Archive for the ‘AICN’ Category
Sunday, August 16th, 2009
Ladies and gentlemen (although, let’s be honest, mostly gentlemen around here), Michael Jai White has arrived. He has officially gone from “promising” to fully formed action icon. He has earned the right to just be referred to as MJW and have everybody know what it means. It doesn’t matter that Hollywood hasn’t figured out to build movies around him like they do with Jason Statham, that Sly didn’t think to make him an Expendable, that Marvel Comics hasn’t lined up some super hero for him to play. He’s sick of waiting so he’s just taking it.
I believe come this Fall many of you will agree with me on this, and even for those already on board his status in your internal action hero rankings will be elevated. In October you’ll get to see him in the very entertaining blaxploitation homage BLACK DYNAMITE, where he gets to show both his badass presence and his previously untapped comedy chops. That’s a long time from now but you’ll only have to wait until September 15th to see him in a serious DTV action vehicle called BLOOD AND BONE. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Ben Ramsey, best DTV movies, DTV, Eamonn Walker, Gina Carano, J.J. Perry, Kimbo Slice, Michael Jai White, MMA, underground fighting
Posted in AICN, Martial Arts, Reviews | 41 Comments »
Monday, July 13th, 2009
Man, anybody notice they do alot of remakes these days? Seems like it anyway. I’d have to research it a little more to be sure. This is the remake of Larry Cohen’s 1974 killer baby picture. I thought it was supposed to play in theaters, but that’s because I didn’t know it was from the DTV kings at Millennium Pictures and Josef Rusnak, director of ART OF WAR II: BETRAYAL and THE CONTRACTOR. This one unfortunately doesn’t star Wesley Snipes, but instead Bijou Phillips as the mother of the killer baby.In this version she’s a graduate student under some pressure to not have the baby so that she doesn’t screw up her education and throw away a career she’s been working toward. But she makes the decision to leave school to give birth and live with her boyfriend and the disabled younger brother he’s raising. The baby grows unusually fast so she has to have a forced birth. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: remakes
Posted in AICN, Horror, Reviews | 14 Comments »
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009
DIRECT CONTACT is the new Dolph Lundgren DTV movie directed by Danny Lerner (SHARKS IN VENICE) and written by Les Weldon (RAGING SHARKS). It comes out in the US on Tuesday and has already been released in Thailand, Kuwait, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Finland, Denmark and Sweden.When we first meet Dolph as Mike Riggins, life is not the best. #1, he lives in a Balkan prison. #2, he owes a bunch of gangsters money, and some guy spits in his food, so he has to fight everybody and stab a dude in the eyeball. #3, the screws come in and club him like a baby seal. #4, he gets put in solitary. #5, when he pukes up blood a rat comes over and starts eating it.
On the other hand, it’s kind of a cute rat eating the blood he puked up. Not RATATOUILLE cute, but he doesn’t look like he has fleas. Well-groomed. So it could be worse. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Dolph Lundgren, DTV
Posted in Action, AICN, Reviews | 29 Comments »
Sunday, June 7th, 2009
I’ve missed some potential good ones at this year’s Seattle International Film Festival, but I was not about to miss the midnight show of BLACK DYNAMITE. If you don’t know what this is, it’s a retro blaxploitation movie where Michael Jai White (also co-writer) plays the title character, an ex-CIA, Vietnam vet, kung fu practicing, five-women-at-a-time-fucking badass motherfucker trying to find out who killed his brother.
Doing a blaxploitation homage in 2009 sounds good on paper, because there are a finite amount of authentic movies of this genre. At a certain point you run out of blaxploitation to watch, and you need more. It never hurts to have backups. But when you think about it there are a million ways for a movie like this to be disappointing or worse. BLACK DYNAMITE has great posters and trailers, but that doesn’t prove anything. For my tastes it’s a fine line to walk. I didn’t want to see something too jokey or spoofy, something that was mocking these movies more than paying tribute to them. And there’s no reason to assume an independent film out of nowhere from filmatists without that much of a track record will capture a vintage blaxploitation feel. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: blaxploitation, Michael Jai White, Scott Sanders
Posted in Action, AICN, Comedy/Laffs, Reviews | 28 Comments »
Monday, May 18th, 2009
First of all, let’s be honest: no Steven Seagal character really has to be “driven” into killing. He’s never gonna play a peaceful guy living an uneventful life as a librarian or a computer consultant who one day is forced by circumstances to tap into a savage side of himself he never knew existed. That’s just not a Seagal character type. True, in MARKED FOR DEATH he states an explicit isolationist philosophy to Keith David and only starts killing a few minutes later when his sister’s house gets shot up by gangsters. But even in that one he’s already done a whole bunch of killing earlier in life without necessarily being driven into it. He’s never just an ordinary non-violent guy at the beginning of a movie.
And especially in this one, because although he is a very successful crime writer under the name Jim Vincent, everybody knows he’s actually Ruslan (no last name, like Prince, McG or Vern), former Russian gangster. In a rare visual change to the iconic persona, Seagal sports MARK OF CAIN style tattoos on his forearms. There’s a nice badass moment when some young guys are pushing him around, he breaks a glass on one guy’s head and then pulls up his sleeves. The other guy just about shits his pants before he starts apologizing. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: DTV, revenge, Seagalogy
Posted in Action, AICN, Reviews, Seagal | 10 Comments »
Tuesday, March 17th, 2009
SPOILER ALERT !!
LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT REMAKE
WARNING: This review contains spoilers for LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT remake, LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT original, VIRGIN SPRING, CHAOS, THE HILLS HAVE EYES remake, and URBAN LEGEND.
Well well well, what do we have here? Looks like a remake of a Wes Craven movie, already unofficially remade as a Demon Dave DeFalco movie, itself based on an Ingmar Bergman movie based on a 13th century ballad based on a legend of why a particular Swedish church was built. I’m not sure the modern moviegoer is concerned with the origin story of the Kärna church, so we gotta wonder what exactly the reason is for this remake. The answer, of course, is that the original movie was first called KRUG AND COMPANY, they didn’t call it LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT until it had been traveling around for a while. They made it up after the fact, it didn’t really mean anything, so in the movie they never mentioned the location of the house. I saw the trailer for the remake where somebody’s driving down a road and says “it’s the last house on the left.” This is the reason to remake it, you can finally go back and establish that! (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Dennis Iliadis, Garret Dillahunt, good remakes, rape-revenge, remakes, revenge, Wes Craven
Posted in AICN, Horror, Reviews | 7 Comments »
Friday, January 2nd, 2009
Well, shit. The first bummer of 2009, or the last one of 2008. Turns out last night before his New Year’s Eve dinner the great mystery writer Donald Westlake collapsed and died. He was 75.
Westlake was a hell of a prolific writer. He started in 1960 and delivered books faster than his agent thought he should. Supposedly it was bad to try to promote more than one book in a year, so he started using pseudonyms. Under the Westlake name he wrote around 50 books – add in the pen names and that number doubles. Movies based on his books include THE HOT ROCK (a fun Robert Redford heist comedy recently reviewed by Quint), BANK SHOT, A SLIGHT CASE OF MURDER and the most recent Costa-Gavras movie THE AX. He was also a screenwriter who sometimes adapted other writers – Patricia Highsmith for RIPLEY UNDER GROUND, Dashiel Hammett for a TV anthology, Jim Thompson for THE GRIFTERS (he was nominated for an Oscar for that one). Personally I think his best screenplay is THE STEPFATHER, which does such a great job of including dark satire of ’80s family values in the subtext of an effective thriller. He was often known for lighthearted and goofy material but he was definitely good at the mechanics of a tight mystery or thriller story.
The reason this one hits me hard is that one of the other writers hidden beneath the friendly Westlake exterior was Richard Stark. If you had asked me yesterday I would’ve told you Stark was my favorite living writer. Aside from four spinoffs about an actor/thief named Grofield, Stark’s entire output was the 24 novels of the Parker series. These are the sparsely written, ridiculously badass adventures of a guy who plans heists, then leads the team executing them. He’s the best at what he does, knows how to work with the best people, and is usually disciplined enough to follow his rules and obey his instincts. But something always goes wrong anyway and that’s his other job, the problem solver. The guy who cleans up the mess. Usually, but not always, he’s able to outsmart and outfight everybody and get away with his ass intact, and most of the loot. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: books, Donald Westlake, Parker
Posted in AICN, Vern Tells It Like It Is | 126 Comments »
Sunday, December 28th, 2008
SPOILER ALERT !!
Usually I don’t write much about a movie before it’s made, because I prefer movies that exist. Every once in a while somebody sends me a script like LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD or RAMBO, but I usually ignore them. I would rather watch the finished movie and not know what the original plan was. And to be honest I’m not sure how qualified I am to tell you about the meal based on the recipe. But THE EXPENDABLES – a Sylvester Stallone action ensemble picture where he will write, direct and then star alongside Jet Li, Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Forest Whitaker and Randy Couture – is a big fuckin deal among those of us who love the action cinema of the ’80s and ’90s. We can’t help but dream about this one like nerds once dreamed of Star Wars prequels or new outfits for their limited edition Serenity dolls so they can act out what would’ve happened in the second season. So when Stallone’s script fell into my lap this time I couldn’t resist.
By the way I would like to take a moment to welcome A.B. King to the talkback. Welcome, A.B.
The ragtag team of the title are a group of elite mercenary badasses – at one point described as “totally prepared to die in a blaze of glory” – hired to take out a dictator in the South American country of Corza. I do not have an opinion on what’s going on in Corza because I believe it is a fictional country, but if in fact they’re real I’m against them. They got all kinds of human rights violations and shit. No good. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Badass Laureates, scripts, Sylvester Stallone
Posted in AICN, Vern Tells It Like It Is | 1 Comment »
Sunday, December 21st, 2008
Over my several years as a rising Seagalogist I have been asked many times who would win in a fight between Seagal and Van Damme. I have also been asked who would win between Seagal and Bruce Lee. I have never been asked who would win between Seagal and vampires, but I know now that the answer is Sea(SPOILER)gal. But this is also one of those whoever-wins-we-lose type scenarios because, I’m sorry to report, AGAINST THE DARK may be the least interesting movie Seagal has ever made.
Some might disagree. Many who don’t like Seagal’s movies criticize him for the exact reason why I think he’s interesting: he keeps making the same type of movie over and over again. To me it’s the perfecting, tinkering, and slow evolution of that formula that makes the movies cool. You don’t listen to blues to hear brand new riffs. Still, it SEEMS like it would be interesting to see his first attempt at a horror movie. But let’s be honest, nobody’s expecting it to work as a horror movie, and it doesn’t. So it should be a real Seagal movie, but it isn’t. It’s a shitty Sci-Fi-Channel-worthy vampire siege movie where one of the characters happens to be played by Seagal. And not even the main character. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: DTV, Seagalogy
Posted in Action, AICN, Reviews, Seagal | 9 Comments »
Wednesday, November 26th, 2008
Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here.
By now, you most likely know what this is, and wheter or not you’re interested in it. I’m thrilled Vern got a chance to check it out, though, and if there’s any review of it I’ve been waiting to read, it’s this one.
This is one of those things that almost seems too good to really exist. Did a talented French director really convince Jean-Claude Van Damme to play himself in an arty hostage thriller, giving him his best production values in years, one of his best movies, and definitely the best acting performance and most personal artistic expression of his career (so far)? Okay, I can believe somebody would come up with the idea, I can sort of believe Van Damme would be interested, but it’s hard to believe that they really found the money, really made it, really executed it this good. 2008, I love you. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: JCVD
Posted in AICN, Documentary, Reviews | 65 Comments »
