“There’s a lot of priceless stuff in this movie, like where we have cars flying between an obelisk. Why they allowed me to have flying cars by an obelisk that’s 800 years old, I don’t know.” —Michael Bay
By popular demand I watched 6 UNDERGROUND, Michael Bay’s mysteriously straight-to-Netflix movie starring Ryan Reynolds (R.I.P.D.). Not that I was against watching it when it came out in December, but I had other shit to do, and you know how it is without a theatrical window – less urgency.
I say “mysterious” because I really couldn’t figure out why Bay – who has spent his entire career with pretty much no other goal but to make the biggest, loudest, fuck-you-est, blockbuster spectacles he can manage – would be willing to make a DTV movie. The explanations I heard were not convincing:
1. “For the money.” I just cannot believe that Bay needs more money than a studio will pay him
2. “They’ll let him do what he wants.” Having seen TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT I also cannot believe that anyone ever says “no” to him.
But now that I’ve seen it I guess I sort of get it. Other than an opening that earned a seizure warning – Bay intentionally trying to be disorienting is a hell of a thing – his messy action plays well on the small screen, and it’s nice to see him applying his anti-social tendencies to R-rated action again. As long as he for some reason doesn’t mind skipping theaters, and Netflix continues to have a magic money tree to dump into expensive things that nobody pays extra to see, they make a good team. (read the rest of this shit…)
Have you ever noticed what a hell of year 1987 was for action movies? Not only did it give us several stone cold unimpeachable classics, but most of them have a distinct, super-charged, roided out, larger-than-life 1987ness to them that could only really happen at that moment on the verge of ’80s excess sugar crash, between everybody wanting to be RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II and everybody wanting to be 
When we last saw Australian writer/actor/director Leigh Whannell two years ago, he had graduated from James Wan’s main writer (
A while back somebody asked me if I was gonna review FROZEN II. I’m sure they lost interest by now, but I work on my own schedule. I didn’t review the first FROZEN (unless you count 
IN FABRIC is a unique little movie – a horror film that’s not exactly serious, but not adverse to making its absurd premise work; a comedy too, but dry as freshly folded laundry. It’s primarily an exercise in style, a period piece exalting the golden era of Italian horror with its slender beauties and very good retro score – more proggy than the synthy stuff everybody is doing now – by somebody called “Cavern of Anti-Matter.” It fetishizes retail fashion, taking place in and around the women’s department at a ritzy London department store, frequently featuring montages of (and a nightmare about) catalog models, having its characters repeatedly make small talk about “the sales,” and whether each other found anything good to buy. And of course mannequins. Lots of mannequins the look like people and people that look like mannequins.
BALLISTIC (no relation to 
The star is Marjean Holden (
COLOR OF OUTER SPACE is last year’s comeback film for Richard Stanley, known for not directing 
21 BRIDGES is a police thriller with some action. It reminds me of the kind of stuff studios made in the ‘90s, when maybe it would’ve starred Denzel or Wesley Snipes or maybe Samuel L. Jackson if he’d been offered it during that window when he could be the main character and starred in 
TRUE VENGEANCE is a 1997 Daniel Bernhardt movie that I bought specifically because it was written by Kurt Johnstad. I think I was looking him up because he wrote 
Burt Reynolds is Sharky, sometimes just “Shark.” I think it’s his last name. He’s an undercover cop, seemingly beloved on the force, but he gets into trouble when a drug bust turns into a public transportation shootout after this dipshit Smiley (Darryl Hickman, THE GRAPES OF WRATH, voice of “Pac-Junior” on the Pac-Man cartoon) drives up to say hello and blows his cover. Everybody thinks it’s bullshit and calls Smiley a fuckin asshole as they whisk Sharky off to his new job in the vice squad. There’s a great bit about how that department is located in the basement and his old partner is only willing to walk him halfway down the stairs.
