Explosive Action

Airboss (1997)

2013-05-01T09:00:00.000+10:00

Tagline:

When Terrorism Threatens America, They Threaten Back.

Movie Review:

In the former Soviet Republic, the military are working on a new fighter, the MIG 35 "Firebomb". Unfortunately some ex-Spetsnaz soldiers, led by Bone Conn (Kayle Watson, an actual Navy SEAL), go ahead and steal the thing in order to dominate the world's oil supplies (somehow). The Pentagon gets involved and send in special forces to take it back, aided by top gun Frank White (Frank Zagarino), a jet pilot who can't forgive himself for the death of his student during flight training. Frank has to overcome his fears, defeat the bad guys and get the MIG back.

Oh sweet jesus, this was just appalling. Easily the worst Zags film I have seen so far, by a long shot. The only redeemable feature of the film was the Zags himself; other than him, this film featured the worst acting I have ever seen in anything made available for sale to the public. This truly is student film quality. The camera is the shakiest I have ever seen (I had to close my eyes a few times to give them a rest), not even able to focus on a television screen without wobbling all over the place. Hell it can't even stay in focus a lot of the time, and horrible effects are employed to simulate motion such as spinning the camera in a circle like a bad transition.

Most of the film nothing actually really happens. Frank flies stock footage jet, crashes stock footage jet, walks through desert, gets captured, escapes, comes back to get MIG and bad guys. All the while the most obnoxious Casio keyboard soundtrack plays underneath. The action, when it happens, is atrocious. I roughly estimate that half of this film is stock footage of jet fighters flying in circles, military helicopters zipping about, and soldiers running on sand. You can tell when it's stock footage, too, because the camera stops fucking shaking. When it actually is Zags or somebody else shooting, the muzzle of the gun is mostly just out of shot so that no effects have to be used. In a battle scene in the final third - the only vaguely passable part of the film - we do see some actual guns being fired by the stars of the movie. Woop-de-fucking-do.

And the dialogue. Oh, the dialogue. Some choice lines include "I'll have all your asses like white on rice", and "That major night time drop that became a goat fuck." Excuse me? Became a what? If it wan't for that one line, this film could have passed for family time viewing. Not that you would want to subject your family to this, but that's beside the point. And I can't forget the brilliant line Zags spouts during the final dogfight with Conn: "Oh you know America, the country that paralysed your nation? Forced your people to sell trinkets by the road side? Hahaha." What in the actual fuck.

Director J. Christian Ingvordsen has made a living out of direct to video action - which should be applauded in my books - but this is the first film of his I have seen, and it's not good. Can you believe there are four of these Airboss movies? FOUR. According to his IMDB bio, "The AIRBOSS films feature state of the art digital and miniature effects as well as unprecedented access to United States military hardware." What film was this guy watching? It certainly wasn't the first Airboss film, that's for damn sure.

No. Just no. But I won't write off Ingvordsen from seeing the one film. Our friends at Comeuppance Reviews enjoyed his film Comrades in Arms, so I'll check that out at some point. I have to see the Airboss sequels: Airboss II: Preemptive Strike, Airboss III: The Payback and Airboss IV: The X Factor. I really, really do.

Highlight:

Frank had BAD DOG written on the front of his helmet. That's it.

Sourced From:

An ex-rental VHS from around the time the film first came out.

Trailer:

There's a video on YouTube that claims to be for Airboss, but none of the footage in that trailer was in the movie. Who knows, maybe it's really and just another feather in the cap for this shit-storm of a movie, but as it doesn't represent Airboss at all, I decided not to include it.

Death Race 3: Inferno (2012)

2013-04-26T22:55:00.001+10:00

Tagline:

The rules are simple: Drive or Die.

Movie Review:

After successfully winning four races during and after the course of Death Race 2, Carl Lucas aka Frankenstein (Luke Goss) only has one more race to win and will gain - along with the rest of his crew - a full pardon from Terminal Island Penetentiary. Unfortunately for Lucas, the Death Race franchise has been bought out from under Weyland's (Ving Rhames) watch by new owner Niles York (Dougray Scott), who does not intend to honour the previous bargain. Instead, the racers are shipped off to a new desert race track in South Africa. Will Lucas live long enough to gain his freedom from the new tyrannic race-master?

I was a big fan of the first film with Jason Statham and very much enjoyed the direct-to-video prequel from 2010. I stated back then that while the script had some niggling continuity errors, the CAR-nage more than made up for it. Death Race 3: Inferno ramps up the CAR-nage (okay, okay…) with even bigger explosions and crashes than it's predecessor, and much more interesting and varied scenery. Setting the race in South African sand dunes and slum towns was a good idea, I thought, and sees the racers combat in far more unpredictable terrain than a track in a prison complex. Indeed some of the shots of the dunes, valleys and towns are quite attractive (There's certainly a lot of red sand around that place).

Where the film falls down is the characterisation - or complete lack of it. There is no growth of any of the (returning) characters: Danny Trejo's Goldberg, Fred Koehler's Lists, Taint Phoenix's Katrina and Carl "Luke" Lucas plod their way through the film not really bringing anything new or interesting to the table, outside a very small handful of light-hearted additions. Goldberg for instance has a very small fling with a nurse after being injured in the race. An attempt is made to introduce jealousy to the Katrina character but you really just don't care that much. We meet a handful of new characters, principally the new drivers (with names like Razor, Nero, Olga, Fury, etc), but none are that interesting - in fact the one called Psycho was really getting on my nerves by the end of it with his bad lines. Some of the more interesting exchanges involve the uncredited African locals, who get in on the race as well bringing their own cars and machine guns in to the mix, and there's even some minor humour when the race intrudes into the peoplehomes (literally).

Ving Rhames literally phones in his performance as Weyland (half of his scenes are on a car phone). He is really only here to hand over the reigns to new boss York, which is a shame. York himself is the guy you love to hate; the only one in the film you could have any emotional connection with, albeit a negative one. He double-crosses, violently outbursts at his staff - poor secretary Prudence (Roxane Hayward) cops the brunt of it - and holds a massive grudge again Lucas that will see him try to sabotage his own Death Race. Another returning character is competing driver 14K (Robin Shou) who literally spends his whole time yelling in a Chinese dialect to his co-driver and not much else (that lack of character development problem again).

There also seems to be far more shaky-cam in this one and far, FAR too much ultra-zoomed-in shots. When the cars are flying over sand dunes or crashing through shanty towns, the picture is great. When the camera focuses on the drivers we can see up their nose. And in the fight sequences we see a lot of elbows and feet as the camera jerks around. It's not the worst example of MTV-style film making I've seen (see the early/mid-2000's Seagal flicks for that) but it was off-putting.

So the race mayhem itself is still as good as ever, and the scenery is far more interesting than before, but the lack of empathy or even interest I had for the characters really brought this one down. There's no chatter between the drivers and co-drivers of any real purpose, and between matches in the pit nothing much goes on. I will say that the final third does bring some "Aaaaaaah!" moments that rectify this to a fairly substantial degree, but the writers and director could have spiced up the dialogue for the rest of the film. Recommended of course for the action, but I think I will find myself re-watching part two more than part three.

Highlight:

The vehicular mayhem is pretty epic, but the sixteen year old boy inside me couldn't get past the glorious opening girl-fight sequence. To pick the ten winning co-pilots, all the girls are thrown into a ring to fight to the death. Similar to the sequence in the previous Death Race prequel, the contestants in skimpy outfits that promote breast size unlock weapons and kill each other in over-the-top fashion until only ten combatants remain. I very much enjoyed the flame thrower. I also quite appreciated the brief, slow-mo shower sequence with Katrina, baring all her assets. Ahem.

Sourced From:

The Australian blu-ray, presented in excellent quality 1.78:1 widescreen with a thundering DTS soundtrack.

Trailer:

Hunt to Kill (2010)

2013-04-21T12:05:00.001+10:00

kill poster" width="250" height="344" border="0" />

Tagline:

Survival of the Baddest.

Movie Review:

01" width="500" height="282" border="0" />

Steven Austin is Jim Rhodes, a U.S. Border Patrol agent, is out camping and hunting with his unwilling teenage daughter Kim (Marie Avgeropoulos). She gets bored and drives to town and gets busted by the sherif for shoplifting. Her unimpressed father comes to bail her out, but at the same time a gang of bank robbers are holding up the sherif station. Killing the sherif for being uncooperative, the family Rhodes are forced to help the bank robbers track their way through the forest to find their bounty, which was stolen by a double-crossing associate.

That's the plot in a nutshell, very simple and straight-forward. The film runs for 90 minutes and generally moves at a fair clip even though most of it is slowly walking through a forest. There are enough detours, deviations and chances for Gil Bellow's trigger-happy Banks to take out those that get in his way to spice things up. It seems a bit odd that these people - who can rob a bank with the aid of non-existent voice synthesising technology to divert an incoming police pursuit - need the help of a ranger so badly, but that's just one of those "Well I guess they needed to make a plot out of something" details that I can (generally) forgive. Along the way, both Rhodes attempt to escape a couple of times, and in the third act we presume that Jim is killed. That's when he comes back Rambo-style, armed with a convenient crossbow!

02" width="500" height="282" border="0" />

Gil Bellows (True Justice and a bunch of other TV) was good, albeit predictable, as the main bad guy Banks. He's everything you love to hate in a bad guy boss; he holds a serious grudge that forms the focus of the film, he does not accept incompetence among his own team, and he never stops grinning evilly. Banks was a seriously dislikable character, which means Bellows succeeded in crafting a good baddy. Good enough for 90 minutes of direct-to-video action, anyway. I did give a little cheer when he got his comeuppance.

Gary Daniels plays Jensen, Banks' second-in-command and the most well-balanced and loyal of the team to Banks. Daniels' thick British accent (thicker than usual, it seems) really stands out like a sore thumb. I was disappointed in the lack of action that Daniels' had on screen, actually. Mostly it's just bickering between the rest of the gang, a couple of shots fired and then the final fight with Austin - which at least was worth the price of entry as he gets a few decent roundhouse kicks in to Austin's face. The other gang members (Michael Eklund's "Geary" the techie one, Adrian Holmes' "Crab" the incompetent one, Emiliie Ullerup's "Dominika" the pretty one) are all pretty bland and not really worth discussing. They simply serve as cannon fodder for both Rhodes and a pissed-off Banks.

03" width="500" height="282" border="0" />

Director Keoni Waxman is quite prolific among the DTV-action world, particularly with Austin and our favourite Steven Seagal. He directed both of them together in Maximum Conviction, a film I enjoyed more than the rest of the world (it seems), and is helming the upcoming Seagal/Danny Trejo/Ving Rhames vehicle, Force of Execution. On paper that one sounds a blast. Waxman's also, in retrospect, put many cast members from this and his Seagal films into Seagal's television serial True Justice.

You may have noticed that I tagged Eric Roberts but so far have not mentioned him. That's because the son-of-a-bitch is dead before the opening credits roll! In a scene that is only there to show Austin receiving a watch that will come in handy later, he and Roberts take down a meth lab in the middle of nowhere, Texas, and Roberts faces the mean end of a drug dealer's shotgun. That's it. Although he's not on the cover of the DVD or any of the photos on the back, he is listed as #1 on IMDB in the credits list - so I'm calling this a bait-and-switch on technicality.

Overall I thought this was decent enough, if you can ignore the obvious plot faults of a crew of technologically-benefited bank robbers not being able to determine where North is without a 17 year old girl to help them. And if you don't expect to see Eric Roberts for more than a millisecond. Seriously he must have just been driving by the set when Waxman shouted out "Hey Roberts! Want to make fifty bucks?" Check out what our buddy at the DTVC thought of the film as well. I commented on his review two-and-a-half years ago but I'm only just getting to mine now!

04" width="500" height="275" border="0" />

Highlight:

Serious spoiler alert! There are two main highlights for me; the eventual one-on-one fight of Austin and Daniels, and the final (drawn out) death-throws of Gil Bellows' Banks character who "dies" not once, not twice, but three times. Eventually after hobbling away from the first two failed attempts at being dispatched by Rhodes, Banks pushes for a third attempt by quipping at Rhodes "Is that all you got, mountain man?! You can't kill me!". To which Rhodes invokes the films title: "When I hunt.. I HUNT TO KILL!" (given in away in the trailer) and ploughs Banks down with a quad bike in a hilarious fashion, before blowing him and the quad up with a flare gun. Champagne stuff and worth seeing the film to the end for.

Sourced From:

Region 2 DVD from Anchor Bay. Sharp 16:9 print as you would expect.

Trailer:

Silencers (1996)

2013-04-01T16:01:00.001+11:00

Tagline:

The government denied they exist. But the Men in Black are here...

Movie Review:

Jack Scalia plays Agent Rafferty, a Secret Service agent tasked with protecting a Senator. He fails in this task when a group of strange Men In Black terrorists manage to eliminate their target, however, all is not normal with these terrorists. Meanwhile a group of scientists at the Phoenix corporation are working on creating a dimensional portal between our world and an alien world, overseen by the same Men in Black that killed the senator - the leader being an alien called Lekin (Carlos Lauchu, Anubis in the Stargate film) who looks a lot like Skrillex with those black-rimmed glasses. Coming unexpected through the activated portal is another alien, Comdor (Dennis Christopher, Fade to Black, Circuitry Man II, Alien Predator) who is here to close the portal and rid Earth of the silently-colonising Men in Black race (called the Marcabians) but unfortunately is knocked out cold and captured. Agent Rafferty is tasked with transporting a payload (that he does not know is a restrained Comdor) to a research facility, but the Men in Black have other plans.

Wow! I didn't think PM Entertainment would be capable of science fiction this good, but I have been (happily) proven wrong. This is actually very good stuff. The action quotient is very, very high and the science fiction elements work well. This is the kind of thing that the SyFy channel should be spending their money on - less CG creature-features and more Men in Black with exploding cars!

Jack Scalia is believable as a Secret Service agent. He plays the role cool and professionally, and after being smacked in the face with the proof aliens exist just gets on with his job - to protect the payload - however, Dennis Christopher is very good as Comdor, and has the required "what is this human emotion you call love?" quirks down pat (though in this movie that line is not uttered, but you get the drift). He admits his race is pacifist, which comes across in his inability to (initially) fire a weapon and his openness in giving detailed explanations about his solar system to an elderly couple in a diner over lunch. The two grow to have a good relationship that reminded me of something like a cross between Enemy Mine and Twins. Carlos Lauchu's Lekin was also entertaining in a manic way, laughing evilly when given the opportunity.

For a PM film, the special effects were actually extremely good. Of course we are used to PM pulling out all the stops when a car needs to blow up, but we had a few good alien spaceship shots, the Stargate-like portal, green blood and a few other other-worldy type effects. Colour me impressed, but this was better quality than most made-for-TV even today.

The action? It's PM so there was a lot of it. There was and endless supply of cars running into other cars, or launching off other cars into trucks and choppers. A few buildings exploded, with the obligatory slow-motion jump from the fireball. Every second person had an automatic weapon and was not afraid to shoot it at somebody else with an automatic weapon. So suffice to say, there was plenty of action in Silencers to keep the audience enthralled. It also seemed to me that everybody was doing their own stunts, particularly Scalia. There were scenes where he was climbing all over a moving truck that definitely was no stunt double. He spent a few minutes hanging off the side off a tanker moving at high speed, shooting at enemy aliens. I couldn't see any harness and it was definitely not green-screen, so big props to Scalia and everyone else who had the guts to perform stunts in Silencers.

Overall this was one of the best PM films I've seen to date. The action was practically non-stop, the story and acting were of high quality and there was no dull parts (outside a few minutes at Rafferty's ex-wife's house - though this did get to show us Comdor relating to Rafferty's son). Definitely recommended for fans of science fiction with high action.

Highlight:

Outside the 14 or so cars that flipped, I think the highlight for me was the truck vs. helicopter chase that ended with Rafferty launching a car into the chopper, it crashing to the ground in flames.. and Rafferty walking away from the upturned car with barely a scratch. This is Die Hard territory, folks!

Sourced From:

A very bad transfer on the Payless Entertainment R4 DVD that squishes Silencers with another PM film, Hologram Man, onto the one disc. This would be fine except they only used a single-layer disc, so the compression is severe and blocks up consistently. Best to buy another edition. Runtime approx. 100 minutes.

Trailer:

Maximum Conviction (2012)

2013-01-10T23:21:00.001+11:00

Tagline:

Maximum security. Maximum firepower.

Movie Review:

Steven Seagal has released consistently watchable and enjoyable direct-to-video films for the past five years. Before that there were a few shaky ones, but with the possible exception of Against the Dark (his brief appearances in a vampire film) it's been a pretty good ride since 2007 with Renegade Justice aka Urban Justice, Pistol Whipped, Driven to Kill aka Ruslan, The Keeper, A Dangerous Man and Born to Raise Hell all being good to excellent DTV action films. Steven has been busy of late doing his TV series' Lawman and True Justice and I was wondering if we would get another film. Thankfully we did, and it's just as good as any of the others mentioned above. It's got action "newcomer" Steve Austin in it, and is directed by Keoni Waxman of Seagal's A Dangerous Man and Austin's Hunt to Kill fame.

It should be an easy day's work for Cross (Steven Seagal) and Manning (Steve Austin); overlook and orchestrate the closure of a military penal facility, and organise the transport of the final inmates to their new civilian prison. Cross shows who is boss early in the piece by beating up a 200kg inmate who steps out of line, while Manning is given the delightful task of running the garbage disposal. The day only gets worse when a rolled up note is found that was accidentally dropped by an inmate, detailing times and locations for an attack on the facility. Cross, on his way back to the prison and Manning, still dealing with that garbage disposal, are suddenly involved in a foothold situation as Chris Blake (Michael Pare) and his mercenaries, posing as marshalls, take over the complex in order to extract two of the prisoners - Samantha (Steph Song) and Charlotte (Aliyah O'Brien) - for their own purposes. And it's of course up to Cross, Manning and their phoned-in team of soldiers to sort this out!

The film is similar to Austin's own Tactical Force, except that in that film the good guys only had blank ammunition for training. Not so here; it's an automatic weapons festival! Being essentially one team of mercs. versus another team of mercs. you would expect this, and the film delivers in droves. Fast-firing rifles backed up with hand guns and even a few one-on-one close combat fights make this one of the more action-packed Seagal films in recent times. The dialogue is fairly light to accommodate the continual action; so much so that the only time I looked up at the clock was to see we were 70 minutes in and just about to kick into the final twenty minutes of yet more action and comeuppance for the bad guys.

Seagal and Austin share equal amounts of screen time here, which itself isn't dominating. A lot of the smaller players as well as Pare get their faces on camera. When Seagal and Austin do show up, they are almost always slap-fu'ing, drop-kicking, machine-gunning or launching fire extinguishers as rockets. Seagal appears to be doing most of the stunts himself this time round, which is great, and I doubt Austin even has a stuntman. The only real downside to the movie is the handful of occasions that Seagal speaks to Austin - their voices are both so low and gravelly I had a hard time trying to decipher what was being said!

Michael Pare is good fun as the renegade Chris Blake. It's good to see him taking time out from endless Uwe Boll films to join the big boys of action for a while. He's a little bit sadistic in getting what he wants, stabbing the poor warden in the hand and cutting off one of his fingers - ouch. Also on good form here is Australian actor Bren Forster as Bradley, who leads up Cross and Manning's squad of soldiers. Forster has some martial arts skills and gets to put them to use in a fight near the finale.

Overall this is one of the better DTV action films of the past few years. It's simple, it's direct and it never lets the plot get in the way of a good shootout. Just the way I like it! And there is more to look forward to as Steven Seagal teams up again with Director Keoni Waxman and co-stars Danny Trejo and Ving Rhames in Force of Execution!

Highlight:

There are no major highlights in the film as it is all fairly solid, but I especially enjoyed Steve Austin's various one-liners throughout the film. He breaks a guys elbow? "Does that hurt? You fuckin' pussy." He gets beaten up by a woman? "What the fuck, baby!" He impales a bad guy on a weights rack in the exercise yard? "No pain. No gain." Quality stuff!

Sourced From:

Ex-rental blu-ray from Transmission Films. Great picture and sound quality as can be expected from modern DTV on blu-ray.

Trailer:

Death Race 2 (2010)

2012-11-10T07:00:00.000+11:00

Movie Review:

I'm usually against remakes, but sometimes the remake is better than the first film. Cronenberg's The Fly is far superior to the 50's film. The 1988 version of The Blob is scarier than Steve McQueen's. And the 2008 version of Death Race starring Jason Statham is, in my opinion, leagues ahead of the Sylvester Stallone and David Carradine Death Race 2000 from 1975. It was faster, more violent and just more fun overall - and closer to The Running Man than the original, which is a good thing in my book. So when a sequel - actually a prequel - for the remake was hitting the shores of direct-to-DVD, I was excited.

This prequel sets up the events that take place in the Statham film and establishes the Frankenstein mythology. Ving Rhames is the owner of Weyland Corporation (not related, presumably, to Weyland Industries from Alien), a corporation that among other things privately runs the prison systems. As they own the prison and the prisoners therein they can do whatever they like with them; Death Match is a televised fight-to-the-death between randomly selected prisoners. It begins unarmed but combatants can unlock weapons by triggering plates on the ground. This is all well and good, but ratings are starting to plummet. What can the producers do to spice things up?

Enter: Death Race! Nine cars, armed and armour plated driving a course around the prison facility. And just in time to join in the fun is Carl "Luke" Lucas (Luke Goss, Blood Out, Blade II), a convicted bank robber and cop killer. After doing the dirty work of crime lord Markus Kane (Sean Bean, Lord of the Rings trilogy), Lucas is sent to Weyland's penitentiary. It's not long before he's suckered in with hopes of freedom to race for Weyland's TV entertainment manager September Jones (played ruthlessly by TV actress Lauren Cohan). With the gorgeous Katrina (Taint Phoenix) as his co-driver, things hot up on and off the race track!

Grab your friends, get some beer and strap yourselves in because this is a fantastic ride. If you just want to be entertained by brutal fights, hot cheerleaders and plenty of CAR-nage, then this is the film for you. Director Roel Reiné (Marine 2, Steven Seagal's Pistol Whipped) gives the DTV-action fans and fans of the first film exactly what they want. Luke Goss is a good actor and certainly fills the Frankenstein mythology that would be continued by Statham - the two are even vaguely similar in appearance and build. He's a beefcake when it comes to fist-fighting and looks like he knows how to handle a car (and later on in the film, a woman too).

Some of the characters and actors from the Statham film are in this film too; the somewhat savant Lists (Fred Koehler) in the role of the helper-monkey in Luke's pitt crew. Robin Shou returns as rival driver and Korean triad member, 14K. And new to this film is the ever-awesome Danny Trejo (Machete), who isn't used to the full extent he could be in the pitt crew but still provides a foreboding presence. All the other drivers have their interesting quirks; I especially loved the brief appearance of a driver called Hill Billy who, you guess it, is a big, fat cliched redneck hillbilly. Yee-haw!

With a budget of 7 million (pretty high in the DTV world), the special effects and size of the play field are very decent. Obvious CG is minimal, with plenty of realistic blood splatters and car mashing resulting in real explosions. There is a bit of MTV-style editing, but thankfully it's mostly slow-mo's and not much shaky-cam. The cameras do zoom in close to the drivers from time to time to save on exterior shots, but there's still plenty of outside driving (and crashing) to see. There's a few little niggling script continuity errors but.. WHO CARES, crash those cars! Recommended.

Highlight:

The CAR-nage (okay, I'll stop doing that now) is absolute throughout the film! THAT is the highlight - the film never bores!

Sourced From:

A sweet deal in a local release Blu-ray double-pack featuring the first film and this sequel.

Trailer:

Special Forces (2003)

2012-11-04T12:15:00.001+11:00

Tagline:

They fight for your life.

Movie Review:

It's been a while since my last review, but I couldn't be happier to break the drought with something as explosive as Special Forces. The plot is incredibly simple; ambitious American female reporter gets captured by Maldovian forces trying to take photos of a genocidal event, US Special Forces team bust heads in an attempt to extract her. You already know how this will go, and it goes exactly how you think. America wins, woo! But it doesn't matter that you know how it goes, what matters is how high the body count is when you get there.

Special Forces hits the nail on the head for action fans. Directed by Isaac Florentine (Undisputed II and III, Ninja, Shepherd: Border Patrol, U.S. Seals II), one of the best in the business as far as I'm concerned with nary a single MTV-style quick-cut in use, and with many appearances by (but not fully starring) the awesome Scott Adkins. Well acted by all involved, we see the team of special forces comprised of interchangeable rough-and-tough men going by the names Jess, Bear, Wyatt and Reyes lead by Major Don Harding (Marshall R. Teague, U.S. Seals II, The Rock, Armageddon and a lot of TV work), who work their way through Maldova to rescue the girl and take out the ruthless General Hasib Rafendek (Eli Danker) - of which Major Harding has already been acquainted with, as revealed to us by a flashback sequence.

Action hero (and I'm happy to call him that now that he's played alongside The Action Greats in The Expendables 2) Scott Adkins shows up as the last remaining soldier of a British squad that never made it out of Maldova. He acts alone but saves the bacon of the Special Forces team on three occasions. It's also great to hear Adkins using his real British accent for once!

"Mission is King"

This is a non stop actionfest, folks. There are at least six full shootouts featuring every military-grade weapon you could think of. The minuscule $2.5m budget must have been used entirely on ammunition and exploding trucks, so I'll forgive the frankly terrible looking CG helicopter that whisks the team away at the end of the film. It's not a gory film either, with a high level of violence but not an overly grotesque. The scenery of Lithuania doubling as Maldova provides an authentic representation of a war-torn post-USSR republic.

This is easily the most overly-patriotic bordering on silly action film I've ever seen. There are so many scenes featuring American flags I lost count, but my favourite moments would be the artistic blood splatter across a US flag patch received by a captured Corporal, the Major drinking from a coffee cup emblazoned with the flag and the final scene rolling onto the credits that features the Major telling Talbot "this is why I keep doing it" as we pan across to a waving American flag. Coupled with the constant footage of Maldovian soldiers beating on their own women and children, it's clear who we are meant to be rooting for here.

Highlight:

The action basically does not stop for the full ninety minutes, but the highlight simply has to go to the duel fights in the finale - Marshall R. Teague vs. Eli Danker, and Scott Adkins vs. stuntman Vladislavas Jacukevicius. Surprisingly, Teague is reasonable with the ol' high kicks and lands a decent punch on Danker a few times. But the Hong Kong style fight between Adkins and Jacukevicius is simply outstanding - easily the best Adkins fight I've seen. He's as fast as Jackie Chan in his early days and just as creative, using whatever is laying around to help him win the fight. Jacukevicius is a great opponent for Adkins as he does this kind of stunt work for a living (this is is only acting role) but the upper hand, of course, goes to the triumphant Adkins.

Sourced From:

Ex-rental R4 DVD brought to us by Roadshow Entertainment and Ninth Dimension. Presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, the film looks and sounds good but suffers a little from too much video compression in some scenes.

Trailer:

Getting Even aka La Vendetta (1988)

2012-09-05T07:00:00.000+10:00

Tagline:

It's time to settle the score!

Movie Review:

I love 80's Italian action films. There is always a substantial amount of poorly choreographed punch-fighting directed at people with beards in paisley shirts and beige trousers. Magnificent stuff, really. Getting Even aka La Vendetta is a 1988 revenge film directed by Leandro Lucchetti (Apocalypse Mercenaries, Caged Women) starring The Shaft himself, Richard Roundtree and ably assisted by Italian action/post-apocalyptic mainstay Harrison Muller Jr. (2020 Texas Gladiators, Warrior of the Lost World, The Final Executioner, She).

Roy Evans (Harrison Muller Jr.) ia an ex-Marine who ran top secret missions for the C.I.A. in Vietnam. Captured and tortured for five years during the war after being left behind at gunpoint by supposed friend John Slisko (Michael Aronin), Evans has now been recruited by old 'Nam buddy Dundee (Richard Roundtree) to hunt down Slisko who has been murdering prostitutes in New York City with his old war knife. After being betrayed all those years ago, Evans is keen to have his revenge!

The two beat up some squatters (including knocking a guy off a motorbike with a baseball bat!) to get information and learn that Slisko is now an international arms dealer boss who runs a local gym as a front. The pair find him at his gym but are caught off their guard by his thugs. Slisko escapes during a shootout which then leads our pair to Bangkok, the centre of Slisko's arms operations!

Getting Even is a solid actioner with a solid cast. It's not remarkable by any means but it's good fun - a lot of the best action in the film is lifted from another Muller film that Lucchetti produced, The Violent Breed. Roundtree and Muller put in good performances and know how to win a fight or ten, with Roundtree putting in some well-aimed single shots, and Michael Aronin plays a decent mob style boss. But really, Italian action films from the 80's are about the ACTION and not much more; lines are more often than not dubbed by someone else, and dialogue only used to get you from one place to another. Oh and there is usually some naked female form on display, which is not an exception in Getting Even!

Highlight:

The final fifteen is a pretty explosive display of machine guns, grenades to jeeps and plenty of slow motion jumping from exploding huts as the pair move in on Slisko's regime. Just what you want in your Namsploitation films!

Sourced From:

VHS bought from eBay.

The Expendables 2 (2012)

2012-09-01T16:12:00.001+10:00

Tagline:

Back for War.

Movie Review:

To say that I've been looking forward to seeing The Expendables 2 is like saying "I quite enjoy breathing". I needed to see this movie, as my wife will attest to, and it simply did not disappoint. If you are a fan of big, dumb 80's style action films, a fan of the first movie, or somebody who thought the first movie needed to go further, then all you need to know is "go see this film immediately".

The film opens in Nepal as mercenaries are bludgeoning a captive prisoner. Enter: The Expendables - Toll Road (Randy Couture), Hale Caesar (Terry Crews), Gunner (Dolph Lundgren), Yin Yang (Jet Li), Lee Christmas (Jason Statham) and Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone) to save the day with tanks, missiles, and endless rounds of ammunition unleashed upon enemy forces resulting in CG-gore head-shots (which look pretty good to my eyes, and not obviously cartoon-y - just over the top!), and newcomer Billy the Kid (Liam Hemsworth) sniping from a distance with his 50 calibre rifle. Jet Li even pulls out the martial arts with saucepans like a late 70's Hong Kong film. It's hard to put in words how awesome this opening scene is.

Rescuing their target (and somebody else who was in the wrong place at the wrong time) the team fly home for some R&R. That's when Church (Bruce Willis) shows up demanding that a debt to him be paid by Barney Ross, so the team set out to retrieve a package from a safe in a downed plane. Sounds like an easy pay check but Ross has to agree to take specialist Maggie (Nan Yu) along with him. Of course it all goes terribly wrong when somebody else is after the package - Villain (Jean-Claude Van Damme), a ruthless arms dealer - and one of the Expendables crew is killed in action by a knife to the throat held by Villain's right-hand-man, Hector (the awesome Scott Adkins). So what does a team of old mercenaries do? "Track 'em, find 'em, kill 'em!" … with a few old friends showing up along the way to give a helping hand.

This was a great, great action movie. If movies are based solely on the amount of fun you have watching them, then The Expendables 2 is up there with the best. Don't be stupid and look for deep meaning, just giggle like a schoolgirl when Schwarzenegger, Stallone and Willis empty an entire airport with automatic weapons! Laugh as Lundgren gets drunk and tries to crack on to Nan Yu's Maggie. Fist-pump the air as Terry Crews brings out the automatic shotgun from the first film and dismembers wave after wave of bad guy. Grin from ear to ear as Jason Statham dressed as a priest declares "I now pronounce you man and knife!". Cheer as Chuck Norris appears out of the smoke and forgets how to act entirely (Arnie is a bit rusty too, but who the hell cares?). Even Nan Yu (also in Dolph Lundgren's "Diamond Dogs") gets her fair share of carnage in.

"I'll be back!", "You've been back enough! It's time for me to be back!"

If you thought the first film had a lot of back-slapping referential humour, you ain't seen nothing yet! Any time Schwarzenegger, Willis and Stallone share a scene it's just a constant stream of "Rambo", "I'll be back" and "Yippie-ki-yay" lines. You'll cringe but you'll love it at the same time. They are clearly having a whale of a time doing it and you'll have a whale of a time watching it. And you may have read it elsewhere but Chuck Norris does crack a Chuck Norris Fact joke - and it's brilliantly awful.

Van Damme is excellent as the plutonium-obsessed leader Villain who forces slaves to dig mines looking for the lost Russian chemicals of destruction. His twisted portrayal of the character gives you someone to hate and also makes you wonder why JCVD doesn't do bad-guy roles more often - he previously only seemed to do them when he appears in the movie as two characters ala Replicant. Scott Adkins' Hector is just as great as his right-hand-man, and is ruthless in carrying out orders given to him by Villain. And yes, we get to see both dudes roundhouse kicking members of Ross' team - Van Damme's still got it!

Downsides? Well Yin Yang is only in the opening scene before making a discreet exit out of the plane with a parachute over China, to which a disappointed Gunner asks "Who am I going to make fun of now?" and Yin replies "Find another minority". Toll Road, Hale Caesar and Gunner are pushed more to the background than the first movie with no real shining moments given to any of them - though Gunner does try to save the day in one instance with his degree in Chemical Engineering; a degree that Dolph Lundgren actually has! The end fights involving Adkins and JCVD could have been longer but that is really splitting hairs - they were great as they were. Any other downsides revolve around similar issues people had with the first movie; that is some of the emotional plot lines were a bit forced and didn't quite work. That issue is still apparent here when Sly talks with Hemsworth or Nan Yu but not as bad as the attempts with Mickey Rourke were in the first film.

The Expendables 2 is the cure to all the Mission Impossible 17's and Bourne Whatever's of the world. No brains, all brawn, big guns and fun dialogue. Directed this time by Simon West who has helmed Con Air and Tomb Raider, he films a frenetic action film that only resorts to shaky-cam once by my count and looks a treat, outside a few overly-dark moments including the final Stallone/JCVD fight. Another classic in Nu Image's action repository. See this now!

Highlight:

There are many, many glorious moments in this film but I have to give it up for the few appearances we get of Chuck Norris. Every time he appears on screen he gets his own theme song. He cracks a Chuck Norris joke, badly, and it's brilliant. And he gets one of the funniest kills in the movie where the resultant headshot is viewed through the full body security scanner at the airport. Boom!

Sourced From:

Watched at the cinema, and worth every dollar!

Trailer:

Angel of Fury aka Lady Dragon 2 (1992)

2012-08-28T23:42:00.001+10:00

Tagline:

She's got a right hook that's DEADLY.

Movie Review:

Well it's been a while between reviews! Finally I'm back with a little Rothrock to entertain. I'm also going to dispose with the Quick Blast titles on shorter reviews and just let the reviews speak for themselves, be they long, short or a one line "Worst. Movie. Ever." Hope you enjoy.

Cynthia Rothrock is Susan Morgan, "The Golden Angel", a boxer who is married to a famous Indonesian soccer star Sonny Sumarto (George Rudy). After successful matches for both of them, the couple fly back from LA to Jakarta, but at the airport their bags are switched with ruthless diamond thief Diego (Billy Drago) and his merry band of cohorts, Jack (Gret Stuart) and Reb (Sam J. Jones, looking like he's walked off the set of one of his many Vietnam war movies, bandana and all).

After returning home, Diego and co. break in to their house looking for the diamonds but neither are forthcoming, so Jack and Sam break Sonny's legs and Diego rapes Susan. That's not the end of it; Diego and co. come back day after day (unbelievably there are no police guarding the house) looking for the diamonds, and one day when Susan is out, Diego brutally kills poor wheelchair-bound Sonny. This sets Susan on an inevitable and incurable path of one-woman's-revenge!

"You're not gonna get inside my head, fucker!"

I had fun with this. It was far darker than I was expecting; even the cheap synth soundtrack was moody. I guess any movie that opens with a rape in the first fifteen minutes isn't going to be laugh-a-minute. It get's quite bleak during and after Sonny's funeral where we learn that his was an icon among his native village; they even thrust a one legged kid on crutches in our face to make the point of the revenge more obvious. A strange Indonesian priestess (I think) says Susan looks like a woman with revenge in her heart - ain't that the truth. She has three people to kill!

Drago is an evil slimeball in this. He plays the character really well and you just love to hate him. His mannerisms are quite sickly and I got creepy shivers whenever he (repeatedly) said "There's my pretty, pretty, pretty.." to Rothrock's character, or called her on the phone to stalk her. I still don't get how stupid he was returning to the scene of the crime at least four times in the movie, but I digress. Jack is a bit of a nothing character sadly and is dispatched first by Susan as she dressed like Marilyn Monroe and seduces him in an elevator - with his own belt tied around his neck, if you follow me. Sam Jones' Reb seems like he is high on the best drugs ever throughout the whole film, continually laughing at his own shadow. Even Diego get's annoyed at this and slaps him around a few times.

Rothrock is her usual great self and gets at least five decent fights in the film, and a car chase that shows the same car explode SIX TIMES from different angles! The first fight is hilarious as she dresses as a streetwalker to get information from a random pimp who attacks her with a sword. She of course fights the three main bad guys, and the final one with Diego is pretty damn good. You know a final fight is going to be good when it's held in an Indonesian steelworks. And you just know that somebody is going to go into the open oven, and it's not going to be the film's heroine.

"How do you like your murderers; medium or well done?"

A solid revenge-thriller with plenty of good B-action set-pieces. Directed by David Worth, best known for directing Kickboxer and Bloodsport - movies not that far removed from Angel of Fury.

Highlight:

Definitely the moment when Susan and Reb square off down at the shipping docks. Susan kidnaps Reb from the mens room at a fancy restaurant and forces him to drive at gunpoint. He manages to break free and after a cat and mouse chase between shipping containers, Susan catches up with him and knocks him to the ground. Injured and unable to move, Susan drops a container from a conveniently placed crane onto Reb squishing him flat. He laughs his manic laugh right up until he becomes a pancake.

Sourced From:

A thrift store VHS pickup.

Trailer:

Quick Blast: Scorpio One (1998)

2012-06-20T09:00:00.000+10:00

Tagline:

At the edge of space, patriotism and terrorism are about to cross the line.

Quick Blast Review:

The Scorpio One is an orbiting research station and it's just been sabotaged, leaving all the occupants dead. NASA has no idea what has happened so sends up a new team lead by Commander Wilson (Steve Kanaly), Carter (Robert Carradine), Pilot Hutton (Michael Monks, Hijack) and Shannon Brey (Robin Curtis, Saavik from Star Trek III and IV), with the assistance of a squad of marines captained by Jared Stone (Jeff Speakman) and Till (Brent Huff). After docking the shuttle with the doomed Scorpio One, the rescue team board and are immediately attacked, leaving one member dead. An attempt is then made on Stone's life but he manages to escape and inform Commander Wilson that one of their own team is responsible and trying to steal the scientific research from Scorpio One. That's when Till and his allies take over the shuttle by force, demanding the research computer discs or hostages will start dying and ships start exploding!

You can rely on Royal Oaks to deliver a decent 90 minute time-waster as much as you can bet on Nu Image and PM Entertainment. In that regard, this was pretty decent, even a bit more cerebral (only a bit, mind you) then I was expecting. It's not often these made-for-TV actioners involve political intrigue and espionage, but this one did. We also got two separate sources of action that tied up both ends of the story, which itself is also unusual, but appreciated. Whilst the by-the-numbers Die Hard on an Orbiting Space Station goes on (ala Fallout), down on Earth a deadly plot implicating a Senator in the Scorpio One sabotage is discovered by CIA Director Wilfred Parlow (George Murdock, adding some class to the picture), who sends a small team of two to break into a security facility to gather evidence, and random Agents being knocked off with a roll-on deodorant that makes your heart explode.

The special effects in the film are rubbish (probably the worst shuttle model I've ever seen, and why are these people firing lasers in 1998?) and the science offensive - in one sentence Brey says that the space station's artificial gravity is functioning perfectly, but that there is a gaping hole in the ship that has sucked out all its atmosphere - but it moves at a fast pace and is enjoyable enough. Huff doesn't do much for 45 minutes except drink coffee, but once he shows his true intentions (beginning with ejecting one of the astronauts into the airlock and depressurising it, blowing him into chunks) he appears solidly for about twenty minutes being a bad guy. Speakman only gets two quick hand-to-hand fights but he gets to remind the audience that he is good at this Kenpo thing and can swing a roundhouse-kick or two - one of them pointed at Huff's head.

Special mention has to go to the pointless but highly entertaining ten minutes at the beginning that sees Speakman rescuing a soldier in Iraq from captors in a bloody melee, then being choppered away while yelling "Nooooo!" to his man left behind. And I've not mentioned Carradine much in this review because, well, despite his top billing he really doesn't do anything.

The Final Fifteen:

Hutton (who turned bad) has run off with the space shuttle after Stone kicked Till into the airlock and into outer space. With Scorpio One rigged to blow, the only option is the single escape pod. Back on Earth, Speakman has found out that Director Parlow is just as corrupt as the Senator and gives him the option of a trial or driving his car off the top of the building - he chooses the latter.

Sourced From:

I found this on VHS at a charity shop for 20c. You can get a DVD as well in most territories.

Trailer:

Quick Blast: No Contest II: Access Denied aka Face the Evil

2012-06-17T11:07:00.001+10:00

Tagline:

She's the right woman, in the wrong place, at the wrong time... again!

Quick Blast Review:

Sharon Bell (Shannon Tweed), an action movie starlet has gone to visit her sister Bobbi at the art gallery she curates, along with her Director Jack Terry (Bruce Payne) in order to convince her into allowing a scene in her film to be shot there. Eric Dane (Lance Henriksen) happens to be conducting business at the gallery regarding a recovered statue from Nazi Germany. Suddenly terrorists shoot up the joint and Eric Dane reveals himself to be Eric Dengler - he revealed it in a way that seemed to indicate I should have know who that was; perhaps somebody from the first film which I've not seen - and hostages are taken. Eric is after a biological weapon hidden within the Nazi statue, with which he could sell for vast sums of cash. Just as John McClane was in Die Hard, Sharon Bell happened to be elsewhere in the building when the action kicked off. Thus begins Sharon needing to quickly change from action star to action hero, save the hostages and dispatch the bad guys.

This was actually pretty odd. The time passed super-quick (I looked at the clock once to find myself an hour in), the action was there... but the characters just weren't likeable. Lance was technically great as the maniac, but he was too sadistic for the rest of the film. I mean, we have a film that starts with an old switcheroo scene of Shannon doing her action movie scene on set making us, the audience, think this is what we are getting the whole movie... and then we end up making tear gas from paint tins for weapons, but then also a scene where Dane/Dengler forces hostages to act Shakespeare and get shot repeatedly for doing it badly. I dunno, it just didn't seem to gel for me. It's a little like crossing Last Action Hero with Die Hard and a sadistic Korean revenge-thriller.

It's interesting to see Shannon Tweed in this kind of role; an action film star who has to play for real. I get what she was doing, trying to make it look like many of her kicks and punches were 'dumb luck', and genuinely looking frightened and cowering in certain scenarios. I guess that's just not what I wanted. I was hoping for another Cynthia Rothrock - somebody who was well versed, well grounded and knew precisely what they were doing in the action department. Tweed's character was the equivalent of somebody performing CPR based on what they saw on TV. Bruce Payne was interesting playing a good guy, as I best know him as the terrorist from Passenger 57.

This was a case of most things being in the right spot - the machine guns rarely stopped firing - but the characters were either incompatible with the movie or just unlikeable, so I'm not entirely sure I'd recommend it. It's quite hard to nail down, but I guess I just watched the whole thing with a slightly confused look on my face. Maybe I'd enjoy it more the second time round?

The Final Fifteen:

With all the henchmen disposed of, but Sharon, Shannon and Bruce all trapped in the building together, they agree to a cease-fire in order to all get out of the locked building. After some double and triple crossing, Eric Dengler ends up locked in a glass chamber with the biological weapon which goes off and melts him, slowly.

Sourced From:

Literally pulled out of a two dollar bin after decent rummage, the old Hollywood R4 DVD presents the picture in an average fullscreen presentation that looks like it was sourced from a suspect master. It gets the job done but it's not the best. Runtime 86 minutes.

Trailer:

Quick Blast: Command 5 (1985)

2012-05-20T16:05:00.001+10:00

Tagline:

Four men and a woman of courage.. their mission: to combat violent crime!

Quick Blast Review:

When recluse, action junkie ex-army Captain Blair Morgan (Stephen Parr) is ready to throw in the towel, he is persuaded to create a civilian task force to clean up violent crime. He agrees if only he can choose his team; a by-his-own-rules cop and demolition derby car driver, J. D. Smith (William Russ); female police psychologist and machine gun expert, Chris Winslow (Sonja Smits); alcoholic cop with a short fuse Jack Coburn (Wings Hauser) and demolition expert and general nutter, Nick Kowalski (John Matuszak). Together they are COMMAND 5! And as Command 5 under Captain Morgan's command, they get an awesome bullet-proof truck that make the Star Trek door sound when it opens its hatch, and an arsenal of the latest weapons (and motorbikes in the back of the truck) to wreck havoc with.

After a relentless training montage, the team are called in for the first assignment - a group called The Brotherhood, let by Hawk (William Forsythe), have taken the Governer's daughter hostage and hold an entire town to ransom. They demand that their people be released from prison or the bodies will start piling up. Who else can save the day but COMMAND 5 - they have badges on their jackets and their own jumbo jet, too!

This is top shelf entertainment right here, folks! I had a whale of a time with this obvious A-Team clone. Everyone gives it their all to blow up as much stuff as possible. John Matuszak's Kowalski is the highlight for me, being the massive fan of One Man Force that I am. Kowalski grins insanely while playing classical music as background to his planned detonations, or just screaming at and pushing down walls instead of climbing over them. His best moment would be carving a statue of The Thinker out of explosive clay and blowing up a bridge with it, haha! J. D. Smith's constant "like my daddy always said" lines get a bit tiresome, but it's never tiresome seeing Chris Winslow with an automatic weapon in her hands!

Wiliam Forsythe is a baddy in everything he plays, and there is a reason for that - he does it so well! He's pretty slimy as Hawk and you just love to hate him. Stephen Parr's Morgan is a quality leader, showing restraint and good leadership skills, managing to group this band of misfits together without the colossal force of Wings and Matuszak causing the whole thing to explode. Wings is his usual great self, and his schtick of drinking scotch with milk is pretty amusing. He has a temper on him and is the cause of both bar fights in the film. That's right we get bar fights (one with hookers and a pimp!); we also get motorbike chases and countless rounds of ammunition used to blow up large set pieces.

Being a TV movie that is almost viewable by younger folk - I'd let a 12 year old watch this, for sure - only two guys are killed during the film, and there is no blood splatter. But a HELL of a lot of cars and buildings are decimated! That's more fun anyway, right? BOOM!

The Final Fifteen:

Just how you think it goes! Hawk won't release the hostages, the Governor won't release the prisoners, so how do we resolve this situation? Send in Command 5! The team go covertly in with the attitude of "secure the hostages first, nail the punks second!". Explosions abound as Command 5 battle their way through Hawk's brigade of scum and rescue the hostages, with Kowalski throwing guys out of windows and Coburn throwing grenades at everything else. After a quick bike chase to catch Hawk, the film ends in the TV-cheeseball kind of way that even gets a "Merry Christmas" thrown in for good measure.

Sourced From:

Japanese VHS I picked up from eBay. It was made for TV so 4:3 is the correct ratio to watch this in. Distributed by CIC worldwide from what I can see.

Trailer:

Not a trailer, but it may as well be - the opening credits sequence that I recorded from my own tape. Sensational!

Quick Blast: Fallout (1999)

2012-05-13T10:00:00.000+10:00

Tagline:

The world is waiting...

Quick Blast Review:

It's the "future" (2015, which must have looked a long way away in 1999), and NASA is planning a mission to the new space station, Skyhook. On the trip will be space veteran J. J. "Jim" Hendricks (Daniel Baldwin, ) Russian cosmonaut Capt. Previ Federov (Frank Zagarino). Hendricks keeps failing the pre-flight test scenarios and is grounded, which he reacts to by resigning. With a space on the launch freed up, NASA takes the opportunity to get some repairs done to the space station by sending up Amanda McCord (Teri Ann Lin, Pure Danger). And a guy from Family Ties (Scott Valentine) is the ground commander.

Federov and co. make it to the space station and Amanda soon discovers that the computer on the station isn't broken, it's been sabotaged. That's when Federov and the Russians already aboard unpack some weapons and take over the place. He demands that Russia pulls back their invading army from his home country of Tajikistan or he will blow up world cities with satellites he now controls, thanks to the space station. This is despite the fact that NASA is an American organisation and has no sway over Russian politics, but whatever, this is a TV movie. Who's gonna save the day? Why that's freshly discharged "Jim" Hendricks of course, who will fly the experimental X33 shuttle - that launches like a regular jet plane (!!?) - along with a team of soldiers to infiltrate the station and take it back from the invading Russians.

This is decent but unremarkable, and chock-a-bloc full of stock footage. For two bucks I'm not complaining, and if you catch it on TV (where it belongs) then give it a go. The action isn't in massive quantities but its worth the price of entry alone to hear Zagarino's hilarious Russian accent! His true Zagarino accent shines through constantly, though he is still better than the Scottish-Russian abomination Sean Connery flaunted in The Hunt for Red October. Baldwin is okay enough as the Bruce Willis character, though action is not his forte. He sneaks around a lot and doesn't crack any good one-liners. He's pretty generic, overall, but serviceable. He should have gotten angry and thrown something, I would have cared a bit more.

The science is lame but it's the future, so they can get away with that; magnetic boots for gravity, though nobody's hair stands on end etc. There is still the special toilet with the hose pipe though. The opening act is ripe with dialogue such as "If you didn't have such a chip on your shoulder, you wouldn't have such a crack in your record."

The Final Fifteen:

Hendricks has snuck on board and freed the captive American astronauts, including Amanda who has been trying to send messages back to Ground Commander Family Ties using random bits of circuit she found in their holding cell. They manage to turn the life support power off to the station which co-incidentally gives the exact same amount of time to stop the satellites auto-firing their payloads - fifteen minutes.

Cue some wrestling and gun firing to and from Federov and the other Russians until he's finally taken out by Hendricks. The power is restored and the payloads aborted with, you guessed it, one second to spare. But that's not all; now Hendricks has to overcome his failed attempts during the opening acts' training scene and land the damn shuttle. Oddly the voiceover says "Catastrophic failure", fades to black, and then everyone is on the ground hugging and cheering at their safe return?!

Sourced From:

My bargain-basement two buck shop RAAM Multimedia DVD. Picture was fine though overly compressed, so in fast scenes it was a little messy. You get what you pay for!

Trailer:

The only trailer I could find was in German, which makes Zagarino's Russian accent even more hysterical!

Quick Blast: Ninja's Extreme Weapons (1988)

2012-05-09T10:00:00.000+10:00

Tagline:

The day of the Ninja is here!

Quick Blast Review:

Isn't that cover just the best? Ninjas with spiked knuckle-dusters and broadswords, helicopters, masked men with machine guns and a freaking jumbo jet crashing out of the sky and splitting in half.. being set on by an entire platoon of men. That is the best movie ever, right there. So... what the hell did I just watch!? It is impossible to do a proper review about this so I'm going to have to bullet point it.

There's a bunch of multi-coloured ninjas working for a mob boss in a wheelchair (who keeps telling us "I am the boss.. and don't you forget it!").
By multi-coloured I mean their clothing. These are all white men. One has a porno moustache.
Some sort of drug deal happens in the forest and a renegade Blue ninja steals the suitcase of drugs.
The boss drinks cans of Coke at a camping table.
Somewhere else, there's a bunch of Chinese people (apparently this was filmed in Hong Kong).
One of them is Sergeant Kim and he's a total playboy. He says lines like "Some people judge me for being a playboy... but I get the job done."
Kim cracks onto a singer in a nightclub. She's singing a completely different song to what we are actually hearing.
There's some army guys walking through tall reeds littered with skulls, after jade treasure in a mountain. They get attacked by a White ninja who disguises himself as a Chinese dragon with a flamethrower in the mouth. Then he literally does a "ninja vanish".
There seems to be a story about prostitutes tattooed with dragons being forced to work for an Underworld boss. I'm pretty sure it's not the wheelchair bound boss who drinks Coke, either.
The playboy is dubbed by an Australian voice actor. He gets attacked by randoms of the Underworld. He throws an old lady at them as defence.
Back to Ninja-land, the boss tells his Red ninja to protect his magic ring from his son who he can't trust. Also if the Blue ninja got a hold of it, the world would end.
The boss gets a full body massage from three Black ninjas.
We get a decent three-colour-Ninja fight. The Blue ninja flies horizontally through the air then does a quadruple backflip.
A chinese dragon is a great place to hide two guys with mullet haircuts brandishing machine guns. And they kill the parents of one of the prostitutes (yes we are back in the second movie again)
I think everyone in the Hong Kong part of the movie died except the playboy. I can't recall. No, I'm not re-watching.

As you can see this is basically two movies smashed together; about twenty minutes of cheap, Ninja related goodness and an hour of underworld prostitution rings and playboys dubbed by Australians. It should have been called Ninja Book-end.

Godfrey Ho, you've done it again.

The Final Fifteen:

The final fifteen is really the final five and the only thing truly worth seeing. The Blue ninja meets with the boss to discuss terms for returning the drugs. It's a heist of course and we get a Ninja battle. The best thing in the movie then happens - the crippled, wheelchair bound boss leaps forty feet in the air, landing on the Blue ninja. Why couldn't the whole movie be like that? Blue gets hoisted up a tree as punishment and the Red ninja retrieves the stolen drugs suitcase. When he opens it it's actually a bomb, and everyone except Blue explodes in a pretty satisfying, slow-motion death sequence.

Blue looks down from the tree and says "In the name of God, Amen."

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

Sourced From:

I have absolutely no idea how I got this tape.

Trailer:

Not a trailer but it's a scene from the Ninja portion of the movie.

Direct Action (2004)

2012-05-06T10:00:00.000+10:00

Tagline:

Can one man make a difference?

Movie Review:

It really is about time I reviewed another Dolph on the site. After all, excepting Schwarzenegger he is easily my favourite action star. There is something about this well-built Swedish brute (meant in the nicest possible way, folks) that keeps me coming back. His physique leads him to action films but I think it's his way of delivering lines that I enjoy so much. He always sounds like he enjoys his work so much. Direct Action is no exception, as the gum-chewing Dolph here again demonstrates.

Dolph Lundgren plays Sgt. Frank Gannon, a veteran member of the Direct Action taskforce - an elite force given special powers to clean up the city; and they have been mightily successful. Crime is at the lowest it has been in a decade. However, these statistics and extra powers have gone to the heads of the team who have taken their elevated stature as an excuse to commit crimes themselves. Profitable crimes, headed up by Captain Stone (Conrad Dunn, Death Warrant, Silent Trigger). All that is except Frank Gannon, who refuses to take any part and Sgt. Ed Grimes (Rothaford Gray, Exit Wounds, Max Payne) his partner who wants to protect his wife and children.

Gannon is assigned a new transfer as his partner, Billie Ross (Polly Shannon, No Contest, The Girl Next Door). When the corrupt Stone can't convince Gannon to take part in the scams he is caught, tasered and lined up to be executed by the other officers on the take. With the help of new partner Ross, picking off his would-be executors at a distance with an assault rifle, the two escape. Stone tries another tactic by implicating them both in the drug ring and issuing and APB for their arrest, for the murder of three police officers. As well as that, Sgt. Grimes' family is kidnapped.

It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest to learn that that Direct Action was meant to have been a Steven Seagal film. I'm only speculating here, but the good cop getting to the roots of corruption/mafia/drug syndicate plot is usually Seagal's signature. I am glad to see Dolph doing one of these too as he does a great job as the good cop, breaking in a new partner and taking down the bad cops in his unit. I had been putting off seeing Direct Action as it has a reputation of not being one of his better films. I disagree; this is a solid DTV Dolph on par with Command Performance, Direct Contact and The Mechanik, better than Icarus/The Killing Machine and FAR better than Retrograde and Diamond Dogs (in my opinion the worst of Dolph's DTV output).

Plenty of action to enjoy in this one. Dolph shows off both his hand-to-hand and foot-to-face unarmed combat skills, but also he gets to blast away with a pistol and machine gun frequently. His partner Ross gets many opportunities to wipe out bad guys with an assault rifle, which is pretty amusing to see a girl in full makeup, hair done for a night out and hooped earrings - standard police outfit? - not even break a sweat. Over the ten hours or so that the film takes place we see the relationship between Ross and Gannon establish very quickly and she takes her position as his new partner, covering Gannon's back as many times as he covers hers. He keeps offering her gum throughout the film stating "you don't know what you are missing out on" each time she refuses. She finally relents after being shot at enough.

The best thing about a Dolph action film versus a Seagal action film is that Dolph tends to not use stunt-doubles. Or if he does you at least cannot tell easily. The camera-work on Direct Action was solid and no ridiculous effects and zoomed-too-close action to ruin everything. Part of Dolph's Canadian-based film cycle (like Silent Trigger, Detention, Hidden Agenda) instead of the Bulgarian/Russian/Romanian set-pieces that would dominate his later work, the locations pass easily as the LA it is trying to portray; at least to an outsider such as myself.

This is a solid film with a solid final act and payoff. Gannon stays true to his badge and therefore gets shot at a number of times tracking down Stone and his grunts completing the drug deal with the Asian drug lords. Gannon and Ross show up with extra help from the CIA and after a sweet car chase dispose of them all... except Stone. He goes on to testify that everything is hunky-dory at Direct Action. That is until Gannon shows up in the car park, blows Stone's arse away, and spits his gum on the corpse! Recommended.

The Video:

Presented in the correct 1.85:1 16:9 ratio, as far as I can tell, the R4 DVD was only made available for rent. The R1 is easy enough to obtain online. The US Blu-ray is solid as well, though Region A locked. Runtime ~90 minutes.

Sourced From:

Ex-rental Australian DVD for a couple of bucks.

Trailer:

More Screens:

Quick Blast: Deadly Force (1983)

2012-05-02T10:00:00.000+10:00

Tagline:

The killer is too insane to be caught. This ex-cop is mad enough to try!

Quick Blast Review:

Stoney Cooper (Wings Hauser) is an ex-cop ex-husband making a living as a Private Eye cum vigilante in New York. When he hears that the duaghter of his friend Sam (Al Ruscio) has been murdered in L.A by a serial killer called 'X', Cooper flies out to investigate - though his help is not at all appreciated. His ex-wife Eddie doesn't want him there, his ex-Captain threatens to arrest him, and the local mob boss he had previously rubbed the wrong way is out to get him. Once he starts getting too close to the killer, he finds himself being shot at by even more people. Can Cooper catch the guy that a whole police force seems cannot?

Deadly Force is a strange one. It stands on that border between gritty 70's Dirty Harry style police thriller and 80's over-the-top action, taking portions from both eras. On one side the L.A. mob guys, the neon lights and the power-rock soundtrack cement its foothold in the 80's action film era - and the opening scene with Wings 'negotiating' with a dynamite-weilding terrorist by insulting him is very 80's. But the style of the (numerous) car chases, the well plotted and evolving police procedural storyline, and the almost giallo red-herring killers place it in the 70's. This makes for an interesting film that puts a lot more thought into the plot than the usual action film we review here. The secondary characters, particularly Cooper's ex-wife Eddie, are well established and all serve a purpose.

Wings is great and a total smart-arse throughout. He beats information out of people on one hand or tries to buy them off with the other. Being of cop vintage his weapon of choice is a pistol, but it's mainly him that is getting shot at. One hilarious scene sees Cooper being shot at with a machine gun, from an adjacent apartment block, while he is in the bath! Most of the rest of the film involves Cooper interviewing people and being chased in a car. I could have done without the nude hammock sex scene showing more of Cooper than Eddie, however. Keep an eye out for a short appearance of Estelle Getty as Wing's cab driver Gussie!

The Final Fifteen:

The cops have what they believe is the body of the serial killer, but Cooper does not agree. After another glorious car chase where both cars burst through a wall, Cooper begins his final hunt for who he believes is the real killer, dispatching his associates and taking out the main player in a pretty tense cat-and-mouse scene. To remind us it's an 80's action film, one of the final shots is the killer's car exploding in flames after Cooper shoots it in the boot.

Sourced From:

Australian PAL VHS released by Roadshow only a year after the theatrical run (pretty good for 1983-4). Solid full-frame picture that appears to be open matte, as I saw quite a lot of boom mic's! Not yet on DVD.

Trailer:

Quick Blast: Pray for Death (1985)

2012-04-29T10:00:00.000+10:00

Tagline:

Judge, Jury and Executioner!

Quick Blast Review:

Sho Kosugi is Akira, a family man and ex-ninja with a shady past he wants to forget. At his wife's request, he and his family of two sons - fantastically played by Sho's real life boys Shane and Kane - move to the USA to start a new life running their own business. The shop they buy from a retiring old man seems to have also been used as a storage place for gangs hiding stolen goods. When a priceless neckless goes missing, the top thug of the crime gang, Limehouse (James Booth) kidnaps Akira and one of his boys. Sho breaks free but Limehouse still believes he has the jewels. His wife and other son are near-fatally hit by a car. In hospital, Limehouse posing as a Doctor murders Akira's wife. With vengeance in his heart, Akira becomes a Ninja again!

This is a quality 80's Ninja film, complete with the token 80's synth-pop soundtrack. I think I enjoyed this even more than Revenge of the Ninja and Ninja III: Domination. This is definitely the most I've seen so far of Sho doing dialogue scenes, and although his accent is quite heavy, he is easy to understand and it adds to the realism anyway. Sho is on top form in the first two-thirds of the film demonstrating mainly defensive skills in hand-to-hand combat and utilising objects around him to his advantage. I was really impressed with Sho's offspring Shane and Kane! Both got in the thick of it and kicked bad guys in the groin or hit them with nunchucks, or simply use Ninja tricks to escape them - skills they learned from dojo training and watching The Black Ninja, their favourite TV show.

The film gets progressively darker as it goes on which I thought was done well. The kids fight against local bullies is light hearted, almost to the point of adding comical sound effects to it, and much of the early action is frenetic and artistic. However once his wife is murdered, the tone of the film becomes quite ugly, matching the mood that I can imagine Akira must have been in. Sho's acting ability is actually half-way decent, and he has the "I'm going to kill you" look that many try to emulate, and fail.

The Final Fifteen:

We get a glorious montage of Akira creating his new sword and performing a rite. Once he's in his Ninja costume, complete with the helmet and steel mask, Akira fights his way into the syndicate's mansion, dispatching guards holding uzis with shurikens to the hands and skull. It's actually pretty bloody stuff; lot's of close ups of wounds and sharp objects making those wounds wider. There is even the threat of a circular saw death! Glorious.

Sourced From:

Australian PAL VHS on the Palace label. From what I can ascertain, this edition is uncut. The US print misses some of the blood and gore; about 4 minutes worth. There is no official DVD yet, although MGM did show the cut edition in widescreen on American television. Seek out an uncut edition.

Trailer:

Want to see what Sho has been up to since leaving the cinema? Why, selling home exercise videos demonstrating stretch techniques using a towel. Towelcise!

Quick Blast: Blastfighter (1984)

2012-04-27T16:05:00.001+10:00

Tagline:

The Force of Vengeance

Quick Blast Review:

I have decided that in an effort to get more reviews on to the site, I will supplement my regular reviews with much shorter ones. These I have dubbed Quick Blasts (and thanks must go to my wife for that title suggestion!). These reviews will be two to three paragraphs at most, with fewer or even no screenshots, a trailer where possible, and a new heading called The Final Fifteen which describes how the movie pays off in the final (usually most explosive) fifteen minutes. You can skip this section to avoid spoilers. I hope you all enjoy these shorter reviews as much as the longer ones (if you enjoyed those at all!)

Blastfighter is a Lamberto Bava directed Rambo derivative. Michael Sopkiw (2019: After the Fall of New York, Massacre in Dinosaur Valley) is Jake "Tiger" Sharp, an ex-cop who served eight years behind bars for the murder of his wife's murderer. When he returns to his home town Georgia (where the film was actually shot), he is upset to see that the local hunters have taken the necessity of hunting for food into a mass slaughter for profit, selling deer and bear to Chinese herbalists for a small fortune. He tries to convince the local hunters to stop, but being rednecks they tell him to shove off with a "Yee-haw!". The violence escalates between the opposing forces until Tiger's daughter Connie (Valentina Forte, Cut and Run, Bodycount), whom he only just became re-aquainted with, is killed by the brother of his close friend, Tom (George Eastman, Anthropophagus, Stage Fright).

This is an awesome little action film, dressed with the extra explosions that the Italian directors of the 80's enjoyed adding to their films. It was a bit of a cack to see a thinner George Eastman in the film, having been mostly familiar with his work in Italian horror film. Sopkiw is great as Tiger, giving a restrained performance until the death of his daughter, where his screams of "CONNNIIIEEE!!!!" cause Tom to say to his brother "You've gone and done it now." And boy, had he ever.

The Final Fifteen:

Thus we commence the explosive hunt through the forest, seeing Tiger go up against trucks full of rednecks, all armed to the teeth, but not as armed to the teeth as Tiger himself. The title of this film refers to the ridiculous gun that Tiger carries, the Blastfighter, which as he says "is easy handling, lightweight, basically a riot gun with an interchangeable rifled barrel that will give you a 6" bullseye at 300 yards". With this gun he lines up shots from a distance as well as taking out bozos up close. It can fire rockets and smoke grenades, and can see in infra-red. There's enough exploding cars in the final fifteen to keep any action junkie happy!

Sourced From:

Reviewed from Australian PAL VHS released by CBS FOX which gives a good fullscreen picture. There is a new widescreen DVD available from Europe by AWE.

Trailer:

Ninja III: The Domination (1984)

2012-04-15T13:57:00.001+10:00

Tagline:

He's the ultimate killer. She's the perfect weapon.

Movie Review:

About a month ago, our esteemed colleagues at the Lost Video Archive came up with the idea of holding a Week of Hong - a retrospective set of reviews from guest bloggers, all reviewing films that star in some way the excellent character actor James Hong. I discovered the Week of Hong only moments after I posted my review for Jeff Speakman's The Perfect Weapon, which had a decent role for Hong in it as the lead bad guy, and was eager to jump aboard with another Hong film review. After scanning his vast IMDB filmography and deciding against doing Missing in Action (having watched it only a couple of months prior) I settled on Ninja III: The Domination, a film that I have had on VHS for a long time and been meaning to watch, having enjoyed previous Cannon ninja films Enter the Ninja and Revenge of the Ninja.

A Ninja with a bad moustache (David Chung) emerges from a secret cave with a stash of weapons and proceeds to lay waste to a VIP playing around on a golf course and his protective guards (the reason for this is never explained, from what I could tell). It's a fantastic opening act of darts shot into gun barrels (exploding the gun), shurikens to the hand, cop cars flying into rivers and helicopters crashing into mountains. It takes ten cops to finally subdue the Ninja, who pulls a Ninja-vanish act with a smoke bomb. Wounded and trying to elude the cops, he catches the attention of Telephone repair-woman Christie (Lucinda Dickey) who he insists (in Japanese) that she take his sword. As soon as she touches it, she feels the spirit of the Ninja and has flashbacks of each of the cops that gunned down the Black Ninja.

Returning to work she becomes a person of interest to officer Billy Secord (Jordan Bennett), assigned to the case of the mysterious Ninja deaths, and a potential love interest as well. There's no boobage in the movie, but there is implied boobage. Every night, Christie is awakened by strange, supernatural goings-on in her apartment (usually involving smoke coming out of an appliance, and the magic sword gifted to her by the Ninja floating in the air) that overcome her. Dressed in Ninja clothes, Christie will dispatch cops that subdued the Black Ninja one by one, and not know what happened to her when she awakes the next morning, covered in bruises and losing track of time. She is gradually overcome entirely by the Black Ninja; who will be able to save her from its clutches?

This is what I like to refer to as a slice of fried movie gold. There is nothing I didn't enjoy about this film. On the pure entertainment level, I think Ninja III is the most fun out of the three quasi-related Ninja films - the other two being Enter the Ninja with Franco Nero, and Revenge of the Ninja with Keith Vitali - all staring Sho Kosugi as a ninja, but as a different character in each. Bless Cannon Films for their dedication to the Ninja sub-genre of trash action film. There is so much 80's nostalgia to love in this film. I think my favourite scene that epitomises this is Christie, in her aerobics lycra gear and pair of Nike trainers, playing an arcade machine - with a trackball! - and listening to the generic power-pop, synth-heavy music of the time. It's only a quick camera pan but it could easily be the poster for this film. The music is a highlight, ranging from the aforementioned synth-pop to some suitable effective scoring for the Ninja scenes.

This is the Week of Hong, so where does James fit in here? Unfortunately what we ended up with here is very little Hong indeed. I can't really classify this as a bait-and-switch as Hong doesn't have top billing. I knew from the beginning that his involvement in the film would be as a secondary character, but I didn't quite think it would be tertiary character level. Hong shows up at about the 50 minute mark as Japanese spiritualist-for-hire Miyashima (complete with Fu-Manchu moustache and beard) a character that Billy takes Christie to to find out what force has taken hold of her.

While he's not in it for very long - ten minutes at the absolute most - Miyashima has a vital role in bringing the demonic spirit of the Black Ninja to the surface through Christie for all to see. Chained to the wall, Miyashima make Christie smoke some sort of pipe before chanting and calling the spirit forth who possesses Christie's body. The power of the Black Ninja is too great and he breaks free from the chains, barking in Japanese at Miyashima who begs for forgiveness, then screaming "I am a Ninja!". The spirit is eventually calmed and a tired, emotionally wrecked Miyashima tells Billy "There is one thing... only a Ninja can defeat a Ninja." Cue: Sho Kosugi!

Sho Kosugi is awesome in this. His eyepatch is magnificent and he uses it as a storage place for poisoned darts. The film really takes a sharp turn when he shows up at the half-way mark, ominously hanging around at crime scenes left in the wake of the Black Ninja attacks, planning his retrieval of the Ninja's corpse to perform a ceremony to stuff his spirt back into the body that it belongs. He provides the best action in the film without doubt, demonstrating the excellent skills he showed in previous Cannon Ninja films. Sho kicks a cop into a bin and throws belt-mounted shurkien at some others. He's got a bit of physical comedy in him as well, convincing two morgue workers to walk up to him then clunking the heads together, knocking them out! He does it with such a dry expression to make it funny.

This really is Lucinda Dickey's film, and for the third act a great portion of Kosugi's as well. It's a shame that she didn't do much more than this film and two Breakin' films, as she could have become quite the action starlet. She's easy on the eyes and can perform some decent movie-grade martial arts. I don't think she had a stunt double for the role either. She's no Cynthia Rothrock, that is a trained martial artist doing films - she is actually a dancer from the Solid Gold TV series who was picked up for a dancing role in Breakin'. The most dancing she does in Ninja III is during her aerobics training session. Her plight and to some degree her appearance remind me a lot of Sarah Connor in the first Terminator film, and Kassandra ("with a K") from Warlock. All three films feature a typical, young American girl who get's caught up in someone else's mess and has to grow as a person to survive it.

The final act is a sensational climax of cheesy Ninja action, with the now un-possessed Christie as an observer to a glorious battle between Sho Kosugi and the Black Ninja back in his original bullet-ridden body. There's plenty of reverse-jumps, backflips, sword clashes, Ninja-vanish smoke bombs and some early computer-graphic flying spirits and fireballs during the fight in a derelict building and into the desert. Kosugi, near defeat, loses his sword but Christie comes to the rescue and impales the Black Ninja with his own magic sword, who deals with his imminent death by spinning into the ground like a drill! Hilarious stuff.

Very little Hong, but a very good example of 80's Cannon action that embodies everything we love here at Explosive Action. Desperately needs a remastered DVD release so that it can join it's two prequels in Ninja Glory. They only way you will find this is VHS or grey market DVD, but I suggest VHS for that authentic 80's Ninja ambience. The US tape is the only uncut edition I think, with the UK (and probably Australian) tapes having some of the Ninja-ness censored.

Week of Hong Contributors:

Illogical Contraption - Bloodsport II and Bloodsport III

Fist of B-List - The Dynamite Brothers
From the Depths of DVD Hell - Big Trouble In Little China and Balls of Fury

Direct to Video Connoisseur - South Beach Academy and Caged Fury

She Blogged By Night - Seventh Sin

Booksteve's Library - Two China Girl s

Lines That Make Things - The A Team (TV episode)
Temple of Schlock - Hot Connections
Explosive Action - Ninja III: The Domination
Thrilling Days of Yesteryear - Classic TV with James Hong

Lost Video Archive - Teen Lust, Gladiator Cop, Cyber Bandits and Blade in Hong Kong

The Video:

The VHS I have is pretty wobbly and the print isn't the best. I don't think there is a really decent print of the film in circulation. Like I mentioned in the review, Ninja III badly needs a remastered DVD release. Runtime 94 minutes.

Sourced From:

Used VHS from eBay.

Trailer:

More Screens:

Past Perfect (1996)

2012-03-24T16:02:00.001+11:00

Tagline:

They came from the future... to destroy the past.

Movie Review:

Eric Roberts has done a lot of films. He's an actor we have barely scratched the surface of, appearing in everything from 80's classic Best of the Best, to 90's made-for-video actioners like Freefall and a slew of SyFy channel monster films in the 00's like Raptor, Cyclops and Sharktopus. It really was great to see him as the villain in The Expendables, as he played the role of a bad guy so well, but in Past Perfect he is on the other side of the law.

Past Perfect is a sci-fi action film from the good people at Nu Image. In an alternate 1996 that's only a slight exaggeration of reality, violent crime is at such a stage that even kids are gun and drug running. One group of such teenagers is led by a kid called Blade (Yee Jee Tso) and his associates Skull, Shy Girl and Rusty. These kids steal automatic weapons from drug dealers and know how to use them, blowing away a stack of other bad guys and even cops when trying to make their escape. The law is always on the side of minors in this society, so when Detective Dylan Cooper (Eric Roberts) catches one of them - Rusty - during an explosive car and helicopter chase, he has to act quick to get information on the other kids before he is released back to his parents.

It all gets a bit weird when three strange characters appear out of a portal in a junkyard and start hunting down Rusty's other gang members. These three people appear to be cops, but one is a woman with a mechanical arm (the braun), one is a guy with skin that looks like glue (the boss) and the other is Saul Ribinek (Unforgiven, True Romance, the boss in the series Warehouse 13, or other bad-action films like Memory Run or Hostile Intent) - the brains. The first of the three escapees are caught, tried for crimes they will commit in the future, and executed with some sort of super-Tazer. Then one of their eyes is removed (!), I guess as proof that the sentence was carried out. After finding the first and second bodies, Dylan and his hot partner Ally (Laurie Holden) try to keep Rusty safe as well as find out who is playing the vigilante cops.

This was a pretty good time. You had elements of I Come in Peace (with Dolph Lundgren) in the form of the cat-and-mouse style chases and the overall gritty atmosphere, and of course a lot of influence from Timecop (with JCVD). There was an onslaught of gun violence - somebody is always shooting at somebody else in Past Perfect - ranging from pistols to machine guns - from the back of vans, rooftops, running down the street, and the classic twin-gun shootout in a restaurant kitchen. If gunplay is your thing you will be happy with what is on show in Past Perfect.

The three future-cops were the best thing about this film. Nick Mancusco (Under Siege 2, Rapid Fire) plays Stone, a cop from the future (well, 2007) sent back in time with a mechanical arm wearing woman and a court record keeper to locate, convict and summarily execute individuals that will detrimentally affect the world of the future. He's the cold, heartless bad guy we all love to love and he takes great pleasure in his job as executioner. The woman with the mechanical arm, Zoe (Marcie Mellish) was a good hitman. The mechanical arm is not explained (though we see her putting it on) but it added some believable braun to her otherwise slim physique. Rubinek, simply referred to as Bookkeeper, plays the role sheepishly as it's evident it is his first time in the field, and he reluctantly reads out the sentence to the victims.

The special effects were pretty amusing and somewhat resemble a cheap version of those found in I Come in Peace, and perhaps American Cyborg. Zoe is in charge of these twin spinning pyramid things that are launched to hunt down victims and immobilise them. They look pretty crappy, but not as bad as the reverse-death effect we see. The science of the movie dictates that to travel back in time you need to be completely encased in a protective shield (a transparent glue), and if it breaks, you revert to the age you should be in the current year. If you aren't born yet, which is the case for one of the future-cops, you turn into a child, then a baby, and then vanish into your clothing! It's about as good as the logic in Timecop where you can't touch your past-self or you merge together into a screaming blob of goo.

Interesting fact: Eric Roberts and Yee Jee Tso went on to star opposite-each other again in the pretty awful Doctor Who movie made the same year, where Tso played a similar kind of role as Chang Lee and Roberts played the series best enemy and arch nemesis of the Doctor, The Master. That was probably the first time I had seen Roberts as an actor and it stuck with me for years, unfortunately not in a good way. Being the rabid Doctor Who fan that I am, seeing an American playing The Master was enough make me steer clear of Roberts for many years to come. Of course I now see the errors in my ways, and can actually see some good aspects to Roberts' portrayal of the classic villain.

Overall, I enjoyed this quite a lot. The action was fast-paced and pretty continuous, with rarely any dull moments to slow the pace down. The three characters from the future-world were great fun and it was good just to see Ribinek in something else. Roberts was solid looked to be having a good time with the character, even managing a quip ("You have the right to remain silent - forever!"). Laurie Holden works well with Roberts on screen though her character isn't anything special. The science was baloney, but inventive, and the explosions were plentiful and of a decent size. Recommended.

The Video:

I reviewed the R4 DVD put out by Reel Entertainment/Ninth Dimension. The film was presented 4:3 which may or may not be its original aspect ratio, it is hard to tell. The picture is mostly fine, but the compression on the disc was a little too high and in some fast-moving scenes pixelation is evident. The stereo soundtrack is nothing special and a little quiet, but is good enough. Runtime approx. 90 minutes.

Sourced From:

A department store for a fiver.

Trailer:

More Screens:

Hijack aka The Last Siege (1999)

2012-03-18T23:20:00.001+11:00

Tagline:

Never Surrender.

Movie Review:

I just can't get enough of these Die Hard clones, I really can't. Here we are again with a cheap made-for-cable film starring Jeff Fahey and Ernie Hudson called Hijack (and in some territories, The Last Siege), brought to us by our friends at Royal Oaks Entertainment, responsible for other cheapy action films such as Executive Command, Moving Target and Maximum Security. Sitting in a two-buck bin I couldn't say no to a cast this promising. The Lawnmower Man and the fourth Ghostbuster! What a great combo.

You can probably work out the drill here. Eddie (Fahey) is an ATF agent with a vendetta. He botches a bust operation to capture the ruthless bad guy Anderson by letting him get away and is fired. Being home with nothing to do except stew on the failed arrest causes a strain on Eddie's marriage to Senator's aid Valerie Miller (Beth Toussaint). She flies out to assist Senator Douglas Wilson (Hudson), who has a strong anti-gun viewpoint that is ruffling a few people's feathers. With no work keeping him in town, he decides to surprise his wife with a bunch of flowers on the train that she is on with the Senator. What nobody realises is that the Senator's regular security guard has been replaced with a new guy... and the train conductor isn't all he appears to be, yet he seems to be familiar to Eddie.

"Somebody's overridden the override system!"

This is decent enough time-filling material. You get exactly what you expect from a cheap Die Hard clone. Jeff Fahey takes on the role of Bruce Willis here, making himself scarce when the train is taken over by Anderson posing as the conductor and his team of grunts - the "Brotherhood of Vengeance" (?!) - who have placed a nuclear device on board. And just like any good Die Hard clone, he picks off the bad guys one by one until just the lead bad guy is left standing. He protects the senator, makes amends with his wife, jumps from a helicopter onto the moving train and derails it causing a massive fireball. I know I say this a lot, but you truly have seen all this before. But whatever, it was still entertaining.

You can't help but like Ernie Hudson, no matter what film he is in. He's just a likeable guy. Hudson gives a solid performance as the Senator and has a nice shouting monologue at the Anderson character about guns versus patriotism. He also has to deal with the ultimate irony of firing an automatic weapon at a person in the last act. One thing I didn't realise until afterwards is that Ernie Hudson Jr. is in the film, playing a small fry role as the ATF phone operator. Another little tidbit of trivia; the false security guy and Anderson's second in command is played by Patrick Kilpatrick - who also played a bad guy mercenary in Under Siege 2! Talk about type-casting.

"I like killing politicians. I'm good at it."

Oh, and speaking of Anderson; did somebody say.. Brent Huff? You got it! Bad guy Anderson is played by the same Brent Huff we've featured in Cop Game and Strike Commando 2, those glorious jungle films from Bruno Mattei. This was a real surprise to me as his name is not mentioned at all on the front or back cover of this DVD, and boy did I fist-pump the air when his name appeared during the opening credits. Of course it's a decade later so I wasn't expecting him to be a tough-as-nails mercenary. What we got was a refined and subtle manic leader with a plan, who mainly got his grunts to do the dirty work. I have to say I was disappointed in the lack of hands-on action Huff got in this film but he does play the restrained, articulate bad guy pretty well. I still wanted him to mow down people with a machine gun though.

Apparently scenes from this film were cut into the Brian Bosworth film Mach 2. I've not seen that one yet, and based on the scathing review over at our good friends The Direct to Video Connoisseur, I'm not likely to get to it any time soon. What I found interesting was that in their review, it's mentioned that Bosworth starts the film by jumping onto the back of a train and taking it over from some hijackers, spouting witty one-liners as he goes. I have to assume that it's the same train footage used from Hijack. I wonder if it's actually Jeff Fahey running around on that train in Mach 2, with only close-ups of Bosworth? Clarification on that alone makes me want to seek that film out.

There's a review on IMDB that refers to this movie as "Under Par: Dismal Territory", in an amusing and degrading reference to Under Siege 2: Dark Territory. That's a little unfair I think. You get what you pay for here - a made for TV clone of a bigger budget, bigger starred film. It kept my interest for 90 minutes, didn't particularly insult my intelligence more than any other action film, and was reasonably well acted for the most part. Under par? Perhaps. Dismal? Not at all. See it cheap or better yet, see it on TV.

The Video:

Pleasing enough fullscreen picture that just screams "midday movie" at you. Accompanying sound is as fine as it is unremarkable. Runtime approx. 90 minutes.

Sourced From:

Cheap $2 RRP disc from a variety store, put out by Payless Entertainment/RAAM Multimedia here in Australia.

Trailer:

Unfortunately I couldn't locate one, and there wasn't one on the disc.

More Screens:

The Perfect Weapon (1991)

2012-03-04T16:52:00.001+11:00

Tagline:

No Gun. No Knife. No Equal.

Movie Review:

Until recently, The Perfect Weapon was only available on VHS or a bootleg Australian DVD (mastered from VHS) that had made it's way worldwide due to the demand for this film. Finally in February, Olive Films in the US gave this one it's first DVD and Blu-ray release. It's always been renowned as one of, if not the, best film that Jeff Speakman was involved in so it's about time it got some loving, digital attention.

Jeff Sanders (Jeff Speakman) receives a distressed phone call from his long time friend and Korean shop owner, Kim (Mako). During his long drive back home to rescue Kim, Jeff reminisces about his past, which gives us the opportunity to see how he learned the martial art-form Kenpo at age 10, and how at age 17 is disowned by his father for being a bad influence on his younger brother. When he arrives at Kim's shop he sees Kim being threatened by local Korean mafia, whom he dispatches with a blinding array of punches, kicks and stick smashing.

Of course, the Korean mafia won't take this kind of insult calmly, and by the next day Kim has been killed by an unknown assailant (though we as the audience know who it is). When Jeff finds out what has happened, via his younger brother Adam (John Dye, Best of the Best) who is now a cop, he plans to take the law into his own hands, and after a routine 'weapons at the ready' montage, take down the heads of the Korean mafia.

"The Tiger is strong and fearless. The Dragon is full of wisdom."

This was absolutely amazing. Talk about a hidden treasure! Jeff Speakman's The Perfect Weapon is right up there with early Steven Seagal films. If you enjoy Marked for Death or Out for Justice, there's simply no question at all that you will like this one. The 80's period set-pieces (even though this came out in 1991, I'm calling it an 80's film) are fantastic. We get beat up brown undercover cop cars, flashing neon sign nightclubs, underground Asian mafia, a multitude of mullets and training montages. The movie starts AND finishes to the tune of Snap's "I've Got the Power". If that doesn't convince you then this is the wrong blog for you.

Speakman brings the Kenpo action fluently, which is no surprise as its the part of the film he doesn't have to act - Jeff is a 8th degree rank in American Kenpo Karate. His arts film very similar to early Seagal (who holds a 7th degree rank in Aikido) with a lot of hand-to-hand fighting. Seagal had his slap-fu, Speakman has this trick where he hits you around the face so fast you don't know what's going on. He only breaks it out once or twice in a movie (we saw it in Deadly Outbreak) but it's fantastic. He is also skilful with Kenpo Sticks, unleashing rabid wooden fury on a few occasions throughout the film, including a great one-against-three fight at a dojo and an even better one-against-four back alley fight. He's really at the top of his game here, and his prowess isn't watered-down by any romantic sub-plot either.

This film has the best secondary Asian character actors from the vintage 80's action period. First of is Mako from Crying Freeman, Sworn to Justice, Midnight Man and Fatal Mission with Peter Fonda. We also get James Hong (Missing in Action, Ninja III: Domination, Big Trouble in Little China) as the red herring bad Mafia boss, playing a suitably evil role as Yung. Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa (Mortal Kombat) who we recently saw in Tekken is Yung's Lieutenant, Kai, and while he doesn't get much to do, he has a pretty great fight with Speakman at the end.

There's a supremely awesome and recurring appearance of Professor Toru Tanaka (The Running Man, Martial Law, Hard Justice) - as Tanaka - playing Yung's hitman who sparked Speakman's initial revenge. This is probably the most I've seen of the Professor in a film and he's just amazing. He doesn't say anything except mumbling to himself manically in Korean. He takes two successive taser shots to the chest, after lifting car off his head. Totally awesome stuff. Tanaka can also take claim in this film to being the highlight of one of the best finale wharf explosions in cinema.

The prize appearance for me was the uncredited, blink-and-you'll-miss it scene in the nightlcub fight. Amongst all the bodies throwing themselves at Speakman was Al Leong! The same Al Leong from Die Hard, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Action Jackson, Big Trouble in Little China, Cage, Dark Angel, Steele Justice.. everything amazing from the 80's. He says nothing, hell he doesn't really do anything, but I still teared up when I saw him. I had to rewind to double check that it was him, but it's him. Fantastic.

There's a little bit of comedy in the film. I especially enjoyed a little throwaway scene showing Jeff's brother Adam trying to get information out of a restaurant chef, asking about Kim, receiving a "Yes!" and a box of Kim Gee. Adam tries again and receives another "Yes!" and another box of food. Giving up he says goodbye, to which the the chef replies in fluent English "Have a nice day." Champagne comedy!

I loved Speakman's Deadly Outbreak but this is the kind of action film I really get down with. I like to call them "catalyst revenge" films. All it takes is the death of your respective martial arts Master and it's on like Donkey Kong. It's completely obvious how it will all play out and that allows you to sit back and enjoy the martial arts and haircuts. We aren't very far into Speakman's career here at Explosive Action but I hope that some of his other films (off the top of my head with have The Expert and Street Knight to look forward to) have similar urban settings with gritty street-fights.

Mark DiSalle directed this. He was responsible for directing JCVD's Kickboxer, and was the producer on Death Warrant, Street Knight and Bloodsport. That's a pretty solid heritage to ensure you are getting a quality American martial arts film. He also played the football coach that tends to the oaf that young-Speakman knocks out cold with his kicks. Props must go to DiSalle for getting a live crocodile to appear in a tank at the movies' nightclub, The Croc Bar.

The Perfect Weapon is essential viewing for 80's and early 90's action fans. The DVD and Blu-ray put out by Paramount and Olive Films is the first time the film has been released legitimately since the days of VHS. Olive should be applauded for delving into Paramount's back catalogue and bringing this one to a new audience. If you read my old About page you'll see I harp on about how I missed out on obvious action films when I was growing up. Perfect Weapon is definitely one of those films. Buy it now!

The Video:

As mentioned above, we finally have a DVD and Blu-ray release courtesy of Paramount and Olive Films in the US. I can't speak for the DVD but the Blu-ray is All Region ABC and played perfectly on my Region B locked player. The film is presented in 1.78:1 widescreen and sports a healthy, natural grain that places the picture as vintage 80's action. Sound is a solid if unremarkable DTS Master stereo track. No extras, just a menu and chapter points, but who cares - this is Perfect Weapon on disc for the first time! Runtime 85 minutes.

Sourced From:

Amazon.com: Buy the DVD or Blu-ray.

Trailer:

More Screens:

Depth Charge (2008)

2012-02-21T23:58:00.001+11:00

Tagline:

A deadly weapon. A high profile target.

Movie Review:

After the awesome Deadly Outbreak from the review prior to this one, I was in the mood for another Die Hard in a Something type of film. After browsing the shelves I pulled out this one. Depth Charge, starring Eric Roberts and some guy called Jason Gedrick who doesn't seem to have much worthy of note since 1989's Iron Eagle. Still I quite like submarine films so the one-man-force deal should be fun, and RHI Entertainment are known for their decent bad-action and creature feature films.

On a routine training mission, the USS Montana receives a distress call from a sinking ship. Once they have assisted the refugees, seasoned naval officer Commander Krieg (Eric Roberts) seizes control of the sub along with the refugees, who are actually hired mercenaries. Now fully in control, Commander Krieg ejects the Montana crew to the (not so) sinking refugee boat and declares his demands to the President (Barry Bostwick, Spin City) via video feed; pay him the sum of One Billion Dollars (pinky finger to the mouth) or he will use the sub's nuclear warheads - and experimental stealth technology - to blow up Washington.... for world peace? What he didn't bargain on was medical officer Doc Ellers (Jason Gedrick, from (snigger) Desperate Housewives) and young sailor James Piersall (Chris Warren, from (haha!) High School Musical) hiding on board, and their uncanny ability to pick off his mercenaries one by one.

Well. That was that then I guess. It's hard to write about Depth Charge as it was just so.. bland. I was strangely intrigued for the most part and the 80 minute run time went by smoothly without too many groans at the bad acting (the President was hilarious and his aid was just.. terrible) but it's really just a 'blah' kind of film. You get that feeling as well when watching it, that the entire cast knew they were in a TV movie, that there were absolutely zero chance of getting an Oscar from this, so giving it your all wasn't a requirement.

This is Under Siege, Red October, Crimson Tide and Die Hard all wrapped into one low budget TV film. Gedrick is the star here; the Steven Seagal/Bruce Willis of the piece. He's okay in the role of the Doc and can fire an assault rifle, as well as kick and punch someone to the ground. The choreography in this was pretty average though so none of the fights are that great, but the gun violence is decent. He doesn't even spout one cool line in the film which was a huge disappointment. He takes Piersall under his wing, much like Seagal's Casey Ryback takes young Bobby Zachs under his wing, as the wise-cracking black sidekick - though Piersall is far less annoying than Zachs, thankfully. The mercenaries are all generic, right down to the 'hot but deadly' token woman.

Eric Roberts is of course why we are here and he acquits himself, in military speak, with an honourable discharge. He tries to make the best of what he has but he's obviously pretty bored with it. I also can't recall him leaving the bridge at any one point. They must have gotten in him to do his scenes in one day and paid him with cash. "Bada-bing bada-boom, I'm done." I don't blame him for going through the motions on this one. After all, he filmed this the same year as the SyFy channel film Cyclops. Poor guy. He gets to try a little 'acting' as the producers keep ramming home the fact that he's part delusional due to his pain medication, but otherwise he's just threatening his mercenaries and making small talk over the CB with Doc; that at least is funny, as Doc starts and ends every conversation with "Get off my sub!"

One thing irked me though. In Under Siege, Seagal is just the ships cook who happens to have formerly been a SEAL. In Depth Charge, JDoc Ellers is the ships doctor... who is given the launch codes to the sub missiles! That shit just doesn't happen. And just how were they transmitting live video feeds when submerged a hundred feet under water? No, no no no no...

The scenes outside of the sub with the President and his men are pretty poor. The script really is lifeless in these scenes, you can almost read word for word what they are going to say before they say it. "He was a loose cannon", et al. In bad action this can usually be funny but again, the laziness of this whole production made the scenes simply a recourse for getting from point A to point B. President asks "What's the situation?" and one of his dozen or so men and women say "Sir, he's demanding a billion dollars or he'll launch a nuclear missile at Washington." In one close zoom to the President's gloomy face I was on the edge of my seat waiting for the inevitable "God have mercy on us all." Unfortunately it didn't happen, or else I would have cheered.

I guess the overwhelming response I have to this movie is "Well.. I guess it could have been worse." And it definitely could have been. For a made-for-TV action thriller, it's not bad for 80 minutes. It's just not that good either. If it's on TV or a dollar pickup, and you simply have to see another Die Hard clone, it will do the job. But it's no Deadly Outbreak.

The Video:

The R4 DVD put out by RHI and Paramount sports a nice 16:9 transfer and strong stereo soundtrack. Runtime a lean 80 minutes.

Sourced From:

Ex-rental DVD for a buck.

Trailer:

More Screens:

Deadly Outbreak aka Deadly Takeover (1995)

2012-02-15T09:30:00.000+11:00

Tagline:

The fear is spreading.

Movie Review:

Not sure how we've gotten this far without a Jeff Speakman review on the blog. This one I learned about thanks to one of our readers Venom, who many moons ago suggested to me some of the best Nu Image titles to check out. Amongst the dozen or so titles was Deadly Outbreak. It's a tough one to find on DVD too, and I'm not even sure that it got a US or UK release. You can get VHS in those territories, but the disc I'm reviewing is the uncut Dutch release.

"Your party stinks. There's not enough ice cream and way too many clowns."

Jeff Speakman is Sgt. Dutton Hatfield, a special services agent tasked with escorting a group of scientists to a chemical plant in Israel. Unbeknownst to him and everyone else, the plane carrying the scientists was hijacked by Colonel Baron (Ron Silver, Timecop) and his team of mercenaries, who killed the original occupants and assumed their places. In Israel, Hatfield takes this team of "scientists" to the plant for their tour of the operations.

That's when Colonel Baron and his men unleash automatic weapon fury on the guards and take over the building, their ultimate goal being to steal a prototype chemical weapon from the head scientist, Dr. Allie Levin (Rochelle Swanson), and hold the world to random. Hatfield eludes capture and tries to restore order in what could have easily been called Die Hard in a Chemical Factory. Along the way he recruits the only other good guy survivor, one of the plant workers Ira, and the good Doctor herself.

Oh man, was this ever sweet! This has gone straight to the top of my favourite Nu Image films list, and up there with the best Die Hard rip-offs as well. I'm talking Under Siege and Sudden Death quality here. The action rollercoaster rarely ever stopped, and when it did it only stopped for Speakman to catch his breath before taking out more bad guys with a combination of automatic weapons, his fists and his feet. Speakman was the definition of cool. He muttered one liners to himself throughout the movie when toppling bad guys, but none better than when he blasts a guy in the crotch with a SHOTGUN and says "guess you forgot to wear your bullet proof cup." Fantastic!

This was cookie cutter stuff but it was done supremely well; at least when using the B-cinema scales. Ron Silver was totally awesome as the bad guy, and was downplayed and placid just like he is in Timecop with Van Damme. He has a very threatening persona and plays the Hans Gruber role perfectly. He has his henchmen to assist who are all straight out of the school of cliched hired goons. You got the guy with the long curly hair and uzi, the guy with the perm mullet and knives, the guy that gets too freaky with the token female and therefore is prone to a quick death by our hero. All we needed was Professor Toru Tanaka to turn up. In his place we do get a tall black man who enters a room with a machine guy and says "Take a seat!" before blowing everybody away. That was pretty cool.

The violence was pretty high in this. The opening takeover scene on the plane was just vicious and cold with one of the grunts shooting half a dozen passengers, completely unaware of his presence, in the back of the heads with a silencer. It was a little TOO much really, and I thought we were going to get a dark film. The film is big and loud like any good Die Hard clone. I suppose this was just the equivalent of the Die Hard "I suppose you're just going to have to kill me" brains splattered on the window scene - the standout vicious moment that you remember. Speakman cuts an unconscious man's achilles tendon and quips "if he wants to catch us, he'll have to crawl after us." Yikes!

As well as the gun fights we get quite a few examples of Speakman's martial arts prowess. So many guys get kicked off three story railings or flights of steps and fall in slow motion that I started to lose count. The scene in the bathroom shows Speakman can slap-fu as good as if not better than Seagal himself! There's also a sweet helicopter versus bus chase to look forward to, a huge car chase through the underground factory that sees hundreds of barrels get their comeuppance, Speakman makes out with the good Doctor, and just to round out the staples, he has to disarm a bomb by cutting the red wire! I'm not shitting you!

I can't say I can think of many other action films that take place in Israel. Not that you'd really be able to tell in Deadly Outbreak as the vast majority of the film takes place indoors, and the outdoors segments are just non-descript airports or highways. It's not like there were snipers on the Wailing Wall or anything. About the extent of it is a few accents and the military are wearing Israeli uniforms.

According to IMDB, this film was edited into Steven Seagal's Ticker. Now I've not seen Ticker yet so I'm not sure what parts Albert Pyun lifted for his movie, but that movie get's generally panned so he must not have picked the good parts. I find that hard to believe as there's very little here to dislike. Perhaps he only used a few minutes of soldiers running around and then built a crapcake on top of it? One day I'll find out when I sit down and watch it.

This is a great time. If you like Die Hard on a Boat/in a Car/on a train/in the Ocean/on the Moon kind of movies then you will dig this. It's actually quite similar to Michael Dudikoff's Strategic Command though this is far, far better. It's fast, it's violent, it has great bad guys, witty one liners and a great action star with Jeff Speakman and a cold hearted baddy with Ron Silver. I'm not really surprised that the action in this was so good as it was directed by long time stunt co-ordinatior Rick Avery, and lists Nu Image boss Avi Lerner as the executive producer. Definitely worth your time.

The Video:

Solid full screen video that doesn't look cropped from widescreen. I will mention that this edition is supposedly UNCUT when compared to a German edition. I'm not sure how it compares to any US or UK VHS. Runtime approx. 90 minutes.

Sourced From:

A seller on eBay for about 15 Euro + shipping. It's not an easy one to find! You might want to just get the VHS if that's easier.

Trailer:

More Screens: