Christopher Lamb-izzle. Lamb-eezy. The Lambinator. Lamba-damba-ding-dong. The big fella is back for his fourteenth movie here at the DTVC. Like another European hall of famer, Jean-Claude Van Damme, we're running out of movies of his to review. This one I found on Netflix to watch instantly on my new Netflix player for my TV. Quite a fun time.
Resurrection is a straight-up Seven rip-off, only here the killer is taking body parts to make his own Jesus Christ. That's pretty much it. Paint-by-numbers, same cinematography style as Seven, even the sets looked the same.
And that's it, baby. This sucked ten kinds of asscrack. The murders were as brutal as possible. The police station was as 70s newspaper building as possible. The plot twists were as predictable as possible. From start to finish, this was rip-off city. Sometimes rip-offs are good, like a nice Dolph Die Hard rip off. But when it's just brutal murders for the sake of brutal murders, I'll watch Jason beat a woman against a tree in her sleeping bag instead.
Like Van Damme, Lambert's accent is explained away by him being from New Orleans. I'm not sure I've ever seen that used on him. I think it's because Lambert's accent is harder to place. A lot of times his name is even pronounced LAM-birt, as opposed to LAM-bear like it should be, which assumes he's more Anglicized than he really is. I guess it doesn't matter where his hilarious voice comes from, just that he has it; and in this film, his voice is at its best. When he yells, when he becomes frantic, when he thinks he has a breakthrough in the case: it all sounds silly. It just would better if that hilarious voice was attached to a man wielding a samurai sword instead of a detective in a bad serial killer movie rip-off.
Last Christmas my mom bought me a Roku Netflix player so I could watch movies in my instant queue on my TV. Early on it wasn't such a great deal. I was using the wireless connection to hook up to the Internet through my router in the other room, and rather frequently throughout the movie, it would stop and have to reload. So I abandoned it for a month or so, and when I came back, they had updated the software, and now I can watch films completely uninterrupted. Not only that, but they updated the streaming player for the computer too, and that works better. It's still not as user friendly as a DVD as far as skipping ahead and rewinding goes, but what I like is that I can get images easier by just watching in Firefox, pausing, and hitting Print Screen.
Part of Lambert's character was that he was undergoing a crisis of faith, and he would see a priest played by director David Cronenberg. The same one that directed DTVC Hall of Famer Peter Weller in The Nude Lunch. I don't know which is more puzzling, the fact that he was in this, or how Viggo Mortensen has become his mainstay. Maybe he's friends with director Russell Mulcahy, but that still doesn't explain casting Viggo in his last two films.
Another big name in this is former pro basketball player Rick Fox. He was on the Lakers teams that won three championships in the early 2000s, and he also played for my Boston Celtics for a few years. It's funny watching basketball on TV, because all the players look like an average height, but when they're paired in a movie with non-basketball players, we get to see just how tall they are. No one came up to Fox's shoulders in this movie. And it's not like he was a center, he was a swingman. It's always hard to fathom that the point guard, who always looks so small, is in most cases taller than most of my friends.
There's really no reason to watch this. Seven is enough. Lambert doesn't bring enough to the table to make this rip-off worth doing. I didn't even really like Seven, actually. The problem is there isn't much else out there of Lambert's for me to review... or is there? According to imdb he's in Albert Pyun's Sword and the Sorcerer sequel Tales of an Ancient Empire, due out in June of this year. Can't wait for that.
For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0142804/
No comments:
Post a Comment