"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Bad Day at Black Rock

A reader named Stephen A., and probaly some other people in the past, have been reminding me to watch BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK, a classic 1955 badass picture from director John Sturges (THE GREAT ESCAPE, McQ). So I finally did. Thanks guys.

In a weird way the opening kind of reminded me of a great late ’80s, early ’90s action movie, because it’s widescreen with this train coming and SPENCER TRACY and everybody else’s names are in huge letters that fill almost the whole screen. Just like it would say STEVEN SEAGAL if that train was from UNDER SIEGE 2 PART 2: DARKER TERRITORY. (read the rest of this shit…)

July 11th, 2007 | 25 Comments »

Cobra

COBRA is not a great Stallone movie, but Stallone does play a cop named Marion “THE COBRA” Cobretti, and in this crazy world that’s gotta count for something. In the opening scene a ranting maniac goes into a super market, kills a bunch of people and takes the rest hostage. The police are helpless so they “call in the Cobra.”

Cobretti struts in wearing sunglasses and chewing on a matchstick. You’d think he’d want to have the full power of vision at his disposal in a situation like this, but he chooses fashion instead – not a great character trait for a human being, but acceptable for an action movie hero. If you want to get picky Dirty Harry probaly should’ve put down his hot dog to foil that bank robbery, but he didn’t, and we admire him for that. (read the rest of this shit…)

July 11th, 2007 | 57 Comments »

American Ninja

This review is dedicated to Ryan Kenner, who’s been bugging me to see this for almost a year, and to the soldiers and planners of the American Revolution, especially if any of them were ninjas (not sure)

AMERICAN NINJA is not something I consider a classic, but it is a solid, enjoyable b-movie and it finally made me understand the Michael Dudikoff phenomenon. When I saw him in a much later movie, BLACK THUNDER (a Stealth bomber thriller remade as Seagal’s FLIGHT OF FURY) I was surprised at his lack of fighting. I assumed he was some karate champion or something like most of the ’80s action stars, but when I looked him up I found out he started as a model. No wonder.

But in this movie wouldn’t’ve noticed, because he does do plenty of fighting and makes it convincing. His line deliveries are sometimes bad but they manage to make him not talk very much. In fact, he doesn’t speak for the first 15 minutes of the movie, it almost seems like he’s mute. (read the rest of this shit…)

July 6th, 2007 | 34 Comments »

Vern vs. TRANSFORMERS – One shall stand and one shall fall…

Three words for you about TRANSFORMERS: Ho. Lee. Shit. Not as in “Holy shit, I was blown away, it was a blast as well as AWESOME!” but as in “Holy shit, society really is on the brink of collapse.”

Usually if a movie is already playing in theaters I don’t send my review here, I just use it at my geocities.com/outlawvern sight, but jesus, SOMEBODY had to say something. I can’t believe how many positive reviews I have read of this. I think Harry’s was the only negative I saw, but he was polite about it. I read Moriarty’s review before the screening and I thought wow, what if I actually like this movie? Like me, Moriarty hates Michael Bay’s movies from head to toe, style and content, and me and him agree on all kinds of stuff. I don’t remember too many cases where I thought he was being too easy on a movie, at least not a big one like this (only one that comes to mind is the much smaller DAREDEVIL). I never thought I would like this movie until I read his review. He had me about 80% convinced that it would surprise me and win me over, like LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD did. And I might have to seek counseling after enjoying those two movies in a row, but that’s life. (read the rest of this shit…)

July 3rd, 2007 | 42 Comments »

Vern returns to tell you all about the new Wesley Snipes DTV effort: THE CONTRACTOR!!!

SPOILER ALERT !!

THE CONTRACTOR, which comes out July 10th, is probaly the best DTV Wesley Snipes picture so far. Sure, it’s got that usual DTV vibe – Avid farts, cheesy electronical music, somber tone, not gonna make you smile or laugh too much, definitely not original in any way. But for this type of movie it’s pretty solid, and it takes advantage of Wesley’s talents. He runs alot, he gets in some shootouts, some car stunts, one quick but impressive fight. But most of all they let him act. He plays the sort of quiet, unfriendly-but-ultimately-kind badass he excels at. He gets to communicate what’s going on with facial expressions and posture more than with words, which is his thing. He gets some good bonding moments, including with his adversary after he mortally wounds him. In a DTV movie if there’s anything other than black and white/good and evil, any grey area at all, it deserves a shiny star on its sticker chart. I like that kind of shit.

When I got a screener for THE CONTRACTOR I got kind of nervous because I hadn’t seen his last one, THE MARKSMAN. And since the front cover for THE CONTRACTOR calls him “the world’s greatest marksman” I thought this might be an unadvertised sequel like Seagal’s BLACK DAWN was to THE FOREIGNER. (read the rest of this shit…)

July 2nd, 2007 | 2 Comments »

Holy Cow! It’s Vern’s Review Of LIFE FREE OR DIE HARD! Did He Like It Or Not?!?!

SPOILER ALERT !!

Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here.

I haven’t seen this one yet. Almost went to a midnight show tonight, but it just didn’t time out right. But honestly, you guys don’t care what I have to say about this. You probably don’t care what Quint or Harry have to say, either. Or Capone. Or Massawyrm. Or anyone here at the site except for one man… the guy whose original rant about the PG-13 rating ended up summoning Bruce “Walter B” Willis out of the ether in one of the craziest talkback moments of all time.

Yes, that’s right. It’s time for Vern’s review of LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD. Which means it’s time for me to piss off and hand over the stage to him:

“No one has that power. There is a much more powerful guy in Hollywood, and his name is Rupert Murdoch. It’s his corporation. I only work there.” –Bruce Willis to Vanity Fair, on not being able to do an R-rated DIE HARD

“This city is like a big CHICKEN, waiting to get PLUCKED.” –SCARFACE, edited for TV version

Fellas–

DIE HARD, the motion picture, characters and their likenesses, are the copyrighted intellectual property of the Twentieth Century Fox Corporation. To them DIE HARD is a franchise, a license, a property, a brand, a tentpole, a consumer product, an opportunity for cross promotion with Arby’s and whichever candy bar it was. To them DIE HARD is a dollar amount for an opening weekend, a domestic gross balanced against a marketing budget. But to the rest of the world, to the people with beating hearts, DIE HARD is something more. (read the rest of this shit…)

June 27th, 2007 | 93 Comments »

Vern’s Got A DVD Review For You! WHO CAN KILL A CHILD?

Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here.

Vern and an obscure horror film I’ve never heard of? Sounds like a great read for a Sunday afternoon to me.

Ever since I reviewed the TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE ULTIMATE EDITION I’ve been getting screeners in the mail from MPI Home Video. It’s awfully nice of them but I can’t really review all of them, because they’re mostly stuff like THE DORIS DAY SHOW SEASON 4 or a ten hour documentary about the ’70s or COMIC LEGENDS: PHYLLIS DILLER. But they do send me stuff from their Dark Sky label, the same guys who did the CHAIN SAW dvd. And these guys put out good stuff, lots of weird European horror and action movies, mostly things I never heard of. You know, one of these boutique labels that’s like a DJ, always digging to find some weird gem you didn’t know about. I know alot of people have sunk themselves financially by finding and restoring these old obscurities so I have alot of gratitude to the people who do it. Takin one for the team (the team being a metaphor for the human race in this case).

One thing Dark Sky does is a “Drive-In Double Feature” series (SEARCH AND DESTROY and THE GLOVE comes out this Tuesday) that’s the same concept as GRINDHOUSE but for real: two movies with vintage drive-in intros and trailers in between. Good stuff. Another release this week is THE LAST HUNTER which is a 1980 Vietnam War movie made by Italian exploitation director Antonio Margheriti. It’s kind of trying to be like THE DEER HUNTER but it has more explosions, intestines and funky music. And it’s dubbed. So it’s pretty different. (read the rest of this shit…)

June 24th, 2007 | No Comments »

The Glove

Like I mentioned in my review of WHO CAN KILL A CHILD? that should be running on The Ain’t It Cool News soon, I’m on the mailing list for this Dark Sky DVD label. So I get all these nicely packaged Italian horror obscurities and what not, and to be honest I haven’t watched most of them yet. I loan them to my horror watcher friends and hope they’ll tell me I got a must-see there. But that doesn’t usually happen.

For the batch that comes out this week though I found time to watch them and I was impressed. The one I had the highest hopes for was WHO CAN KILL A CHILD? which is a creepy sun-drenched Spanish horror movie in the vein of VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED. But I already heard that one was good before, so a more impressive find is THE GLOVE, the b-picture in their latest “DRIVE-IN DOUBLE FEATURE” along with SEARCH AND DESTROY. (read the rest of this shit…)

June 23rd, 2007 | 3 Comments »

The Perfect Weapon

This review is by special request of several individuals on the STONE COLD DVD talkback and other people over the years who have tried to get me to watch this movie. The Perfect Weapon of the title in this 1991 white martial arts movie is Jeff Speakman, an American Kenpo Karate sixth degree black belt who I guess is playing himself, since they just call him Jeff. The movie opens with Jeff shirtless and oiled up, in a living room doing karate moves to that horrible song “I Got the Power (It’s Gettin It’s Gettin It’s Gettin Kinda Hectic It’s Gettin It’s Gettin It’s Getting Kinda Hectic I Got the Power!)” by the group Snap!. It’s funny because this movie is only 85 minutes long but they still felt they had time for him to do moves to that entire song. As it ends he puffs his chest out like he just won a medal.

Then Jeff goes for a ride in his convertible and as he soaks in the open road he thinks about his past. So we learn that after his mom died he was a troublemaking kid, and his cop dad wanted to send him to military school. Fortunately Pops’s Korean war buddy Kim (the great Mako) convinced him to send Jeff to Kenpo Karate Dojo instead. To learn self discipline. (read the rest of this shit…)

June 22nd, 2007 | 39 Comments »

Saw, Saw II and Saw III

SAW

Usually I’m on top of the popular horror movies, especially if and when they get to the part 3 mark. But until now I never bothered with SAW. I know there was a pretty good buzz on that first one, but I just wasn’t buyin it. I had seen that fuckin puppet on the TV ads and I wasn’t so sure about a killer with an evil puppet. Evil puppets in horror should always be alive, like Chucky. A killer who plays with a normal, inanimate puppet – that’s just silly.

Plus, I read some essay years ago that referred to TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE PART 2 as ‘SAW 2, and since it takes a while to type out TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE PART 2, and since that movie tends to come up alot for a guy like me, I started to use that nickname. Me and that movie are tight, we call each other by nicknames. It calls me V and I call it ‘SAW 2. Until now, because now there’s a SAW and a SAW 2. These movies interfered with my relationship with TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE PART 2. So I sort of resent them for that. (read the rest of this shit…)

June 18th, 2007 | 23 Comments »

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