Posts Tagged ‘Andrew Davis’
Wednesday, May 20th, 2020
May 3, 1985
Just like with GYMKATA, I’ve reviewed CODE OF SILENCE before, and I had some good jokes in there. I also wrote about it a little in Seagalogy, as a comparison to ABOVE THE LAW. But it’s one of the movies that was playing when the summer of ’85 began, and representative of the type of action movies that were summer moviegoing events in those days. So I thought it was important to revisit. And just do a quick 3,000 word deep dive.
CODE OF SILENCE stars Chuck Norris as respected Chicago P.D. sergeant Eddie Cusack, part of a team trying to take down coke gang brothers the Comachos. He’s spent a month planning a sting operation that goes horribly wrong in two ways. First, a rival gang coincidentally goes in right before them and machine guns all the Comachos, kicking off a brutal gang war. Second, one of the guys on his team shoots and kills a young civilian in the apartment building hallway. As a cop with a moral code, a strong work ethic and good karate kicks, Cusack will spend the movie trying to deal with the repercussions of both of these things. Also there’s a robot.
Let’s set the scene a little. Norris was already well established as a movie star, having released one movie a year since ’77 (and two in ’82). His first independent starring vehicles BREAKER! BREAKER!, GOOD GUYS WEAR BLACK and A FORCE OF ONE were all successful, leading to studio releases THE OCTAGON, AN EYE FOR AN EYE, SILENT RAGE, FORCED VENGEANCE and LONE WOLF McQUADE. MISSING IN ACTION, his first film on a new multi-picture deal with Cannon, had been a big hit. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andrew Davis, Bert Remsen, Chuck Norris, David M. Frank, Dennis Farina, Dennis Shryack, Gene Barge, Henry Silva, Joseph Guzaldo, Michael Butler, Mike Grey, Molly Hagan, Ralph Foody, Ron Dean, Ronnie Barron, Summer of 1985
Posted in Action, Reviews | 14 Comments »
Tuesday, July 23rd, 2019
THE PACKAGE is… kind of an action movie from director Andrew Davis. After the better-than-average Chuck Norris vehicle CODE OF SILENCE (1985) and Steven Seagal’s debut ABOVE THE LAW (1988) the director put some similar elements into a thriller with Gene Hackman in the lead. Hackman had just done MISSISSIPPI BURNING (which he got Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for) but did not have any black belts in anything, so I’m not sure why he thought he should be in movies?
He plays U.S. Army Master Sergeant Johnny Gallagher, who I assume is respected for his skills, but he seems mostly just beloved for being a great guy. He’s introduced arriving for security detail at the site of U.S.-Soviet Union disarmament talks in West Berlin and walking around smiling and saying hi to everybody. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andrew Davis, Dennis Franz, Gene Hackman, Harry Lennix, Joanna Cassidy, Kevin Crowley, Pam Grier, Summer of '89, Terry J. Leonard, Tommy Lee Jones
Posted in Action, Reviews, Thriller | 19 Comments »
Tuesday, June 19th, 2018
June 5, 1998
I thought I had reviewed A PERFECT MURDER before, but for some reason it didn’t come up when I searched for it, so I watched it again. Then when I searched for my DIAL M FOR MURDER review to refresh my memory I did find a review of A PERFECT MURDER from five years ago. But that review wasn’t that good so fuck that review. This is the first time I’ve reviewed it in my opinion.
A PERFECT MURDER is the first of two Viggo-Mortensen-co-starring Hitchcock remakes that came out in 1998. The other is Gus Van Sant’s PSYCHO, which is not a summer movie, but is worth bringing up as a comparison. While that was a complete anomaly – an audience-provoking experiment infused with bright colors and stylized costuming – this loose, updated remake of DIAL M FOR MURDER is an expensive, high gloss star vehicle. Remember? They used to make R-rated thrillers that were A-movies, sometimes by top directors. Michael Douglas’s movie before this was David Fincher’s THE GAME. For co-star Gwyneth Paltrow it was part of a prolific period – after being in SE7EN and then really blowing up with EMMA she starred in five 1998 movies: SLIDING DOORS, GREAT EXPECTATIONS, HUSH, this, and best picture winner SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andrew Davis, David Suchet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Michael Douglas, Patrick Smith Kelly, Summer of '98, Viggo Mortensen
Posted in Reviews, Thriller | 26 Comments »
Monday, January 20th, 2014
ANGEL is a story about a young girl named Molly (Donna Wilkes from JAWS 2 and GROTESQUE) who lives near Hollywood Boulevard and buses out to the North Oaks Prep School. She gets straight A’s, she seems very innocent, and when a super nerd at school (who looks easily 35, but it’s okay because she’s 24 in real life) asks her on a date she turns him down by saying her mom says she’s too young to date. I thought she might be telling the truth, but after school she goes back to the boulevard, where everyone calls her Angel, she puts on makeup and starts walking the strip. Yep, our little angel is a teenage prostitute. It quickly becomes clear that she’s paying her own way through school, and that there’s a reason she’s not letting anyone into the room where she says her paralyzed mother is holed up.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andrew Davis, Cliff Gorman, Dick Shawn, Donna Wilkes, John Diehl, Robert Vincent O'Neill, Rory Calhoun, Steven M. Porter, Susan Tyrrell
Posted in Crime, Reviews, Thriller | 65 Comments »
Wednesday, September 4th, 2013
…which ends with Mr. Davis promising to look up my book Seagalogy, thanks to Fred telling him about it. It’s a good interview centering on THE FUGITIVE (on the occasion of its 20th anniversary) but also giving some background on the script of ABOVE THE LAW that I sure could’ve used when I wrote the book.
thanks Fred!
here’s the interview
Tags: Andrew Davis, Seagalogy
Posted in Blog Post (short for weblog) | 14 Comments »
Thursday, March 14th, 2013
With DIAL M FOR MURDER fresh on my mind I was really curious how they updated it in the 1998 remake A PERFECT MURDER. In this one Michael Douglas plays the scheming husband, Gwyneth Paltrow is the wife and Viggo Mortensen (when he was still a rising character actor and not yet the guy from LORD OF THE RINGS) is her boyfriend.
The basics are all there. The husband knows the wife is cheating, he blackmails someone else into doing the deed, but she ends up killing the guy, and he has to desperately maneuver to cover his tracks, ultimately being undone by a mistake he made after giving the would-be killer a key to the apartment. But within that framework they do all kinds of things to update, expand, complicate and alter things. Some of it is kinda clever in the way it will surprise you if you’re expecting everything to go the same as in the Hitchcock version (I can’t say “the original,” because that would be the play by Frederick Knott, credited as the basis of this). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andrew Davis, David Suchet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Michael Douglas, Viggo Mortensen
Posted in Reviews, Thriller | 17 Comments »
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009
After revisiting THE RUNNING MAN I decided it would be a good time to catch up on a more recent Schwarzenegger movie I had skipped before.
COLLATERAL DAMAGE is a dumb movie, and not the good kind of dumb. On paper it sounds like it has a zeitgeisty post-911 exploitation revenge premise, but it completely fails to deliver on that premise. It supposedly (according to director Andrew Davis in the DVD extras) means to subvert expectations by having a hero who saves lives instead of takes them, but that point gets muddled too. It’s not a good action movie and it sure as shit doesn’t come across as an effective drama about war, terrorism, interventionism, the cyclical nature of violence, or intercontinental travel. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andrew Davis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, revenge
Posted in Action, Drama, Horror, Reviews | 21 Comments »
Tuesday, May 16th, 2006
In 1985, a couple years before director Andrew Davis introduced the world to Steven Seagal in the classic ABOVE THE LAW, he did another, similar movie, sort of a rough draft, starring Chuck Norris.
They have the same setting (Chicago), the same villain (Henry Silva) and alot of the same supporting actors playing cops and criminals. They have the same type of cheesy ’80s scores by David M. Frank. (Get ready for cheesy slap bass and the whitest horn section you ever heard.) ABOVE THE LAW is about CIA corruption (inspired by the Iran-Contra affair) but CODE OF SILENCE sticks with corrupt cops. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andrew Davis, Chuck Norris, Henry Silva
Posted in Action, Drama, Reviews | 9 Comments »
