Archive for the ‘Thriller’ Category
Monday, June 8th, 2009
See, this is the type of gold I’m always digging for. This is why I keep browsing and renting weird old movies I don’t know much about. I’m trying to find a movie like HIT!. Last time I rented a Billy Dee Williams movie it was AGENT 00-SOUL, which I’d wanted to see for years only to discover it’s not a serious movie, it’s a “comedy” where he just keeps tripping on things and falling out of things. It makes the worst Leslie Nielsen movie look like the Coen Brothers.
But HIT! is not only a serious movie, it’s revenge-meets-arthouse, almost like POINT BLANK. It’s an ambiguous, slow-burn revenge movie with great performances and character moments and a creepy Lalo Schifrin score. There’s more care put into the buildup and the little moments than into the action movie parts, but they’re good enough for that to be a fair trade.
In the beginning a teenage girl dies from a heroin overdose. Billy Dee plays her father, some kind of CIA agent. He doesn’t talk until 15 minutes into the movie. Before that he just smolders. His boss tries to help him out, tries to send him on a vacation. But he wants to go after the source – not the street pushers, but the top of the pyramid, some guys in Marseille who run a heroin cartel. Of course the agency tells him not to, and of course he does it anyway. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Billy Dee Williams, revenge, Richard Pryor, Sidney J. Furie
Posted in Action, Reviews, Thriller | 30 Comments »
Saturday, May 16th, 2009
THE GLADIATOR is another movie I found on VHS by accident while browsing the video store. It’s a car vigilante TV movie, so I was surprised to find it with the Abel Ferrara movies. Yes, the director of KING OF NEW YORK and BAD LIEUTENANT also did a TV movie starring Ken Wahl and guest starring cheeseball ’80s top 40 DJ Rick Dees as his obnoxious boss. From about ’85 until ’88 Ferrara mostly worked in TV, doing some episodes of MIAMI VICE and CRIME STORY, plus this one in ’86. Seemed like something I should investigate.
Wahl plays Rick Benton, a stoic car mechanic working for Dees’s specialty car business. The only people in his life are his kid brother who he raised (Brian Robbins, director of NORBIT), his Vietnam buddy who works at the junkyard, and a customer he’s starting to date, talk radio host Nancy Allen. He works for rich people but chugs along in the kind of lower middle class existence not usually depicted casually in a TV movie. A couple nice touches I noticed: they eat on paper plates, and they wrap gifts with the Sunday funnies. You ever notice how presents on TV and movies are usually perfectly wrapped with shiny bows and sometimes even lids that just lift off? I could never pull that off. The Sunday funnies is more relatable. Good one Ferrara. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Abel Ferrara, car chases, TV movies, vigilantes
Posted in Action, Drama, Reviews, Thriller | 24 Comments »
Saturday, April 18th, 2009
Yesterday was Roddy Piper’s birthday. I’m celebrating late with the Piper/Billy Blanks picture from 1993, BACK IN ACTION.
Script-wise, I gotta say, this is a half-assed affair. They got the maverick cop (Roddy Piper), the ex-soldier who is back in action on a one man mission of justice (Billy Blanks), standard issue evil druglords, damsel-in-distress sister and also the female reporter love interest always looking for a good story but who ends up trying to help (see also DARKMAN 2, UNIVERSAL SOLDIER). Also some obvious one-liners that I guess I got a laugh from, like when the bad guy thinks (let’s face it, naively) that Piper won’t kill him because of his Miranda rights. Piper stabs him and says “You have the right to remain silent. Forever.” (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Billy Blanks, Roddy Piper
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews, Thriller | 14 Comments »
Tuesday, March 17th, 2009
Nope, this is not a sequel or rebuttal to Walter Hill’s SOUTHERN COMFORT, and it’s not a withering expose of labor unrest at the Southern Comfort liqueur factory. SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT is an hour long documentary about a night of indie wrestling in Alabama made in 2000 by Fred Olen Ray, a director I thought only did no-budget movies with babes and dinosaurs and shit like that. Although much more upbeat than THE WRESTLER or the Jake “The Snake” Roberts portion of BEYOND THE MAT this is that same world, the bonebreaking for small crowds and small pay in high school gyms.
The Iron Sheik is the superstar of the bunch, doing a good job of not seeming depressed that he went from 19,000 fans at Wrestlemania in Madison Square Garden to 400 at the Saks High gymnasium. But the stars are all wrestlers I never heard of before who as far as I can tell have mostly never achieved much more fame than this and in their interviews never imply that they want to. They’re happy working regular small town jobs and then on the weekends putting on a mask and throwing people around. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: David F. Friedman, Fred Olen Ray, Steve Latshaw, The Iron Sheik, wrestling docs
Posted in Documentary, Reviews, Thriller | 1 Comment »
Thursday, March 5th, 2009
James Remar is a New York City cop. Not the kind in a uniform, the cool kind. We know he plays by his own rules because he wakes up in a messy apartment face down next to a pizza box with a couple of uneaten slices still left. Can you believe that? He just let two slices dry out overnight. This is a guy who just doesn’t give a fuck! It’s like the saying goes, “Never face an enemy who does not fear wasting pizza.”
We also know he’s a rugged individualist because he drives a motorcycle, movie code for “he’s a rugged individualist.” In the opening he sees a dude on rollerskates swipe a lady’s purse and he chases him down, driving his motorcycle into a subway car, doing a wheely, using the stairs from the subway entrance as a ramp to jump over some pedestrians, finally grabbing the rollerthief, dragging him at high speed and tossing him into some water. And it’s hard to swim with rollerskates on.
(By the way, I swear I saw this exact same thing happen on CHiPs one time. Were rollerpursesnatchers really a serious problem? I don’t remember.) (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Clay Borris, Daphne Ashbrook, James Remar, Nick Cassavetes, Ted White, Travis McKenna
Posted in Reviews, Thriller | 10 Comments »
Wednesday, February 4th, 2009
TAKEN has finally hit American shores many months after everybody else in the world already saw it and emailed me about it. As reported, it is a Luc Besson-produced version of a Seagal-type scenario: ex–CIA badass’s daughter gets kidnapped in Paris, he goes and gets her back. An old favorite. The hook is that this badass is not played by a Seagal, or even a Statham. It’s Liam Neeson (SCHINDLER’S LIST).
Okay, so admittedly action is not completely new for Neeson. He was a swordsman in both BATMAN BEGINS and PHANTOM MENACE. A long time ago he was Darkman. He even co-starred in a (not very good) Patrick Swayze action picture called NEXT OF KIN. (The one where not-famous-yet Ben Stiller plays a mobster’s douchebag son.) But mostly he’s moved beyond that, and I think most people consider him a Serious Actor. You know – MICHAEL COLLINS, KINSEY, GANGS OF NEW YORK, Spielberg’s choice to play Lincoln. And here he is playing a role that the first Ain’t It Cool review complained could’ve been played by Jean-Claude Van Damme. But of course you and I agree that’s why it’s so cool. We want to see a Van Damme movie but with Liam Neeson. Or how about a Michael Dudikoff with Frank Langella? Or a Bolo Yeung with Daniel Day Lewis? A Cynthia Rothrock with Susan Sarandon? (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Besson productions, Liam Neeson, post-action
Posted in Reviews, Thriller | 50 Comments »
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008
The first time I saw KILL BILL VOLUME 2, when Michael Madsen got chewed out by his boss at the strip club, I thought Who is that guy? Because he had such a presence, he seemed so perfect to play that type of sleazy (but completely justified in this case) boss, but I didn’t think I recognized him from anything. Turns out he was Larry Bishop, son of Joey Bishop. He’s an actor going back to WILD IN THE STREETS and an I DREAM OF JEANNIE episode, and the guy who directed that movie MAD DOG TIME a while back. Well, Tarantino obviously liked him so he helped him to make a biker movie, this time not just as director but as writer/director/producer/star.
Tarantino put his name on the movie as a presenter, hooked Bishop up with Dimension Films, and loaned him the use of Michael Madsen and David Carradine for a while. He also seems to be a big inspiration on the attitude of the movie, which is basically a western on motorcycles with lots of weird non-sequitur shit thrown in. The movie also has some pretty hip marketing, one of the first incidents in modern times of a movie released with a cool illustrated movie poster that remains as the DVD cover. Everyone knows you’re supposed to throw away the poster and put a shitty photoshop collage of the actor’s heads on the DVD. That’s in marketing 101. This one breaks that rule. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: self-indulgence
Posted in Reviews, Thriller | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008
After watching DARK AGE and ROGUE recently I started thinking about other Australian pictures, but without giant crocodiles: MAD MAX, RAZORBACK, CHOPPER, WOLF CREEK. And I thought holy shit (American for “crikey”) I gotta see some more Australiama or whatever it’s called. Actually, I have since learned that a documentary on Australian exploitation cinema played in Austin recently and got all my Ain’t It Cool colleagues excited about “Ozploitation.” I’m not ready to accept that term, that seems pretty forced. How bout if we call it “cinemarang.” Or “cinemaroo.” Or “Australian cinema” would be another good one.
Anyway I decided to watch this one by Richard Franklin, best known in the states for the surprisingly decent PSYCHO II. He did that one because he was obsessed with Hitchcock, studied all his movies, even got him to come speak at his film school. Can you believe that shit? “Good evening kids, I’m Alfred Hitchcock. Questions?” I wonder if he hung out in the dorms at all. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Australian cinema, Everett De Roche, Jamie Lee Curtis, Richard Franklin, Stacy Keach
Posted in Reviews, Thriller | 11 Comments »
Wednesday, October 8th, 2008
Avery (Brian Cox) treats his dog Red like family. He doesn’t talk to him in funny voices or make him wear a dog sweater. But he does apologize to him for making him wait while he gets his things together to go fishing. The movie gets rolling in about scene 2 when three teenagers show up, pretend to make small talk, try to rob him, and then shoot Red.
Going in I really thought this was gonna be the rural version of DEATH WISH 2. Instead of his housekeeper and daughter getting raped it’s his dog getting killed. Instead of creeps infesting L.A. it’s brats in the woods of rural Oregon. Avery tris talking to the boy’s father, but the boy’s father is Tom Sizemore. So that doesn’t work out. He tries to go through the police, through the courts, but there’s not enough evidence and the kids are too connected, so the system fails him. But he knows guns. He’s a veteran. Time for revenge? (read the rest of this shit…)
Posted in Reviews, Thriller | 2 Comments »
Sunday, September 28th, 2008
DARK AGE
In my ongoing tribute to the land of MAD MAX and CHOPPER I have come across another good giant crocodile movie that pre-dates ROGUE by a good 20 years. But this one actually has John Jarrat – the widower Russell in ROGUE, the fuckin maniac in WOLF CREEK – as the park ranger hero.
This one reminds me of RAZORBACK a little, because it reminds me of JAWS a little. The director, Arch Nicholson, was second unit director on RAZORBACK, but his movie is in a more realistic vein, less stylized and exaggerated. The crocodile never runs through the side of a house and steals a baby like the razorback did. The photography is pretty naturalistic, it’s by Andrew Lesnie whose name seems familiar because he did the LORD OF THE RINGS movies, the BABE movies, and I AM LEGEND. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Australian cinema, giant crocodiles, Viggo Mortensen, William Lustig
Posted in Action, Drama, Horror, Reviews, Thriller | 2 Comments »
