"K" is for King Boxer

 As I am led to understand, King Boxer set off the "kung fu" craze in the U.S. when the dubbed version (Five Fingers of Death) made a splash on this side of the Pacific. I hadn't seen Five Fingers of Death, but it seemed like the dubbing didn't help the experience of Django, so it made more sense to watch this landmark chop sockey film in its native language.

 Other than 1978's The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, King Boxer seems to be held in the highest esteem for Shaw Brothers Kung Fu movies, and I can understand why. I suspect that the dubbed version would make it even more enjoyable for Western audiences, but the film is no slouch in Mandarin. For such a simple story (a tournament of fighters that will determine which discipline controls the provinces), King Boxer packs in a number of subplots, introduces new characters nearly every ten minutes, and has crisply shot, kinetic fight scenes. And then there's the gore - it doesn't start until nearly an hour in, but when Chang-hwa Jeong (Six Assassins) commits to eye gouging and decapitation, he goes all out.


Chao Chi-Hao (Lieh Lo) is a student under the tutelage of Master Sung (Wen Chung Ku) and is in love with Sung's daughter Ying Ying (Ping Wang). When bandits attack Sung, he decides it would be better for Chi-Hao to study under Master Sun*(Mien Fang), where Chao's brother Ta-Ming (Bong-Jin Jin) has been training. He sends Chi-Hao out, not knowing that the bandits are servants of Meng Tung-Shun (Feng Tien), who wants to eliminate the other disciplines in order to win the tournament and control the provinces.

 Meng Tung-Shun is, to outward appearances, an honorable man, and in public he stops his son (Shen Chan) from making him look bad. But behind closed doors, he's scheming to destroy Sun and Sung, along with their best pupils. He also collects master-less warriors, including Chen Lang (Chi Chu Chin), a fighter who uses his mighty forehead in combat. Later he attains the assistance of Okuda (Hsiung Chao) a brutal Karate expert from Japan who travels with two swordsmen. They do his dirty work, until Chi-Hao intervenes.

 When Chi-Hao proves himself to be worthy of training, Master Sun teaches him the "Iron Palm," a deadly skill that requires harsh training, all the more so after Meng Tung-Shun's henchmen destroy Chi-Hao's hands (in a very similar way to Django). Not to spoil too much, but let's just say he makes an unexpected full recovery in time for the tournament.

 In order not to bog down the review with names, I'm leaving out several important characters, including a love triangle involving a singer and one of Sun's other pupils - who betrays Chi-Hao out of jealousy - but there's a lot going on in King Boxer between all of the great fight scenes. The lulls between action never feel boring because there's so much going on, so many characters with differing agendas, and allegiances being swapped regularly. It's not the most streamlined movie, but King Boxer is never difficult to follow aside from keeping track of who's who (by name anyway, physically they're pretty distinctive characters).

 I had heard King Boxer was pretty violent, but early on it seemed like that was exaggerating things a bit. Not so later in the film, when blood starts pouring and savage wounds are opened as a result of fights getting serious. Once Okuda shows up, the film takes a decidedly darker turn and as the tournament approaches, King Boxer becomes more of a revenge film than you'd believe early on. Not that I'm complaining, because it elevates the film from "pretty damn good" to "holy crap" in short order.

 Finally, it's worth noting that King Boxer uses the theme from Ironside, and whether you know the show or not, you'll recognize the theme - Quentin Tarantino also used it for Kill Bill, and he appears on the commentary track for this film, which was a nice surprise. I think it's the second commentary from Tarantino I've heard for a movie he wasn't involved with (the other is Hot Fuzz). I will admit it's hard to remove the baggage of Kill Bill when I heard it in the film (and it plays quite a bit in a similar fashion) but that didn't detract from the experience. Call it King Boxer, call it Five Fingers of Death, whatever works for you, but settle down and enjoy some Shaw Brothers at their finest.



 * IMDB says "Sun" but the DVD I watched had subtitles that said Suen.

"J" is for Journey Back to Oz

Editor's Note: If you somehow came across this review looking for something to show your children, I strongly advise you go elsewhere. This review is not safe for work, for home with families, or for most other purposes. Kind of like the terrible movie it's about.

 I would expect that many of you were thinking that this was the Cap'n misremembering the title Return to Oz, and that you might get a review of that nightmarish sequel. And trust me, I wish it had been to, but instead I'm stuck talking about this piece of shit.

 Unbearable isn't a term I throw around a lot when I talk about terrible movies. I just won't finish them if they're that bad, and it's not a long list of movies I haven't completed. Boy, I really struggled to get through 85 turgid minutes of this stinker, this colossal waste of space. If you're looking for a movie that gives the moniker The ABCs of Movie Masochism its due, Journey Back to Oz is it.

 There's nothing about this cheap tie-in to The Wizard of Oz worth recommending: the animation is cheap, the songs are god awful, the story is inane. Halfway through I was yelling at my TV, begging the characters to just shut up and get it over with, but no, there were more instantly forgettable tunes and cheap stunt casting designed purely to make me want to gouge my eyes out.

 Honestly, I'm amazed that this played in theatres, because the cast is a "who's who" of TV Variety show regulars: Paul Lynde plays Pumpkinhead, Danny Thomas plays The Tin Man, Milton Berle is the Cowardly Lion, Paul Ford is Uncle Henry, Herschel Bernaridi is Woodenhead Stallion III, Jack E. Leonard the Signpost, Mickey Rooney is the Scarecrow and lest I forget, Ethel Merman as Mombi, the new evil witch that's angry Dorothy killed her "cousin" from the West.

 After Dorothy and Toto are swept back to Oz in a cyclone, they go to meet the Scarecrow - now King of Oz - only to discover that Mombi is planning on attacking The Emerald City with her magical green elephants, which she then does, immediately after they arrive. Mombi takes Toto and the Scarecrow hostage and Dorothy tries to recruit help from the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion, but instead they're to chickenshit and sing stupid songs and have dream sequences about being assaulted by magical green elephants. Dorothy eventually kind of gets help from Glinda the Good Witch (Rise Stevens), but more or less because she's give a box full of magic mice.

 I cannot stress how boring this movie is, how insipid and taxing on the patience of audiences, and how insulting it is to be a fan of The Wizard of Oz and know that THIS was how Filmation chose to honor the film's 35th Anniversary. It looks like a cheap, made for TV movie, and when it did play on TV they had the good decency to film live action segments with Bill Cosby as the Wizard.

 There are two bits of inspired casting in Journey Back to Oz: the first is Margaret Hamilton (The Wicked Witch of the West) providing a cameo as Aunt Em at the beginning. It's a nice touch and is a better way to honor her involvement than when she played the Wicked Witch again two years later in The Paul Lynde Halloween Special. The second, and arguably best, casting decision made was to bring in Liza Minelli to play Dorothy. When she's speaking, she does a spot-on impersonation of her mother in The Wizard of Oz. Their singing voices are different, so that's a dead give-away, but then again if you subject yourself to Journey Back to Oz, the fast forward button is going to be your new friend when someone starts singing.

 Out of courtesy, I'll also mention Mel Blanc, the voice of Mombi's crow, because he didn't make it into the main credits with the likes of Paul E. Leonard and Herschel Bernardi. It's not hard to pick out the voice of Bugs Bunny in a movie with otherwise unremarkable voice talent (seriously, how hard did they have to work to make Paul Lynde barely sound like Paul Lynde?).

 Under no circumstances would I ever recommend this to anyone, even if you wanted to punish your children for doing something terrible, horrible, no good, or very bad. This is too cruel even for them. It made me want to curse in a review, which over the years I've made a conscious effort to scale back. But for Pete's sake does this movie suck! Ah well, to paraphrase Radiohead: I do it to myself, and that's what really hurts...

"I" is for I Come in Peace

 Most people (the Cap'n included) mostly remember I Come in Peace from the trailer, which was seemingly attached to every movie and videotape I ever watched from 1990-1993.  When I mentioned it to friends who were coming over to watch it, almost all of them responded to the title by saying "you go in pieces." One of them hadn't even seen the movie, but that's how ubiquitous the trailer is in the 90s action zeitgeist. I'm pretty sure I had seen I Come in Peace at some point during high school, but I didn't remember much of it, and certainly not as well as I did Universal Soldier, the movie Dolph Lundgren made two years later*.

 In the rest of the world the movie is called Dark Angel, but I've only ever known it as I Come in Peace which is a much better title, if you ask me. Since I'm writing this we can safely assume you're not going to get a dissenting opinion in the body of the review, so I Come in Peace it is.

 For reasons that aren't very clear, I Come in Peace is set during Christmas, which gives me one more movie to show during DecemberFest. There's some rich jerk driving around with a cd player in his car (that's how you know he's rich, because this is 1989-1990 depending on when they filmed it) but some disturbance causes him to crash at a Christmas tree dealership. Fortunately for the guy, the disturbance is not Detective Riggs; unfortunately for him it is Matthias Hues (Talons of the Eagle), a giant blonde alien with glaucoma who can only say 'I Come in Peace," which he demonstrates by killing the dude with a wrist gun that shoots killer cds.

 Meanwhile, some crooks have infiltrated the police station and are stealing heroin from the evidence locker, but since they kill a cop played by the poor man's Steve Guttenberg and steal his name tag, it raises suspicions. The good news for them is at one of them is crazy enough to leave a bag explosives so powerful that it presumably kills everybody in the precinct station. They take the heroin and head off to the rendezvous point, a club called Jockos.

Meanwhile meanwhile,  Dolph Lundgren plays Detective Jack Caine, who is doing some surveillance outside of Jockos for the Houston police department when his partner is killed during a sting operation. He probably could have helped him, but Caine had to get out of his car to thwart a robbery across the street at a convenience store. Therefore his partner is murdered and then most of the bad guys are killed. It would be safe to guess that his superiors wouldn't be happy about this - they aren't - but I had also foolishly assumed his superiors were killed with every other cop in the station when the bomb went off. For some reason that never comes up during the investigation or during the film at all.

 Well, the other thing that Caine missed was that the bad guys are massacred by our boy Matthias (IMDB has his character name listed as "Talec" but I never heard that) and his flying cd weapon, but only so he could steal their heroin. In what sounds like the least cost-efficient plan I can think of, Matthias came all the way to Earth to pump people full of heroin, thus boosting their endorphins so that he could extract it for an alien drug. It takes him two briefcases full of heroin to collect five vials of endorphins, so I'm really not sure he's the brightest drug dealer in the universe. Also he's being chased by Jay Bilas (Sportscenter) who is a bounty hunter / space cop or something. He shaves a bald sport into his forehead so he kind of looks like he has a skullet, which doesn't help him blend in with normal Earthlings.

 Both aliens have a gun that causes things to explode (in any of their five available settings), which you think would draw attention, but in Houston nobody looks twice when you pull out a gun in a strip club or walk out of your apartment complex holding a shotgun. That, and literally everything explodes in this movie when it's shot, no matter what gun you're using.

 Lundgren must have been working really hard with a diction coach for I Come in Peace, because this is the most lucid I've ever heard his speaking voice in any Dolph movie I can think of. It's not that it's normally hard to understand him, but for some reason in this movie it's very easy to make out exactly what he's saying and his drawl seems to be at a minimum. Still, he's not dubbed - it's definitely Dolph talking - but I was taken aback a bit.

 I really like that none of the characters know this is a movie about aliens until halfway in. The audience knows, because director Craig R. Baxley (Stone Cold) keeps cutting away to Matthias so we can see how he extracts the drug (it involves injection tubes) from random victims, but neither the good guys nor the bad guys have any idea they aren't in a procedural crime movie. Det. Caine gets the third degree from his Sergeant and the FBI show up and force him to work with Special Agent Larry Smith (Dream On's Brian Benben) in tracking down the killer, and while they do find one of the spinning discs of death, nobody assumes "alien drug dealer" as primary suspect.

 So they make the rounds and talk to informants and sleazeballs like this guy Boner (character actor du jour Michael J. Pollard) and the crime lord who set up Caine's partner (played by the poor man's Robert Townsend) which leads them to a secondary drug deal with the henchman from Die Hard (Al Leong) and finally Caine meets the aliens. Suddenly he realizes what kind of movie he's in, which is good because while the cop movie we've been watching was also pretty good, it's WAY better when there's an alien drug dealer running around stabbing people and stealing brain chemicals.

 You may have noticed that I used the phrase "the poor man's" a bit in this review, and that's because I Come in Peace has two things that are almost as important as the main plot. One of them is the fact that this movie is littered with "that guy"s or actors who look like the more affordable version of other actors. There's a guy who looks like the weasel-y dude from Commando who Arnold promises to kill last (he lied) but is definitely not David Patrick Kelly. There's a cop who looks like he could have been Jonah Hill's dad, a guy who kind of looks like Carl Weathers, an so on. It becomes a fun game you can play while watching the movie, and between periods of "that guy!" you get to play the other game: spot the extra.

 I seriously want to give kudos to the person (or people) in charge of background casting for I Come in Peace, because they selected some of the finest extras you could hope for in a movie. Whether it's top notch moustaches, eye-catching costumes, or people finding absurd "business" to do on camera, I Come in Peace has a great selection of "what is that person doing?" going on in nearly every scene. There's even a misdirect outside of the other, non-destroyed police station where you think an extra dressed as a cop is waving to the camera, only to pan over and see he's just waving to a cop walking up to him.

 Now you may think that the fact I was fixated on background actors in some way means I didn't like I Come in Peace's main story, but that's where you are mistaken. For a movie that's roughly the poor man's Predator 2, I Come in Peace is a lot of fun with just the right balance of action movie cheese. I still don't get why you'd call this movie Dark Angel when I Come in Peace is a much more appropriate title (who would the "Dark Angel" be, anyway?) but that's a minor quibble. If the damn thing weren't so hard to find in the U.S., I'd recommend you all go watch it. Because you'll have a rollicking good time no matter where you focus your attention.




* If you were curious, he made The Punisher immediately before I Come in Peace, and there's a good reason I don't remember that one as well.

"H" is for His Girl Friday

 When I was putting together the list that ended up being The ABCs of Movie Masochism, the film I was most looking forward to watching was Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday. I've never actually seen it before, which is probably inexcusable to most of you. It is to me too: while it may surprise all that don't know the Cap'n very well, I have a soft spot for screwball comedies. They're the only types of romantic comedies I consistently enjoy, I'm guessing because I was exposed to Bringing Up Baby and The Philadelphia story at a young age. I'll rarely pass up a Cary Grant film if I see one on or if the opportunity rises (I've seen Arsenic and Old Lace more times than I can remember), so it's weird that one of the best regarded Grant movies went unseen for so long.

 Thankfully, I rectified that tonight, and I'll tell you, it was time well spent. It's arguably more complicated than just about any screwball comedy I can think of - for a long stretch of the film, you actually forget what Walter Burns (Grant) is really scheming. On the other hand, the Hawks-ian overlapping dialogue is utilized to maximum effect, the jokes come fast and furious, and I found myself caught off guard more than a few times.

 Based on the play "The Front Page," His Girl Friday is the story of Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell), a newspaper reporter who works for her ex-husband, Walter Burns, or did anyway. Hildy's come to the offices of The Morning Post to inform Walter that she's not coming back to the paper in the wake of their divorce, but is instead marrying Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy) the next day in Albany, New York. Walter can tell that Bruce is a wet blanket right away and starts scheming ways to win Hildy back. Luckily for him, a major criminal case involving dubious political figures and a hanging are making major news - just the kind she can't resist...

 It's actually the Earl Williams (John Qualen) murder / impending execution subplot that ends up dominating most of His Girl Friday, to the point that Walter's various tricks to keep Hildy and Bruce apart move into the background. Russell and Grant aren't on screen together for most of the film, and it's not until they're both in the same room together that we remember what the whole story is about. Instead, there's a lot of clever business involving why Williams execution has to happen when it does, what political favors the Sheriff (Gene Lockhart) and Mayor (Clarence Kolb) expect as a result. Hildy spends most of the movie in the press room of the courthouse with other reporters. They play poker, torment Molly Malloy (Helen Mack), the "girlfriend" of laid off factory worker turned cop killer Williams, and jockey for position as the story develops.

 Bruce is often on the outside looking in, due in no small part to Walter using every trick in the book to keep him away from the courthouse, and preferably incarcerated. Let's just say that as a newspaper editor, Burns keeps some dubious company and isn't above breaking the law repeatedly. Then again, neither is Hildy, which is why she can see right through the plans when Bruce and his mother (Alma Kruger) keep winding up in trouble.

 For such a wild story, His Girl Friday takes some dark turns. Not only is the political corruption tied to race baiting and cop killing, but before the film is out there's an attempted suicide (used to distract characters) and an implied death that sours the mood at a critical point. All while a killer is being hidden in a desk, and not because he didn't kill anybody, but because he's being used as a negotiating point between the press and officials. This is without considering a few casual jokes about Hitler made at a time before most people knew what he was really doing.

 Still, the use of over-lapping dialogue, something relatively novel for 1940, keeps the pace snappy and provides for plenty of good one liners to sneak in before you've had time to process them. The subplot is interesting and twisty enough that I didn't mind the romance taking a backseat at all - His Girl Friday sets up one kind of story and then nudges it aside in order to tell a more interesting, albeit tangential one. That our leads end up together (and poor Bruce ends up, in all likelihood, still in jail) is icing on the cake.

 There are two moments where His Girl Friday "winks" at the audience, although one was more clear than the other in 1940. The more obscure of the two is when Burns suggests that the last person to say "that to me was Archie Leach" - Grant's real name. The earlier joke, the one that almost didn't make the movie, is when Burns is trying to describe Bruce to an associate, and in order to convey his blandness, he says "you know, like Ralph Bellamy." It caught me completely unawares, but by all accounts it's the biggest laugh in the film.

 If you, like the Cap'n, had been meaning to see His Girl Friday and hadn't, give yourself a treat and make some time to watch it soon. It may be nearly 75 years old, but it never feels it. The execution is as fresh today as it was in 1940, and for a movie to last that long, something very right is going on.

"G" is for A Good Day to Die Hard

 Somewhere in the bowels of 20th Century Fox, the dank recesses where mid-level executives and producers are relegated, a day came along like any other. But this day would be different, as it would be a good day. Wallowing in its own filth, one enterprising young junior executive wondered aloud "why not make another Die Hard film?" and instead of climb across the table and gouge his eyes out with a pen (the customary Hollywood form of saying "why would we do a stupid thing like that?"), the other mouth breathing trolls agreed. It had been a long time since Live Free or Die Hard for, after all, six years in Hollywood time is an eternity (nearly half the requisite period to wait to remake a Spider-Man film), so they scrawled out their horrible idea with fecal matter and shuttled it up to the dungeon where regular producers dwell.

 Preparations were made: a dump truck was loaded with money and driven to Bruce Willis' mansion, on the off chance the the one-two punch of Moonrise Kingdom and Looper had fooled him into thinking he was "above" slumming around as John McClane, but they needn't have worried. Of course he'll say yes, on the provision he's allowed to appear as disinterested as possible in the film. But they needed a screenplay, and more importantly they needed a director with no vision of his own, so there was no chance of straying from focus group tested notes about what a Die Hard audience would like*.

 Fortunately, the writer of X-Men Origins: Wolverine literally had nothing better to do. Better still, the director of Max Payne, The Omen remake, Behind Enemy Lines, and Flight of the Phoenix the remake (what do they all have in common other than being unremarkable at best? They were all made at 20th Century Fox!) was schedule to be released back into the wild, having fulfilled his period of indentured servitude to the studio, but someone has slashed the tires to his 1983 Gremlin**. He would need money to pay for new tires, and Die Hard movies always make money!

But where to set this latest Die Hard, and what to call it? Well, one of the unpaid interns had a mock-up poster with the tagline "Yipee-ki-yay, Mother Russia" that was originally designed to mock Live Free or Die Hard's PG-13 rating, so let's demote him to janitor and set the movie in Moscow! And Chernobyl, because as far as audiences are concerned, it's all the same place.

 They could bring back Mary Elizabeth Winstead to play Lucy McClane, but in the interest of not paying much for another returning cast member (except for a contractually mandated "one scene on camera and one scene in voice-over / phone call"), let's just hire some interchangeable twenty-something guy, slap an American accent on him, and hope that audiences remember McClane has a son, too (it's in the picture in Die Hard! It counts! Continuity!).

 And so we have John McClane and John McClane, Jr. - one is still a cop and the other has been a CIA operative since some time between Die Hard with a Vengeance and Live Free or Die Hard - and because they are also estranged, somehow nobody doing Jr.'s background check ever contacted the supercop who killed both Gruber brothers, Colonel Stuart, General Ramon Esperanza***, and cyber terrorist Thomas Gabriel. Never even called to check that reference. Never occurred to them.

 Anyway. since all that matters are the "'splosions," McClane has to go to Moscow because his son has been arrested. How can he help? Why was his son in Moscow? Why does McClane keep saying "I'm on vacation!" when that's not why he's there at all? What does the bad guy want? Which one is the bad guy? Who cares? It's a DIE HARD movie, assholes! It's rated R this time!!!

 I could complain about the incomprehensible editing in the car chase at the beginning or the myriad lapses in logic in the plot, but it's beside the point. 20th Century Fox as a corporate entity and the gaggle of suits and money men behind the decision to make a fifth Die Hard film didn't care about the plot of the movie. They didn't even care that it was a movie, because to them A Good Day to Die Hard is a product, a calculated effort designed to maximize grosses in theaters and home video.

 There's a trickle down effect to this lack of giving a shit, because when the powers that be clearly don't care what the movie is so much as it's done under budget and in time for release and the star of the film mumbles his way through the script with the bare minimum required of his presence, then the rest of the crew starts messing around. Foley artists are emboldened to use comical punching sound effects that would be right at home in a cartoon. The props department selects a comically oversized machine gun for Bruce Willis to pick up off of the floor of a CIA "safe house". The result of their collective disinterest makes A Good Day to Die Hard not only seem lazy, but comically inept to boot.

 Somewhere along the line, I suspect at least one of the basement dwelling junior executives (who will remain as such until he slays and consumes a middle executive) thought it would be a good idea to fool audiences into thinking that Live Free or Die Hard wasn't as bad as they remembered it being, and that was partially in mind while "making" A Good Day to Die Hard. That John McClane ceased to be the everyman from the first two films and somehow swapped places with Willis' superhero from Unbreakable was irrelevant to the crew and the star.

 But, as we all know, 20th Century Fox didn't need divining warlocks or the deal that fell apart at the last second - one that would turn every screening of the film into something resembling the movie Demons - to ensure the success of a film scraping double digits in critical reviews. Nope, bad word of mouth still brought in audiences for the opening weekend, and eventually it'll recoup its budget and make way for Die Hard 6. It's what the masses want, even if they don't think they do. They recognize the name, and until Willis no longer has the clout to prevent an inevitable remake, Fox will keep up with the law of diminishing returns. I'm sure that Bonnie Bedelia is at home right now, unplugging her phone in anticipation of the McClane "reunion" that nobody's asking for. I mean, it's not like Samuel L. Jackson, Reginald VelJohnson, or the guy who played Argyle are going to turn it down...

 It's hard NOT to be cynical about this, because when something this patently manufactured just to get asses in seats (not to enjoy the film, but just to show up) does, in fact, succeed, then why bother trying to make a good Die Hard movie? Cash in on the name, make the last one look better by comparison, and release a reasonably priced box set later in the year with all five movies, knowing full and well that people will pay for two movies they'll never watch again. You don't even need to be a troll living in the bowels of 20th Century Fox to know that'll work.

 * The focus group indicated that they would like a movie that wasn't anything like Die Hard, but if it had they same name they wouldn't forget what they were going to see, so this would be fine.
** I know what you're thinking, but it turned out this was simply a fortuitous coincidence for all involved parties.
*** Played by Django's Franco Nero - see what I did there? Tenuous connection!

"F" is for Five Minutes to Live

 In some ways, Five Minutes to Live is a distant cousin of a Samuel Fuller movie, specificallly The Naked Kiss. It has that sleazy underbelly of suburbia that David Lynch (arguably) mastered with Blue Velvet, but with the stark black and white aesthetic of early Fuller. I wish I could say that Five Minutes to Live was as good as either of those films, but it has some tasty morsels for fans of quasi-arcane film trivia.

 For example, Five Minutes to Live (also known as The Door to Door Maniac, which makes a lot less sense given the plot) stars Johnny Cash, who also wrote the title song for the movie. It would surprise me to hear that anybody but the most die hard of Johnny Cash fans had ever heard of the movie, let alone the song.:



 To be fair, it's not the most memorable Johnny Cash song you're ever going to hear, but then again his performance isn't that swell, either. Don't get me wrong; Cash shows a lot of enthusiasm as Johnny Cabot, a big city criminal cooling his heels in Camellia Gardens, New Jersey, but his line delivery is a little stilted. He looks more comfortable when he's sitting in his hotel room plucking away at a guitar while his girl (Midge Ware) complains about being stuck in the suburbs.

 Then again, when he finds out that she isn't who she says she is, Cabot (SPOILER) guns her down in cold blood. While his delivery isn't great, Cash does sell the career professional who knows when to be careful and when to be ruthless. It's just when he needs to vocally express it that we run into trouble, but the Man in Black's charisma sneaks out when he's being stoic or casing out a joint.

 Cabot ended up at the wrong job at the wrong time and shot his way out of a police ambush, which is what got him dumped off in Camellia Gardens, a seemingly idyllic small town where the Vice President of the Bank is married to the "Homemaker of the Year." That's where crook Fred Dorella (Vic Tayback) gets the idea to rob an otherwise impregnable bank: he'll handle the husband while Cabot threatens the wife. To ensure everything goes smoothly, they'll call every five minutes or she gets it - hence the title.

 The catch, it turns out, is that it's anything but paradise inside the home of Ken and Nancy Wilson (Donald Woods and Cay Forester) - he's browbeaten about the added stresses being put on him by her job (and the meddlesome town council that put them both where they are) and it frequently boils over behind closed doors. Neither of them have time for their son Bobby (Little Ronnie Howard - oh, did I forget to mention that Ron Howard is in this movie?).

 Here's another point where Five Minutes to Live was a little tricky to get a handle on: while Fred and Johnny are casing the Wilson house, the movie frequently cuts in to their domestic life / morning routine, and it's hard to tell if director Bill Karn (Guns Don't Argue) is going for darkly melodramatic or wryly cynical. It seems like Bobby's observations about his parents and much of their banter is meant to be funny, but the delivery is so earnest that it's more uncomfortable than amusing. Meanwhile, the crooks are sitting outside, trying to comprehend a world where people live by schedules and routines.

 But it gets better - Ken is cheating on his wife  with Ellen Harcourt (Pamela Mason) - unbeknownst to anyone, he thinks. so things get... complicated. Well, not at first: Cabot pretends to be a door-to-door guitar salesman (hence the alternate title to the film) in order to get into the Wilson home. Before long, the killer is flummoxed by her social schedule impeding on their plan and Ken discovers that his dalliance with Ms. Harcourt may not be "their little secret," even as he plans to run away with her later that day. Fred's more than a little surprised that Mr. Wilson says "Suppose you'd be doing me a favor by killing my wife?"

 With a little more finesse, Five Minutes to Live could be another The Naked Kiss, but it hits just shy of the target, a sleazy exploitation film that isn't quite sure what direction it wants to go in. It doesn't surprise me that elements of Five Minutes to Live pop up in movies like The Ref and Bandits, which play to the comedy more and the domestic sleaze less. There are times that, despite its muddled execution, Five Minutes to Live is a bitterly funny movie. At the same time, the more we get to know Cabot around Mrs. Wilson, the more disturbing he becomes.

 There are shades of Frank Booth in the way he handles her and terrorizes her - first singing "Five Minutes to Live" and then grazing her face with a bullet. He harasses her for not "looking right," not because she cares but because he does.  If you ever thought, "you know what would be a good vibe for Johnny Cash? Rape-y!" then you're in luck. It gets even darker than that towards the end, when Bobby shows up - Cabot doesn't like to involve children and a shootout with the police has tragic consequences for the normally cautious "maniac."

 Five Minutes to Live is just shy of being the movie it could be, and even though there's a good reason the film isn't very well known, I'd say more often than not it's worth the watch. The rough spots hold it back, but just because it doesn't find the artful balance between sleaze and cinema, Five Minutes to Live still has a trick or two up its sleeve if you're patient. Check it out, if you're in the mood for something mean spirited and rough around the edges.

"E" is for Expect No Mercy

 1995's Expect No Mercy was the hotly anticipated re-teaming of DTV action duo Jalal Merhi and Billy Blanks (Talons of the Eagle). Because they'd already been undercover operatives taking down Asian criminals, Blanks and Merhi needed a new challenge, and luckily for them (not so much for us), the mid-nineties brought about the "hot" fad of Virtual Reality. It's time to head inside the virtual world for some martial arts action!

 Expect No Mercy begins with Warbeck (Wolf Larsen) booting up the "Bertolucci" program, which leads us into an amazing cgi landscape that's some serious "Money for Nothing" shit right here. I mean quality. It turns out that this is the fancy way we get to his elite hit squad, who are infiltrating Bertolucci's compound. One of them uses a whip, and another guy carries around an iguana, but is nice enough to leave him somewhere safe. Also there's a guy with grey hair named Spyder, played by Michael Blanks. Since (SPOILER) Billy Blanks fights and kills him later in the movie, you can probably call "nepotism" on his prominent role.

 They all have tiny cameras on their, uh, headsets, and Walkman earphones so that Warbeck can see and communicate with them. He warns them that they call Bertolucci the "cat" because eight previous assassination attempts have failed, but they manage to take him out and all of his body guards with minimal effort. I guess as a tribute to the target's namesake, a chick gets naked and goes skinny-dipping before it all goes down. Enjoy it fellas - it's the only gratudity you're getting in this flick.

 Now maybe I was naive in assuming we're supposed to want these guys to kill this jerk and that the iguana thing is supposed to be cool or something, but it turns out Warbeck and his team are the BAD GUYS. Good job with the "bait and switch," movie. It's weird because they make wisecracks and don't behave like evil assassins or anything - just a team that knows their job and how to do it well. But it turns out the cops frown on assassinations from a guy who runs the Virtual Arts Academy, so they send in Justin (Blanks) to find out what Warbeck is up to and stop him.

 Already on the inside is Eric (Merhi), an instructor who helps the Virtual Arts Academy students use VR training to "know kung fu" faster than they would learn it normally. They fight in virtual environments with computer generated opponents while wearing those VR goggles that you haven't seen since The Lawnmower Man or the local arcade gave up trying to get people to pay for a dumb gimmick. Also there is technician Vicki (The Walking Dead's Laurie Holden), who inadvertently gets tangled up in their vague corporate espionage.

 Meanwhile, Warbeck is being hired to kill Goldberg (Sam Moses), a key witness at some trial, so Eric, Justin, and Vicki need to stop that from happening. But first shenanigans as Justin learns all about virtual reality training and meets his other students. Also, for reasons unclear to anybody but Billy Blanks, when he arrives at the Virtual Arts Academy, he decides that he need to look like Wesley Snipes in White Men Can't Jump. It doesn't serve any purpose, but it happens.

 Expect No Mercy is a movie that moves forward chronologically, but without any of the connective tissue that helps a narrative make sense. Yes, technically what happens from scene to scene is what should happen in order for the plot to advance, but the how or why Eric and Justin get there is often completely ignored. For example, Justin gets in a fight in the cafeteria in order to steal a security card from one of the staff. The next scene (after the guards are holding him) is Justin and Eric sneaking around the heavily fortified compound (which has cameras everywhere) using the stolen card. Did the guards just let Justin go? Where the hell did Eric come from?

 If I'm being honest, it just adds to the charm of this ridiculous movie. It functions best during the "virtual" segments, of which there are less and less as the story goes on, but the best way to describe what they were going for with the "opponents" is "Mortal Kombat on a budget." There's even a kung fu clown that Billy Blanks immediately kicks in the balls. In fact, most of these guys would be right at home in a WWF ring, what with all the low blows, sleeper holds, and eye gouging. Blanks and Merhi have terrible one liners, and it's hard to assign all the blame to writer J. Stephen Maunder (also Talons of the Eagle), because you have to be able to deliver a one liner in the first place.

 One could say that Merhi and Blanks have wooden delivery, but that's an insult to wood. Their fights are often hilarious because of the ADR and foley, but it is what people came to see. Or rented to see. The upside is that Laurie Holden doesn't seem to be aware that she's in a shitty action movie and manages to be pretty good while still baring her midriff for the entire movie. (No nudity though, although it looks like she ends up with Merhi, so maybe we're winning out by not having a love scene). Wolf Larsen is also pretty good, as is his lieutenant, Damian (Anthony De Longis), the guy who likes to use a whip.

 Expect No Mercy is not a great movie; like many films obsessed with a fad, it just seems really dated now and while you won't see me giving this movie credit often, in the wake of The Matrix anything from the 90s dealing with virtual reality just looks silly, including Virtuosity. But laughing a lot is not such a bad thing in my book, so Expect No Mercy has a level of entertainment value that I appreciate. For movies starring Billy Blanks*, it's definitely a high water mark.


 * By this I mean "movies that are not The Last Boy Scout"

"D" is for Django

 Django (1966) is the sequel to Takeshi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django (2007) and has the distinction of not being one of the many Django knock-offs released between 1967 and 2012. Nah, I'm just pulling your chain, at least about the first part. It is true that Sukiyaki Western Django is ultimately a prequel, but I doubt that Sergio Corbucci (Super Fuzz) really planned for his Spaghetti Western about revenge, gold, and shooting Mexicans was meant to be based on a movie starring Japanese actors speaking phonetic English and Quentin Tarantino talking like he was being dubbed by a Japanese Quentin Tarantino impersonator.

  Anyway, I knew that Django existed for a while, but I'd only ever seen it made reference to, usually in documentaries like The Spaghetti West. I had seen Sukiyaki Western Django and I knew the story, so I was excited to hear that Tarantino was going to make a Django knock-off*, but it was weird that not many people I knew had heard of the original. Well, I figured it was high time for me to see it so that I could impart some wisdom to you good folks, and just maybe you'd watch Django, too.

(For the record, I watched the dubbed version because it was the only one available, so I'm not going to try to comment on performances. Everybody's voices were pretty bad, especially Django's. I'll try to watch the subtitled one when I can.)

 Django isn't really a classic in the way that Fistful of Dollars is, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have its charm. If it's remembered for anything, it's for having a great theme song and an even better gimmick for its title character.

 Franco Nero (Django Unchained) is Django, and we meet him trudging through the desert, dragging a coffin behind him. The theme song hints at loss and of love and I guess it's safe to assume that there's somebody in that coffin, so one can be forgiven when he later tells somebody that it's his friend, "Django." Long story, but we do get half an explanation later. Stick around and I'll share it with you.

 Django comes across Maria (Loredana Nusciak), who is being whipped by Mexican bandits for trying to escape them. Before Django does anything about it, the bandits are wiped out by soldiers who then indicate that they want to kill Maria, so Django brutally murders all of them. One of them even falls into quicksand, which is a pretty nasty way to go but it turns out is mostly foreshadowing the last act of the film. Django takes Maria into town, and into a saloon / brothel run by Nathaniel (Ángel Álvarez), who explains that she is not welcome, but our hero doesn't care.

 In fact, Django is kind of a jerk to Nathaniel and all of the ladies who work there. He drags the coffin inside and makes a mess and later kills a bunch of guys and tells Nathaniel to "clean it up, but don't touch my coffin." He's a pretty presumptuous guy, if you ask me. He's also pretty cruel to Maria, and it turns out there's no real rhyme or reason behind it. I don't know that I want to pull for him yet, but everybody else is pretty much a scumbag too.

 The town is one of those "neutral areas for two opposing factions" that you see in movies like these (and also Yojimbo, where Leone "borrowed" most of Fistful from): there are the Mexican bandits, controlled by General Hugo Rodriguez (José Bódalo), and the soldiers of Major Jackson (Eduardo Fajardo), who hates Mexicans almost as much as he hates Yankees. His soldiers wear home-made red hoods and carry a burning cross when they come for Django. Sounds kind of familiar, but I can't tell why...

 Major Jackson is mad because Django keeps killing his men (but sparing Jackson) but he's also wary after finding out that the "friend" in Django's coffin is a machine gun that wipes out his posse. Jackson is a pretty rotten guy - he gets his kicks out of letting Mexicans out of a pen and shooting them with a rifle as they run away, so we know he has to die eventually.

 Rodriguez and his bandits aren't much better: they catch one of Jackson's men, Brother Johnathan (Gino Pernice) trying to escape town, so they cut off his ear and make him eat it. If that wasn't bad enough, Rodriguez shoots him in the back as he walks away, so I guess Django will just play both sides against each other or something like that. I mean, I've seen this movie before, and Corbucci already gave away the secret of the coffin thirty minutes in, so what's left to surprise us?

 Well, plenty, it turns out: Django IS working for one side, but he never works for the other, and the side that thinks are his friends end up just being muscle for a robbery the titular character has in mind. Poor Maria keeps getting dragged into this because she ran away from Jackson's men and to the bandits, then realized that was even worse and tried to escape, so everybody wants her dead. Even the other prostitutes (whores?) get into a mud fight over whether it's Maria's fault that Django is killing everybody. In my estimation it's not really her fault that he saves her and brings her back when he didn't know that's where she was running from, but maybe I'm not privy to some inside information.

 There's some gold thieving and some shoot-outs and some betrayals (surprisingly not who you think) and then some frontier justice and more quicksand (this time it's Django's coffin, which has been filled with gold) and a final shootout at the cemetery. Django tells Nathaniel and later Maria that he lost somebody a while ago, when he "was too far away to help" and it looks like he's wearing a uniform under all of those heavy coats. But it's not clear if Jackson was responsible for it - Django seems to hate him but it's never clear what exactly he did - but vengeance must be served.

 I like the aesthetic of this "Old West": yes, there's a lot of dry landscapes, but the town is constantly wet and muddy and cold. There's a continued thread that any water you see in this area has to be disgusting or slimy or quicksand, which is a nice change of pace from dust and sand everywhere. Django's plan, while convoluted, has some pretty clever twists and turns, even if it's never clear why he's doing it. I guess he vaguely references being able to buy off who he was in order to start a new life, but I'm pretty sure the people he'd be paying off were the same assholes he just robbed and ran away from. Oh well, the final show down is pretty cool, and he does it without functioning hands.

 Nero would play Django again in 1987, but in the mean time people continued making Django movies - kind of like the Spaghetti Western equivalent of Asylum Studios - so you have lots of options. Still, this is arguably the best of them, I'm going to go out on a limb and say, but I'd be happy to be proved wrong. It just seems like no knock-off is going to topple the original. I mean, even Tarantino knew better than to leave Franco Nero out of his shameless tie-in to the series...

 * I guess the respectable term for when QT does it is "homage."

"C" is for Critters 3

 I don't think I've ever seen Critters 3, and it's been a long time since I saw Critters or Critters 2. I definitely never saw Critters 4 based on the way that this movie ends, although since it ends with a "To Be Continued..." I might have to suck it up and finish off the series.

 This sure was a different movie than I remembered the Critters films being, so I went back and checked the first two movies. See, I remember them being sorta sci-fi / horror blends with a little bit of goofy comedy, but I didn't really remember there being subtitles that explained what the critters were saying to each other (there sure were) or that the tone was so kid-friendly (although the protagonists are definitely pre-teens in Critters and Critters 2). Sure enough, when I looked they're all rated PG-13, so maybe I'm remembering them being more violent than they were.

 Either way, Critters 3 is pretty fun but it's hard to argue that it isn't a dumb movie for kids for most of its 86 minutes. Not that it's necessarily a bad thing, but I definitely wasn't expecting some of the goofy shenanigans on display in this here movie. You know, the second sequel to Critters. Oh, who am I kidding?

 Critters 3 starts out in much the same way that O Brother Where Art Thou? does not, with some cheesy synthesizer music and a cartoony title font that let's you know this here is going to be some goofy shit, but then Clifford (John Calvin) and his kids Annie (Aimee Brooks) and Johnny (Christian and Joseph Cousins) are driving along singing "Big Rock Candy Mountain." I didn't see that coming, but I bet the Coen brothers did. It probably inspired them. Yup, I'm sticking with that.

 Clifford is on his way back from vacation with Annie and Johnny when they run over some firecrackers* and the tire blows out. They have to pull into an RV camp, where Johnny goes to throw his frisbee and almost goes over a steep incline. He's saved by Josh (Django Unchained's Leonardo DiCaprio), another kid hanging out with his mother (Nina Axelrod) and asshole stepfather (William Dennis Hunt), and said asshole stepfather feels the need to be all rich and obnoxious to Clifford while he changes his tire.

 The kids eventually do throw the frisbee off of the incline (technically, it's Leo's fault) and they run into this crazy survivalist named Charlie (Don Opper), who if I had remembered Critters 1 or 2 well enough I would have recognized as the nerdy guy who becomes apprentice intergalactic bounty hunter. Fortunately for me and all of the kids in the audience circa 1991, Charlie explains what happened in the first two movies, complete with flashback footage to jog our memories. It's also done in this obviously "kiddie" tone that's hard to explain unless you're watching it, but think of how everybody acts or is treated in Mac and Me and you'll have a pretty good idea. That's when I realized that this was not going to be a horror movie.

 Of course, Critters 3 decided to trick me when the family leaves the RV park and we jump ahead to the apartment complex they normally live in. We meet the sleazeball electrician Frank (Geoffrey Blake) who is in charge of chasing all of the tenants out. Said tenants include all of the stereotypes for "apartment" in movies: the fat lady who lives downstairs, the old couple upstairs with the husband who is a conspiracy theorist, the lady who works for the phone company that Annie is trying to get her dad involved with...

 Oh yeah, I didn't mention that, did I? So in addition to Clifford working for the railroad and being away from his kids a lot, causing family strife, he's also a widower after the result of something horrible happening to Annie and Johnny's mother. It's not explicitly stated in the film, but I'm guessing it had something to do with why the elevator at the apartment complex doesn't work. Anyway there's this family drama and a sleazeball mechanic who lives in the basement, so you could forgive my slight confusion. Also, the family unwittingly brings home critter eggs. Hey, you go to the RV park, you never know what could come back with you...

 The critters hatch and begin eating people, as they are prone to do, and at least when they kill Frank there's some suspense. But then Rosalie (Diana Bellamy) goes downstairs to see what happened to her laundry and they fail to kill the fat lady, so I kinda knew the score from there on out.

 Luckily, it turns out the asshole stepfather also turns out to be the asshole landlord, and he drags Josh over to the building in the hopes of evicting everybody without having to pay their "relocation fee" before turning the complex into a strip mall. I wonder if he's going to die or not? If it helps, in one of the best "that's why they couldn't call for help," he cuts the phone lines and turns off the power, just because he's that much of an asshole. So yes, of course the critters eat him.

 And nobody else. That's right, while they attack Rosalie and Clifford, they never kill another person in the movie, because everybody else is basically good so they don't need to die. This is the kind of movie that juxtaposes bowling on TV with Annie rolling a trash can down the stairs at critters, complete with a strike for both!

 I'm not actually bagging on Critters 3 because for what it is, it's all right. Certainly better than a lot of "part 3"'s that I can think of (okay, maybe two). This is definitely a movie that "borrows" from Gremlins 2: The New Batch (released the year before), particularly during the section of the movie where the critters just give up on chasing the tenants and goof around in the kitchen. One of them drinks soap and another one eats beans, and then there's a pie fight and antiquing, and I'll let you guess if one of the critters farts or burps bubbles (SPOILER: they do).

 Despite the goofy tone, there are some novel solutions to "getting help" that don't quite pan out but I hadn't necessarily seen in this kind of movie. It isn't always as dumb and obvious as I feared it might be, and when there is gore it's pretty good. Critters 3 was written by David J. Schow (The Crow, Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, which Critters 3 is better than) and was directed by Kristine Peterson, who made, uh, Kickboxer 5 and Body Chemistry, but who was also Assistant Director on Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Tremors and Chopping Mall, so she's all right in my book. They both do a pretty good job here of balancing two diametrically opposed genres, and even if it's not as successful as The Monster Squad or The Gate, Critters 3 is entertaining enough.

 This comes in the period of DiCaprio's filmography before he was in This Boy's Life and What's Eating Gilbert Grape and right around the same time he was on Growing Pains, so he's okay. I mean, it's hard to distinguish him from the other kids in the movie other than the fact that he grew up to be the guy who Martin Scorsese works with all of the time, but in 1991 it's not like he was leaps and bounds better than Aimee Brooks or the two kids who played Johnny. He's probably more memorable in The Quick and the Dead, but you have to start out somewhere, right? It's not like they elevated his name on the cover like they did for Jennifer Aniston with Leprechaun.

 Anyway, so as Critters movies go I guess this is one of them. It's a respectable effort and reminds me of the days when New Line Cinema would make these little genre movies and everybody seems to be having a good time doing it. Back before David Fincher and those hobbits made it all prestigious and crap...

 Speaking of "prestigious crap," our next movie stars Django Unchained cameo have-r Franco Nero. And it's not Die Hard 2: Die Harder... or is it?

 * Speculation on the Cap'n's part.

"B" is for Bullet to the Head

 On paper, there's no way that Bullet to the Head should be as disappointing as it is - Sylvester Stallone has been on a mostly successful run since returning to big screens with Rocky Balboa, and while you can debate the relative merits of The Expendables films, I'd venture to say that they're getting better as they go along. Teaming Stallone with Walter Hill (48 Hours, The Warriors, Red Heat, oh, and one of the writers of Alien) for a gritty revenge film just seems right. And then, for good measure, throw in Sung Kang (who I enjoyed in the last two Fast and the Furious movies), Christian Slater and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as the bad guys, and what the hell, Jason Momoa as the heavy.

 Like I said, on paper it sounds like a winner; so what the hell happened? Well, Bullet to the Head isn't a total disaster, let me mention that right up front. It's a thoroughly average action movie unnecessarily saddled with a "buddy cop" template when it really needs to be about getting Stallone and Momoa on-screen together. That happens twice in the movie, and when it does, Bullet to the Head comes to life. Otherwise, it's a drawn-out bore.

  I hate to say it, but most of the problem is Kang's character, Detective Taylor Kwon. While Kang has an easygoing chemistry with Vin Diesel the rest of the F&F gang, he sucks the life out of Bullet to the Head. It's hard to tell if he just didn't get a handle on the character or if Kwan is just horribly written, because he comes off (at best) as incompetent at his job. When Kwon's partner is killed, he travels from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans to track down the killer, and ends up forming an uneasy alliance with Jimmy "Bobo" Bonobo, a hitman whose partner was also killed by the same shady figures.

 Normally, you'd think they'd not get along and then find some common ground, but instead Kwon never gets past the first stage, where he's constantly threatening to arrest Jimmy on principle despite the fact that the criminal is much better at tracking these guys down than the cop is. Kwon's "detective" work consists of using his smartphone to call the station, have them look up a name, and then listen to someone give him exposition which he then relays to Stallone. This happens repeatedly in Bullet to the Head, usually while they're driving and almost always before or after an argument.

 My takeaway here is that in order to be good at following leads, all you need to be is literally anybody with a smart phone. Early in the film the NOPD makes him give up his gun (because this isn't his jurisdiction) but apparently the DCPD are perfectly willing to help him with a rogue investigation.

 Kwon is such a shitty detective that he can't figure out that the corrupt New Orleans police chief and detective working for African crime boss Morel (Akinnuoye-Agbaje) are tracking him and Jimmy with the GPS in his phone. Nope, he just keeps using it to advance us to the next lowlife that Jimmy needs to kill so that Kwon can get indignant. Mind you, this is after "Bobo" saves his life and helps him remove a bullet from a failed assassination attempt.

 Speaking of which, in the one touch I liked (until the movie ruined it), Kwon mistakes Lisa (Sarah Shahi), the tattoo artist who helps remove said bullet from his shoulder for Jimmy's girlfriend, when she is, in fact, his estranged daughter. Had the character relationship been limited to that, I'd be happy, but in the "cop / criminal" twist logic of this film, Lisa and Kwon have to get together., despite having no chemistry whatsoever.

 In fact, Kang and Stallone have no chemistry either, which really grinds everything down to a halt during the movie. When Stallone is on his own, or with Slater (as Morel's sleazeball attorney) and especially with Momoa, Bullet to the Head gets much better, but unfortunately those are but brief glimpses of a finer action film.

 Since I haven't really mentioned Jason Momoa, who is the best part of the ridiculous Conan the Barbarian, let's get back to the positives of Bullet to the Head and talk about him for a moment. So Momoa plays Keegan, a mercenary / hitman hired by Morel to take out anybody associated with a conspiracy the war criminal is trying to cover up. He's the one who kills Louis Blanchard (John Seda), Jimmy's partner. He also tries to kill Bonomo, but that doesn't quite work out.

 Unlike Kwon, we actually see Keegan develop a bit in the film from just being "the heavy." It turns out that he's respected by other mercenaries because he has a code of honor and he sticks to it, so when Morel screws him over from a moral standpoint, Keegan (SPOILER) kills the bad guys and leaves their warehouse hideout. That's right, our heroes don't kill the big bad guy, the bad guy's henchman does, and I don't even mind. Yes, it's a story flaw, but Momoa's Keegan is a much more interesting character, and it's clear all he really wants to do is finish the fight he started with Jimmy.

 And boy, do they ever. The only reason I'm even recommending Bullet to the Head is because the axe fight between Momoa and Stallone ("What are we, vikings?" quips Jimmy) is the high point of the movie. Keegan is so impressed that Jimmy can put up a fight that he starts smiling and at one point starts clapping. This is a show of respect between two tough motherfuckers that refuse to be the loser in this battle. Hell, Jimmy stabs Keegan in the throat with Louis' knife and THAT doesn't stop him from trying to score the killing blow. Nope - that would be Kwon shooting Keegan from across the room, breaking his "rule" about not killing "bad guys" when he can arrest them.

 It's the Die Hard / Lethal Weapon moment where Al / Murtaugh shoots the bad guy as they lunge forward which ties back to something they said earlier but in this instance because Kwon is such dead weight I was just pissed off that he killed the only interesting character not played by Stallone. Conversely, I didn't mind when Stallone killed Slater (SPOILER) after an interrogation scene because there was a least a joke there.

 So as not to sound like a sourpuss, here are a few more things I liked about Bullet to the Head:

 - I really enjoyed the set up and pay off of Kwon unloading Jimmy's gun while he was talking his daughter into helping remove the bullet. Later in the film, Jimmy goes into a bath house to confront another hitman who had a hand in getting his partner killed, and when the conversation leads to the inevitable "pull out the gun and shoot" moment, the look on Stallone's face when he hears "click" is priceless. It also allows for a protracted fight scene that is also pretty good.

 - The use of photos of Stallone throughout his career as mugshots (one of which looks like it's from First Blood) is actually a really nice touch in establishing his back story without having to spend too much time on it. Jimmy Bonomo is a career criminal, and with a few brief glimpses of Stallone as a younger man, we buy that a life on the wrong side of the law would result in the hardened asshole he plays in the movie.

 - Also, the opening "hit" that sets up what Jimmy and Louis do is short but effective. It's unexpected when they shoot the guy (who, by the way, is one of Kwon's former associates) in the chest but he doesn't die immediately but instead gets pissed off and tries to take them out, leading to the first (of many) instances of the title coming into play in the movie.

 One final note on the use of New Orleans as the backdrop for the story - it's not a major issue for me that Louisiana is offering credit to film crews in order to get them to shoot there, but having almost every action movie in the last five years in the Big Easy is starting to get a little repetitious. There's an assault on Jimmy's house (which is on a river) that ends in almost exactly the same way that the Jason Statham version of The Mechanic did, and that's not the movie you want to remind me of. Were it not clear to me that it couldn't be the same house (because, well, it had been blown up in The Mechanic), I might have assumed they used the same location. So it's cool that you can use New Orleans on the cheap, but let's try to vary it a bit, huh? If Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call Nicolas Cage could switch it up a little bit, I'd like to think Walter Hill could find different places to film.

 So yeah, this is a pretty average action movie that should have been better. There's no excuse for it not to be better, and the glimpses of a pretty great movie in there only compound the issue. If I were channeling my inner Rex Reed, I'd say "B is for Bullet to the Head? More like a C minus!" but that's beneath all of us. No wonder they killed Sung Kang in Tokyo Drift...

"A" is for The Ape

 Back in 2005, James Franco was best known (to me) as the guy who played mopey, insular, navel-gazing male leads, exemplified by Harry Osborne, the only more tortured comic book character in the Spider-Man films than Peter Parker. He was the title character in Sonny and also James Dean in a movie of the same name and would continue along this path throughout most of the early to mid-2000s in movies like Annapolis and Tristan + Isolde before people (read: me) learned he was really more of a weird spaz who enjoyed arty movies that confounded mainstream audiences.

  I mean that in a good way, but since I was late to the Freaks and Geeks party, I didn't know that James Franco was funny or had an off-kilter sense of humor until after Pineapple Express. In fact, I may be one of the three people on Earth who didn't hate him as co-host of the Academy Awards because I had seen the SNL Franco hosted and that's pretty much exactly how I thought he would approach the Oscars.

 I can only imagine what people thought of The Ape in 2005 (provided anybody saw it then), Franco's adaptation of a play he wrote with Merriweather Williams and performed in California. It has the same kind of schlocky premise that would make Happy Madison a small fortune (in fact, The Zookeeper is probably the Sandler-fied version of this movie) but is tonally in a completely different zone. You know, as movies about talking gorillas go.

 Franco plays Harry, a struggling writer who abandons his family and moves to the big city (Hoboken, if I'm reading the signs correctly) to live alone in an apartment and finish his masterpiece. That is, of course, until he discovers that included with the apartment is a gorilla (Brian Lally) who talks and wears Hawaiian shirts, khakis, and sometimes beanie caps. The ape points out that there's even a provision in the lease that renders Harry responsible for "upkeep of the ape" and therefore, just like the last tenant, Harry has no choice but to live with his new roommate.

 There are, of course, shenanigans, and based on the premise alone I bet you can guess a few: Harry has an overbearing boss (Allison Bibicoff) that forces him to give a big presentation with short notice, Harry's wife is convinced he's seeing someone else while she works on pottery with her mentor, Flies with Eagles (David Markey), and Harry just can't seem to find time to write his novel. Because of the 800lb gorilla in the room, of course.

 So here's where it's pretty clear that The Ape is not a Happy Madison movie that goes exactly where you think it's going to, even when it does have similar narrative conceits. For one thing, Franco plays the whole thing like a drama, a serious, deadpan existential struggle that just happens to have a guy in a gorilla suit (that you can see light shining through in profile).

 Let's take a relatively simple gag from early in the film, one that would have the cheap seats howling with laughter in any other version of this story. Harry is resigned to living with the ape, but he insists that the gorilla is NOT sharing the bed with him. The ape, who has been taking what sounds like a really painful shit in the bathroom, flings his poop onto Harry and then jumps into the bed. The camera lingers on Franco for a moment, and then he lets out a scream of abject terror. Cue laugh track. The Ape is a movie that ends up being funny precisely because it's not funny. By design, I'd wager.

 Since he is the co-writer / director / star, I feel comfortable in assigning most of the tonal decisions to Franco, which makes The Ape a much more bizarre experience. It's hard to tell if he's making a comment about dumb gimmicks in comedies or if / when we are going to laugh at the film. I mean, it is funny, but almost never in the way a buddy movie with a talking animal normally is. In fact, it's hard to be sure whether the gorilla really exists or not. The landlady insists there's no clause in the lease, but Harry also gets lice from his roommate and it's so bad they have to send a memo out at work about it. There's a sense of "this is a low budget movie, so let's just go for it!" even when it isn't necessarily clear what "it" is supposed to be from scene to scene.

 Harry works for the HR department of the phone company, and there's a long scene about an hour into the film where Harry's co-worker Beth (Stacey Miller) has a conversation with another employee (Vince Jolivette) - who we've never seen before and won't see again - about what people really want out of life and then tangentially manage to tie it back into Harry, even though he's not in the room at any point.

 This isn't the only flourish that says "independent movie," by the way: as transitions, The Ape frequently cuts back to another primate that held up the title cards during the credits, and who will eventually let us know that the film jumps ahead "three months later." Franco, working with View Askew regulars Dave Klein (DP for most of Kevin Smith's films) and editor Scott Mosier (Smith's long time producer), makes a nice looking movie that only periodically looks like it was made on the cheap. I mean yes, there's a scene where Beth overhears Harry and his boss getting wild that's clearly out of focus and the transition from the beginning of finally writing his novel to the end of the first chapter is a little cheesy, but I can look past most of that. Even the performances, which range from pretty good to not so good, I don't mind. Credit where credit is due, Lally never overplays the gorilla - he's just sort of there, very matter of fact, and I kind of got a chuckle out of the line "I'm living the dream - I'm a gorilla living like a white man in the big city."

 However, The Ape takes a serious turn into "What the Hell Was That?" territory in the last ten minutes, making two rapid tonal shifts in a short span of time. Since I don't imagine many of you will ever watch this, I'll go ahead and say that yes, the titular character is a product of Harry's imagination, but that doesn't necessarily explain why Franco's hair is becoming more gorilla-like or the ape sex-doll he bought his buddy for Christmas. I'm pretty sure that was really there, although I guess you could argue that everything after Harry quits his job and loses his wife is totally in his head. Fair enough.

 The ending reminded me a little bit of the ending of Killer Joe - which while the movie technically came out after The Ape, the stage production is much older - in that while it's appropriate for the story being told, I'm guessing it works a lot better on stage than it does in the movie. Killer Joe at least went for abrupt ambiguity - The Ape literally fades the house lights before completely going to darkness.

 I gotta say that I admire Franco for making a movie like The Ape - it totally makes sense considering his life since Pineapple Express reads like an extended audition for I'm Still Here Part 2  - but I don't know that I'd watch The Ape again, or even recommend it. For one, I'm not entirely certain what Franco was saying or that he was successful in any of the possible readings of the story. I don't necessarily agree with the IMDB user review that said the movie was great because Franco was visibly high in scenes (I mean, it's possible, to be sure), but it's probably a little bit better than a 4.1.

 Well, maybe that's about right. I can't see many people that I know liking The Ape, or even really wanting to finish the movie, but I kinda appreciated the experience. If nothing else, it's going to change the way I watch Rise of the Planet of the Apes the next time I see it. It's an auspicious way to start off The ABCs of Movie Masochism, and that's what I was going for, y'know? Trying new things out...

 See you soon with "B" for Bullet to the Head, starring Sly Stallone and Jason Momoa.

So, where were we?

 As you may have noticed, the Cap'n has been a bit more MIA in the Blogorium than I've been, well, ever. My routine of posting something every day whittled down to five days a week and then three days a week and then around the new year, to almost not at all. Part of that was that I was cramming in movies for the year end recap, part of it was that I just didn't prioritize correctly.

 Sure, some of it was work and when I had two jobs and was working every day it was hard to keep up the self-imposed schedule I had operated under since the Blogoium was on MySpace (I feel comfortable mentioning this since they relaunched and erased all the old profiles and that Cap'n Howdy's Blogorium no longer exists). But I found a way to write between movies at The Galaxy (also being demolished, which I hate, but there's nothing any of us could do about that so I'll honor it by name) and could even continue the Adventures in Projectioneering series while that lasted.

 Anyway, the Cap'n hasn't stopped watching movies, but as I feared, the longer I went without writing regularly, the harder it was to make myself sit down and do it again, even when I wanted to. Covering Nevermore was a good chance to dip my toes in, but then I let two weeks go by without reviewing any of the six or seven movies I saw after the festival was over (one of them, Heather Langenkamp's I Am Nancy, is a great companion piece to Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy and you should see it out).

 But this isn't about navel-gazing and making excuses. Nope, I found a gimmick to get the Cap'n back in the swing of things, and it's either going to re-invigorate the Blogorium for the next two months or kill me in the process.

 I call it The ABCs of Movie Masochism. It's borrowed, in concept, from the anthology film The ABCs of Death and in practice from a friend of mine who is doing something very similar to cleanse his palette from two months of cramming 2012 movies into his brain. I've selected 26 movies, each corresponding with a letter of the alphabet, and I'm going to watch all of them and review them on the Blogorium, by the end of April if that's possible.

 For the record, because friends of mine have already been confused about this, I don't mean to imply that I'm watching 26 terrible movies to punish myself and others. Yes, there are some schlock picks in the list, but the "masochism" comes from undertaking this task in a short a period as I can humanly accomplish it.

 It's absurdly ambitious for the Cap'n, considering that I work an 8-5 job during the week, but what the hell? I want to do it, and I want you to join in on the experience of it. Either in person or vicariously - if I know you, you're welcome to join me for double features every Saturday night until I'm done.

 One thing I can promise is that if you come to the Saturday screenings, you'll see two movies that you never in a million years would think of putting together. I'm not going to reveal the titles of all twenty six films yet, because it'll be more fun for you to find out the day that the review goes up, but each one is either a movie I've never seen or one I've never reviewed here before. Many of them are connected in unusual ways, even if you really have to bend over backwards mentally to figure out how.

 So stay tuned, readers, because I'm just going to put them up as I go along. I may tell you what the next one is at the end of each review, I may not, but know that every film is a hint towards something coming in the next two months. And to prove that I'm sticking to this one, the first review will be up tomorrow, and the next one the day after.

Nevermore Film Festival Recap (Day Two)

 Welcome back to Cap'n Howdy's coverage of the 14th annual Nevermore Film Festival. Today was a lineup I'd been looking forward to - another collection of short films (from North America this time), a partially "found footage" film about ghosts, and the double feature of a classic (Dawn of the Dead) and a newer film that might end up with its own "cult" following down the line (John Dies at the End).

 The Cap'n started the day with They're Coming to Get You, Barbra!, a selection of ten north American shorts that ran the gamut from scary to funny to darkly whimsical and bizarre. Here's a brief description of each, with accompanying links (they were actually harder to locate online than their foreign counterparts):

 T is for Trash - from what it looks like online, "Trash" began its life as a submission for The ABCs of Death, but I'm glad that Nevermore included it as a short in its own right because it deserves to be seen in its own context. If its possible to call something "a bizarro world take on Boxing Helena," Trash fits that description. When you think you have a rough idea where the story is heading, something very unusual happens, and I have to say I liked it.

 Till Death Do Us Part - a clever horror comedy dealing with a couple having cold feet on their wedding day, exacerbated when their exes show up for the ceremony - as zombies. Did I mention the film is set in 1985? It's not a crucial detail, but it adds to the humor a bit.

 The Stolen - less of a horror movie and more of a dark fairy tale, one that happens to include fairies. A little girl helps a boy after her brother locks him in a cage, and he promises to grant her wish. The final image, while sudden, is effective and unsettling.

 Sandwich Crazy - the first of two short films in the lineup made with the involvement of Hobo with a Shotgun director Jason Eisener, Sandwich Crazy is a twisted Faustian tale about a man with no ambitions, a magic microwave, and talking, bleeding, vegetables. You'll laugh, you'll gag, you'll laugh some more. (Note: the link does not take you to the actual Sandwich Crazy short - I can't find it anywhere online - but another short film that uses some of the same puppets and has a similarly bent sense of humor.)

 Blue Hole - "inspired by a true story," this short is about a lake that the Devil lives in, and if he drags a loved one down, the only way to get them back is with a sacrifice. Three couples learn the hard way that not every bargain is one worth making...

 Take That - is the story of a veteran with an overbearing wife and a friend who wants to make his evening. When he decides to finish up at work, his buddy calls the service anyway, and our hero gets more than he ever wanted to deal with. I wasn't gaga with this film, but it did at least make an effort to keep the protagonist virtuous.

 Torturous - in this twist on "torture porn," a career counselor finds himself in a Hostel-esque room with a "drill" specialist, one not too happy with his job. Can he talk him into a change of career before it's too late? This leans more heavily on the comedy, but there's one impressive gore effect that helps keep the stakes high. The ending is great.

 Klagger - I enjoyed this low key film about a surveyor who walks into a building scheduled for demolition only to discover he's not alone, and the other party isn't interested in talking things over. It has a nice twist at the end and some effectively utilized country music to add to the atmosphere.

 Game - the second Eisener involved short has the edge over Sandwich Crazy for me, only because it takes your expectations of what kind of film you think you're watching and turns it on its head. It shifts from being a straightforward, fairly stark "killbilly" story into something much stranger. I don't want to spoil it, so I hope at some point the short will be available to watch online.

 Lot 66 - returning NC director Robert W. Filion brings us the tale of a man afraid in the dark, alone in his new house. Everything seems to be going well enough until he starts getting messages from a stranger who claims to be wandering around the house... and then the power goes out. It was a little heavy on stylized CGI and the ending reminded me of current events, which contributed to my ambivalence towards the short.

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 The second feature for Saturday was The Casebook of Eddie Brewer, a British film that blurs the line between "found footage" and traditionally narrative horror. Eddie Brewer (Ian Brooker) is a paranormal investigator being followed by a film crew for a special on hauntings, and they join him for two major cases: one involving a mother (Bella Hamblin) and her daughter Lucy (Erin Connolly), who have been experiencing phenomena reminiscent of a poltergeist. Eddie suspects that Lucy's "imaginary" friend, Grimaldi, might be responsible, but to what end?

 Eddie is also called into a renovated building being used by the government because of strange sounds coming from a "hole" in the basement, but it becomes clear that the activity isn't limited to that area. Before long, the staff are dealing with an increasingly hostile force, one that has a particular interest in Brewer, and may have something in common with Lucy's "friend."

 Unbeknownst to Brewer, the documentary producer (Natalie Wilson) has arranged for skeptic Dr. Susan Kovac (Louise Paris) and a team of paranormal investigators to join him at the end of the investigation. Brewer, who works alone and with outdated equipment, is infuriated, but the confluence of events involving Lucy and a message that Grimaldi sends the investigator leave him no choice but to join the rest for a wild night of paranormal activity.

 I was rather impressed with The Casebook of Eddie Brewer, which alternates between the footage being shot by an unseen cameraman (director Andrew Spencer) and a third person, omniscient perspective. Appropriate to the narrative, the bulk of actual "ghost"-related events happen when the documentary camera isn't on, bolstering the case for Kovacs and increasing the doubts of the crew that anything is actually happening, even as it becomes clear to the audience that something horrible is afoot. It takes a moment to adjust because both styles use the same camera, but Spencer is careful to mark points in the film when it's clear which perspective we're watching from.

 The way that the two investigations dovetail is also handled in a clever way, if not one that is always clear near the end. When Casebook goes all out, beginning with the arrival of a psychic medium, Spencer manages to keep the various narrative threads and suddenly swollen cast together in a sensible way, and the imagery is chilling without being too outlandish for the limited scope of the story. Of the two feature films I hadn't seen prior to coming into Nevermore, I'd say that The Casebook of Eddie Brewer was my favorite.

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 After returning to the lobby for a snack and to meet up with friends for the double feature, I settled down in Fletcher Hall to see George Romero's Dawn of the Dead on the big screen for the first time. I'd seen it at home and in classrooms and at parties, but I've never seen it in a theatre, and it turns out that's because it's not an easy thing to do for festival programmers. Producer Richard Rubinstein has, until recently, fiercely resisted Dawn of the Dead being show, but he finally agreed and Nevermore's most requested vintage horror film was ours for the viewing.

 I don't want to say much more about Dawn of the Dead because I've written about the film before here in the Blogorium, but I'd like to share something curious that happened when I saw this with a large audience.

 Dawn of the Dead is, perhaps, the best "zombie" movie in the sometimes cluttered subgenre, even if I prefer Night of the Living Dead. It's a close first and second, but while I side with the stark simplicity of the first film, Dawn of the Dead is continually rewarding with repeated viewings, as without fail I find something I'd never noticed. And this time it wasn't even the "neglige" zombie (and geez, she must have been cold)* - no, this time I was exposed to a different side of the humor inherent in Dawn of the Dead.

 Having seen it in small groups and in academic settings, I was used to what I thought were the bulk of the "jokes" in Dawn of the Dead, many centered around consumerism and the juxtaposition between commercialism and the undead. What surprised me more were the periods when the audience, in unison, reacted to scenes I had always read as somber or bleak with laughter. For example, when Roger and Peter are discussing Fran's pregnancy and the possibility of ending it (while Fran is in another room), the audience began laughing, and laughed even harder when Romero cut to Gaylen Ross' reaction shot as she overhears them. I had never considered the moment funny, but the inherent comedy in that uncomfortable conversation opened my eyes to yet another reading of the film. Perhaps Dawn of the Dead is even more intentionally comedic than I had thought.

 You're not going to go wrong watching this movie with a large group of strangers, especially ones not familiar with the gruesome Tom Savini-created special effects. If you can see Dawn of the Dead in a theatre, if that opportunity ever presents itself, I highly recommending doing so.

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  The final film of Day Two, and the second part of the double feature, was the festival's debut of Don Coscarelli's John Dies at the End. Several years ago, they included Bubba Ho-Tep in their programming, so audiences were looking forward to seeing what the director of Phantasm had in store for us after ten long years (I'm counting John's debut on VOD as its release date, because I saw it in December of 2012).

 I wrote about the film briefly during my 2012 recap, and finally had the chance to see it with a crowd equally composed of folks who had and had not read the David Wong-penned novel the film is adapted from. Unfortunately, I didn't get to talk to many people who hadn't read the book after the film ended, but everybody seemed to enjoy the alternately disgusting and hilarious story of two slackers who save the world from an alternate universe's resident demon, Korrok.

  What I didn't mention last time was the inspired casting of Paul Giamatti as Arnie and Clancy Brown as Doctor Marconi, who along with Chase Williamson's David and Rob Mayes' John keep the film moving at a brisk pace. I also enjoyed the cameos by Doug Jones, Daniel Roebuck, and especially the Tall Man himself, Angus Scrimm, whose character hints at a set of antagonists dropped from the story during the adaptation from novel to screen. I'm still sad that Fred Durst isn't in the film.

 As I mentioned to friends after the film was over, given some of the changes and the relatively low budget of John Dies at the End (he doesn't, by the way. SPOILER), I can't imagine how This Book is Full of Spiders (Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It!) could ever happen, but I'd welcome it. And I'd watch it. The continued adventures of Dave, John, and Amy in the demonic cesspool that is Undisclosed** are something I look forward to more of, whether on paper or the big screen.

 By the way, if you want to see John Dies at the End now, it's available On Demand. If you're thinking of just pirating the film, David Wong has a special warning for you:



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 This ends my coverage of the Nevermore Film Festival, but if I can cajole some of the good folks I attended with to add reviews of some of the movies I didn't see (Found, Dead Weight, the long-form shorts), I'll put them up some time soon. It was a great time with lots of fans of horror, and I'm looking forward to the 15th anniversary next year!


 * Seen easily in the parking lot when Fran is watching Peter and Stephen move trucks in front of the entrances, and again later in the film.
** By the way, it's not "Undisclosed" in the movie - it's identified as Sherwood, Illinois.