Category: External Movie DVDs (Page 48 of 74)

Starship Troopers 3: Marauder

July 29, 2008 /

Whatever self-awareness the “Starship Troopers” franchise may have had about its neo-fascist nature is long gone in this latest installment, which is a shame because it certainly started off promisingly enough. Casper Van Dien is back as Col. Johnny Rico, who goes from villain to hero in time to save old friend Lola Beck (Jolene Blalock) from attack on a hostile bug planet. The artwork promotes the new weapons the Federation has to play with, but they don’t come into play until the final 15 minutes…and look just like Obadiah Stain’s suit from “Iron Man.” Not only that, the soldiers operating them have to be naked for them to work. Yep, that’s the plot piece they wrote into the story in order to get the girls’ tops off. (Strange, then, that Van Dien later steps out of his Marauder suit fully clothed.) They have some fun with the character of Sky Marshall Anoke – not only is he Sky Marshall, but he’s a million-selling pop star with songs like the recruitment anthem “A Good Day to Die” – and the Federation Updates are always amusing, but it seems completely lost on all concerned that they are asking the viewer to root for a “1984”-style government that sentences protestors to death and views religious faith as an act of rebellion in a godless society. Who funded this, Pat Robertson?

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The Last Winter

July 22, 2008 /

Much like M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Happening,” “The Last Winter” is an eco-thriller that tries so hard to deliver its Big Message that it forgets all about being scary. Set in Northern Alaska where oil pumps beneath the ground like blood in veins, the film stars Ron Perlman as Ed Pollack, the leader of a small team of oil scouts who have just discovered that not all is right with the frozen tundra. The group’s resident scientist (James Le Gros) warns Pollack that the permafrost is melting (thus making it impossible for the oil rigs to be delivered by truck), but before he can do anything about it, his fellow team members are slowly driven crazy and then killed by some unseen evil. Ridiculous on so many levels, “The Last Winter” is indeed terrifying, but not like you might think. The performances are wooden, while the long stretches of silence (supposedly meant to add to the suspense) just make it that much easier to fall asleep. Of course, when the audience is finally shown the evil that’s causing all of this, you simply won’t believe your eyes. I’m not one for spoilers, but the nature spirit that’s punishing these people for simply doing their jobs looks like Harry Potter’s Patronus. No joke. It’s literally a blue, CGI spirit in the shape of a moose, and while I applaud writer/director Larry Fesseden for attempting to comment on the world’s ecological troubles by way of a horror film, he’s better off just leaving that sort of stuff to people like Al Gore.

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Icons of Adventure

July 17, 2008 /

Starting in the late fifties and on through the seventies, England’s low budget Hammer film studios became known for a series of profitable reboots of classic gothic horror franchises, but the busy film studio actually produced all kinds of movies. This two-disc set gives us a mixed-bag of thrillers bringing the mean, lean, and graphic (by early sixties standards) Hammer touch to pulpy adventure yarns as well as featuring the considerable acting skills of go-to bad guy/monster man Christopher Lee as the chief villain of three of the four pictures.

The set gets off to an unfortunate start with “The Pirates of Blood River” — an insufferable bore thanks to some plodding pacing and an insipid performance by leading man Kerwin Matthews — Lee’s bad guy pirate, no Jack Sparrow, can only do so much. Fortunately, there’s more of Lee, actual ships, swordfights, and all-around piratical fun in “The Devil Ship Pirates.” The second disc brings us a pair of politically and ethnically suspect flicks set in English colonies. “The Terror of the Tongs” is a casting nightmare from the point of view of ethnic sensitivity, with innumerable Hong Kong Chinese characters played by English, French and, in one shocking instance, an actual Chinese actor. (Burt Kwouk – Kato from the original “Pink Panther” films — who, naturally, is killed five minutes into the movie). Still, it’s a surprisingly nasty and perversely entertaining film with some amazing low-budget production values and another strong bad guy performance from Christopher Lee (no relation to Bruce), speaking perfect English in a sort of practice run for his later performances as super-unPC villain Fu Manchu.

If “Terror” is the set’s Harold, “The Stranglers of Bombay” is it’s Anglocentric Kumar. It’s an fitfully entertaining, occasionally creepy tale of a stalwart British officer (Guy Rolfe) fighting Indian thuggees – those fanatical, kill-crazy bad guys who tried to overrun British India in “Gunga Din,” tried to off Harrison Ford and friends in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” and who, led by Leo “Rumpole of the Bailey” McKern (!), viciously tried to take Ringo’s famed ring finger, in “Help!”

With four commentaries – three of them featuring Hammer standby screenwriter Jimmy Sangster — this is a must for those obsessed with the famed studio’s history, but definitely optional for others. (Only one commentary, “Terror of the Tongs” is all that engaging, even by film geek standards.) Still, there are worse ways to while away a series of weekend afternoon. For all their flaws, these movies are far more noble time-wasters than most of today’s multiplex potboilers.

Click to buy “Icons of Adventure”

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Heroes of the East

July 16, 2008 /

Cursed with a misleading English title and a narrative flaw or two, this remarkably little known 1979 Hong Kong comic action fest is nevertheless an absolute must for serious martial arts fans and a treat for the rest of us. The young Gordon Liu (cruel tutor Pei-Mei from “Kill Bill: Volume 2”) stars as Ah To, a young man in an arranged marriage with the pretty Kung Zi (Yuzo Mizuno), recently returned from her native Japan. After some initial fretting, the two prove more than compatible. Actually, it turns out they may have a little too much in common — they are both martial arts experts and excessively proud proponents of their respective nation’s martial arts styles. Though frequently compared to “The Taming of the Shrew,” the first hour plays more like an early sixties sex comedy, only with comic physical jabs replacing the verbal sparring.

Early on, the action is nearly dominated by the spunky, hyper-talented Yuzo Mizuno — think a young Shirley MacLaine as a comically destructive martial arts virtuoso. Still, “Heroes” ultimately turns out to be Gordon Liu’s show, and quite a show it is as the reluctant Ah To must face a herd of angry Japanese martial artists who have come to defend their nation’s honor. Martial arts trained director Lau Kar-Leung’s good natured action rom-com – something of a (biased) plea for mutual respect between the Chinese and Japanese peoples – turns into a more traditional series of increasingly stunning action set pieces that concludes with a real bang as Ah To at last faces his romantic rival, a treacherous ninja (Kurata Yasuaki) who throws the ninjitsu book at our hero. It’s a stunning conclusion to a real whiz-bang of a late period Shaw Brothers martial arts extravaganza. Also, with relatively little in the way of anything like serious violence (for the most part the characters aren’t really trying to hurt each other) and only some very mild sexual innuendo, “Heroes of the East” is also appropriate for younger martial arts fans.

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Prairie Fever

July 10, 2008 /

Any movie that earnestly harks back to classic westerns and tries to strike a blow for human liberty at the same time can’t be all bad. Sadly, a single star is all I can justify for this direct-to-DVD oater. “Prairie Fever” brings us onetime TV Hercules Kevin Sorbo as Preston Biggs, a former small town sheriff turned town drunk. When several mail order brides start to exhibit signs of pretend-insanity – incessantly quoting Bible verses, miming playing the piano, and generally exhibiting signs of really bad acting – the woman are assumed to have fallen to a sort of female hysteria apparently brought on by living on a pretend-Western hamlet, i.e., “prairie fever.” The cure, such as it is, is to have Biggs take the women, and a tidy sum of money, to the nearest train station hundreds of miles away. Along the way, our not-so-anti-hero encounters the feisty and beautiful Abigail (Dominique Swain), who is on the run from an occasionally villainous gambler (Lance Henrickson). While this set-up initially appears lamely misogynist, rest assured that it is actually lamely feminist. These women are suffering from old West PTSD caused by frontier cruelty, but in true old school TV style, they will all fully recover within less than 81 minutes.

Written and directed by a triumvirate of TV veterans, “Prairie Fever” effectively evokes the bad television of yore. For all the attempts at characterization, it’s often possible to recite the dialogue in advance of the characters. Moreover, action sequences are badly muffed, though the three stars are, for the most part, able to keep their heads above water. The less said about the supporting cast, however, the better.

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