Tag: USA

Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever

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★★
To quote Marshall Fine: “Kaos would have saved everyone a lot of time and money by simply eliminating the stars and the story and releasing Ballistic as Giant Fireballs, Vol. 1.”

Despite the title, this movie rarely pits Ecks (Banderas) vs. Sever (Liu). The two spend more of the film teamed, up taking on the evil duo (Henry and Park) who killed Sever’s family and have kidnapped Ecks’ son – perhaps a spoiler, but anyone who didn’t see that one coming, was probably run over on the way to the cinema.

The film raises a number of interesting issues. Unfortunately, they stem more from the cinematic process, such as wondering why no-one taking part in the car-chases ever appears to drive faster than the speed limit. I know it’s Canada, but these are supposed to be characters living on the edge, not concerned with getting traffic tickets. And speaking of Canada, why are so many American government agencies operating in the open, blowing things up and shooting anyone in range, with barely a whimper from the locals?

The other problem is that no-one in the movie can act – we should perhaps exempt Liu, since she has barely a dozen lines. The scenes of Banderas and his wife (Soto) are woefully lacking in chemistry, and Ray Park is simply dreadful, despite looking so much like Oz from Buffy, that I kept expecting a full moon and a transformation. The plot is equally inept, tacking on an entire chunk about microscopic robotic assassins which is almost totally redundant. It’s nice that the studio changed Sever from male to female, but the results are…well, at time of writing, the Rotten Tomatoes review score runs 64-0 against the movie, which must be some kind of record. [Update, December 2013: Try 110-0!. Which is, indeed, the worst ever.]

There is one great sequence, when Sever is ambushed at a library, in which she mows down an entire army, picking up their weapons and turning them against their owners. This culminates in a fabulous shot from above of a victim dropping onto a car which you keep thinking is going to cut away – it doesn’t. That, however, is it, and despite such brief flashes of potential, this is largely lame, tame and full of unfulfilled possibilities. Ten years ago, it might have been a Hong Kong movie starring Simon Yam and Yukari Oshima – on the whole, that would have been much more entertaining.

Dir: Kaos
Star: Antonio Banderas, Lucy Liu, Gregg Henry, Ray Park

Fathom

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★★★
“Credits includes “Parachute jump suits for Miss Welch by…” ‘Nuff said.”

Released five years before Jennifer Garner was even born, there are some odd similarities between this 1960’s time-capsule and Alias:

  • A girl is plucked to work as a secret agent…
  • …for a group that may not be all it seems…
  • …and is tasked with a perilous mission…
  • …which involves exotic gadgets…
  • …not to mention running around a lot…
  • …in a variety of interesting costumes.

Hmmm.

After an excruciating opening sequence, with what feels like a real-time jump from 30,000 feet, parachuting dental hygienist (!) Fathom Harvill (!!) is recruited by HADES to find a lost nuclear detonator. Which might not be nuclear, or a detonator, and which two other interested parties are also keen to find. The latter aspect is where the film is most entertaining, twisting and turning in its second half like a frantically fruggin’ go-go dancer. There’s also entertainment to be had in seeing a very young Richard Briers: I kept expecting Penelope Keith to peer over the bushes.

Chronologically between Modesty Blaise (with whom it shares a composer and Clive Revill) and Barbarella, its attitude fits there too. To modern eyes, Fathom is very passive, doing little except run; a little karate would have helped. It’s all hugely Sixties, wouldn’t stand the slightest scrutiny, and wobbles precariously near camp – as you’d expect from the original Batman director. The music is excruciatingly easy-listening: at one point, Welch halts it by taking the needle off a record, and I hoped that’d be a running gag. I was disappointed, but just can’t bring myself to dislike any movie with explosive ear-rings.

Dir: Leslie H. Martinson
Star: Racquel Welch, Tony Franciosa, Ronald Fraser, Richard Briers

Dead Men Can’t Dance

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★½
“Army women are only twist to very routine action flick.”

Plotwise, this is a by-the-numbers action thriller about a special forces group on a mission in the Korean Demilitarised Zone, who get embroiled in a CIA operation to retrieve nuclear triggers. Why it merits any coverage here, is because their command structure is matriarchal, from Brigadier General Burke (Zabriskie), through their operational leader and former agency operative Victoria Elliot (York), down to Staff Sergeant Rhodes (Barbara Eve Harris), who could give R. Lee Ermey a run for his money – Ermey, incidentally, turns up as the CIA boss.

This does add a nice bit of sexual tension to matters, as the leader of the CIA team is Elliot’s lover, played by Michael Biehn – what are the odds against that? Characters like Zabriskie and Harris are fun to watch; however, the action is lacklustre, consisting largely of running around and firing automatic weapons, while the plot is painfully obvious – helpful of the Koreans to build their nuclear facility within convenient walking distance of the border. Still, had to laugh at the reason for betrayal given by the (inevitable!) CIA traitor: “large sums of hard cash, what else?”.

Dir: Steve Anderson
Star: Kathleen York, Michael Biehn, Adrian Paul, Grace Zabriskie

Cleopatra Jones

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★★★
“Blaxploitation goes bigtime.”

The success of independent blaxploitation films inevitably let to the major studios trying to cash in, and this applied to both sexes. Jones was their response, with 6’2″ Tamara Dobson over-filling Pam Grier’s shoes, as the special agent taking on dyke drug queen Mama (Winters, chewing scenery atrociously) and police corruption, at home and abroad (“Turkey”, supposedly – I wasn’t convinced).

Still, they’ve clearly thrown a lot of money at this, and Dobson has presence in a Grace Jones sort of way, if not perhaps much acting talent. She can’t do kung-fu for toffee either, but when Shelley Winters is your nemesis, how well do you need to fight? She can spray automatic weaponry with the best of them, however, and her car – a midnight blue Corvette Stingray with a customised hydraulic roof (to avoid messing up the ‘fro), and a secret arsenal in the door panel – is also fabulous, perhaps the best ever owned by a female action heroine.

Fargas, later to make his mark as Huggy Bear in Starsky and Hutch, pimps memorably as Doodlebug, a role he’d later parody in I’m Gonna Git You, Sucka, and despite its studio origins, didn’t sell out to The Man as much as I expected. Can’t help wishing they’d used Pam Grier though; she deserved the production values on show here, and they deserve a better actress than Dobson.

Dir: Jack Starrett
Star: Tamara Dobson, Shelley Winters, Antonio Fargas, Bernie Casey

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: season two

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★★★★
“Possibly the slayer’s finest hour…all 24 of them.”

While there have been stand-out Buffy episodes since, season two perhaps ranks as the most consistently high in quality. There’s hardly an episode that ranks as less than excellent, and the writing is sparklingly witty, with more eminently quotable lines than you can shake a stake at.

The big bad in this series is Angel, and he is far better as a villain than the drippy, mopey good guy he seemed in series one. By sleeping with Buffy, and thereby knowing true happiness (hmmm, so sex = happiness, does it, Joss?), he loses his soul. If this story arc has a weakness, it’s that it is spread over about nine episodes. In most of these he just pops in, torments Buffy and leaves, when it would have packed more wallop to cover the entire thing in three or four hours. However, even the less significant episodes are great, and the transformation of Spike from villain to Buffy’s unwilling accomplice is fabulous.

Other highlights include the Judge, a demon that can’t be killed by human weapons (or at least, couldn’t last time he was incarnated), Kendra the West Indian slayer (and her stake, Mr. Pointy), and the growing relationship between Giles and computer teacher Miss Calendar (about which the words “oh, dear…” come to mind). There is a certain feeling of rehash to some of the episodes – yet again, Xander falls for the wrong girl, making Inca Mummy Girl too close to Teacher’s Pet – but the actors have really grown into their parts and the results still seem fabulous and fresh.

Star: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Alyson Hannigan, Nicholas Brendon, James Marsters

His Bodyguard

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★★
“Competent but hardly thrilling role-reversal of The Bodyguard.”

The imagination on view is exemplified by the title; changing a definite article is about as imaginative as it gets in this TV movie. Kapture, a veteran of Silk Stalkings, plays Jenny Farrell, the security officer at a pharmaceutical company who has to guard the only witness to a robbery, a deaf man (Natale) whom the villains want dead. Oh, and they’ve got inside help.

Save for an interesting diversion at a deaf school midway through, the story (by Dynasty veteran, Emma Samms) follows exactly the path you’d expect: hero and heroine begin antagonistically before falling in love (and into bed). Naturally, the police are not brought in, no matter how many rounds of gunfire are sprayed at the target, with Jenny instead preferring to run and hide in the mountains, where the bad guys can come and have the obligatory final shoot-out.

Kapture isn’t bad, but lacks any physical presence, and while there are attempts made to give her flaws, this just ends up making her character seem weak. It’s nice to see a challenging role for a deaf actor, but it feels like an exercise in political correctness – there’s no reason for him to be deaf, so it smacks of tokenism. While never particularly bad, it’s a remarkably even film, and never gets much beyond mediocre either.

Dir: Artie Mandelberg
Star: Mitzi Kapture, Anthony Natale, Michael Copeman, Robert Guillaume

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: season seven

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★★
“Not with a bang, but a whimper, and a whine.”

Hannigan and Brendon claim to have learned about the show’s demise in Entertainment Weekly, but it was apparent early on that Gellar in particular was going through the motions. Whedon too, seemed to have lost interest, and you know a show is in trouble when they drag back characters from previous series, who seem ten times more interesting than the regulars. The thrust this season was towards a confrontation with the ultimate evil. Oh, my: an apocalypse – how original. And look! It’s a vampire with a soul! Pushing Buffy back into the school environment was another admission that the show had lost its way when it “graduated”, abandoning the whole concept which had powered it early on. It never found a replacement, floundering around in search of a point.

Did like the idea of an army of proto-slayers, despite the painful inevitability of one falling into Willow’s bed, reinforcing our theory that everyone in Sunnydale is a slut. That’s been something of a mantra over the past couple of series [when we talk about Buffy the action heroine, this isn’t the sort of action we mean…]. The return of Faith added a sharp edge, though Buffy’s transition to “adulthood” ended with her becoming a morose, introverted, self-centred bitch. Presumably not quite what Whedon and Co. intended. She was still far better than pointless waste of air Andrew, who deserved to die ten thousand times.

Unlike series six, where the finale rescued the season, this time, it was dreadful, despite some cool effects. They threw out fundamental Buffy philosophy – “into every generation, a slayer is born” – in favour of vapid girl power posturing. What about the previously-expressed idea that imposing slayerdom on someone without their consent was equal to sexual assault? Give it up for Willow, the lesbian who ‘raped’ thousands, if not millions, of little girls… I will miss the show; there was nothing quite like it on TV, and it leaves the networks devoid of action heroines save for Alias. But before it ended, watching it ceased to be a pleasure, and much of the final series bordered on a chore. They should have quit while they were ahead. Somewhere round about three years ago.

Star: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Alyson Hannigan, Nicholas Brendon, Michelle Trachtenberg

Wounded

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★★★
“A forest frolic which is bear-ly satisfactory.”

This starts off brightly, and ends not badly – if a little predictably – it’s the middle where it falls apart, spending the best part of an hour fiddling around to no particular purpose. Amick plays a forest ranger whose fiance is murdered by a bear poacher (Pasdar, looking disturbingly like Al Jourgenson of Ministry) – she nearly dies too and, rather than helping the authorities, vows to take revenge herself.

The wilderness portions of the film work well, with cool ideas like the poacher finding the bears through the radio collars put on them by the rangers, and there’s also a grisly grizzly graveyard scene which is quite spooky. After she’s shot, however, the movie wanders back into civilization. This could still have worked, with the poacher hunting down the only witness amid an “urban jungle” theme, but he just comes to town, taunts her a bit, kills a supporting character and heads back to the wilderness for the obvious finale.

Amick isn’t bad, conveying smouldering hatred effectively enough to make her unwillingness to help the police more than an obvious plot device. There’s also a nice twist where the buyer of the bear parts helps out, after deciding his supplier has become a loose cannon. However, the second act is so lacking in energy, with the heroine doing little more than sitting round, gazing into space and answering the telephone, that my attention wandered severely. A good idea, doomed largely by a serious lack of development.

Dir: Richard Martin
Star: Madchen Amick, Adrian Pasdar, Graham Greene

Trapped

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★★★
“Hell hath no fury like a mother separated from her daughter.”

Karen and Will Jennings have an idyllic life – money, a really nice house and Abby, the sort of six-year old daughter only ever seen in Hollywood films. That is, it’s idyllic until Joe Hickey (Bacon) and his family enter, kidnapping Abby for ransom, just after Will has left for a conference. Their scheme of terror has proven effective several times before, and the Jennings have just 24 hours to save their daughter.

This film is a contrast between the Jennings and the Hickeys, and in particular Karen Jennings (Theron) and Cheryl Hickey (Love), who are polar opposites in looks, lifestyle and background, but share a fierce dedication to their families – especially, their daughters. Both are prepared to go to any extreme, even violence, to right what they perceive as an injustice [if the preceding sentence sounds awkward, it’s because I’m waltzing around a spoiler!], and I defy you to watch the scalpel scene without a twitch.

Karen has to handle the ever-dangerous Joe, while Will (Stuart Townsend) is kept occupied by Cheryl, and Joe’s cousin (Pruitt) looks after Abby, who turns out to be severely asthmatic. The cutting back in forth is designed, partly to increase tension – it does – but perhaps more importantly, cover some dodgy plot elements. As with all kidnappings, how do the criminals expect to collect the ransom? This is never made quite clear, and as the film goes on, it unravels to a frankly implausible finale involving a light aircraft, a logging truck and a mile of busy highway.

Which is a shame, since the actors involved are good, even if none of the roles are much of a stretch: Courtney Love playing a white trash slut doesn’t exactly show imagination in the casting department. Still, if you want a Discovery channel documentary about a mother bear defending its cub, in human form, this is effective. I just wish they’d developed that side more, and the usual thriller aspects less. Hell, who wouldn’t want to see Theron in a 2 Days in the Valley-style catfight with Love? :-)

Dir: Luis Mandoki
Star: Charlize Theron, Kevin Bacon, Courtney Love, Pruitt Taylor Vince

Steel and Lace

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★★★
“Rape, revenge and robots, cheap and cheerful.”

Inside ten minutes, we’ve had heroine Gaily Morton (Wren) raped and her attackers acquitted in court, not to mention her subsequent leap off a roof-top to her death – this isn’t a film which hangs around, boys and girls. Luckily, her brother is a NASA boffin (Davison – you might recognise him as the Senator from X-Men), who builds a robot in her image, in order to wreak gory revenge on the perpetrators five years later. Cleaning up behind are a cop (Naughton) and his ex-girlfriend, a courtroom artist (Haiduk) who joins the dots.

This was a notch or two better than I expected, with Wren managing to bring a surprising degree of emotion to her role as the robo-revenger. Despite obviously not being a large budget movie, most of the deaths are impressive (one meriting a spontaneous round of applause from the GWG viewing panel) and the android effects are decently realised. The plot holds few surprises – actually, the count probably falls short of two; while that one certainly nailed me, Chris did spot it – though the whole brother/sister thing had a nice, creepy and unhealthy edge.

If the main plot works, the cop/courtroom artist thing doesn’t, and the two characters are largely superfluous. There’s no chemistry to speak of, and their sole purpose appears to be occupying screen time between the killings. When they’re on screen, the movie dies – yet much like the heroine, it keeps coming back, until the perfectly executed ending which is sudden, memorable and fitting.

Dir: Ernest Farino
Star: Clare Wren, Bruce Davison, David Naughton, Stacy Haiduk