Tag: die hard

Free Fall

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★½
“It’s like Die Hard! Except, in a skyscraper!” Wait, what?

free fallI’ve no problem with Die Hard clones, because the original is a brilliant concept, beautifully executed: it’s one of my all-time top movies, of any genre. This certainly isn’t the first effort to try and port this into the action heroine genre, but it may well be the worst. And that’s quite some effort, considering previous attempts include one starring Anna Nicole Smith. It’s less star Butler’s fault, than a script which staggers from cliché to idiocy, and sloppily amateur execution, apparent in captions that spell “allegations” with one L and refer to something called the “Securities Exchange Commission.” Jane Porter (Butler) is an up and coming executive with Gault Capital, whose world is shattered when her manager apparently jumps to his death from the top of their building. I say, “apparently,” because it’s entirely unsurprising when Jane finds a USB stick and, in blatant violation of every security protocol, slaps it into the side of her work PC [the company I work for, just had a training course on precisely why this is a Very Bad Idea]. Ooh, look: her manager had found evidence of financial irregularity! Who can Jane turn to? And why not wait until she’s the only person in the building?

Which I could have forgiven had this been the springboard to some Die Hard-esque action, and the film certainly foreshadows this, with the first time we see Jane, she’s pounding away on a punch-bag. Except the script then has her spend the meat of the movie’s running-time stuck in an elevator, while the hitman (Sweeney) sent to to “tidy up” the mess, tries to figure out how to get at her. If there’s one thing duller than being stuck in an elevator, it’s watching someone else be stuck in an elevator. I’m surprised I have to state this, but the makers of this are apparently under the impression that it’s actually the height of tension. Boy, are they mistaken there. The potential inherent in the office location and a battle of wits between a smart heroine and a lethal adversary is instead frittered away in scenes spent, for example, watching the latter looking for a key to open the elevator door. I kid you not, and stand corrected: there seem to be a number of things duller than being stuck in an elevator, and this film is intent on showing them all to me.

Even the makers seem to realize this was a misstep suddenly generating another character out of thin air, an elevator repair man, about whom we are given no reason to care beyond a painfully obvious scene establishing his family. He then gets to fight the bad guy for a bit, while the supposed heroine stands around inside the elevator. While she does eventually get to go toe-to-toe with him – and isn’t a bad little battle – it’s far too late, and comes well after the point where doctors would have given up on this patient and turned its body over to the family. Both the title and tagline are good summaries of viewer interest.

Dir: Malek Akkad
Star: Sarah Butler, D.B. Sweeney, Ian Gomez, Malcolm McDowell

No Contest II: Access Denied

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★★½
“Second time’s the not-so charming.”

In many ways, this is a shameless rip-off of a shameless rip-off, trying to recapture the success of the original. It’s not quite as successful, lacking the gleeful sense of energy which help its predecessor overcome its (obvious) limitations. Once more, Tweed plays action actress Sharon Bell, this time filming her latest work in Eastern Europe. She arranges for the film to do some location work in a gallery owned by sister, Bobbi (Heitmeyer), which is just about to open an exhibition, showcasing artefacts that were looted by the Nazis in World War II. The gallery is taken over by Eric Dane (Henriksen) and his crew, who seal the place off from the outside world, intent in stealing a lethal German nerve agent hidden in the base of one of the sculptures. Unfortunately, inside at the time are both sisters, along with the movie director Jack Terry (Payne), who is scouting the place out.

To be honest, the plot makes little sense. Why does Dane – who has apparently had access to the statue for quite some time – wait until it is installed in the gallery, behind a hefty security system, before going after the nerve-gas? And when he does, his subsequent actions and plan seem to be designed more to artificially generate tension for the movie plot, than any practical purpose: for example, his decision to leave one of the canisters, attached to an unstoppable time, in an air-duct, while he is still present in the sealed building. Meanwhile, the heroes prove adept at fashioning tear-gas and lethal blow-darts from everyday materials (or, at least, everyday materials for an art gallery).

If you don’t look too hard, this is still passably entertaining, with the art gallery providing an interesting location for some battles (the cat-fight between Sharon and Dane’s henchwoman comes to mind, ending on a piece of unfortunately-pointy artwork). Henriksen us good value as ever in the psycho role, e.g. shooting people because they can’t deliver Shakespeare to his liking and, while Payne is better known as a villain, he does decent work here in a more sympathetic role. However, the film doesn’t use them as effectively as before, and the film needs to be less obviously stage-managed towards its conclusion, which is obvious well before it happens. The flaws are likely not much worse here – just a little more obvious.

Dir: Paul Lynch
Star: Shannon Tweed, Lance Henriksen, Bruce Payne, Jayne Heitmeyer
a.k.a. Face the Evil

No Contest

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★★★
“No originality, no budget… But no disaster, either.”

An almost-entirely shameless Die Hard rip-off, this stars Tweed as Shannon Bell, the host of a beauty-pageant, which is interrupted by Oz (Clay) and his gang, who take a half-dozen of the beauty-queens and Bell hostage, up in the penthouse, and demand $10 million in diamonds for their release. Bell manages to slip away and, fortunately, her character is an actress, famous for playing action heroines [yeah, it’s all a bit ‘meta’ – except, it came out in 1992, largely before ‘meta’ became popular…]. So she gets to go all John McClane on their asses, crawling round air-ducts and assisting ex-federal agent Crane (Davi), who was bodyguarding one of the participants, who is a politician’s daughter, but popped outside the building for a fortunately-timed smoke.

The script is hackneyed, certainly, but it’s a stellar B-movie cast, that works well, and largely keeps things entertaining. This is where the thought has gone in. While Oz is undeniably brutal, he is as far from Hans Gruber as can be imagined, a foulmouth sleazeball rather than a suave sophisticat, and Bell, similarly, is the opposite of McClane, despite her action pedigree (one character describes the roles she plays as, “Bruce Lee with boobs”). Endearingly, she bursts into tears after she has to kill someone. Davi, of course, was in the original, playing Special Agent Johnson [“No – the other one…”], and we’ll watch anything with Piper in it, after They Live. It’s clear Tweed is not exactly in the realm of Lee, but does credibly enough to paper over the cracks, action-wise, and perhaps surprisingly, keeps her clothes entirely on.

Things do fall apart at the finale, which is convoluted and strained, to say the least: the film is much better when sticking to its basic premise – or, more accurately, someone else’s basic premise. But, having sat through much the same film with Anna Nicole Smith in the lead, this is an enormous improvement. Certainly, it’s cheap and cheerful, the kind of thing you can imagine seeing in an early 90’s videostore, with an appropriately lurid cover. But it is entertaining, and given the sights of the makers were clearly aimed no higher than that, has to be judged a success.

Dir: Paul Lynch
Star: Shannon Tweed, Andrew ‘Dice’ Clay, Roberto Davi, Roddy Piper

Hard to Die

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★★★
“I just want to get my clothes on and get out of here.”

This slice of cheese couldn’t be any riper. Five employees of the Acme Lingerie Company are called in to work on a Saturday to do inventory, despite the presence of creepy janitor Ketchum. A misdelivered package arrives, intended for Dr. Newton, an investigator of witchcraft, and when the ladies open it, they unleash the soul of a serial killer (allowing the use of flashback footage from a previous Wynorski flick. Sorority House Massacre). Meanwhile, the workers, having got all dusty gathering up boxes in the basement, make the logical decision: to take showers and try on the latest Acme line of skimpy products. Which they then wear for the rest of the film. As the unleashed killer picks off them, and everyone else in the building, one by one. Fortunate that there’s an arms dealer who has also set up shop on another floor, and who has left large quantities of merchandise and ammo around…

For the first 70 minutes, you’ll be wondering why this even qualifies for the site. It’s more in the campy horror line, with the emphasis more on the “camp” than the horror: always nice to see genre icon Forrest J. Ackerman in a supporting role. Otherwise, this is basically an excuse to ogle scantily-clad babes, but the tone is kept light – check out the squeaking sounds when they are assiduously soaping their breasts in the shower. Even the deaths are basically off-screen, with a fraction of the gore we get now, more than twenty years on. As a B-movie, it’s fine, but despite the title, Joe-Bob Briggs was about a million miles off when he said, “It’s the female version of Die Hard, full of lighting-hot action.” There’s a reason just about everyone involved uses pseudonyms. And then, fortunately, there’s the final reel, to which no description can do justice. Fortunately, someone posted it on YouTube, so I think I’ll just let the footage speak for itself.

Quite why they waited until the end to unleash this furious assault on the senses, I don’t understand. Is it great art? Not in the slightest. But it crams in more marvellous, lingerie-clad, automatic, dumbness into ten minutes than many better-known GWG entries do in their entire running-time, and should only be respected as such.

Dir: “Arch Stanton” [Jim Wynorski]
Star: Robyn Harris, Lindsay Taylor, Debra Dare, Orville Ketchum

Skyscraper

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★½

The obvious point of comparison for Smith would be Pamela Anderson, another Playboy playmate who moved into films of doubtful quality, but any such comparison would be unfair. To Anderson, that is, who given the right role, is not actually too bad. With Smith, you get the feeling she simply has no talent, and any character would be a stretch, let alone the Shakespeare-aware, ace helicopter pilot and crackshot she is supposed to portray in this shameless Die Hard clone.

She is trapped in a tower block by a bunch of criminals who are after a computer chip which…er, well they never actually say what it does, but they clearly want it bad. Just like Brooce, she’s bickering with her other half, a police officer – “I wanna have a baby,” she whines, not long after the immortal line, “Well, excuse me for still believing in Sunday walks in the park and little babies.” It was at this point, that my sympathy for her character made its excuses and left.

Other points of similarity with McTiernan’s classic action film:

  • Hero/ine crashes in through a plate glass window, half-way up the building.
  • Slimy worker tries to cut a deal with the terrorists, only to get a fatal come-uppance.
  • Bad guys are largely European types – though in Skyscraper they look pretty gay, too.

When in motion, the general execution is not so bad, and the first of these probably provides the film’s best sequence, as Smith leaps onto a window-washer’s cradle, and dangles from a cable, trying to avoid gunfire from the rooftop. Not brilliant, I admit, but compared to much of the rest of the movie, it stands out as tense and well-staged.

The script and the acting sink this one early, and it’s damned further any time Smith opens her mouth. The chief villain – associate producer Hubner – quotes Shakespeare badly, mixing in the odd Biblical quote for good measure: his performance is mercilessly skewered in one review which includes a highly amusing parody of his style. Another article, now sadly lost, spent half its time detailing a Saturday night search for a copy of the video. The other supporting characters such as the cowardly security guard are, at best, good ideas badly implemented, and at worst, pointless wastes of space (who are probably also associate producers – there’s a coincidence!).

Smith whips ’em out four times: one shower scene, two consensual sex scenes (one as a flashback, while she’s right in the middle of evading the terrorists!), and one rape – the last of these might actually have some vague relevance to the storyline, but the others certainly don’t. Her attempt at any kind of action are ultra-lame as well, presumably out of fear that any kind of sudden motion could rupture an implant. She might have been better served by trying to smother the terrorists, Double Agent 73 style.

It’s easy to imagine the pitch for this one: “It’ll be Die Hard with tits!” Given the vast number of other clones in that style made before and since, such an endeavour was probably inevitable – and in the right hands, or at least with the right leading lady, might have had some potential. Instead, the main reason to watch this is for some cheap laughs at the most woeful acting performance since the early days of Pia Zadora. Bad movie fans will likely love it; everyone else should stay clear.

Dir: Raymond Martino
Stars: Anna Nicole Smith, Charles M. Huber, Richard Steinmetz, Branko Cikatic