"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Posts Tagged ‘Glenn Plummer’

Wedlock

Monday, February 5th, 2024

There are a bunch of directors who made legendary movies in the ‘70s and ‘80s but in the ‘90s were directing, like, episodes of Timetrax and shit. One such director is Lewis Teague, who gave us the outstanding large animal pictures ALLIGATOR and CUJO, plus FIGHTING BACK, CAT’S EYE, THE JEWEL OF THE NILE and COLLISION COURSE. But after NAVY SEALS it was all TV for the rest of his career.

Oh well. It’s respectable work if you can get it, and at least his small screen period started with a pretty fun sci-fi/action movie for HBO. WEDLOCK (1991) (also released on tape as DEADLOCK) is a futuristic prison escape movie that came out less than a year before Stuart Gordon’s FORTRESS. It’s not as good, but it was first. (read the rest of this shit…)

Menace II Society

Thursday, August 20th, 2015

tn_menaceiisocietyMENACE II SOCIETY is generally considered the best and most hardcore of the ’90s “hood movies.” BOYZ N THE HOOD (released almost 2 years earlier) was already controversial and blamed for violence near theaters  despite its unmistakable Increase the Peace preachiness. Now here comes this lower budget movie with more violence, more anti-social behavior, more expectation of the audience to know right from wrong, and no Huxtable sweaters, football or Stanley Clarke fusion to help the medicine go down. The “nice kid” in this one is a drug dealer who, when he gets a call from a girl telling him she’s pregnant with his baby, says “Look, I ain’t got time for this. Peace.”

It’s narrated by that kid from Watts, Caine (Tyrin Turner, PANTHER), telling the story of his summer after graduating from high school. It starts with him and his friend O-Dog (Larenz Tate, WAIST DEEP) going into a mini-mart for 40s and getting into an argument with the Asian couple who run it (June Kyoto Lu [who was in CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM EATER!] and Toshi Toda [LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA]). Caine and O-Dog are being jerks, opening the bottles before paying for them, even though they’re under 21 and oughta be grateful that these people are gonna sell it to them in the first place. Caine is kinda laughing it off but then fuckin O-Dog decides to shoot and kill the couple. He takes the security tape and spends the summer showing it to all his buddies like it’s a funny Jackass video or something.

This shows you the relationship between these two. Caine knows it’s stupid to be showing it to people, and he complains about it every time, but he never makes him stop. (read the rest of this shit…)

Speed 2: Cruise Control

Monday, July 21st, 2014

tn_speed2I never watched SPEED 2 before. When I decided the day had come I actually got excited about it for a minute. Wait, so there’s a studio blockbuster in the DIE HARD or UNDER SIEGE type of subgenre that I haven’t seen? What was I waiting for? I mean, I know it was almost unanimously hated, and that it was an early example of the PG-13-sequel-to-R-rated-action-movie, but when has that stopped me before? I am an individual with an open mind and an open heart. I am ready to welcome SPEED 2 into the hospitality of my mental space.

I thought. But the mob was right on this one. SPEED 2 is pretty sucky. It’s the SPEED 2 of SPEED sequels.
(read the rest of this shit…)

Speed

Thursday, July 17th, 2014

tn_speedDo you guys know about SPEED? It’s like GRAND PIANO with a bus! An L.A. public bus that requires the very precise driving of not going below 50 mph or it will blow up. Even if it went through a school zone it could not slow down to avoid crunching the little ones under its wheels. That’s fucked up! I mean they don’t run into that problem in the movie but jesus, bad guy mastermind, think of the children.

It’s no mystery to us, this is the work of bomber-for-ransom Dennis Hopper (TICKER), who in a pre-bus sequence tries a similar job on an elevator full of Patrick Bateman types, but is foiled by Jeff Daniels (BLOOD WORK) and his young gum-chewing sidekick Keanu Reeves (MAN OF TAI CHI). This was after POINT BREAK but before THE MATRIX, so Keanu as the lead in a big action movie was still a new notion to the world. But what are you gonna do, the Jeff Daniels character gets shot and taken off the streets, it’s just not in the cards for it to be a kickass Jeff Daniels vehicle. I’m sorry.
(read the rest of this shit…)

Ca$h (the Sean Bean one)

Thursday, June 21st, 2012

An Avenger and a Throne-Gamer butt heads over a suitcase of money in this mediocre DTV thriller

Wasn’t that awesome? I wrote a headline.

Chris Thor Hemsworth plays Sam, a Chicago knucklehead who thinks the Lord is smiling on him when a suitcase full of money is thrown over an overpass and lands on the hood of his station wagon. He’s not a streetwise tough guy of any kind, not a guy that knows how to handle the situation. He’s just a dipshit who thinks since nobody saw him take it as far as he knows he can just live off the money and there will be no consequences. At first his wife Leslie (Victoria Profeta) is nervous about it, but she decides to go along with it anyway. They pay off their debts in cash, buy a new Range Rover, a new house, new furniture, new TV. (read the rest of this shit…)

Thursday

Friday, February 17th, 2006

This poor bastard Skip Woods. How was he supposed to know? He stumbles across this winning formula of late ’90s independent quirky crime drama, and it just so happens that another individual, somebody named Quentin Tarantino, has already done it.

You gotta feel sorry for Skip. How was he supposed to know that Tarantino loved to take larger than life movie archetypes and show the mundane parts of their lives? Like this opening scene where three criminals who obviously don’t realize how annoying they are (Aaron Ekchart, Paulina Porezkova, James LeGros) stop in a convenience store after a big score to get coffee, and argue over the price until they end up killing the clerk and then have to pretend to work there when a cop comes in. And how could Skip have known that when he has the cop ask, for no reason, whether Eckhart prefers Picard or Kirk… that it JUST MIGHT look like he was some fuckin idiot jackass blatantly and embarassingly trying to copy the most superficial elements of Tarantino’s formula? (read the rest of this shit…)