Archive for the ‘Action’ Category
Sunday, October 7th, 2012
I meant to see this when it was in theaters in 1988, didn’t get around to it until now. It’s okay. Not worth that long of a wait, but luckily I did other stuff in between.
Treat Williams (THE SUBSTITUTE 2-4) and Joe Piscopo (Saturday Night Live cast, 1980-1984) play two 1980s Movie Cops. Treat is supposed to be the straight laced one, so he wears a suit. Piscopo is the wildman who wears a leather jacket and hits on every woman who appears on camera, because that’s always funny (see also: Jay Leno in COLLISION COURSE). This was after SNL when he got really into bodybuilding, so he also shows off his muscles alot. He’s kind of a cross between a wisecracking Bruce Willis type of character and a crazy Mel Gibson one.
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Tags: action-horror, Darren McGavin, Joe Piscopo, Keye Luke, Mark Goldblatt, Professor Toru Tanaka, Robert Yeoman, Steve Johnson, Treat Williams, Vincent Price
Posted in Action, Horror, Reviews | 50 Comments »
Friday, October 5th, 2012
In a quest for odd action-horror combos I came across this comic booky French movie that kind of seems like their version of a Milla Jovovich vehicle. Although it came out in 2002 it’s not that slick digital type of fake-looking, like ULTRAVIOLET or a RESIDENT EVIL or something. It’s more of a retro-MORTAL KOMBAT type of look with lots of badly composited red cloudy skies, lightning strikes, green fire, etc. But it could use some aggressive KOMBATtty techno music or guitar-and-drums scoring instead of the shitty keyboard-pretends-to-be-orchestra approach.
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Tags: drag queens, French horror, Julien Magnat, Laurent Spielvogel, Olivia Bonamy
Posted in Action, Horror, Reviews | 17 Comments »
Tuesday, September 25th, 2012
CITY ON FIRE, a 1987 Hong Kong crime movie by director Ringo Lam, is a vehicle for Chow Yun Fat’s charm. He’s not a God of Pistols, he’s one of these fuckup characters who loves the ladies but does pretty terrible with them. In a restaurant he argues with two different women, one I thought was his wife and the other his mistress, but that later seems to be wrong. Anyway one of them seems to be leaving him for an older guy who owns the restaurant, so he gets into a confrontation and a brawl.
The cops bring him in for what seems like questioning but is actually a meeting. It turns out he’s an undercover cop, or at least he was, but he doesn’t want to do it anymore. His boss pushes him into it, so he gets a couple guns out of a bowling alley locker and sells them to a gang of jewel thieves.
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Tags: Chow Yun Fat, Ringo Lam
Posted in Action, Crime, Reviews | 37 Comments »
Sunday, September 23rd, 2012
Dreddful. Absolutely dreddful. That means good! I really liked this movie.
It’s a coincidence, but it’s kinda cool and weird how much DREDD is like a sci-fi version of THE RAID. Similar premise: heavily armed but outnumbered police team raid a building controlled by a crimelord, crimelord announces over the intercom that they need to be killed, they have to fight their way up to the top of the building to kill the leader. But since it’s sci-fi the brutality and overkill of the police force is part of a dystopian future, the building (called “Peach Trees”) is 200 stories instead of about 30, and the whole thing is sealed behind blast shields so that nobody can get out. Instead of powerful silat skills our protagonist Judge Dredd (Karl Urban) relies on a badass computerized and voice-activated gun with various forms of bullets, explosives and firebursts.
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Tags: 3D, Alex Garland, dystopian futures, Karl Urban, Lena Headey, Olivia Thirlby, Pete Travis, Wood Harris
Posted in Action, Comic strips/Super heroes, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 195 Comments »
Thursday, September 20th, 2012
In Seattle we have this big music and arts festival every Labor Day weekend called Bumbershoot. This year I was waiting in line for one of the bands that was gonna play when a guy near me was looking at his phone, he says, “Eddie Murphy died!” I couldn’t believe it. It seemed like he was talking to somebody that was with him, then I realized he was by himself, just sharing this shocking news with the crowd. It used to be you go to an all day event like this and you’re off in a separate world, you don’t know until you get home that something blew up or somebody got killed or something. Now everybody knows, word spreads.
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Tags: Allen Garfield, Brigitte Nielsen, Chris Rock, Eddie Murphy, Gilbert Gottfried, Hugh Hefner, John Ashton, Judge Reinhold, Jurgen Prochnow, Larry Ferguson, Ronny Cox, Tony Scott, Warren Skaaren
Posted in Action, Comedy/Laffs, Reviews | 92 Comments »
Tuesday, September 11th, 2012
REVENGE is a 1990 film directed by the late Tony Scott. REVENGE is called REVENGE because it’s based on a novella called Revenge (by Jim Harrison) and because both are partly about revenge. But don’t let the stripped down title lead you to expect a pure revenge tale. Or at least not one that’s in a hurry to get to the revenge part.
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Tags: Anthony Quinn, Jim Harrison, John Leguizamo, Kevin Costner, Madeleine Stowe, Miguel Ferrer, revenge, Sally Kirkland, Tomas Milian, Tony Scott
Posted in Action, Reviews, Romance | 35 Comments »
Thursday, September 6th, 2012
Wait a minute, you’re telling me that a Tsui Hark/Jet Li movie is showing in 3D Imax in my town? Shit, that’s something I gotta experience, something I gotta support. I managed to squeak it in on the next-to-last day of the 2 week limited engagement, so I’m sorry that I failed to give some of you a heads up.
Apparently this is a remake of DRAGON GATE INN (1966) which was already remade as NEW DRAGON GATE INN/DRAGON INN (1992), neither of which I’ve seen. It is not a remake of DRAGON TIGER GATE, which I have seen. Donnie Yen was offered the lead in this, but he turned it down because he was already in the ’92 version and thought that would be weird to do another one. Or maybe he was confusing it with DRAGON TIGER GATE and didn’t want to revisit the goofy hair style he had in that.
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Tags: 3D, Gordon Liu, Imax, Jet Li, Tsui Hark, wuxia
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 19 Comments »
Thursday, August 30th, 2012
TOUGHER THAN LEATHER is a unique specimen – a time capsule movie vehicle for a musical act at their height, but a legit act with street credibility that they did not lose by being in a movie. This is not the Fat Boys or Meth and Red making a comedy. It’s Run DMC in a gritty action movie made independently by the same people they made their records with. Maybe a good comparison would be Isaac Hayes in TRUCK TURNER or Jimmy Cliff in THE HARDER THEY COME, except they weren’t playing themselves.
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Tags: Beastie Boys, Flavor Flav, hip hop, Richard Edson, Rick Rubin, Run DMC, Slick Rick
Posted in Action, Music, Reviews | 19 Comments »
Tuesday, August 28th, 2012
Researching my review for CRYING FREEMAN I found out there was this five-years-older adaptation of the same comic. This one’s actually a Hong Kong action movie for real, but it’s not the moody John Woo type that influenced the 1995 version. This is the frenetic wire-fu style that was also big at that time.
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Tags: assassins, Clarence Fok, Dean Shek, Hong Kong action, Kazuo Koike, Maggie Cheung, Samuel Hui
Posted in Action, Comic strips/Super heroes, Martial Arts, Reviews | 25 Comments »
Monday, August 27th, 2012
CRYING FREEMAN (1995) is a pretty cool movie that I went back to hoping it would be better than I realized before. I did a brief write-up of it in a column years ago, but I’m not gonna link to it right now because most of the column is angry rants about what was going on in the news at the time and it makes me cringe. Based on a Japanese comic book (or “Japomic Book”) by Kazuo Koike, the same writer as Lone Wolf and Cub, CRYING FREEMAN is a moody, serious assassin movie with Yakuza, mind control, a witch, romance and tragedy. It takes place in 4 different countries (U.S., Canada, China, Japan) with the most convincing, of course, being the part that takes place in Vancouver, B.C.
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Tags: assassins, Byron Mann, Canadian, Christophe Gans, Julie Condra, Kazuo Koike, Mako, Mark Dacascos, Rae Dawn Chong, Roger Avary, Tcheky Karyo
Posted in Action, Comic strips/Super heroes, Reviews | 26 Comments »
