Posts Tagged ‘Tim Thomerson’
Friday, August 25th, 2023
August 19, 1983
METALSTORM: THE DESTRUCTION OF JARED-SYN is yet another sci-fi/fantasy/adventure released in the summer of RETURN OF THE JEDI that seems like it wouldn’t have existed without STAR WARS. In fact, a 1983 Cinefantastique article quotes screenwriter Alan J. Adler (PARASITE, THE CONCRETE JUNGLE) saying that he “packed my bags and left town for Los Angeles” when he saw STAR WARS. To be fair, this particular movie seems much more inspired by THE ROAD WARRIOR, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
Before seeing them, I always mixed this up with SPACEHUNTER: ADVENTURES IN THE FORBIDDEN ZONE, without realizing they were released a few months apart, and both in 3D. Now that I’ve seen them I know that they actually are kind of similar – both have a tough bounty hunter guy driving around a wasteland planet in large all-terrain vehicle, fighting mutants and warlords and shit while searching for someone. Dogen (Jeffrey Byron, HOT RODS TO HELL) is a “Finder,” and instead of trying to rescue some abducted tourists he’s trying to kill a wizard guy named Jared-Syn (Michael Preston, Pappagallo from ROAD WARRIOR), who’s trying to do a, like… evil crystal thing. Because the treaty with the Nomads was violated, I believe is what Dogen says. You know how it is. Gotta stop that, obviously. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: 3D, Alan J. Adler, Charles Band, Jeffrey Byron, Kelly Preston, Larry Pennell, Michael Preston, R. David Smith, Richard Moll, Tim Thomerson
Posted in Reviews, Fantasy/Swords, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 27 Comments »
Wednesday, December 14th, 2022
THE TAPE RAIDER TRIBUTE TO ALBERT PYUN PART 2: HEATSEEKER
Yes friends, here’s another Albert Pyun film that has only been released on VHS in the U.S., HEATSEEKER. It came to us in 1995, #2 of 3 between SPITFIRE and NEMESIS 2: NEBULA. Pyun has a story credit, with the screenplay written by Christopher Borkgren (whose only other credit is SPITFIRE).
Set in the futuristic New America of 2019 A.D. (“After Dollman?”) it’s the story of kickboxing champion Chance O’Brien (Keith Cooke, CHINA O’BRIEN I & II) trying to keep doing his thing in a changing world. Combat sports are beginning to be dominated by new models of cyborgs, including those created by the sinister Sianon Corporation, who try to bait “the greatest human fighter in the world” into entering their imaginatively titled event “The Tournament.” (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Albert Pyun, Chad Stahelski, cyborgs, fighting tournament, Gary Daniels, John Machado, Keith Cooke, Norbert Weisser, Tape Raider, Thom Mathews, Tim Thomerson, Tina Cote
Posted in Reviews, Action, Martial Arts, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 1 Comment »
Monday, March 21st, 2022
Would you believe I’d never seen NEMESIS (1992) before? I’d heard claims it was one of the better movies for director Albert Pyun and/or star Olivier Gruner, but I didn’t get around to it until now. From the cover I always thought it was gonna be kind of a TERMINATOR knock off, so I was very surprised and impressed when it opened seeming more like BLADE RUNNER in the style of THE KILLER.
It starts in Los Angeles, 2027 A.D., which does not look overly futuristic, but is covered in an eerie orangy brown haze. Alex Rain (Gruner, who had only been in ANGEL TOWN) is in a hotel for a liaison with a woman, but then he shoots her in the head, revealing a bunch of wires and electrodes. “God damn cop,” she says. “God damn terrorist” he replies. Though he very poorly delivers a one-liner to her exploded head, he looks very cool when he walks out of the hotel with a Chow Yun Fat style tie-overcoat-and-sunglasses look, passing a bunch of people in the hallway who take a minute to figure out he’s the cop who shot their friend. But then they follow him. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Albert Pyun, Branscombe Richmond, Brion James, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, cyberpunk, Deborah Shelton, Jackie Earle Haley, Jennifer Gatti, Marjean Holden, Marjorie Monaghan, Olivier Gruner, Sneaky Pete Kleinow, Sven-Ole Thorsen, Thomas Jane, Tim Thomerson, Yuji Okumoto
Posted in Reviews | 22 Comments »
Monday, August 17th, 2020
August 16, 1985
VOLUNTEERS is a Summer of 1985 comedy that takes place in 1962 – about the same time Bobby Fontana died in THE HEAVENLY KID, when George and Lorraine McFly must’ve been a few years out of college. But it doesn’t really offer much commentary or even nostalgia for the era – the period detail is so understated (or half-assed) I thought for a bit that the JFK/Castro/Ed Sullivan/“Blue Moon” montage at the beginning was just a fun history leading up to the Peace Corps. I don’t know, maybe it was the ‘80s Tom Hanks hair that prevented me from being transported through time.
This is the fifth Hanks film, the fourth where he’s the star, and the second of the summer (I skipped THE MAN WITH ONE RED SHOE, released in July). It’s different from what we expect from him now, because he plays a total asshole. He’s Lawrence Bourne III, entitled rich jerk pursuing his hobby of high stakes gambling as he’s about to graduate from Yale. He’s introduced in a card game staring down five older Black men, meant to be scary in the same way as Steve James and friends in the Kandy Bar scene of WEIRD SCIENCE, but he’s not going to bond with them. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Ernest Harada, Gedde Watanabe, George Plimpton, Harry Yorku, Ji-Tu Cumbuka, John Candy, Nicholas Meyer, Professor Toru Tanaka, Rita Wilson, Shakti Chen, Summer of 1985, Tacoma, Tim Thomerson, Tom Hanks, WSU, Xander Berkeley
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Reviews | 14 Comments »
Monday, October 14th, 2019
NEAR DARK is what happens when young, hungry Kathryn Bigelow comes off of co-directing the arty biker movie THE LOVELESS and teams up with the writer of THE HITCHER to do horror movies. She and Eric Red sat down and wrote two scripts together, one for each to direct. A producer says on the making-of featurette that he trusted her to direct, then admits he told her up front that she had three days to convince him not to fire her.
Man, firing her would’ve been a huge fuck up! It’s definitely a cool scenario they came up with, but the primary appeal of the movie is Bigelow’s style, mood, attitude. I suppose the alternate timeline scab that took over would’ve at least had the great cast she put together. Yes, three of them (Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton and Jenette Goldstein) had already been together in ALIENS (a movie that exists in some form within the NEAR DARK universe, unless the “ALIEN5” we see on a marquee meant PROMETHEUS). Bigelow correctly guessed that they’d not only be perfect for the characters, but would carry over a chemistry and familiarity that would work well as this outlaw family. Reportedly she hired them all separately and all were worried about the perception of following ALIENS with a low budget vampire movie. But they knew what they were doing. They chose right. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adrian Pasdar, Bill Paxton, contemporary western, Eric Red, Jeanette Goldstein, Jenny Wright, Joshua Miller, Kathryn Bigelow, Lance Henriksen, Tangerine Dream, Tim Thomerson, vampires
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 25 Comments »
Thursday, February 28th, 2019
I always remembered IRON EAGLE as a chintzy ripoff of TOP GUN, but in fact it came out six months earlier. Shame on you, TOP GUN. Did you think we’d never find out the truth? You’ve got alot to answer for.
Both movies involve hot-shot rule-breaking F-16/F-14 pilots who have run-ins with Russian MIGs, but IRON EAGLE is the only one that uses a stencil font at the beginning. That means it’s a legit b-action movie and therefore follows two tried and true traditions:
1) the UNCOMMON VALOR/RAMBO FIRST BLOOD PART II/MISSING IN ACTION off-the-books P.O.W. rescue mission
and
2) the RED DAWN/TOY SOLDIERS teens-take-matters-into-their-own-hands wish fulfillment adventure (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: David Suchet, George Clinton, Jason Gedrick, Jerry Levine, Kevin Elders, Larry B. Scott, Louis Gossett Jr., Michael Bowen, Robbie Rist, Shawnee Smith, Sidney J. Furie, Tim Thomerson
Posted in Action, Reviews | 21 Comments »
Monday, August 11th, 2014
CHERRY 2000 is a quirky post-apocalyptic adventure, one with a cool sci-fi western premise and alot of underlying oddness and satirical observation about life in the ’80s. The action is slightly stilted, and I think director Steve De Jarnatt (who followed this up with the pre-apocalyptic MIRACLE MILE) is more comfortable doing funny twists on the genre than sincerely following its tropes, but I also think there is a good faith effort to deliver the goods. There are lots of machine guns and blowtorches, some explosions, some great stunts involving a car hanging from a crane. When the weinery yuppie protagonist decides to man up he does it by setting fire to a bunch of cars and rigging an explosion that knocks over Tim Thomerson and swarms him with bees. Not bad. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Basil Poledouris, Ben Johnson, Brion James, David Andrews, Lloyd Fonvielle, Melanie Griffith, Michael Almereyda, Pamela Gidley, post-apocalypse, Robert Z'Dar, robots, Steve De Jarnatt, Tim Thomerson
Posted in Action, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 14 Comments »
Monday, August 13th, 2007
I don’t remember this one, but it was in a book about action movies I’m reading (Action Speaks Louder by Erich Lichtenfeld) and sounded pretty good. It’s one of those “Vietnam vets go back to rescue POWs” movies, but according to the book it’s the first one. And the weirdest part is that it’s from Ted Kotcheff, director of FIRST BLOOD, and made two years before George P. Cosmatos’s RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II. Maybe that’s why Kotcheff didn’t come back for part 2, he’d already done that movie.
Of course, the feel is pretty different from RAMBO. And there are three major differences in the type of story we’re dealing with here. Number one, it’s a team movie, it’s not focused on one dude. Number two, these are normal vets who have gone back to civilian life, they are not maniacs who have gone on a rampage and must get a pardon to go on the mission due to their skills with explosive tipped arrows. Number three, they are privately funded, they are not working for the government. In fact, the government is trying to stop them from doing it (you know how those fuckin bureaucrats are, with their red tape and what not. It makes you so mad BRING OUR BOYS HOME! etc.) (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Fred Ward, Gene Hackman, John Milius, Patrick Swayze, Randall "Tex" Cobb, Reb Brown, Ted Kotcheff, Tim Thomerson, valor
Posted in Action, Drama, Reviews | 5 Comments »
