Until recently, I’d seen most of the Conan films. I’d rented Arnold’s first film on disc, and the same with the film with Jason Momoa taking the role. However, while I’d seen bits and pieces of Conan the Destroyer on cable, I’d never really seen the film. I figured now was as good a time as any to get to Arnold’s final outing as the sword-swinging Comparison.
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The Hong Kong movie industry of the 80s and 90s was one that was willing to create a bunch of action comedy horror films, with Sammo Hung serving as almost the martial arts film equivalent to Dan Ackroyd on Ghostbusters. I’ve covered one of the films of this era in the past with Mr. Vampire. Now it’s time for another, one starring Mr. Hung himself, with Close Encounters of the Spooky Kind.
Read moreThis week I’m taking a look at Ringo Lam’s undercover-cops-and-robbers crime thriller, City on Fire.
City on Fire is available from Amazon.com (Affiliate Link): https://amzn.to/4oGSqt2
‘Solecism’ by Scott Buckley – released under CC-BY 4.0. www.scottbuckley.com.au
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It’s been a while since I’ve discussed a Dario Argento film, so it’s time to get back to some Giallo with Tenebrae.
Kicking off my October Spooky Horror reviews with the underrated Cannon films horror-comedy House of the Long Shadows.
When it comes to the Procedural genre of film, generally these works tend to put their focus on law enforcement – cops and robbers, literally. However, the cops the generally don’t cover are ones who deel with what are considered more “boring” crimes – white collar financial crimes. Smuggling is sexy, robbers are sexy, gangsters are sexy. Tax fraud is still sexy… except people stealing from workers by not properly paying taxes, people stealing from the community by not paying taxes to pay for the services the government provides that they use are still robbers. So, it’s up to a more financial cop to catch them – one like the protagonist of A Taxing Woman.
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A while back I watched and enjoyed William Friedkin’s The French Connection, and had seen, of his subsequent films, To Live & Die in LA come up a lot as other films I should watch, first just as Friedkin film in general, then in terms of crime films of the ’80s, and in terms of great films with Willam Defoe, then in terms of great movies with pop bands doing the score. So, eventually I decided that it was time to take this film off my watchlist, and onto my watched list.
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In 1983, when House of the Long Shadows came out, it was heavily panned by critics of the time as being derivative of the old film “Seven Keys to Broadpate”, that the ending undermined the story, and it didn’t have much for scares. I would argue that the critics of the time were simply not picking up what this movie is putting down.
There will be spoilers below the cut.
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Now that I’m caught up with the most recent anime reviews, it’s time to get back to the horror with some Dario Argento, and him returning to a more… conventional Giallo with Tenebrae. There will be some spoilers for a 20+ year old movie
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And now we move fully into the horror films with an ‘80s supernatural horror slasher film – Slaughterhouse Rock, with a bunch of college students being terrorized by a supernatural terror. Also, it’s scored by Mark Mothersbaugh and Devo, so it’s gotta be good – right? Right?
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I’m not a fan of Auteur Theory. Movies, television, and video games have so many people involved in the process of creating them that putting all the weight of a work’s success on a single person weakens the contributions of everyone else in the project. That said, a good director can make a world of difference on a film, not because of their sole artistic vision, but because of the other contributors who they can ask to take part in the project because of their own past experience. Such is the case with In The Line of Duty 4, which has Yuen Woo-Ping in the director’s chair, which in turn makes a world of difference.
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The In The Line Of Duty series of films is kind of odd as far as film series go. It’s not like the Zombi or the Italian House series – where you had a bunch of directors taking a bunch of desperate films with common elements (zombies or horror films regarding a house respectively), and sticking the label of an existing series of films on them, making for a bunch of films based around a thematic link instead of a narrative link. The first two films in the series – Yes, Madam and Royal Warriors had a thematic link (women police investigators), and a cast link (Michelle Yeoh), but no character linkage, and otherwise did not share a common brand. However, over the course of re-releases and alternative titles, both of those films were re-branded as being the first part of a series of films known as “In The Line of Duty” – with In The Line of Duty 3, from 1988, being technically the third part of that series, but the first to codify the “brand”.
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River of Death is a movie Cannon films picked up in the very late ‘80s, when they were kind of on their last legs, and trying to get by through doing the things that made them successful – capitalizing on other studios successes with low budget films (or optioning films at low cost) that had a similar vibe to them as other successes. In this case, going off of the success of Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade, by optioning a movie that was already under production that had a similar adventure theme. Instead of returning to the Allan Quatermain well that they’d visited twice before, this time they went with a jungle adventure film based on a novel by Alastair MacLean, the author of Guns of Navarone.
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A week or so ago I ended up watching an Australian kid’s adventure film called Frog Dreaming (also released in the US as “The Quest”) with some friends – it’s a Kids On Bikes film that’s flawed, but not necessarily in the ways that some of the less prominent films in the genre are.
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It’s been a while since I reviewed Royal Warriors, the second installment in the retroactive “In The Line Of Duty” series of films – so now it’s time for me to take a look at the first film, and the starring debut of Michelle Yeoh and Cynthia Rothrock, 1985’s Yes, Madam.
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When re-watching a beloved childhood film as an adult, there is a worry that the film won’t stand up. That characters you loved will actually be grating, a story you thought was deep was paper-thin, dialog you thought was clever was trite. What you saw as a lake turns out with time to have only been a puddle. I will say upfront, before getting into the meat of the review, The Princess Bride does not have this problem.
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Saturn 3 feels like a film coming off of the environmental dystopia films of the 1970s – like Silent Running – combined with a bit of horror. However, having a cast smaller than that of Alien – just 3 actors – ultimately ends up working against the film.
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This week I’m taking a look at a cyberpunk tokusatsu film from the ’90s.
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Gunhed is a film that I remember seeing often on TV schedules for the SCI-Fi channel back in the day, but never got around to watching in its entirety. I was impressed by the film’s effects work, but I was never really able to watch enough of the film to really get the plot. At long last, though, I’ve finally gotten around to watching the movie in is entirety.
Read moreThis time I’m reviewing a Golden Harvest film featuring Jiangshi.
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Anime, often, cribs from works of western science fiction – particularly films. Star Wars, Star Trek, the Starship Troopers novel, and Lensmen have all been borrowed from or in some cases adapted outright. However, there are some instances where the level of cribbing doesn’t quite pan out, and Odin: Starlight Mutiny is one of those.
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The last Lucio Fulci film I watched was The Black Cat, and while it was a pretty decent horror film, I will say it didn’t quite get into Fulci’s reputation as an extreme gorehound. The Beyond, part of his “Gates of Hell trilogy” and one of the films to make the Video Nasties, on the other hand, definitely fits that criteria.
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