Tag: USA

The Trail

  By

★★★½
“God told me to do it.”

thetrailI’m not religious, and “faith-based” films normally have me running a mile, though I confess a certain guilty fondness for the more extreme, Revelations-based work [I mean, have you ever read Revelations? The things that go down are certifiably insane. This is what Hollywood should be making, not Noah or Moses stories]. But it was only at the end of this, with a final title quoting a Bible verse, that I realized The Trail likely falls into the category, as shown by the alternate title; fortunately, it’s very much understated, and can be appreciated even by godless heathens like myself. Amelia (Jandreau) is on her way to California as part of a wagon train with her husband (Brown), when they decided to split off on their own, he believing he knows a short cut. Unfortunately, they are attacked by Indians, and Amelia is left, on her own, in the middle of nowhere, to try and make her way through a vast, unforgiving wilderness.

The closest cousin is Nicolas Roeg’s brilliant Walkabout, not least because Jandreau bears more than a passing resemblance to Walkabout‘s star, Jenny Agutter: both have a similar pale beauty, and habit of opening their mouths just a smidge. The similarity is also in the relationship Amelia strikes up with a young indigenous child (Nash) she meets, that proves crucial to her chances of survival, echoing the one in Roeg’s film. However, the take here is a good deal less earthy and primitive in its themes, and Amelia is a good deal less dependent, instead being a lot more pro-active, which is why it merits coverage on this site, being equally a story of self-discovery and survival against the odds. Indeed, perhaps its main weakness is, rather too much against the odds: while there’s not much idea of the overall timeframe here, she survives blizzards clad only in a light dress (the kid is sensibly wearing furs), and doesn’t seem to do much hunting or gathering beyond a tiny fish. Maybe that’s supposed to represent the power of her faith?

Despite throwing this on late at night, it managed to hold my interest better than you think it might, considering the lack of conventional action sequences: it’s more or less 95 minutes of Amelia versus the great outdoors. It helps that the heroine is given an inner strength of character – again, I presume in hindsight, this is a religious thing – and determination to overcome any obstacle, sometimes with inventiveness, such as when she turns her wedding dress into a fishing-net. The landscapes are fabulous, and the photography does both them and the heroine justice, capturing the latter with an almost luminescent glow. As a different take on the era, eschewing the obvious characters and situations, it’s worth a look if you’re in a more contemplative mood.

Dir: William Parker
Star: Jasmin Jandreau, Tommy Nash, Shannon Brown
a.k.a. Let God

Solo

  By

★★
“…and this is why we don’t camp.”

soloGillian (Clark) takes a job as a summer-camp counselor, only to discover that part of the training involves her spending two nights, by herself, on an island in the middle of a nearby lake. That isn’t an ideal sitation for Gillian, since she’s troubled by nightmares of her past, and is unsettled to discover a previous trip by campers to the island, ended when a young girl sleepwalked her way to tragedy. Her spirit is still supposed, according to camp counselor lore, to roam the island, etc. etc. There may be less parapsychological threats to Gillian’s safety, although are they real or just her paranoia playing up? She finds a broken doll, and then finds a tent, with photos of young women taped to the roof inside. Ok: it’s probably not just her paranoia then. The potential culprits include Fred (Clarkin), the creepy owner of the camp, who was part of the previous expedition; his creepy son, Marty (Love), called “Martian” by the other councillors, for reasons that are obscure; and apparently friendly fisherman, Ray (Kash), who shows up and offers first-aid, after Gillian gashes her leg.

Clark is a decent heroine, although one perhaps too defined by her vulnerabilities. The main issue is a script that is astonishingly dumb. For instance, as with any modern wilderness horror, it has to deal with The Cellphone Issue. Here, it does so by Gillian being forbidden from taking hers on to the island, which is kinda neat. Except she does. But there’s still no signal. So she swims out into the water, the phone in a plastic bag held between her teeth, and tries to send a text. When that doesn’t work, she hurls it away in a fit of pique. At some point later, the phone unilaterally decides to send the text. But the recipient doesn’t bother doing anything significant with it. WHAT WAS THE POINT? They should simply have stopped at her being forbidden to take hers on to the island. It’s this kind of inanity which plagues much of the proceedings here, with people behaving in ways that don’t seem credible.

This is just about plausible for the villain – after all, you are a loony stalking camp counselors in the middle of a lake,  critical thinking may not be your forte. However, the second half of the film, consists of little more than four people stumbling around, making poor decisions. Much though you want to root for Gillian, and she does find a decent amount of inner fortitude at the end (Let’s just say, “Anchors aweigh!” and leave it at that), the overall feeling is that everyone deserves to be voted off this island.

Dir: Isaac Cravit
Star: Annie Clark, Daniel Kash, Steven Love, Richard Clarkin

Avengers Grimm

  By

★★★
“Once Upon an Enchanted Time.”

Avengers-GrimmI don’t mind The Asylum studio at all. They are notorious for churning out their “mockbusters” – low-budget, similarly-titled movies intended to cash in on a bigger budget film’s publicity e.g. Transmorphers. And, let’s be honest, most of those do suck. However, they have achieved some renown for cheerfully silly creature features, the best-known of which is the Sharknado series. [Though in our house, we worship at a shrine to Mega Python vs. Gatoroid, starring those titans of 80’s bubblegum pop, Tiffany and Debbie Gibson.] Avengers Grimm occupies an odd middle territory: while its title is clearly intended to be riding the coat-tails of Avengers: Age of Ultron, yet a more accurate mockbuster title would be the one given above. The sole reference justifying the A word is when one character says, to no particular purpose, “We’re not heroes, we’re avengers.” Marvel’s legal department would probably beg to differ there.

For this is actually about the crossing over into the modern world of fairy-tale characters. The villain here is Rumpelstiltskin (Van Dien), who hijacks the magic mirror belonging to Snow White (Parkinson) since it can – an ability inexplicably omitted by the Brothers Grimm – act as a portal to our own, magic-free universe. He travels through dragging her with him, and by the time Snow’s princess posse catch up, he has become mayor of Los Angeles, because time flows at a different rate here. He is creating an army of “thralls,” mind-controlled minions that will do his bidding and allow him to expand his realm from a city to much further, and must be stopped. While Snow is trying to do just that, the arrival of her allies poses a problem, as they bring with them the last fragment of the mirror: it can be used to return to their world, or allow Rumpelstiltskin’s pals to join him. Making matters worse, he has enlisted the help of Iron John (Lou Ferrigno) and turned him into an unstoppable killing machine to hunt down the princesses.

This is as much an exercise in limiting expectations. Do not expect anything to do with Marvel, and instead something that’s an energetically low-budget riff on Once Upon a Time crossed with Enchanted, and you’ll be about there. There are probably a couple of princesses too many: outside of Snow, only Red Riding Hood (Peteron) and Rapunzel (Vanderbilt) made much impression, the latter swinging her weighted hair around like an offensively-coiffeured version of GoGo Yubari. There’s a nice subplot which has Red more or less going on her own mission, to take down the big, bad Wolf – one of Rumpel’s sidekicks – because he killed her parents. That’s the kind of inventive storytelling we could have used more of, or perhaps showing how the princesses adjust to modern life, which seems to happen with little more than a flick through a fashion magazine. However, Van Dien and Ferrigno make good foils for the ladies (many of whom come from Team Unicorn), and there are adequate quantities of princess ass-kicking. I was adequately entertained: and that’s more than can be said for my short-lived attempt to watch Once Upon a Time. This is a case where, as far as I’m concerned, the mockbuster tag probably does the film more harm than good.

Dir: Jeremy M. Inman
Star: Lauren Parkinson, Casper Van Dien, Elizabeth Peterson, Rileah Vanderbilt

Cat Run 2

  By

★★½
“Time for this cat to be put out.”

The original Cat Run was an unexpected pleasure, lifted far above its expected delivery of slick, vapid entertainment by Janet McTeer’s wonderful turn as polite hitwoman Helen Bingham. The sequel lacks McTeer and it’s no surprise that this time, it is no more than slick, vapid entertainment. Leads Anthony (Mechlowicz) and Julian (McAuley) are back, still dabbling in private eye work, and end up in New Orleans after Julian’s cousin, a soldier, is involved in a strange incident at an army research base. Two hookers, brought in for the pleasure of the officers, turn out to be on a mission to steal secret blueprints: one is gunned down, but the other, Tatiana (Zoli) escapes, and a cover-up is instigated by the military. The more our heroes dig, the worse things get, as they attract the attention of the criminal cartel behind Tatiana, led by Hannah Wollcroft (Branch).

catrun2Unfortunately, the makers retained the most irritating part of the original – the two main characters, who remain as blandly irritating as they were previously, delivering the sort of witty banter between friends which only occurs in movies like this. To little or no purpose, they also lob in a meandering, weak subplot about Anthony opening a restaurant and needing to find his inner soul in order to win a televised cooking contest. I’d rather have had more sequences of naked, cybernetically-enhanced Eastern European assassins kicking ass: while your mileage may vary, I suspect I’m not alone there. Zoli does her best, yet is certainly well short of McTeer, even if the script tries to give her the same kind of character arc, and the story does provide her character with a spot more background then usual. Then, at the end, for some reason the script decides it wants to be Iron Man. I’m sure there’s a world in which that story decision made sense.

Still, there are moments which work, such as the the sequence where Tatiana has to take on a ninja posse while simultaneously distracting a guy she picked up speed-dating. It’s clear Stockwell has seen far too many badly-dubbed kung-fu flicks, and I’m right alongside him there. When it isn’t trying too hard, and the film is content to be that slick, vapid entertainment I mentioned, it’s fair enough, with some well-staged action such as a hovercraft chase through the bayou, and a solid sense of atmosphere and location, not present in the original. However, the absence of McTeer leaves a gaping hole, and helps explain why this is a significant step down in almost all other ways.

Dir: John Stockwell
Star: Scott Mechlowicz, Alphonso McAuley, Winter Ave Zoli, Vanessa Branch

Tigresa

  By

★★½
“Tigresa, tigresa, burning bright…”

tigresaTIL there’s a genre of cinema – indeed, an entire culture – called “Nuyorican”, which is for and by the immigrants from Puerto Rico who now live in and around New York. del Mar made five such movies, mostly in the late sixties, but this 1969 production is the sole action heroine entry. It has a nice sense of local atmosphere, feeling a bit like the early work of Abel Ferrara, but also has it’s moments of berserk insanity, which one can only presume must have made sense at the time.

The heroine is Patricia (Faith), a young woman who is bullied by her schoolmates, and whose life reaches a low after she is assaulted by a bedroom intruder, an attack which also results in the death of her father. But, in a plot twist I defy anyone to see coming, she is left half a million dollars in the last will of a Jewish store-owner for whom she works, and this lets Patricia dye her hair blonde and sets her up as the owner of a nightclub, the ‘Chateau Caribe’. She has also developed a heck of a lot more self-confidence, allowing her to take revenge on her former tormentors, rescue other women from assault and continue looking for the man responsible for her assault and her father’s demise. However, her friend, Maria (Lee), has plans to rob Patricia, with the help of her boyfriend, Jimmy (H) – who, it turns out, was also the rapist. They concoct a scheme for Jimmy to seduce Patricia, providing a distraction which will allow them to break into her safe.

There are also subplots involving the local mafiosi, and a police detective (Crespo), who doggedly attempts to solve the crime by dressing as a transvestite hooker. I’m not quite sure hoe that’s intended to work: it might take a while, to say the very least, and my instinct is it probably says more about the cop’s personal proclivities than anything. Certainly puts a new spin on “to protect and serve”. I liked Faith’s performance, since she genuinely manages to get your sympathy, as the dysfunctional nature of her relationship with her father becomes apparent. He gets drunk because its the only way he says he can see his late wife; so she then gets drunk, wanting to see her dead mother too. This is accompanied by a tinkly, music-box like score that’s quite poignant – well, up until the point that the musical cue gets overused to death, anyway.

After her transition into the tigresa [incidentally, the “La” part of the title seen on the DVD sleeve appears to be entirely the distributor’s addition], she’s still quite a laudable character, taking no shit from the organized crime boss. She refuses to let him use her club as a front for drugs and prostitution, but does partner with him in exchange for his help finding her attacker. Though this just consists of wandering local gyms trying to find someone with the distinctive back scar which was her assailant’s sole distinguishing feature – I’d have expected better from the mob. It’s just a good thing absolutely no-one in these places ever wears a shirt. There’s another bizarre diversion where she meets a gangster, who then goes home to discover his wife in bed with another man. So he drowns her in the bathtub and decapitates her lover, before vanishing from the film entirely.

Yeah, it’s like that: nonsensical in many ways, and obviously cheaply made, with performances all over the place, from the monotone to the hysterical. Yet it’s strangely hypnotic, and you find yourself watching, just to see what will happen next and in what surreal way things will develop. For all its many faults, I can’t say I ever found Tigresa dull. There are GWG films which are so forgettable, I find myself struggling to write 300 words on them. This was certainly not one of those.

Dir: Glauco del Mar
Star: Perla Faith, Johnny H, Cindy Lee, Guillermo Crespo

Amazon Warrior

  By

★★★
“Where’s Lana Clarkson when you need her? Er… Never mind…”

amazon warriorI’ve seen some painfully cheap, poorly made excuses for movies in the post-apocalypse genre in my time, and I was actively braced for another one here. To my pleasant surprise, this didn’t suck. While it certainly delivered on the first half, apparently being made on a budget of spare change off the producer’s bedside table, the film possesses a script into which some work has gone, and decent leading performances, neither being expected. Indeed, this is likely some production values away from being genuinely good, at least in a nostalgic way, harking back to the Argentinian sword ‘n’ sorcery flicks that were churned out for the video market in the mid-eighties.

After the world has gone to hell in a hand-basket [and a bad digital effect], it returns to a tribal state. One of these are the gynocentric Amazons, but their territory is invaded by the marauders, an alliance of tribes under General Steiner (Storti), who perpetually needs to find and takes over new territory, to stop his alliance from splintering. You could read a political subtext into this, although that would likely be giving the script too much credit, I suspect. The only survivor of the slaughter that follows is Tara (Rodgers), who grows up, vowing revenge on Steiner and his crew. We join the vengeance in progress, with Tara now a mercenary who notches her belt for each marauder killed, but has taken time out from her busy revenging to escort two young women from one spot to another, at the request of their father (Sherer). On the way, she meets Clint (Jerman), a like-minded individual, who also had his family killed by Steiner, and so who is on his own personal mission. Or, is he?

It’s this angle which is one of the facets that keeps things interesting, with the storyline taking some unexpected twists and turns, right up to the final scene. Rogers is also effective in a role that could easily have become a collection of cliches, and the supporting performances are appropriate to their tasks. The fight sequences just about pass muster – it helps if you squint at them sideways, rather than giving them your direct attention – and it appears that after civilization has collapsed into anarchy and chaos, what remains will resemble an SCA get-together, albeit with rather more fur bikinis. The audio could also have done with some significant clean-up, not that hearing every word of dialogue is exactly crucial. Still, this comfortably exceeded all expectations, even if those were basically flat-lined going in; it retained my attention and was entertaining throughout. If you can manage your hopes realistically, not anticipating something on a par with the upcoming Mad Max remake, this should do the same for you.

Dir: Dennis Devine
Star: J.J. Rodgers, Jimmy Jerman, Raymond Storti, Bob Sherer

Deliverance Creek

  By

★★★½
“Once in a Lifetime.”

deliveranceThere’s one thing it’s vitally important to understand before watching this. It’s not a stand-alone Western movie. This is what’s called a “backdoor pilot”: something aired as if it were a discrete entity, with the aim of gauging audience reaction to see if it gets picked up. This matters, because it explains the film’s otherwise inexplicable failure to resolve… Well, just about any of the plot threads it constructs during its 90 minutes. If you expect closure, you’re going to be massively disappointed, and there are other aspects which are similarly out of place, such as Skeet Ultich as a local saloon pimp, who serves absolutely no purpose. However, if you take this for what it is – an introduction to the setting, characters and situations – it’s actually more than serviceable, especially since it’s a product of Lifetime, whose output tends to the bland in the same way as vanilla pudding. Thanks largely to Ambrose, this rises above that, and leaves me definitely interested in seeing more.

She plays Belle Barlow, struggling to keep things going on her farm as the Civil War grinds on; her husband was fighting for the Confederates, but has not been heard from in forever. Things aren’t made easier by the neighbours, the Crawfords, who own the local bank and the loan on which Belle is falling behind. Her sister, Hattie, is also involved in helping the underground railroad, the network which smuggled escaped slaves to freedom: Belle has mixed feelings about this, but finds herself hosting one such refugee as her “slave”, Kessie. Meanwhile, a bunch of renegade soldiers, led by Belle’s brother Jasper (Backus), arrive on the farm, intending to knock off a delivery of army gold that will be held temporarily in the bank. Initially opposed to this, Belle’s opinion is changed after a tragic accident, for which she blames the Crawfords, and it turns out Kessie holds the key (literally) to pulling off a successful robbery.

I can’t stress this enough: do not go in, expecting any one of these threads to reach a satisfactory conclusion. It’s the journey which you need to enjoy instead, because the destination is never reached. Fortunately, I was forewarned, and so didn’t suffer the same sense of “Is that it?” as some reviewers. Instead, I was able to appreciate a heroine that’s a good deal more complex than many, and the film also does a good job in portraying the murky nature of the Civil War, where people from the same town (or even family) would sometimes be on different sides. I particularly liked Belle’s little rant in regard to the Crawfords:

I want revenge too. But a bullet for each of them while they sleep is little comfort. I want them to suffer, as I have suffered. I want them to feel what it’s like to have everything they love stripped away from them, piece by piece.

That speech does a really good job of setting up her character’s direction for the rest of the movie, and providing credible motivation. As yet, I haven’t heard of any series following and that’s a pity, because this has potential and I’d like to know where it might have gone. While it’s obviously much easier to write a film where you don’t have to worry about the ending, don’t let the attached name of Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook, and other sappy romances) put you off, for this is better than many TV movies, and definitely better than almost all Lifetime ones.

Dir: Jon Amiel
Star: Lauren Ambrose, Wes Ramsey, Christopher Backus, Riley Smith

Robo-CHIC

  By

★
“Overdrawn at the comedy bank”

robochicDr. Von Colon (King) has completed his life-work, a female robot called Robo-CHIC (Shower and/or Jennifer Daly – we’ll get into the logic of this later), the second half of her name standing for Computerized Humanoid Intelligent Clone. At the same time, nerd terrorist Harry Truman Hodgkins (Ward) has planted a dozen nuclear bombs around the United States, times to go off at regular intervals. While he’s easily arrested, he is busted out during transit to the federal pen, falling under the control of evil overlord Quentin Thalian, who decides that if he holds Hodgkins hostage, he’ll then hold the nation hostage. And his demands won’t stop at getting girls to like him: he’ll also demand the police stand down so he can do whatever he wants. An unguarded remark by the Doctor – more or less along the lines of “somebody needs to do something!” – sets Robo-CHIC in pursuit of Hodgkins, along with TV reporter John Kent (Baker), and they have to resolve all this mess before any more stock footage of nuclear explosions occurs. And I haven’t even mentioned the biker gang, Satan’s Onions. They should be Satan’s Minions, but there was a screw up with their jackets. This does, however, provide a good indication of the extremely low-hanging comedic fruit at which this film aims.

Even given this, it misses more of than it hits, in particular with Dr. Von Colon, who comes over as some bizarre cross between Albert Brooks and Lloyd Kaufman – and not the good aspects of each, either. The only two people who have the right approach are Ward, and Rita Gonstodine as stunningly stupid newscaster and colleague of Kent’s, Bambi Doe. Those offer about the only times you laugh with the film, rather than cringing at it. Then, you have the fact that two entirely different actresses play the heroine during the film. It appears Shower, despite receiving a production credit, bailed on the production midway through shooting, but it was decided to replace her and keep shooting, on the basis the audience either wouldn’t notice or wouldn’t care. The blonde, curly wig worn by both helps, and it’s not as blatant as, say, Bela Lugosi in Plan 9, yet they also decided this was a story which needed to be told at a length of more than 100 minutes. Even if this was now a sunk cost, the correct decision when the lead actress left, would have been to shoot the bare minimum necessary with the replacement to qualify as a feature. Trust me, future generations of viewers would have thanked you.

This is so lacklustre, it barely qualifies as an action film. However, this is also so unfunny, it barely qualifies as a comedy, and long before this reaches its climax, your attention will be sorely taxed, because it feels perilously close to an idea rejected by Troma. And given the films Troma did make the same year this came out (1990) included Sgt. Kabukiman N.Y.P.D. and A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell, that would set the bar so low, a limbo-dancing midget would encounter problems. Avoid, at all costs.

Dir: Ed Hansen + Jeffrey Mandel
Star: Kathy Shower, Ranson Baker, Kip King, Burt Ward

Perfect: Android Rising

  By

★★
“Future imperfect.”

androidFeeling mostly like a fan-film located somewhere between the universes of Robocop and Terminator, this starts with a military project to create a soldier-android, which goes wrong and ends with the creation killing the wife of its creator, Dr. Peter Hess (Lombardi): it’s then abducted from a storage facility, and vanishes. Fast-forward a few years, and Hess tries again, this time creating Lia (Talbott), in the image of his wife: the military, led by General Arken (Zahn)  remain interested, because America has collapsed into internal strife and civil war, with group of rebels taking on the larger forces of the government. As a test, Lia is sent out to exterminate one of their nests, but with the help of an EMP gun, the rebels’ leader, Kass (Williams) captures the attacker. Can she be re-programmed from a mindless killing machine into something bearing a closer resemblance to a human? And what will Lia do if Kass succeeds?

Having enjoyed Notarile’s previous GWG film, Stand Off, this one was somewhat disappointing. The sci-fi oriented theme attempted here requires a little more in the way of production values, than the urban crime one of Stand Off, even if it’s simply to give the impression Lia is stronger, faster or more powerful than a human. That doesn’t happen, and she simply appears bulletproof, so you wonder why they bother. The other main problem is the dialogue. You know how some films sound like people speaking, and in others, it sound like characters saying lines from a script? This definitely falls in the latter department, with too many lines that seem necessary to the plot, rather than flowing naturally from the situation. The re-wiring of Lia is also way too easy: this is supposed to be bleeding-edge military technology, unseen in the civilian world, but I’ve installed browser plugins with more difficulty. Delete one file, tell her, “Hey, you shouldn’t be killing us,” and she goes, “Well, I’m convinced”, then changes sides. And the Genesis subplot is abandoned entirely in the middle, before showing up again at the very end, for no apparent reason beyond foreshadowing a sequel.

This isn’t to say it’s totally without merits. Talbott is rather better as Lia than as Mrs. Hess, capturing the emotionless android well, and the lack of wire-fu or other artificially-enhanced action sometimes does work for the movie. Notarile captures the blasted post-industrial landscape well, getting good bang for his (relatively few) bucks. But unlike Stand Off, this never escapes its low-budget origins. If you’re into fan films, this is respectable enough, and I remain interested in see further work from his Blinky Productions studio – Assassinista looks particularly interesting. However, you need to set your expectations appropriately, and if you’re looking for something reaching the level of a fully-professional feature, you’re going to be disappointed.

Dir: Chris R. Notarile
Star: Roberto Lombardi, Samantha Talbott, Kasey Williams, Rick Zahn

Cyborg 2

  By

★★★
“The film that launched a thousand lips…”

cyborg2Before there was Salt, before there was Mrs. Smith, before there was even Lara Croft, there was Cash Reese. For Angelina Jolie got her start as a grown-up actress in this 1993 sequel to a Jean-Claude Van Damme action film. She plays a cyborg pumped full of liquid explosives by her creators, Pinwheel Robotics, with the aim of being dispatched to assassinate the board of their Japanese rivals, Kobayashi Electronics. However, Cash is busted out from their complex by employee Colton Ricks (Koteas) along with a mysterious virtual guide known as “Mercy” (Palance). Unwilling to let their investment go, Pinwheel unleash psychotic bounty-hunter, Danny Bench (Drago) to track her down, before the pair can escape to Mombasa, a free zone for independent cyborgs.

“After I saw it, I went home and got sick,” said Jolie. Really? Damn, she must have hurled like Regan MacNeil after watching The Cradle of Life then, for this isn’t all that bad. Sure, it’s cheap, and rips off Blade Runner shamelessly in its visual style. However, it benefits immeasurably from an above average cast, who are all good for their roles. While Jolie’s lack of acting experience is certainly apparent, this doesn’t work against her character, an artificial person who is getting to experience the real world for the first time. Koteas is decent as the rugged hero – even though Cash is obviously stronger, quicker and probably smarter than he is. This does make the film’s finale somewhat dumb: in it, Ricks takes on Bench in a fight to the death, in order to win money for their passage to Mombasa, even though the rest of the film strongly suggests it’s Cash who would have a better chance of beating the hunter.

However, we must not forget the supporting cast who certainly help carry this, in particular Palance. His is mostly a voice performance, his lips appearing on video screens along the way to direct and assist Cash and Ricks, and brings an understated gravitas to proceedings they really don’t deserve. At the other end of the performance spectrum, yet equally fun to watch, is Drago, chewing scenery in memorable fashion. And we mustn’t forget Karen Sheperd as Chen, another hunter trailing Cash, leading to some good action there too. The script was originally intended as a standalone film called Glass Shadow [the name of the bio-explosive], which may explain why there’s no apparent connection to the original movie – as the not necessarily entirely accurate sleeve shown suggests, it was released this way in some territories. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and purely for opening the door to Jon Voight’s little girl, and the much bigger, (mostly) better things to come, definitely is deserving of a certain regard.

Dir: Michael Schroeder
Star: Elias Koteas, Angelina Jolie, Jack Palance, Billy Drago