Archive for the ‘Action’ Category
Wednesday, April 18th, 2012
Isaac Florentine’s third movie (after FAREWELL TERMINATOR and DESERT KICKBOXER) is a western starring Olivier Gruner as Joseph Charlegrand, a Frenchman trailing somebody through the American west. The box claims it’s a true story, but the internet disagrees.
In the grand spaghetti tradition, Charlegrand is a mysterious stranger wandering through the desert on his horse. Some cowboy assholes knock him off his horse and he drops his gun, so he busts out the kickboxing. They know all about punching, of course, but this shit blows their minds. It’s like he came down from space. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Donald Gibb, Isaac Florentine, James Brolin, Marc Singer, martial arts western, Olivier Gruner, R. Lee Ermey, savate
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews, Western | 24 Comments »
Tuesday, April 10th, 2012
“Ron, now you know, I’m a great low budget filmmaker now. So when we bring somethin it’s got to be devastatin. I don’t want no bullshit.” –DOLEMITE EXPLOSION director Ron Hall, recounting what Rudy Ray Moore would always say to him
About a year and a half ago Xenon Pictures released the Dolemite Total Experience box set. I thought it was the same as the old box set I already had, except with more compact packaging and a better cover. I didn’t realize that it included Rudy Ray Moore’s unreleased final film, THE DOLEMITE EXPLOSION.
When I put the DVD in my first thought was they didn’t make this shit anamorphic? This is 2012! But in retrospect even the shitty transfer fits the home-made, do-what-you-can, sell-it-out-of-your-trunk ghetto tradition of Rudy Ray’s entire career.
It was hard for the fringe icons of the ’70s to recapture the magic even in the ’80s or ’90s. There was that SUPERFLY RETURNS movie with a different actor playing Priest for the hip hop age. There was the last Curtis Mayfield album with beautiful songs interrupted by terrible rapping, there were pretty good George Clinton albums trying a little too hard to cram in guest appearances by Ice Cube, there were attempts to remake DOLEMITE as a studio movie starring LL Cool J. Always trying to use what’s popular at that moment to try to legitimize the O.G. shit for the kids. Sometimes it’s okay, but it’s never a home run. It’s never devastatin. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: blaxploitation, Rudy Ray Moore
Posted in Action, Comedy/Laffs, Reviews | 19 Comments »
Monday, April 9th, 2012
I’m kind of interested in this Kurt Wimmer guy. My favorite movie by him is before he made it big, the first of his three directorial works so far, ONE TOUGH BASTARD a.k.a. ONE MAN’S JUSTICE (1996) starring Brian Bosworth and MC Hammer. And I just discovered that his first writing credit was DOUBLE TROUBLE starring the Barbarian Brothers. But since then he’s had some success in much bigger, studio-backed b-movies: he wrote LAW ABIDING CITIZEN, SALT and the remake of TOTAL RECALL. He also wrote the remake of THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR, which I liked.
But as a writer/director his best known movie is EQUILIBRIUM (2002), that sort of asinine dystopian one where Christian Bale rebels against A World Where Love Is Against The Law because they try to make him kill a puppy. ULTRAVIOLET (2006) is Wimmer’s only directing job since then, and his biggest budget one. I heard it was kind of dumb fun, so I rented it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Cameron Bright, Kurt Wimmer, Milla Jovovich, Nick Chinlund, vampires, William Fichtner
Posted in Action, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 67 Comments »
Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012
You probly don’t need me to tell you that THE RAID is the new action movie phenomenon with a big buzz coming off multiple film festival conquests and a kickass trailer that made it a must-see for those of us into this type of shit. Here in the U.S. it’s in a slowly widening release (we got it in Seattle this week) under the dumb title THE RAID: REDEMPTION. The subtitle has no relation to the movie, so in my opinion it’s just called THE RAID. The THE REDEMPTION is silent.
THE RAID is from the team that debuted with a more traditional martial arts movie that I really dug, MERANTAU. It’s the Indonesian star and choreographer Iko Uwais and Welsh director Gareth Evans. Uwais is a master of the Indonesian martial art Silat, but here he’s playing a cop so he’s also a master of shooting a whole bunch of people in the head. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Doni Alamsyah, Gareth Evans, Iko Uwais, Indonesia, Silat, Yayan Ruhian
Posted in Action, Reviews | 337 Comments »
Sunday, March 25th, 2012
I found this DVD called MOTORCYCLE GANG, starring Carla Gugino and Jake Busey, directed by John Milius. That’s gotta be a TV movie, right? Yes, upon closer inspection I figured out it was part of the Rebel Highway series that Showtime did in 1994.
Rebel Highway was what happened when producers Lou Arkoff (son of Samuel Z.) and Debra Hill (one-time producing partner of John Carpenter) put together a group of ten directors and let them choose titles from the American International Pictures library of ’50s drive-in movies. They could remake it or just use the title if they wanted. They got low budgets and short shooting schedules, but apparently they were given final cut and encouraged to make them sleazy. So it was alot like the original AIP. Some of the directors included John McNaughton, Joe Dante and William Friedkin. The only one I’d seen before this was ROADRACERS, which was Robert Rodriguez’s practice movie between EL MARIACHI and DESPERADO. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: bikers, Carla Gugino, Debra Hill, Gerald McRaney, Jake Busey, John Milius, made-for-cable-movies, Rebel Highway
Posted in Action, Reviews | 13 Comments »
Tuesday, March 6th, 2012
BOUNTY HUNTERS is a low-rent but likable b-or-maybe-c-movie that is the movie debut of Trish Stratus. I didn’t know who that was to be honest, but she was the 7-time Women’s WWE Champion, which it turns out is a thing they have. Stratus plays a bail enforcement agent named Jules who, along with her boss/special friend Ridley (Frank J. Zupancic) and wiseass partner Chase (Boomer Philips) get into some trouble when they make an unethical choice while picking up a bail jumper.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Actionfest, bounty hunters, DTV, Trish Stratus
Posted in Action, Reviews | 35 Comments »
Tuesday, March 6th, 2012
“You killed him?”
“Technically it was the explosion that killed him.”
In his latest, RECOIL, Steve Austin plays a little bit darker version of his usual screen persona. A little Stone Colder. He’s still an ex-cop who knows how to beat the shit out of people, still a stranger drifting into a small town and getting into trouble with the local criminals, still a scary-looking regular working man with a no bullshit attitude and an inherent sense of decency, but at least at the beginning he’s more of a Terminator than usual. He drives into Hope, WA in his black 1968 Plymouth GTX with 12 score marks burnt into his arm, apparently representing the number of killers and rapists he’s executed in his travels. He’s way ahead of the FBI, who want to put “24 hour surveillance” on a child killer before they figure out Stone Cold already “made abstract art out of him” 2 days ago. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Danny Trejo, DTV, Keith Jardine, Noel Gugliemi, Serinda Swan, Stone Cold Steve Austin, vigilantes
Posted in Action, Reviews | 16 Comments »
Monday, March 5th, 2012
I never knew about HEAT until I read that Brian DePalma’s doing a new version with Jason Statham. [UPDATE FROM THE FUTURE: DePalma didn’t end up directing but it was pretty good and called WILD CARD.] It started as a book by William Goldman, who also wrote both movie versions. This one stars Burt Reynolds (with mustache) as a likable Vegas low-life-for-hire. We don’t really get an upfront explanation of who he is or where he comes from, but over time we learn that he dreams of moving to Venice, he’s a familiar face to organized crime, he has been extensively profiled in Soldier of Fortune, he’s a gambling addict, and he’s an expert in the use of edged weapons. So much so that the only reason another character can think of for him to use a gun is because nobody would ever believe it was him. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Burt Reynolds, Diane Scarwid, Dick Richards, Howard Hesseman, Karen Young, Peter MacNicol, William Goldman
Posted in Action, Reviews | 33 Comments »
Friday, March 2nd, 2012
ACT OF VALOR takes the covert-military-mission subgenre that we know so well from the works of Cannon and Nu-Image and puts a new spin on it: it’s a special ops procedural. Directed by 2005 Baja 500 winner Mike “Mouse” McCoy and stuntman/documentary editor Scott Waugh (together known as commercial directors “The Bandito Brothers”), it combines the old “elite team of warriors have to stop a mad bomber” formula with sort of a Soderberghian approach, building the movie around non-actors and taking advantage of their real life skills and unpolished presence. Except for the abducted CIA asset they have to rescue (Roselyn Sanchez from RUSH HOUR 2) the heroes are all played by actual Navy SEALs. “Active duty,” the ads and press releases like to say, so their last names are left off the credits.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Navy SEALs, Roselyn Sanchez, valor
Posted in Action, Reviews | 40 Comments »
Thursday, March 1st, 2012
After I saw MANDRILL I was looking at Marko Zaror’s filmography and realized there was one I hadn’t noticed before, a starring vehicle that he did in Mexico instead of his native Chile. IMDB lists it as a 2009 release, after KILTRO and MIRAGEMAN, but from the looks of it I’m pretty sure he filmed it before those (it seems to have played a Mexican film festival in 2007, and the trailer says “introducing the Latin Dragon Marko Zaror”). It’s credited to his Mandrill Films and Zaror Brothers companies, but directed by one-timer Peter Van Lengen instead of his better known partner Ernesto Diaz Espinoza. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Marko Zaror
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 2 Comments »
