Gallowwalkers (2012)

This is one we've been hearing about for a long time.  It was shot back in 2006, and I think as early as 2008 Netflix was listing it as something you could put in the "Saved" section of you DVD queue.  Finally it made it out a few months ago, but it was stuck on "Long Wait" status, so I couldn't get it.  I got Amour instead, then became busy and didn't get a chance to watch that, having it at home for almost two weeks (a really great movie by the way), and by the time I got it watched and the DVD back to Netflix, this was finally available, and we're finally doing it now.

Gallowwalkers stars DTVC favorite Wesley Snipes as Aman, a man whose lover is raped by five men, and then dies giving birth to the child that was consummated in the assault.  Snipes swears revenge on them, and kills them all.  But what connection do they have to the undead-- known locally as "gallowwalkers"-- who are terrorizing the people living in the small desert communities around which Snipes lives, and if they can't die, how can Snipes defeat them?



I really enjoyed this movie.  First off, it was really striking visually.  It was a mix of a lot of great Western conventions, from the desolate landscapes to the Sergio Leone-style extreme close-ups.  The colors popped, the sets were all nice, and the actors all seemed to be on board with the director's vision.  This was an out-there concept for a movie, with it having some real macabre elements, but not exactly being a horror movie; yet too many horror conventions to be a straight-ahead Western; and despite being that out-there, the cast bought in, which brought the whole film together.  Snipes especially was into this, and it showed.  He was the lead, and he relished it, and made the film that much more fun.  I didn't know what to expect when I went in, but what I got was a really cool movie that mixed a lot of genres and influences and gave us something truly unique and entertaining.

We haven't seen Snipes on here in over 2 1/2 years, when we did Game of Death, but man, what a way to come back.  This is as good a Snipes as I've seen in a long time.  I watched the behind the scenes interviews featurette, and the fact that he was in that at all was big, because a lot of times the name actor of the film doesn't do the interviews for that; but beyond that, he sounded really excited to be working on this project, and was also excited that the film was shot in Namibia and hoped it could help build the film industry there.  All of that came through in his performance, plus we know from the Blade series that he can lead a film like this, and it all worked.  Definitely nice to have him back.



One thing I liked about the approach to this Western is that it felt like it was set in a liminal space.  I think even Snipes himself said his character was trapped in a kind of purgatory.  A lot of Westerns end up like that by default, but there's always this idea that these isolated areas are somehow a part of the greater United States or Mexico, depending on where they're set.  Here it was like these people and this place were not exactly in this realm.  Even the ordinary things weren't quite real.  Yet even in all of that, at its core this film is a Western, and the fastest gun still wins.  It was a really great use of a lot of traditional Western devices.

We had some other interesting people in this.  Patrick Bergin has a small role as the hanging marshal in a small town called Enoch's Hammer.  I always like seeing him on here.  Kevin Howarth played the main baddie.  The same way that Snipes seemed to enjoy being the hero, he was great as the villain.  Riley Smith played Fabulos, the young gun who Snipes recruits to help him take out Howarth's gang.  He was a great second to Snipe's character, where he looked young enough to not be at Snipe's level, but old enough to look like he knew what he was doing.  Then there was the great former wrestler Dallas Page, who played one of the baddie's hatchet men.  He wore a big metal helmet most of the time, and when it was off his face was obscured by a lot of make-up.  Finally, the woman who played Snipe's adopted mother was great too, but I don't know who she is because she doesn't have her picture on her imdb.  This is a message to all actors and actresses out there: get your picture on imdb, that's how we find out who you are.



Finally, we've seen Tanit Phoenix on here a fair amount.  She was in Lost Boys: The Thirst, and the two Death Race prequels, all three filmed in her native South Africa.  This was by far her best performance, but I think that was because she had the material here.  The character was written like and had the aesthetic of Claudia Cardinale's character in Once Upon in the West, and from there I think Phoenix was able to bring her style to the role.  Especially in the Death Race prequels, there's a one dimensionality to her character, even over two films, so it was good to see her get something more rounded and see what she could do with it.

I think this is a must see, but it is a different film, so if you're not up for that I'd say wait on it.  I thought it was great, and I was glad to finally make it happen.  As of right now you can get this on the usual DVD suspects, like Netflix and RedBox.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0829176/

Death Race 3: Inferno aka Death Race: Inferno (2012)

When last we visited the Death Race series, we were on prequel 1, Death Race 2.  That one I thought would've been good had it not been for the nausea inducing split-second MTV edits that gave me a migraine.  Part of me went into this one, the sequel to the prequel, even more apprehensive.  That 105-minute running time didn't help.  Also, our buddy at Explosive Action did this one too, so you can go there to see what he says about it.

Death Race 3 takes place after part 2.  Luke Goss is back as Frankenstein, and he's one Death Race win away from his freedom.  Problem is, owner Ving Rhames sells the rights to tycoon Dougray Scott, which should be an awesome thing for Rhames because he's cashing in, but I guess he feels like he lost to Scott,or something, which makes no sense to me either.  Anyway, Scott isn't down with this whole let Frankenstein go thing, so he tells him he'll kill him or something if he wins the next Death Race, which is a three-day affair in South Africa, across the desert, even though the racers return back to the prison at the end of each leg, so it's not really across the desert, just three out and backs.  Now Goss needs some help from his friends if he's going to take the evil Dougray Scott down.



Wow, where do we begin?  The shaky-cam MTV edits thing from the last one is worse in this one.  Man, can I just say, I love watching a movie I can't see.  I love not being able to focus on anything for more than half a second.  From an action standpoint, we had a few good chases with some sweet crashes, and in those moments, I wanted to temper my bad review; but then we had three fight scenes that I couldn't focus on either, which was really frustrating-- again, I love being frustrated by my movies.  Story-wise, I don't what we're doing here.  We had too many racers-- actually, too many for the movie too, because they had this battle royale between the women navigators, where 14 (or 16, I don't remember, and it doesn't matter) fought to the death for 10 spots with ten racers, only to have 11 racers race-- but it was hard to keep track, and with the constant jump cuts, and all the characters and cars being similar and unremarkable, I couldn't make sense of anything.  Then Rhames sells the rights to Death Race to Dougray Scott, makes money on the deal, but now wants revenge on him?  Will the guy who sold Tumblr to Yahoo want revenge on Yahoo now after he personally made $250 million on the deal?  I don't know, this was a hot mess with a few nice crash scenes in it.

I watched the original Death Race 2000 for comparison to this one.  First off, I love the idea that an improvement on the original was making it so we can't see it.  "You know what I didn't like about that old one that I really want to improve?  The fact that it didn't involve rapid jumpcuts.  Seriously, you're not making a movie unless you're giving your audience a headache."  The original also had compelling characters.  Not only Frankenstein, but Stallone as the main heel was great, as was David Carradine's navigator.  Here, for the heel we had a guy that looked like a cross between Colin Hay and Danny Bonaduce, who had like three lines and did barely anything heelish, unlike Stallone; for the navigator we had Tanit Phoenix who, outside of a brief moment where she wields a flamethrower, does nothing but show off her cleavage and have silly romantic moments with Goss that were grafted in, all of it a total waste of her character.  Also, the original was almost 30 minutes shorter, yet covered much more ground from a story standpoint.  That one had the whole dystopian future, the rebels, and then the mysterious Frankenstein character.  We had none of that here, the best they could do was the Dougray hostile takeover that didn't make any sense.  This is not mere nostalgia factor rearing its head again, the original really did do a better job at making their movie than this one did.



In the last film Ving Rhames made up for a lot of that film's shortcomings, but unfortunately here he wasn't in it enough to do that.  As always, he's splashed across the cover, making it a sweet Rhames bait-and-switch. I understand maybe you couldn't get Rhames to shoot for the whole thing, and maybe you didn't want to wait for him to be more available, but that's when you show some integrity and put Dougray Scott on the cover instead.  I guess that's too much to ask though from a movie that's apparently so bad the people making it don't want us to actually see it, instead inundating us with rapid jumpcuts.  I wonder if the whole film is just cardboard boxes and tarps and the jumpcuts make it so we couldn't see that.  If so, I hope they recycled all that after.

Danny Trejo had a little more screentime than Rhames, which was good, and I think his character was a little better than the last time, but it wasn't a great Trejo style character anyway.  I've noticed that for Trejo to work, he really needs a bigger part, even as a supporting character, it can't be a few lines here or there.  Like in Recoil he was the main baddie, or in Machete he was the hero, he had a lot of room to work, and we got the full effect of what Trejo can do.  I think that's because he's kind of a reductive actor, he's said himself that he likes to say his lines in as few words as possible.  If he has a lot of screentime, he can make up for that in his presence, but in a few jumpcuts, we lose him and he might as well be anyone else-- though I guess not for him, because he gets a paycheck when he's in the movie.  Anyway, co-star Fred Koehler gets a hug from Trejo at the end of the film, and I was thinking that had to be a career highlight for him.  I would love to get an on-screen hug from Danny Trejo.



Here we have Tanit Phoenix as a total badass wielding a flamethrower (I noticed Explosive Action liked the same scene and captured the same image).  That's pretty much it for female badassery though, which was a disappointment.  With Phoenix, it's pretty much her cleavage and waiting to see what Goss will do next, not at all like the great navigator Frankenstein gets in Death Race 2000 who is trying to undermine Frankenstein as he drives because she works with the rebels.  Why not have her do something more, especially if you're going to hit us with that flamethrower scene to start.  We also had the producer of the show, who was played by Hlubi Mboya.  She was really good too, but she's really just playing second fiddle to Scott and Rhames; better though than the way the strong woman in the last film was dealt with, with her getting run over and Rhames saying "dumb bitch", which was not a good look.  They tried to include Olga Braun as a tribute to the original, but even that fell flat, with her just making a rookie mistake and getting killed as a result.  It's funny how this has worked out, that the original was made 37 years before this one, yet we've seen the imagery regarding women grow less progressive, not more.  That's not a good sign.  Maybe the next one will make up for all of that and have Michelle Rodriguez as Frankenstein.  How kickass would that be?

So that's it, outside of a few nice car crashes and explosions, this is pretty much a blah fest.  Probably a good 30 minutes too long, and in 105 minutes, the average shot was probably only a half a second long.  What a mess.  Is this what the action movie had become?  I need to sit through 100 minutes of bad jumpcuts and crap to see five minutes of good car chases in a movie about a car race?  

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1988591/

Death Race 2 (2010)

I didn't know what to expect with this movie going in. It had some great names, including DTVC favorites Danny Trejo and Ving Rhames, but you just never know nowadays. A great idea for a film can be snatched from you, right before your very eyes, with a series of blinding jumpcuts, bad camera effects, and a droning cookie-cutter modern rock soundtrack. I'm just sayin'...

Death Race 2 is a prequel to the original. Ving Rhames runs a corporation that owns prisons and TV channels, and a woman working for the latter decides he can make money by combining the latter with the former in the form of Death Matches. They do all right to start, but not good enough, so the lady ups the ante to Death Races. Meanwhile, Luke Goss is a wheelman who kills a cop in a bank robbery, and is sent to Ving's prison. Sean Bean wants him killed for fear he'll testify against him, but the lady wants him to Death Race for her first. Quite the dilemma.



So, what I could see of the film, I thought wasn't bad. Yes, it had the inane modern rock soundtrack-- they couldn't even use the Ram Jam's version of "Black Betty", they had to modern rock cover that too-- but Ving Rhames was great, and Danny Trejo, though playing kind of a cornball character, wasn't bad either. I even didn't mind Luke Goss. What killed me, and ruined the film, was the camera effects. I think Lee over at Straight-to-DVD-Heaven coined the term "avid farts", and this movie did it to death. One millisecond I'm seeing a guy go to throw a punch, then I see his back, then I see a chainlink fence, then I see stock footage of a guy being shot in the stomach with a cannon ball, then I see Max Headroom. Dude, seriously, lay off the Red Bull. Then there were the 360 crane shots. Who are you, Ernest Haller, trying to win an Oscar for cinematography? Cut the shit, you're making me dizzy. Then there was the constant slo-mo, acting as if this was the first movie to ever have a car chase, or the first movie to ever blow up a car. It was beyond excessive, it was almost insulting, as if we viewers are so dumb that we can only appreciate an exploding car if it's done in super slo-mo.

The director, Roel Reiné, has directed two films that I've seen, one, Pistol Whipped, which I enjoyed, and another, The Marine 2, which I didn't like. In neither case, though, did he go the MTV/avid farts route. Pistol Whipped was an especially great film, so to see this one turn out like Death Race 2: The Punchfighting was a disappointment. This was such a bad punchfighting film, in fact, that I was wondering where Tony Schiena and Hector Echevarria were. I don't know what this movie was, but had it been a little more straightforward and less gimmicky, I think I would've enjoyed it. I couldn't help thinking, while watching it, about a PM Entertainment film called The Sweeper with C. Thomas Howell, which I reviewed about 18 months ago. Just a good bad action movie. The people making this have a lot to learn from something like that. Stop thinking you're cooler than the 90s, because you're not-- not even close.



Luke Goss always has this squinty scowl on his face, like he's smelling something funny. The way the film handled his character finally getting scarred was interesting for a few reasons. First, he's badly burned while trapped in a flaming car. Before that, every car exploded on impact, but this one, for some reason (plot convenience theater), slowly immolated. Second, I thought in the previous film, his face was scarred from so many accidents, and I almost think it would've been cooler that way, say if he ends the film and has a big gash on his cheek, like it's just the start of things to come; though I do like doing it the way they did it too, especially so they could bring the mask into it. Finally, I don't know why they showed his face at all. By showing his face all burned and scarred, it ruined the impact of his putting the mask on. I know us Americans have to see everything, but sometimes less is more. What's the point of putting the mask on if you already have us used to seeing his burned face? That'd be like deciding three movies in to give Freddy a mask in Nightmare on Elm Street. Give us some mystery, leave something to our imagination.

I did like Ving Rhames, as I mentioned above. He has a great line, when he's telling Luke Goss that this his prison is like Ancient Rome. Goss asks him "then who are you?" "I'm Caesar." Yes you are. His character was betrayed by the bad script in something I'll be getting into next, when the woman who sets up Death Race is killed by Goss, he sees it on TV and says "That's a dumb bitch." It was crass and ignorant and totally not what Rhames's character had been throughout the movie. I guess it just showed that the people involved with this movie didn't have the capacity to understand how cool Rhames is.



This was supposed to be an applause scene, where Goss runs over the woman who started the Death Race, but it was a very dangerous message. Violence against women is never a good look, and I know she wasn't a nice person, but really all she did was jump in with the corporate sharks and become one of them too. No one else had a problem with using the prisoners for these twisted games, yet it's only the "dumb bitch", as Rhames so eloquently put it, who gets it? There were also messages about her using her body and having sex with powerful men to get by in life, as if the only way a woman can make it in the business world is on her back. The whole thing was just really chauvinistic, ignorant, and in poor taste. I know I shouldn't expect women's lib from a DTV action film, but maybe something a little less irresponsible. More 2010, and less 1950, is that too much to ask?

This had some potential, and there was some good action, it's just more often than not, that action was overly edited into something that was hard to focus on. I'm worried that this is the future of the action film, that I'll be doomed to gimmicky camera affects and cinematography that makes me sea sick, all set to a soundtrack of a bunch of Disturbed and Linkin Park wannabes. Lord help me!

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1500491/

Lost Boys: The Thirst (2010)

I went back to the archive, to over two years ago, to read my review of Lost Boys: The Tribe. I liked it, but not too much, and I was stuck with a feeling of "why was this made?", similar to the feeling I had after seeing Star Wars Episode I. Anyway, I had forgotten all about that review when I saw Lost Boys: The Thirst pop up on my Netflix queue, and was just excited to see what Feldman had in store for us this time.

Lost boys: The Thirst had Corey Feldman as Edgar Frog, living in a trailer that's being foreclosed on, and he needs some cash. When a hot stranger with a British accent comes to him hoping she can save her brother from vampires, at first he declines, but then he thinks about it, and decides it might be worth a go. Word on the street is, he can get a shot at the head vampire, the Alpha, the oldest of all time. He wants his brother Alan's help, but Alan's a vampire, so he can't count on that. He turns to a coquettish comic book store owner who has a thing for him instead. Can they take down this ultimate baddie?



Wow, this was the bomb. Totally got it right. As good as we can expect. Tongue-in-cheek in the right parts, bloody in the right parts, and awesomely Feldman in the right parts. This just got it, and because it got it, I loved it. There were great jokes about the Twilight series, reality TV, bloggers, and comic book buyers. The story and acting did a great service to the original, and I think fans of the original will like this one much more than Lost Boys: The Tribe. It also hits a perfect 81 minutes long. This was just a lot of fun, what you're looking for from a DTV Lost Boys movie.

This is one of those hybrid action/horror/comedy films, so I'm not sure I can classify it as strictly horror for the sake of this paragraph, but I'll try anyway. When I first started this site, I was drawing from a much larger scope of films than simply 1980s-90s bad action. My friends and I growing up loved all genres of low-budget DTV movies, from Sci-Fi like Cyberjack, to action like Showdown in Little Tokyo, to comedy like Ski School, to horror like Bad Taste and Street Trash. In fact, the horror was perhaps a bigger part of the picture than action films were. What happened along the way, though, as the blog grew in popularity, a lot of the energy in the comment threads came for the action films, and it was on the basis of that momentum that I started picking movies. Particularly big are those comments I get where someone comes in and is like "I loved this or that part, this is one of my all time faves, I love this or that actor", which is great, and I just don't get those in the horror films. I do know that I have a lot of horror followers, only they're not as vocal, and that's fine; it's just hard to ignore that energy, and because it mostly comes from the action films, that's why a huge percentage of my reviews are of action movies.



Corey Feldman really brings it here. He doesn't take himself too seriously, but he knows when to be funny, and when to play it straight and let the atmosphere do the humor for him. This is a huge change from his early days in comedic films like Busted and National Lampoon's Last Resort. There's still a lot he did in the 90s that I could go to for future posts, but I'm not sure how much I should, considering the odds are good it won't be as good as this. I think we're all rooting for Feldman and dig that he's made good now, and I can't wait to see what's next.

This film introduces an interesting dichotomy between two types of woman: the absolute hottie that's probably unattainable, and when she comes calling, a guy like Edgar Frog should be suspicious; and the cute comic book chick, who may not be as gorgeous as the hottie, but doesn't do so bad in the looks department herself, and also happens to know tons about comic books and other nerdy stuff. The idea, of course, is that the hottie is dangerous, while the cute comic book chick is innocuous, and the safer bet. This film follows that logic up until the end, when they show that even the comic book chick has an edge-- that she may not be that innocuous after all. I like that, when DTV movies do a decent job depicting their female characters in more rounded ways. It's an easy way to add depth that takes very little time, yet is seldom done.



Finally, we all watch this film with a heavy heart, knowing Corey Haim no longer with us. He actually turned down a role in this with a plan to appear in a fourth installment. We see him in flashback shots from the very first film, and it's eerie to think Feldman as Edgar Frog is mourning the loss of his friend, when soon after the real Feldman would be mourning the loss of his real friend. This film, for as much fun as it is, does bring home the fact that Haim didn't make it with us, and didn't get to enjoy this too.

This is an excellent movie. I'm upset that I had to wait over a month for Netflix to get it, but they have it now, so if you have Netflix, have at it. It's been since Titanic II that I've seen a new movie that got it as much as this one did, and I'm glad I had an opportunity to review it and tell everyone about it.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1400526/