Archive for the ‘Action’ Category
Monday, December 5th, 2005
Recently I reviewed RED SCORPION and I talked about The Enigma of Dolph Lundgren. The enigma is that this guy who I’m betting is fascinating in real life (he’s a big muscleman martial artist who does dumb action movies, but he’s highly educated) has almost no presence in movies. Well after seeing this topnotch John Woo TV movie I take it back. It turns out when he’s not pretending to be Russian he’s got all kinds of charisma.
I know this is made for TV, not video, but it’s exactly the kind of gem I’m looking for when a dig through all this crap. A ridiculous, enjoyable and unusual action movie. The main reason it’s unusual is that Dolph Lundgren’s character is afraid of the color white. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Dolph Lundgren, Fred Williamson, John Woo, made-for-cable-movies, Saul Rubinek
Posted in Action, Reviews | 5 Comments »
Sunday, November 27th, 2005
The other day I was reading an article about Jack Abramoff, the notorious Republican lobbyist at the middle of a bribery scandal that’s dragging down Tom Delay and supposedly ties in to at least 30 other DC ho’s. The whole thing is real complicated and the charge right now is for wire fraud but the investigation has brought to light all kinds of payoffs, exploitation of Native Americans, embarrassing racist emails and a supposedly coincidental death that anybody with at least one eye will notice appears to be a mafia style hit. We’re talking more corruption than even Senator Billy Jack probaly knew about.
Anyway, the particular article I read referred to Abramoff as a “former b-movie producer.” Holy shit! I thought. I guess I hadn’t been following this closely enough because I hadn’t heard that before. The trusty ol’ internet movie database explained that Abramoff had produced and wrote the story for the Dolph Lundgren picture RED SCORPION, not to be confused with RED SONJA, RED DAWN, RED SUN, RED EYE, THE RED VIOLIN, THE RED BALLOON, or Krysztof Kieslowski’s THREE COLORS: RED. He’s also credited as executive producer on RED SCORPION 2. That’s it although his brother Robert went on to produce a bunch of other movies I never heard of. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brion James, Dolph Lundgren, Jack Abramoff, Joseph Zito, M. Emmet Walsh, Paul Erickson, right wing propaganda
Posted in Action, Reviews | 3 Comments »
Thursday, November 3rd, 2005
Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with my man Vern and his opinion of the newest cheesefest from Mr. Steven Seagal. If you know Vern, you know you’re in for a treat. If you don’t, then shame on you, but you’ve still got a chance to redeem yourself! Read below brother! Vern’s got the gospel for ya’!
To Harry and friends:
Shit, it seems like just a few weeks since I saw TODAY YOU DIE. In fact, it just came out last month. But here I am with an early review of another straight to video Steven Seagal picture, BLACK DAWN, which comes out a couple days after Christmas.
Seagal plays Jonathan Cold, “ex-CIA, current freelance operative specializing in covert operations and nuclear weapons intelligence.” He seems to be a bad guy because he’s hired to bust a guy out of prison and help him acquire the parts for a suitcase bomb. I never got the chance to realize this before but Seagal makes a good bad guy, always standing around, narrowing his eyes and grimacing like a henchman. He should look into that. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: DTV, Matt Salinger, Seagalogy, Tamara Davies
Posted in Action, AICN, Reviews, Seagal | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, October 26th, 2005
SPOILER ALERT !!
Hey folks, Harry here… A couple of days ago, crazy Massawyrm began yapping about how much he liked LEGEND OF ZORRO and I pretty much wrote the film off, cuz… well Massa is a bit goofy in the head. He’s rooting for John McCain to be President in 2008 – so he’s not always to be trusted. But then I get this review from man-god Vern that says Zorro is essentially fighting Californian Neocon Christian Terrorist (C.N.C.T for short) and well, that’s the kind of goofy ass fantasy that I might be able to sign up for. Here ya go…
Legend of Zorro is an old fashioned cornball type of movie, just like the first one. It’s all about sword fights and horse chases and the need for California statehood. You got your swashbuckling, your derring-do, your flips, etc. Zorro is the type of guy who will add a flip into any plan whether it’s needed or not. In the opening scene he is chasing an ugly bad guy with wooden teeth, and at one point he does a flip that is actually counter-productive, it causes him to lag behind. But he still catches up. He’s fuckin Zorro, man, what did you think was gonna happen? (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Antonio Banderas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Martin Campbell, Nick Chinlund, Orci & Kurtzman
Posted in Action, AICN, Reviews | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, October 19th, 2005
It goes without saying that TODAY YOU DIE is Steven Seagal’s greatest movie title since at least OUT FOR A KILL. So I won’t bother to say it. Isn’t it awesome though? The movie itself is worth the time of any Seagalogist, but at least on my first viewing here it’s not one of the more crucial ones. It’s more competent than most straight to video movies (especially Seagal’s, lately) but not legitimately great. So, without anything really special or truly ludicrous, it ends up kind of forgettable. But it has its moments.
SUBMERGED flirted with being Seagal’s first monster movie (they cut out the CGI mutants before finishing the movie) and this one threatens to be a rare supernatural storyline. I won’t say his first because he did have some voodoo and shaolin magic in BELLY OF THE BEAST. There were also voodoo curses used by the villains in MARKED FOR DEATH, but it came off more like some cold mafia threat type shit than actual working magic. Anyway the opening scene here is a tarot card reading. I expected the card reader to say “Today you die,” but no dice. In fact, she had a surprisingly honest explanation of the DEATH card, which she said can mean different things. You gotta admire a straight shooting tarot card reader. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: DTV, Seagalogy, Treach
Posted in Action, Reviews, Seagal | 10 Comments »
Monday, October 17th, 2005
I probaly never woulda known this if there wasn’t a movie, but it turns out Laurence Harvey, who is a guy in THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (but not Frank Sinatra), had a daughter named Domino. But wait, there’s more. This daughter supposedly tried to follow in the footsteps of her super model mother, but then got bored and became a bounty hunter. Rich girl model becomes bounty hunter – sounds like a good story, and apparently director Tony Scott was friends with Domino and spent 12 years trying to bring “her story” to the screen. Tragically, she died of a drug overdose last summer having only seen parts of the unfinished movie. I just watched the whole god damn thing so believe me, I can relate. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brian Austin Green, Ian Ziering, Keira Knightley, Mickey Rourke, Richard Kelly, the worst shit ever, Tony Scott, unwatchable garbage
Posted in Action, Reviews | 14 Comments »
Thursday, August 11th, 2005
Director Rob Cohen’s STEALTH, which would be called WHOOOSSSHHHH! if it was up to me, takes place in the near future. In the near future, the world’s three best and also sexiest pilots have been specially trained to combat terrorism. The way this works is, they fly around and drop bombs on the terrorists. They got this shit down to an art, so for example the CIA calls and says listen up super flyers, we know for sure that three evil terrorist cell leaders who are planning an imminent and deadly attack are going to be meeting up in 24 minutes in a completely empty skyscraper in Rangoon. Have at it, kids.
Even though they know for sure that there are no innocent office workers, janitors or burglars inside the building, our three top guns check out some statistics on their onboard computers to make sure this is morally sound. They know this is in the middle of downtown so they have to plan out a way to implode the building so that it will be all neat and tidy and no bricks will fall on anybody’s heads or anything. And they pull it off! (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Jamie Foxx, Jessica Biel, Joe Morton, Josh Lucas, Rob Cohen, Sam Shepard, W.D. Richter
Posted in Action, Reviews | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, July 26th, 2005
Harry here with Vern’s uncovering of the greatest America has to offer. This time it is BLAST starring… ah hell, I’ll just hand it over to Vern – he’s who you come to AICN desperate for something new to read…
Boys –
You know how it is with me, every time I get a screener for some shitty straight to video movie I get this idea somewhere in my brain… what if this is it? What if this is THE ONE? The one I’ve been looking for all these years? Well today we’re here to discuss BLAST, which is not the one. But it is one of those rare surprisingly competent ones. Destined for a Not As Bad As You Would Think award from the Direct to Video Academy of Well Who Are We Kidding There Is No Art Or Science In These Things.
Basically BLAST is DIE HARD on an oil rig. Or maybe UNDER SIEGE on an oil rig, but not ON DEADLY GROUND. Anyway the important thing is instead of Bruce or Seagal, we got wisecrackin Eddie Griffin. You know, from MY BABY’S DADDY. Now look, I wouldn’t watch 99% of the shit this guy has made. But I do think he can be funny. I’m more of a POOTIE TANG man, but I liked him in UNDERCOVER BROTHER. And his standup movie/family documentary DYSFUNKTIONAL FAMILY was funny. Here, he has a couple good smartass lines, but mostly plays the action hero. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anthony Hickox, Breckin Meyer, Die Hard on a ____, DTV, Eddie Griffin, Nadine Velazquez, Steven E. de Souza, Tiny Lister, Vinnie Jones, Vivica A. Fox
Posted in Action, AICN, Reviews | No Comments »
Friday, July 1st, 2005
Sometimes for scientifical type purposes I try to predict what bad puns the hack critics will use in reviews of upcoming movies. For WAR OF THE WORLDS I was leaning toward an “out of this world” or “worlds away from E.T.” type thing. Somebody suggested “Bore of the Worlds” but I was saving that for “Fantastic Bore” and “Fantastic Snore.”
But then I saw WAR OF THE WORLDS and you know what this is? The scariest PG-13 movie of all time. Fuck dinosaurs. Fuck a guy eating monkey brains. This is as hard as Steve Spielberg is gonna get. This is a well put together piece of work in my opinion. Usually making a movie PG-13 when it could be R is a copout, but in this case it’s almost subversive. Sorry about taking the guns out of E.T., to make it up to you I’m gonna give your kids the worst nightmares from now until they turn 16.
So now I’m thinking the pun headline should be CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE KIND WHERE YOU ALMOST SHIT YOUR PANTS. Or maybe E.T. – THE EXTRA-WE’REFUCKED-STRIAL. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: aliens, Dakota Fanning, H.G. Wells, Justin Chatwin, Miranda Otto, Steven Spielberg, Tim Robbins, Tom Cruise
Posted in Action, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 5 Comments »
Wednesday, June 22nd, 2005
Hi, everyone. “Moriarty” here with some Rumblings From The Lab…
I’m working on my review for this one now, having seen it earlier tonight. For now, I’ll leave it in the always-capable hands of Vern:
Fellas –
Well the Batman fans have their good Batman movie to get excited about, the Star Wars fans have their good Star Wars movie to complain and make rape metaphors about*, and now comes the actual, genuine most anticipated movie of the summer. In my opinion.
[*and no, this is not a license to talk about Star Wars in the talkbacks. you even THINK about mentioning Hans shooting whatsisdick the hutt or what have you, even in a relevant comparison to the works of George Romero, you’re fuckin fired]
There’s not much of a rumbling in the media, there doesn’t even seem to be as much excitement on the internet thing here as you’d think there’d be. But some of you out there know what I’m talking about. We’ve been waiting for this movie a long god damn time. I mean how many false alarms can you live through over the years, the guy saying he almost has the money to make another Living Dead movie? It starts to seem like a pipe dream. How many Resident Evils and 28 Days and Haunted Mansions can go by with us saying “fer chrissakes you morons, just give George Romero some money for a living dead picture and make the world a better place for all creeds, colors and stripes.” (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Asia Argento, Dennis Hopper, George Romero, John Leguizamo, Robert Joy, Simon Baker, zombies
Posted in Action, AICN, Horror, Reviews | 2 Comments »
