One Shot (2021) / One More Shot (2024)

The main selling point of James Nunn’s tale about a Navy Seals squad lead by Jake Harris (house favourite Scott Adkins) having to survive a terrorist siege when they’re about to guard the transport of an inmate of one of those US torture camps for prisoners that officially don’t exist anymore is that is indeed a one shot movie. Logistically, that’s a rather impressive feat even in the age of digital editing, particularly since the film’s action sequences are often surprisingly complicated; I can’t even imagine how difficult it must be to get an choreography together for the hand to hand combat.

Despite the pretty unpleasant torture camp setting, and the restrictions of the one shot style, there’s quite a bit of decently effective character work here as well, enough so that every character at least has believable motivations – even some of the villains are allowed to be human beings. Human beings played by some fine character actors and a very game Ashley Greene to boot, so there’s a surprising amount of humanity in between the exciting murder and explosions.

Made three years later or so, One More Shot takes place only a couple of flight hours after the first film. Harris, the only survivor of his team and his prisoner Amin Mansur (Waleed Elgadi) land not exactly in the country they were expecting to end up in, and soon find themselves thrust into a mercenary attack on the airport, as masterminded by one Robert Jackson (Michael Jai White). As it turns out, the supposed Islamist terrorism case is only a set-up for an attempted coup in the USA.

Harris, not exactly the biggest fan of Mansur after the first film, finds himself dragged into protecting the man as well as Mansur’s pregnant wife while also figuring out what exactly is going on.

This second film is a nice escalation of the first one, sharing most of its virtues – character actors doing their stuff admirably (hi, Tom Berenger) under one shot circumstances, and action sequences that look bigger and even more complicated to set up. The car crash bit does frankly look a bit insane to me to actually have been pulled off.

The plot’s turn into the more convoluted does sit better with me as the old evil Muslim thing but it also does make the second movie somewhat less plausible. Fortunately, I’m not really going into a Scott Adkins movie looking for plausibility – everything else you might want from a low budget action movie, these two films deliver.

Three Films Make A Post: Taking Them One Mishap at a Time.

Accident Man (2018): House favourite Scott Adkins stars in the adaptation of a Pat Mills/Stu Small comic I haven’t read, directed by frequent Adkins collaborator Jesse V. Johnson. Adkins plays a professional killer specialized in murders that look like accidents or suicide. Things go a bit out of control when he learns that his ex-girlfriend (who happens to be pregnant by him, too) is murdered by some colleagues. A whole lot of hand to hand fighting and murdering ensues. The film, typical for the Johnson/Adkins combo, goes for the pop-coloured and cynically humorous, with a load of pretty eccentric characters (played by beloved action movie character actors like Ray Stevenson, Ray Park and Michael Jai White) fighting it out in not always completely serious ways, in between scenes of often genuinely funny one-liners and dialogue that at least sounds of a piece with some of Mills’s writing.

That the action sequences are budget conscious yet also excellently choreographed and genuinely fun is rather par for the course for projects from this particular circle.

Meurtre à Montmartre aka Reproduction interdite (1957): Self-important whiny art dealer Marc Kelber (Paul Frankeur), falls in with a pair of art forgers to pay for stuff like his step son’s (whom he clearly despises) piano lessons. Because everybody is incredibly high-strung, and really bad at planning, things quickly go wrong.

There are moments when Gilles Grangier’s crime movie is visually effective and captivating, but it self-sabotages with a melodramatic streak as wide as the ocean, where everybody’s emotions are always at eleven, and no single character has ever seemed to have learned even the tiniest bit of self-control. Worse, the film clearly wants the viewer to sympathize with Kelber’s plight, but neither makes any effort to provide reasons for empathy, nor makes him interesting.

Run a Crooked Mile (1969): This TV movie by Gene Levitt aims for a twisty take of weird conspiracy (like The Prisoner minus the depth, the surrealism and the look) that’s mostly aimed at a viewer’s suspense glands. This works well for the first half or so, but once our hero (played by the seldom interesting Louis Jourdan) gets conked over the head and wakes up two years later in Switzerland as a polo playing playboy married to the yawn-inducing Elizabeth (Mary Tyler Moore), things become bogged down in exactly the things I’m least interested in: the marriage problems of two painfully flat actors, a conspiracy that seems to be run by complete idiots, and suspense plotting that misses out on the whole “suspense” thing.

In short: Seized (2020)

Our typical Man with a Violent Past who nobody calls by his old name of Nero anymore (Scott Adkins) works as a security expert somewhere in Mexico, trying not to be driven insane by his very teenage son Taylor (Matthew Garbacz) while trying to teach him better than he himself learned. There’s clearly a bit of guilt concerning the death of Taylor’s mother involved in the relationship, too, and we all can imagine what kind of thing must have gone done via obvious genre tropes.

As you’ll probably expect, Nero will have to fall back into some of his old bad habits when a mysterious guy in a cowboy hat (Mario Van Peebles, who is supposed to be Mexican, by the way, and seems to have a lot of fun) kidnaps Taylor to press our protagonist into his service. Nero just needs to massacre various Cartel heads and their men, and afterwards he’s going to get Taylor back, or so he is told.

I wish this reunion of director Isaac Florentine and low budget action king Scott Adkins could have involved a slightly more interesting script than the one Richard Lowry delivered. The pair really doesn’t need much more than a reason to set-up a series of fights – chases weren’t in the budget – but the series of clichés that makes up the film’s plot still could have used something to make them a bit more interesting, if only dialogue that’s either better at being cheesy or less cheesy. The only truly fun idea the script has is to have Van Peebles’s character stage a murder party where he and his partners and underlings watch live footage of Nero murdering his way through many a nameless thug, cheering every kill while getting drunk. That’s pretty fun and funny in a meta way, even though the film is not actually using this for anything else but as a diversion.

There’s nothing exactly wrong with the movie’s structure, though, so at least things flow well enough from action scene to action scene. The fights are all fine. They don’t exactly show the Florentine/Adkins combo at the height of their powers of creativity – there’s a sad lack of goofy martial arts movie humour here as well as a dearth of interesting places in which to beat guys up in – but middling Florentine/Adkins is still more energetic, more elegantly choreographed in its brutality than the best of what most other direct to home viewing filmmakers can deliver.

Three Films Make A Post: An Old Man and his Mule Go West

A Perfect Enemy (2020): Don’t you just hate it when a film clearly thinks it is oh so very very clever, but actually confuses cleverness with being contrived and far-fetched? Case in point (at least for me) is this example of the type by Kike Maíllo, one of those films that thinks they are twisty and formally complex, when in fact they are a bit tedious and increasingly obvious. The plot, such as it is, would – after judicious rewrites to get rid of the faux cleverness - have made for a nice thirty minute episode of something like Inside No. 9, but is stretched out to ninety minutes full of pointless detail and the film shouting “look how clever I am!”.

There’s a nice, scenery chewing lead performance by Athena Strates without whose efforts the whole thing would become completely tedious, but her counterpart Tomasz Kot approaches his role so low key, she might as well not have bothered, while their surroundings scream of technical achievement in the filmmaking arts without any idea how to properly apply it.

Terror and Black Lace aka Terror y encajes negros (1986): Keeping with the tediousness, how about this sleazy Mexican number that starts as a sex comedy and continues in that way for way too long, until it turns into a mock giallo about a serial killing hair fetishist. From time to time, there’s a genuinely creepy scene popping up, and the hetero pervs among us will not complain about all the ways the film comes up with to show off attractive women with little or nothing on. Alas, even the latter gets tedious after a while, while the former’s mostly used to keep the audience awake through all the tedium. If I were a nicer guy, I’d probably suggest that Luis Alcoriza is trying to satirize the Mid-80s Mexican bourgeoisie like a cut-rate Chabrol during the sex comedy parts, but Chabrol was never this relentlessly boring.

An added minus is that every single character here is thoroughly unlikeable, either a serial killer, an abusive husband, or women trading sex for material goods, with no complexity to help a viewer tolerate them.

Abduction (2019): Last but certainly best today is this direct to home entertainment science fiction and action movie by the dependable Ernie Barbarash, starring Scott Adkins and Andy On. Adkins is laying it on a bit too thick this time around for my tastes, but then, the action is surrounded by a lot of weird to totally cracked alien abduction business that’s at least partially expressed through the language of martial arts cinema (so the aliens are really into chi-driven dimensional travel because this is a Chinese production after all), so subtlety clearly isn’t asked for. If you think that sounds a bit dumb but also rather a lot of fun, you have the film pegged perfectly; and if you’re like me, and always wanted your cheap but well-staged action (Barbarash and his leads know what they’re doing in this regard) paired with affordable interdimensional shenanigans (see On run through the same patch of park again and again, trapped in a loop, watch Adkins realize he’s been abducted for decades etc), you’re going to enjoy this just fine.

In short: Legacy of Lies (2020)

Twelve years ago, a mission in Kiev to retrieve documents concerning a secret Russian assassination program went very badly indeed for MI-6 agent Martin Baxter (Scott Adkins), not just ending with him losing the documents but also with the death of the mother of his child through one of his own bullets.

Now, a retired Baxter moves across Britain with his precocious twelve year old daughter Lisa (Honor Kneafsay), earning their keep with underground fights (it’s a Scott Adkins movie, remember) and work as a bouncer. The last few months seem to have been particularly hard for Baxter, his PTSD symptoms now even including waking visions of his dead wife. That’s a timely development, too, for Sacha (Yuliia Sobol), the daughter of one of the people killed during that very bad mission seeks Baxter out looking for help in acquiring the same old documents of twelve years ago.

Of course, she’s not the only one looking for them – Baxter’s old colleagues from MI-6, the CIA (or maybe the NSA) as well as the Russians are also very much still interested in them. When the Russians kidnap Lisa, Baxter really has no other choice than to resolve the issues of his past violently.

Among the considerable number of low budget movies starring the great Scott Adkins, Adrian Bol’s espionage action movie has a decent place somewhere in the quality middle. Even though it is not as much of a cheap and awesome action extravaganza as some films featuring Adkins are, there’s more than enough of the fun violence to keep me happy. Most of it is choreographed and shot very well, too, but the emphasis of the film is elsewhere. For this one seems genuinely interested in Adkins’s tragic past, and the way it shapes his relationship with his daughter as more than just a device to keep the action going. It doesn’t come to any startling new insights about these things, but I can’t help but respect when a movie like this that could get away with simply showing Adkins punching and shooting people puts actual effort into characters and their relationships. This doesn’t keep Legacy of Lies from having some pretty silly ideas, but those, you can really only read as the film trying not to be boring.

While the action stays fun bread and butter stuff, and the plot makes just as much sense as it needs to be, it’s the character work that throws some interesting curveballs. Of particular interest is how the completely ruthless Russian agent (Anna Butkevich) in charge of Lisa treats her, acting like a genuine human being with hang-ups and an inner life, the film daring to turn one of its villains into something amounting to a human being without getting all soppy or pretending she’s just a nice decent woman at heart. Rather, the film says, she’s complicated. Which may not sound like much, but is a pretty fine thing to see in any low budget action movie.

Past Misdeeds: Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (2012)

aka Universal Soldier IV

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Even after the positive buzz by people whose opinions I respect, I did expect this new addition to the Universal Soldier franchise to be at best a decent bit of cheap-o US action cinema with one or two hints that director John Hyams has seen Apocalypse Now in it. However, what I actually got was so much more.

This is another movie with themes quite close to the spirit of Philip K. Dick. One should probably wish filmmakers to be inspired by more contemporary SF too, but then I'm already happy when filmmakers read anything at all. It's an amnesiac's (Scott Adkins, stuntman/martial artist turned actually rather good actor) attempt to understand why a certain Luc Devereaux (Jean-Claude Van Damme at his most disquieting) brutally murdered his wife and kid during a home invasion, and his subsequent quest to take vengeance. This rather typical plotline is permanently enhanced and deconstructed by twists, turns, and ideas concerning the nature of our hero, free will, the uses of memory, and the killing of fathers/gods, all told in a visual style that reminded me most of Beyond the Black Rainbow and Driver (films this one does actually see eye to eye with) in the way it suggests wrongness and disturbed subjectivity with every colour and framing choice.

The whole film has the feel of a paranoid's nightmare full of bleak colours, grimy instead of adrenaline-pushing violence, and a feeling of claustrophobia - all not exactly things you'd expect in an US action movie belonging to a mildly successful franchise that generally always avoided to actually delve into the thematic mire of conspiracy theory and identity horror its basic ideas are so ideally suited to. Reckoning, on the other hand, delves in without ever looking back, pulling the part of its audience willing to go into nasty and confusing places with it, and leaving the kind of people who need to have the plot explained to them afterwards behind on the IMDB where they belong.

It's not only Hyams's ambition to go where Universal Soldier hasn't gone before I admire here, it's that he actually fulfils it, making one of the most off-beat and unexpectedly disturbing action films with a side-line in existential horror I've ever seen.

Hard Target 2 (2016)

After he has killed his best friend in an MMA championship match – and was thrown out by the officials of his league – guilt-ridden Wes Baylor (Scott Adkins) is fighting illegal underground matches in Southeast Asia, clearly looking for a way to die but unwilling to do the deed himself.

When one Jonah Aldrich (Robert Knepper) offers Baylor the opportunity for one last big fight in Myanmar worth a million dollars, the fighter has vague dreams of using that money for some kind of redemption that’ll come in the uncommon form of a beach house (don’t ask). Unfortunately, though not terribly surprising given the film’s title and prologue, that “fight” isn’t so much a fight but rather a big game hunt through a part of Myanmar’s jungle kept free of pesky villagers by corrupt military, with Baylor as the prey. If he makes it the hundred miles to the border of Thailand, he’s home free with a bag full of rubies, supposedly. Of course, the hunting group consisting of Aldrich, his partner Madden (Temuera Morrison) and a bunch of rich assholes – killed off too early to have any character traits Gigi Velicitat, rich girl in leather pants Rhona Mitra, torero Adam Saunders, rich redneck Peter Hardy and wavering rich redneck son Sean Keenan, and gamer dude Jamie Timony – have vehicles where Baylor is on foot, military assistance, drones, and all kinds of weapons.

Yet that might still not be enough to kill one very angry Baylor, particularly once he meets Tha (Ann Truong) in the jungle, the sister of one of Aldrich’s former victims, and borrows a cause to fight for apart from mere survival from her.

There may be people who think the John Woo directed Jean-Claude Van Damme-starring Hard Target didn’t need a very belated direct to streaming (home video?) sequel, hell, there may even be people who believe the original wasn’t terribly great. Spoilers: both of these groups are wrong, the latter even horribly wrong.

This film’s a sequel to Hard Target only very freely anyway; it’s simply another Most Dangerous Game variation that found a sexier (or at least some decades more modern) title to use, so the producers might just as well have called this one a reboot. Director Roel Reiné does clearly love his John Woo, too, so the film includes about half a dozen direct homages to certain Woo tics used in the original film, naturally including those frigging doves. Otherwise, Reiné is no John Woo, but he’s certainly one of the more talented guys working in the low budget action sphere at the moment, showing a sense of pacing, a clear understanding of how to use the camera to create physical spaces for the characters to fight in, and an obvious appreciation for the fighters and stunt people involved that uses editing and whooshing noises to emphasise their efforts instead of distracting from them.

It does of course help that Scott Adkins is the contemporary king of this kind of movie – a decent actor and a great screen fighter, and by now also an experienced workhorse who is having a slow year when he’s doing only three films in it. The more important parts of the cast are rather great low budget movie people, too. Knepper, Mitra and Morrison all have a couple of action scenes to sink their teeth into as well as more than enough opportunities for some rather delightful scenery chewing.

Speaking of the action, while the film obviously puts the emphasis on the very fine martial arts fights, you also get a variety of fun vehicle stunts, a bit of shooting, as well as a lot of running; there’s even what I think counts as an exploding hut. Reiné does well by all of it.

What further elevates the film about the lower tiers of the contemporary low budget action crowd is a script that’s not written around some one shooting day cameos and so hangs together well without having to ruin its pacing to accommodate Bruce Willis’s need to buy cigars. The character work is pretty obvious, but pretty obvious is what a film where motorcycles are inevitably carrying machine guns needs.


Also wonderful is the film’s complete lack of warehouse sets. Shot in Thailand (with a mostly Thai crew in the technical on-set roles), Reiné has rather a lot of very picturesque jungle, a few ruins, waterways and bridges to work with, which does of course help enable the variety of action scenes I’ve already praised and provides the film with a sense of place and space always useful in action cinema. It’s what turns Hard Target 2 into a much better film than you’ll probably hope for going in.

In short: Avengement (2019)

One scarred and pissed-off man with very frightening metal teeth we will soon enough learn to be called Cain Burgess (Scott Adkins), walks into a pub (after knocking out some guards) to hold a bunch of gangsters hostage. In flashbacks, he tells the gents what made him so angry.

Turns out, Cain once was a retired boxer, making the mistake of asking his gangster-brother Lincoln (Craig Fairbrass) for a loan to open a gym. Lincoln, apparently a man of principles, doesn’t lend money to his relations, though, and, apparently also being a prick, he asks Cain for a little criminal favour in return for the money. Cain’s just supposed to steal a bag from a particular woman. An unfortunate series of events leaves said woman dead and Cain in prison for manslaughter, where his brother, thinking Cain wants to squeal on a criminal business he knows very little about, sends wave after wave of killers after him.

Which eventually leads to a very scarred, hardened and angry Cain standing in Lincoln’s pub.

On a good day, Avengement’s director Jesse V. Johnson is one of the best filmmakers in the contemporary low budget made for whatever you want to watch it on that isn’t a cinema action movie sphere, helped along by a long association with Scott Adkins, as everybody should know one of the best actors/screen fighters working in this realm.

Avengement is certainly one of the better cooperations between the two, delivering the expected cheap yet crazed and excellently choreographed melee combats – Johnson fortunately belonging to the school of directors who actually want the audience to see what’s going on there – but also using the film’s episodic flashback structure to deepen the characterisation. Now, I’m not talking about the sort of psychological exploration French arthouse cinema loves (often to the detriment of being actually engaging to anyone not sharing a given director’s favourite psychological ideas), but Johnson does give Cain enough substance to make him rather more interesting than I expected him to be going in. It’s certainly an interesting move to provide the guy with more of an end goal than simply killing off his horrible brother, turning the usual vengeance business somewhat less egotistical than typical in this sub-genre, easily making it much easier to root for this particular tough guy once the film tells the audience what he has done beside murdering a lot of rude men.


For an action film, the whole affair has a lot of dialogue, too. Most of it is in a surprisingly fun post-Tarantino style mix of profanity and cleverness with a nice, quick, flow to it, spoken by actors who seem to enjoy the whole affair a lot, providing breathing space between action sequences that’s actually as entertaining as watching Adkins kicking ass (and getting his ass kicked).

Past Misdeeds: Ninja (2009)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Not to be confused with Ninja, Ninja, Ninja, or Shinobi

Master Takeda's (Togo Igawa) dojo is the last true progenitor of the fighting style of the Kouga ninja, but one that has been adapted into a more honourable kind of philosophical teaching, because who'd want an evil ninja as their movie hero. Takeda also keeps the Yoroi Bitsu, a chest containing the nearly-sacred armour and weapons of the last true Kouga. The sensei is progressing in years, and it will soon be time to choose a successor for his position. Two men are in the final running  - the adopted American orphan Casey (Scott Adkins) and Masazuka (Tsuyoshi Ihara). As is tradition in this sort of film, Masazuka is a total jerk, but instead of going the equally traditional way of trying to put his rival into an undeservedly bad light, he just loses it completely one day and tries to murder Casey in front of the whole dojo, a clever move that sees him banished forever.

On the plus side (for him), Masazuka can now begin to adapt the ninja style to the modern world, using some technical gimmicks to reproduce age-old ninja tricks and/or stuff he liked in Splinter Cell, and starts a career as a professional assassin for a powerful secret criminal society in New York. Said society is the kind of society that is so secret, it brands its members with its sign right on their breastbones, and so powerful, it consists of one rich guy and a bunch of thugs wearing partner-look leather jackets. But hey, whatever gets you through the night.

Things could stay rather peaceful for everyone Masazuka isn't trying to kill, but once the day comes when Takeda finally is going to make Casey's status as his successor official, the evil ninja returns to Japan to make a scene. Takeda immediately sends Casey and his daughter Namiko (Mika Hijii) - yes, of course she and Casey are in a state of undeclared love - to the US, supposedly so they can keep the Yoroi Bitsu safe, but clearly also to keep them out of harm's way when Masazuka's obvious attack will come. Not unexpectedly, Masazuka kills Takeda and the rest of the dojo the following night.

Now, Casey and Namiko have to keep the Yoroi Bitsu safe, survive the onslaught of Masazuka's secret society buddies out to get them, escape the police who make them responsible for various murders because all the non-stupid cops must be on holiday, and finally cope with Masazuka himself once he arrives back in New York. Nobody ever said being a ninja is easy.

When it comes to contemporary (mostly) direct-to-video action directors in the USA, Isaac Florentine is a bit of a throw-back to the middle to late 80s with a preference for filming martial arts based fighting scenes in ways that actually let his audience see what's going on, and letting his movies hang together through more than semi-ironic winking.

Ninja, of course, takes many of its ideas and basic plot beats from the curiously beloved sub-genre of US low budget action that concerns the adventures of - white unless they're Sho Kosugi - ninjas doing what action movie ninjas are wont to do. It's not a sub-genre I'm personally very nostalgic for (witnessing middle-aged Franco Nero pretending to be a martial artist will do that to you) , but Florentine's film does its thing so well nostalgia isn't necessary to enjoy Ninja.

Obviously, I do highly approve of Florentine's project of not making action sequences boring and actually showing us what's going on in them without giving up on dynamic camera work (though I could go with a little less slow-mo/sped-up edits). There's a really beautiful flow to most of the action scenes, with the actors' bodies and the camera working together in what I often think is the more bloody (and therefore entertaining) version of the same thing a classic film musical does. Of course, you can do this sort of thing only well when you have actors you don't have to replace with stunt doubles for every shot; they at least need to be able to pose a little. Fortunately, that's where the talents of Adkins, Ihara and a horde of stuntmen playing henchmen come in, as well as Akahiro Noguchi's fight choreography. Mika Hijii does get a few convincing fight moments in, too, but unfortunately, the film does rather tend to make her "the girl", so she doesn't kick ass as well as the men and is of course in the end kidnapped by the main bad guy, something the poor actress knows well from her role in Garo. At least she is allowed to project some personality, has some chemistry with Adkins, and isn't helpless as much as out-matched.

Apart from that weakness, there's little I don't like about Ninja: it's a film that treats its silly ideas with utmost seriousness without ever feeling the need to make fun of them or apologize for them to the audience, has some outstanding action scenes (my favourite would probably be the fight in the subway), decent acting-acting and brilliant physical acting, and is excellently paced. Plus, despite having been shot in low budget mecca Bulgaria, it puts some much appreciated effort into making things feel authentic. It's not normal to find actual professional Japanese actors one might even know from film or TV in their own country in this sort of thing, nor is it typical to hear them speak actual Japanese among each other or accented English with their own voices, yet it is exactly the level of care and respect this demonstrates that makes Ninja so great.


Well, that and lots of scenes of Scott Adkins kicking people in the face.

Three Films Make A Post: Terror goes into over-time.

Home Invasion (2016): Despite being a direct-to-video production, director David Tennant’s Home Invasion looks and feels more like a TV movie, the sort of thing Lifetime gets up to from time to time, say. So the film doesn’t take the violence or the threat to its central characters very far and plays things rather safe and friendly for a home invasion movie, building up competent enough thrills but not exactly telling a riveting story. It also wastes Scott Adkins as the least interesting bad guy available, generally opting for stilted dialogue and little else whenever it can get away with it. Natasha Henstridge and child actor Liam Dickinson are okay, but the film plays the threat for their lives and limbs so conservatively, I found myself less than excited.

Mandrake (2010): Tripp Reed’s Mandrake for its part actually is a TV movie. Just another SyFy Original, this one’s concerned with an “expedition” (or as we in the biz call them, annoying people wandering through the jungles of Shreveport) that pulls out the wrong dagger from the wrong chest and has to contend with the resulting awakening of a very pissed-off ent (whose name probably would be Grumpyroot or something of that kind). For most of the time, this plays out like the adaptation of a second string Weird Tales story, with its same basic adventure tropes (including the usual bullshit about “natives”, though they aren’t exactly the bad guys here; in fact, punchier writing could have made something quite interesting out of the way they aren’t), the same somewhat cool monster, and the same pleasantly clichéd plot structure.

Additional selling point is that our heroes seem to be surprisingly okay with human sacrifice as long as they aren’t on the wrong end of the dagger. Obviously, I enjoyed the whole she-bang well enough, but who am I kidding?

Southbound (2015): Given how many of the people involved with this anthology horror piece concerning the misadventures of various soon-to-be-dead (or worse) characters travelling southbound on a nameless US desert highway have been part of the VHS films, I was rather expecting an unpleasant trip into the world of bro horror.
Instead, I got a pretty good horror anthology with some truly nasty bits, with rather simple yet very effectively realized short tales, and a sense of weirdness floating around the edges of the stories that to me is pretty much the opposite of bro´horror, like Twilight Zone episodes gone horribly wrong. It’s a delightful show case for all the directors – Roxanne Benjamin, David Bruckner, Patrick Horvath and collective Radio Silence – that also suggests they were rather held back by the VHS films’ paradigm to look really shitty.

In short: Re-Kill (2015)

It’s a few years after the first (fast) zombie virus outbreak. Large parts of the world’s population have been killed, but the survivors – at least the US ones, which are the only ones we’ll meet - are pretending things did not fundamentally change, so there’s still TV, TV ads (though for things like an anti-zombie-virus medication that doesn’t actually work, and sex because there’s a certain repopulation pressure), and reality shows. The reality show we are watching is called Re-Kill and follows the misadventures of a squad, ahem, division of the Re-Kill military organization created to kill the not exactly tiny remnants of the Re-Ans (which is this film’s zombie moniker).

Journalists Jimmy and Bobby are the lucky bastards accompanying R-Division 8 (among whose members are Daniella Alonso, Roger R. Cross, Scott Adkins and Bruce Payne). After encountering a truck shipping Re-Ans through the United States, the group is tasked with following the truck’s trail to something called Project Judas in the walled-off ruins of Old New York. The mission doesn’t go very well.

If you’re like me and you’re suffering from a bit of zombie fatigue (and don’t even like The Walking Dead outside of its Telltale Games incarnation), a POV military horror film with zombies which predominantly takes place in corridors and empty industrial buildings does not sound too enticing. So I think it says something for Valeri Milev’s Re-Kill when I tell you I actually think it’s a pretty neat little low budget horror/action movie that doesn’t re-invent the zombie genre but does put quite a bit of effort into its worldbuilding, even if most of it comes in form of – rather funny – fake ads for post-zombie-apocalypse products that break up the bloody, camera-shaking violence. These ads not only do some nice satirical work on contemporary TV culture, they also represent the state the film’s world is in, the story the characters try to tell each other to be able to sleep at night, but also provide useful exposition, and all in a simple yet flexible format. It’s the sort of cleverness and humour you’d have found in a New World production from its golden age, and like in the best of the films of that particular era, they enhance a simple yet effective genre tale with a bit of cleverness.

Said genre tale is certainly on the pulpy side, not very complex, but told with gusto and a lot of blood and guts, providing quite a bit of fun for this jaded viewer. Milev makes the most out of the budget he has to work with, never letting his characters stop so much their mostly grey and brown surroundings become boring, setting up some nasty little set-pieces, all the while taking a look at a world full of people who’d really like to pretend everything’s going to go back to normal some day soon, but just can’t anymore. The cast of TV and character actors does the expectedly good job, leaving the increasingly shaking camera as the only thing I found potentially annoying about Re-Kill. Though thematically and logically, the camera shakes do belong into the footage we see, so the film gets a pass there too.

So it seems there’s still life in the rotting corpse of the zombie genre.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,action,valeri milev,daniella alonso,roger r. cross,scott adkins,bruce payne

In short: The Legend of Hercules (2014)

Warning: contains rampant misuse of parentheses, but then the film at hand contains rampant misuse of any viewer’s time, so I can still feel morally superior to it. Which I do.

As long-suffering victims of this blog know, I have a high tolerance for all kinds of things in movies that make sane people cry, so when a film is as generally reviled by mainstream critics as Renny Harlin’s CGI epic about everyone’s third-favourite Greek half-god, I’m not too fussed by it. Unfortunately, this time around, it turns out I can’t disagree with the consensus at all, for this Hercules version really makes the baby Eros cry.

There’s bad writing (and I don’t mean bad writing in a “I don’t like the film’s world view, or want it to be exactly like something I would have written” way the phrase often means on the internet but in the “these people don’t actually know anything about writing for movies, not even blockbuster style ones where the writing flavour of the year takes care of most of your plotting anyhow”), dialogue to make one’s brains bleed with its combination of insipidness and lack of style (it’s high-falutin’ EPIC MOVIE talk time written by people who just don’t get how this sort of thing works, and wouldn’t have an ear for it even if they did), acting that is all too often bad in the most boring manner (except for Scott Adkins as – I kid you not – Amphitryon -, who clearly will make a great scenery chewer one day when his buffness has diminished and all evil ninjas have been ass-kicked), and special effects with a big emphasis on the “special” (and partying like it’s 1999). In fact, I have seen Asylum movies with better CGI. Well, and with better scripts, now that I think about it.

To really top things off, Renny Harlin – who really should know better – presents this mess as a piece of cargo cult filmmaking that takes the idiot surface of things like 300, The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones without a) realizing that these films and shows actually have diametrically opposite styles and approaches to storytelling from one another, and without b) understanding what functions any given stylistic element actually fulfils in them. It’s enough to make one look forward to Brett Rat(t)ner’s Hercules version, if only in hot expectation of the ways in which that guy will be able to make things even worse.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,fantasy,renny harlin,kellan lutz,gaia weiss,scott adkins

In short: Legendary: Tomb of the Dragon (2013)

A dam building project somewhere in China is disturbed by attacks of a mysterious giant animal. Lawyer Doug McConnell (James Lance), working for a mysterious money source, hires cryptozoologist Travis Preston (Scott Adkins) to catch whatever the creature may be. Despite his last expedition having ended in something of a catastrophe, Travis and his partners Katie (Lydia Leonard) and Brandon (Nathan Lee) soon make their way to beautiful China.

Once there, they not only have to cope with a generally hungry and rude giant amphibian but also Harker (Dolph Lundgren), a former partner of Preston who has turned against him after what we will call the giant bear fiasco (that happened in the movie’s intro). Harker, never the sanest of men, is now clearly fully living the evil mastermind fantasy version of the Great White Hunter, which makes him just as dangerous as the giant animal he of course doesn't want to catch but to kill. One can't help but ask oneself how these people ever worked together.

I can't help but think that Eric Styles's UK/Chinese co-production made a bit of a tactical error by casting action specialists Scott Adkins and Dolph Lundgren in Legendary's lead roles, for fans of the two going in expecting an action fest will surely be sorely disappointed, while the actual audience for a (mostly) family friendly adventure movie with a giant monster might be turned off by the same expectations.

Me, I'll watch whatever people put in front of me, though, and I'm certainly not going to complain about actors broadening their horizons slightly. Particularly not since Adkins makes for a perfectly decent white-bread hero, while Lundgren seems to relish the opportunity to utter dialogue containing every Evil Great White Hunter cliché ever written (including, of course, multiple variations of the old hit "does the lion care for the fate of the lamb?"), and playing his bad guy as the king of smug self-satisfaction. It's certainly not deep stuff, but the two are fun to watch and nicely supported by a decent international supporting cast.

The rest of Legendary also isn't deep stuff yet fun enough to watch: the production makes good use of its actual Chinese locations (the glory of international co-productions strikes yet again), the action scenes are competent, and the dialogue is generally funny enough when it wants to be. The giant monster, on the other hand, is a bit of not very good CGI that emphasises the feeling that what you're watching is a slightly up-market version of a SyFy Channel movie without a bizarre explanation for the existence of its monster. That's of course fine by me, because I happen to like SyFy Channel movies, and more of them (or really, any of them) should star Scott Adkins or Dolph.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,chinese movies,in short,adventure,eric styles,scott adkins,dolph lundgren,huang yi

Ninja: Shadow of a Tear (2013)

After the events of Ninja Casey (Scott “Best Western Martial Arts Actor” Adkins) and Namiko (Mika Hijii) have gotten married and are continuing Namiko’s father’s ninjitsu dojo. Now, Namiko is pregnant, and we all know what that spells for women in martial arts movies: death. Consequently, one night while Casey is out indulging Namiko’s pregnant wishes for chocolate and seaweed, someone murders her.

Casey assumes it was an act of vengeance for a little lesson he taught a couple of robbers, and does some murdering of his own. Vengeance leaves Casey with anger management problems and no proper direction to his life, so he takes the invitation of his senpai Nakabara (Kane Kosugi, not as horrible as usual) to visit his dojo in Thailand to get a grip on himself again.

However, it soon turns out that Namiko’s murder had rather more complicated reasons, and that Goro (Shun Sugata), the son of a former enemy of her father, is the man truly responsible, and still rather vengeful too. Casey decides perhaps a little more vengeance will make him feel better about himself, so he travels to Myanmar, where Goro has built quite a career as a jungle-based drug lord, to finish matters between them.

With Shadow of a Tear, director Isaac Florentine and actor/martial artist Scott Adkins continue their mission to make martial arts and action movies in a more classical style, which turn out to be as good as anything you will find in the genre. Unlike the first Ninja, this isn’t quite as much a love letter to even the cheesiest and silliest of Western made ninja films (though it shares the first film’s basic respect for Japanese culture as well as the highly excellent concept of casting actors from the correct parts of Asia to play the role of characters from said regions), but more interested in being a classic martial arts revenge movie. Which only is a bad thing to the degree the film can’t do anything better than kill Mika Hijii’s character – the only woman with an actual role in the film – off early on to motivate its male protagonist. Not exactly a plot device I love, though it would on the other hand have been quite difficult to find any other reason to get Casey back into the killing habit.

At least, and this is something Florentine always does well beside his obvious virtues as an action director, the handful of scenes between Adkins and Hijii do sell them very well as a loving couple, and Hijii as a person, which is a good way to keep Adkins sympathetic once he gets down to violent business. Florentine is one of the handful of directors in contemporary action cinema who actually seems to understand that the moments when people aren’t fighting are important too, and who is able to use these moments to build a modicum of emotional momentum. A modicum of emotional momentum of course being all a film needs that expresses most of its emotional content through violent action.

By now, it seems hardly necessary to talk about Florentine’s – damn correct – idea of how to film a martial arts fight in a way that shows off the performers and keeps an audience excited as well as oriented about what is going on, nor to praise his ability to go back to this older, non-shaky, style of action filmmaking without eschewing what modern technology can provide, namely giving the camera a physical presence during the fights which makes them all the more dynamic. Unlike some other Florentine admirers I’m not using the word “realistic” to describe the fight scenes, because of course, these fights are as beautifully (and brutally) choreographed as only screen fights can be. Realism, on the other hand, would be rather less attractive (and would probably not contain performers on the level of Adkins or Tim Man), and would look nothing at all like the glorious one-take fight in a dojo relatively early on in the movie, or like the explody ninja action in the film’s pre-finale.

All of Ninja: Shadow of a Tear’s beautiful carnage is presented with great flair for good location work (most of the film being shot in Thailand), actually intelligent use of colour filters (which is to say, a use that knows where and when not to use them too), and the enthusiasm of true believers in the martial arts film as an art form that can and does express a lot of things through its violence. I, for one, am certainly much too distracted by excitement to disagree with this enthusiasm.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,thai movies,reviews,martial arts,action,isaac florentine,scott adkins,mika hijii,tim man,kane kosugi

Three Films Make A Post: WHITE WOMAN VERSUS DEADLY PYTHON!

El Gringo (2012): I really wish people would stop making these pseudo-Tarantino movies - or perhaps pseudo-Robert-Rodriguez movies in this case - if they don't have the talent or the intelligence to make them work (of course, if they had, they'd do more than just try to ape other directors). El Gringo wastes a perfectly able Scott Adkins, and two or three decent ideas on an execution that suggests the production being dominated by a couple of twelve year old boys with never a moment that doesn't look as if the actors were playing dress-up, which fits a movie that tries and fails to sell Bulgaria as Mexico without doing more than putting some rickety sets up and turning the colours to "bleached and yellowish".

Plus, it just isn't funny at all.

The Man From Nowhere (2010): As far as films in the "depressed former government killers go on a killing rampage to free someone kidnapped"/save the babies movies go, I'm not too impressed with Lee Jeong-beom's effort. An at its core simple tale is bloated by much unneeded exposition, and long careful scenes that spend way more time with cops and bad guys than the film's actual plot would need turn the film's pace to a crawl. Worse, these additions never actually add much of substance to the film beyond taking up time, for the characters here are exactly who you expect them to be and will do exactly what you expect of them anyway. As it stands, the movie lacks either depth or speed, either of which would have been enough to make it interesting.

Citadel (2012): This one, I expected to enjoy quite a bit more than I actually did. A clever little low budget film about urban decay with a male lead that is as ineffectual as possible should be right up my alley, after all. And really, director/writer Ciaran Foy does have a hand for the staging of threatening situations and knows how to use a handful of locations for the best. However, I never really warmed to to the movie thanks to my annoyance at various basics of the script: every mistake protagonist Tommy (played by Aneurin Barnard with lots of wide-eyed gasping) makes seems to be attributed to his agoraphobia, which is portrayed in a way that puts the emphasis on plot convenience, as if his anxiety disorder (and believe me, I know about those) weren't so much the aftereffect of heavy trauma but the only way the script could work. Obviously, it's not a good thing when the audience realizes this. I'm also quite unhappy with the absence of any form of authority beyond a priest in the movie. I know, thematically this makes a lot of sense, and cops don't visit the poor part of town all that often but once a horde of hooded demon children regularly runs amok somewhere, you'd expect a certain degree of interest even from them.

In the big picture, these things shouldn't be enough to ruin a horror film for me (I have enjoyed films with much less internal logic) but watching Citadel, I found myself rolling my eyes at the movie more often than not. Perhaps being halfway to a poverty porn horror movie and halfway to something more interesting is not far enough in either direction.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,south korean movies,irish movies,in short,scott adkins,lee jeong-beom,ciaran foy,action,horror

On Exploder Button: Ninja (2009)

Do you like ninjas, kids? Of course you do, everybody does. As luck will have it, this week's column on Exploder Button does include ninjas, and it's a rather great bit of American ninjasploitation as I'd not have expected to see it in a movie not made during the 80s.

So focus your chi on this link and ninja-hop on over.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,action,martial arts,isaac florentine,scott adkins,mika hijii,tsuyoshi ihara,togo igawa