MC_Lovecraft

Based solely on the fact that Pam Grier was listed among the cast, I decided to go ahead and watch Fortress 2: Re-Entry (2000).

Christopher Lambert is the only cast member from the original to reprise his role (John Brennick) for this low-budget follow up ($11mil budget vs $48mil for the original). Pam Grier plays the head of Men-Tel, but clearly shot her parts in a single afternoon, mostly in one room, so very disappointing on that front. I suppose that's why she wasn't credited higher despite legitimately being the biggest name in the film beside Lambert. Patrick Malahide plays Peter Teller, Pam's step-son and the supervisor of this movie's new and improved Fortress. It's in space this time. Karen is replaced by Beth Touissant (who played Tasha Yar's sister in an episode of Star Trek) but it's okay because she's even less important to the plot this time around despite playing exactly the same role in it.

The core group of cellmates this time around includes Stan (Willie Garson) who's implant (oh yeah, there are implants again) malfunctions, leaving him absent minded and delirious, Rivera (Liz May Brice) one of Brennick's fellow renegades, Marcus (Anthony C. Hall, who is not listed on IMDB or Wikipedia's pages for this film for some reason, despite having more lines than several of the other characters) the comic relief/tech guy, and Max (Nick Brimble) a secret Russian spy.

Teller runs the prison station with the aid of several bored guards and one total psychopath, Sato (Yuji Okumoto). The tension between Sato and his fellow guard Gordon (Fredric Lehne) gives them something to do other than be faceless goons, which is a decent effort for this kind of film. The prison itself looks worse than the original, and there are fewer shooting locations. Teller's office (and a few of the other locations as well) looks like a dressed-up hotel room, and the control center for Zed this time around is little more than a closet. Also Zed is a kiwi now, and hearing her pronounce 'Death Sentence' as 'Dith Sintince' every time is utterly hilarious.

The dialogue is still terrible, but less fun most of the time. There are a handful of good lines, mostly between Brennick and Marcus, with probably the only clever line in the movie coming while they discuss their escape plan, and building a particular device. The gang has just discovered that their implants allow Zed to see through their eyes, so when Brennick asks if Marcus can build the device they need, and he responds "With my eyes closed," Brennick quips back "That would be the way to do it." so kudos for the exactly one good joke in the movie.

The film manages to be both more and less sleazy than the original. There is no actual rape scene in this one, but the threat of sexual violence is still presented as a joke. There is a lot more nudity, but it is nearly all female. Definitely no conga line of wieners in this one. Pam Grier remains fully clothed as well, so further disappointment abounds.

The plot is essentially the same as the original. Brennick gets caught while on the run with his family, including their now seven year old son Danny (Aiden Ostrogovich), and is spirited away to a supposedly inescapable prison. The actual escape plot is a little more involved this time, and there are a lot of little moments that make me think someone in the writer's room actually cared about this one. It wasn't enough to right the ship, but it was enough to keep me entertained long enough to finish the film. The two characters that sort of sparked my interest, Rivera and Max, get a smidgen of plot focus (and Rivera's breasts get some camera focus) but are left underutilized like many of the best elements of this film.

Overall this is an uninspired follow-up with bad CGI, bad miniature work, and a criminal under-use of Pam Grier. I'll give it back the half-star I shaved off of the original because they made some progress on the sexual assault front, but that still leaves this one hovering around 2.5/5. I would only recommend this one if you saw the first one and loved it exclusively for Christopher Lambert's performance, because there's not really anything else from the original here, and less to recommend it on its own merits.

My final thought is that Wikipedia claims this is an American-Luxembourgish production, and I am just floored at the idea that this is what Luxembourg is doing with all of that gold they have. They're the richest country in the world by density of capital, and they apparently use their hoarded lucre to make bad Christopher Lambert vehicles. I thought that maybe Lambert was from Luxembourg, given his bizarre accent (despite the fact that I had always assumed he was French-Canadian), but that isn't the case. He was born in New York and raised in Switzerland, by French parents. What mad Luxembourgish person decided that the world needed Fortress 2, and why? Anyway, I'm going to watch something with more Pam Grier in it next time.

Tonight I pulled down a DVD that I got from a garage sale and promptly forgot about for years, Fortress (1992).

I can't believe I had never seen this movie before. I knew from quickly scanning the case that it starred Christopher Lambert (Highlander) and Kurtwood Smith (That 70s Show, RobCop), but I was not expecting to see my favorite actor of all time, Jeffrey Combs, especially in such a prominent role. There is almost no marketing copy on the case, so it was a hugely pleasant surprise.

The movie takes place in the distant future of 2017, when the United States has implemented a one-child policy and total ban on abortion, in a flatly contradictory scheme to control a booming population (and harvest babies from newly criminalized mothers). Lambert plays John Brennick, husband to Karen (Loryn Locklin) who is pregnant with her second child. While trying to cross the border into Canada, where they can have their child in peace, the couple are captured and sent to The Fortress, a massive underground Panopticon, lorded over by Poe (Kurtwood Smith) and the AI control system Zed-10 (Carolyn Purdy-Gordon).

The Fortress is a private prison run by Men-Tel, and they treat the prisoners to a hilarious guided tour with heavy reliance on the slogan/motto "Crime Does Not Pay." Zed-10 and Poe inform the prisoners of the security measures in place, including the 'Intestinator,' a combination belly bomb and remote pain device. There are also red and yellow lines that the prisoners are not supposed to cross, upon pain of death. As soon as this is established we see a prisoner cross those lines and set off his Intestinator, and then the lines are never seen or mentioned again. Just a tough break for that guy I guess. The cells within the prison have laser-grid bars, and a series of ceiling-tracked robot cameras serve as Zed-10's eyes and ears. We get to see a surprising amount of full frontal male nudity as the incoming prisoners are processed, which is the only nudity in the film apart from a psychedelic wet dream reconstructed by a computer later in the film, so points for breaking the mold there.

After the tour, Brennick meets his cell-mates, including Gomez (Clifton Collins Jr) the other newbie, Abraham (Lincoln Kilpatrick) the old timer, Stiggs (Tom Towles) the skinhead rapist, and D-Day (Jeffrey Combs) the hippie-dippy bomb-maker. Another prisoner, Maddox, is alluded to but not seen. Stiggs and Maddox are purely stereotypical prison skinheads, and they attempt to rape Gomez pretty much as soon as the prison part of the film starts. It's cheap, gross, homophobic, and easily the worst part of the film. It's a pretty graphic, if brief, depiction, and the only redeeming factor is that it's not played for laughs (in that one scene at least, there is some other homophobic stuff sprinkled throughout).

Zed-10 and Poe are the weirdest part of the movie. She has a camera that can see prisoner's dreams, and seems to be a fully general AI. She and Poe run the prison together, and neither one seems to be totally in charge. Zed-10 controls all of the infrastructure, but we see Poe talk her into all kinds of things, often by making emotional appeals. The best line in the movie is when he yells through a locked door, trying to convince Zed-10 to open it, "Do you know what they'll do to you? You'll be lucky if you end up a Speak-and-Spell!" Over the course of the film we learn that Poe is a cyborg, and that he himself was a baby taken by Men-Tel under the one-child policy. He was modified as an infant and spent his entire life in the control room of the Fortress. Clearly the experience has taken a toll on him, because he spends his time watching the wet dreams of prisoners, to Zed-10's consternation, when he should be punishing them for 'unauthorized thought processes'. The more we learn about Men-Tel and the cyborgs, the more horrific they become, and it's honestly a very effective slow-burn escalation.

A lot of crazy shit happens in this movie. There is a fun gyroscope ride that wipes your brain, leading Karen to use Zed-10's dream camera to Inception her brain-dead husband back to life. Brennick gets savaged by dogs, beaten to a pulp by Maddox, and Intestinated all in one day. D-Day uses the power of magnets to remove everyone's belly bombs, and some fun is had with them after that. Several people get just massive holes blown in their torsos, and once the cyborg soldiers start dying we see some excellently creepy practical effects for their innards, all caked in blue goo. Zed-10 possesses a truck.

I just love Jeffrey Combs' commentary on everything as it happens. When they first take out one of the cyborg guards, he pokes around in the innards, muttering to himself "the shit they're coming up with these days!" He also refers to the bombs in their Intestinators as 'TNT on PMS' which made me giggle a little. Unfortunately, this movie conforms to the standard model of dystopic actioner, and everyone apart from the core couple has to die before the runtime is over, and D-Day is no exception. He gets a triumphant send-off which is nice, but it would be great to see one of these super silly action movies where a few more of the secondary characters make it to the end credits. They even get Gomez in the last few moments, and Abraham was marked for death from the moment he appeared on screen, in all his budget Morgan Freeman glory (He's the other one I would have liked to see live, the non-rapist cellmates were both fun characters with more stories to tell, they should have lived).

This movie is pretty stupid from start to finish, but there are so many elements that I love about it, it's hard to decide what score it deserves. I think I'm going to call it a 2.5/5. If the completely unnecessary prison rape trope was excised completely, I would bump it up another half star at least, but it's more than just a line of dialogue and so it has to be reflected in the score. With that major caveat, I would still recommend this one for fans of Christopher Lambert's hilarious accent, Kurtwood Smith's unnerving smile, or Jeffrey Combs' genius everything.

I went ahead and made Deep Rising (1998) the finale to my underwater marathon.

Released in '98 rather than '89, Deep Rising is a fun, dumb, summer schlockbuster.

This movie has a pretty stellar cast. Treat Williams, who I will always love for playing Berger in the Hair film adaptation, plays Finnegan, a hopelessly trusting mercenary boat captain of some sort, who lives by the motto "If the cash is there, we do not care," a credo that immediately lands him in hot water as he takes on a crew of heavily armed criminals without even asking where they are going. Finnegan's ship is crewed by Joey the engineer (Kevin J O'Conner, Beni from The Mummy (1999)), and Leila (Una Damon) who dies so early and unceremoniously that I was sure it was a fake-out all the way until the credits rolled. The fabulous Wes Studi plays Hanover, the leader of the thieves, and his gang includes some great character actors, particularly Jason Flemyng and Djimon Hounsou. Simultaneously with Hanover's heist, cat burglar Trillian (Famke Janssen) is also attempting to rob the floating casino that serves as the location for most of the movie. Anthony Heald rounds out the main cast as the loathsome capitalist behind the Argonautica cruise ship, Simon Canton.

The dialogue is truly terrible, but in a way that wraps around to being fun again. Everyone speaks exclusively in cliches, and the first few minutes include three different characters angrily shouting "X, my ass!" in a way that lets you know the screenwriters thought they were really doing something. The little moments between characters are frequently funny, even if no line of dialogue ever feels like it was delivered by an actual human being. I think my favorite moment is a one such quiet exchange between Finnegan and Joey; "Whatcha got there? Peanut. Peanut? Peanut."

The basic plot is that Hanover's crew have hired Finnegan to get them to an undisclosed location along with a cargo that turns out to be a bunch of torpedoes. They plan to rob the vault of the Argonautica and then scuttle the ship. Canton, the businessman, serves as their man on the inside, hoping to cash in on the insurance policy for the boat to bail him out of his poor financial decisions. These schemes are interrupted by the presence of giant, tentacled worm monsters from the deep. They aren't mutants, or aliens, or prehistoric crustaceans this time, just a nasty beastie that apparently lives in the area, according to the opening text dump. The creatures quickly consume nearly everyone aboard and our heroes have to make their way around the stricken vessel, avoiding the monsters and searching for the loot.

Treat Williams looks and acts bizarrely like Lonestar from SpaceBalls in this movie, but everyone else is so ridiculous that it doesn't stand out as an oddity. Famke Janssen is gorgeous and fun, while Hanover's crew all chew the scenery like mad dogs. Joey was the standout character for me though. He plays the long-suffering-nerd archetype, and does it well, although it really bothers me that his relationship with Leila is made use of in a scene exactly twice before she is killed, and he spends the whole movie not knowing that she's dead, until the end, and then he goes right back to wisecracking after a moment of emotion. The writers clearly did not have a strong direction for his character, so he ends up as the repository for all the comic relief jokes that didn't fit anyone else. The fact that Kevin J O'Conner is genuinely super funny turns the role from one that could have been incredibly abrasive into a solid comic sidekick.

The CGI for the monster is very inconsistent. There are a couple of shots that look very good, especially for 1998, and then there are plenty that look just bad, even for 1998. It was a very ambitious creature design, and I feel that it mostly works, but I will always dock points for CGI creatures where they could have been done more effectively with practical effects, and I do feel that is the case here. The limited locations in the film meant that they could have spent the time putting in place some really good looking animatronics and puppets, but they went 100% digital all the way. The explosions in this are also just terrible, copy-pasted stock effects. I should probably also mention the stupid guns Hanover's crew use. They have rotating-barrel assault rifles, like little mini-miniguns, apparently the cutting edge hardware in China. There are just so many problems with them, but the question that hangs over it all is why someone thought that this movie about CGI tooth-worms needed a fictional firearm in the first place. The prop designer must have been the director's nephew or something.

I had a blast watching this one, but it is truly trash-cinema. I'll give it 3/5, and that's probably too generous.

I continued the underwater theme today with Leviathan (1989). Another of the 1989 underwater thrillers, this film follows almost exactly the same beats as DeepStar Six, but I feel that it has both higher highs and lower lows than that one.

Our team of underwater roughnecks this time are miners extracting silver from the sea bed. I have no idea if this is an economically viable setup, or even if there is silver at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean, but it could not matter less, because it never comes up in relation to the plot.

Peter Weller plays Beck, a geologist tasked with leading the mining team. He is completely monotone the entire film, and I can't decide if he hated making this movie, or if he's just like that. The only non-RoboCop role I have seen him in prior to this was Buckaroo Banzai, where I also noticed that he had a particularly flat aspect compared to the rest of the cast. Was Weller typecast as the stone-faced straight-man, or is this just how he performs every role? If so, I can see why he was picked for RoboCop in the first place. It's not a bad performance exactly, it's just that his emotional reactions (or lack thereof) are jarringly at odds with the scenes happening around him. If he was going for cool and unflappable, it kind of works, but Beck's character arc in this film is about gaining the confidence to stand up to his corporate overlords, so having him be cool as ice from the start is at odds with the text of the film. I'm probably overthinking this, because I want to like Peter Weller, but so far the first RoboCop is the only movie where he seemed to understand the assignment (Although to be fair, he's barely in RoboCop 2 at all).

Richard Crenna (Trautman from First Blood!) plays a world weary and cynically detached Doctor Thompson, in probably the standout performance of the picture (other than Jones). Daniel Stern (One half of the Wet Bandits from the Home Alone movies) plays Six Pack, the requisite drunken sex pest member of the crew. Williams (Amanda Pays) is a posh and proper Brit, who fills the role of Beck's love interest. Cobb (Hector Elizondo) and Jones (Ernie Hudson, Winston from Ghostbusters!) are miners and good union men. Bowman (Lisa Eilbacher) plays the apparently also requisite role of 'girl who likes the drunken sex pest character'. DeJesus (Michael Carmine) is the final member of the team, and I thought he was going to basically be analogous to Miguel Ferrer's character in DeepStar Six, but that ended up being Doc Thompson. Cult movie regular Meg Foster plays Ms. Martin, the human face of Tri-Oceanic, the corporation which owns the mining platform, and who repeatedly delivers the news that the team is not going to be rescued.

The creature in this movie is both far creepier and better looking than the crustacean in DeepStar, and the plot nonsense around its creation is a lot of fun. Basically, the russkies were playing around with genetic engineering, trying to make a fishman, and made something much worse instead. This picture heavily borrows from The Thing, in addition to the standard Alien stuff, and the body horror is done pretty effectively. I noticed that this movie had almost triple the budget of DeepStar, but it really doesn't look like it apart from those effects. The diving suit sequences are great, but there is almost no actual underwater footage in this one, and much fewer miniatures. It doesn't look worse than DeepStar, but apart from the creature, it doesn't look better either. They just failed to make back their budget, so it seems like the audiences felt the same way at the time (DeepStar Six made almost their whole budget back, but certainly was not a success either).

The chemistry between the characters is somewhat lacking, and while there are some funny lines, there doesn't seem to be the kind of easy camaraderie among the crew that is so important for establishing audience buy-in in this kind of movie. They just don't seem like people who have been working together for 87 days at the start of the film. That said, Hudson's Jones is a welcome ray of sunshine in a number of scenes (even if he's complaining in most of them) and his comedic chops do a lot to carry the movie. That's probably why he was one of the longest surviving crew-members, somewhat contrary to the stereotype (Although ultimately giving in to it in a frankly disappointing display. I wanted Jones to live, and his death was not cool enough to be better than letting him survive in terms of audience satisfaction. The movie was already basically over. That was probably the lowest point in the film, which sucks because it was during the climax. This parenthetical has gone on way too long now.) and why he was the only crew member really shown to have a relationship with more than one of the others.

One of my favorite lines actually was delivered by Weller. He threatens Six Pack at one point, telling him "I'll pop your top. All six of em". At least, I assume that was a threat, it kind of reads a little bit like homoerotic innuendo. The true comedic standout, Jones, responds to the news that Six Pack has some kind of skin condition with "The only 'skin problem' I see is white people," to the white doctor, which is pretty hilarious. Upon the revelation that the creature has eaten the blood supply in the infirmary, he shouts "we got a goddamn Dracula in here with us?" and I will never not find it funny when people refer to all vampires (or blood-sucking lamprey creatures) as Draculas.

While DeepStar focused mostly on stealing the suspenseful elements of Alien, Leviathan opted to lift more of the grungy industrial vibe, and the flamethrower specifically. We only get to see them used briefly, but for much of the film members of the crew are carting around a set of flamethrowers that would not look out of place in Warhammer 40K, as well as some other formidable looking chainsaws and pole-axes.

The action is fairly well paced, although as mentioned, the emotional responses by the characters to what is happening to them are bizarrely muted, again with the exception of Jones. I'm fairly sure that the ending was actually at least two different endings that were cut together, because we see the creature pretty definitively die on-screen, and then it returns to kill Jones. The post-rescue scene has a comedic tone to it that is completely at odds with the entire rest of the movie, culminating in a slapstick gag where Peter Weller punches a woman in the face (with a comic sound effect) and then makes a quip about it. I am convinced they added that bit after realizing that Beck's character arc didn't have a resolution without a confrontation with his boss, because his core flaw had been established as a reluctance to stand up to her, and he doesn't do that in a meaningful way prior to escaping the mining platform.

Overall I enjoyed this one maybe a little more than DeepStar Six. The plot is more ambitious, and the creature far more effective. That's why I feel weird about this, but I'm also going to give it a 3.5/5. I think watching this movie did more to make me cognizant of DeepStar's structural flaws, many of which it shares with this movie, than it did to leave a distinct impression. DeepStar probably should have been a 3, or even a 2.5, and this one only squeaks over to a 3.5 because the creature is so much better, and Ernie Hudson put in some real work here.

We've been getting rain for the first time in months, and I wanted to celebrate with some underwater films. Tonight I watched Deepstar Six (1989).

1989 saw the release of about a billion underwater thrillers. The Abyss, Leviathan, and even The Little Mermaid came out that year. Deepstar Six falls into the sub-category of underwater films that were also Alien rip-offs, which is not a small number, but I feel it handles the premise fairly well. For what it's worth, this one was a TriStar picture, and that Pegasus (especially the classic version) has rarely steered me wrong.

The plot follows a team of Navy technicians working on a deep-sea underwater platform to install missiles on the seabed. The project is apparently headed by a private citizen, Van Gelder (Marius Weyers), and he is pressed for time for some reason. This urgency leads him to rush the job and call for his team to detonate explosives over an undersea cavern. The entirely predictable consequences of that act play out over the rest of the runtime.

I was happy to see Miguel Ferrer again, and he had a sizeable role in this film as Snyder, which I enjoyed immensely. The cookie-cutter 80s action badass lead is McBride, played by Greg Evigan (Looking this guy up led me down a rabbit-hole ending in TekWar, a sci-fi series by William Fucking Shatner). There are three women among the crew, which was a refreshing gender balance for this kind of movie. Collins (Nancy Everhard) is McBride's love interest, and I'm not sure what her actual navy job is. Scarpelli (Nia Peeples) is some kind of scientist, and she is the first to raise concerns about the cavern and its possible inhabitants. Dr. Norris (Cindy Picket) is the base's medical officer, and one of the most level headed and competent members of the crew. Captain Phil Laidlaw (Taurean Blacque) does a serviceable Carl Weathers impression, aided by a glorious mustache. A young Elya Baskin also appears in this as a geo-scientist of some kind. Thom Bray and Ron Carroll play submarine pilots and the first hapless victims of this film's creature.

The last member of the crew is Richardson, played by Matt McCoy. I had an instant dislike of Richardson, and I couldn't put my finger on why (other than the fact that he's a smarmy, leering creep in this movie), so I googled him and realized that he's the bad guy from that episode of Star Trek where Troi and Crusher do jazzercise in the hallway.

The miniatures and practical effects, as well as the designs of the mini-sub interiors were all excellent. This film had a budget of only 8 million dollars, and they spent their money well. It's not the best looking movie that came out that year, but it's far from the worst. The creature design is great, and Sean Cunningham does a good job of teasing it out over the course of the film. The first time we see the creature, it has already claimed several lives, and it erupts from a hatch like an aquatic Graboid. That first look is impressive, but the monster has a few more tricks up its sleeve that keep the tension up even once it has been partially revealed. There are some very nice gore effects, including a chest explosion from a shark dart.

The crew have a chemistry that works, despite being so clearly cribbed from Alien, down to the breakfast table they all talk shit at. Both the Navy folks and civilians, with the exception of Van Gelder, exude an easy blue collar competence that I appreciate in this kind of movie. Snyder is visibly at the end of his rope from the first moment, but the other crew members manage him to varying degrees of success, with the familiarity of people who have been living and working together, in tight quarters, for months. The dialogue is cheesy, and most of the jokes are lame, but there are moments of real humanity between the crew, and especially between each of the crew members and Snyder, as his mental state deteriorates.

The sequences that were actually shot underwater were well done as well. The movie takes the time to establish that McBride can hold his breath for long periods without needing to spell it out, or like lampshade it with a swimming trophy in his bunk, which I appreciated. In general all of the action and stunts were quite grounded, and the only places where the budget really showed through were in the exterior miniature shots of the mini-sub rescue scene, because the miniature kept moving around in ways I'm pretty sure it wasn't meant to.

In the latter half of the movie things conform pretty closely to the formula for 80s thrillers, with each character revealing some heartwarming personal detail shortly before they are killed off, and a final couple forming as the survivors are picked off. Greg Evigan does a serviceable job as McBride, but neither he nor Nancy Everhard's Collins have much in the way of charisma, and once they are the last of the crew left alive, it's kind of a relief that the movie is nearing it's explosive conclusion (that would be recreated almost exactly in Deep Blue Sea years later). That's not to say that I didn't enjoy this one, I very much did, but the core couple are not the strongest part of the film.

One last thing that I thought was funny is how casually it is revealed that the missiles they are installing are nukes. I guess it would have been obvious in 1989, but the cold war was in its last sputtering months when I was born (at least according to the history books I read in school, I imagine the books written in the future will have something different to say about this period) a few years later, and that subtext completely flew over my head until it was spelled out. The base is also powered by a nuclear reactor, which provides a nice ticking clock for the climax, as it approaches meltdown.

Overall, this is a fun mashup of genres that failed to really stand out from the crowd upon release, but I think it's one of the better attempts to cash in on the trend of the year while still making something watchable. I give this one a 3.5/5 stars, mostly for the miniature and prop work, and Miguel Ferrer's performance as Snyder.

Now, the most important question, has anyone here watched TekWar? I am so tempted to binge watch the series, but I can easily see it being the kind of thing that's not even 'so bad it's good'. I love Bill Shatner, but the man has made some real turds in his time.

I followed up Gymkata with Bloodsport (1988).

Let me begin by saying that the real life Frank Dux is a delusional fraud, and literally one of the subjects of the original Stolen Valor. For the rest of this review, you can assume that any time I refer to Dux, I am referring to the 100% fictional character, and not the real-life fraudster.

The story of Frank Dux (in one of Jean-Claude Van Damme's first leading roles) is a simple, bloody spectacle. Dux is a young man who was taken under the wing of a world-renowned martial artist and who wishes to achieve the dream of his master's late son to seize victory in the Kumite. The Kumite is an underground, full-contact martial arts tournament held every five years by a clan of ninjas to determine who their greatest fighter is. The Kumite depicted in the film is the first time the event has been opened up to westerners, and fighters from all over the world have flocked to Hong Kong to take part.

Dux is some kind of military badass, and he has to keep his participation in the tournament a secret from the higher ups, who are apparently more concerned with him getting hurt in an MMA fight than whatever it is that he does for the military. Not getting shot at, I guess. Maybe he's a translator or something, and that's why they care so much about him? In any case, he goes AWOL and two agents (one played by a young Forest Whitaker) are dispatched to ineffectually tail him and periodically threaten him with tasers.

On his way out of the country, Dux stops at the home of his aging master, Tanaka (Roy Chiao) and we are treated to a flashback sequence that details all of Dux' history with Tanaka, while occasionally cutting back to Van Damme's impassive face to remind us that there's a present-day narrative that we'll be getting back to any day now. Most of the training montage content of this martial arts flick is also flashback content, like a delicious trope sandwich.

Once he's in Hong Kong, Dux quickly encounters Ray Jackson (Don Gibb), a foul-mouthed and publicly drunken sex pest, but an instantly loyal friend to Dux. Gibb's performance reminded me a lot of Mick Foley's in-ring persona Mankind, and I kind of wonder if he was a fan of this movie. The two men share a strong physical resemblance as well. Leah Ayres plays Janice, a reporter in Hong Kong to uncover the secrets of the Kumite, and to be Dux' love interest.

The Kumite takes place within the Kowloon Walled City, which is a fascinating little bit of geography itself that sadly (or happily, probably, I never had to live there) no longer exists. It is also apparently regulated by the 'IFAA' or the International Fighting Arts Association. It's just so like a sports movie to have an organizing body for an illegal underground fighting ring. With the regulatory body apparently comes a need to demonstrate that you belong in the tournament, which Dux does by performing the Dim Mak, the 'death touch', on a stack of bricks, shattering the bottom brick but leaving the others intact. It's a fun moment.

The tournament makes up most of the rest of the movie, and it's pretty great. Lots of different fighters with different styles get to show off, and despite being coordinated by real-life fraudster Frank Dux, the fight choreography is more than competent, it's flashy and fun. The Heel role is filled by Chong Li (Bolo Yeung) who performs with charm and style. He does the Terry Crews jumping pecs thing a lot too, which is fun. The editors did him a little dirty by not dubbing in any sound for his cheers and celebrations, making him look like a silently screaming weirdo in those sequences. Jackson abuses his opponents on the mat with the drunken grace of a trailer park wrestler, which is a nice contrast to Dux' more refined and reserved style. They both make really wild facial expressions though, which is great. The fights are filled with great moments, like Dux uppercutting a sumo wrestler in the 'nads, and Chong Li snapping a kick-boxer's femur.

The dialogue in this film is serviceable, with some genuinely funny jokes sprinkled throughout, and a lot of line readings that are elevated to unintentional comedy by their scenery-chewing deliveries. Probably the best line is Jackson retorting "I ain't your pal, dickface!"

This movie mostly takes itself very seriously, which is funny because it is a deeply silly premise and the lead actor could barely speak English at the time. The blend of unintentional humor and solid fight sequences make for a thoroughly enjoyable watch, and I feel like this one is a solid 4/5 stars. The end credits begin with a series of title cards claiming a bunch of bullshit about Frank Dux' mythical achievements, but they're worth ignoring because the credits roll to the theme song 'Fight to Survive' which is a fucking banger. I recommend this one if you enjoy martial arts flicks, goofy Orientalism, or want to see Van Damme in one of his first roles.

I started today off with Gymkata (1985) because I couldn't get the subtitles to work on my copy of Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, and the dubbed version doesn't translate the on-screen text.

Gymkata tells the story of Jonathan Cabot (Kurt Thomas), an Olympic gymnast who is recruited by the US government for a top secret mission to the secluded country of Parmistan (lol), where a dangerous game (basically just an obstacle course) is held and the winner entitled to a single wish. The government wants Cabot to exchange his wish for permission to install a Star Wars surveillance satellite over the country, because this movie is a true product of the mid 80s. The feds sweeten the deal by telling Cabot that his father was a secret spy who was sent in to attempt the Game himself.

This movie straight up does not have a first act. There is a brief prologue where we see Cabot's father attempt to win the Game, intercut with shots of the younger Cabot at the Olympics, and then Jonathan is thrust into a training montage that also lets him speedrun the romantic subplot of the movie (with his conveniently mute-by-choice love interest, so we can skip all the unnecessary dialogue). Then he's off to Parmistan and a series of very silly fight scenes where he gets to do gymnastics to people with the aid of conveniently placed parallel bars and pommel horses among the anachronistic 19th century streets of the city.

Princess Rubali (Tetchie Agbayani) and her father The Khan (Buck Kartalian) are fun most of the time, and they have good chemistry with one another. The Khan in particular comes off as a pretty good king, if a little naive. His villainous vizier Zamir (Richard Norton) is suitably musclebound and nefarious. Kurt Thomas was apparently a real Olympic athlete. He won a bunch of World Championship medals, but never medalled at the Olympics themselves. I know absolutely nothing about gymnastics, but I guess he seemed like he was good at it. It does not make for a convincing fighting style, however.

The plot of this movie is silly, but fine, and the stunts are well done (if silly as well a lot of the time) but the technical aspects of this film are seriously lacking. There is a tremendous reliance on slow-motion and scenes that refuse to end just to make it to a 90 minute runtime. You could edit this thing down to a lean 45 minute TV special and not really lose anything in the process. The music also frequently does not match the tone of the action on screen, and it sometimes feels like they just didn't have anything that fit, so they reused other parts of the score. In that same vein, the ADR made necessary by the slow-motion sequences is not done well, which wouldn't be a big problem if those scenes were not so incredibly long.

Overall I feel this is a 3/5. It could have been tightened up and been more watchable, but not without bringing it below feature length. There's just not much movie here.

Tonight I watched Scanners (1981) for the first time.

I love Michael Ironside so much. Starship Troopers is one of my all time favorite movies, and since then, every time I see him on screen it elevates a film for me. Seeing him here as a psychic renegade with the power to literally blow your mind was a real treat.

Stephen Lack was also great as the heroic Cameron Vale, and Patrick McGoohan gave a moody, melodramatic performance as Dr. Ruth.

Where Zardoz's Eternals are sedate and melancholy in their psychic emanations, the Scanners are alive with ecstasy and terror. The dissonant keening that accompanies the instances of 'scanning', alongside distorted voices and other audio artifacts, makes the process seem deeply unpleasant for every party involved, although we learn that this is not necessarily always the case. Nonetheless, the facial performances by Ironside and Lack are something to behold, and despite being objectively ridiculous, they completely work alongside that discordant soundtrack and dramatic framing.

If you haven't seen this movie, it's where that .gif of a dude in a suit's head exploding comes from. That moment comes shockingly early in the runtime, and is sadly the only total head explosion in the movie. There are tons of other cool psychic powers on display though, from telepathy and mind control to telekinesis and fire-starting. At one point Cameron reads the mind of a computer, which is pretty silly, but it sort of works alongside the techno-thriller narrative the move has going for it. The practical effects are varied and thoroughly entertaining, especially during the final psychic duel between Cameron and Ironside's Darryl Revok.

The explanation for how 'scanning' works is kind of like a quantum entanglement of two nervous systems, which is pretty cool. Dr. Ruth describes it as "the direct linking of two nervous systems separated by space." He also describes scanning in a bunch of deeply purple prose, like "a derangement of the synapses called telepathy" that really only works because he delivers the lines through a luxurious beard and mustache with the affect of a man who has been dipping into the company ketamine.

There are some decent action sequences, although I was oddly distracted by the sheer number of shotguns in this movie. Nearly every gun we see is a shotgun of some kind, and we see a lot of guns. It had to be a deliberate choice, and maybe I'm just missing some context that makes it make sense because I was not alive in 1981 when this came out, but it was conspicuous enough that I was thinking about that instead of what was happening on screen during at least a couple of scenes. During one car chase sequence, a panel van opens up gun ports along the side and issues forth a shotgun broadside like a 17th century pirate ship. It's weird.

Jennifer O'Neill plays Kim Obrist, and does a fine job. She spends most of the runtime being traumatized either by seeing her friends die or being forced to kill people with her mind, remarking at one point "Now I know what it feels like to die." She and her friends were a group of Scanners living outside the control of Dr. Ruth or Darryl Revok, until Cameron crashed into their lives and Revok sent in the shotgun squad.

The computer I mentioned earlier is a charmingly retro 80s mainframe computer, with terminal access. Very much before my time, but instantly familiar from playing the Fallout video games. The description of its magnetic tape reel-to-reel system as a "nervous system" by Dr. Ruth is a bit of a stretch, but the payoff of seeing Cameron do psychic battle with a computer is well worth the effort to suspend disbelief. The beginning of the scene brings to mind the real life 'Phone Phreakers' who could manipulate systems connected to the telephone network with audio recordings and even by whistling specific tones. Those guys basically had real technopathic powers, enabled by the weird way our communications infrastructure was set up. In any case, it's one of the best fight scenes between a man in a phone booth and computer in a building miles away ever put to film, for sure.

There is a kind of corporate espionage subplot that involves the production and distribution of a drug that suppresses Scanners' abilities (with some other effects that we discover later.) That angle creates some parallels to the real world Thalidomide scandal, as well as historical medical experimentation on the public, such as the Tuskeegee experiment, that give the plot some scope, and long-term implications.

The ending is simply fantastic, I won't ruin it by going into detail, but it's a lot of fun. Overall I feel this was a solid 4/5, with excellent practical effects, a moody and melodramatic atmosphere, and a surprisingly complex plot. Enjoyers of techno-thrillers, body horror, and beloved character actor Michael Ironside should definitely check this one out.

I've been watching a bunch of older movies, mostly Sci-Fi and Exploitation flicks, and reviewing them on SufficientVelocity and Letterboxd. I might as well post them here as well, so here's a link to my most recent review on SV.

My Letterboxd reviews can all be found here, but the versions on SV frequently have additional information added as it occurs to me.