"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Jungle Fever

June 7, 1991

JUNGLE FEVER is five films and five years into the career of Spike Lee. You have the financed-on-credit-cards debut SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT, the polished studio debut SCHOOL DAZE, the explosion of DO THE RIGHT THING, the follow up MO’ BETTER BLUES, and then this. Like all of his movies it’s interesting and bold and full of greatness but in my opinion, especially in retrospect, it’s his first fumble. That’s fine. He did MALCOLM X next.

It is the story of possibly the most only-Spike-Lee-would-ever-name-a-character-this character of all time, Flipper Purify, played by Wesley Snipes, who had been in Lee’s MO’ BETTER BLUES and was coming off of the success of NEW JACK CITY. He’s an upper class architect, living in Harlem with his wife Drew (Lonette McKee, BREWSTER’S MILLIONS, ‘ROUND MIDNIGHT), and things seem to be going well from the hot morning sex that opens the movie (the sounds of which greatly amuse their daughter Ming [Veronica Timbers]). (read the rest of this shit…)

June 7th, 2021 | 21 Comments »

Blind Warrior

Previously on Vern Tries To Learn About Indonesian Super Heroes:

The 2019 film GUNDALA caused me to read up a little bit on the other Indonesian comic book characters who will be part of an MCU-inspired franchise called the Bumilangit Cinematic Universe. It turned out some of them had been in movies before, and I was able to find THE DEVIL’S SWORD, about a character named Mandala who will be played by Joe Taslim in the BCU.

The character that sounded coolest, though, was Barda Mandrawata, The Blind Man From the Ghost Cave, a.k.a. Si Buta (“The Blind” or “The Blind Man”). I was intrigued partly because he’s a warrior who poked out his own eyes to learn how to defeat his blind enemy, partly because he has a pet monkey, and partly because his new movie is to be written and directed by Timo Tjahjanto (HEADSHOT, THE NIGHT COMES FOR US).

I was able to find two ’80s movies about Si Buta. The first was THE WARRIOR AND THE BLIND SWORDSMAN (1983), in which the character crosses over into part 2 of a trilogy starring THE DEVIL’S SWORD’s Barry Prima as a different character. The blind swordsman was cool looking, but I didn’t get very into the story and didn’t have enough to say about it to write a review. (read the rest of this shit…)

June 3rd, 2021 | 4 Comments »

The Rookies

a.k.a. DEADLY FORCE: MISSION BUDAPEST

I’ve been a fan of Milla Jovovich since THE FIFTH ELEMENT, but I think it was when I finally watched her in Paul Whenharrymet Sally Anderson’s THE THREE MUSKETEERS that it occurred to me what a genre icon she’s become playing acrobatic heroes or cool villains in digital age B+ movies like the RESIDENT EVIL series, ULTRAVIOLET and HELLBOY. Then, while researching my review for MONSTER HUNTER, I noticed on IMDb that she’d even had a turn as the American marquee name in a 2019 Chinese-Hungarian movie. Jovovich + crazy international co-production = I want to see that, but it hadn’t made it stateside yet.

Written and directed by Alan Yuen (PRINCESS D, FIRESTORM) with action direction by Stephen Tung Wei (HERO, BODYGUARDS AND ASSASSINS, KUNG FU KILLER), the original title is 素人特工 (AMATEUR AGENT), but the English V.O.D. title is THE ROOKIES, and last Tuesday Shout! Studios released it on DVD and Blu-Ray as DEADLY FORCE: MISSION BUDAPEST. (Yes, that sounds like a joke title I would use for a fake generic action movie, but that’s real.) Jovovich plays a cool supporting role to a younger Taiwanese and Chinese cast in this comedic spy thriller. (read the rest of this shit…)

June 2nd, 2021 | 11 Comments »

Army of the Dead

I’ve been waiting for Zack Snyder’s ARMY OF THE DEAD since it was first announced in 2007, at which point he’d only directed DAWN OF THE DEAD and 300. Snyder would’ve produced and they had commercial director Matthijs van Heijningen (who later did the THE THING premaquel) set to direct. My understanding of the premise was that Las Vegas was walled off to contain a zombie outbreak, a team of mercenaries were hired to go in for a heist, and the hero was really trying to rescue his daughter who was stuck in there.

14 years later it exists in what could only be an entirely different form, since it’s directed by Snyder himself, rewritten by a guy who was 13 years old when it was announced, starring a guy who was a WWE wrestler and hadn’t even been in a David DeFalco movie yet, made with technology that didn’t exist, distributed on a service that didn’t exist. As always, Snyder is unpredictable. I definitely wouldn’t have guessed that I’d be happier with his 4 hour redux of JUSTICE LEAGUE than the zombie movie I’d already been waiting several years for when he did MAN OF STEEL. But here we are.

ARMY OF THE DEAD did not live up to my hopes, so I will share many complaints about it. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t like it – it’s an entertaining movie, especially for straight-to-Netflix. I recommend watching it if you’re into this sort of thing and won’t pull your hair out that it’s either surprisingly sloppy or prioritizes setting up anime spin-offs and fan theory speculation over telling a good story. (read the rest of this shit…)

June 1st, 2021 | 118 Comments »

The Legend of Hercules

Recently I was a guest on the Adkins Undisputed podcast and the subject of the episode was THE LEGEND OF HERCULES, the 2014 movie in which Scott Adkins plays the villain. Somehow I had never gotten around to seeing it, despite knowing about Adkins’ participation, and that it was directed by Renny Harlin (between DEVIL’S PASS and SKIPTRACE, but I haven’t seen those either), and that I tend to go to these F.S.G. (Fantasy Sword Guy) movies and at least somewhat enjoy them. For example I saw the other Hercules movie starring The Rock that came out the same year. I didn’t understand why they made it a world where there was no magic, and I still liked it.

This is the Hercules played by Kellan Lutz, who you may know as one of the young guys in THE EXPENDABLES 3, if not from TWILIGHT. He also starred in a DTV action movie I reviewed called ARENA. And it looks like he played William Shatner in Michael Almereyda’s EXPERIMENTER? His thing is I guess he’s a uniquely babyfaced burly guy. He looks young and doesn’t try to macho up with a beard or something but is also very, like… wide-headed. I guess he’s tall, but he always looks to me like a comics-Wolverine, Ram Man type guy. (read the rest of this shit…)

May 31st, 2021 | 10 Comments »

Hudson Hawk

“Certainly I am a lot to blame for the film but I can’t say the alchemy of it was well balanced. What I have always said about my participation in action films in general is that I like to cut the head off of a rhinoceros and put a giraffe’s head on it. For some people, a rhinoceros with a giraffe’s head on it is interesting and something to look at. ‘Wow, you don’t see that every day!’ Other people will say ‘That is wrong! That is an abomination against nature! Kill it now! Get it out of my sight!’”

—HUDSON HAWK screenwriter Daniel Waters to Money Into Light, 2016


May 24, 1991. Yes, THELMA & LOUISE, BACKDRAFT and HUDSON HAWK were all released on the same day. (Also ONLY THE LONELY and WILD HEARTS CAN’T BE BROKEN.) And cinema was never the same.

I reviewed HUDSON HAWK 11 years ago, and I stand by that review. There are many things about the movie that don’t work, but none of them overshadow how much it makes me laugh or how much I enjoy seeing, as the quote above puts it, “a rhinoceros with a giraffe’s head on it.” So read that review if you’d like to hear more detail, including my theory about its flop status being partly caused by Eddie “Hudson” Hawk being in many ways the opposite of John McClane. But this is so much the type of movie I love to look at in a summer retrospective – an attempted blockbuster, using star power and production value to try to draw normal people into something kinda weird – that I felt I should rewatch it and add further thoughts in the context of the other 1991 releases. (read the rest of this shit…)

May 27th, 2021 | 62 Comments »

Backdraft 2

Yes, it’s true – in 2019, 28 years after the release of the hit movie BACKDRAFT, it got a DTV sequel. Since I hadn’t seen the original when this came out two years ago I didn’t really pay attention, and kind of assumed it was just an unrelated firefighter movie taking on the brand name.

In fact there’s quite a bit of continuity: original screenwriter Gregory Widen (HIGHLANDER) returns, the lead character is meant to be the grown up son/grandson of Kurt Russell’s characters, William Baldwin returns as Brian McCaffrey (now assistant chief) and Donald Sutherland returns as crazy/fun pyromaniac Ronald Bartel. Also it’s supposed to be the same fire station, there are photos of Russell and Scott Glenn on the wall, the events of part 1 are discussed, and (in a real fuckin stretch) Brian uses the phrase “career dissipation light,” which was already a stretch when he repeated it back to a corrupt Alderman he heard using it 28 years ago. Are we really to believe he loved it so much he made it part of his lingo? (read the rest of this shit…)

May 26th, 2021 | 19 Comments »

Backdraft

May 24, 1991

This may surprise you, but I had never seen BACKDRAFT until now. It’s often mentioned as the Ron Howard movie people like, or a good Kurt Russell movie or ‘90s thriller, or a movie with amazing pyrotechnic effects, and I knew I’d heard people speak of it fondly. I asked on Twitter and received many emphatic confirmations that people consider it a classic, some having even reaffirmed their love semi-recently in a theatrical screening.

So I hope you won’t all feel direspected when I tell you I thought this movie was pretty fuckin ridiculous! Maybe that’s part of what you like about it? It’s also true that the fire stuff is impressive, and of course Russell is good in it, and his character is pretty interesting because he’s about 85% total asshole and 15% guy you root for, which is not the obvious choice. Also, it’s fair to say that there aren’t very many movies specifically about firefighters; usually the macho ball-busting sweaty working class bros who go to the pub together to be rowdy and are in dutch with the old lady because of the job in movies are cops. Also, I can’t fault people for loving the type of corny old-fashioned weepy-eyed hand-over-your-heart astronaut movie type salute it gives to the heroism of firefighters. I think these are all legitimate reasons to like the movie, I’m not questioning that. (read the rest of this shit…)

May 25th, 2021 | 68 Comments »

Thelma & Louise

“Check the booty, yo it’s kinda soft an’ / If you touch it you’re livin in a coffin / I’m in the ‘90s, you’re still in the ‘80s, right / I rock the mic, they say I’m not ladylike”

—“You Can’t Play With My Yo-Yo” by Yo-Yo

On May 24, 1991 – exactly as the above-quoted song debuted on the Billboard charts at #87 – a parallel but more wide-reaching pop culture event arrived. Ridley Scott’s THELMA & LOUISE isn’t the type of movie we normally think of as a summer blockbuster, but it was a phenomenon arguably bigger than most of the t-shirt and Slurpee selling spectacles I love to document in these retrospectives. A surprise hit, an Oscar winner, a capturer of the zeitgeist, it inspired months of back-and-forth editorials and feature articles, and was soon declared a watershed moment for women in movies. A genuine cultural moment.

But I hadn’t re-watched it since that moment, and I really wasn’t sure how it would play now. It turns out when you remove it from any newness or perceived importance, it only emphasizes what an effective piece of entertainment it is. (read the rest of this shit…)

May 24th, 2021 | 12 Comments »

Switch

May 10, 1991

Okay, I’m looping back a little here. I initially skipped SWITCH because it didn’t look very fun to me. But as I think about MADONNA: TRUTH OR DARE and a couple of the movies coming up later I’m realizing that changes in the portrayal of women in pop culture will be a major theme of this series, so it seems like a mistake not to look at a movie about a sexist guy waking up in the body of a woman. Also, Bryan in the FX2 comments wrote, “I don’t blame you for not wanting to review SWITCH but I was excited to hear your thoughts about it. It seems it could teach us a lot about 1991.” Good point. So I’m doing it.

SWITCH is late period Blake Edwards. That’s not a period held in high regard by anyone I’ve come across, but I did kind of like BLIND DATE (four years and three movies before this), which got terrible reviews. So you never know.

Steve Brooks (Perry King, CLASS OF 1984, MANDINGO) is “one hell of an advertising man,” which of course means he’s introduced in his office putting golf balls into that thing that business assholes putt into in all ‘80s and ‘90s movies. Then he gets an an unexpected call. Three of his ex-girlfriends, Margo (JoBeth Williams, POLTERGEIST), Liz (Lysette Anthony, KRULL, Bryan Adams videos) and Felicia (Victoria Mahoney, Brewster Place) invite him over for “a surprise party.” (read the rest of this shit…)

May 20th, 2021 | 35 Comments »

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