Posts Tagged ‘Vernon Wells’
Wednesday, February 22nd, 2023
Ryuhei Kitamura is an interesting director. He started in Japan with the attention-grabbing yakuzas vs. zombies movie VERSUS (2000). That one was kinda cool but I straight up loved his fourth movie, the samurai manga adaptation AZUMI (2003), and by 2004 he was doing that crazy GODZILLA: FINAL WARS. If nothing else, he’s a hero for doing the one thing everyone wanted to do but nobody knew they could do: assassinate Roland Emmerich’s version of Godzilla. I think we all remember where we were when we first heard the news. Ladies and gentlemen, we got ‘im.
That unprecedented act of heroism made Kitamura so huge and important to cinema that in 2008 Hollywood chose him for the crucial job of directing Bradley Cooper’s first serious leading role. He agreed to do it only under the condition that it could take place at midnight on a meat train. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Amazon Eve, Emile Hirsch, Gigi Zumbado, organ trafficking, Ryuhei Kitamura, Sabina Mach, Stephen Dorff, Tanner Zagarino, Tyler Sanders, Vernon Wells
Posted in Reviews, Crime, Horror | 5 Comments »
Wednesday, April 20th, 2022
We’re all sad that Bruce Willis has retired, and more than that to have confirmation of his long rumored cognitive issues. He’s still there, and unable to say goodbye. It’s crushing.
The upside is how nice it’s been to have everyone on the same page again and celebrating his great career and all the happiness he’s brought us over the years. That made me want to watch something of his I’d never seen before – thanks for the recommendations, everyone. I decided to check out Blake Edwards’ SUNSET (1988), since it’s from that period when Moonlighting was still on the air, and I truly believed Bruce represented the maximum coolness potential for a human being. The earlier Edwards/Willis joint BLIND DATE has a terrible reputation, but I liked it, so SUNSET seemed worth a try. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andreas Katsulas, Anthony B. Richmond, Blake Edwards, Bruce, Bruce Willis, Dermot Mulroney, Henry Mancini, James Garner, Joe Dallesandro, M. Emmet Walsh, Malcolm McDowell, Mariel Hemingway, Richard Bradford, Rod Amateau, Tom Mix, Vernon Wells
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Mystery, Reviews | 31 Comments »
Monday, August 3rd, 2020
August 2, 1985
I’m no expert on the films of John Hughes, but I’ve seen enough to know WEIRD SCIENCE (which he wrote and directed) is pretty different from the other ones. It’s still a teen movie, like he was known for at the time, but it’s his only foray into science fiction unless you count his screenplay for JUST VISITING (the 2001 flop remake of LES VISITEURS) for involving time travel.
It feels a little off to call WEIRD SCIENCE sci-fi though. It’s more like computer magical realism, I think. We’ll get to that in a minute.
Much like EXPLORERS, we have two oft-bullied nerds, the main character Gary (Anthony Michael Hall, following SIX PACK, VACATION, SIXTEEN CANDLES and THE BREAKFAST CLUB) and computer genius best friend Wyatt (Ilan Mitchell-Smith, HOW TO BE A PERFECT PERSON IN JUST THREE DAYS, DANIEL, THE WILD LIFE). Going by the actors’ ages, Gary and Wyatt are about 2 or 3 years too old to be Explorers or Goonies. So they’re different in that they do not dream of adventure; they are entirely consumed by horniness. And the girls they like to stare at in school ignore them, so Gary’s big idea is to make a woman. He’s inspired by seeing BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN on TV (colorized! what the fuck!?) and figures his smart friend should be able to do something like that with his fancy computer machine. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anthony Michael Hall, Bill Paxton, Craig Reardon, Danny Elfman, Joel Silver, John Hughes, Judie Aronson, Kelly LeBrock, Michael Berryman, Robert Downey Jr., Robert Rusler, Steve James, Summer of 1985, Suzanne Snyder, Vernon Wells
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 65 Comments »
Monday, July 20th, 2020
When Stuart Gordon died at the end of March I decided it was finally time to watch SPACE TRUCKERS, a movie I had been meaning to see for literally 23 years. You know how it is. You get busy sometimes.
Obviously I dig Gordon as a Master of Horror, director of RE-ANIMATOR and FROM BEYOND, as one should. And in recent years I’ve really come to love THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM and CASTLE FREAK. But I also think he’s under-appreciated for his sci-fi movies ROBOT JOX and FORTRESS. And ever since I first saw ALIEN I’ve loved those stories that are about space but the heroes are just working class people doing their job, not some royalty or chosen one or member of any federation or academy. As the title makes clear, this is about characters like that. Truckers. In space. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Charles Dance, Debi Mazar, Dennis Hopper, George Wendt, Koichi Sakamoto, Screaming Mad George, Stephen Dorff, Stuart Gordon, Vernon Wells
Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 13 Comments »
Thursday, May 28th, 2020
DEBT COLLECTORS comes to V.O.D. tomorrow, May 29, and to DVD June 2nd. This review has mild spoilers (including my favorite line) if you want to hold off until you’ve seen it.
Friends, the Scott Adkins/Jesse V. Johnson streak continues to continue. In just four years the martial arts star and director have collaborated on SAVAGE DOG, ACCIDENT MAN, THE DEBT COLLECTOR, TRIPLE THREAT, AVENGEMENT, and now DEBT COLLECTORS, a very welcome plural sequel to their singularly titled criminal-lowlifes-on-the-outskirts-of-L.A. buddy movie. Like the first one it’s written by Johnson and Stu Small (ACCIDENT MAN).
I loved THE DEBT COLLECTOR and thought it was a shame they got shot up at the end since I would have loved to see those characters have more misadventures. Honestly even if it had ended with them alive and a TO BE CONTINUED I wouldn’t have taken it for granted that they’d be able to make another one. So I’m thankful. If you need to know how the story continues, it’s pretty much the 3 FROM HELL approach: yes, they got shot, isn’t it amazing they survived? One in a million. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Cuete Yeska, Jermaine Jacox, Jesse V. Johnson, Josef Cannon, Louis Mandylor, Luke LaFontaine, Marina Sirtis, Mayling Ng, Nils Allen Stewart, Scott Adkins, Stu Small, Vernon Wells, Vladimir Kulich
Posted in Action, Crime, Reviews | 20 Comments »
Thursday, May 14th, 2015
Note: Like most people of the planet Earth, I re-watched the whole MAD MAX trilogy during this last week of a decade of waiting for FURY ROAD. And I knew I’d never done a write-up of MAD MAX before, so I did one. I followed that up by writing about ROAD WARRIOR. And then I realized that I already wrote a review of it 8 years ago. And sometimes that’s fine because I think my old review is sucky and I can do better now, but actually I kinda like that review, I made some good points, and I called Wez’s bitch his “desert life partner,” which was pretty good.
But let’s be honest, we’re not gonna think about a god damn thing besides Mad Max between now and 7 pm tonight and whenever we see the new one, so what the hell. Here is my alternate dimension review of THE ROAD WARRIOR where I still love it in the same way but say it in different words.
* * *
Yeah, I always liked MAD MAX, but THE ROAD WARRIOR (or MAD MAX 2 as most of the world calls it) is more my speed. Get it? Speed. ‘Cause that’s one of the things George Miller knows how to capture on screen. Even the mythically narrated opening montage establishing Max (née Rockatansky) as a legendary hero seems to be moving fast, then the screen opens up wide, we pull out of the blower on Max’s car and the movie just launches us down the highway. The insane car stunts of the first one are multiplied, now we have even more cars flyiing through the air, rolling, flipping, smashing through each other, dragging broken pieces (or people) behind them, scraping across the pavement, spraying sparks, shooting pieces of rusty debris in all directions.
Wherever Max was before, where there were bars and homes and children and stuff, he ditched that fuckin place and now he scours “the wasteland” with all the other thirsty leather-clad psychos. And I kinda doubt the Halls of Justice are still standing anyway, it seems like shit has gotten worse in general, and we know from the montage that some forgotten factions of humans went to war and dropped the bomb on each other (in old black and white stock footage). Whatever the current socio-political situation is, we know that guys like Max travel the desert roads looking for crashed cars, or causing crashed cars, and trying to steal any leaking or unused gas, or “juice.” It’s a snake eating its tail, really. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bruce Spence, car chases, George Miller, Mel Gibson, mohawks, post-apocalypse, Vernon Wells
Posted in Action, Reviews | 39 Comments »
Monday, April 20th, 2015
FORTRESS is one of those rare b-movie (or B+ movie?) gems that you come across every once in a while that has everything: good cast, great gimmicks, unexpected emotion and substance, cyborgs. It’s a 1993 sci-fi action movie, but clearly without a summer blockbuster budget, so it feels somewhere between Paul Verhoeven and ROBOT JOX. And that makes sense, because it’s the same director. Man, why did I never see this before? Didn’t I know it was a Christopher Lambert movie directed by Stuart Gordon? Don’t I believe in the auteur theory?
Lambert plays Brennick, an ex-soldier (“the most decorated captain of the Black Berets, yet you quit in disgrace…”) busted with his pregnant wife Karen (Loryn Locklin) trying to sneak out of the country because it’s illegal to give birth twice. They both end up at the Fortress, a giant underground, privately owned prison. The convicts become property of the Men-Tel Corporation and used for prison labor. Their job: to keep building further into the ground, making more room for more convicts to build even further. That’s my favorite concept in the movie because it so deviously illustrates the problem of the prison industrial complex. Zed-10, the computer program that runs the place (voice of the director’s wife Carolyn Purdy-Gordon), keeps saying the Men-Tel slogan “Crime does not pay.” But of course for them it does. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Christopher Lambert, Clifton Collins Jr., Jeffrey Combs, Kurtwood Smith, Lincoln Kilpatrick, Loryn Locklin, prison, prison escape, Stuart Gordon, Tom Towles, Vernon Wells
Posted in Action, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 19 Comments »
Wednesday, December 4th, 2013
GREEN STREET HOOLIGANS 2: STAND YOUR GROUND opens with another BRAVEHEART style two-crowds-running-at-each brawl set to an upbeat punk anthem. But the ground they have to stand in this one is fenced in – they’re in the joint. It’s about exactly what you dreamed the DTV sequel to GREEN STREET HOOLIGANS would be about: one of the supporting characters from part 1 is in prison for the big fight they got into at the end and continues to feud with the guy that killed Petey, now played by a different actor.
Ross McCall (SUBMERGED) triumphantly returns to his role of Dave, he was the guy who was the airline pilot, he called them up and warned them there were a bunch of guys that were gonna beat them up at the game or whatever. I don’t remember him being that important of a figure but prison is one of those small ponds that makes his fish parts look bigger or whatever. It’s just him and two oafs we never saw before from the GSE (Green Street Enthusiastic Soccer Fans Club dot org) and all the sudden he’s the brains of the operation, he acts like the leader and they follow him around and stuff. McCall is good actually, I had to look him up to make sure he was in the first one because he has a much stronger presence here, he seems like a different guy. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: DTV, DTV sequels, Graham McTavish, Jerry Trimble, Jesse V. Johnson, Mathias Hues, Ross McCall, Vernon Wells
Posted in Action, Crime, Reviews | 4 Comments »
Thursday, May 23rd, 2013
This week in my Daily Grindhouse column I check out STRANGLEHOLD, another Cirio H. Santiago picture. This one is from 1994 and stars Jerry Trimble, who you may know as the guy who fights Dolph in front of the welders in THE PACKAGE. It’s an UNDER SIEGE type scenario where delighted-with-himself terrorist Vernon Wells has taken over a chemical plant while Trimble was doing security for a visiting congresswoman.
Take a look.
Tags: Cirio H. Santiago, Jerry Trimble, Vernon Wells
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 8 Comments »
Saturday, June 20th, 2009
BIKER GANGS SAVING P.O.W.s IN VIETNAM DOUBLE FEATURE: THE LOSERS and NAM ANGELS
In THE LOSERS a Vietnam era biker gang is recruited by the American military for a dangerous mission to recover a CIA agent being held in Cambodia. I guess it’s a mission that has to be done off the books, plus it requires high speed transportation. Biker gang it is. So they build some modified combat bikes, figure out a plan, practice it on a miniature model, then go for it.
But not until the last 25 minutes or so. That’s what’s unique and (I admit) disappointing. Most of the running time is spent fucking around, getting into trouble at bars or visiting their Vietnamese girlfriends. Very little of the backstory is explained – it seems like most or all were soldiers before, but it’s not clear how or why they came back. They don’t show them being tracked down in the U.S. and pressured to join. They’re already on board at the beginning. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: bikers, Cirio H. Santiago, Jack Starret, Vernon Wells, Vietnam, William Smith
Posted in Action, Reviews | 6 Comments »
