Hard Target was John Woo’s first big film in the United States and Hollywood, and it paired him with one of the top action stars of the early ’90s – Jean-Claude Van Damme, a star who was very much not known for his gunplay, and was much more known for his martial arts. It’s generally been held up as a rough start to Woo’s Hollywood run, but that said, I think it’s still an okay fun little action movie, even if it doesn’t reach up to the heights of his earlier Hong Kong career.
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Film Review: Twin Peaks – Fire Walk With Me (+ The Missing Pieces)
When Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me came out, it was critically panned. Not unsurprising when a critical darling, an auteur who had been nominated for an Academy Award would dare to make his next film after daring to work in *shudder* television decides to make a movie that is tied in with that TV series. It lost money, it was roasted by critics and by David Lynch’s peers, burning him out on the Twin Peaks franchise entirely.
The sentiment of that critical establishment is not one I share – I’m a Trekker. I grew up watching the original series films, along with the movies for Next Generation – and appreciate the depths of both the series and the films, along with some of the ancillary works. Consequently, I would not dismiss a film tie-in to a TV series – so I came into Fire Walk With Me, and the edited-together Deleted Scenes of The Missing Pieces with an open mind, and was not disappointed.
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Movie Review: Mission Impossible (1996)
When I first watched Mission: Impossible, and Tom Cruise’s first outing as Ethan Hunt – I was much younger – still in High School, with a degree of familiarity with the TV series from watching reruns on TV on Saturday mornings, or on cable on TV Land, and with a limited degree of familiarity with the spy or the suspense genre as a whole. So, I don’t think it worked for me the way that Brian De Palma intended. However, the passage of time has lead me to have more experience with thrillers, the spy genre in its multiple flavors, and some of De Palma’s other work (such as The Untouchables), which has lead me to a place where I think I’m able to re-appraise this film on its own terms – and I think it fares much better in this re-appraisal.
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Film Review: Silence of the Lambs
Very few horror films, and I’d consider Silence of the Lambs in that category (in spite of the book it was based on being credited as having killed the horror genre of novels), have won Academy Awards for Best Picture, never mind the level of sweep that Silence of the Lambs took. So, when I was going for a horror film for Halloween, I decided that Silence of the Lambs was the one to go with, as the last time I’d watched it was on a fairly small TV, and on DVD. Since then it’s gotten a 4K release (which is what I watched), and I have a larger TV to watch it on (and also better speakers), so I felt this was a good time to give it a real re-appraisal.
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Film Review: The Replacement Killers
When Chow Yun-Fat came to the US, he brought a reputation from various Heroic Bloodshed epics, from John Woo and Ringo Lam – a reputation as an action star with a strong acting range. So, it’s unsurprising that his early roles would fall into that same category, with The Replacement Killers doing a film in that style, but with some admittedly more Hollywood sensibilities.
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Cast a Deadly Spell: Film Review
Cast a Deadly Spell is interesting as a historical artifact. While the film wears the trappings of the Cthulhu mythos, with the Necronomicon being the focus of the plot, and the protagonist bearing the name of H. P. Lovecraft (though with a different first name than the spectacularly racist author), it has almost more in common with the Hardboiled Detective variety of Urban Fantasy that we now associate with books like the Harry Dresden series. It’s not by any stretch the first urban fantasy work – Mike Resnick’s John Justin Mallory novels and War for the Oaks pre-dates it, with Resnick’s series also being hard-boiled detective fiction. But by being a movie made for HBO, it provided the genre a level of visibility that it had never before seen. But is it good?
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Johnny Mnemonic: Film Review
Johnny Mnemonic is a very flawed film. It’s not a garbage film that other aspiring cyberpunk movies from this time can be, but it is a movie that significantly stumbles in its execution. That said, there are chunks of this movie that help make it still a pretty enjoyable film.
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Body Bags: Film Review
One of the genres where horror thrives is the Anthology film, and by “thrives” I mean that pretty much the only anthology films being made these days are horror films. Often, they take the framing narrative from EC Comics and it’s like – horror stories book-ended with a narrative by a ghoulish presenter of some form or another – you know, the classic Tales From the Crypt formula. Well, when HBO launched their Tales From The Crypt anthology TV series and films, Showtime filmed a pilot for their own, to be titled Body Bags. They didn’t decide to go forward, but did take the three filmed stories and turned them into their own anthology film.
Continue readingThis week I have another martial arts film review, as I’m taking a look at Golden Harvest’s Feng Shui fueled adventure film, “Bury Me High”
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Bury Me High: Film Review
I love martial arts films – particularly those from South East Asia (starting with Hong Kong but expanding over time to Thailand, Korea, and Malaysia), thanks to role-playing games – with two, in particular, starting me down this path.
The first was Dragon Fist by Chris Pramas, which seeded my love for wuxia. The other was Feng Shui, which expanded my love to the entire Ur-genre. However, when trying to sell people on Feng Shui, I had to downplay why the game had that title – the concept of a variety of factions from through history, past and future, doing battle over “Feng Shui Sites” – places of great magical power where those who hold them can shape the flow of destiny. If I had seen Bury Me High, I would have had a lot more confidence and just told people to watch this instead.
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Movie Review: The Mask of Zorro (1998)
I love the swashbuckler film genre and have ever since I saw The Princess Bride and several of the Zorro films as a kid. Consequently, I’m somewhat surprised that I never got around to seeing Mask of Zorro until just now. Continue reading
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Film Review: Point Break
Cops & Robbers movies have been a part of cinema for as long as there has been cinema, though prior to the 1990s, the general tack was to either have the robbers be the good guys (going back to various western films), or to have the cops be the good guys, but with a few exceptions generally not really both. Continue reading
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