Posts Tagged ‘Mark L. Lester’
Wednesday, August 25th, 2021
“Y’know – this is a weird part of town.”
August 23, 1991
SHOWDOWN IN LITTLE TOKYO is a movie I have long enjoyed (here is a pretty dumb review of it I wrote 13 years ago). It’s a buddy cop movie starring Dolph Lundgren (between COVER UP and UNIVERSAL SOLDIER) and Brandon Lee (between LASER MISSION and RAPID FIRE), so any possible deficiencies are easily overcome by their great charisma and the unrepeatable novelty of their team-up. Watching it in the context of these other ’91 movies it does seem slightly primitive; it’s a Warner Bros. movie, but the budget was $8 million, which is less than DOUBLE IMPACT – or even non-action stuff like DEAD AGAIN, THE COMMITMENTS, BINGO, RETURN TO THE BLUE LAGOON and LIFE STINKS – let alone the new state-of-the-art represented by POINT BREAK and TERMINATOR 2. Fortunately it’s in the capable exploitation hands of director Mark L. Lester (STEEL ARENA, CLASS OF 1984, FIRESTARTER, COMMANDO, CLASS OF 1999), so it has heavy doses of The Good Shit. He always gives you something extra.
Just as MYSTERY DATE has its two leads getting into trouble with gangs in Chinatown, this is about two guys fighting a Yakuza drug ring in L.A.’s Japanese district. In this case that’s in their job description as members of the LAPD Asian Crime Taskforce. Dolph’s Sergeant Chris Kenner gets the kind of introduction all his characters deserve: he single-handedly raids an illegal fighting circuit by climbing through a skylight, swinging into the ring on a rope and saying, “Haven’t I told you this is illegal, and it pisses me off?” Then he’s announced as the new challenger and has to fight the guys in the ring. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Al Leong, Brandon Lee, Branscombe Richmond, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Clint Cadinha, David Michael Frank, Dolph Lundgren, Gerald Okamura, James Lew, Mark L. Lester, Pat E. Johnson, Philip Tan, Reid Asato, Renee Griffin, Roger Yuan, Simon Rhee, Stuart Baird, Summer of 1991, Terry J. Leonard, Tia Carrere, Vernee Watson
Posted in Reviews, Action | 36 Comments »
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2020
EXTREME JUSTICE is a 1993 cop movie by director Mark L. Lester (STEEL ARENA, FIRESTARTER, COMMANDO, SHOWDOWN IN LITTLE TOKYO) that you can find on DVD, VHS or streaming on Prime. Lester has done a pretty broad range of b-movie types, but one thing some of them have in common is a great sense of exaggeration. In CLASS OF 1984, for example, he presents a world where juvenile delinquency is so severe that a previously mild-mannered music teacher has no better choice than to do battle with one of his students and dump him through a skylight into the school gym during the big recital. In its sci-fi sequel CLASS OF 1999, such out-of-control kids have led to an overreaction that includes militarized robot teachers.
So I wasn’t sure which way he would go in his movie starring Lou Diamond Phillips (RENEGADES, UNDERTOW, THE BIG HIT) as an LAPD detective who rather than getting in trouble for his police brutality gets promoted to a secret unit where “what useta get you in trouble’ll get you a round of beers.” I guess the reason I wasn’t familiar with this one is that they were worried about releasing it a year after the L.A. riots/uprising and dumped it to HBO. But I’m happy to report it doesn’t have to be a guilty pleasure – the movie is very clearly saying that this extreme justice is too extreme and not justice. It’s not the good kind of Paul Verhoeven “you have to be really thick to not understand this satire” clear, unfortunately, but right now I’ll settle for the more accessible “he has a girlfriend who’s the conscience of the movie and convinces him that this is all wrong” type. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Chelsea Field, Ed Lauter, Lou Diamond Phillips, Mark Irwin, Mark L. Lester, Robert Boris, Scott Glenn, Spiro Razatos, William Lucking, Yaphet Kotto
Posted in Action, Crime, Reviews | 13 Comments »
Friday, May 19th, 2017
STEEL ARENA doesn’t seem at first glance like a particularly distinguished b-movie, especially in its current form as a poorly transferred old VHS tape that’s scanned but not panned. Many scenes, including the first one, are conversations in the front seats of vehicles with one or more participants mostly cropped out of frame. I rented it because it’s one of these stuntsploitation movies I find so interesting, but this time it’s about the lives of professional stunt drivers in a road show, not in movies. Most of the stars are real drivers playing themselves and doing their own driving. STEEL ARENA is to stunt drivers as ACT OF VALOR is to Navy SEALs.
It centers on Dusty Russell, a not-all-that-talkative good ol’ boy with a silly mustache that would endear him to the modern hipster. He’s looking for work and a moonshiner has a job opening.
“Can you drive?”
“Sure.”
It doesn’t seem like it’s his passion in life yet, but he turns out to be good at it, leading the cops on a chase that predicts every episode of The Dukes of Hazzard ever made. But the payment plan has some problems so he moves on and finds his way into “the destruction derby” (same as a “demolition derby” as I always knew it), teaming with a guy he meets, Buddy Love, and going on to dominate the circuit. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: David Webb Peoples, Gene Drew, Mark L. Lester, stuntsploitation
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 4 Comments »
Monday, September 12th, 2016
FIRESTARTER is a classic tale of ’80s style supernatural paranoia. An innocent father and daughter are on the run from menacing agents of a secret government entity nicknamed “The Shop.” A university experiment with hallucinogens in the ’70s gave dad (David Keith, WHITE OF THE EYE) and now-deceased mom (Heather Locklear, MONEY TALKS) psychic powers, which have passed on to daughter Charlie (Drew Barrymore in her next movie after E.T.). She can sense things, sometimes move things, but her trademark is fire. When she gets angry at people things get hot. Mom and dad had been trying to teach her to keep it under control, with mixed success. You really gotta recognize what a difficult parenting challenge this would be even if The Man wasn’t out to get them.
So now it’s Take Your Daughter On the Lam Day. They’re hitchhiking, scrounging up change, using Jedi mind tricks. She’s already used to lying to people and using fake names. It reminds me of Starman (TV show), or The Golden Years, like this a Stephen King creation and also using The Shop as the antagonists. Through no fault of their own this family are considered dangerous, and the government wants to either use them as weapons or kill them. Neither seems appealing to them.
This kill-them-for-safety-purposes policy is obviously fascist and heartless, but it’s based in a reasonable fear that if this little girl can blow up cars with her mind what will she be able to do if she grows up? And will she do it? (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: David Keith, Drew Barrymore, George C. Scott, Mark L. Lester, Martin Sheen, Moses Gunn, Stanley Mann, Stephen King, Steve Boles, Tangerine Dream
Posted in Horror, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 22 Comments »
Thursday, December 8th, 2011
John Cribbs over at thepinksmoke.com did a new interview with b-movie great Mark L. Lester. Lester doesn’t seem to get alot of credit or attention, but I figure if one guy directed COMMANDO, CLASS OF 1984, CLASS OF 1999 and SHOWDOWN IN LITTLE TOKYO then it can’t be a fluke. John uses the occasion to go through most of the Lesterography. He offers some interesting analysis of reoccurring themes and has me interested in checking out alot of the ones I haven’t seen, even some recent DTV suspense thrillers.
I love this kind of shit. Check it out when you have a few minutes. Here’s the link: MARK L. LESTER: THE MOVIES
Tags: Mark L. Lester
Posted in Blog Post (short for weblog) | 13 Comments »
Saturday, May 24th, 2008
The Dolph Lundgren vs. Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa Saga
SHOWDOWN IN LITTLE TOKYO (1991) and BRIDGE OF DRAGONS (1999)
As I continue to learn about the works of Dolph Lundgren (no, sorry, I’m not writing LUNDGRENICS, I’m just trying to become a more well-rounded individual) it’s refreshing to find that he has many movies where he is a charismatic action hero and not just some grunting oaf. SHOWDOWN IN LITTLE TOKYO is one people have been recommending to me for years because it has him teamed with Brandon Lee, which is a pretty big deal for somebody whose most notable co-stars are often talk show hosts like Jerry Springer or Montel Williams.
Basically this one is a cop buddy picture with Dolph as the line-crossing, bushido practicing white cop on the Little Tokyo beat who by the way is out to avenge the deaths of his parents by a samurai, but that’s neither here nor there. We know Dolph is a bad motherfucker right away because he single-handedly busts up an illegal underground fighting circuit by rappelling in from the ceiling in the middle of a match and then taking on those who disagree with his decision. Later he’s in a cafe when he happens to see some of the same Yakuzas bullying the old lady owner for protection money. In the middle of the brawl that ensues he’s introduced to his new partner, Brandon Lee. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brandon Lee, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Dolph Lundgren, Isaac Florentine, Mark L. Lester
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 6 Comments »
Sunday, May 18th, 2008
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.
The first one took a while to warm up, but CLASS OF 1999 is at maximum awesome levels straight out of the gate. You can’t help but laugh as the movie apes ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and then ROBOCOP and then a little TERMINATOR. The ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK part is that the hero is a juvenile delinquent who they let out of prison to go– well, not on a mission. To high school. And it’s in a walled off zone where the kids are so out of control the government has decided not to enforce law there. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: filmed in Seattle, Mark L. Lester
Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 1 Comment »
Saturday, May 17th, 2008
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.
But Mr. Norris can’t just get used to it. These hoodlums are always interfering with his class, and they sell drugs to one student who flips out and climbs up the flagpole and lets go. And later wiseass trumpet player Michael J. Fox (in his first movie role, and looking about 14 years-old) gets stabbed, something that rarely happened on Family Ties, in the BACK TO THE FUTURE or TEEN WOLF sagas, or in any of those TV movies about summer camp. Plus they start threatening Norris outside of school, showing up at his house in Halloween costumes and spraying him in the face with fake blood. Which is a metaphor for real blood, if I know my teens. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Mark L. Lester
Posted in Action, Reviews | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, August 1st, 2007
COMMANDO is a rare commodity – a Schwarzenegger picture on a low enough budget to feel like the early Seagal and Van Damme pictures. The good ones, though. Schwarzenegger plays John Matrix, the perfect name for an ex-special forces muscleman who lives in a cabin out in the woods with his daughter Alyssa Milano. (Who is the boss, anyway? I never did figure that out.) She doesn’t want him going on dangerous missions anymore so he stays home and spends his days chopping wood and feeding deer with her. Luckily, before he gets too bored with this Snow White lifestyle some other soldiers he used to be knee dip in the shit with kidnap his daughter as a way to force him to assassinate some South American leader or other. So he gets to go to war. And to be honest he looks more comfortable running around with camoflauge paint on then he does feeding a deer. We all have our little things we’re good at, you know. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mark L. Lester, Val Verde
Posted in Action, Comedy/Laffs, Reviews, Thriller | 15 Comments »
