No joke, BLACK DYNAMITE won the Golden Space Needle Award, which is the top audience award at the Seattle International Film Festival. It joins such notable past winners as KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN, MY LIFE AS A DOG, BAGDAD CAFE, THE WEDDING BANQUET, TRAINSPOTTING and WHALE RIDER. And, uh, PUMP UP THE VOLUME.
Not to brag or anything but I gave it the highest rating when I voted, so I am partially responsible. Also it was the only movie I bothered to see at the festival this year, which means I pick ’em well. Congratulations to everybody involved, especially star/co-writer Michael Jai White and director/co-writer/one-time-outlawvern.com-commenter Scott Sanders.
A couple years ago I was on one of my bi-annual TEXAS CHAIN SAW kicks, and that led me to track down another old Austin indie movie from 1983 called 
After determining that Brian Helgeland was responsible for the scene I loved in ASSASSINS I thought I should watch one of his movies that I haven’t seen before. But not his new one (the remaking of Pelham One Two Three) because life is too short for new Tony Scott movies.
After the disappointment of TERMINATOR SALVATION the last thing we need is another movie that fails to live up to James Cameron’s original creation. But here is TERMINATOR WOMAN, which not only lacks the punch of Cameron’s two sci-fi action classics, but also fails to communicate to the viewer (in this case me) why the hell it’s called TERMINATOR WOMAN. The cover says “It’s about time!” as if to suggest it’s exciting to have a woman Terminator (before TERMINATOR 3: RISE OF THE MACHINES), but the movie isn’t even remotely about robots or even terminating, and there’s also a man in the movie who fights on what is portrayed as an approximately equal skill level with the woman. So if she counts as a Terminator then he must too. I’m not sure why it’s not TERMINATOR MAN AND WOMAN.
DIRECT CONTACT is the new Dolph Lundgren DTV movie directed by Danny Lerner (SHARKS IN VENICE) and written by Les Weldon (RAGING SHARKS). It comes out in the US on Tuesday and has already been released in Thailand, Kuwait, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Finland, Denmark and Sweden.When we first meet Dolph as Mike Riggins, life is not the best. #1, he lives in a Balkan prison. #2, he owes a bunch of gangsters money, and some guy spits in his food, so he has to fight everybody and stab a dude in the eyeball. #3, the screws come in and club him like a baby seal. #4, he gets put in solitary. #5, when he pukes up blood a rat comes over and starts eating it.
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.
I’ve missed some potential good ones at this year’s Seattle International Film Festival, but I was not about to miss the midnight show of BLACK DYNAMITE. If you don’t know what this is, it’s a retro blaxploitation movie where Michael Jai White (also co-writer) plays the title character, an ex-CIA, Vietnam vet, kung fu practicing, five-women-at-a-time-fucking badass motherfucker trying to find out who killed his brother.
Sadly, David Carradine wasn’t the only martial arts star who died yesterday – we also lost Shih Kien, best known as Han in ENTER THE DRAGON. Apparently he’s also in DRUNKEN MASTER but I didn’t realize it at the time so if anybody remembers which character he played let me know.
Nothing too fancy, but just wanted to take a minute to pay some respects to poor David Carradine. Like many people I was saddened by his passing, and by the knowledge that for now on whenever you mention the poor guy some god damn prick will get to make a smarmy quip about the apparent circumstances of his death. Can’t defeat his kung fu but you can defeat him with your powers of ironic distance and obvious jokes. Congratulations, dick.
