dee.reid Reviews

Drunken Master II (1994)

"Legendary" "The Legend of Drunken Master"

[9/10 · 6 January 2024]

Jackie Chan was 39-years-old - about to turn 40 - when "The Legend of Drunken Master" (original title: "Drunken Master II") was released in February of 1994 in China. The mentioning of Chan's age at the time of the film's release is significant because while he was approaching a time in his life when he should have started thinking about writing, directing or producing feature films, he clearly showed no signs of stopping.

And that's a good thing.

In fact, it's a very good thing.

By 1994 when "The Legend of Drunken Master" was released (an English-dubbed version of the picture eventually saw a wide North American distribution in October of 2000), Chan had already starred in well over 40 films since the mid-1970s, and was the next major Chinese martial arts star following Bruce Lee's death in 1973. What Jackie Chan did to distinguish himself from Bruce Lee (and other martial arts stars of the era), was his trademark combination of martial arts, do-it-yourself fight choreography and elaborately-staged stunt-work (which Chan famously performed himself), and slapstick humor - which made him something akin to an Asian Buster Keaton or Fred Astaire.

Another interesting tidbit is the fact that by the mid-'90s, Chan was already pretty well-known to American audiences and was a household name - despite having not yet had a major hit in Hollywood. He had tried to make a name for himself in the United States with his first English-speaking leading role in an American film with "The Big Brawl" (1980), but he was unhappy with that film and a few others he did for Hollywood in the early '80s because U. S. filmmakers would not allow him to practice his unique blend of eclectic slap-happy martial arts and D-I-Y stunt-work due to fears that he was an insurance liability for the studios who didn't want to take a loss financially in the event he got seriously injured on one of their film productions. This caused him to retreat back to Hong Kong, where his popularity continued to soar. The international box office success of Stanley Tong's "Rumble in the Bronx" (1995) prompted renewed popular Hollywood interest in the work of Jackie Chan, and Hollywood producers sought him out for the action-comedy "Rush Hour" in 1998 (which paired him up with comedian Chris Tucker), which became a worldwide hit and Chan's first commercially successful American film and suddenly he was a global superstar as EVERYONE now knew who he was finally.

But let's go back to "The Legend of Drunken Master." Directed by the legendary late Chinese filmmaker Lau Kar-leung ("The 36th Chamber of Shaolin"), "The Legend of Drunken Master," a loose follow-up of sorts to Chan's earlier break-out film "Drunken Master" (1978), is routinely regarded as one of Chan's greatest films. (Yes, granted Chan has an exhaustive catalog of "great" movies that can be considered his best, but "The Legend of Drunken Master" is frequently cited as, arguably, the greatest film he's ever made, or at least one of the top-three greatest films he's ever made. After all, the praise surrounding this film's extensive fight scenes, stunts, and choreography have earned it a place on many lists as one of the greatest action movies of all time.)

Set in China in the early 20th century when the country was still under British colonial rule, Chan plays Chinese folk hero Wong Fei Hung, who is a master of the legendary Drunken Boxing style of Chinese gong-fu, and is so-called because its erratic, unpredictable movements are based on the fighter being, well, drunk, and the fighter's abilities may be enhanced if he or she is genuinely intoxicated. Hung's Father (Ti Lung) is a pacifist who encourages his son not to fight - out of concerns that Hung may not be able to control his drinking - and Hung tries his best to respect his wishes, but his dashing Stepmother (the late Anita Mui) often aids him in his schemes to try to do something good with skills.

When Hung inadvertently discovers that British officials (and their traitorous Chinese subordinates) are smuggling priceless Chinese artifacts out of the country - threatening to further erode Chinese national pride and culture during a time when both are at a nadir - he puts his fists and feet to work and become a hero to his people, one drink at a time.

As you can see, like a lot of martial arts movies, "The Legend of Drunken Master" doesn't have a plot that is terribly complex, but also like a lot of Chinese martial arts movies, it speaks still in a simplistic fashion of the need for the Chinese people to have pride in their country and history, and do their best to try to preserve it. Of course, the plot primarily serves as a "clothesline," in the words of the late film critic Roger Ebert (from his positive three-and-a-half star review of the film), for its numerous martial arts set-pieces, including an extended fight with Hung and former Manchu general Fu Wen-Chi (played by Kar-leung himself, who was also one of the film's fight choreographers along with Chan and his Jackie Chan Stunt Team) against the feared "Axe Gang" (Stephen Chow used them in his blockbuster 2004 action-comedy "Kung Fu Hustle") in a restaurant. But the film's most widely talked-about action sequence is the climatic two-on-one final battle between Hung and John (Andy Lau), a turncoat Chinese enforcer for the British consulate, and his right hand Henry (Ho-Sung Pak, of the first two entries in the "Mortal Kombat" video game franchise), in a steel factory - which reportedly took four months to film, with Chan himself citing that just one day on set only resulted in about three seconds of usable footage.

Such dedication to perfecting his action scenes and Chan's willingness to get wheeled out on a stretcher after a hard day's worth of filming is nothing short of commendable.

From all of this, you can now clearly see why "The Legend of Drunken Master" is regarded as one of the greatest action movies of all time, and why Jackie Chan has also earned his place as a globally recognized martial arts superstar.

Lastly, it's also worth noting that "The Legend of Drunken Master" was released the same year as the Gordon Chan-directed, Yuen Woo-ping-choreographed Jet Li epic "Fist of Legend" (1994), which is also regarded as a martial arts masterpiece, and its style and fight choreography were cited as major cinematic influences by The Wachowskis on "The Matrix" (1999).

9/10.

This Is the End (2013)

It's the End Of The World And Everybody's Invited!

[8/10 · 31 December 2023]

• "And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads" - Revelation 12:3 (KJV)

• "(You Gotta Fight) For Your Right To Party" - the Beastie Boys, "Fight For Your Right (To Party)," from the album "Licensed to Ill"

Having grown up in the Baptist church, I was about eight- or nine-years-old when I first learned of "The Second Coming" and "The Last Days" and "The End of Days" - all otherwise known as "Judgment Day," or, more simply, the Apocalypse, or "The Rapture." Needless to say, as a young prepubescent kid who had previously been raised to believe that God forgives all and loves all and that God was not a wrathful or vengeful god (except in the biblical Old Testament), this scared the living hell (no pun intended) out of me. Over time, however, as I grew older and more mature and adopted a more realistic and symbolic, and less literal, attitude, toward religion, my fear of the biblical "end times" subsided.

But I'm also a movie fan, and have come to realize, as well, that God has a sense of humor. I knew this first-hand when I watched Kevin Smith's "Dogma" (1999). "Dogma's" mix of God-loving spiritual and philosophical musings combined with gross-out toilet humor most certainly played some sort of influence on the 2013 apocalyptic horror-comedy "This Is the End," which marries its unique blend of Judd Apatow gross-out gags, stoner humor, and gratuitous violence with "survivalist hoarding and eschatological speculation" (borrowing the words of Ann Hornaday, in her two-star "The Washington Post" review of the film) and prevents "This Is the End" from simply being another dumb, ridiculously violent union of post-"Scream" cynicism with self-aware meta-humor and horror.

It's taken me 10 years to get to "This Is the End," a film that has long been on the back-burner of my extensive film collection. Having been indoctrinated into the Apatow brand with such classics like "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" (2005), "Knocked Up" (2007), "Superbad" (2007), "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" (2008) and my personal favorite, "Pineapple Express" (2008), "This Is the End" seems like a fitting summation of that late-2000s era of Canadian-bred semi-improvisational, pop-culture-digesting slacker comedy. It's coming to us from the writing and directing team of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (in their directorial debut, and based on the 2007 Jason Stone-directed short film "Seth and Jay versus the Apocalypse"), and it features a mega-cast that includes Rogen himself, and other Apatow "Freaks and Geeks" regulars like Jay Baruchel, James Franco, Jonah Hill, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson, Michael Cera, and Emma Watson - along with a who's-who of other familiar Hollywood celebrities, each playing exaggerated, deeply depraved versions of themselves at a house party in the Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles.

The set-up is surprisingly innocuous: Jay Baruchel arrives in L. A. to hang out with his close friend Seth Rogen, the latter of whom has pre-emptively set out a welcome party of weed, soda, Starburst candy, and 3-D television - all Jay's favorites. The evening's events then move to a house-warming party at James Franco's mansion in the hills just outside of downtown Los Angeles, where a slew of celebrity cameos including Aziz Ansari, Kevin Hart, Mindy Kaling, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Rihanna, Paul Rudd, Jason Segel, and Martin Starr - along with the aforementioned Cera (for whom the term "playing against type" was practically invented) and Watson (whom Rogen famously said earlier this year walked off the set due to her objections over the film's content) - make themselves known. Before you know it, a series of powerful earthquakes, mysterious blue lights from the sky and a rash of unexplained disappearances around the city throw the party-goers into full-on survival mode, leaving only a small band of would-be heroes that includes Baruchel (my target character in the movie and the most relatable of the film's nominal protagonists), Franco, Hill, McBride, Rogen, and Robinson to ride out the Apocalypse in Franco's fortified Hollywood mansion.

From there, the usual raunchy antics of past Apatow comedies becomes apparent; boozy stoner humor and hilarious raunch (the guys' D-I-Y improv of a sequel to "Pineapple Express" is especially brilliant and laugh-out-loud funny in its banality and stupidity and for off-handedly foreshadowing one principal actor's fate late in the film's third act, as well as its sly critiques of past flops like "The Green Hornet" and "Your Highness," and a riotous sequence featuring references to both "The Exorcist" AND "Rosemary's Baby") combine with the nihilistic post-apocalyptic survival-horror that's become so familiar to anyone that's paid attention to the likes of "The Walking Dead" over the past decade. But what really brings it all together are the relationships between the six leads and how their close friendships strain and fracture over the course of the next several days following the Beginning Of The End. The film is especially and unexpectedly sentimental in its analysis of the strained friendship between Seth Rogen and Jay Baruchel, the latter of whom has, over time, become increasingly distant from his friend following the latter's move to Hollywood, and dislikes the latter's new circle of friends (Hill, in particular). Friendship has always been the one key recurring theme in much of Apatow's work, and everything related to it. It lends "This Is the End" its rare sort of emotional core apart from the raunch and anarchic end-of-the-world shock-horror.

Furthermore, is "This Is the End's" exploration of over-privileged young actors' "narcissism and spiritual bankruptcy" (again, in the words of Ann Hornaday) since as "The Rapture" drags on, the six leads are forced to examine their lives and wonder why they've been left behind and if there is any hope for redemption. From the outset, you wouldn't expect to see or hear something like this in a film like "This Is the End," much less think that Rogen and Goldberg would be capable of injecting that level of spiritual intelligence into what is essentially a simplistic, rude & crude, arm-chair Hollywood morality tale for slackers masquerading as an end-of-the-world survival-comedy (even more so considering the fact that Rogen, Baruchel, Hill and Franco are all of Jewish heritage, and speculating on the "end times" as depicted in the "Book of Revelations" in the New Testament is quite revealing). To me, it's just a little remarkable nugget planted in a film that while it is not always tonally consistent, it keeps you thoroughly on the edge of your seat as you wonder what wild, crazy direction it's going to veer toward next - making it one of the most fun, less-predictable films of its genre.

"This Is the End" is a fitting conclusion (if it really is a conclusion) to an era of hilariously raunchy, yet unexpectedly sweet-natured comedy from a collective of brilliant young Canadian (and American) comic stars. The 10 years were well worth the wait for this not-yet-jaded viewer.

8/10

P. S.: "This Is the End" concludes with the most laugh-out-loud hilarious (if more than a little unnecessary and maybe blasphemous?) dance number I've ever seen.

Holiday Rush (2019)

Another feel-good, Netflix Christmas holiday treat

[6/10 · 10 December 2023]

In what seems to be a new Christmas holiday tradition of mine, on days like this I'll scroll through the Netflix holiday movie line-up and see what warm, feel-good fun the online streaming service giant can come up with next. So today, I stumbled across the 2019 Christmas-themed romantic-comedy "Holiday Rush."

Directed by Leslie Small and co-written by Sean Dwyer & Greg Cope White, the story centers around Rashon "Rush" Williams (Romany Malco), a popular New York City-based hip-hop radio DJ and his beautiful producer friend Roxy Richardson (Sonequa Martin-Green, "The Walking Dead"). A few weeks before Christmas, Rashon and Roxy's radio station WMLE is bought out by CamCom, a large telecommunications firm, which then switches over to a pop music format and unceremoniously fires the two of them.

Dejected, Rashon, who is a widower and lives a privileged upscale lifestyle with his four spoiled children - Harvard-bound eldest son Jamal (Amarr M. Wooten), fashion-minded Mya (Deysha Nelson), and twin girls Evie (Andrea-Marie Alphonse) and Gabby (Selena-Marie Alphonse) - is then forced to sell their home and move back in with his loving Aunt Jo (Darlene Love). Meanwhile, Roxy comes up with a risky proposal that in order to get back on their feet - and, by extension, the airwaves - they buy up WBQL, the old radio station where the two of them, years earlier, originally got their start. It will take a Christmas miracle for Rashon and Roxy's gamble to pay off, especially with looming competition from the CamCom-owned and -operated WMLE and its ruthless corporate-minded new head honcho Joceyln "Joss" Hawkins (Tamala Jones).

As you can see, "Holiday Rush" is not a deep or particularly involving holiday film, like a lot of Netflix Christmas movies are. But also like a lot of Netflix Christmas movies, "Holiday Rush" provides a much-welcomed distraction from the, well, Holiday Rush of this time of year. It makes you feel warm and good inside. And sometimes, that is all that really matters. And sometimes, that may be all that you really need.

6/10.

Godzilla Minus One (2023)

Another year, another "Godzilla" ("Minus One")

[10/10 · 1 December 2023]

• "Godzilla is the son of the atomic bomb... ...He is a nightmare created out of the darkness of the human soul. He is the sacred beast of the apocalypse. As long as the arrogance of Man exists, Godzilla will survive..." - David Kalat, author, "A Critical History and Filmography of Toho's Godzilla Series"

"Godzilla Minus One" is living proof that in the words of one viewer over on YouTube, you can re-tell the exact same story a dozen different ways and you can still produce an excellent end-product. Japan saw fit to reboot its long-running "Godzilla" series with "Shin Gojira" back in 2016, and has re-booted the franchise, yet again, with "Godzilla Minus One," which was released in Japanese theaters on November 3rd, 2023, to mark the 69th anniversary of the film that started it all, Ishiro Honda's grim black & white "Gojira" (1954); "Godzilla Minus One" saw an American theatrical release today on December 1st, 2023, making it the first Japanese-produced "Godzilla" film to be released theatrically in the United States since "Shin Gojira," which itself was the first Japanese-produced "Godzilla" film to be released domestically since "Godzilla 2000" (1999) (which as a tearful aside, was the last film I ever saw at the Cineplex Odeon at my local shopping mall before it closed down later that summer in 2000).

As most readers here know, I am a life-long Godzilla fan; "Gojira" is my all-time favorite giant monster movie (and 1989's "Godzilla vs. Biollante" is my favorite giant monster "versus" movie and is a unique gem amongst giant monster movies and "Godzilla" movies, more specifically - I love it). When I had first heard that Toho was planning on releasing yet another kaiju-eiga ("Japanese monster movie") featuring the mighty "King of the Monsters," I began to get really excited. (It's really hard for me to get excited about most new movies these days for a litany of reasons. More on this in a bit.) Of course, Toho was keen to keep the very specific details of the movie under wraps, which only made the anticipation greater. (I had experienced that same sensation of immense excitement when "Shin Gojira" received a one-week distribution stateside back in 2016, and I had to drive all the way to Washington, D. C., from my home in Northern Virginia, which is where the nearest theater playing the film was located.)

As written and directed by visual effects specialist Takashi Yamazaki, "Godzilla Minus One" takes a huge creative leap with firmly established Godzilla lore by going back to the beginning. Well, not just going back to the beginning, but going back even FURTHER than when things first began with "Gojira" in 1954. Yamazaki's film opens during the closing days of World War II in Japan, and ends two years later in 1947 - seven years before Honda's original. We all know the story of how a fictional dinosaur species called a "Godzillasaurus," which was living on a deserted island in the South Pacific Ocean after the Second World War, was then exposed to radioactive fallout from American nuclear weapons testing in the region, and how it later mutated into a gargantuan, seemingly indestructible fire-breathing beast that later attacked Japan - Gojira ("Godzilla," in English).

But right there, by setting "Godzilla Minus One" immediately after Japan's defeat in World War II and having Godzilla appear much sooner than he did in Ishiro Honda's original, Yamazaki's film stands apart from "Gojira" and it gives Yamazaki some new creative and dramatic territory to explore - in this case, how Japan, already at its lowest point after having surrendered to the Allies following the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945, must now contend with another looming disaster of unprecedented scale: an attack by a gigantic, radioactive, fire-breathing monster (or daikaiju, "giant strange beast").

The story here focuses on Imperial Japanese Navy kamikaze pilot Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), who in the final days of WWII in 1945, lands on Odo Island after feigning that his plane is experiencing technical issues. He meets with the lead mechanic there, Sokaku Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki), and during the night their camp is attacked by a giant dinosaur that comes ashore from the ocean and slaughters everyone except Shikishima and Tachibana, who comes to blame Shikishima for his hesitation at a critical moment which resulted in the deaths of all their comrades.

Later that year after Japan's surrender, Shikishima, wracked with survivor's guilt, returns to Tokyo, which has been ravaged by Allied fire-bombing raids - raids that claimed the lives of both his parents. (As an aside, these scenes of a devastated post-war Tokyo have to be a visual reference to the eye-witness accounts given by Ishiro Honda himself after he'd been discharged from service overseas in the Imperial Japanese Army, and then toured Hiroshima on his way home following the city's atomic bombing, and he later used these experiences to form his vision of the character of Godzilla. And as a matter of fact, Yamazaki, as a visual effects artist, has a nice taste for shocking and unsettling imagery - the first sighting of the un-mutated Godzillasaurus, the actual first appearance of Godzilla at sea or the so-called "black rain" following the giant monster's later rampage on Tokyo, are some prime examples - which makes his film one of the more visually interesting "Godzilla" features ever produced.) While salvaging what little he has left, he meets Noriko (Minami Hamabe), another war orphan who carries in her tow, an infant girl named Akiko (Sae Nagatani), whose mother perished in the fire-bombing raids and had charged Noriko with the child's care. He allows the two of them to move in with him and a loose family of sorts is born.

Pretty soon, however, Japan, which is only in the early stages of reconstruction (just at it was in "Gojira"), is threatened by the terror of Godzilla, who rises from the Pacific Ocean to unleash his wrath on a country that has already suffered heavy devastation brought on by nuclear bombers, and must now face a threat that could destroy the country completely. Since Japan cannot rely on its military (the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces were disbanded in 1945 following the surrender, and the Japan Self-Defense Forces - JSDF - weren't founded until July of 1954) or the United States (Japan would not begin to enter into a series of mutual security and cooperation legislative agreements with the U. S., and thus become our closest Asian ally, until the early 1950s) for aid - due to rising tensions with the Soviet Union - it is up to Shikishima and a few other dedicated private citizens to defeat Godzilla and protect what little country of theirs that is left to protect.

"Godzilla Minus One" is a thrilling cinematic event the likes of which I have not experienced since, well, "Shin Gojira." I should now state here that I rarely go to the movies anymore, as there just isn't much out there these days that truly interests me. Since superhero movies no longer carry the geeky thrill that they once did for this viewer, I found "Godzilla Minus One" to be a much-welcomed shot in the arm, and something very, very different from much of what I've seen lately. That it was a subtitled foreign-language feature that had received a wide distribution stateside ("Godzilla 2000" had a wide theatrical release back in 2000, albeit in an edited, English-dubbed format, while, as stated earlier, "Shin Gojira" only had a limited one-week engagement back in 2016), "Godzilla Minus One" lives up to its high expectations and by going in a different direction from the anti-bureaucratic satire of "Shin Gojira" and by extension the dark apocalyptic tone of "Gojira," this makes it stand out from much of the fare that I've seen in recent years, and even other "Godzilla" films.

What also makes "Godzilla Minus One" stand out is that it's a feature that is not steeped in nostalgia or purposeful throwbacks to the "Godzilla" films of yesteryear (most domestic so-called "legacy" features love doing that for eagle-eyed, dog-eared fans of the originals to compensate for a lack of originality). Yes, "Godzilla Minus One" does include some obligatory references to films past, including some familiar musical themes by the late Akira Ifukube, who also created Godzilla's signature roar in the original 1954 "Gojira" and who remained Japan's most esteemed composer until his death in 2006. But this film is not about an avid fan-boy geeking out and showing off his hero-worship of the material. No, "Godzilla Minus One" is simply a tale of a country trying to pick itself up again following the end of a devastating conflict - a conflict that nearly destroyed the nation - and having to face a force of nature more dangerous and destructive than any war. That is perhaps where Takashi Yamazaki succeeds the most, and his film is also not steeped in the usual anti-American resentment and finger-pointing and anti-nuclear allegory, and - and! - the assertive pro-Japanese nationalist sentiment of most recent "Godzilla" movies (a more recent phenomenon that has been pervasive in many "Godzilla" features since the early 1990s, after Japan had fully rebuilt its economy and was looking to re-assert itself on the global market).

"Godzilla Minus One" is a "Godzilla" film that was well worth the seven-year wait.

"Godzilla Minus One" rates a solid "10."

10/10.

House on Haunted Hill (1999)

Seven strangers + plus a million bucks + a night in a haunted insane asylum = "House on Haunted Hill"

[7/10 · 27 October 2023]

It's a classic Hollywood scare-story: In 1931 Los Angeles, the patients of the Vannacut Psychiatric Institute for the Criminally Insane overwhelmed the asylum's medical staff, and the institute's founder and head physician Dr. Richard B. Vannacut (Jeffrey Combs) initiated the building's lockdown procedures, leading to the place to go up in flames and kill everyone still trapped inside. It's been said that ever since that fateful night in 1931, the angry spirits of the dead doctors and mental patients who perished in the raging inferno have continued to haunt the place to this very day.

In the present day (at the time, 1999), uber-wealthy, slightly-more-than-a-little-eccentric amusement park mogul Steven Price (Geoffrey Rush) organizes a surprise birthday bash for his conniving, money-grabbing wife Evelyn Stockard-Price (Famke Janssen) at the Vannacut Institute, which is now a private residence. But being that Price has a few tricks up his sleeve and a real knack for harmless and theatrical fright gags, he disposes of his wife's original guest list and comes up with his own, inviting four strangers to spend the night in the supposedly haunted insane asylum and if they make it to the next morning, they'll each win $1 million - no questions asked. So, just who are the five unlucky contestants? One is ex-professional baseball player Eddie Baker (Taye Diggs); pompous Dr. Donald Blackburn, MD (Peter Gallagher); another is film executive Jennifer Jenzen/Sara Wolfe (Ali Larter); former game show hostess Melissa Marr (Bridgette Wilson); and the house's edgy current owner Watson Pritchett ("Saturday Night Live's" Chris Kattan).

From there on in, things are about to get REALLY scary...

The 1999 Robert Zemeckis-/Joel Silver-produced, William Malone-directed "House on Haunted Hill" was a horror film that I initially ignored upon its release 24 years ago today. But over the intervening years I developed a casually growing interest in it and was surprised to find a well-made, modestly budgeted (for the time) horror/fright vehicle. A remake of the 1959 William Castle-directed Vincent Price film of the same name - which I have not seen, and Geoffrey Rush's character's surname and overall physical appearance are obvious references TO the late film star Vincent Price - "House on Haunted Hill" 1999 gets by on its initially very strong build-up and inventive introduction of its principal characters.

But as we dive into the meat of the story and despite some genuinely tense moments early on (see Price's first scene at one of his amusement parks for reference), it later develops an irritating tendency toward cheap jump scares, which diminishes the initially strong build-up. For example, an early sequence at the Vannacut Institute involving a rooftop window fixture suddenly breaking and nearly killing one of the characters, and another scene where Sara finds herself literally up to her arms in a "Buick-sized" vat of blood, feel cheap and forced. It must also be stated that this latter scene (and a few others like it), will often involve folks unwisely venturing off by themselves into the house's labyrinth of dimly-lit hallways and maze of underground tunnels (one of the hallmarks of lazy horror movie storytelling).

On the plus side, the screenplay by Dick Beebe does give way to some uniquely interesting characters (even if some are not all that well-developed), in particular the blackly humorous back-and-forth dynamic between the bickering Prices, who are both played with scenery-chewing enthusiasm by Geoffrey Price and Famke Janssen (both of whom obviously enjoyed playing their roles and their overall dedication to the material shows). Also, the film's mix of practical special effects magic, CGI, and make-up (by Gregory Nicotero's KNB Effects Group and the late Dick Smith) are quite creative and disturbing (those flickering, spinning-head ghosts! Whoa!!). (It should also be noted that "House on Haunted Hill" was probably one of the last mainstream Hollywood films to ever combine practical effects and CGI like this.) Malone definitely has an eye for frightening and disturbing imagery once this film's horror elements kick into high gear and the supernatural forces at work in the house begin to make their acquaintances with the human protagonists.

"House on Haunted Hill," while far from a perfect entry into the horror genre, does keep you entertained throughout with its engaging characters (especially Geoffrey Rush and Famke Janssen tag-teaming each other with their venomous line-readings) and a few genuinely scary moments. Its only downsides are the irritating jump scares and unwise decisions by some of the characters that lead to their demises.

So, would YOU spend a night in a haunted mansion for a million dollars?

7/10.

Freddy vs. Jason (2003)

A blood-soaked, gore-filled live-action horror comic book

[6/10 · 21 October 2023]

In what was the first horror-beast battle crossover event of the new millennium, 2003's "Freddy vs. Jason" delivers exactly what it promises: Two well-known, well-worn horror icons going head-to-head, with a small group of hapless and helpless teenage cannon-fodder caught in the middle.

The basic premise is not terribly bright, even if it is still quite detailed, overall: In Hell, razor-fingered, dream-stalking child killer Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) calls upon machete-wielding, hockey-masked mass murderer Jason Voorhees (now played by stuntman Ken Kirzinger, having replaced series regular Kane Hodder, who had portrayed Jason Voorhees in four films previously) to initiate a killing spree of his own in Krueger's former stomping grounds of Springwood, Ohio, in the hopes that the bloodshed would create enough fear amongst the town's young people for him to return from Hell and start his dream-stalking reign of terror all over again.

However, Krueger doesn't account for the possibility that by bringing Jason back from the dead, that he would eventually lose control over him, and thus take away from his pool of potential victims and THUS jeopardizing his own well-laid plans. Caught in the middle of it, are Lori Campbell (Monica Keena), her close friend Kia Waterson (Destiny's Child singer Kelly Rowland), Lori's formerly institutionalized boyfriend Will Rollins (Jason Ritter), Will's fellow inmate Mark Davis (Brendan Fletcher), stalwart nerd Charlie Linderman (Christopher George Marquette), pothead Freeburg (Kyle Labine), and recent sheriff's department transplant Deputy Scott Stubbs (Lochlyn Munro). Now you know all that you need to know about them as their group numbers start to dwindle as the battle between Freddy and Jason rages on, and these teens struggle to find a way to survive and stop their bloody rampage.

I was a senior in high school at the time of the film's release in August 2003, and did sort of embrace the film - but only at arm's length, really. I had only recently developed a fixation with horror films and was not particularly a fan of the original "Friday the 13th" (1980), but I loved "A Nightmare on Elm Street" (1984). So, I may have only enjoyed the film halfway because I love Freddy Krueger but do not care much for Jason Voorhees. But this is all beside the point.

In terms of the production, "Freddy vs. Jason" looks great and feels exactly like what a big-budget, special effects-driven and blood- and gore-drenched live-action comic book horror movie crossover event should feel. Ronny Yu, known in Hong Kong mainly for his action and martial arts movie fanfare there, and who had previously directed the horror-comedy sequel "Bride of Chucky" in 1998, brings what he learned in Asia to a uniquely American concept - and that is primarily a frenetic pace gleamed from his years working in Asian action cinema. It's an interesting marriage of East and West that hasn't really been witnessed again in the horror genre since this film's release in 2003.

Having seen the again film today for the first time in ages, "Freddy vs. Jason" does feel very much like a product of its era in the early 21st century. Has it aged well? In a sense, yes; its largely prosthetic make-up and gore special effects still hold up, but when you factor in the fact that since 2003 both the "Friday the 13th" and "Nightmare on Elm Street" franchises have seen ultimately disappointing reboots (I readily admit my fondness for the 2009 "Friday the 13th" reboot, but I digress), "Freddy vs. Jason" does start to feel dated. It feels like a legacy piece, since it was the last real time that Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees were portrayed by their respective series regulars and the product still felt like something genuinely connected to what came before it.

For that, it should probably be commended - if nothing else (and no sequel crossover with the "Evil Dead" franchise ever materialized, either).

6/10.

Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

One of the last great old-school Universal creature features, and one of the most memorable movies from my childhood...

[10/10 · 23 September 2023]

One of the greatest things that can ever be said about Jack Arnold's 1954 3D-minded creature feature "Creature from the Black Lagoon" is that it was one of the last truly great monster movies ever produced by Universal Studios, and the titular "Creature" was one of the last truly memorable, if not the last truly memorable, old-school movie monsters to ever join their ranks (Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Wolf Man).

I remember "Creature from the Black Lagoon" as one of a handful of black & white monster movies ("The Thing from Another World," "Them!") from the 1950s that I grew up watching as an impressionable youth in the early '90s. But unlike the old-school Universal Studios movie monsters from the '30s and '40s, "Creature from the Black Lagoon" differed from its predecessors in that instead of being set in a Gothic, fog-drenched Universal studio back-lot, the action has been moved to the Amazon River in the jungles of Brazil. But this big change in scenery does not automatically mean that Jack Arnold was not able to create an atmosphere of fear and dread and suspense, and he still manages to get great mileage out of the almost-oppressive yet sweeping panoramic jungle views and spectacularly beautiful underwater photography (more on this latter part in a bit).

What gets the ball rolling in "Creature from the Black Lagoon," is that geologist Dr. Carl Maia (Antonio Moreno) has just discovered fossilized evidence (a clawed hand with webbed fingers) while working in the jungles of the Brazilian rain forest; Maia believes that this finding proves the so-called "missing evolutionary link" between human beings and fish. He then recruits his old friend and former student ichthyologist Dr. David Reed (Richard Carlson), along with his beautiful fiancée Kay Lawrence (Julie Adams), and David's financially-minded boss Dr. Mark Williams (Richard Denning) to lead a scientific expedition back to the jungle site where the claw was first discovered so that they can try to find the remainder of the skeleton.

What they discover, to their terror, is a mythical creature that time forgot: "The Creature" (dually played on land by stuntman Ben Chapman, and professional swimmer/diver Ricou Browning for the underwater sequences), a.k.a., "The Gill-Man," a half-man/half-fish amphibious humanoid beast that sets its sights on Kay, who looks quite stunning in a contour-hugging swimsuit (and also represents a doomed love story echoing "King Kong," which was said to have served as an inspiration on the story), and an epic battle between Man and Fish-Man where the hunter becomes the hunted.

Film producer William Alland was said to have gotten the idea for "Creature from the Black Lagoon" 13 years earlier while attending a dinner party for Orson Welles's "Citizen Kane" (1941) after listening to stories told to him by Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa about half-man/half-fish creatures living in the rivers of the Amazon rain forest. He produced story notes that later fed into a script treatment by Maurice Zimm, and screenwriters Harry Essex and Arthur Ross later wrote the final feature-length screenplay for Jack Arnold to film.

While it is true that certain aspects of the picture have not aged well (i.e., the screaming damsel-in-distress, heroic male saviors, racial minorities in cannon-fodder supporting roles), "Creature from the Black Lagoon" still does represent something of a departure from the legacy it would eventually become a part of. Its key defining attribute in this regard (aside from the drastic change in setting, remember) is that it was also one of the only original movies of its kind. The Gill-Man was a completely original - not to mention decidedly low-tech, a man in a suit - monster design; it was not based on a novel or firmly established folklore. No. "Creature from the Lagoon" was created completely by the filmmakers, which earns the film a highly distinguished reputation in the old-school Universal Studios movie monster canon.

The underwater photography for this picture was quite stunning and breathtaking for the time it was filmed, and even today Hollywood has yet to shoot underwater sequences that match this film's sweeping grandeur. (Of course, everything on this production was done manually by someone holding an underwater camera - in this case, by Charles S. Welbourne, with direction by James C. Havens; a film made today would most likely use CGI to accomplish this arduous task.) Also, if the movie were to have been filmed in color, it would be even more beautiful to look at but I think that it would still somehow diminish its overall impact and the atmosphere that Jack Arnold painstakingly created, as well as the genuinely thrilling underwater action sequences that dominate the film's second half.

"Creature from the Black Lagoon" is a monster movie classic, truly one of the last great pictures of its kind, and it also served as a major influence on future major Hollywood "B"-movies like "Anaconda" (1997) and its sequel "Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid" (2004), as well as satire in the character of "The Missing Link" (voiced by Will Arnett) in the DreamWorks Animation feature "Monsters vs. Aliens" (2009).

10/10.

Airborne (1993)

"Airborne" (1993) - "The Wave Is Mine!" - And it's also one of my favorite movies from my childhood!!

[10/10 · 3 September 2023]

In the 1993 sports-themed adventure-comedy/fish-out-of-water teen-comedy story "Airborne," California-born-and-bred teenage surfer/in-line skater Mitchell Goosen (Shane McDermott, in his only big-screen film role) learns that there are some things in life that are worth fighting for - like the love of his dream girl and the respect of his sworn enemy (who also happens to be the brother of his dream girl).

Things get underway in "Airborne" when Mitchell's zoologist parents get a research grant that will whisk them away to Australia to study wombats for six months. Because Mitchell cannot be out of school for that long, they instead ship him off to live with his goofy, nerdy, working-class aunt and uncle in Cincinnati, Ohio - which might as well as be the Land Down Under to him, anyway. His only real friend becomes their son, his misfit cousin Wiley (Seth Green).

Right away, Mitchell butts heads with the local hockey-playing meat-head jocks, whom he irritates with his affability and California-borne surfer-bum mellow attitude, and the fact that he's flirting with, and getting all the attention, of the girls - their girls. "Don't mess with other people's property," Mitchell is warned. A botched hockey game later, Mitchell and Wiley later become the targets of cruel pranks and verbal harassment by their school's toughs, who are led by Jack (Chris Conrad) and his number-two Augie (a pre-fame Jack Black).

Things start looking up for Mitchell when he eyes the tall, blonde-haired high school beauty Nikki (Brittney Powell), who, of course - and not really spoiling anything here - later turns out to be Jack's sister. But throughout it all, Mitchell never breaks his cool: a reformed surfer hooligan himself who never once hesitated to throw the first punch, he now counts Popeye and Gandhi amongst his personal heroes, the latter of whom he has even co-opted his core philosophy of non-violence and passive resistance as his own (hence, Mitchell's never backing down even when confronted with physical harm by his adversaries). Later inspired by a dream involving a tidal wave and a Spanish-speaking shark named "Pepe," Mitchell eventually manages to find an appropriate middle ground where he can readily resolve his conflicts - while not always addressing his own needs in return, exactly - without compromising his values. In other words, he learns to go after what he really wants, and he also comes to discover that there ARE some things in life that are worth fighting for.

Mitchell and Wiley's battles with Jack and his goons are set amongst the backdrop of a simmering conflict between Jack's gang of working-class toughs, and a group of cackling, uber-wealthy, upper-crust elites from a rival high school who have been continually putting them down and besting them at pretty much everything they do. It all culminates in a spectacularly choreographed - by professional in-line skater Chris Edwards and his Team Rollerblade - 10-minute, no-holds-barred, all-or-nothing, downhill in-line skating race where pretty much everything is at stake. But, will Mitchell save the day with his finely-tuned rollerblading skills, after he gets asked to join his former bullies-turned-allies in the race? Will he get Nikki, the girl of his dreams? Will he finally be able to call his nemesis Jack his friend in the end?

Directed by Rob Bowman, in his feature-film directorial debut, "Airborne" was one of my favorite movies when I was a young kid growing up in the early to mid-1990s, and it still is. It was a perpetual go-to movie to watch on lazy weekend afternoons or in the early mornings before I went to school.

Of course, what struck my interest in the film were the deftly choreographed in-line skating sequences. Having grown up a casual neighborhood rollerblader myself, it was nice to see a movie where in-line skating was one of the central subjects of the film ("Airborne" may just be one of the only mainstream Hollywood films to address rollerblading as a valid sports pastime, and was a few years before the booming popularity of professional skateboarder Tony Hawk). And of course, for me, "Airborne's" major draw is the climatic final race, which is as thrilling as it is staged and executed by the film's actors and legion of professional stunt performers. (In a funny aside, when I was growing up in the mid-'90s and whenever "Airborne" came on television, I always somehow or another came across the final racing sequence. I don't know how or why that was, but call it one of my fondest memories from my childhood.)

I still can't believe that "Airborne" will be turning 30 on September 17.

My, how time flies.

10/10.

Judgment Night (1993)

"Judgment Night!!!"

[8/10 · 2 September 2023]

In "Judgment Night," things start off innocently enough: four life-long friends who include the soft-spoken and straight-laced family man Frank Wyatt (Emilio Estevez), his womanizing best friend Mike Peterson (Cuba Gooding, Jr.), Frank's reckless and impulsive younger brother John Wyatt (Stephen Dorff), and the lecherous fast-talking lawyer Ray Cochran (Jeremy Piven) are heading out to downtown Chicago for a boys' night out at a boxing match, end up taking a wrong turn off the expressway to avoid a large traffic jam, and eventually wind up on the wrong side of town.

After stumbling upon a hit-and-run victim who later turns out to have been shot, the young Kid (Michael DeLorenzo) curiously refuses their help. "You guys don't know what you're messing with!" he warns, and before they know it he's dragged out of their decked-out camper into the street and promptly executed by Fallon (stand-up comedian Denis Leary, barely eschewing his trademark motormouth MTV-style rants), a psychotic neighborhood drug lord, and his three leering henchmen.

"Rule number-one," Fallon states before finally killing the young man, "Don't ever steal from me. Rule number-two: No witnesses," and that's when the gang turns their attentions toward Frank, Mike, John and Ray, who saw Fallon's cold-blooded execution of his thieving lieutenant.

From then on, "Judgment Night" finds Fallon and his goons (who include House of Pain lead rapper Everlast, credited here by his birthname of Erik Schrody) relentlessly pursuing the four hapless suburbanites through the decaying downtown Chicago city streets, vagrant-packed rail cars, apartment housing projects, the sewers, and even a supermarket as they attempt to survive a living nightmare through an urban hell.

At the time of its release on October 15, 1993, "Judgment Night" was really the latest in a loose chronology of violent urban action-thrillers that also included the previous year's "Trespass" (1992) that brought the relatively crime-free middle-class suburbs to the dangerously crime-ridden and poverty-stricken inner-city. This tension, of course, was highlighted by some of the real-world conflicts of the time, including the 1992 L. A. Riots that had been touched off by the acquittal of four police officers for the severe beating of a black motorist, the late Rodney King, and later the O. J. Simpson murder case.

But a social and class commentary, this film is not. What "Judgment Night" is, however, is one of the most thrilling, nail-biting, and genuinely suspenseful and action-packed films of the genre - even though it is a curiously overlooked gem of said genre. Stephen Hopkins ("A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child," "Predator 2") directs the picture, and he maintains a firm grasp on the action and the characters, leading to some genuinely tense moments including a scene in a rail car with some conniving hobos and a particularly chilling sequence in which the four friends seek refuge in an apartment building.

The four leads are all adequate - especially Emilio Estevez as Frank, who becomes the de-facto leader of the group since he has a family and is therefore the only one with anything to lose - but it's really Denis Leary who steals the show. As stated before, you still see much of his trademark ranting stand-up comedy routine, but it's the psychotically unhinged menace that he brings to his character that makes him one of the more frightening and overlooked portrayals of screen villainy that the genre is ever likely to see.

By the end of "Judgment Night," you'll think twice about taking another wrong turn off the expressway...

8/10

P. S.: The soundtrack to "Judgment Night" features 11 hit collaborations between well-known hard rock/heavy metal and rap artists of the time, including Helmet and House of Pain, Teenage Fanclub and De La Soul, Living Colour and Run-D. M. C., Slayer and Ice-T, Faith No More and Boo-Yaa T. R. I. B. E., Sonic Youth and Cypress Hill/Pearl Jam and Cypress Hill, and my personal favorite colab between Biohazard and Onyx (on the hard-hitting title track "Judgment Night"). The "Judgment Night" soundtrack was utterly ground-breaking at the time of its release due to these collaborations - though not altogether unsurprising since a few of these rock acts (Slayer, Living Colour, Faith No More, Biohazard) had veered toward rap before and some of these rap artists (Run-D. M. C., Ice-T, Cypress Hill, House of Pain, Onyx) had previously ventured into the rock arena - as it marked another major entry in the burgeoning rap-rock scene of the early 1990s, and the future development of so-called "nu-metal," which would dominate the metal and rock scene of the late '90s and early 2000s.

Golgo 13: The Professional (1983)

Before "The Professional" (1994) and the "Hitman" video game series...

[7/10 · 25 August 2023]

...There was "Golgo 13: The Professional."

World-renowned professional assassin Duke Togo - code-named "Golgo 13" - has just eliminated his latest target, Robert Dawson, the 29-year-old heir to Dawson Enterprises and the son of billionaire oil industrialist Leonard Dawson. The elder Dawson swears bloody vengeance against Golgo 13 for killing his only son, using all manner of underworld hit-men, government- and military-trained professional mercenaries and genetically altered superhuman freaks to take out Golgo 13, who carries on with other unrelated assignments that take him from California, to Italy, to Brazil, and finally back to the United States.

Golgo 13 is a ruthless and amoral professional assassin - one who is 100%, lethally committed to his chosen line of work. He is so devoid of humanity and emotion, that much of the film's emotional drama evolves from other character's reactions to him and his activities, which lends the picture a rare degree of unpretentiousness and amorality. Yet, you still root for the guy for some reason, even though he seems completely unrelatable. And YET - yet! - he is also identifiably human: he gets wounded several times during the course of his frequent and bloody battles, and still keeps on to his next job.

"Golgo 13: The Professional," first released in Japan in 1983, was the first Anime' (Japanese animation) film to be adapted from the long-running Manga (Japanese comic book) series that was first created in 1968 by Japanese author Takao Saito; two other live-action films based on the Manga had been released previously in Japan - one featuring the late martial arts superstar Sonny Chiba. The film was directed by Osamu Dezaki and it's a remarkable achievement in several respects.

First of all, "Golgo 13: The Professional" is as "realistic" an Anime' film as this sort of production is likely to get - "realistic" in the sense that the action and drama feels real and fluid within the context of an animated motion picture. In an irony, while many Western films made in the late 1990s and early 2000s would imitate the frenetic visual style and pacing of Anime', "Golgo 13: The Professional" mimics the tone and style of Western action films and spy-thrillers, with a film-noir visual touch (including "split screens, sketchy freeze-frames, and psychedelic visuals," according to a review from Allmovie) and a jazz-infused film score by Toshiyuki Omori (which is reminiscent of Lalo Schifrin's work on the American TV series "Mission: Impossible" and other action films from the 1970s).

The film's action scenes are fast and violent. And did I mention that there was a lot of violence in this movie? As well as frequent and explicit sex scenes & nudity (and a sequence of a brutal and repeated rape)? "Golgo 13: The Professional" is definitely animation for adults - animation for adults that has since become quite common on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, but not so much so in 1983. And it needs to be repeated, that such scenes of explicit bloodshed and graphic sexuality were also something that the film picked up from Western film productions made in the '70s and early '80s.

Lastly, while "Golgo 13: The Professional" may not always get the recognition it deserves in this aspect, this film does have some strong historical significance: it was the first animated film - Japanese or otherwise - to incorporate computer-generated imagery (CGI) with traditional hand-drawn cel animation. The sequence in question comes at the film's heavily-touted pre-"Die Hard" climax set at the Dawson Enterprises high-rise in San Francisco and involves Golgo 13 ascending the building while being assaulted from the outside by the military helicopters that were sent to dispatch him. Despite this ground-breaking special effects sequence, the CGI visuals don't match up very well with the hand-drawn animation - the only real flaw here, though I guess the technology just didn't exist at the time to blend CGI and hand-drawn animation more seamlessly.

I first saw "Golgo 13: The Professional" on VHS right after I graduated high school back in 2004, and I also remember that it was one of the first truly adult Japanese Anime' films I ever saw - since upon a viewing today I was reminded of the extremely bloody violence and sex scenes, though I don't remember the film's story being so complex and having a number of different plot twists and turns over the course of its rapid-fire 94-minute running time.

"Golgo 13: The Professional" is a film worthy of any Anime' film fan's library and comes highly recommended. (And I also finally saw where Quentin Tarantino lifted a famous scene from this film and re-created it into the Anime' sequence in "Kill Bill." You will know which scene I'm talking about when you see it.)

7/10.

In the Line of Fire (1993)

Clint Eastwood puts himself "In the Line of Fire"

[9/10 · 29 July 2023]

"In the Line of Fire," the 1993 Jeff Maguire-scripted, Wolfgang Petersen-directed political action-thriller, is one of the most gripping and exciting action films ever made. It also contains one of the most thrilling games of cat-and-mouse ever depicted on the big screen. And lastly, it also features one of the best performances of its legendary star, a then-63-year-old Clint Eastwood.

At the time, Eastwood was coming off the success of winning his first Oscar for directing the previous year's Best Picture-Winner "Unforgiven" (1992). Like in that film, Eastwood uses his age to great effect in the character he plays. In "In the Line of Fire," Eastwood plays Frank Horrigan, a Secret Service agent who is the only remaining active-duty member from the detail of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who, of course, was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. Horrigan has been haunted for the past 30 years by his inability to protect Kennedy, since he had failed to react quickly enough to the first shot. Why he did not react faster, he isn't exactly sure. Did he mistake the sound of the first shot for something else? Or could it be because he's afraid to take a bullet for the president, even though that is his job?

In the present, Frank is now an investigative field agent with his younger partner Al D'Andrea (Dylan McDermott) as the pair work to thwart a mysterious fiend who calls himself "Booth" (as in John Wilkes Booth, the gunman that killed President Abraham Lincoln in 1865) and is gunning for the current president, who has embarked on his re-election campaign. "Booth" likes to taunt Frank over the phone (well aware that his phone calls are being traced) and even goes the extra step of providing him with just enough clues about his next actions while still remaining elusive. "Booth" is also aware of Frank's past.

"Booth" is later revealed to be Mitch Leary (John Malkovich, who received a well-deserved Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his performance here), a disillusioned former assassin for the C. I. A., who had suffered a mental breakdown and now sees the murder of the president as the ultimate form of revenge against his former handlers. Leary is a chameleon-like master of disguise and expert modelmaker - two skills that he acquired from his work with the C. I. A., that he puts to excellent use in his plans to assassinate the current president, along with the homemade weapon that he will ultimately use to carry out his fiendish plot.

For Frank, he sees stopping Leary at any cost as his chance at redemption for failing to save President Kennedy 30 years earlier.

"In the Line of Fire" is a smart and satisfying, heart-stopping action-thriller, with top-notch performances from all of its cast members. Eastwood is in top form, as always, and again using his age to great effect to play yet another trademark character. He is his usual no-non-sense tough guy who butts heads with his superiors and later has to go at it lone wolf-style. But he's also aware that he isn't the same man that he was 30 years ago, as time has worked its way over him. He even struggles to keep pace in the presidential motorcade as it drives through the nation's capital. It's a stirring, realistic moment that shows that Horrigan, and Eastwood, is not a superman, and is not immune to the hands of Father Time.

On his down time, he even finds opportunities to flirt with Lily Raines ("Lethal Weapon 3" Rene Russo), his new Secret Service field chief. They get off to a rocky start - he accuses the Secret Service of tokenism by employing female field agents like herself - but over the course of the "Booth"/Leary investigation they build up a mutual respect for one another over jazz, bars, and romance. Russo was an interesting but not altogether unusual choice for Horrigan's love interest, since she again plays a formidable but tender-hearted love interest for a raw and rugged leading man.

And a hero is really only as good as his villain, and "In the Line of Fire" supplies us with John Malkovich as Mitch Leary. The oddball John Malkovich has made a career out of playing creepy and intelligent psychopaths; his Mitch Leary is no different. Leary is 100% determined to carry out his plans, and sees his conversations - which take the form of real conversations that are brilliantly acted by both himself and Eastwood - with Horrigan representing the ultimate challenge that he has set up for himself in his quest to assassinate the president. He even comes to regard Frank as his "friend." When these two meet face-to-face for the first time after a thrilling rooftop chase, there comes a moment when Leary demonstrates the depth of his insanity, and his commitment to his self-appointed mission. Malkovich is both frightening and captivating; it's no wonder, then, that he received an Oscar nomination for his performance here.

"In the Line of Fire" is not only a great action film, but it's also an outstanding Clint Eastwood film.

This one is definitely not to be missed.

9/10.

Cobra (1986)

"DIrty Harry" meets "Rambo" = "Cobra"

[5/10 · 7 July 2023]

With its "Terminator"-inspired poster art, Lt. Marion "Cobra" Cobretti (Sylvester Stallone, also the film's screenwriter, and who used material sourced from the novel "Fair Game" by Paula Gosling for his script) is another one of the many over-the-top "rogue cop" characters that were so prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s in the wake of films like "Bullitt" (1968) and the legendary film that really launched the genre, "Dirty Harry" (1971).

But by 1986, when the ridiculously over-the-top "Cobra" was released, the genre was growing depressingly stale, and "Cobra," Stallone's vanity project that he had made using ideas that were rejected by producers on "Beverly Hills Cop" (1984) - supposedly for being prohibitively expensive for the production, and for which he was originally slated to star in - was so over-the-top that the whole thing felt like a parody. Stallone himself seems like a caricature here, with his mirror shades, tight blue jeans, and custom-made vehicles and firearms (including a laser-mounted submachine gun). (The "rogue cop" genre itself would get injected with some new energy the following year in 1987 with "Lethal Weapon.")

Cobretti is the stereotypical lone-wolf policeman who constantly defies his superiors and firmly established department regulations to do things his own way. Cobretti and his sweets- and junk food-loving partner Gonzalez (the late Reni Santoni) are the only detectives on the Los Angeles Police Department's "Zombie Squad," because they only take on the cases that "nobody else wants." This 1986 Reagan-era Los Angeles is depicted as a violent-crime-ridden cesspool where Stallone's character fits right in, and his law-bending vigilante tactics are for some reason tolerated by his superiors because they get results (however minimal they may be; more on this in a bit).

To get whatever plot there is rolling, L. A. is in the grips of a violent crime wave, and Cobretti is the only man for the job of keeping these streets safe. 16 people have been gruesomely murdered by an axe-wielding psycho called the "Night Slasher" (an imposing Brian Thompson, whose character's name is an obvious reference to the real-life serial killer Richard Ramirez, a.k.a., the "Night Stalker," whose murder and crime spree had terrorized the city just one year earlier), who is actually the leader of an army of neo-fascist social Darwinist radicals who represent the "New Order": they have a murderous disregard for the laws of modern-day society and want to remake it in such a way that only the strong will survive by first eliminating the weak. (Charles Darwin, eat your heart out.)

Cobretti gets involved in the case when he blows away one of the neo-fascists while he's holding up a supermarket during the film's opening action sequence, and later model Ingrid Knudsen (Stallone's then-real-life wife Brigitte Nielson, whom he'd met on "Rocky IV" one year earlier) witnesses one of the "Night Slasher's" killings, and he then makes it his mission to eliminate her personally since she's the only person who can positively identify him and thus poses the greatest threat to his "new order" vision. She's then placed in protective custody with Cobretti and Gonzalez.

As you can see, "Cobra" is not a very bright movie, or even a very good one, and it repeatedly faced many cuts for its extreme violence in order to avoid an 'X" rating. The characters are glaringly thin. The romantic tension that predictably builds up between Cobretti and Ingrid is shockingly dull, considering the fact that Stallone and Nielsen were married in real life at the time. But, the late George P. Cosmatos, who directed this utterly preposterous star vehicle (and who also directed Stallone in the previous year's "Rambo: First Blood Part II") has a strong penchant for deftly staged action choreography, including several car chases, shoot-outs, and the final showdown between Cobretti and the "Night Slasher" in a foundry.

Speaking of the "Night Slasher," Brian Thompson proves to be a worthy adversary to Stallone's Cobra, and is, honestly, the most interesting character in the whole movie, by far. We don't know much about the "Night Slasher" or his true motives, other than he's "evil" (according to what Thompson was told by Stallone himself about the character) and only wants to wipe out society's "weak" and anyone who would oppose him and his cult. But Thompson makes him scary and gives the "Night Slasher" an intimidating physical presence with only a minimum of dialogue and despite only being featured in a few scenes (and having one of the coolest-looking knives ever in an action movie). In short, he's the best thing about the movie, even if he was still sold short by the film's star, who's featured in just about every scene and spouts off one corny one-liner after another.

Lastly, when discussing the "Night Slasher" and his well-armed neo-fascist cult, back then, such bizarre antagonists were merely over-the-top cartoon characters who only existed on the fringes of society and in post-apocalyptic action yarns (i.e., the "Mad Max" trilogy). But in today's times, and with the threat posed by such "fringe" individuals who have no qualms whatsoever about acting on their radical beliefs a very real thing to a democratic society, the passage of time has given "Cobra" a frightening prescience that it was never meant to have. While this may seem to elevate "Cobra" in some degree or fashion, the fact remains that it hasn't aged well and is a stale product of its time.

Sylvester Stallone would go on to make many better movies after "Cobra," but it also represents a film from a time when he'd let his over-sized ego overshadow his art.

5/10

(P. S.: As someone who majored in criminal justice in college and who loves action movies like "Dirty Harry," I can honestly say this movie is wholly unrealistic in terms of its portrayal of police work - simply because it doesn't seem like its police detective protagonists are very intelligent and don't do much in the way of actually investigating crimes. More so, a rule-breaking cop like Cobretti would be unemployable on any police force, even a so-called "Zombie Squad" - for the simple reason that he wouldn't be able to make cases, either because suspects would wind up dead, or because said suspects could justifiably level excessive force or police brutality complaints against the LAPD that would make Cobretti fully accountable for his actions and most likely be fired, if not put in prison. To make it worse, it's even implied that Cobretti's bosses give him the okay to use his unique brand of quasi-fascist vigilante tactics in his pursuit of the "Night Slasher." Think about his line: "This is where the law stops, and I start." Even a "rogue cop" like Clint Eastwood's Inspector "Dirty Harry" Callahan would ultimately realize the importance of working within the legal system that he was sworn to uphold, protect, and enforce - even if he did not always personally agree with the decisions being made by the courts and even if it also made it more difficult for him to do his job. That's the price we pay for living in a democracy.)

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

"Across the Spider-Verse"

[9/10 · 19 June 2023]

The 2023 computer-animated "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse," the belated sequel to the phenomenally successful 2018 "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse," is a breathtaking animated superhero movie experience that in many ways surpasses its predecessor and does so perhaps most famously in not just the quality of the CGI animated visuals, but the various animation STYLES employed to realize it. Sometimes, it appears as if you're looking at a kaleidoscope-colored, computer-generated comic book; other times, it looks like you're staring at a water painting. (See what I mean?) The animated visuals are perhaps the biggest draw for the picture. However, despite the love-labor and reverence for the source material - Marvel Comics' flagship character, Spider-Man, and more specifically the half-black/half-Puerto Rican Miles Morales version of Spider-Man (voiced here by Shameik Moore), who also happens to be my preferred version of the character - I didn't find the story as interesting or as engaging this time around as I did in the first movie. That was my only real fault with the picture. Other than that, I loved the characters, the various nods to the original comics, the high-flying humor and its vertiginous, colorfully animated action sequences.

9/10.

Contra Force (1992 Video Game)

More video-gaming nostalgia from my early-'90s childhood

[10/10 · 25 April 2023]

My short & sweet "Contra Force" review/commentary...

There is not a whole lot to be said about Konami's 1992 side-scrolling shooter "Contra Force," which was originally slated to be released in Japan in 1992 as "Arc Hound," but the title was changed to "Contra Force" when released in North America later that year; "Contra Force" shares very little, aside from the title, with the two previous entries "Contra" and "Super C," despite being the third game in that series to be released using the "Contra" mantle.

I remember playing this game with my father on the Nintendo when I was a young pre-teen growing up in the early '90s. He and I would easily kill an hour or two playing this game on Friday or Saturday afternoons.

With the advent of YouTube since the mid-2000s, I've also managed to locate this game's original electronica-based soundtrack on that platform, and listen to it - thus taking me back to my fondest years as a seven- or eight- or nine-year-old kid back in the early 1990s.

10/10.

Nothing to Lose (1997)

Nothing to lose, but everything to gain

[8/10 · 24 April 2023]

Nick Beam (Tim Robbins) is having a bad day. The mild-mannered Los Angeles-based advertising executive has just come home to find his beautiful wife Ann (the late Kelly Preston) in bed with his greedy boss Phillip (Michael McKean). Rather than confront them, he gets in his four-wheel-drive Chevy Yukon and drives off aimlessly onto the L. A. freeway where he makes a wrong turn and winds up in one of the high-crime parts of the city, and, when you thought his day couldn't get any worse, he gets carjacked by T (Martin Lawrence), who is not as dangerous as he appears and is more talk than walk.

"Boy, did you pick the wrong guy on the wrong day," Nick says, and he floors it through the city, and T faints from the shock of it all. Before we know it, we're in the middle of the Arizona desert. After several fisticuffs and other comic mishaps, the pair realize that they are not what they appear to be to the other: Nick is 100% a coward and awfully presumptuous about social issues, but displays resiliency, and T is unemployed and non-threatening but is quite knowledgeable about electrical engineering. They put their heads together and realizing that they have Nothing To Lose, they conspire to drive back to L. A. and rob Nick's boss Phillip as revenge for sleeping with his wife. In the process, they also run afoul of two born-to-kill hardened criminals, Rig (John C. McGinley) and Charlie (Giancarlo Esposito).

"Nothing to Lose" came to us from "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" writer-director Steve Oedekerk, who also appears in a cameo role late in the film as a lip-syncing, dancing security guard. With "Nothing to Lose," Oedekerk aims for a slightly higher, slightly more ambitious brand of comedy, which is not only of the "R"-rated variety, but also taking aim at the lead characters' socially-ingrained assumptions about one another and breaking down cultural and societal barriers (which, no matter how well-intentioned it is, does not always work and can come off as quite forced at times). While the black-white "buddy movie" dynamic is nothing new, the unlikely pairing and on-screen chemistry of Martin Lawrence and Tim Robbins keeps the movie going.

"Nothing to Lose" was the other of two big-budget action-comedies released in 1997; the other film was the Brett Ratner-directed Chris Tucker/Charlie Sheen vehicle "Money Talks." Both were films that I remember fondly from my early teenage years when they were first released on home video and I watched them repeatedly with my late mother.

8/10.

Streets of Rage 2 (1992 Video Game)

"Streets of Rage 2"

[10/10 · 8 April 2023]

"Streets of Rage 2" is one of the greatest video games ever made - period.

I grew up in the early 1990s, and "Streets of Rage 2" (also known in Japan by its original title "Bare Knuckle II," and is the sequel to 1991's "Streets of Rage") which debuted in North America in December of 1992, was one of my favorite video games to play on my trusty Sega Game Gear in the wee hours of the morning before I had to go to school.

A fast-paced, side-scrolling "beat-'em-up," "Streets of Rage 2" does not really have much of a plot, but what draws you in and keeps you playing are the beautifully designed levels and graphics, the fast-paced gameplay, and its "ground-breaking" electronic dance music (EDM) soundtrack (by Yuzo Koshiro and Motohiro Kawashima) - the latter of which is so addicting and memorable that I have a link to the full video game score on YouTube saved on my computer.

"Streets of Rage 2" is truly one of my favorite video games, and is definitely one of the greatest video games ever made.

10/10.

Jurassic Park (1993)

Where the Wild Things Are - Welcome to Jurassic Park. "No Expense Spared."

[10/10 · 31 March 2023]

In "Jurassic Park," no expense is spared, as we are frequently reminded by the kindly, visionary, slightly more-than-eccentric multi-gazillionaire Mr. John Hammond (the late English thespian/director Sir Richard Attenborough), who is hoping to realize his dream of Jurassic Park, a wildlife theme attraction where the wild things are genetically engineered dinosaurs - cloned back into existence by geneticists utilizing preserved DNA found in the stomachs of fossilized mosquitoes.

Hammond's wealthy investors are worried about the park's safety, and he's invited Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill), a noted paleontologist, and his top student, paleobotanist Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), to come to Jurassic Park to give their positive endorsement of it. Along for the ride, are lawyer Donald Gennero (Martin Ferrero), who represents Hammond's nervous investors, and mathematician and "Chaos Theory" subscriber Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), who argues that Jurassic Park's ecosystem is ultimately unsustainable and doomed to failure. "Life finds a way," he ominously intones, and "Chaos Theory" soon prevails...

"Jurassic Park," of course, is the 1993 science fiction blockbuster directed by Steven Spielberg and adapted from the 1990 novel of the same name (which I have never read, but am aware of the many significant differences between the original source material and the film adaptation) by the late sci-fi author Michael Crichton, who also co-wrote the film's screenplay with David Koepp.

The film's tagline of "Jurassic Park" being "an adventure 65 million years in the making" is a tagline that delivers on exactly what it promises. So, for once, the promotional materials don't lie. I saw "Jurassic Park" in the theater during its history-making run at the box office when I was just seven-years-old back in 1993. I still have vivid recollections of that experience, and the film was at the center of my childhood fascination with dinosaurs. (It's a wonder that I didn't go into paleontology.) The characters of Lex (Ariana Richards) and Tim (Joseph Mazzello), Hammond's grandchildren, represent that innocent, childhood fascination with dinosaurs that I'm sure Spielberg himself had when he was a kid (and probably still does).

And of course, "Jurassic Park's" big attraction for the film audiences of the time was its pioneering blend of state-of-the-art Industrial Light & Magic- (ILM-)-produced CGI and practical (animatronic) special effects provided by the late Stan Winston and Phil Tippett to bring the dinosaurs to life - the overall quality of which still holds up today and remains as fresh and tremendous and ground-breaking as they were back in 1993. "Jurassic Park" represented the next step in the CGI revolution that had been started two years earlier with James Cameron's revolutionary "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" (1991).

Having seen the film again today for the first time in many years, I still felt that same level of excitement and wonder that I felt the first time I saw it all those years ago back in 1993. That same excitement and wonder is what attracted Steven Spielberg to Crichton's source material, and only Spielberg was capable of delivering it. No other living filmmaker can provide such wonder and excitement on a consistent basis with each new film he directs, and "Jurassic Park" represented yet another monumental, history-making cinematic achievement for the most prolific director working in the modern film industry.

10/10

P. S.: My favorite dinosaur, by the way, is the Dilophosaurus.

Fortress (1992)

Futuristic version of "The Great Escape"

[7/10 · 24 March 2023]

The futuristic science fiction action film "Fortress" has an interesting concept behind it: In the then-future 2017, the United States government has instituted a strict "one-child" policy as a means of population control; having a second child is a crime now punishable by life-time imprisonment. At the beginning of the film, former U. S. Army "black beret" captain John Henry Brennick ("Highlander" Christopher Lambert), a combat veteran and highly distinguished war hero, is sentenced to 31 years in prison after he and his illegally pregnant wife Karen (Loryn Locklin) are arrested while trying to cross the border into Mexico.

As punishment, Brennick and Karen are sent to the Fortress, a privately owned, high-tech maximum-security prison in the middle of the desert that's owned by the powerful international conglomerate Men-Tel Corporation. The Fortress is run by Prison Director Poe (all-purpose bad guy Kurtwood Smith), and the highly advanced computer system Zed-10, which controls everything within the prison. The rules are strictly enforced, with laser-beam prison cell bars and the inmates, upon arrival, being forced to swallow "intestinators," devices that inflict pain as a form of compliance/punishment or can even cause death (by inner microwaving).

"Fortress," released in 1993, was the first big-budget studio film of the late "B"-movie heavyweight Stuart Gordon (that's "Gore"-don), who made such delightfully campy, excessively gooey, gory sci-fi/horror classics like "Re-Animator" (1985) and "From Beyond" (1986). While the movie does flourish in some spots under his competent direction (and does live up to Gordon's trademark of extreme violence and gory special effects), "Fortress" really is nothing more than a futuristic version of "The Great Escape" (1963) and really cannot avoid many of the science fiction and prison movie cliches that unfortunately come with the latter genre. That the screenplay for "Fortress" is ultimately attributed to four screenwriters is quite telling in that collectively they couldn't find a unique way to transcend these cliches, even by simply moving the prison setting into the then-future and infusing the story with a high-tech, sci-fi-themed anti-corporate message (specifically the technological repression and exploitation of prison inmates as a source of slave-labor by large multi-national corporations, and the sudden philosophical shift in the American criminal justice system from rehabilitation to retributive justice - punishment).

That Brennick becomes the mastermind of a daring prison escape - a la, "The Great Escape" - along with his new cellmates, who include the youthful "fish" Nino Gomez (Clifton Gonzalez Gonzalez), computer nerd and explosives expert "D"-Day (Gordon regular Jeffrey Combs), resident prison bulldog Stiggs ("Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer" Tom Towles) and Poe's trustee Abraham (Lincoln Kilpatrick), isn't the slightest bit unexpected from those familiar with the genre.

Christopher Lambert, as Brennick, proves to be a capable leading man, even if he is not the greatest or most expressive of a performer. I've personally always enjoyed everything I have ever seen him in. In "Fortress," he proves to be a brave and resourceful leader that his comrades come to respect and look up to, which is admirable and not an easy thing to do given that he's the only one of his group that is not a hardened criminal.

Lastly, "Fortress" is a movie that I was introduced to by my late mother sometime in the late '90s when I was a teenager. I liked the film then, even if at that young age I realized it was kind of campy and gory fun that didn't take itself all that seriously, but did have some cool special effects and futuristic technology, and action scenes.

I still like it now, almost 25 years later.

7/10.

Crimes of the Future (2022)

"Crimes of the Future" - A Return to Familiar Territory for David Cronenberg

[8/10 · 17 March 2023]

One thing that you can be certain about regarding Canada's very own "Baron of Blood," "King of Venereal Horror" David Cronenberg, is that you cannot really be certain of anything about him or his work. And that is one of the greatest things about him - he always keeps you guessing.

Cronenberg, who just turned 80 this past Wednesday (March 15), has had a long-standing career as one of the most controversial and respected (by other filmmakers as distinguished as Martin Scorsese) cinematic auteurs that we've seen over the past 50-odd years. His films are also not easily categorized; he started out making blood-soaked, gross-out special effects-driven horror features ("Shivers," "Rabid," "The Brood," "The Dead Zone"), science fiction ("Scanners," "Videodrome," his masterpiece "The Fly," "eXistenZ"), psychological thrillers ("Dead Ringers," "Naked Lunch," "Spider," "A Dangerous Method"), gangster pictures ("A History of Violence," "Eastern Promises"), pure eroticism ("Crash"), and even black comedy ("Maps to the Stars").

The one principal theme running throughout much of Cronenberg's work (even his more "mainstream" efforts) is the transformation and destruction, and even the evolution (more on this in a bit), of the human body (and later the mind) through medicine, disease, science, or technology - a.k.a., "body horror," which Cronenberg is often considered to be a major innovator of - and often realized through extreme carnage and gore, and graphic & explicit depictions of sexuality. (These latter traits have been the source of much derision and controversy with his work over the years.)

This brings us to his latest, 2022's "Crimes of the Future," which is unrelated to his own earlier 1970 film of the same title. "Crimes of the Future" is sort of a return to Cronenberg's early "body horror" works from the 1970s and 1980s, but is not really "horror" in the usual "Cronenberg sense," but is more science fiction - science fiction that easily riffs on some of Cronenberg's past themes about the evolution and transformation of the human body (Cronenberg is a staunch Darwinist and devout atheist, despite being descended from Lithuanian Jews).

Set at an unspecified time in the future, significant advances in biotechnology have led to the invention of machines that directly interact with and control bodily functions (i.e., bio-mechanical chairs that assist with the consumption and digestion of food). At the same time, certain biological changes of indeterminable origin are causing humans to evolve at an alarming rate - which has some people struggling to call those afflicted with such mutagenic conditions "human."

The murder of an eight-year-old boy by his mother is what sets the story in motion. His distraught father Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman) reaches out to the celebrity performance artist Saul Tenser (Cronenberg regular Viggo Mortensen) and his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) to perform a public autopsy on his son's corpse - for reasons that are just as much political as they are personal. Saul Tenser suffers from "accelerated evolution syndrome," a condition that allows his body to randomly create new organs of no known function, and his act largely revolves around Caprice surgically removing these "neo-organs" on stage while Tenser is fully conscious (the majority of people in this future no longer experience physical pain), and surgery itself is often likened to sexual intercourse (one character even matter-of-factly states that "surgery is the new sex").

"Crimes of the Future" is the most challenging and provocative film that Cronenberg has directed in a long while - on par with his early work from the late '70s and '80s. Yet there is also a glossy mainstream aesthetic to it, with a big $27 million production budget and big-name stars who are finely attuned to the script's material - most surprisingly, perhaps, is the mousy government clinician Timlin (a perfectly cast-against-type Kristen Stewart), who is captivated by Saul Tenser's performance routine. The film is also appropriately droll, but not grim, as, in true Cronenberg fashion, the grotesque special effects, imagery and gore that take front stage, serve to highlight his underlying theme here that human evolution is not a crime, and that there are those subversive elements in this not-too-distant future society who are willing to go to extreme lengths to prove it.

Like most of David Cronenberg's work, "Crimes of the Future" is not for the taint of heart, nor is it a film that you want to watch while you're eating something. But it does show that Cronenberg can return to familiar roots while still exploring new, and troubling, thematic territory.

Now that is something that Charles Darwin would be proud of.

8/10.

Knock Off (1998)

The title has a dual meaning

[5/10 · 14 January 2023]

1998's "Knock Off" has the distinction of being the second collaboration between Hong Kong action veteran Tsui Hark and Belgian martial arts sensation Jean-Claude Van Damme - their first being the previous year's "Double Team" (1997) - and it also proved to be their last action picture together. Hark would return to Hong Kong after being disappointed with his two back-to-back American efforts, and Van Damme, whose popularity in Hollywood was declining steadily at the time, would make one more film in the U. S. that would see a major theatrical release (1999's "Universal Soldier: The Return") before he would retreat to direct-to-video and limited releases of his films in overseas territories. (Van Damme, of course, would make a major comeback with his French-language masterpiece "JCVD" in 2008.)

"Knock Off is yet another early fusion of East and West - before "The Matrix" (1999) made such cinematic trends a widely copied mainstay of mainstream Hollywood. Despite Van Damme's decreasing popularity in Hollywood as the '90s wore on, he WAS ultimately responsible for introducing not one, not two, but THREE legendary Asian action vets to Western audiences. Aside from Tsui Hark, he also introduced John Woo (from 1993's "Hard Target") and the late Ringo Lam (on "Maximum Risk" in 1996). "Knock Off" has the usual fast-paced editing, outrageously staged action sequences including gunfights and martial arts choreography, ensemble casting, and a threadbare plot that doesn't make a whole of sense under intense scrutiny.

Written by Steven E. De Souza (who also wrote Van Damme's camp classic "Street Fighter" in 1994), "Knock Off" takes place on the eve of Great Britain's historic 1997 hand-over of Hong Kong back to China. Fashion designer Marcus Ray (Van Damme) is a former vendor of counterfeit goods who has since gone straight with his best friend and business partner Tommy Hendricks (comedian Rob Schneider). However, the two eventually find themselves waist-deep in a plot involving the Russian mob trying to implant nano-bombs inside of counterfeit goods that Marcus and Tommy have been unwittingly selling to the United States, and also murder anyone in their way. Together with Karen Lee (Lela Rochon), the beautiful fashion exec sent to investigate the counterfeit merchandise; a local Hong Kong vice cop named Detective Han (Michael Fitzgerald Wong); and a small unit of CIA operatives led by Harry Johanson (the late Paul Sorvino), they go about punching, kicking, and shooting their way out of the Russian mob's operation.

As you can see, from the co-writer of "Die Hard" (1988), "Knock Off" is not a very bright picture. The film moves at such an incredibly fast pace that the audience actually has trouble keeping up with everything. There really is not a whole that's remarkable or memorable about "Knock Off," except for Jean-Claude Van Damme and his formidable supporting cast. Van Damme performs some incredible stunts and fight scenes, while Rob Schneider and Lela Rochon (who are both later revealed to be undercover CIA agents) do their best with the material they were given; Schneider does a few jokes that are mostly hit or miss, and Rochon holds her own in a few action scenes including an impressive hand-to-hand martial arts showdown with Van Damme and the climatic final shootout onboard a shipping freighter, and plus she's also pretty easy on the eyes.

"Knock Off" was one of the last major pictures of star Jean-Claude Van Damme from his Hollywood heyday. It wasn't his last picture altogether, since 10 years later he made a huge comeback with the masterpiece that is "JCVD."

5/10.

Shaolin and Wu Tang (1983)

Grindhouse 101

[7/10 · 6 January 2023]

The 1983 Lau Kar-leung-produced martial arts epic "Shaolin vs. Wu-Tang" is famous in two key respects.

At the time of its release in 1983, the film marked the directorial debut of its star, Gordon Liu (credited here by his birth-name Chia-Hui Lui), who was by then already a firmly established kung-fu movie veteran who had appeared in over a dozen martial arts films since the 1970s.

While the film quickly became a kung-fu movie and grindhouse favorite, it also remained in relative obscurity (at least when compared to other Shaw Brothers Studio-produced martial arts films from the time). However, "Shaolin and Wu-Tang" gained renewed popular interest 10 years after its release because it was cited as a major source of inspiration for hip-hop music producer The RZA (born Robert Diggs), the co-founder and de-facto leader of rap super-group the Wu-Tang Clan, who derived their name from the film's title and released their ground-breaking debut album "Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)" in November of 1993. Dialogue samples from the English dub of "Shaolin and Wu-Tang" were featured prominently in the album's songs.

I have to admit that when I first saw "Shaolin and Wu-Tang" when I was in college, I'd checked out the film - a poor-quality bargain-bin full-screen DVD copy of the film, no less, which I still have - mainly because I'm a huge fan of the Wu-Tang Clan and martial arts movies, and I had wanted to see the classic that inspired it all. Until today, I had only seen the film once, which was that first time all the way back when I was in college. With hindsight and acquired knowledge over the years on my side, it is a much better film than I remember it.

The film has a plot that's really nothing new to the genre itself, but plays into some of the recurring lyrical themes of the Wu-Tang Clan's music. Yung-Kit (Liu) and Fung-Wu (Adam Cheng) are close friends who are also the top students at rival martial arts schools in the same city - Yung-Kit represents Shaolin Gong-fu and Fung-Wu trains in its off-shoot Wu-Tang Sword Style. The treacherous local Ching Lord (Johnny Wang) who oversees the city, is jealous of both schools and wants to learn both styles so that he can wipe them both out and rule the province unchallenged. His conspiracy sets in motion a series of events that eventually lead to the murder of Fung-Wu's master - turning him into a fugitive - and ultimately pitting him against his friend Yung-Kit, whom he blames for his master's death.

The film's plot is not terribly complex, but the behind-the-scenes machinations that turns close friends against each other is the source of "Shaolin and Wu-Tang's" character drama. And of course, there are also the fighting scenes, which are excellently staged and executed. The film opens with a much-touted, classic gong-fu training sequence, and there are also several more training scenes throughout the rest of the picture that have been compared to "The 36th Chamber of Shaolin" (1978) - which also starred Gordon Liu - and some have said that the training scenes here surpass those in the former production. I have to disagree with that assessment. The training scenes in "The 36th Chamber of Shaolin" make up that film's entire second act, and we're along for the journey of Gordon Liu's character as he makes his transformation from fugitive to gong-fu master. It's one of the rare times that you can truly identify with a character in a martial arts film. Unfortunately, I don't feel you really get that same emotional connection in "Shaolin and Wu-Tang" that you would have gotten from "The 36th Chamber of Shaolin," since this film's training scenes occur much later in the story and are only featured in brief montages.

"Shaolin and Wu-Tang" ends the way it's supposed to, with an epic gong-fu battle between former friends and their respective fighting styles, and then finally against the evil Ching Lord who originally turned them against each other.

It was nice to go back and once again see the film that inspired the legendary rap group who famously said to "Bring Da Ruckus."

7/10.

King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962)

A highly satirical, super-beast battle for the ages...

[6/10 · 28 December 2022]

***This review is based on the heavily edited American version of "King Kong vs. Godzilla" - the original Japanese-language version of which, unfortunately, I have never seen.***

Late Japanese director Ishiro Honda's 1962 monster-mash "King Kong vs. Godzilla" made history at the time of its release by becoming the most widely attended cinematic feature in Japan's history - a feat of which, to date, in 2022, has never been matched. Essentially, it was the first Japanese blockbuster. It was also the first film of its kind in Japanese history: a big-budget (by 1962 standards) cinematic crossover event that paired America's "Eighth Wonder of the World" King Kong against their own "King of the Monsters" Godzilla, in color, no less, and in widescreen. It also convinced Toho to produce further "Godzilla" movies.

Ishiro Honda, a legend in Japan along with his close friend and fellow master of cinema Akira Kurosawa, was always keen to place deep and profound themes in his films, from "Gojira" (1954) all the way to "King Kong vs. Godzilla." "King Kong vs. Godzilla" is no different - though instead of the potent anti-nuclear allegory that had come to define the nascent "Godzilla" series, Honda, along with long-time series screenwriter Shinichi Sekizawa, decided to have a little fun with this third Showa-Era entry. Honda intends and succeeds (even in the American version) to create a brilliantly pointed satire of the Japanese television industry and the extreme lengths that some large businesses would go to just to simply make a buck - even if it means importing a dangerous giant monster into the country to help promote Japanese products, and never minding the large-scale chaos and destruction that said monster is sure to cause.

This satirical bent to the proceedings is what sets the plot of "King Kong vs. Godzilla" in motion, in which Mr. Tako (the late Ichiro Arishima), who is tired of Godzilla and desperate for a new monster to help his lagging pharmaceutical company pull in tremendous ratings and profits, assigns his two underlings Osamu Sakurai (the late Takao Takashima) and Kinsaburo Furue (the late Yu Fujiki) to journey to far-off Faro Island, where a supposedly non-habit-forming narcotic berry juice has recently been discovered amid reports that the tiny island nation is also protected by a fierce monster-god.

Surely enough, in deft homages to the original 1933 "King Kong," Sakurai and Furue discover that Faro Island is protected by the gigantic ape King Kong, who also has a seemingly addictive fondness for the berry juice - which the natives are fully capable of mass-producing all by themselves. (In a hilarious scene, we watch King Kong get "drunk" off the berry juice and pass out.) Meanwhile, back in Japan, the country is facing the menace of Godzilla - last seen in "Godzilla Raids Again" (1955) - recently freed from an iceberg in the Bering Strait by a ravaged American nuclear submarine. The Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) are powerless to stop Godzilla, and Dr. Shigesawa (the late series regular Akihiko Hirata) theorizes that the only way to stop him is to let him fight King Kong, since the two appear to be instinctively drawn to one another and are presumably prehistoric enemies.

"King Kong vs. Godzilla" was undoubtedly the "event" movie of its time, and its legacy had a significant impact on the future of the "Godzilla" series. Of course, it is widely known that King Kong was actually more popular in Japan at the time than Godzilla was, and despite the film's ending two sequels would eventually be produced featuring both monsters - "Godzilla vs. Mothra" (1964), which was the last Showa-Era "Godzilla" film to portray the "King of the Monsters" as the villain before being transformed into a superhero, and "King Kong Escapes" (1967), which was the last Japanese-produced monster movie to feature King Kong.

"King Kong vs. Godzilla" was essentially remade in 2021 with the Legendary Monster-verse entry "Kong vs. Godzilla."

6/10.

Blockbuster (2022)

Nice effort - even if a lot of things feel forced

[6/10 · 27 December 2022]

The 2022 Vanessa Ramos-created Netflix series "Blockbuster" is tinged with both nostalgia and irony.

The nostalgia is heartfelt - if, a number of times, forced. Having been born in 1985 and come of age during the 1990s and early 2000s, I lived at Blockbuster Video pretty much every weekend and would often come home with my late mother with two bagsful of rented movies. And it was a crying shame that the three Blockbuster Video retail stores in my hometown all shuttered their doors by the end of the decade.

The irony of all this is that Netflix, the digital video service that practically KILLED much-loved video-store chains like Blockbuster Video, has produced a 10-episode TV series righteously enough called "Blockbuster," a workplace comedy depicting a fictionalized version of the real-life "world's last remaining Blockbuster Video retail video store" that's located in Bend, Oregon.

This series has a simple enough premise that follows Timmy Yoon (Randall Park, "Fresh off the Boat") as the owner and general manager of the last remaining Blockbuster Video store in the world in Grandville, Michigan, and his enthusiastic attempts to keep his business open. He has a loyal and colorful team supporting him including his long-time crush Eliza (Melissa Fumero); the much-older Connie Serrano (Olga Merediz); Carlos (Tyler Alvarez), a college-age film geek and aspiring filmmaker who wants to be like his hero Quentin Tarantino; the friendly but inexperienced Hannah (Madeleine Arthur); and Kayla (Kamaia Fairburn), the youngest employee on Timmy's staff and who is also the 16-year-old daughter of his landlord and best friend Percy (J. B. Smoove).

Much of the series' humor arises from the typical workplace situational comedy, but it would be better served if that same humor was reserved for some more of the nostalgic references to our favorite films - and by extension - the much-better days of pre-online streaming services. It could have also worked even better as a pointed satirical commentary on how online streaming giants, like Netflix, have strongly affected retail stores (and small businesses, in general) and forced many of them to close up shop forever.

(In a sense, the COVID-19 pandemic was one of the best things to ever happen for online streaming services since because so many people were in lockdown with nothing to do all day and couldn't leave their homes, they just simply binged on all their favorite TV shows and movies - which they were more than happy to provide. The impact felt by a lot of retail stores was harsh.)

But these are just observations and criticisms. The series appears to be too light-hearted for any of that - though regrettably it seems that "Blockbuster" could work much better as something MORE than just a workplace comedy.

6/10.

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

Into The Woods...

[9/10 · 26 December 2022]

Sam Raimi (1982's "The Evil Dead"), eat your heart out.

Here it is, "The Blair Witch Project," the 1999 "found-footage" shocker that terrified audiences and subsequently launched an entire sub-genre of horror that would quickly wear out its novelty over the next two decades.

Although "The Blair Witch Project" was not the first so-called "found-footage" picture - feature films that typically use unknown or inexperienced or unprofessional actors and purport to be real footage and are filmed in amateurish documentary-film-style to support that notion - that honor actually goes to the Italian-made "Cannibal Holocaust" (1980).

Despite polarizing audiences and critics at the time of its release, "The Blair Witch Project" nonetheless became a bona-fide pop culture phenomenon and international box office sensation - grossing $248.6 million and becoming the most commercially successful independent feature of all time (until it was beaten by Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" in 2004) - because it took a huge creative leap not seen in "Cannibal Holocaust," and that was by successfully convincing viewers that what they were seeing was indeed real, complete with an ahead-of-its-time viral marketing campaign on the nascent Internet, radio and television and in print sources; keep in mind, this was BEFORE the advent of social media giants like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and Instagram. (I should know, I was 14 at the time of the film's release back in 1999 and fell for it myself, and remember being convinced that everything had actually happened. The more cynical and jaded of us out there would call this a "snuff" film if that was actually the case.)

It's an ingenious (the late film critic Roger Ebert described it as "insidious" in his four-star review of the film) tactic that works, by tricking the audience into believing that the events of the film are real and having the faux documentary film style to back it up - complete with the requisite bare-bones production budget ($60,000) - the formula for a horror movie cultural phenomenon was set.

Another reason for its success was the fact that "The Blair Witch Project" was riding the wave of the big horror revival of the late 1990s - initiated three years earlier by "Scream" (1996). And by capitalizing on the then-novel "found-footage" caveat as a means of distinguishing itself from the other big-budgeted horror films of the time, co-directors/co-writers/co-editors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez almost single-handedly gave rise to a new sub-genre of modern horror.

Like "Jaws" (1975), "The Blair Witch Project" has a deceptively simple premise that gets by because of its novel if flawed execution that early on seems at least partially inspired by "Deliverance" (1972) and "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" (1974). By now, we all surely know the story: In October of 1994, three film students by the names of Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams went into the woods outside of Burkittsville, Maryland, to make a documentary about the local legend of the "Blair Witch," and are never seen again. One year later, their footage was found. That +found footage+ is what forms the basis of the film that we, as the viewer, sees.

That's it. But what follows, is a descent into pure terror. Myrick and Sanchez wrote a 35-page screenplay in 1993 that forms the narrative backbone of the picture, and the actors were forced into improvising most of their scenes with minimal direction and instruction from the filmmakers. Supported by the shaky hand-held camerawork (which quite frankly has never been an issue for me in any of these sorts of pictures - though I get the frustration that some people have with this particular style of filmmaking), we, as audience members, get the impression that we are watching a real-world documentary, since the entire movie was actually filmed using two hand-held cameras. I have always commented that when it comes to "found-footage" features, the one thing that we can always count on are natural performances from the actors. That is no truer here in "The Blair Witch Project" than it is in any of its similar-themed followers over the years. Because of the minimal direction and improvisation on the part of the performers - combined with the natural, hand-held camera visual aesthetic - many (if not all) of their reactions to the (unseen) seemingly supernatural forces that menace them in the film's second half are in fact real; a lot of these "unseen" forces were just the film crew spooking the hell out of the three leads since the budget did not allow for elaborate special effects. Also like "Jaws" in its initial stages, that fear of the unknown is what makes it so scary.

That sort of immersive realism cannot be replicated by your standard-fare feature film. The characters are terrified and we're terrified along with them, but we also have to remind ourselves that Donahue, Leonard, and Williams were never at any time in any real danger. But still, their camera captures the oppressive and ominous backwoods of Maryland quite well. And despite the lack of any special effects, the viewer still gets a nice taste of horror imagery; simple objects in the forest like a bundle of sticks, a pile of rocks, bizarre stick figures hanging from the trees, a huge log fallen across a river, a decrepit old house in the middle of nowhere - these images are all quite unsettling and have a unique way of eliciting pure primal terror and lodging themselves into the viewer's memory because of their un-pretentious, unassuming simplicity.

In a nutshell, "The Blair Witch Project" launched a craze and was a terrifying cinematic horror-movie moment that cannot ever happen again. The viral marketing and the brilliantly-sculpted illusion that the film's events are all true were the key to the success of the picture. If it were to come out now, in the digital media age of 2022, there's no question that the illusion would not work and people wouldn't fall for it like they did back in 1999.

It was a brilliant flame that could only ever burn this bright, this one time. And like "The Evil Dead," it also convinced people not to go into woods ever again...

9/10

P. S.: Although no music is heard in the film (except for a quick cut on a car radio early on), "The Blair Witch Project" does have an accompanying soundtrack called "Josh's Blair Witch Mix" that like the film, also presents itself as a "found" mix tape of music that Joshua Leonard was hip to and was found by investigators in his car along with the camera equipment the three were traveling with to shoot the picture. It's a dark, ominous, doomy, gloomy collection of Goth, industrial, and vintage sounds by Lydia Lunch, Public Image Ltd., Skinny Puppy, The Creatures, Type O Negative, Meat Beat Manifesto, and even the dirge-y composition played over the end credits of the film called "The Cellar" by the film's composer Antonio Cora. I highly recommend picking that up if you can find it somewhere since it perfectly matches the grim and foreboding mood of the film.

Christmas with You (2022)

As usual, another fun and heartfelt romantic Christmas comedy...

[6/10 · 25 December 2022]

Angelina Costa (Aimee Garcia) is a 30-something pop superstar in New York City who has hit a bit of a career slump. Facing dual pressure from her label management to craft a big holiday single in time for the upcoming Christmas season as well as competition from a young up-and-coming hitmaker, she retreats from the city to the suburbs to find some much-needed creative inspiration.

Inspiration comes in the form of Cristina Torres (Deja Monique Cruz), a 14-year-old high school girl who posts a cover of one of Angelina's early hits to her Instagram page, and Angelina takes the opportunity to fulfill Cristina's wish of meeting her idol and grabbing a selfie with her. Angelina also learns that Cristina's widowed father Miguel Torres (Freddie Prinze Jr.), a music teacher at her school, is also a songwriter and gifted if unsung musician himself. She then makes a deal with him to have him help her write a new hit song, in exchange for a chance for the songwriting credits and a share of the royalties if the song is a success. Predictably, sparks begin to fly as these two collaborate on a new song together in time for the Christmas holidays...

In time for the 2022 holiday season, Netflix has debuted "Christmas with You," a sweet, warm-hearted feel-good Christmas-themed romantic-comedy directed by Gabriela Tagliavini, with a screenplay written by no less than three different authors (Michael Varrati, Paco Farias, and German Michael Torres).

The performances are all very good, particularly Aimee Garcia (who apparently really does sing her own songs here), and also Freddie Prinze Jr., who was a pretty big teen heartthrob back in the late 1990s. Admittedly, it is a great to see him in another role that's a return to familiar territory for him - even if he is noticeably older now (but that doesn't seem to have fazed any of his female admirers one bit).

Get warm and cozy with "Christmas with You."

6/10.