Archive for the ‘Action’ Category
Thursday, March 16th, 2017
Detective Jenny “Silk” Sleighton, the famous character created by Claudine St. James, is back three years later, keeping the streets of Honolulu safe once again. Except this time they don’t credit Claudine St. James, supporting my theory that there is no such person as Claudine St. James and they just put that credit on the first one to make the character seem extra pulpy. (And it worked.)
This time Silk is played by Penthouse Pet Monique Gabrielle (CHAINED HEAT, EMMANUELLE 5, DEATHSTALKER II). She really doesn’t seem like the same character without Cec Verrell’s quirky fashion and bad girl vibe, but Gabrielle’s version is very likable in a different way. She sounds a little too nice to pull off some of the tough talk, but she’s good at making the facial expressions while ducking in and out of corners to fire/dodge bullets.
She has a much older partner/best friend named Chris Meadows (Bon Vibar, CAGED HEAT II: STRIPPED OF FREEDOM) who is celebrating his impending retirement, and you know what that means. The funny thing is he’s killed because of an old Yakuza debt, so the retirement is really unrelated, it still would’ve happened if he’d left the danger behind years ago. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bon Vibar, Cirio H. Santiago, Hawaii, Jan Merlin, Jimmy Fabregas, Joe Mari Avellana, Ken Metcalfe, Maria Claire, Monique Gabrielle, Peter Nelson, Robert King
Posted in Action, Reviews | 10 Comments »
Wednesday, March 15th, 2017
BLACKBELT II: FATAL FORCE is pretty different from part 1. It has the same producers (Roger Corman and Cirio H. Santiago), and continues the tradition of listing championship titles on the credits, but it doesn’t have the same characters or any story connection or seem like the same type of movie or same level of quality. Also, according to IMDb, it came out three years before part 1. Huh.
This one starts during the Vietnam War, with a very serious narrator telling us stats about the war and MIAs over generic jungle battle scenes. After a bunch of machine gun fire and explosions the American helicopters take off, leaving three soldiers behind.
Now in LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA some beat cops stumble across a night time warehouse arms deal and it turns into a big shootout. It took me almost 10 minutes into the movie to figure which one was gonna be the main character (because nobody seems like an obvious blackbelt) but it’s a cop with the enviable name Brad Spyder (“Blake Bahner – W.K.F. World Kickboxing Champion”) who chases one of the escaping criminals to the top of a building and has a long fight with him, but is horrified when he accidentally kicks him off the roof. He yells “NO!” and catches his hand, but then drops him. The guy’s dad is mad so he shoots Spyder’s partner Lee Stokes (Ronald William Lawrence. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Blake Bahner, Cirio H. Santiago, Hawaii, Kevin Tent, P.O.W.s, Roger Corman, Vietnam
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 12 Comments »
Tuesday, March 14th, 2017
“Look Silk, I know it’s gonna be hard to recognize these cold cuts, but that’s your scag dealer, minus one ear.”
Oh Silk, you’re one of the good ones. Maybe America’s relationship with law enforcement wouldn’t be so complicated if more of them were like you, with your sense of honor and style. In Cirio Santiago’s 1986 police story, Cec Verrell (HELL COMES TO FROGTOWN) stars as Jenny “Silk” Sleighton, a Honolulu police detective with commanding style and a worshipful theme song.
“She ain’t the usual cop that hangs around,” the song informs us. “Don’t you push your luck too far / Silk’s gonna get you no matter where you are / You’ll never get away / from Silk! /yowww!/ [guitar solo]”
She says they call her Silk “because I’m so fuckin smoooothhh.” The movie itself does not go down as smoothly as its lead character, or its theme song, or its badass movie poster that inspired me to rent it. But of the things in life that I regret, watching this is low on the list. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Cec Verrell, Cirio H. Santiago, Frederick Bailey, Hawaii
Posted in Action, Reviews | 11 Comments »
Monday, March 13th, 2017
a.k.a. KICKBOXER COP
In my experience, a good Don “The Dragon” Wilson vehicle is one where he goes routinely through standard action formulas, provides his kicking expertise and likable personality, and the filmatists throw on just enough flair to make it stand out from the pack a little. In this one that flair comes in the form of the weirdo villain played by Matthias Hues, the 6′ 5″ German-born martial artist best known as the evil alien in Craig Baxley’s I COME IN PEACE.
Hues plays John Sweet, who when we first see him is about to have a romantic encounter with a woman (Mia Ruiz, WILD AT HEART) in a hotel. He seems like he’s leaving to get a bottle of champagne or something, and she hums to herself and strips while she waits. But he knocks on the door of a nearby room where some criminals are meeting, and he kills them all with his bare hands.
Then he goes back to the room like nothing happened. I thought he was a rival gangster or vigilante but then he murders this poor woman (who turns out to be a prostitute, despite her enthusiasm) and cuts off her ring finger.
We meet our hero Jack Dillon (Don “The Dragon” Wilson) as the opposite of a guy killing a prostitute: he’s a guy beating up a pimp. “The broken nose is for the girl. The vasectomy’s free.” And he brings one of the pimp’s stable back to her mother. Dillon is not for-hire, though. He refuses payment because “I don’t charge to take out the garbage.” Or, I assume, to unload the dishwasher. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alan Blumenfeld, Charles Philip Moore, Cirio H. Santiago, David S. Green, Deirdre Imershein, Don "The Dragon" Wilson, Jack Forcinito, Kimberly Lord, Matthias Hues, Mia Ruiz, Neva Friedenn, Richard Beymer, Rick Jacobson, Roger Corman
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 8 Comments »
Tuesday, March 7th, 2017
(some spoilers here for a great movie that you should just go see regardless of what I say)
When the first X-MEN movie came out I thought this new “Hugh Jackman” guy looked and acted so much like Clint Eastwood that I called it “The Return of Clint.”
“I’m not sure how this was accomplished exactly,” I wrote at the time. “Maybe this is a computer generated renderation of a young Clint… Maybe it is Clint under a lot of makeup to make him look more like he did in his Thunderbolt days. Maybe it is a son of Clint’s, much like Chad McQueen but keeping more in the true spirit of his father than Chad does. Or hell, maybe it’s just some dude named Hugh Jackman who looks a lot like Clint Eastwood.”
These days I lean toward the third one, and maybe the resemblance is harder to see now that Jackman is such a star in his own right and has done plenty of roles where he’s not scowling. But man, he elevated the world of that movie by squinting at it with that Clint attitude, and he was even introduced as a bare knuckle brawler like Philo Beddoe minus the orangutan. It didn’t feel like a guy self-consciously imitating a Clint-like persona, either. It was a genuine badass presence and charisma that I still believe birthed the entire modern era of comic book movie mania, for good or bad. Because without Jackman as Wolverine I don’t think X-MEN would’ve caught on and if X-MEN didn’t catch on I don’t think the Marvel movies would’ve gotten off the ground and we’d all be going to conventions dressing up as characters from serious adult dramas. (I can’t decide if I’m going as BRIDGE OF SPIES this year or one of the ACLU lawyers from LOVING.) (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Boyd Holbrook, Dafne Keen, Elizabeth Rodriguez, Hugh Jackman, James Mangold, Michael Green, Patrick Stewart, Scott Frank, Stephen Merchant
Posted in Action, Comic strips/Super heroes, Reviews | 41 Comments »
Wednesday, March 1st, 2017
The last Guy Ritchie movie I watched was the first SHERLOCK HOLMES. When it ended I realized first that I wasn’t sure what the mystery was that Sherlock Holmes had solved, and then that I was having a reaction from accidentally combining medication and alcohol. But some people told me they saw it undrugged and didn’t know what the mystery was either. At any rate, I had long since given up on Ritchie since the initial excitement of LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS, which I have not revisited.
That’s why I took much too long getting to THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E., a fun, charming, stylish summer blockbuster Cold War spy thriller that represents Ritchie at the very top of his game. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alicia Vikander, Armie Hammer, based on a TV show, Cold War, Guy Ritchie, Henry Cavill, Hugh Grant, Nazis, spies, Sylvester Groth
Posted in Action, Comedy/Laffs, Reviews | 21 Comments »
Monday, February 20th, 2017
THE GREAT WALL fulfills two different personal moviegoing habits of mine:
1) trying to see some of the higher profile Asian imports that play at the AMC theater here
2) going to lightly attended afternoon shows of almost every fantasy sword-dude movie that comes out
Maybe you can’t call this an import, because it’s produced by Universal and Legendary, it’s mostly in English and its star Matt Damon (SPIRIT: STALLION OF THE CIMARRON) is an American white in my opinion. And maybe you can’t call it a fantasy sword-dude movie either, because it’s more in a fantasy bow-and-arrow-dude vein. But it is from the great Chinese director of lush historical epics Zhang Yimou (RAISE THE RED LANTERN, HERO, HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS), it’s the most expensive movie ever filmed entirely in China ($135 million), and it was released there two months ago and had already made $224.5 million worldwide by the time it came to us. So it’s close enough to these two categories that it piqued my interest.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andy Lau, international co-productions, Jing Tian, Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal, Willem Dafoe, Zhang Yimou
Posted in Action, Fantasy/Swords, Reviews | 25 Comments »
Monday, February 13th, 2017
JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 2 is the solid sequel we always hoped (in fact assumed) it would be. The first film – already a certified modern action classic – had a perfect combination of elegant high concept (legendary assassin comes out of retirement to avenge some dipshits who killed his dog) and interesting world (a society of killers with their own rules, services and even currency). Rehashing the former would make for diminishing returns, so returning screenwriter Derek Kolstad (ONE IN THE CHAMBER, THE PACKAGE) digs deeper into the latter, showing us more about the operations and codes of the Continental Hotel and its affiliates as Wick is forced to repay a debt, getting himself into more and more trouble and testing the limits of his unkillableness.
He’s still trying to retire. The movie has a sense of humor about it without undermining his sincerity. Moments after he finishes cementing his weapons back into the basement floor the doorbell rings and you think “Jesus, what now?” Well, it’s Italian gangster Santino D’Antonio (Riccardo Scamarcio, THE BEST OF YOUTH), who helped him escape the business and now is cashing in his favor to drag him back in. Wick would have to get into the Vatican to assassinate Santino’s sister Gianna (Claudia Gerini, THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST). Throughout the movie Wick finds himself backed into corners and all he can do is keep killing his way out of them. And the more killing the more corners. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Chad Stahelski, Claudia Gerini, Common, Darrin Prescott, Derek Kolstad, Franco Nero, Ian McShane, J.J. Perry, John Leguizamo, Keanu Reeves, Lance Reddick, Laurence Fishburne, Peter Serafinowicz, Peter Stormare, Riccardo Scamarcio, Ruby Rose
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 110 Comments »
Wednesday, February 8th, 2017
Let’s face it, I’m stupid to not have seen all the Akira Kurosawa movies. Usually when I see one it becomes my new favorite movie. HIDDEN FORTRESS is my latest favorite movie.
It’s another one with Toshiro Mifune playing a badass warrior, but it starts on two buffoonish peasants, Tahei (Minoru Chiaki) and Matashichi (Kamatari Fujiwara). They’re all dirty and their clothes are torn up and they’re arguing, blaming each other for the shit they’ve just been through. One of them got the bright idea they could make money fighting with the Yamana clan, but they got to the battle too late and were mistaken for the losing Akizuki clan and forced to help bury all the dead bodies. And shortly after this they get taken prisoner again, locked up in the vanquished Akizuki castle and forced to dig for their hidden gold until there’s a riot and they escape.
On the lam they accidentally break a stick that has a piece of gold inside, marked with the Akizuki seal. What the hell? And while they’re checking all the sticks in the area for more gold they run into Mifune. He starts bossing them around without telling them he’s General Makabe Rokurota of the Akizuki clan and that he’s trying to sneak the clan’s gold and their sixteen year old princess Yuki (Misa Uehara) to safety. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Akira Kurosawa, Toshiro Mifune
Posted in Action, Reviews | 9 Comments »
Friday, February 3rd, 2017
CABO BLANCO, or CABOBLANCO, or “Caboblanco – where legends are born…” as it actually says onscreen, is a 1980 kind-of-remake of CASABLANCA starring Charles Bronson. It’s his third collaboration with ST. IVES and WHITE BUFFALO director J. Lee Thompson (THE GUNS OF NAVARONE, CAPE FEAR, CONQUEST OF/BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME, THE EVIL THAT MEN DO, DEATH WISH 4: THE CRACKDOWN), and in my opinion definitely not their best.
I guess the producer’s first choice to star was Paul Newman, who couldn’t do it so he suggested Steve McQueen, who was sick so he suggested Bronson. I guess if you have to have somebody fill in for Humphrey Bogart, it would be one of those guys, and Bronson might be the best for it. He plays the admirably named Giff Hoyt, who can’t return to the U.S. for unspecified reasons and instead runs a fancy hotel bar on the coast of Peru. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Camilla Sparv, Charles Bronson, Denny Miller, Dominique Sanda, Fernando Rey, J. Lee Thompson, Jason Robards, Jerry Goldsmith, sort of remakes
Posted in Action, Reviews | 9 Comments »
