Category: Action

Split Second (1992) [Midnight Movie]

It’s the year 2008 and global warming has managed to submerge London in about a foot of murky water. I’m not sure where the mutant rats figure into this poor man’s cyberpunk world, but the little buggers are ubiquitous and the characters will wreck entire apartments just to gun ’em down. Harley Stone (Rutger Hauer) is a loose cannon of a cop who punches and kicks anyone who gets in his way. When a fellow cop inquires about his sanity, the chief of police (Alun Armstrong) replies with that good ol’ “he’s the best there is” cliche.

Actually, calling anything in this movie cliched might be missing the point. It isn’t “only” science fiction, fantasy, horror, and action, but I want to say it’s a parody of all that stuff, too. It even goes out of its way to do the old “meet your new partner” routine with surprising freshness. Or maybe I’m being too kind to it, considering I feel like I’m the only person who likes this movie. And I always liked this movie.

Split Second opens in a scuzzy night club called The Non-Stop Striptease. A spiky-collared Rottweiler attempts to bite Stone’s nuts off in the alleyway entrance, at which point Stone calmly flashes the dog his badge and says, “I’m a cop, asshole.” This placates the dog. We don’t know why Stone is here—we get the feeling he doesn’t know, either—but soon a woman’s heart is ripped out and, somehow, no one saw who was responsible for the murder. This doesn’t stop Stone from racing out into the dark streets, punching and shooting anything that moves (or doesn’t) in an attempt to alleviate his severe anxiety.

See, a long time ago Stone’s partner was murdered by the very thing which is running around town, ripping hearts out and drawing intricate astrological signs in blood. Stone has been steadily going downhill ever since the incident and it’s not until later when we find out why he’s psychically linked to the beast. The monster, by the way, is ten feet tall, has a wicked set of teeth and claws, but turns out to be one of the most disappointing rubber suits you’ll ever see. Never mind that because the ride up until that point is fun as hell.

Featuring Kim Cattrall, Pete Postlethwaite, and Michael J. Pollard, this British production from The Burning director (my favorite slasher film) is a madhouse that rarely loses steam. You’ll laugh at it for the first ten to twenty minutes, then you’ll realize it’s very much in on the joke, allowing you to laugh with it for the rest of the running time. Rutger Hauer is one of the few bonafide actors who fell into these low budget films with the same wit and enthusiasm he had in more serious efforts—you can tell he’s enjoying it, too. I can’t think of anyone else who was equally great in both A- and B-movies, then slipped back into A-movies without missing a step.

Do you like the early 90s ridiculous vision of the future? Do you like Rutger Hauer? If yes, you’re going to like this movie. Early nineties Terminator, Alien, and Predator ripoffs are kind of a guilty pleasure for me, if only because I’m so damn nostalgic for them.

And you know what? Fuck the haters. This is a legitimately exciting movie. It was the perfect cure for the unbelievably disappointing Star Trek Beyond, which I saw on the same day. How a movie can have so much cool stuff in it, and completely fail to excite me, I’ll never know, but I digress. Split Second delivers the speed.

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) [Midnight Movie]

In the opening scene, the handheld point of view is following a diverse group of Los Angeleno gang members who are obviously up to no good. The gritty style, in combination with John Carpenter’s pleasantly droning music, is immediately inviting. We begin to wonder: Why are we here? What are these guys up to? Just when you think you’re about to get an answer, the players are ambushed by police and brutally gunned down.

Come to think of it, you never really know what the gang members are up to or why they do what they do. Carpenter chooses to keep them enigmatic, which makes their resolve doubly spooky. You rarely (if ever) see them talking and there isn’t a singular villain who explains his diabolical plot to the audience. Lesser movies, such as the embarrassingly average 2005 remake with Ethan Hawke, would have missed the point: these guys are scary because we don’t what makes them tick. If Anton Chigurh had been the type to join a street gang, this is where he would have pledged.

Soon after the gundown, we’re introduced to Lieutenant Bishop (Austin Stoker), a green policeman who’s just been assigned overnight duty at the titular precinct which is about to be permanently closed down. It’s a thankless job, the last thing Bishop had in mind when he became a police officer. There he meets Napoleon Wilson (Darwin Joston), a lifer who’s unexpectedly brought to the holding cells along with a handful of other prisoners. Then there’s Leigh (Laurie Zimmer), an oddly collected and level-headed clerical worker who seems as mysterious as the gang which besieges the precinct.

When Leigh first meets Bishop, she offers him coffee. “Black?” she asks him. “For over thirty years,” replies Bishop, before breaking out in a huge grin. It’s the kind of exchange modern movies really suck at. It’s reminiscent of the scene in the original Shaft, in which the characters compare the color of their skin to coffee mugs and point out they’re not so black and white after all. Fast forward to today and I’m guessing 1995’s Die Hard with a Vengeance is probably the last time a major action film dealt with race without completely embarrassing itself, which is pretty sad if you ask me.

So there are many details along the way, showing how the characters find themselves in the dangerous situation, but here’s all you need to know: the good guys are holed up in the building and the bad guys will stop at nothing to kill them. The great thing about Carpenter is he was a working class filmmaker who wasn’t interested in making movies the modern way. All you really need is a camera, a hero, and bad guys. That’s movies in their purest form.

Assault on Precinct 13 is one of my favorites—easily in my top fifty, perhaps twenty. The last time I saw it was on a badly worn VHS rental. Seeing it in HD blew my mind because I had no idea it looked this damn good. (Please forgive the low quality of the screenshots… I was having technical issues.) I’ve never enjoyed the film more thoroughly than I did tonight.

Maniac Cop (1988) [31 Days of Gore]

This is it, folks: the year’s final 31 Days of Gore post. It’ll be eleven whole months until the next one.

I hadn’t seen Maniac Cop in so long I forgot how good it is. With a screenplay by the legendary Larry Cohen, who wrote some seriously offbeat genre flicks (It’s Alive, God Told Me To, Black Caesar, and The Stuff), the pacing of the movie is extraordinary. The movie opens with a kill, does a normal scene, shows another kill, normal scene, kill, normal scene, etc, etc. The titular maniac cop snags himself more victims in the first twenty minutes than the average horror movie dispatches in its entirety. Sometimes you see where an individual scene is going—and sometimes you’re right—but overall this is one surprising cookie.

Imagine you’re being chased by a couple of thugs through the dark, curiously empty streets of New York City. Then you spot a rather large cop (Robert Z’Dar) standing in the shadows of a nearby park and race to him for assistance. When you get close, however, you realize something is wrong and, before you have the time to recoil, he wraps his hand around your throat with superhuman strength and wrings your neck. It’s a creepy premise, the implications of which are properly explored through news segments which reflect the city’s growing fear and distrust toward police officers. Most genre films wouldn’t bother going so deep.

Now check out this cast of players: Robert Z’Dar, Tom Atkins, Bruce Campbell, Lauren Landon, William Smith, and Shaft himself, Richard Roundtree. As far as exploitation movies go, can it get any better? It rarely does. I love this cast.

Tom Atkins plays a straight-shooter lieutenant who can’t stand the thought of some bozo walking around in a police uniform and killing people. When Bruce Campbell’s character, also a cop, is implicated as the serial killer, Atkins is the only one who stops to consider it could be a setup. It turns out the real maniac cop knows exactly how to set someone up because he has inside information. And he has that inside information because he really was a cop at one time in his life, which leads to the whodunnit elements of the film.

Naturally, when the maniac cop shows up to the police station to tie up loose ends, Bruce Campbell escapes custody with the help of his mistress, fellow cop Lauren Landon. The two lovers then team up with Atkins to work out the killer’s identity and clear Campbell’s name.

I love this movie. It turns out Nicholas Winding Refn, the director of Drive and Bronson, is also a big fan. He and director William Lustig are co-producing a remake. I don’t think I’ve ever been more excited for a remake in my life.

Cameos include Jake LaMotta (Lustig’s uncle) and Sam Raimi.

Note: I was planning to feature the entire trilogy, but I think I’ll be getting the sequels on Blu-Ray to review at a later date. Right now, the streaming options available to me aren’t even in widescreen. 

Over the Top

My partner and I were channel surfing. When I passed Over the Top, she asked me to go back. Reluctantly, I did. I was in the mood for literally anything else, but whenever I’m dead set against watching something, Starla goes all in. I tried to explain it’s an embarrassingly sappy film about arm wrestling. This only enticed her.

Several minutes in, she asked, “Wait, are you sure this is about arm wrestling?” The movie takes forever to warm up, but once it does: whoa boy. You’re going to need a serrated blade to cut this cheese, maybe even an electric carver. Sylvester Stallone plays Lincoln Hawk, a truck driver who just reunited with the son he walked out on a decade earlier. See, the mother is dying. Although her wealthy father (Robert Loggia) is gunning for custody, she wants the boy to be with his deadbeat father. Long story short: complex emotional conflicts will be resolved with arm wrestling. As God intended.

Hawk, with his muscular physique and rust bucket of a truck, is portrayed as an everyman whose home contains one-arm exercise equipment. Loggia’s character, who may be perfectly justified in his assessment of Hawk, is portrayed as the villain. Loggia represents The Man who despises his son-in-law because no college-educated sophisticates could possibly understand arm wrastlin’ and truck drivin’. It’s always bizarre and highly entertaining to view American culture through the eyes of Israeli director Menahem Golan, co-founder of The Cannon Film Group, whose unpretentious productions greatly shaped the pop culture of my formative years. Here he cranks his unique patriotism up to eleven… or perhaps “jumps the shark” is more accurate.

Nonetheless, Over the Top is a fun ride through the cheesiest depths of the 1980s. This remarkable artifact even films its climax during a real life arm wrestling tournament. I know what you’re thinking: “Arm wrestling tournaments really exist?” Well, sort of. This one was created specifically for the film, and two guys actually got their arms broken. One of the gruesome incidents ends up in the obligatory sports movie montage.

In typical Cannon fashion, Over the Top is vapid but impossible to turn off. It’s interesting how Golan spins sport-movie clichés to make them fit arm wrestling instead of ball games. In case you’re wondering about the curiously apt title, Over the Top refers to a special move Stallone’s character has incorporated into his matches. I suspect the physics have no basis in reality, but this movie isn’t directed by a man who lived in reality, so who cares?

Midnight Movie: Fortress of Amerikkka (1989)

John Waters once said, “Get more out of life. See a fucked-up movie.”

I’ve written about the purity of exploitation films many times. They promise a certain kind of entertainment—usually mindless—and they either deliver or they don’t. Here’s one that delivers, but once it crosses the line, it doesn’t stop. Early on, a defenseless old man gets drawn between a car and a tree in gruesome fashion. Soon after, a terrified child get shot in the back. Not that any of it looks real, mind you, but it’s still not for the faint of heart.

Fortress of Amerikkka has a lot in common with Surf Nazis Must Die. They both have sleazy titles, they both contain unbridled cheese, and they were both distributed by Troma Entertainment (of course). Surf Nazis Must Die is just a little more fun; any revenge film in which the hero is a motorcycle-driving black mama is clearly better than one in which a white actor (Gene LeBrock) plays a Native American named John Whitecloud.

Whitecloud has just been released from prison. The first thing he does is stock up on weapons and ammunition at the local gun store. There he has a run-in with the dirty cop who killed his brother and put him away in the first place. The cop tells Whitecloud he better watch his back, a scene every movie like this must include. Meanwhile, there’s a militia performing training exercises in the surrounding woods. The villain, who reminds me of Donald Trump making Amerikkka great again, commands his mindless followers to kill anyone who stumbles upon the location of their camp, which seems to be damn near everyone but the cops.

These are two very different plots which run parallel until, suddenly, they don’t. And here’s where the confusion comes into play: Why is America spelled with a triple-K? It leads you to believe the militia has ties with the Klan, yet they’re a racially inclusive and female friendly group, as far as I can tell. Troma films have been known for being as subtle as a cannonball, so I’m not sure what the social commentary is here, if any. I just can’t bring myself to believe the guy who directed two Class of Nuke’Em High sequels had anything more important to say than “violence and boobies, yay!”

The “that’s so wrong” factor of this movie is simply stunning. Get a bunch of drunk friends together and you’ll probably have a blast. It’s one of the wildest Troma films that wasn’t produced in-house.

Midnight Movies: The Toxic Avenger II & III

I originally saw the original The Toxic Avenger on USA Up All Night! when I was something like eight or nine years old. On my many repeat viewings of the worn VHS I recorded myself, I would laugh gleefully when, upon committing vehicular homicide, one of the evil punks announces he has to go to bed early “because I’ve gotta go to church.” Years later, at the beginning of Toxic Avenger Part IV, Stan Lee’s voiceover recounts the events of the first film before going on to say, “Then… two rotten sequels were made. Sorry about that!”

Curiously, I’ve watched the “rotten sequels” more than I saw the fourth movie. I actually prefer Toxie’s makeup and his John Candy-like demeanor in the two middle entries. The biggest problem with the back-to-back II & III is they were intended to be one film until director Lloyd Kaufman, realizing he had shot too much footage, had the idea to split the one movie into two. The problem is Kaufman overestimated just how much usable footage he had.

Following the events of the first film, Melvin the mop boy, aka Toxie, has successfully cleaned Tromaville of crime and pollution. He lives with his blind girlfriend Claire (even Kaufman has admitted he doesn’t know why they changed the character’s name from Sarah) and finds himself without purpose. So he sets off to Japan in search of his long lost father, only to find the man sets off his Spidey-Sense (uh, I mean “Tromatons”) because he is, in fact, an evil drug lord. Meanwhile, in Toxie’s absence, an evil corporation moves into Tromaville.

The good stuff is present, albeit smothered in the padding. Part II opens with a hilariously stupid fight before the promising pace trips on the overuse of voiceovers and the extended interlude in Japan. A lot of the footage that’s used in Toxic Avenger II is actually recycled in Toxic Avenger III, sometimes with replaced dialogue, sometimes unaltered, but always at the expense of fun. In other words, there’s a great Troma movie between the two pictures and if a skilled fan editor hasn’t made a singular supercut yet, I’d be very surprised.

When I was younger, I preferred Part II because I somehow liked the stuff in Japan. Now that I’m older, it’s clear the third film, The Last Temptation of Toxie, is the superior picture. The opening was obviously shot after Kaufman decided to split the film into two. The fight may not be as long and complex as the one which opened the previous movie, but its brevity helps solidify the pace and believe me: this movie can use all the help it can get.

Toxie’s relationship with Claire takes an unexpectedly cute turn. Toxie literally sells his soul to the devil to pay for the operation to restore her eyesight (and to get his mother a microwave oven). He does this knowing full well that once she can see, she may be repulsed by his hideously deformed nature. That’s our little Melvin—a selfless darling—and we can only hope the inevitable Hollywood remake will absorb the more subtle ingredients of the franchise rather than focusing solely on the exploitation stuff.

Nothing in these two films is half as wild (or gleefully politically incorrect) as the punks who squash a little boy’s head before beating an elderly woman to death. Nor is the dialogue ever quite as poetic as the thug who exclaims, “I’ve always wanted to cornhole me a blind bitch!” Unless you’re a completionist, or a die hard Troma fan, it’s probably acceptable to skip all the sequels. But there is some of that old magic here. It’s only in short bursts, few and far between.

Keanu (2016)

Movie nerds can spot fellow movie nerds from across the room. Key and Peele don’t just parody specific movies (see: their Gremlins 2 sketch), but sometimes entire types of movies (see: their funhouse villain sketch). Any comedy team who casts character-actors like Clint Howard, while paying rapt attention to lighting and cinematography, is speaking my language. I’m sure Keanu is only one of many worthwhile films that will result from this partnership.

Rell (Jordan Peele) has just been dumped by his girlfriend. When we first see him, he’s moping beside a bong and a couple of posters for New Jack City and Heat. His best friend Clarence (Keegan-Michael Key) is a suburbanite who drives around in a mini-van while listening to George Michael on repeat. Clarence is on his way to cheer Rell up, but it turns out he doesn’t need to anymore. Rell has adopted a stray kitten he calls Keanu and all is well in the world.

What Rell and Clarence don’t know is Keanu has just escaped a shootout at a Mexican cartel operation. The two super-assassins responsible for the shootout are also played by Key and Peele in heavy makeup and wigs. The bad guys also want the kitten, but when a local gang tries to trash the house of a dumb drug dealer (Will Forte), they accidentally target Rell’s house next door. The leader of the gang, played by Method Man, takes a liking to the kitty, too. So when Rell and Clarence go to get Keanu back, the gang mistakes them for the aforementioned assassins and… well, this certainly sounds like a routine comedy, doesn’t it?

And it is a routine comedy, but not the low-effort kind. This is the kind of movie Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder could have starred in thirty years ago: a simple vehicle for complex talent. Each time the movie starts to lose its footing on the slippery slope of situation comedy, they completely save it with their antics. There’s an unlikely and somewhat contrived scene in which the boys must perform a wall-flip in order to prove they’re the assassins. In most comedies, the flip itself would be the joke. The joke here is Clarence’s face when he somehow nails it. It’s not about what happens, but how it happens.

So do you like Key and Peele’s TV show? If you do, you’ll like Keanu. It’s pretty rare for sketch performers to make the leap to the silver screen so well. Most comedians probably just see it as a promotion, but Key and Peele have been grooming themselves for film for years. Yeah, it’s absurd to believe a street gang could ever mistake these two for legendary assassin, but I’m willing to suspend my disbelief for gags as good as these.

The Nice Guys (2016)

Look, kids. This is what summer blockbusters used to look like. I like Captain America movies as much as the next guy, but this is the film I was most hyped to see this year. If you’re wondering how Shane Black’s latest buddy action film stacks up to his previous underrated classic, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, I’ll save you the suspense: it’s probably even better.

The Nice Guys was supposed to open later this year, but Warner Bros. moved it forward to give its original date to Central Intelligence, which appears to be another soulless comedy for Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart. Now The Nice Guys is opening against Neighbors 2 and The Angry Birds Movie, further proof that studio executives have no fucking clue what they’re doing. In promos, you can tell producer Joel Silver and the cast of the film are understandably bitter about the idiotic scheduling.

Ryan Gosling plays Holland March, a shitty private detective who has rare bouts of intuition. Like Saul Goodman, his client list consists of confused elderly people. Russell Crowe plays Jackson Healy, a guy who beats people up for money and he’s just been hired to kick Holland’s ass. Soon they’ll discover they have overlapping cases, at which point they team up and scour 1970s Los Angeles for leads. Holland’s impressionable young daughter, who’s at least a little smarter than her dad, tags along for the ride. She’s not incidental to the plot, either.

My favorite supporting characters are Keith David and Beau Knapp’s henchmen. These nuts would have stolen the show if not for the perfectly cast leads. David is just one of those guys I love seeing in movies and his presence here makes it all the more legitimate as a throwback film. Knapp, who I’m not entirely familiar with, plays a presumably coked-up idiot who has a hilariously evil laugh.

Gosling and Crowe make a brilliant team. I really miss the mid-budget action-comedy. This is exactly what going to the movie theater was like when I was kid.