You know John-Rhys Davies? I believe he’s the dwarf in the Lords of the Rings, but he’s best remembered as Sallah, loyal friend in the Indiana Jones pictures and passionate explainer of seatbelts in the Indiana Jones Disneyland ride. IN THE SHADOW OF KILIMANJARO is the story of Sallah’s further adventures as a mine operator in Kenya. The credits don’t call him Sallah, they call him “Chris Tucker.” But you tell me which is more likely: John Rhys-Davies is playing Sallah again, or John Rhys-Davies is playing Chris Tucker? I rest my case.
(read the rest of this shit…)
In the Shadow of Kilimanjaro
Steven Seagal: Lawman Season 2 Episodes 3-4
Episode 2.3: “Crossfire”
As the episode opens Seagal explains that one of their duties is to protect the public from “bad guys” who drink and get rowdy. Once again the Seagal Squad report to the scene of a truck shot full of holes, this time owned by white people for once. Around the corner there’s another vehicle shot up, this one with two people inside, but they say they didn’t see anything. Seagal gently narrates that they have a “street code” that prevents them from telling the cops anything. There’s also a long shot of a stop sign, possibly a reference to the street code and smoke shop t-shirt phenomenon known as “stop snitching.”
(read the rest of this shit…)
The Sentinel
I never really thought about this before, but I think maybe there’s such a thing as Upper Class Horror. Alot of the horror movies are about the middle class, kids from the suburbs, babysitters, etc. The kids in TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE driving around in that van probly don’t have a ton of money. And you got some working class horror here and there, some of the Romero movies, or different ones about cops or whatever. In PSYCHO you have a secretary desperate for money and a guy running a dying motel business. DON’T GO IN THE HOUSE the guy incinerates trash for a living.
But Upper Class Horror would be the ones about professors and celebrities and what not. THE EXORCIST, DON’T LOOK BACK, THE SENTINEL, these are movies about people with money. The men wear suits and ties. The heroines don’t have to get up and go to work every day. When they think they’re going crazy they have the luxury of just worrying about getting better, not about how they’re gonna pay the medical bills. They have the best doctors. (read the rest of this shit…)
Van Damme is okay
Yesterday it was reported that Jean-Claude Van Damme suffered a mild heart attack while in New Orleans filming for WEAPON, a movie where he’s co-starring with Scott Adkins. Van Damme is reportedly okay and has returned to Belgium. If you need any more reassurance, LIONHEART director Sheldon Lettich posted on thevandammefans.net and from what he says it sounds like it was a few days ago and he’s long since back to normal.
But of course you gotta worry about a guy with a physical job like that having those type of health issues, and I know many of us here are fans of Mr. Van Damme (who by the way turned 50 on Monday). Not only has he made many of our favorite cheeseball American martial arts movies (KICKBOXER, BLOODSPORT, HARD TARGET, etc.) but in my opinion he’s on a hell of a roll right now. First he had a surprisingly good dramatic performance in UNTIL DEATH, then his best (and most) martial arts in years in the Isaac-Florentine-disowned THE SHEPHERD: BORDER PATROL, then of course a big breakthrough with his best acting ever in JCVD and the best DTV movie to date UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: REGENERATION. And since then he’s directed THE EAGLE PATH so we’ll have to see how that turned out when it gets released.
So my hat is off to Mr. Van Damme for his hard work and I think I speak for all of us in wishing him good health. Take care of yourself bud and don’t do the splits too much.
Mirrors 2
The original MIRRORS (Alexandre Aja’s American remake of the Korean movie INTO THE MIRROR) was a pretty good little b-movie. Kiefer Sutherland played a troubled night watchman at a fire-damaged department store who starts seeing creepy things in the building’s mirrors, causes his estranged wife to believe he’s lost his mind, solves a mystery and faces down a curse or something. But that story left alot of questions unanswered, for example “What if a different troubled individual worked as a night watchman in a different not-currently-open branch of the same department store chain where a different bad thing happened, so he has to solve a different mystery about what the mirror wants, and kind of on a smaller scale as if it were being filmed on a smaller budget?”
Well, wonder no more, friends. MIRRORS 2 answers that question with fierce adequacy. (read the rest of this shit…)
Steven Seagal: Lawman Season 2 episodes 1 and 2
Episode 2.1 “They Drive By Night”
The second season of LAWMAN opens with a kick to the balls – not literally, unfortunately, but still a surprisingly eventful opening. Seagal and his partners have responded to a call for an erratic driver going around with his lights off, hitting mailboxes. They catch up with the car and see it going the wrong way in traffic. You can hear officers yelling “No!” sounding seriously distressed. Many of these episodes have Seagal just showing up to the scene where other officers already have things under control, but here the camera captures a head-on collision over Seagal’s shoulder. (read the rest of this shit…)
Slugs
In my opinion, slugs is not necessarily one of the top 5 scariest types of monsters to use in a horror movie. I know, I know, but hear me out. I have a right to my own opinion, no matter how unpopular or vile. Please be respectful of this open forum.
So here is the reason why: they’re fucking slugs! They can barely move. They are smooshable. You can kill them just by putting salt on them. They don’t even have a shell to hide in, like a snail. They ordinarily pose no threat to anyone or anything except for your garden. Even then they are not really that hard to deal with. I guess maybe if this movie was told from the point of view of a vegetable it would be one thing, but it’s not, it’s humans. Hard for a human to be scared of slugs. (read the rest of this shit…)
A Better Tomorrow III
After their disagreements over A BETTER TOMORROW 2, John Woo and Tsui Hark weren’t able to work together on part 3. But they both wanted to do a Vietnam war era prequel, so Woo took his and made it BULLET IN THE HEAD, Hark made A BETTER TOMORROW III: LOVE AND DEATH IN SAIGON. As far as artistic success I’d say Woo definitely won that battle, but at least Tsui got to clean up in the getting-to-hang-out-with-Chow-Yun-Fat department. (read the rest of this shit…)
A Better Tomorrow 2
A BETTER TOMORROW II is a crazy fuckin sequel. The story is incredibly convoluted, the plot (or plots) divided between Hong Kong and New York, continuing the story of Ho, Kit and Jackie, but also following a new character called Uncle Lung (Dean Shek) in conflict with the police and with two unrelated crime syndicates. The weirdest (and best) part is that they actually used the gimmick that’s always joked about but almost never actually done: Chow Yun Fat plays Ken, the never-mentioned-before-twin-brother of his deceased part 1 character Mark. I probly don’t have to say any more than that to convince you this movie is stupid. I liked it though. (read the rest of this shit…)
A Better Tomorrow
If you look for pictures from John Woo’s 1986 breakthrough A BETTER TOMORROW you’ll mostly find Chow Yun Fat lighting a cigar with a burning counterfeit American $100 bill, or wearing a real nice suit holding two guns. That’s from the beginning of the movie when his character Mark is a big shot in a Hong Kong syndicate. That’s not a better tomorrow, that’s a more financially stable yesterday. Most of the movie takes place years later, when Mark has been shot in the leg and has to wear a metal brace, so he’s now just an errand boy instead of a Big Brother. (read the rest of this shit…)
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