Lee movies, most famously as Smiley in DO THE RIGHT THING. If you saw GET ON THE BUS, he was the cop on the bus. If you saw that Soderbergh show K STREET he was Francisco Dupré, the mysterious new guy at the firm. I guess he was in OZ, too, as well as KING OF NEW YORK and DEEP COVER. He plays alot of different types, but especially slick smooth-talker types with gentle voices. Here he does all that but goes more over-the-top and evil than usual, and seems to change his mind about what accent he wants constantly throughout the movie. Like at the end of TERMINATOR 2 when Robert Patrick gets fucked up and starts going through all the different forms he’s shapeshifted into before. (more…)

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