Author: Grant

I love characters who punch their problems in the face, movies that "normal" people think are stupid, and way too many video games. In case you're wondering why I'm cranky, I haven't smoked a cigarette since September 12th, 2015.

Demolition Man (1993) [Midnight Movie]

Demolition Man is a movie I watched so many times on HBO, I started watching it in the network’s secondary audio program to mix things up a bit. (I think that probably taught me more Spanish than the class I took, too.) It’s been at least a decade since the last time I saw it, so I was surprised to discover all the lines were still bouncing around in my head. I was also surprised it was a little more clever than I remembered it.

This isn’t to say Demolition Man is a brilliant movie, only that it isn’t mindless. John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, which shares similar frustrations with the fact Americans prefer safety to freedom, feels a lot more genuine by making its lead character an apathetic anti-hero. Stallone tends to get on a soapbox when he’s not delivering questionable one-liners. It’s not as heavy as it was in Cobra, and Stallone has mellowed out a lot since that film, but it’s still apparent. Speaking of forgoing subtlety: not only is Brave New World flat out mentioned, but Sandra Bullock’s character is named Huxley.

The movie opens four years in the future—1997 to be precise—and Stallone plays a bad ass, door-kickin’ policeman by the name of John Spartan. When we first see him, he’s hovering in a helicopter high above an urban war zone in the middle of Los Angeles. Just before repelling down to the scene, he adjusts his beret and mutters, “Send a maniac to catch a maniac.” The ensuing stunt is good, as are most of the film’s stunts, but the way the editors cut it together would have broken any human’s back… not that I mean to suggest Stallone is merely human.

The maniac Spartan wants to catch is Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes) who manages to murder a group of hostages before framing Spartan for manslaughter. Both men are arrested and, since this is the future, they get placed in cryogenic storage which has replaced traditional prisons altogether. Fast forward to the year 2032, in which crime has been reduced to the point policemen don’t even know how to arrest people anymore. Phoenix manages to escape the cryo facility during a parole hearing, at which point John Spartan has to be awakened to stop his murderous rampage. A smarter science fiction story would have explored the implications of sentencing a human being to cryo-prison, but Demolition Man just wants to entertain. It does a good job of it, too.

Never mind the fact the setup is stupid. The setup doesn’t matter because it’s a conceit to see two 20th century men in a future setting where most people listen to shitty music, eat shitty health food, outlaw everything they don’t like, and bury their heads in the sand rather than acknowledge the inconvenient truths underlying their superficial lives. And yeah, the film’s message wallops you over the head, but you probably won’t find a modern action film even beginning to lift a corner of that veil.

Another surprising aspect of the film is that it actually deals with Spartan’s culture shock quite a bit. Yeah, it chooses to do it with a lot more humor than drama, but it’s there. There is one scene about midway through in which Huxley begins to look up Spartan’s daughter and he stops her. He stops her because he knows what kind of world his daughter grew up in, and it’s a world that’s completely incompatible with someone like him. Something about that short scene strikes me as honest, and it’s another reason I would have preferred a story that dove headfirst into the implications of freezing criminals.

And then there’s the three seashells, also played for laughs, that demonstrates just how weird the future might be to someone who ended up there against their will. No, I don’t think the filmmakers were shooting for anything more than a cheap laugh, but the character’s conundrum did stimulate me in exactly the way I want to be stimulated by science fiction. I’m not entirely sure we won’t do away with toilet paper by 2032.

Even though it came out near the fall of the Tough Guy Movie, Demolition Man is a pretty good example of the subgenre. It feels like Joel Silver’s attempt at a John Carpenter film, at least in terms of subject matter. And all the principal actors are great, in particular Snipes who obviously had a blast filming his scenes. Also good here is Dennis Leary who more or less does his stand-up routine, but hey, he’s good at it and it works, so I ain’t complaining.

Commando: The Director’s Cut (1985) [Midnight Movie]

No, Commando isn’t as good as Terminator, Predator, or Total Recall, but it’s better than just about any Schwarzenegger vehicle which came out after True Lies. It’s better than his comedies, too, but I’m biased because I’m not a huge fan of Twins or Kindergarten Cop. (I appreciate the effort, but I get it already: he’s playing against his masculine image… is that really funny enough to carry multiple movies?)

All you really need to know about Arnie’s role in Commando is he’s a special forces type whose daughter (Alyssa Milano) has been kidnapped by Dan Hedaya, who plays a pretty good bad guy. In fact, most of the bad guys in this movie are pretty good bad guys. You won’t believe any of them are appropriate matches for fist fights with Schwarzenegger, but that’s beside the point. The point is Schwarzenegger’s going to kill them all and that’s enough for me.

It’s been so long since I’ve seen the original cut of Commando I’m not entirely sure what the uncensored cut reinstates. If I had to guess, it’s probably the brutal scene in which a handful of henchmen trap Schwarzenegger in a garden shed and he comes out hacking and slashing with circular saw blades and a sling blade. It’s a flurry of insanity and Savini-level gore effects which seem to be taken straight out of a Friday the 13th movie. Brief as it is, I doubt I’m going to see anything as awesome from any movie which comes out in 2017.

No, I’m not here to lament about how awesome movies were in the 80s because, overall, they really weren’t. Commando, like so many of the other movies I feature here, is an exception to the rule. I’m perfectly happy that we still get great exceptions like Ex Machina, Arrival, and The Witch—three movies I think we’ll also remember in thirty years. Every decade has exceptions in the overwhelming pool of shit and I happen to think this decade is the best for exceptions in a long time.

Having said that, you just can’t dispute the fact Commando contains an absurd amount of entertainment value, which makes me all the more likely to watch it again instead of the movies I mentioned above. And I’m not even ignoring the fact that Commando is a dumb movie… really dumb. In one scene, Schwarzenegger is tackled by a dozen security guards who he casts off of him with Superman-strength. He rips seats out of cars, carries trees on his shoulder, and easily rights flipped sport cars. Bad guys who clearly have the tactical advantage conveniently can’t shoot worth a shit, even when they get the drop on him, and when one bad guy finally manages to clip him, it’s only a flesh wound. Then you’ve got Rae Dawn Chong’s character, who has absolutely zero motivation and proves completely pointless until she has to fly a plane, but she’s actually pretty great at doing nothing.

It’s easy to look past the movie’s faults because it’s is an unstoppable machine with one function and it performs that function very well: dazzling its audience with great explosions and decent stunts. Legendary producers like Joel Silver hadn’t yet figured out Schwarzenegger could carry smarter roles (perhaps he couldn’t yet), but he was getting better with almost every movie he made and it’s always fun to see him at the various points of his career.

I’ll be first in line for John Wick 2, but that’s just a throwback. Commando is the real deal.

Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) [Trailer]

This would have been the first Blu-Ray I bought this year if it weren’t forty friggin’ dollars. On the other hand, I’m surprised it got a Criterion Collection release. So that’s something.

Edit: One day after posting this, the movie went on sale for $27.99, Amazon, which rivals the cheapest price I saw on eBay… and it became the first Blu-Ray I bought this year after all.

The Specialist (1994) [Midnight Movie]

Sylvester Stallone and James Woods used to be explosive experts for the CIA, specializing in assassinations. Yet when James Woods attempts to blow up a vehicle which will claim a little girl’s life, the two split ways. Stallone becomes a freelance assassin while James Woods falls in with a crime syndicate run by Rod Steiger and his son, Eric Roberts. One day, Stallone is contacted by a mysterious woman (Sharon Stone) who wants to put a hit on the men who killed her parents, who happen to be the aforementioned criminals. And if that sounds a little too clunky to you, you’re right, but at least things explode.
The difference between the deaths in a PG-13 and an R-rated movie are usually minor. The Specialist, which isn’t cram-packed with wall-to-wall action, features violence which could have easily passed in a PG-13 movie if not for its perfectly timed (and briefly executed) close-ups. In one scene, a booby trapped door blows a bad guy across the room, which would have been tame enough for a Jason Bourne movie, only there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it close-up of the victim’s head smashing through an aquarium. In another scene, you don’t just see a car blow up, you can actually see the detail on the driver’s face as he tumbles out of the fireball.
These are tiny creative decisions, but they make all the difference in the world. It’s why action movies today just don’t have the same bite to ’em. (I’m reminded of the comically timed cutaway of a bullet-riddled corpse in Schwarzenegger’s Total Recall getting trampled by bad guys and panicking pedestrians alike… and yet studio executives still wonder why no one went to see the PG-13 remake.) And although the action sequences in The Specialist are few and far between, they’re more exciting—if not a lot more ludicrous—than the kind of movies which are too eager to blow their loads. There’s an unexpected restraint on display here, an effort to rise above the usual reckless pace and non-stop violence. Unfortunately, the questionable plot twists and far-fetched feats drag the movie right back down again.
For instance, Sylvester Stallone is wearing nothing more than a towel when he’s informed the bad guys are on their way up to his hotel room to kill him. He not only manages to get dressed (in a suit, no less), but he rigs up a complicated booby trap which surgically blows the room off the side of the hotel without causing any collateral damage whatsoever. Never mind the fact the interior and exterior shots of the hotel are completely at odds with one another (the doorways seen in the hallway would have to be on an outside wall), it’s a pretty dazzling sequence which climaxes with a bad guy’s death that seems brutal even by Stallone’s standards.
Then there’s James Woods’ character, who strolls right into the police station and builds a bomb to convince the department he should lead the manhunt for Stallone’s character. Completely unbelievable, yes, but Woods is so nutty in the role it’s better to let such absurdities slide. Stallone might be the one who calls the shots and makes all the money in his movies, but the villains have more fun.

Let’s not gloss over the real reason people went to see The Specialist: the love scene between Sly Stallone and Sharon Stone was hyped through the roof shortly before release… and the hype is real, my friends. The filmmakers don’t gloss over it with blurry images or bullshit dissolves, either—it’s where they really earn the R-rating. I love memorable screen couples and this is a surprisingly great one, hampered only by a cheesy montage and some poorly worded dialogue, both of which feel like leftovers from Cobra. Doesn’t matter. The scene itself is the kind of stuff you’d expect to see roped off in a museum. It’s as if they filmed The Vitruvian Man and The Birth of Venus getting it on.

Manhunter (1986) [Midnight Movie]

Silence of the Lambs is one of my favorites—easily in my top twenty—yet I almost always hate movies about serial killers. It’s not the subject matter so much as the sloppy way its handled. On the other hand, the first three Hannibal Lector novels were like crack to me and I inhaled them in a single week. (I never bothered with the newer stuff that dug into Lector’s childhood because I don’t want that particular mystery ruined.) The way Lector turns the tables on his captors in Silence was one of the earliest moments I can remember in which I knew I wanted to tell stories.

Before Anthony Hopkins immortalized the character in Jonathan Demme’s 1991 masterpiece (I rarely use that word so don’t accuse me of being hyperbolic), there was Michael Mann’s lesser known Manhunt, based on the original Lector novel, Red Dragon. Simultaneously an unmistakable product of the 80s and somehow timeless, the movie looks unbelievable in HD. It might even be the best looking film of the series, and the synthy soundtrack gives it a meaner edge than its much more conventional remake (which I also enjoyed).
While Hopkins probably makes a better Hannibal Lector than Brian Cox, overall I prefer Manhunter’s cast to the remake. William Peterson plays Will Graham, the FBI agent who captured Lector and almost got killed in the process. Brian Cox plays Lector a little more brutishly than Hopkins while Tom Noonan (who was born to play psychopaths) plays Francis Dollarhyde, the Red Dragon killer. Then you’ve got Dennis Farina as the old colleague who drags Graham back into the FBI, and Joan Allen as the blind woman to whom Dollarhyde unexpectedly warms up.
Manhunter is remarkably faithful to its source material until the action-packed finale, but Dollarhyde’s affair with Allen’s character is so rushed it’s a wonder why they included it at all. The movie quickly stumbles through these scenes (and I suspect there was a better cut at some point), which are ultimately resolved by a cheat. It’s one of the few aspects the remake did better.
Nonetheless, Manhunter is exactly the kind of movie I live for, the kind of electric stuff that makes routine thrillers and police procedurals sickening to the stomach. It’s the reason lesser movies like Kiss the Girls are so unimpressive. We’ve seen what this kind of movie is capable of accomplishing, so why do we have to suffer through bottom-of-the-barrel shit like Tyler Perry playing Alex Cross?

Silence of the Lambs is still the absolute best of these films, but Graham, who managed to catch Lector because he’s haunted by thoughts only serial killers should have, is almost as complex as Clarice… almost. Even if you’ve seen Red Dragon, it’s worth seeing it done from Michael Mann’s perspective. Manhunter is a fantastic movie.

Cobra (1986) [Midnight Movie]

Around this time last year I featured Chuck Norris’s Invasion U.S.A., a gloriously stupid Cannon film which takes place around Christmas. This year I’m featuring Cobra, another gloriously stupid Cannon film which also takes place around Christmas. I’m not going to lie: I fucking loved this movie growing up. To this day I still think chewing on a match looks kind of cool.

Here’s the story, if you can call it that: a cult of maniacs, whose motivation is not explained well at all, are going around killing people at random. One day Brigitte Nielson’s character, a supermodel, sees the bad guys’ faces and now they’ll stop at nothing to kill her. (It’s important to point out she never actually saw the bad guys committing a crime and thought nothing of the incident until after they targeted her.) Never mind the number of witnesses increases the more they try to kill her—they’re not the brightest, these maniacs. By the end of the film, it’s implied they have to murder an entire town of witnesses because their last ditch effort to take her out involves at least a dozen conspicuous motorcycles.

And I’m not complaining. If you’re a filmmaker and your villains don’t ride motorcycles, what the hell is wrong with you? (Double points if they’re bike-riding ninjas.)

Enter Marion Cobretti (Sylvester Stallone), better known as Cobra, a member of the police department’s so-called Zombie Squad. What’s the Zombie Squad? Since Cobra is pretty much the only member of the squad we ever get to see, I assume it’s a unit of plainclothes police officers who can get away with everything from vehicular homicide to assaulting reporters and other cops. In the cold opening, Cobra manages to deliver the worst one-liner (“Go ahead, I don’t shop here” in response to a maniac’s threat to blow up a store) shortly before delivering one of the best: “You’re a disease and I’m the cure.”

Stallone, who recycled ideas he had when he was attached to Beverly Hills Cop, has written a script which acts as a big fat soapbox for some extreme ideas about how crime should be handled in the United States. I’m sure all of the big action stars at the time shared similar stances, but Stallone’s sincerity as he spouts this naive bullshit is a hilarious good time. Naturally, his script has the hot chick agreeing with him while all the strawman characters (Andrew Robinson in particular) oppose him.

I still enjoy this movie a lot, but it just doesn’t cross the line nearly as gratuitously as Invasion U.S.A. did. Still, Brian Thompson makes a great villain and Brigitte Nielsen is hotter than a firecracker here. It is what it is.