Archive for the ‘Action’ Category
Wednesday, March 5th, 2014
From ONE FALSE MOVE and DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS, Carl Franklin seems like a pretty serious, respectable type director even though he’s working in the mystery genre. So what the hell was he doing in 1989 directing EYE OF THE EAGLE II: INSIDE THE ENEMY, a sequel to a Cirio H. Santiago Vietnam shootemup? Well, he was trying to do what a pretty serious, respectable type director would do with something like that.
Like most of the other black directors I’ve been writing about lately Franklin started out as an actor. He was in FIVE ON THE BLACK HAND SIDE and an episode of The Streets of San Francisco and shit like that. His first feature as a director was NOWHERE TO RUN (also from ’89), a drama that stars Jason Priestley but also has Sonny Carl Davis from THE WHOLE SHOOTIN’ MATCH in it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Carl Franklin, Cirio H. Santiago, Todd Field
Posted in Action, Reviews, War | 10 Comments »
Wednesday, February 26th, 2014
“Their first mistake was letting him in. Their worst mistake was letting him out.”
A senator’s polls say he needs more of “the Negro vote” to win re-election, so his strategist suggests accusing the CIA of discriminatory hiring policies. Cut to the CIA considering hundreds of black men as candidates and narrowing them down to 10 men in their training course.
They teach them to shoot, car bomb, collapse bridges, sky dive, scuba dive, judo, etc. But you only need one token to play Ms. Pac-Man so only one of these guys gets through: the guy who doesn’t make any friends, who “has a habit of fading into the background.” So much so that you barely even notice him in these early scenes. Some other guy seems like he’s the main character. But this is the guy. His name is Freeman and he’s played by Lawrence Cook, who also had parts in TROUBLE MAN, COLORS and POSSE. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: blaxploitation, Herbie Hancock, Ivan Dixon, J.A. Preston, Lawrence Cook, Michael Kahn
Posted in Action, Reviews | 15 Comments »
Tuesday, February 18th, 2014
In BATTLE OF THE DAMNED, Dolph Lundgren fights zombies, and I’ll give it this: it’s way better than AGAINST THE DARK, the one where Steven Seagal fights vampires. There are two main reasons for this:
1) AGAINST THE DARK is Seagal’s worst movie ever
2) BATTLE OF THE DAMNED also has robots
It’s almost the same story: group of mercenaries led by beloved action icon of the ’80s and ’90s (in this case Dolph) patrols through a quarantine zone where a plague turns everybody into violent monsters (in this case running zombies instead of vampires) while a group of bland survivors walks slowly and talks about boring shit in a large building. They kill a bunch of the monsters, splattering that CGI blood that dissolves in the air, and there is some running around and stuff. Seagal used a sword, Dolph doesn’t, but he does meet a guy named Elvis (Jen Kuo Sung of NO RETREAT, NO SURRENDER 3 and BLOODMOON) who does. And he knows the military plan to bomb the whole area to stop the virus so he bands together with the survivors he meets and they try to get out of there before it’s too late. The end. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Christopher Hatton, David Field, Dolph Lundgren, DTV, Jen Kuo Sung, Lydia Look, Matt Doran, Melanie Zanetti, robots, zombies
Posted in Action, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 26 Comments »
Sunday, February 16th, 2014
Many remakes, even good ones, remove or weaken the meaning or subtext of the originals. The classic example is Zack Snyder’s DAWN OF THE DEAD (by this same production company, Strike Entertainment), which is a fun action movie version of Romero’s masterpiece, but doesn’t have much time for the questions about our voluntary enslavement to consumerism and materialism. How do we keep our humanity in the face of this apocalypse? Did we have it in the first place? Who gives a shit. Zombies!
Another one is LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT. A surprisingly good remake, in many ways more artful than the original, but with its last act tweaks and audience-pleasing ending it completely ditches the thing that makes Wes Craven’s version worth stomaching: its angry illustration of the dehumanizing effect that revenge has on those who commit it. According to the last scene of the remake fuck all that, sadistic revenge is funny and cool.
ROBOCOP 2014’s goals and tone are very different from Mr. Verhoeven’s 1987 classic, but it’s the rare remake that’s arguably even more directly political than the movie it’s based on. Most would say, and I agree, that Verhoeven’s (or really Neumeier and Miner’s) message about privatization and corporate greed is more powerful because of its hilarious bluntness. It was the sarcastic cop movie that Lee Iacoca and Ronald Reagan’s America was asking for, a movie where amoral corporate assholes run the police force for profit, turn a dead body into a cyborg cop, then unleash him to do high caliber battle with savage DEATH WISH style supercreeps and get mixed up in a feud within the company, reconnect with his old self and turn on them. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Abbie Cornish, Ed Neumeier, Gary Oldman, good remakes, Jackie Earle Haley, Jennifer Ehle, Joel Kinnaman, Jose Padilha, Joshua Zetumer, Michael K. Williams, Michael Keaton, Michael Miner, remakes, robots, Samuel L. Jackson
Posted in Action, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 91 Comments »
Sunday, February 9th, 2014
It would be cool if Ron Van Clief was to Lee Van Clief as Bruce Li was to Bruce Lee, but actually he’s just another martial artist who capitalized on the success of ENTER THE DRAGON by starring in a bunch of low budget non-period-piece kung fu movies. The unique thing is that Van Clief wasn’t a Bruce Lee clone, he was more following in the footsteps of Jim Kelly.
(Now where’s the guy who got a bunch of movies ’cause he looked like John Saxon?)
Like Bruce Lee’s greatest victim, Chuck Norris, Van Clief had made his name in competitive martial arts and ran many schools before finding his way into movies. The year after ENTER THE DRAGON he starred in his first movie, and it was called BLACK DRAGON. It’s a nice idea because even if we still had the original Dragon we still might enjoy experiencing a Black Dragon. So he doesn’t so much have to pass as a worthy replacement. It’s a different thing. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bruceploitation, Charles Bonet, Ron Van Clief, UFC
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 5 Comments »
Sunday, February 2nd, 2014
The Super Bowl is on Sunday. I noticed because here in Seattle people are losing their shit. Every single person I’ve run into in the last month has been a life long die hard dyed in the wool cradle to the grave never forget Seahawk maniac, judging by their shirts, hats, coats and conversations. At the grocery stores they have “12th Man” cupcakes, cakes, microbrews, wines, they have “Beast Cut” deals on meat, that type of shit. The local news had a story about a guy who “created an internet sensation” by putting a jersey on his cat. There’s more blue and green flying than there were flags after 9-11, and an hour doesn’t go by outside of my apartment without people yelling stupid chants at each other, or at nobody. (In fact I hear some right now.)
Yesterday a homeless drunk with an eyepatch gave me a fist bump because “yeeaaaah, that’s the look. That’s the look of a Seahawk,” then told me about “the best defense in the league” and something something Peyton Manning. Basically, these crazy fuckers are gonna burn my building down if I don’t try to exploit, or I mean support the team in some ridiculous way. But I’m sorry friends, I am an honest individual, I cannot tell a lie, I just can’t fake something like being excited that we finally have a local men’s team doing well at something. It’s not a sport I normally watch and it would be real fuckin covenient to start now, wouldn’t it? So the best I can offer is to review 2001’s MACH 2 starring the greatest Seahawk of all time (movie-acting-wise), Brian Bosworth.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andrew Stevens, Brian Bosworth, Charles Cyphers, Cliff Robertson, David Hedison, Die Hard on a ____, football, Fred Olen Ray, Michael Dorn, Shannon Whirry, Steve Latshaw
Posted in Action, Reviews | 56 Comments »
Wednesday, January 29th, 2014
ROYAL WARRIORS is a pretty good 1986 Michelle Yeoh vehicle directed by David Chung (cinematographer of ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINA) with action choreography by Hoi Mang (YES, MADAM!, NO RETREAT NO SURRENDER).
Michelle, called Michelle Khan at the time, plays Michelle Yip, who at the beginning is visiting Japan and enjoying one of those things where Japanese youths dress up rockabilly style and dance in the street. She happens to be in the way watching a guy play barrels as drums when some gangsters come by chasing a fleeing kid. So when she sees what’s happening she goes after them, stickfighting, climbing on statues and kung fu-ing them before she whips out her badge and we learn that she’s a Hong Kong cop. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: David Chung, Hiroyuki Sanada, Hong Kong action, Michael Wong, Michelle Yeoh
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 42 Comments »
Monday, January 27th, 2014
ANGEL III: THE FINAL CHAPTER, the third and last of the four ANGEL movies, finds Molly “Angel” Stewart far from her roots. She is no longer played by Donna Wilkes or Betsy Russell, now she’s played by Mitzi Kapture (Silk Stalkings, Baywatch, The Young & the Restless). She’s not a prostitute or a lawyer or runner anymore, now she’s a photographer helping out the police (we see her go along on a gambling bust to take pictures of people running away) and in her spare time trying to work on a photography book about street kids. Most drastic of all she doesn’t live in Hollywood anymore, she lives in New York. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Emile Beaucard, final chapters, Kin Shriner, Mark Blankfield, Maud Adams, Mitzi Kapture, Richard Roundtree, Tawny Fere, Tom DeSimone
Posted in Action, Crime, Reviews | 25 Comments »
Thursday, January 23rd, 2014
AVENGING ANGEL takes place 4 years after ANGEL. Lieutenant Andrews (now played by Robert F. Lyons) has become Angel (now played by Betsy Russell from DELTA HEAT and SAW III-VII)’s guardian and paid her way to leave the streets of Hollywood for a college somewhere a few hours away, where she’s studying law and excelling at track and field. She goes by Molly again and has a preppie boyfriend named Terry (Richard DeHaven, NIGHT OF THE CREEPS) who doesn’t know about her past as a gun-toting teenage prostitute.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Barry Pearl, Betsy Russell, Ossie Davis, revenge, Richard DeHaven, Robert F. Lyons, Robert Vincent O'Neill, Rory Calhoun, Steven M. Porter, Susan Tyrrell
Posted in Action, Crime, Reviews | 12 Comments »
Monday, January 13th, 2014
LETHAL WEAPON 4 is a family affair. In part 1 we just had suicidal widower Riggs becoming friends with ol’ Murtaugh and his family. We still have them, but also their friend Leo (added in part 2) and Riggs’s girlfriend Lorna (added in part 3) who now he’s thinking about marrying and they live together so now he has two trailers next to each other instead of the one. And he still has his dog from part 1 plus the dog guard he stole from the bad guys and rehabilitated in part 3. And Lorna is pregnant and Murtaugh’s daughter Rianne is also pregnant and also Chris Rock is in this one and also a Chinese family called the Hongs. There’s even four new writers on this one. The cast just keeps getting bigger, like how in a long running sitcom like The Cosby Show or Roseanne they have a bunch of new grandkids and spouses and shit added on by the end.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Danny Glover, Jet Li, Joe Pesci, Joel Silver, Mel Gibson, Renee Russo, Richard Donner
Posted in Action, Reviews | 163 Comments »
