Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan (2013)

I've had this in my Instant queue for sometime now, and last week I noticed our buddy Moe Porne on my Twitter feed talking about it. I asked him to give me his thoughts when he was done, thinking I might review it, and he told me I'd get a kick out of it, so here we are. As an aside, you can catch Moe on his Drunk on VHS podcast hosted by Couch Cutter, a fine site I used to write for from time to time. 

Axe Giant takes place in the Minnesota wilderness, where a boot camp operator takes some troubled teens to rehabilitate them in lieu of a stint in the pen.  Things go from bad to worse though when one of the little brats rips a horn off an ox skull lying on the ground.  Turns out that skull belongs to Babe the Blue Ox, and Paul Bunyan is an enormous twisted man-child with a penchant for murdering people who desecrate Babe's burial ground.  Now everyone is in for it.



This one was pretty fun, but its ending was all over the place, which betrayed the proceedings.  There was one thing I had a real issue with that I'll get into in my last paragraph because it contains spoilers.  It was definitely a low-budget schlockfest that worked both as a time killer and a good bad movie night option until that ending, when it kinda wasn't as much fun anymore.  It definitely had those great low-budget touches though, like I loved that they just took a National Forest ranger office or something, slapped new words over the sign, and passed it off as a juvenile detention center.  And Joe Estevez combined with a scant Dan Haggerty added more laughs.  Paul Bunyan himself was a great baddie, and the idea of making him a horror villain was fun too.  As someone who used to watch Maury, I also appreciated the way they made fun of the drill sergeant in the boot camp episodes.  It had a lot of elements like that that worked, and I think even with the bad ending, it might be fun enough to get you to the church on time.  On the other hand, it's not very remarkable, and with all there is to chose from on Instant, maybe not worth it.

Joe Estevez played the crazy local, and I couldn't figure out what to do with him, but the fact that he was Joe Estevez was enough I guess.  He was playing the stereotypical Southern backwoods crazy, even though he was supposed to be from Minnesota.  It's hard to tell if he was just overacting because he's a D-movie actor, or he was doing a spoof on that character from most horror films.  That's the problem with a lot of modern low-budget horror flicks, they try to have this meta-spoof quality to them that insulates them from criticism, because they can say "oh, we were making fun of that kind of thing, we weren't actually doing it."  The Asylum seems to have made a cottage industry out of that, but theirs often work better.  On the other hand, if you don't trust that Estevez was spoofing old horror flicks, and think he was overacting, you can at least make fun of him.



The Maury boot camp episode has always been the biggest crock to me, and this film really got that right-- which is a reason why I'm inclined to give them a pass on Estevez's character.  I've always seen it as these moron drill sergeants who suffer from a form of Little Man's Syndrome and get off by yelling at defenseless kids.  I remember one when a girl on the show, after being berated by the audience and the drill sergeant while her mom played the innocent victim, said "but my mom is doing drugs with her boyfriend all the time", and the drill sergeant yelled at her "this is about you, not her!"  No, really it's about you being a mental midget Mr. Drill Sergeant, and this movie nailed that with their own drill sergeant, played by Boston's own Thomas Downey.  He was a total jerk to the kids and the counselor, played by Kristina Kopf, who was sent to help the kids.  I kind of wished he'd done it even more, been like the real morons you'd see on Maury, but I guess this was good enough.

If you've been rockin' with me for sometime, you may know I enjoy hiking, and not just any hiking, I like to go up good-sized mountains, hit some steep sections, and really give myself a kick in the pants.  But I'm in good shape, and I enjoy it.  That's why it was funny to see the drill sergeant take the kids on a hike for punishment, and I had to realize that for most Americans, that would be a punishment.  Like the hike I just went on yesterday in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.  I had a great time, but it had some long steep sections that would not be a lot of people's idea of fun.  I guess one person's past time is another's punishment.



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As I mentioned above, the end of the film was all over the place, and it started with Paul Bunyan killing one of the kids, Rosa, played by Victoria Ramos.  She's developed as an honorable and just character, who has a young daughter that she wants to regain custody of once she's out of the pen.  The kind of character we want to root for, or at the very least, don't want to see die because she has a young daughter.  Of course the film then decides to off her.  Really?  How mean-spirited can you get?  That's just bad form, and ruined an otherwise fun horror flick.  From there it gets worse, when her friend Marty, played by Cliff Williams, is killed by Joe Estevez in a fit of craziness as Estevez tries to stop everyone else from killing Paul Bunyan.  It was just weird and an out of place way to knock off another character.  It just seemed like the film couldn't figure out how to end things, and the ending is the most important part.
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So that's it, and we didn't even get into Martin Kove's son Jesse, who plays one of the kids, or Dan Haggerty as a Grizzly Adams type who runs a logging operation up there in the late 19th century.  It's all kind of hit or miss I guess, and while this has its moments, the ending ultimately kills it for me, but you might not have as much trouble with it.  At least it's on Instant, so it's not much of an investment.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1684548/

The Protector (1998)

A friend of mine hooked me up with a copy of his VHS of this flick.  The names Frank Zagarino and Matthias Hues were all I needed to hear to give it a look.  At the very least it might be so bad it's good, right?

The Protector is about a dude with amnesia, played by Steven Nijjar, who is being chased by all kinds of people, like Matthias Hues and Frank Zagarino and the NSA.  He has a disc, or knows where a disc might be, with a virus on it that could have a massive impact on the world economy.  Now Nijjar needs to stay alive, find out who he can trust, oh, and I forgot to mention, someone kidnapped his son.  Will he make it happen?



We use the term "so bad it's good" so often when dealing with these kinds of movies, but what about "so awesome it's good"?, because, while this is pretty bad, it's pretty awesomely bad.  Right away, Nijjar is in a diner which is shot up by a bunch of women who look like a cross between a hit squad and back-up dancers in a Robert Palmer video.  His feet catch on fire, he runs away-- into a body of water to extinguish the flames-- and the ladies start shooting at him with rocket launchers, which blow up the junkers at the car lot Nijjar runs through.  How amazing is that?  Even better, Nijjar's son's voice is dubbed over by a guy trying to sound like a kid.  I'm not kidding.  How much more amazing is that?  Then you have some sweet fights, especially with Zagarino, and between Hues and Zagarino-- some that are choreographed at a higher level than we usually see for a film of this grade.  Just a fun 90s DTV actioner.

Let's start with Zagarino.  He had some really nice fights, which is what you really want from him in a film like this.  He also had some great lines.  I've noticed he's at his best as an actor when he's allowed to deliver sophisticated dialog in a monotone voice.  When he yells at Nijjar "you're an asshole!", it sounds silly, but if he'd just said it calmly, it would've been perfect.  It's a difficult thing for an actor to mitigate a rough screenplay and make it sound natural, and poor Zagarino is often forced to act in films with rough screenplays, meaning he's often caught out.  That's okay if he's allowed to deliver on some good fights, and he has a couple nice ones here, especially a good strip club brawl.  Not the most memorable of Zagarino's flicks, but not horrible either.



Matthias Hues is up to his old tricks as the film's baddie.  I got the sense that most of his scenes were shot in a day, because he's not in many locations.  You get a lot of him smoking a cigar, delivering bad dialog, and either shirtless or in a leopard-print silk shirt.  Then at the end he gets after it with two fight scenes against Zagarino.  Before those scenes, he runs around quite a bit firing a couple machine guns at people off-screen.  You could tell that he's done that enough, because he posed in those shots with style.  That's what you want from a baddie, loads of style.  It would've been nice to see more fights with him though.  Like Dolph, he's one of the best pure athletes we see here at the DTVC, especially for his size, and he makes the fights exciting because of that.

I had heard of Steven Nijjar before reviewing this film, but his parts in the other movies I'd done were small (those movies were TC 2000 and Expect No Mercy).  This one he's in it quite a bit, and while he can't carry a movie the way Zagarino can as a hero or Hues can as the baddie, he's not bad.  He doesn't have many credits to his name after this, so we'll see how many more times he makes it on the DTVC.



There are two kinds of people in this world: those who hear a man speak in a high pitched voice trying to mimic the child that he's dubbing over and think "I need to go on imdb and kill this movie"; and people like me who laugh, text my girlfriend about it, and give the ol' Tiger Woods fist pump.  With over 900 of these reviews in the can at this point, it's moments like this that keep me sane; but, also, it's moments like this that I started the DTVC for, and I love that over six years and 930-plus reviews later that I can still be surprised by something I haven't seen before.

This one is not an easy find.  As of this posting, Amazon doesn't even have it.  It's worth keeping an eye out for it though, because it's a fun time.  Low-budget 90s bad action, a great way to kill 90 minutes.  So awesome it's good.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0137180/

Profile of a Killer (2012)

A couple weeks ago Jasmine Reid, producer of Profile of a Killer, came to me to see if I could review her film, and we're making it happen now.  Also, our friend Vic at Vic's Movie Den hit this one, so you can go there to see what he thought.  Now let's see what I thought.

Profile of a Killer is about a serial killer who's dumping bodies along US-61 in Minnesota.  Saul (Gabriele Angieri), a well known FBI profiler from Florida, is called in to investigate, and before he knows it, the killer kidnaps him.  The killer is a teenage boy (Joey Pollari), and he wants Saul to profile him.  Now Saul is at the mercy of this child killer and needs to use all of his skills in dealing with serial killers to stay a live.  Hot on their trail is Rachel (Emily Fradenburgh), a local detective, who takes over the case after Saul is kidnapped.  Will they be able to stop this boy and his killing spree?



This definitely had its moments, and I wouldn't call it a bad film, but it was long-- like almost 2 hours-- and there really wasn't enough material here for something that long.  I personally saw a great moment to wrap the film up around the 45-minute mark, and while I'm not saying there weren't moments after that that weren't great too, I just don't know how much I needed them.  This easily could've been a solid two-part story arc on a show like Criminal Minds, maybe like an end of the season cliff-hanger, and in that capacity it would've mitigated another area that I had a problem with: poor character development.  If this had been a two-part episode in an established crime drama, we already would've had characters we knew as a base from which to start this, and it could've hit the ground running.  Instead, we had bits and pieces of character development, but it either felt grafted in, like Rachel's moment with her fellow detective, or came at a moment when we needed to move things a long quicker, like Rachel talking to the killer's parents near the end of the film.  Again, this isn't horrible, and maybe even the length wouldn't kill you, so if you're a fan of shows like Criminal Minds this might be worth checking out if you see it at your RedBox kiosk or something.

Anyone who's been rockin' with me for a while knows that a film's length is a sticking point, and I'll tell you why.  I think it was Roger Corman who said the perfect length is 88 minutes, because it fit on 11 reels and made it cheaper to pack than a 90-minute film; but for the sake of argument we'll go with 90 minutes as the optimum length.  90 minutes gets the viewer in and out without asking for too much of an investment, yet at the same time that's ample time to tell us what you need to tell us.  Anything after 90 minutes is borrowed time, so the first 90 needs to be of such high quality that we don't realize we've been watching for that long, and as I mentioned above, the 45-minute mark looked like a great place to start wrapping things up, so by 90 we were already well onto borrowed time.  Considering we already knew who the killer was, we'd seen him kill multiple people, now all we needed to do was get to Rachel finding him, so it was only a matter of time before we were spinning our wheels in place, with all the tension dried up.  That was too bad, because there were some really great tense moments that got my heart rate up, which is what I want from a film like this, I just want them in a smaller package with less packing tape surrounding them.



Gabriele Angieri as Saul was great, and he affected that vibe of a Joe Mantegna in Criminal Minds or Anthony LaPaglia in Without a Trace, which made him a very compelling protagonist.  Again though, this is the kind of story that you drop him into after the season's previous 12 episodes where we've seen him crack however many other cases, or maybe three or four other TV movies that established his character.  I know the market is flooded with TV shows like that, which kind of puts this film and his character in a spot where we wonder "what are they bringing to the table?  Why do I need Gabriele Angieri when I can have Joe Mantegna?"  You know I don't know, I guess maybe because you've seen all the episodes of your favorite crime drama so much that you need something new but along the same lines, and in that sense, Angieri gives you that guy you're familiar with and you're looking for when you pick something like this up from RedBox.

I really liked the idea of the killer being a kid who grew up with no hardships and, as such, had no means of forming his identity.  I used to be fascinated by the Sweet Sixteen show on MTV for the same reason, watching these young girls who have never wanted for anything searching for some sense of self and validation from the outside world.  The problem though is that the character devolves into the bitter teen anon troll we see all over the Internet.  I was waiting to see him show Saul his OK Cupid page where he complains about how he's always "friendzoned".  While it's a cool idea in theory, and might work really well in that TV drama capacity I discussed above, it doesn't make for a very compelling villain, no matter how well Joey Pollari played him.  And that's another area where the run time creeps in, because we're done with this kid's anon trolling manifesting itself in killing and indulgent conversations with Saul by the 45-minute mark, and we wish we could just block him and he'll go away.



SPOILER ALERT!!!!   SPOILER ALERT!!!!   SPOILER ALERT!!!!
This character here was known only as "hooker", and she's the first victim killed by our villain while Saul is his captive.  The scene when Saul wakes up and hears through the baby monitor in his room that the killer has her in his killing station is so chilling and tense, I felt like it made up for the previous 30 minutes where not much happens.  The problem was, it let us off the hook.  It comes and goes so fast, and then we're treated to a scene the next morning where the killer shows Saul her dead body.  What a wasted opportunity.  Take us into the room, and I'm not saying you need to be too macabre, but now that you've got us, really get us and leave us wondering what he's going to do to her-- and she wonders what he's going to do to her.  Keep my heart racing, and use it as a means to really explore the killer's character organically.  Maybe she says something that sets him off.  Maybe she does something that causes him to hesitate.  Why does he react the way he does?  You can have a 2-hour movie as long as the right scenes are longer.  I can think of another where Rachel is investigating a warehouse, and instead of giving us long takes that drive up the tension of the unknown, we get quick jumpcuts and before we know it the scene is over and no action happens.  Contrast that with the scene at the end where Rachel meets the killer's parents.  We're already over an hour into the film, we know that she's going to learn a key piece of information that will get her to Saul's location, this is no time to draw things out, yet here's where the film decides to do that.  It was frustrating.
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So this is ultimately a pass for me, but I do think someone who likes the serial killer TV crime drama might enjoy this, even at the longer run time.  As far as I can tell, Amazon VOD or on DVD from them is the only way to go, so if you're a fan of shows like Criminal Minds, a $4 Amazon VOD rental might not be the worst thing for you, though if it ever ends up on RedBox or Netflix Instant, that would be better.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2387543/

7 Below aka Seven Below (2012)

I saw this was on Instant, and it had Val Kilmer and Ving Rhames in it.  That's it, oh, and it was 90 minutes long.  That helps too.  As an aside, did you know that Val Kilmer and Ving Rhames were born about seven months apart?  Both in 1959, Rhames on May 12, Kilmer on December 31.  imdb is a wonderful time waster, isn't it?

7 Below is about a house in which the family's adopted son kills them all in the early 1900s.  When a group of people in the present time, including Val Kilm and Luke Goss, take a bus trip into the Minnesota wilderness, and the bus crashes, local man Ving Rhames takes them back to his place to wait out a storm.  That place is, you guessed it, the house where the kid offed his family.



I know Val, it hurts.  I don't know what we're doing here.  Too much nothing happening.  Too much almost happening but not happening.  So many loose ends flying together near the end that I needed a pair of safety goggles.  Maybe most egregious: our heroes do nothing to figure out their own plight or how they can fix it.  They stumble around aimlessly in the dark, though we're supposed to believe they know what they're doing, but they never get close to what's happening to them, and need it revealed in the last 10 minutes.  That's lazy in my book.  There was an attempt to affect a Stephen King style secluded location creepiness, but the characters don't buy in, which means we lose it; and the Vincent Price haunted mansion style film falls flat too when, despite Rhames's best efforts, his Price-like character is written too flatly to keep us intrigued.  By the time we see a ghost in a sheet attack the hero (I'm not kidding, it was almost bad Halloween costume ghost in the sheet), I was done.  This is a pass for me.

Val honey, I know, what is your agent doing?  How did you end up in this?  Yes, if you close your eyes enough maybe it'll all be a dream and you'll be back playing Jim Morrison.  His role in this isn't as big as you'd like, and while I'm giving some of the plot away, I think it's better to warn you going in that, while he's good, he barely makes it through the first third of the film.  A surprising development?  A plot twist keeping us on our toes?  Or a Kilmer bait-and-switch?  You decide.  (Oh, and I will not make any jokes about how former Batman Kilmer looks primed to play the Penguin in the next film.)  (Didn't you just say you weren't going to make that joke?)



I don't know if this movie was trying to be original or hit us with an original concept, but it was pretty paint-by-numbers, right down to the classic White Man Will Save You trope.  Latina?  White Man will save you.  What reason do you have not to trust me?  There is not 500 years of history telling you you're making a mistake, this is a movie, and White Man is good, very good.  Yes, statistically speaking, if a woman is stranded on the side of the road with car trouble and a straight White Man pulls over to help her, things are more likely to end badly for her than good for her-- but not in Movieworld, where White Man is good and he will hug you and love and protect you from Bad Men.  Save us White Man!

Ving Rhames does his best to pull what he can from his character.  He tries to make it a cross between his own aesthetic and that old Vincent Price haunted mansion character, but there isn't much there for him to work with.  Man it was fun watching him try though.  Maybe that's why he took this role, for the challenge of pulling that off.  If you really want to think outside the box though, have the blond-haired blue-eyed hero play the Vincent Price character, and Ving Rhames be the guy that picks up the hot Latina who's having car trouble.  Now that's a plot twist for an American movie.



Among the other stars, we had Matt Barr as our hero, Bonnie Somerville as Kilmer's wife, and Rebecca Da Costa as the woman Barr picks up by the side of the road.  They all do the roles you expect them to, though Somerville as Kilmer's wife was fun when she and Kilmer were arguing early on, and it was too bad she couldn't play off him more.  Then there was Luke Goss and Barr's brother.  We've seen him in a fair amount of DTV roles, and he seems to have carved out this niche for himself playing the early-thirtysomething all-American jackass.  He has it all down, the mannerisms, the speech (though his accent does peek out from time to time) the boot-cut designer jeans with rips in all the right places, the gaudy belt buckle, the knit cap, and the four-button muscle-fit henley.  The thing is, in real life he's a fortysomething man from London.  I guess if his twin brother Matty can carve out a niche playing gigs at Caesar's Palace in Vegas, Luke can carve out a niche as the all-American jackass, and I think he being removed from it like he is, he can bring a sense of self-awareness to his rendition of the character that a real all-American jackass wouldn't have.  In that sense, Goss may have been the most consistent character, in that like the others it was so one-dimensional, but he's going for that and nailed it.

Obviously this is a pass for me.  My girlfriend told me that when she looked it up on Netflix after I told her I was reviewing it, that one of the reviewers on there asked for the ol' temporal refund-- you know, "I want my 90 minutes back."  I never demand the temporal refund, because good or bad I get a review out of it, but you might, so I'd avoid it, because we all know no one has ever been made whole on that temporal refund in the history of movies.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1988781/

Bad Girls from Mars (1990)

I saw that this was on Instant, was directed by schlock auteur Fred Olen Ray, and looked like a fun time, so I figured why not make it happen.  Also, clocking in at 81 minutes doesn't hurt either.  Let's see then if I made the right choice.  Also, our friend Mitch at The Video Vacuum made this happen, so you can go there to see what he thought.

Bad Girls from Mars is about the making of a D film of the same name that has been beset by tragedy after tragedy.  It seems its leading ladies can't stop getting themselves murdered.  This isn't the worst thing for the film's producers, who stand to make a killing off the insurance if it's not made ("Springtime for Hitler" it's not), but they decide to take one last chance and hire a notorious madame who just published her tell-all book as their fifth lead.  The film's director can't handle all this stress, but when the murderer starts targeting him too, he's reaching his breaking point.  Will he be able to take enough Alka Seltzer and JD cocktails to keep himself sane?



This is really fun.  A USA Up All Nite style classic, complete with tons of boob shots that would've led to a lot of awkward edits in the cable TV version.  Ray does a great job of handling the spoof aspect in a way that doesn't become too gimmicky, which is hard with this kind of movie.  In a way it kind of feels like a Godard French New Wave film, in that it was a comedic commentary on the D industry the way Godard's films were a commentary on the then mainstream Hollywood industry-- the main difference being, where Godard would've had Jean-Pierre Leaud reading a socialist diatribe, Ray had one of his female stars showing her tits.  This is definitely what you come to a 90s sex romp for, and Ray delivers.

With someone like Fred Olen Ray, who has such a prodigious directing bio, there are bound to be some misses along the way, and it's possible because he needs to pump out so many over a short period of time, more of them end up misses to him than he'd like because he doesn't get the time or the resources to make it the way he wants.  It's good then when we get something like this, or Dinosaur Island, where we can showcase one of his hits, and what's funny about this one is that, in spoofing the D movie industry, he gives us an idea of how hard it is for him to make the movie he wants; but he does it in a way that's still funny and entertaining, and not whining, which is great for us in the audience.  When you think of that great USA Up All Nite aesthetic, no one does it like Ray, and this film is a great example of that.



After Tom Sizemore's pouring beer on his cereal in Point Break, this scene of the director mixing his Alka Seltzer with Jack Daniels is the all-time best degenerate alcoholic food moment in movie history.  Once I saw it, I knew I couldn't not talk about it.  I think when he actually drank it it was like cream soda or something, but still, the effect was there.  In my last post for Wicked, you may remember I mentioned a high school science teacher who was fired for giving another class non-alcoholic champagne.  Here's another great story about him.  One day that year the weatherman predicted a huge snow storm, and our teacher apparently banked on that happening and drank the lights out the night before.  Of course, even if this is the southern tip of Maine we're talking about, it's still Maine, and it still needs to be a massive snow storm to get school called, and that storm wasn't enough.  So he came into class with a hangover, and his lesson for the day was to show us how Alka Seltzer worked.  I'm not kidding.

There are plenty of other people in this.  The great Edy Williams plays the madame, and she seems to just go with all of it, whether she's changing in the back of a car, or telling the director she has a thing for men covered in garbage.  Speaking of the director, he's played by Oliver Darrow, and he hasn't been in much else.  That's too bad, because he was really funny here.  Fred Olen Ray mainstay Jay Richardson is in this as the overbearing obnoxious actor who only cares about his career.  I think he's given license to be as goofy as he wants here, and he definitely wants.  B horror and sci-fi great Brinke Stevens plays the costume girl and Richardson's woman.  She has almost 150 credits on imdb, of which almost all are DTV, and this is the first film of hers we've ever done, after well over 900 posts.  I have no idea how that happened, but it did.  Finally, Jefferey Culver played the producer.  I couldn't figure out who he looked like.  There were definitely some heavy notes of Jerry Orbach, a hint of the guy who played Bookman on Seinfeld, perhaps a dash of any former Murder She Wrote guest, and a blend of both Van Dyke brothers.



One thing you gotta love about watching any film is the director cameo, and Ray has two in this, one here as a guy robbing a liquor store, and later as a member of the crew tossing out scenes from the script-- literally throwing the pages out.  This one here as the liquor store robber looked like it was almost entirely improvised, or at the very least, not rehearsed.  I would've given you a shot of Ray without the bandanna over his face, but by the time he pulls it down, a topless Edy Williams shows up, and we can't show that if we want to keep oue blog without one of those parental warnings on it.

But hey, the movie's on Instant, so you can go there and see all the boobs you want.  Beyond the boobs, this is also a pretty funny and entertaining movie.  Fred Olen Ray delivers with a USA Up All Nite style classic, and it's well worth checking out.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101399/

Wicked (1998)

When I mentioned the DTVC to my girlfriend, she suggested I check this one out.  I was instantly intrigued by the idea of doing a Julia Stiles flick, plus it has DTVC favorite Michael Park as the detective.  I recognized a couple other names too, in particular Patrick Muldoon.  Often that's all I need anyway to get something on the blog, but it didn't hurt that she was requesting it-- yes, I guess that's the key to getting me to review your request, you have to be my girlfriend.  Sorry she beat you to it.

Wicked is about a family living in a gated community in California.  The oldest daughter, Julia Stiles, doesn't get along with the mother, and has a thing for the father.  This works out for her when the mother is murdered.  While detective Michael Parks is looking for the culprit, Stiles is busy filling her dearly departed mother's shoes, with the hopes of becoming her father's new wife.  This isn't exactly working out for either the father or her younger sister, and when he brings a new wife home, tensions rise.  What will Stiles do to get the family life back that she wants?



This is definitely a fun one in the vein of the Lifetime Original.  I mean, don't get me wrong, it's bad, whether it's the wannabe Hitchcockian direction that feels more TV movie thriller, or the story that devolves into something unrecognizable by the end, or just the sheer silliness of seeing Julia Stiles as a young girl trying to be her mom; but it's fun too.  Also, Stiles brings another element to the proceedings, because she is so good.  She turns the silly craziness of her character into an almost chilling deviousness, often just with the look on her face, so one can see in this film that she was going somewhere.  The rest of the cast, a mix of greats like Michael Parks and soap/Lifetime mainstays like Muldoon and William R. Moses, who played the dad, make this a great trash time waster, and sometimes that's all you need from a movie like this.

Julia Stiles is definitely the driving force of this film, and you can tell that, even then, she was a cut above everyone else other than maybe Parks.  I don't know if this is one she puts on the top of her CV, especially when you look at her imdb bio and see that a year later 10 Things I Hate About You blew up, followed by Save the Last Dance a couple years after that.  She's sort of fallen out of big Hollywood lead parts now, I think because they didn't know what to do with her once she couldn't play teens anymore; but to see her in a DTV Lifetime flick before she became big is a lot of fun.  The novelty is definitely worth it.



One of the failures of the writing in this film was the way they utilized Michael Parks's detective.  He was as good as you'd expect, and he comes across early on as that gumshoe who's going to figure this thing out just when the culprits think they're going to get away with it.  This never really happened though, and in fact, he acts against character at the end, giving the film an unresolved quality that felt like a cop out.  The thing that makes these Noir-ish suspense yarns is the detective, and when you have a guy like Parks, why not lean on him?  Also, when you have an agent in your story like the detective, it's like you have an easy element who can resolve the story for you, and to not use that agent properly gives the film an inorganic quality that makes the whole thing not work.  Too bad, but still, for fans of Michael Parks, he's a lot of fun.

Among the other stars, the one that we've seen on here before is Patrick Muldoon, who you may remember getting his ass kicked by Richard Norton in Rage and Honor II.  He plays the derelict neighbor that's shagging the wife before she's offed, making him Parks's prime suspect.  One of my favorites was William R. Moses, who played the dad, and who is a Lifetime Movie mainstay and does tons of TV work too.  It was so weird hearing him swear, and I wonder if he was excited to be able to do that too, like "fuck TV man!"  The mom was played by Chelsea Field, who played Teela in Masters of the Universe, but will be better known to most of you as the Western Airlines flight attendant whom Schwarzenegger tells "don't disturb my friend, he's dead tired" in Commando.  Nothing as cool as that for her here, though she was a great character and it was too bad she was killed off so soon.  Finally, the younger sister was played by Vanessa Zima, who I remembered from Ulee's Gold.  Her last name is great too, reminding me of that alcoholic drink with the same name from the 90s.  Our freshman science teacher asked us if we'd tried it before, and we were like "dude, we're 14!"  Surprise surprise, he was fired at the end of the year for giving kids in another class non-alcoholic champagne, which I guess still has alcohol in it.



Part of the tension of this film is supposed to come with us, the audience, seeing Stiles as a young girl making moves on her father.  Now, the father thing was definitely an issue, but the age wasn't, because she and I are roughly the same age.  I mean, her outfits and whatnot are exactly what girls in my school wore, so I couldn't help transporting myself back to 1998 with them, and by doing that, making myself 19 again.  Where the film did make its money in this respect though came in her interactions with Patrick Muldoon, those definitely made me feel uncomfortable.  It's one of the odd things about movies though, the audience perception has a lot to do with how it comes off, and me not being able to divorce the fact that Stiles is my age from who her character was affected how I perceived the film.

Okay, let's wrap this up.  As far as I know, this is only available on used DVD or VHS.  I know I got it used on DVD, and it was really cheap.  I'm not sure you should go out of your way to track it down, but if you see it in a bargain bin for a buck or two, it's worth it.  As far as my girlfriend's knack for picking DTVC films: she's one for one right now, so we'll see if she retires one for one, or makes some future requests.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120088/

Stranded (2013)

This is one that our friends across the pond had the jump on us on by about two months before we got it here, and for me, having seen some of Christian Slater's other DTV work and enjoyed it, I was excited to see what it was all about.  The problem was, after it was released, it was stuck in Long Wait limbo in my DVD queue.  Finally we got it, so let's see if it was worth the wait.  Also, our buddy Fred, The Ex-Ninja looked at this one, so you can go there to see what he thought.

Stranded is about a moon base that does some kind of mechanized mining operation supervised by a crew of four people.  When the base is bombarded by a meteor shower, vital life support systems are damaged, and the crew is forced to wait while a rescue shuttle may or may not arrive.  At the same time, a spore has been discovered on one of the rocks.  I can't imagine that spore would be trouble at all though...



This isn't horrible by any stretch.  It's well shot, well acted, the sets looked nice, etc.  The thing I'm left with though is "and what?"  We've seen this movie done so many times, and this one doesn't really add anything unique.  Is that the worst thing ever?  I guess kind of?  I don't know.  I think on some levels it wanted to be that combination of Solaris (the Tarkovsky version, of course) and Alien or The Thing, but it never quite got there for me.  It's the kind of movie that if it ends up on Instant, or cable, or what have you, it's a fun way to kill 90 minutes, but I don't know if beyond Christian Slater it's anything you need to go out of your way for.

Slater is solid here again.  It's an odd part though, because he's the lead, but he's not always the focal point of the film until the end.  Other characters are affected by the spore, and we get their experience more, while Slater pops in and out to check up on things.  It's an odd construct when you think about: a film in a small environment with only four characters, and somehow we lose one for periods of it, and that one is the film's main star.  But Slater delivers that same smooth, consistent, almost effortless performance we've come to expect, and even with a film like this that would otherwise have been a skip for me, he elevates it to something else and makes it watchable and review-worthy.  Can't wait to see what he does next.



This movie was directed by Roger Christian.  If you don't know, he won an Oscar for his set decoration along with three other people for Star Wars, and was also nominated for the Oscar in the same category with three other people for Alien.  On the other hand, he won a Razzie as director of Battlefield Earth.  Ouch, though I don't really remember Battlefield Earth being poorly directed per se; but like in football where the quarterback gets all the glory in the win and the blame in a loss, the director has to wear it if his film is Battlefield Earth, fairly or unfairly.  This is much better of course, and while that isn't saying much, I imagine, especially when working with a small budget, that it's hard to pull off the film you want, and I think he put together a solid effort here, one that proves that Razzie was a blip in his career, not indicative of his overall work.

After Slater, I really liked Brendan Fehr as the base's doctor.  Really cool, and definitely made up for the times when Slater wasn't on-screen.  According to imdb he seems to do a lot of TV work, but hopefully we'll see him in more DTV flicks, maybe opposite Slater, because they were good together.  Then we had Amy Matysio as the crew member who first brings the spore on board.  We've seen her a couple times on here before, recently in the Kim Coates flick Ferocious, and in another Slater film, Dolan's Cadillac.  This was by far the biggest part we've seen her in though, and she wasn't bad.  Finally, we had Michael Therriault as the base engineer.  This is the first thing I've seen him in, and he was pretty good too, but I can't get too much into either his or Matysio's parts because I'll give away too much of the movie.



I had one major problem with this movie right from the start though, and while I suspended belief to some degree to get into it, it still affected how believable it was for me.  If we're making bases on the moon, why are we not making them more durable?  We know the moon has essentially no atmosphere, so rocks from space are going to impact what's there, unlike here where only the big ones hit and the rest are burnt up in our atmosphere before they hit.  So you'd think they'd plan better for something like the catastrophe that befell them at the beginning.  I understand that that would mean we'd have no movie, but if the movie hinges on something so unreasonable, isn't better to go back to the drawing board.

You can get this on the usual DVD suspects, Netflix, RedBox, etc.  As I said above, while this isn't horrible, I'm not sure it's remarkable enough either to go too far out of your way for it.  Again, you've seen this before, and it's really not bringing anything new to the table.  A solid cable or Instant time waster, so if it ends up on either of those outlets and you come across it, it might not be too bad.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2268573/