Three Films Make A Post: When the dead start to walk you'd better start running…

The Dead Pit (1989): Half hokey supernatural slasher, half pocket zombie apocalypse movie, Brett “The Lawnmower Man” Leonard’s feature debut never adds up too much. Between attempts at the nightmare logic of a Fulci and the cheesy one-liners of A Nightmare on Elm Street style slashers at their worst, the film never finds any personality of its own.

The acting is dire, the effects undistinguished, and for every single effective shot, there are three whole scenes that look and feel amateurish. It is a film easy to point and laugh at, if you’re of a mind to, but I never found myself interested enough in The Dead Pit to find much actual joy in doing this.

The Cloned Tyrone (2023): If you can make it through the much too broad first twenty minutes or so, you might find that Juel Taylor’s conspiracy thriller weird pulp comedy has rather more to offer than a handful of obvious jokes – hell, there’s even a good reason why these jokes start off as obvious as they do. The movie manages to apply methods and a comedically heightened version of the style of 70s conspiracy thrillers to the feeling of being black and poor in America, and that role’s truly horrifying and individuality-eating aspects. While it’s at it, it then turns this into the kind of existentialist horror that can make one’s laughter get stuck in one’s throat.

Taylor’s direction is intelligent as well as just clever as a meta-game, increasingly putting emotional weight on characters and situations you wouldn’t have expected to be meant to carry them. That John Boyega, Jamie Foxx and Teyonah Parris make one hell of a core cast doesn’t need mentioning; nor Kiefer Sutherland’s effectiveness as a villain.

The Three Musketeers – Part I: D’Artagnan aka Les trois mousquetaires: D’Artagnan (2023): When in doubt, go back to the classics, as does this umpteenth adaptation of Dumas. This is an update clearly meant for the blockbuster franchise era, so the second half of the film follows in December, there’s a scene in the end credits, and the score is as generically 2023 as you can imagine.

Director Martin Bourboulon is fortunately very good at what he does, mixing modern and original sensibilities effortlessly, keeping close to the same points film adaptations of the Musketeers prefer, while modernising and sexing up the margins. It’s a fun, energetic kind of blockbuster, with a great cast – Eva Green as the Milady, Vicky Krieps as Queen Anne, Vincent Cassel as Athos, and so on – a sense of play as well as one of drama.

Will this be the start of the Musketeeromatic Universe? Will someone eventually adapt “Twenty Years Later/After”? We can only hope/fear.

Renegades (1989)

Buster McHenry (Kiefer Sutherland), 80s action movie cop by trade, spends his vacation on a private undercover mission, trying to puzzle out the identity of the crooked cop helping violent dirt bag Marino (Robert Knepper when he was still Rob in an excellently lizard-like outing) do his violent deeds. Unfortunately, Buster’s plan to achieve this goal consists of planning the robbery of a jewellery store with Marino, in the hopes off convincing Marino to let him meet the bad cop in person before the robbery can actually take place. However, idiotic plans like this can go wrong rather easily, and soon Buster finds himself indeed committing the robbery with Marino and his gang, and still without the information he seeks. Dead civilians and quite a bit of property damage result.

On the flight, the gang and the idiot cop stumble into an exhibition where Marino finds the time and inclination to grab the holy lance of the Lakota, and shoot one of the Lakota men watching over it. That man’s brother, Hank Storm (Lou Diamond Phillips), promises to get back the lance and take revenge for his brother. A fine opportunity to start on this work opens up to Hank when his mystical Indian tracking powers (seriously, that’s how the film plays it and will continue to play it) lead him to Buster, who is in rather bad shape after Moreno ended their short-lived partnership by shooting him.

Luckily for Buster, Hank’s dad (Floyd “Red Crow” Westerman himself) is a capable shaman and takes time out of his busy schedule to pray his gunshot wound a bit better. Who needs a physician, right? Once that’s over, Hank and Buster will have to team up, at first (of course) very reluctantly but increasingly (of course) with full 80s buddy movie man love.

I am not the greatest fan of 80s buddy movies but it’s pretty difficult not to like a film whose future buddies are young Kiefer Sutherland (in his pre-“torture is awesome” phase) and Lou Diamond Phillips (in his pre-“Sheriff roles only” phase). Together, in good 80s action movies tradition, they fight slightly more crime than they commit themselves, crash cars, smash a large amount of things, and hurt or kill a lot of people in hilarious and improbable ways.

Director Jack Sholder’s just the right kind of guy at the right kind of place here, shooting the insipid, the hilarious and the exciting all in the straightforward and unpretentious manner this kind of thing demands, until nothing made of glass isn’t broken. It’s such a bunch of merry carnage (not terribly brutal as these films go) broken up by semi-embarrassing Indian (that’s the word the film prefers to use, even though it has the perfectly good word “Lakota” right there in the script; Buster of course is racist dickhead enough to always call Hank “chief”) mysticism, and general nonsense that it’s easy to miss that the script actually has some perfectly neat ideas beside the nonsense.

For once, the captain character in this sort of film (given by cop specialist Bill Smitrovich) does have an actual role to play in the plot apart from reaming out the insane, violent cop working for him, and even Buster’s absurd crusade against crooked cops has a reason to it. It’s nothing original, mind you, but I do think including some bits and pieces that actually make a degree of sense and hint at the real world in a plot only helps to make the general outrageousness of your typical action movies that decisive bit more interesting. Characters for their part are seldom not improved by adding some motivation for their actions either.