"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Train to Busan

Most of the great zombie movies are not as much about zombies as about people and what they do when they band together and try to survive. This is the case with TRAIN TO BUSAN, last year’s South Korean smash hit about the passengers on a train during a sudden ghoulification outbreak.

It centers on this dude Seok-Woo (Gong Yoo, THE SUSPECT) who is kinda like John McClane in that he’s fucked things up with his family because of his work and you kinda feel sorry for him and know he wants to fix things even though to be honest he shoulda known better. But he’s unlike McClane in that he’s a handsome well-dressed fund manager guy. Totally different color of collar. Come to think of it he literally had a white collar because I noticed the tall collar on his shirt looked cool.

Anyway he’s got a bunch of shit going on at work but he reluctantly agrees to bring his young daughter Su-an (Kim Su-an) on the train to Busan to see her mother, because it’s her birthday and she kept threatening to go by herself and then he really blew it when trying to buy her a good present. (read the rest of this shit…)

March 21st, 2017 | 10 Comments »

Manhunter

Michael Mann feature #4 is MANHUNTER. Instead of a moody portrait of a thief like in THIEF he does one of a profiler trying to identify a serial killer. This is of course Mann’s adaptation of Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon, the pre-SILENCE OF THE LAMBS story of a guy chasing a killer called “The Tooth Fairy” after having caught Hannibal Lecktor (that’s how they spell it when he’s played by Brian Cox). William Petersen (THE SKULLS) plays Will Graham, who FBI agent Jack Crawford (Dennis Farina, CODE OF SILENCE) nudges into the investigation by showing him some crime scene photos and making him feel bad. That was a pretty shitty thing to do because Will is just starting to get his life back together after getting inside the mind of Lecktor also got him inside the rooms of a mental hospital.

“You’re supposed to be his friend. Why didn’t you leave him alone?” Will’s wife Molly (Kim Greist, C.H.U.D.) asks resignedly. (read the rest of this shit…)

March 20th, 2017 | 154 Comments »

Silk II

Detective Jenny “Silk” Sleighton, the famous character created by Claudine St. James, is back three years later, keeping the streets of Honolulu safe once again. Except this time they don’t credit Claudine St. James, supporting my theory that there is no such person as Claudine St. James and they just put that credit on the first one to make the character seem extra pulpy. (And it worked.)

This time Silk is played by Penthouse Pet Monique Gabrielle (CHAINED HEAT, EMMANUELLE 5, DEATHSTALKER II). She really doesn’t seem like the same character without Cec Verrell’s quirky fashion and bad girl vibe, but Gabrielle’s version is very likable in a different way. She sounds a little too nice to pull off some of the tough talk, but she’s good at making the facial expressions while ducking in and out of corners to fire/dodge bullets.

She has a much older partner/best friend named Chris Meadows (Bon Vibar, CAGED HEAT II: STRIPPED OF FREEDOM) who is celebrating his impending retirement, and you know what that means. The funny thing is he’s killed because of an old Yakuza debt, so the retirement is really unrelated, it still would’ve happened if he’d left the danger behind years ago. (read the rest of this shit…)

March 16th, 2017 | 10 Comments »

Blackbelt II: Fatal Force

BLACKBELT II: FATAL FORCE is pretty different from part 1. It has the same producers (Roger Corman and Cirio H. Santiago), and continues the tradition of listing championship titles on the credits, but it doesn’t have the same characters or any story connection or seem like the same type of movie or same level of quality. Also, according to IMDb, it came out three years before part 1. Huh.

This one starts during the Vietnam War, with a very serious narrator telling us stats about the war and MIAs over generic jungle battle scenes. After a bunch of machine gun fire and explosions the American helicopters take off, leaving three soldiers behind.

Now in LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA some beat cops stumble across a night time warehouse arms deal and it turns into a big shootout. It took me almost 10 minutes into the movie to figure which one was gonna be the main character (because nobody seems like an obvious blackbelt) but it’s a cop with the enviable name Brad Spyder (“Blake Bahner – W.K.F. World Kickboxing Champion”) who chases one of the escaping criminals to the top of a building and has a long fight with him, but is horrified when he accidentally kicks him off the roof. He yells “NO!” and catches his hand, but then drops him. The guy’s dad is mad so he shoots Spyder’s partner Lee Stokes (Ronald William Lawrence. (read the rest of this shit…)

March 15th, 2017 | 12 Comments »

Silk

“Look Silk, I know it’s gonna be hard to recognize these cold cuts, but that’s your scag dealer, minus one ear.”

Oh Silk, you’re one of the good ones. Maybe America’s relationship with law enforcement wouldn’t be so complicated if more of them were like you, with your sense of honor and style. In Cirio Santiago’s 1986 police story, Cec Verrell (HELL COMES TO FROGTOWN) stars as Jenny “Silk” Sleighton, a Honolulu police detective with commanding style and a worshipful theme song.

“She ain’t the usual cop that hangs around,” the song informs us. “Don’t you push your luck too far / Silk’s gonna get you no matter where you are / You’ll never get away / from Silk! /yowww!/ [guitar solo]”

She says they call her Silk “because I’m so fuckin smoooothhh.” The movie itself does not go down as smoothly as its lead character, or its theme song, or its badass movie poster that inspired me to rent it. But of the things in life that I regret, watching this is low on the list. (read the rest of this shit…)

March 14th, 2017 | 11 Comments »

Blackbelt

a.k.a. KICKBOXER COP

In my experience, a good Don “The Dragon” Wilson vehicle is one where he goes routinely through standard action formulas, provides his kicking expertise and likable personality, and the filmatists throw on just enough flair to make it stand out from the pack a little. In this one that flair comes in the form of the weirdo villain played by Matthias Hues, the 6′ 5″ German-born martial artist best known as the evil alien in Craig Baxley’s I COME IN PEACE.

Hues plays John Sweet, who when we first see him is about to have a romantic encounter with a woman (Mia Ruiz, WILD AT HEART) in a hotel. He seems like he’s leaving to get a bottle of champagne or something, and she hums to herself and strips while she waits. But he knocks on the door of a nearby room where some criminals are meeting, and he kills them all with his bare hands.

Then he goes back to the room like nothing happened. I thought he was a rival gangster or vigilante but then he murders this poor woman (who turns out to be a prostitute, despite her enthusiasm) and cuts off her ring finger.

We meet our hero Jack Dillon (Don “The Dragon” Wilson) as the opposite of a guy killing a prostitute: he’s a guy beating up a pimp. “The broken nose is for the girl. The vasectomy’s free.” And he brings one of the pimp’s stable back to her mother. Dillon is not for-hire, though. He refuses payment because “I don’t charge to take out the garbage.” Or, I assume, to unload the dishwasher. (read the rest of this shit…)

March 13th, 2017 | 8 Comments »

Atomic Blonde trailer

I mean honestly, I didn’t need any more information after the fight at the beginning. But yes, this is from the co-director of JOHN WICK. It’s based on a graphic novel, adapted by Kurt Johnstad, who I think did a good job on the 300 movies. And kudos for noting Charlize’s Academy Award after showing her kick a dude down some stairs. I got high hopes.

March 10th, 2017 | 54 Comments »

Lawnmower Man 2: Jobe’s War

based on characters NOT created by Stephen King

LAWNMOWER MAN 2: JOBE’S WAR (theatrical title: LAWNMOWER MAN 2: BEYOND CYBERSPACE) is a weird sequel to a weird movie. Part 1, of course you remember since it is one of the most cherished and analyzed stories of all time and one of the primary pillars of our culture, is about a mentally challenged landscaper named Jobe (Jeff Fahey) who through virtual reality programs and smart pills becomes a mad telepathic super-genius who kills a bunch of people by controlling a lawnmower with his mind and then tries to live in computers but Pierce Brosnan blows up his lab. Part 2 picks up with stock footage of the explosion and reveals that Jobe survived all burnt up. When he heals he’s a bald Matt Frewer, who does not waste time pretending like they didn’t hire him because he already played a person who lived inside a computer world. He seems to use craziness as an excuse to act totally different in different scenes, but there are definitely parts where he’s mugging and quipping exactly like Max Headroom.

Part 1 took place at “the turn of the millennium.” Part 2 takes place in “Los Angeles – the Future,” a BLADE RUNNER type city of skyscrapers, monorails, futuristic vehicles I assume are left over from other sci-fi productions, fire barrels, steam, sparks and outdoor TVs. But Austin O’Brien (LAST ACTION HERO) returns as Peter, and he’s four years older, so that means this is around 2004. The futuristic year that SHREK 2 came out.

I mean, this is a real dystopia though because there are NO lawns in this movie.

(read the rest of this shit…)

March 9th, 2017 | 25 Comments »

Josie and the Pussycats

Before Riverdale, before the Marvel Cinematic Universe, before Christopher Nolan Batman, before 9-11 even, there was a different type of comic book movie: JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS. Inspired by the Archie comic book and Hanna-Barbera cartoon, writer/directors Harry Elfont & Deborah Kaplan told a goofy version of the little-rock-‘n-roll-band-tested-by-overnight-superstardom story.

Actually maybe we should forget about comics and consider this timeline: it was a year before American Idol started. The Spice Girls had packed it up the year before. NSYNC and Backstreet Boys were still popular. The movie seems to offer the Pussycats as a refreshing alternative for teenage girls to obsess over instead of boy bands, but it should be noted that Destiny’s Child, Alicia Keys, Jennifer Lopez, Janet Jackson, Brandy, Madonna, Mary J. Blige, Pink, and Aaliyah (plus Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson) all had hits that year. But I guess the Pussycats do stand out by playing instruments. Their songs are kind of sassy pop punk, not good in my opinion but not as intolerable as some in-movie music. (read the rest of this shit…)

March 8th, 2017 | 22 Comments »

Logan

(some spoilers here for a great movie that you should just go see regardless of what I say)

When the first X-MEN movie came out I thought this new “Hugh Jackman” guy looked and acted so much like Clint Eastwood that I called it “The Return of Clint.”

“I’m not sure how this was accomplished exactly,” I wrote at the time. “Maybe this is a computer generated renderation of a young Clint… Maybe it is Clint under a lot of makeup to make him look more like he did in his Thunderbolt days. Maybe it is a son of Clint’s, much like Chad McQueen but keeping more in the true spirit of his father than Chad does. Or hell, maybe it’s just some dude named Hugh Jackman who looks a lot like Clint Eastwood.”

These days I lean toward the third one, and maybe the resemblance is harder to see now that Jackman is such a star in his own right and has done plenty of roles where he’s not scowling. But man, he elevated the world of that movie by squinting at it with that Clint attitude, and he was even introduced as a bare knuckle brawler like Philo Beddoe minus the orangutan. It didn’t feel like a guy self-consciously imitating a Clint-like persona, either. It was a genuine badass presence and charisma that I still believe birthed the entire modern era of comic book movie mania, for good or bad. Because without Jackman as Wolverine I don’t think X-MEN would’ve caught on and if X-MEN didn’t catch on I don’t think the Marvel movies would’ve gotten off the ground and we’d all be going to conventions dressing up as characters from serious adult dramas. (I can’t decide if I’m going as BRIDGE OF SPIES this year or one of the ACLU lawyers from LOVING.) (read the rest of this shit…)

March 7th, 2017 | 41 Comments »

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