Three Films Make A Post: BUDDY HAS AN AXE TO GRIND. A BIG AXE.

The Black Room (2016): Softcore veteran director Rolfe Kanefsky here turns his gaze to the seldom effective genre of the softcore sex horror comedy, delivering nothing to write home about. Nudity-wise, the film is surprisingly restrained, probably because it managed to catch Natasha Henstridge for the protagonist role but clearly can’t afford for her to take her kit off, leaving the bit of sleaze it does offer in the hands of the other actresses and Lukas Hassel. It doesn’t much matter anyhow, for the supposedly sexy bits – apart from some pretty damn embarrassing stuff like Henstridge having her way with a washing machine or the other way round – usually go hand in hand with the gory bits, keeping The Black Room away from possible titillation for anyone but the most specialized audience. Which  of course would be perfectly okay if the film had much else to offer. Alas, the plot is a bit boring, the comedy unfunny, and while the effects are actually fine, there’s still nothing going on here to keep one awake.

The Frighteners (1996): Of course, I just might have no sense of humour at all, for I never did find myself terribly amused by the very slapstick-y first hour or so of Peter Jackson’s final horror comedy, apart from Jeffrey Combs’s hilarious FBI agent. To me, the film’s first part is a bit of a slog, with a plot that doesn’t get going because it is permanently put on hold for funny bits that aren’t. Once the film actually does get going, and the jokes and the actually rather dark story begin to seem to belong in the same film, it’s a different matter, the film turning funny and exciting and even a bit scary.

Exotica (1994): If you look at it from a certain angle, Atom Egoyan’s film could very well be your standard erotic thriller. Of course, it’s not a thriller at all but a meditation on loss, guilt, the search for closure, degrees of obsession, the lies we tell ourselves to survive, as well as the human capacity for compassion. It is shaped – quite typical of the director – like a puzzle box or a mystery, not because Egoyan seems much interested in suspense but because understanding the film’s characters and the ways their lives intersect is not meant to be a dry movement from plot point A to point B. There are complex and complicated undercurrents to these peoples’ lives we can better understand when we don’t experience them too linearly.


Apart from letting the viewer do this rather brilliantly, Exotica is also one of Egoyan’s most beautiful films, coming by poetry and beauty and sadness without feeling to strain for them, and certainly never showing any of the tendencies to artsy bombast that have marred parts of Egoyan’s films in the last fifteen years or so.

In short: Cyborg 2: The Glass Shadow (1993)

In the future, two companies, one Japanese and one American, producing intelligent, feeling androids they call cyborgs for no good reason vie for world domination. Pinwheel, the American corp, decides to dominate their Japanese counterpart once and for all by blowing up the competition's executive level with a special cyborg explosive they have prepared their cyborg Casella "Cash" Reese (Angelina Jolie) with.

A quite independent cyborg (who actually is a cyborg and not an android like Cash) named Mercy (Jack Palance) who likes to communicate with the world via a negative image of his luscious lips on TVs lying around - and in this future, TVs are lying disused in the dust everywhere - has other plans for her, and pushes Cash and her martial arts instructor and owner of a big crush on his charge Colson "Colt" Ricks (Elias Koteas) into a daring escape attempt.

The bad guys send a crazy bounty killer (Billy Drago) and an equally crazy cyborg bounty killer (Karen Sheperd) after what will soon enough become the lovers, but as you know, love, kicks in the face and Cyborg-Palance conquer all.

Michael Schroeder's Cyborg 2 is a film that usually gets a bad rep as a horrible, horrible movie. I, however, somewhat emphatically disagree with that position, possibly because I just watched the film this isn't really a sequel of (even though there are a few seconds of random scenes from it inserted into this), and therefore know the difference between a boring low budget movie and one that is trying enthusiastically. Cyborg 2 is the kind of film Roger Corman could have produced in the late 70s if the late 70s had had a thing for somewhat cyberpunk-y futures. It's cheap, it's not as dumb as it pretends to be, and from time to time, it's even rather funny.

And really, what's not to like about a movie that contains: Jack Palance's lips chewing the scenery, and then Billy Drago and Karen Sheperd taking care of whatever he left of it, a young, pretty insecure and very cute Angelina Jolie (who does get naked, as does Koteas so there's nudity for everyone), copious amounts of blue, amber and red lighting, an arena fight below two ventilators, Jack Palance making things explode, cheap production and costume design that is either meant to suggest curious cultural crossovers in the future or a random grab into a wardrobe, and a story - such as it is - where love and an exploding Jack Palance cure all ills? Even better, all this stuff is told without too much boring filler and with a totally annoying synth soundtrack. If that doesn't make Cyborg 2 a winner in anyone's book, I don't want to read it.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,sf,angelina jolie,elias koteas,billy drago,jack palance,karen sheperd

Skinwalkers (2006)

Werewolves exist! And they are divided into two groups. The first group are the nice small-town werewolves who like to have a nice chat drinking coffee and eating apple pie, and like to tie each other up in nice harnesses when changing time comes to not have to go out and kill people. Killing people makes a werewolf insta-evil, you understand, and these evil werewolves, or to be more precise, evil biker werewolves make up the second group of werewolves.

All could be well - or uncomfortable, depending on how you look at it - for werewolf-kind, but there is a prophecy that the son of a werewolf will end their curse when he turns thirteen years; something the biker werewolves do not approve of.

So it is probably rather fortunate that Timothy (Matthew Knight), the chosen one, and his mother Rachel (Rhona Mitra) are protected by a whole small town full of good werewolves. Not that anybody would tell Rachel or Timothy about the whole werewolf Jesus thing - they're thinking they're living with the family of Rachel's dead husband in a very friendly small town.

Alas, a few days before Timothy is supposed to fully turn into Werewolf Jesus, the biker werewolves (all four of them) under their leader Varek (Jason Behr) attack the town. Turns out the good werewolves didn't spend any of the last thirteen years on planning how best to protect their messiah, and are mostly slaughtered, notwithstanding that they should be prepared, are fighting on their home turf, and have an incredible advantage in numbers.

A handful of the nice wolves do at least manage to get away with Rachel and Timothy, but their backup plan seems to be to drive around until they can hide in a cave, so it's probably no surprise that more encounters with the biker werewolves will follow.

As far as action movies with werewolves go, Skinwalkers is one of the better examples of that particular sub-genre. Unfortunately, this isn't a sub-sub-(sub?-)genre that includes many films that are any good at all, so the movie reaches its lofty position at the top of the dubious pack by being just about watchable.

Director James Isaac (of Jason X "fame") does at least know most of the tricks of mid-low-budget action filmmaking, and so all scenes containing shooting, werewolf punch-outs and gratuitous slow motion are as basically alright as they come, if completely lacking in imagination or the sense of excitement that would come with less predictable or just more awesome action. Hong Kong this is not.

But at least there's the - in cheap US action movies since 1995 - mandatory exploding gas station to enjoy. Though it's disappointingly not placed in the rather limp finale.

The rest of the movie (aka every scene without violence) suffers  more from terminal stupidity than from predictability, though it's still more predictable than rain in autumn around where I live. It's not just the whole prophecy set-up - and why exactly does everybody know Timothy is the chosen one? Was there a burning bush somewhere who informed everyone? Do the biker werewolves have an email newsletter? It's also the fact that everybody acts like an utter tool, from the bad guys coming in guns blazing when they could reach their target better by stealth and using the pulsating masses in their heads, to the good guys who don't seem to have any actual plan of action, or any sensible back-up plans. The film seems to take place in a parallel universe where it's logical not to tell Rachel that her son's on somebody's death list; where a shoot-out in a hospital or the killing off of a whole small town or lots of werewolf attacks don't incur any form of police reaction, and so on, and so forth. It's always astonishing how little thought and care three scriptwriters can put into a single script.

That lack of care and intelligence really is a shame in this particular case, because there was an interesting film about the difference between barbarism and civilization waiting to be made out of some of the film's ideas; not necessarily an original one, but a thoughtful one.

On the more positive side, the bad-script-experienced cast is as good as the film allows, with everyone playing their usual parts. Rhona Mitra is only allowed to get into action heroine mode very late in the proceedings, though. I suspect nobody involved with the production wanted to get anyone watching too excited. You never know if a member of the audience has a weak heart, and who wants to have to live through a law suit for manslaughter?

Be that as it may, Skinwalkers is perfectly watchable. It's just not good enough to excite nor bad enough to amuse.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,action,rhona mitra,elias koteas,james isaac