Friends, I don’t know if any of you are with me on this one, but just humor me for a minute and pour one on the curb for the video store. There are still plenty of them holding on and struggling, but the vultures are circling. More and more people prefer the instant gratification of download on demand or the not even close to instant gratification of ordering movies on a fucking websight and then waiting around for them to show up at some later date in your mailbox and then you will leave them sitting on your coffee table for two weeks and then remember that you got it and then watch part of it and send it back. But in my day, and still to this day, there was another part of the equation, the browsing. The hunt.
And it is only through this forgotten activity that you can have an experience like this one. You’re looking through the action section, trying to decide what you should watch:
I’ve seen alot of these. Not interested in a lot of these. Why is that one in the action section? I guess I’m not sure what section you would put it in. Oh, I forgot they did a remake of ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13. That wasn’t very good. MR. AND MRS. SMITH? I never did see that one. Looked kind of good. Everybody said it was bad though. But there was that shot in the trailer, she was rapelling down the building and she had garters on, maybe I should– (read the rest of this shit…)
I know what you’re thinking. THE ONION MOVIE? Are you fucking kidding me? They’ve run out of ’70s slasher movies, TV series, action figures, video games and board games to turn into movies, now they’re moving on to the fucking produce department? Well to be fair onions are a vegetable with a rich history. In Caananite Bronze Age settlements, traces of onion remains were found dating back to 5000 BC. There is Biblical evidence (specifically the Book of Numbers) indicating that onions were grown in Ancient Egypt. In fact, to the ancient Egyptians (SPOILER) their concentric rings represented eternal life. So I think with a visionary artistic team behind the camera and a decent budget an onion movie could be a real eye-opener. Unfortunately this movie has nothing to do with vegetables at all, it is based on that websight The Onion with the fake news articles and the movie reviews and what not.
VISIONS OF HELL: THE FILMS OF JIM VANBEBBER
The Dolph Lundgren vs. Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa Saga
A bunch of people have suggested this one to me over the years, so thank you all. It’s a Michael Dudikoff picture made one year after AMERICAN NINJA. Once again Steve James is the sidekick, this time playing a senator whose family is targeted by racists, so Dudikoff tries to help them and, when that fails, becomes an avenging force.
If you’ve seen anything by David Mamet then you know it’s kind of surprising (and awesome) that his new movie is about Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I even heard rumors that it was a straight ahead kickboxing movie like BLOODSPORT, and when the opening credits had Japanese drums like Christopher Lambert’s THE HUNTED I was about ready for the rebirth of action cinema. But this is really not an action movie. Anyone who goes in looking for that might be disappointed like the guy who wanted his money back when I saw GHOST DOG. Maybe not quite as much – there’s not alot of poetic shots of birds flying or long scenes of dudes driving around quietly contemplating. But this is not BEST OF THE BEST 2008, it’s definitely a David Mamet movie. Slowly unfolding plot that could go in any direction, narrative that respects the audience enough not to spell everything out for them, an intricate con, macho dialogue, magic tricks, Ricky Jay, Joe Mantegna, Mamet’s wife, songs by Mamet’s wife. I was hoping William H. Macey would show up as some retired kickboxing legend, but maybe next time.
Director Mark L. Lester returns in 1990 for an ambitiously ridiculous sequel to CLASS OF 1984. Instead of taking some character or setting from that movie and continuing with it he takes the same sort of story and puts it in a futuristic sci-fi world. So instead of a paranoid vision of violence in schools a couple years from now it’s a purposely ridiculous paranoid vision of cyborg teachers taking on violence in schools.
CLASS OF 1984 is an earlier picture by COMMANDO’s Mark L. Lester. It starts out shitty with a terrible song by Alice Cooper and your usual ’80s horse shit about cities being overrun with maniac punk rocker delinquent savages. In this case the problem is at a high school where new music teacher Mr. Norris (Perry King) is surprised to find metal detectors, switchblades, gang fights and students who lick their middle fingers and say “sit on this, motherfucker.” His new friend, science teacher Roddy McDowall, has learned to get used to it, and carries a piece in his briefcase.
