Indigenous (2014): Your usual young tourist types visit
Panama and go off with a local to tourist up a forbidden waterfall. There, they
encounter the Chupacabra. The usual mix of running through the jungle,
screeching, and “I’m so sorry”s ensues. Well, you can’t blame Alastair Orr’s
film for rampant originality, or pretend it does anything with the characters
that’ll make you care for them even the tiniest bit. The whole film is shot
competently enough but terribly dull even if you’re like me and okay with
generic horror films being generic. There’s just nothing to grab one even a
little bit here.
Dollman vs. Demonic Toys (1993): On the other hand, at least
Indigenous doesn’t reek of complete loathing for the audience that pays
the filmmakers’ bills. This Full Moon abomination, on the other hand, directed
by Charles Band himself, does reek so quite a bit. At one hour of running time,
at least fifteen minutes of which are taken up by the credits and flashbacks to
Dollman, Demonic Toys and Bad Channels, it’s
difficult to shake the feeling of watching a really bad clip show episode of a
horrible TV show (or Phantasm IV, for that matter). It doesn’t help
that the plot of what’s there of actual new footage makes little sense even for
a Full Moon film, the jokes are tepid, and most of it feels like filler with
little of interest happening whatsoever. Not even Tim Thomerson and Tracy
Scoggins reprising their roles from the earlier movies can save anything here,
because there’s no attempt on screen to do anything but dupe us suckers paying
for Full Moon films into literally buying crap.
Three O’Clock High (1987): Fortunately, this 80s high school
comedy rides to the rescue. This is not exactly in my genre of choice but Phil
Joanou’s film recommends itself even to people like me with a non-generic story
made out of very generic elements and a focussed script that plots comedy nearly
as tightly as a good thriller. Which is a good fit for Phil Joanou’s breathless
direction that really goes in for the living nightmare elements of the plot, as
if this were a Hitchcock film, and Casey Siemaszko one of Hitchcock’s everyman
protagonists going accidentally stumbling into a convoluted plot. Just that it
takes place in high school, and there are jokes which are actually funny.
There’s no boring second here.
Showing posts with label tim thomerson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tim thomerson. Show all posts
Saturday, February 23, 2019
Sunday, April 16, 2017
Dollman (1991)
After some (un)funny business concerning “fat ladies”, delightfully named
space cop on the edge Brick Bardo (Tim Thomerson) gets into a space chase with
his flying head nemesis – who is such a delightful thing because Brick shot off
the rest of his body during various earlier encounters we alas do not witness –
Sprug (Frank Collison). Spug threatens their home planet in general and Brick
specifically with some kind of dimensional bomb that’ll turn out to not amount
to much of an explosion much later on.
Both their ships end up crashing down on Earth, the South Bronx to be precise. It’s a movie and it’s 1991, so it’s gang violence central there. Which might be a bit of a problem, because Brick turns out to be only 12 inches tall. Fortunately, he has a very special gun that’ll kill giants dead as good as anyone his own size. Brick starts out early with using it too, for he saves idealistic community activist Debi Alejandro (Kamala Lopez-Dawson) from some gang violence right after he comes to again. Debi grabs Brick and his damaged spaceship, while Sprug and his bomb land in the loving arms of also delightfully named gang boss Braxton Red (Jackie Earle Haley). Things develop from there rather as you’d expect them to.
To my surprise, this is one Albert Pyun movie I actually like. I’m not sure what happened during the making of the film, but somehow it avoids both of the curses plaguing the director’s filmography: Dollman is neither an exercise in boredom mostly broken up by different kinds of boredom, nor does it mistreat a viewer’s eyes with the dregs of Pyun’s would-be artsy direction style that’ll usually make everything he does different to parse bordering on complete inexplicability. Instead, the film’s pace is lively, and the direction expert low budget craft. If this was the first or only Pyun film I’d seen, I’d actually seek out more. It’s rather confusing, I have to admit.
Adding to these virtues is a script by Chris Roghair (an only writing credit that to me suggests a pseudonym) that’s often actually as funny as it thinks it is – though I could have gladly gone without the “fat ladies” bit – when it joyfully wades into cop on the edge clichés and mixes them with plain weird crap. Because the weird stuff alone probably won’t carry a whole film, and because it’s certainly much more interesting this way, Dollman’s tone turns surprisingly serious whenever Debi begins to talk about gang violence. It’s not exactly social realism, but the way the more earnest bits and the full-on B-movie bullshit collide and intermingle is highly fascinating and entertaining. The film also turns Haley’s Braxton into something more than a pure action movie villain. He’s crazy, violent and vile, but he also gets the motives and even a bit of the ambiguity of a person. Which obviously turns his and Debi’s interactions with tiny space aliens just the decisive bit weirder still. Even better, everyone in the cast – Thomerson is Thomerson anyway, and young-ish Haley and Lopez-Dawson certainly are no slouches - can actually sell this tonal strangeness rather well, making the film at once funnier and just plain interesting.
These are not words I expected to write about an Albert Pyun film about a tiny space cop taking place right in producer Albert Band’s main obsession space, but who am I to complain about a film being much more awesome and inspired than I expected?
Both their ships end up crashing down on Earth, the South Bronx to be precise. It’s a movie and it’s 1991, so it’s gang violence central there. Which might be a bit of a problem, because Brick turns out to be only 12 inches tall. Fortunately, he has a very special gun that’ll kill giants dead as good as anyone his own size. Brick starts out early with using it too, for he saves idealistic community activist Debi Alejandro (Kamala Lopez-Dawson) from some gang violence right after he comes to again. Debi grabs Brick and his damaged spaceship, while Sprug and his bomb land in the loving arms of also delightfully named gang boss Braxton Red (Jackie Earle Haley). Things develop from there rather as you’d expect them to.
To my surprise, this is one Albert Pyun movie I actually like. I’m not sure what happened during the making of the film, but somehow it avoids both of the curses plaguing the director’s filmography: Dollman is neither an exercise in boredom mostly broken up by different kinds of boredom, nor does it mistreat a viewer’s eyes with the dregs of Pyun’s would-be artsy direction style that’ll usually make everything he does different to parse bordering on complete inexplicability. Instead, the film’s pace is lively, and the direction expert low budget craft. If this was the first or only Pyun film I’d seen, I’d actually seek out more. It’s rather confusing, I have to admit.
Adding to these virtues is a script by Chris Roghair (an only writing credit that to me suggests a pseudonym) that’s often actually as funny as it thinks it is – though I could have gladly gone without the “fat ladies” bit – when it joyfully wades into cop on the edge clichés and mixes them with plain weird crap. Because the weird stuff alone probably won’t carry a whole film, and because it’s certainly much more interesting this way, Dollman’s tone turns surprisingly serious whenever Debi begins to talk about gang violence. It’s not exactly social realism, but the way the more earnest bits and the full-on B-movie bullshit collide and intermingle is highly fascinating and entertaining. The film also turns Haley’s Braxton into something more than a pure action movie villain. He’s crazy, violent and vile, but he also gets the motives and even a bit of the ambiguity of a person. Which obviously turns his and Debi’s interactions with tiny space aliens just the decisive bit weirder still. Even better, everyone in the cast – Thomerson is Thomerson anyway, and young-ish Haley and Lopez-Dawson certainly are no slouches - can actually sell this tonal strangeness rather well, making the film at once funnier and just plain interesting.
These are not words I expected to write about an Albert Pyun film about a tiny space cop taking place right in producer Albert Band’s main obsession space, but who am I to complain about a film being much more awesome and inspired than I expected?
Thursday, December 8, 2016
In short: Devil’s Prey (2001)
A bunch of young arseholes whose character and actor names are totally
irrelevant (though masochists may want to know about the presence of Charlie
O’Connell, so there you go, masochists) drive to a rave out in the boons.
Because one of them is dealing drugs, and the others are abhorrent, it’s not much of a surprise they’re thrown out of the rave after a handful of misadventures – or is it all part of a sinister plan? Yes, it is. Anyway, before you know what they did last summer, they run over a girl we’ll later come to know under the most excellent name of Fawn (and that’s the sort of name worth mentioning, isn’t it?), though she survives the collision. Apparently, Fawn is being hunted by The Shadows (no relation to the band, one assumes), the local group of Satanist cultists – whose leader we will later learn does like all good satanists abhor greed – who want to sacrifice her. Soon follows some running through woods while our heroes are hunted by people in robes with stupid masks, the-black-guy-dies-first-ing, and a few pretty boring action sequences – all accompanied by the permanent bitching and screeching of our horrible characters.
The cultists will turn out to be rather on the incompetent side, so our protagonists sans black guy end up in a peaceful little town with a minister played by Patrick Bergin and a sheriff role providing the great Tim Thomerson with a well deserved pay check for very little work. Would you be surprised when I tell you a lot of the friendly townsfolk are cultists too?
Despite a set-up that sounds like the perfect basis for a silly chase-based thriller or a silly cultist-based horror film, Bradford May’s Devil’s Prey is for most of its running time only a silly piece of boredom, full of annoying characters acted badly the film takes way too much time to kill off, based on a script that uses its constituting clichés in the least interesting ways possible, and has no clue how to create suspense, or horror, or for most of the time even just inadvertent humour. Well, alright, the sex scene later on is pretty damn funny, but that’s thanks to the film’s tepidness when it comes to digging into its possibilities as an exploitation movie, which leads to decadent satanist sex that utilizes a feather, Patrick Bergin, doggy style, a tiny bit of gagging, and some of the worst moaning you’ll ever hear on a soundtrack. That’s the film’s single scene to make any kind of impression on me. The rest of Devil’s Prey is just sitting there, boring, without ideas, directed by a guy who has both feet in that era of TV direction when having any sort of style was anathema – and this thing isn’t even a TV movie.
Because one of them is dealing drugs, and the others are abhorrent, it’s not much of a surprise they’re thrown out of the rave after a handful of misadventures – or is it all part of a sinister plan? Yes, it is. Anyway, before you know what they did last summer, they run over a girl we’ll later come to know under the most excellent name of Fawn (and that’s the sort of name worth mentioning, isn’t it?), though she survives the collision. Apparently, Fawn is being hunted by The Shadows (no relation to the band, one assumes), the local group of Satanist cultists – whose leader we will later learn does like all good satanists abhor greed – who want to sacrifice her. Soon follows some running through woods while our heroes are hunted by people in robes with stupid masks, the-black-guy-dies-first-ing, and a few pretty boring action sequences – all accompanied by the permanent bitching and screeching of our horrible characters.
The cultists will turn out to be rather on the incompetent side, so our protagonists sans black guy end up in a peaceful little town with a minister played by Patrick Bergin and a sheriff role providing the great Tim Thomerson with a well deserved pay check for very little work. Would you be surprised when I tell you a lot of the friendly townsfolk are cultists too?
Despite a set-up that sounds like the perfect basis for a silly chase-based thriller or a silly cultist-based horror film, Bradford May’s Devil’s Prey is for most of its running time only a silly piece of boredom, full of annoying characters acted badly the film takes way too much time to kill off, based on a script that uses its constituting clichés in the least interesting ways possible, and has no clue how to create suspense, or horror, or for most of the time even just inadvertent humour. Well, alright, the sex scene later on is pretty damn funny, but that’s thanks to the film’s tepidness when it comes to digging into its possibilities as an exploitation movie, which leads to decadent satanist sex that utilizes a feather, Patrick Bergin, doggy style, a tiny bit of gagging, and some of the worst moaning you’ll ever hear on a soundtrack. That’s the film’s single scene to make any kind of impression on me. The rest of Devil’s Prey is just sitting there, boring, without ideas, directed by a guy who has both feet in that era of TV direction when having any sort of style was anathema – and this thing isn’t even a TV movie.
Friday, May 27, 2016
Past Misdeeds: Trancers (1985)
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 without any re-writes or 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.
In what should be the 23rd Century (although the film also calls it the 25th, so who knows), the delightfully subtly named future cop Jack Deth (Tim Thomerson) spends all his time mopping up the remnants of the mind-controlled zombie slave troops (so-called "Trancers") of his dead arch-enemy Whistler (Michael Stefani). His obsession is quite understandable, because Whistler killed Deth's wife, but still costs the cop his job.
Deth spends his new-found free time diving in the submarine ruins of Lost Angeles, until the Future's ruling council has need of him again. That point in time comes sooner than expected. For some reason the film is unwilling to explain, Whistler is still alive and has somehow managed to find his way into the Los Angeles of 1985 to do the Terminator thing. Obviously, Deth is the best man for the job to protect the council's ancestors and bring Whistler back in.
It looks like (the film doesn't bother to explain this point either) you can send dead matter back through time as you wish, but can only transfer the consciousness of people into the bodies of their ancestors. As luck will have it, Deth's and Whistler's respective ancestors both look exactly like they do, so Deth can go on a merry hunt through Los Angeles without having to look at a strange face in the mirror.
Jack ropes his ancestor's one-night-stand Leena (future Academy Award winner Helen Hunt, not as completely annoying as she would soon become) into working as his native guide - and of course future love interest. To make life a bit more difficult for him, he is only a lowly reporter, while Whistler's new body is a Police Detective without rank but with considerable influence.
Once, before his unhealthy obsession with living dolls overwhelmed Charles Band's complete output as a producer and overrode even the small interest in making watchable movies he might have had, the producer/director/writer/etc was trying to be a small-time Roger Corman, just with less talent and imagination. At least, Band had enough clout to rope in promising talent (see Reanimator). Trancers was made in that still promising phase of Band's career and is probably his best work as a director.
Of course, keeping in mind that I am talking about the future director of The Gingerdead Man and Dangerous Worry Dolls here, one has to keep one's expectations at a realistic level, which is my long-winded way of saying that, while words like "style" or "intelligence" just don't belong into the man's vocabulary as a director or producer, Band's work here at least doesn't suck completely. He points, he shoots, he doesn't embarrass himself.
The movie's script by Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo, the pair responsible for the rather delightful "Tim Thomerson is Sergeant Rock and meets aliens" film Zone Troopers, has more logical flaws than my attempts at doing arithmetic. From the wildly inconsistent way time paradoxa work (people whose ancestors are killed and their own children disappear, but everyone still remembers them?) to the fact that the film really should have ended after about 30 minutes - a point where Deth has ample time and opportunity to get rid of Whistler - there is not much that stands up to even the mildest of scrutiny. Worse, the film never explains any of its concepts that need explaining. My remarks about the way time travel works are based only on conjecture, for example. Still, I can't say that I cared much about logic or needed explanations while actually watching the film, because what the film lacks in artfulness, it makes up for in (sometimes consciously ironic) low budget film charm. Following Deth, we flit from one obvious and silly situation to the next.
This is the sort of film that doesn't need to spare the killing of a department store Santa Claus for the grand finale, because it also has a (terrible, of course) punk rock club, little girls with the souls of gruff police chiefs and our hero riding a motor scooter instead of a motorcycle to throw at us. Among other things. But most importantly, Trancers not only shows us those things but does its best to let them be fun, by not taking itself serious. Not taking yourself serious in the good and entertaining way must be a lot more difficult to achieve than it looks like or most films that try for the effect wouldn't be as bad. The difference between Trancers' version of this brand of fluffiness and the bad sort as incorporated in Troma films or Band's later Full Moon Productions lies in the fact that it still takes its audience serious. Where a Troma film winks at itself in a mirror, this is a film still winking at us sitting in front of it.
While I usually just can't stand Helen Hunt, I do approve of the fact that the film doesn't make her character completely useless and only be there to be rescued by Thomerson and wear troubling fashion. She's useful, she has moments of being sensible, she's as much as you can hope for in a cheap SF actioner.
And she's next to nothing compared to the film's true trump card, the utterly awesome Tim Thomerson doing the perfect square-jawed cynical hero with delightfully silly one-liners (personal favourite: "Dry hair is for squids") while having at least one toe in the territory of a parody of a perfect square-jawed cynical hero, which, let's be honest, is the only way those guys can ever be made sympathetic. Somehow, Thomerson even makes Deth kinda cool.
A few years later, Band would go on to turn Trancers into a confused franchise of films that have nothing to do with each other beyond Thomerson, but none of the later films is even vaguely watchable, so this is the one to watch if one wants to see Thomerson doing what Thomerson does best.
Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or 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.
In what should be the 23rd Century (although the film also calls it the 25th, so who knows), the delightfully subtly named future cop Jack Deth (Tim Thomerson) spends all his time mopping up the remnants of the mind-controlled zombie slave troops (so-called "Trancers") of his dead arch-enemy Whistler (Michael Stefani). His obsession is quite understandable, because Whistler killed Deth's wife, but still costs the cop his job.
Deth spends his new-found free time diving in the submarine ruins of Lost Angeles, until the Future's ruling council has need of him again. That point in time comes sooner than expected. For some reason the film is unwilling to explain, Whistler is still alive and has somehow managed to find his way into the Los Angeles of 1985 to do the Terminator thing. Obviously, Deth is the best man for the job to protect the council's ancestors and bring Whistler back in.
It looks like (the film doesn't bother to explain this point either) you can send dead matter back through time as you wish, but can only transfer the consciousness of people into the bodies of their ancestors. As luck will have it, Deth's and Whistler's respective ancestors both look exactly like they do, so Deth can go on a merry hunt through Los Angeles without having to look at a strange face in the mirror.
Jack ropes his ancestor's one-night-stand Leena (future Academy Award winner Helen Hunt, not as completely annoying as she would soon become) into working as his native guide - and of course future love interest. To make life a bit more difficult for him, he is only a lowly reporter, while Whistler's new body is a Police Detective without rank but with considerable influence.
Once, before his unhealthy obsession with living dolls overwhelmed Charles Band's complete output as a producer and overrode even the small interest in making watchable movies he might have had, the producer/director/writer/etc was trying to be a small-time Roger Corman, just with less talent and imagination. At least, Band had enough clout to rope in promising talent (see Reanimator). Trancers was made in that still promising phase of Band's career and is probably his best work as a director.
Of course, keeping in mind that I am talking about the future director of The Gingerdead Man and Dangerous Worry Dolls here, one has to keep one's expectations at a realistic level, which is my long-winded way of saying that, while words like "style" or "intelligence" just don't belong into the man's vocabulary as a director or producer, Band's work here at least doesn't suck completely. He points, he shoots, he doesn't embarrass himself.
The movie's script by Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo, the pair responsible for the rather delightful "Tim Thomerson is Sergeant Rock and meets aliens" film Zone Troopers, has more logical flaws than my attempts at doing arithmetic. From the wildly inconsistent way time paradoxa work (people whose ancestors are killed and their own children disappear, but everyone still remembers them?) to the fact that the film really should have ended after about 30 minutes - a point where Deth has ample time and opportunity to get rid of Whistler - there is not much that stands up to even the mildest of scrutiny. Worse, the film never explains any of its concepts that need explaining. My remarks about the way time travel works are based only on conjecture, for example. Still, I can't say that I cared much about logic or needed explanations while actually watching the film, because what the film lacks in artfulness, it makes up for in (sometimes consciously ironic) low budget film charm. Following Deth, we flit from one obvious and silly situation to the next.
This is the sort of film that doesn't need to spare the killing of a department store Santa Claus for the grand finale, because it also has a (terrible, of course) punk rock club, little girls with the souls of gruff police chiefs and our hero riding a motor scooter instead of a motorcycle to throw at us. Among other things. But most importantly, Trancers not only shows us those things but does its best to let them be fun, by not taking itself serious. Not taking yourself serious in the good and entertaining way must be a lot more difficult to achieve than it looks like or most films that try for the effect wouldn't be as bad. The difference between Trancers' version of this brand of fluffiness and the bad sort as incorporated in Troma films or Band's later Full Moon Productions lies in the fact that it still takes its audience serious. Where a Troma film winks at itself in a mirror, this is a film still winking at us sitting in front of it.
While I usually just can't stand Helen Hunt, I do approve of the fact that the film doesn't make her character completely useless and only be there to be rescued by Thomerson and wear troubling fashion. She's useful, she has moments of being sensible, she's as much as you can hope for in a cheap SF actioner.
And she's next to nothing compared to the film's true trump card, the utterly awesome Tim Thomerson doing the perfect square-jawed cynical hero with delightfully silly one-liners (personal favourite: "Dry hair is for squids") while having at least one toe in the territory of a parody of a perfect square-jawed cynical hero, which, let's be honest, is the only way those guys can ever be made sympathetic. Somehow, Thomerson even makes Deth kinda cool.
A few years later, Band would go on to turn Trancers into a confused franchise of films that have nothing to do with each other beyond Thomerson, but none of the later films is even vaguely watchable, so this is the one to watch if one wants to see Thomerson doing what Thomerson does best.
Thursday, February 20, 2014
SyFy vs. The Mynd: Swarmed (2005)
Oh hey, it's Jaws, but the shark is a swarm of accidentally genetically altered super yellow jackets and the beach festival is a burger cook-off sponsored by a Southern barbecue sauce magnate as played by Tim “Terrific” Thomerson.
No, wait, now I made the film sound rather good, when it is in fact an early example of those SyFy originals that just don't seem to understand which parts of their plots they can treat carelessly, and which they need to treat seriously, leading to a film that is so dumb you might confuse it with a parody of its kind of horror movie, if not for the fact that none of its jokes are funny, and no moment of idiocy paid for with any sort of cleverness.
Swarmed is a film that mostly impresses by how little anyone involved seems to care about their craft, with Miguel Tejada-Flores's script containing not a single thought – either of its own or borrowed from somewhere else -, nor a single fun idea, while slavishly following the usual mechanics of the sub-genre (we can't have anyone watching die of a heart attack when not everything in the movie is completely predictable), while Paul Ziller's - a man who really can do better in the SyFy movie realm - direction never bothers to even try to get a grip on the clichéd, meandering plot. Ziller is certainly not attempting to distract viewers from the idiot plot proceedings by doing anything imaginative or fun, and goes for the sort of competence that is too boring even in the context of lowered expectations I bring to my SyFy movie.
Technorati-Markierungen: canadian movies,american tv,in short,syfy vs the mynd,horror,paul ziller,tim thomerson
Friday, January 29, 2010
On WTF: Trancers (1985)
Trancers is what happens when you combine the natural awesomeness of Tim Thomerson with Charles Band in his least annoying mood and subtract any dolls or puppets - a very fun little movie. You can read more about it in my review on WTF-Film.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
In short: Zone Troopers (1986)
It's World War II again, 1944 in Italy to be precise. After an inexperienced Lieutenant has gotten himself and most of his men killed, stoic Sgt. Rock Stone (Tim Thomerson) hasn't got much of a squad anymore. What's worse is he and his three surviving men are stranded behind enemy lines. Since all bad things come in threes, the local area is just teeming with German soldiers (some of whom even speak recognizable German).
The bad guys seem to be searching for something. Might it possibly be the crashed UFO the GIs stumble upon? Or the bug-eyed alien crash survivor.
One thing the Sarge knows for sure: If the Germans want it, it's his job to make sure they don't get it.
Someone must have liked his old DC war comics a lot and I am the last one to disagree with someone who lets not-Sergeant-Rock meet aliens. I could of course argue against the "war as boy's adventure club" tenor of the movie, or against the Germans all being demonical caricatures, but that wouldn't be fair to a film that doesn't take itself serious enough to merit this kind of annoyance. It's really much too friendly and just plain entertaining for that. Also, I don't believe in art as moral education.
So, if you always wanted to see Nazis disintegrated by blasters, or Hitler decked by a Polish-American, dig it out. And some digging is in order. For some reason, no one has seen fit to release this early (as in: when some of his films were actually watchable) Charles Band production on DVD, so you'll have to live with bootleg VHS copies.
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