On the Edge (2002)

I found this at the video store while looking for other bad movie to rent. The prominently featured Ice-T scared off some of my friends who aren't big fans of his. I agreed on some levels, but I felt the Gary Busey and Fred Williamson factors superseded any misgivings about Ice-T.

On the Edge is about a young basketball player looking to make it into a big time college program and get off the bad streets of LA. He gets into some shady deals with Ice-T the pimp/drug dealer, and when a hit is put out on him, the two bumbling Italians sent to do the job mistakenly kill another young basketball player and his mom instead. This upsets a lot of people, including the husband and father (former pro-football player and Blaxploitation star Bernie Casey) now left family-less, so he investigates. At the same time, the boy who's still alive talks Fred Williamson into helping him get Ice-T off his back. Casey and Williamson, old friends from way back, team up to solve the murder of Casey's family, only to have Gary Busey, who's called in to clean up the mess of the bumbling Italians, kill Williamson's woman. Now the shit's hit the fan, and with the cops mysteriously silent throughout these heinous crimes, it's up to Williamson, Casey, and their ol' buddy Jim Brown to exact some street justice and clean up this neighborhood.



I loved this movie. The music was great, the action was there, all the actors turned in solid performances, and best of all, it was plenty Abusive. My friends who were scared off by the Ice-T on the cover missed a great film. Fred Williamson outdid himself here as director.

In terms of Williamson, he'll be 70 in March of next year. Making this, he was 64, and you'd have never known it. He rocked his Tommy Bahama gear and licked the boobs of his younger female co-star like a man half his age. He also did all right in the action sequences. Many people have asked why Williamson isn't in the DTVC Hall of Fame, and really, we've never put him up for consideration because he's known more for his great 70s Blaxploitation work than his more recent Direct to Video roles. Lately, though, I've been forced to reconsider that stance, as Williamson has been killing it in a bunch of the films I've seen with him in them. This one stands out as probably the best.

Gary Busey is great as the professional killer called in by the bad guy to take care of business. According to imdb, there are four films that he did with Williamson. Crooked aka Soft Target has already been reviewed on here. Unlike Crooked, which had very little of either Williamson or Busey, this features both prominently. Williamson does a great job keeping the Abusive level at a solid number. He never dials it down too much, but he never over does it either. It's not quite Point Break, but what is, really? Good job.



I must confess I liked Ice-T in this as well. As a pimp/drug dealer, he comes off much better than he did as martial arts wielding crime lord in Mean Guns. I'm not saying he should only play pimps and drug dealers, but considering he was also great as the host of The Player Hater's Ball on The Chappelle Show, maybe he should think about it. Unlike a lot of my friends, though, I do kind of like him on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. I guess you could say I don't hate him, I'm more in the realm of ambivalent.

This was the last film role for Ron O'Neal, who unfortunately succumbed to pancreatic cancer in 2004. He'll always be remembered as the great Super Fly. Swayze fans will also recognize him as Colonel Ernesto Bella in Red Dawn. Here he played the dad of the basketball player in trouble with the Ice-T. Unlike Williamson, Brown, and Casey, O'Neal started his career as an actor, not a pro football player, and it shows. He unfortunately never fully shook his reputation in Super Fly, and as such, seldom got the opportunity to play the roles his talents demanded.

The music in this was off the chain. Williamson contrasted hip hop with the soulful sounds of a band called The Love Machine to demonstrate the generational gap between today's African American youth and their parents. It might be an obvious choice to do that, but Jean-Claude Van Damme's The Hard Corps tried the same technique, and it came off as trite, where in this film, Williamson makes it apt. Also, it's just funny that a band would call themselves The Love Machine, and I can see them auditioning for Williamson, and him going "And they're called The Love Machine? They're perfect!"



Jim Brown isn't in this too much. He plays a community leader running a local after school sports program trying to give disadvantaged kids a place to go to keep out of trouble. He did have one memorable scene where he and Williamson go to the bad guy's accountant to get some answers. There's an understood "It's just like old times"/"How much longer are we gonna keep doing this" between the two that anyone who's seen them in enough movies can appreciate. It added a level of fun, as if the two know their audience well enough to understand what we expect out of them when we see their names on the cover. A lot of ass kicking.

Feminist attorney and radio talk show host Gloria Allred has a cameo in this as councilwoman Gloria Johnson. She has just one scene, where she gives Williamson the scoop that there may be more than meets the eye with the local cops. I'm not sure if she and Williamson are old friends or if he just cast her, but it's one of only like three or four theatrical roles she's done where she doesn't play herself. I'd say it's one of the more fascinating cameos I've ever seen in movie.

This is worth watching. Beyond being a statement film about the issues between old and young black America and the conflict between the police establishment and the African American community, it's also a solid action flick. The music's there, the ass kicking's there, and the Fred Williamson and Gary Busey's there. What more do you want?

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0381469/

Dune Warriors (1990)

I rented this movie back as a freshman in high school. I was having a buddy over for the first time, and I knew he was a big sci-fi honk. I really didn't know much past Star Wars and Star Trek and all the bad things I watched on MST3K, but I wanted to look like I did. As such, when I saw this I thought "Oh, Dune, sci-fi guys love Dune. This'll be a sweet film. Well, it was a sweet film, just not the way we planned.

Dune Warriors is a very short remake of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, so short, in fact, that they cut the roster down from seven to five. The movie takes place in a grim post-apocalyptic future, where some warlord known only as William is terrorizing the local landscape. One town, the water rich Chinle, wants to fight back, but they're a peaceful people, and don't know where to turn. They send a chick out, and she finds David Carradine, who then finds four other cats in the Mos Eisley-esqu Freetown. They fortify Chinle and take down William in a battle royal.



Looking back, this film had absolutely nothing to do with dunes, so it was probably titled with the sole purpose of duping people who didn't know better, like me, to spend money on it. I fell for it. At 14, my buddy and I didn't really make it much further in the film before we decided to watch some Beavis and Butt-head episodes I taped. The next day, we wanted to see if we could get another friend to tell us the movie was awesome if we talked it up before he watched it. We told him it was better than Star Wars. About fifteen minutes in, he turned to us and said "Hey guys, this is good, but Better than Star Wars?"

At 77 minutes, though, this isn't as harsh as some in its category that run over 100. I'm not sure why bad movies are so long sometimes. 88 minutes, or eleven reels, is the perfect length for a bad film. To all cheap film makers out there: dump enough boring plot exposition to get us in under 88. All we want are the explosions and the fight scenes. Give me five minutes to explain how the bad guy killed the good guy's wife or partner or whatever, then get back to the flying cars flipping thirteen times and landing in a huge ball of fire. Thank you.



One of our favorite scenes came in the first five minutes, when William is pillaging another village. The editing in this is horrible, and very choppy at parts. Guys get stabbed or punched in three distinct takes spliced together so they look like three distinct takes spliced together. There was one where a guy cut off another guy's head in three shots like that, and after the head fell away, there was a fourth cut of the murderer smiling. It was this great shit-eating grin, and we had to watch it multiple times because we thought it was so funny. I'd done better editing in short movies I made for class projects.

David Carradine is all right in this. It's not quite as much fun as watching him in Kung-Fu: The Legend Continues, where week after week he'd have to save his wussy son in the park from a band of ill-intentioned ninjas. He doesn't really flex his martial arts muscles in this as well as he did in that, which is a slight disappointment. I never understood why his son was such a tool on that show. My friends noticed it too. One time, when a buddy and I were at a bowling alley playing Killer Instinct, he noted: "Hey, look, it's Kane's wussy son hanging out with his kids." The guy looked pretty close, and we were wondering if we shouldn't take any chances and get out of there before the ninjas showed up.



Seven Samurai isn't the only film this borrows from. Star Wars is in it quite regularly with the Jawa-like midget people in red robes, and the Mos Eisley-eque Freetown. Carradine also wears a robe and has a sensibility that reminds us of Alec Guiness as Obi-Wan. There's also the blantant Mad Max elements, from the cars to the clothes. If you throw in that the title was meant to make us think this was based on a Frank Herbert novel, then nothing about this film is original. It's like the film makers put a bunch of movies on a dart board and took turns figuring out what to take from next.

This might one of the worst films ever. As such, it's fun to heckle with a group of friends, and if you see it at your local video or store or in a bargain bin for like $2, don't hesitate. It's 77 minutes of funny bad movie, and at the very worst, by the time you get bored of it, it's almost over anyway. You may also want to use it if you're a professor at a film school to demonstrate bad editing techniques. Good work, fellas.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099474/

I Come in Peace aka Dark Angel (1990)

For my 150th post I felt it necessary to review a film that is very near and dear to my heart. Unfortunately, until recently, I hadn't seen the film in years, probably more than fifteen. I'm not sure why I hadn't bought it sooner, but I finally bit the bullet and got it on VHS used from Amazon. Hopefully soon it'll come out on DVD.

I Come in Peace is about an alien drug dealer who comes to Earth. The best drug in the galaxy is to pump humans full of heroin, then collect hormones from the adrenal glands before the person dies. Unfortunately this alien has stolen a bunch of drugs from a major crime syndicate, and they want them back. Dolph and his partner, Dream On's Brian Benben, are investigating both the drug syndicate, and the rash of forced drug overdoses that are killing random junkies throughout the city. Eventually they figure out an alien is involved, and bump into the extraterrestrial cop sent to stop him, played by ESPN NCAA basketball analyst Jay Bilas (seriously). He dies, but they get his gun, and Dolph has it out with the bad alien, finally taking him down.



This is a classic bad action film. We featured it at our biannual Dolph Fest a few weeks ago. There isn't that one or two good things that standout individually, but the film as a whole just exudes this extreme level of awesomeness. This is the standard I look to whenever I watch a bad movie, and I'm not sure why it's so hard to achieve it. Lots of explosions, lots of gun shots, lots of killing, big alien guys, very little plot exposition, and Dolph Lundgren. Is that too much to ask?

As one of his first movies, I Come in Peace really cements Dolph's legacy as an actor who will probably spend his time on screen doing everything he can to avoid the A-list. In a career that spans over twenty years, Dolph stands out as a sort of monolith in every film he's in. He may look slightly different from time to time, but he's still Dolph, no matter who he plays or what his character's doing. I appreciate that, and I think that's why he's attained the exalted status of Babe Ruth of the DTVC Hall of Fame. He's an action star in the truest sense of the word, a real Hack Blowfist, if you will. Here's to you, Dolph Lundgren, you're one of the Good Ones.



The bad guy in this is played by Mattias Hues. We thought for sure it was someone else, and just couldn't put our finger on it. When we looked him up on imdb, it turned out he wasn't who we thought he was, because we didn't recognize any of the other films he'd been in. (Kickboxer II was the best I could do, and I didn't remember him in that.) It's a shame this guy hasn't been used more often in bigger projects as a bad alien. I could see him giving Vin Diesel a hard time in Chronicles of Riddick, or teaming up with John Travolta in Battlefield Earth.

Brian Benben plays the annoying guy with the stick up his ass that follows Dolph around. You may remember Benben from Dream On, either on HBO, or the edited version on Comedy Central. He did a good job going from annoying to slightly redeemable by the end of the film, and I think that's what we look for in an annoying guy like that. Play it too annoying for too long, and we're good with you getting murdered. Be too cool too soon, and we lose respect for the main hero when he decks you for getting in his way. It's a fine art to being the annoying partner, and Benben excels in this film.



One interesting piece of trivia: this is the only theatrical performance for ESPN NCAA basketball analyst and former Duke basketball stand out Jay Bilas. He plays the good alien chasing the bad alien here on Earth. I'm surprised he hasn't parlayed his success on TV into a more lucrative film career. He's got the physique, plus, with his law degree, he can avoid being swindled by a shady producer with a crummy contract. I'm not sure how often that happens, but I'd imagine with the kind of bad films I watch, it happens enough. I'm sure there are plenty of stunt men who had trouble paying their rent one month because a scurvy shyster producer took the cost of all the shrimp cocktail they ate at craft services out of their paychecks. The guy probably sees his what he made, then sees the deduction, and groans, remembering how sick the shrimp made him anyway.

If you have never seen I Come in Peace, you really can't call yourself a bad movie honk officially until you do. It's only out on VHS, and you may have to get it through Amazon. If money's tight, then I'd say don't go the Amazon route, because you may end up spending over $10. Do keep your eye out for it in bargain bins and places that sell used VHS tapes cheap, though. It's worth it.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099817/

Mask of Death (1996)

I first saw this on a local TV station who knows how long ago. I caught it somewhere in the middle, and figured I got the gist of it from there. Since then, I've caught it a few more times on TV, all from about the same starting point. When I got Netflix, I put this on my list, and figured I'd see what the beginning was like. As it turned out, I had no idea what I was missing.

Mask of Death is the classic bad guy and cop look alike so the cop infiltrates the baddie's crime scene and cracks a case film. In order to make us think that Lamas only slightly resembled Lamas, they made the bad Lamas out with really made-up eyebrows, and made the good Lamas look like Jeff Foxworthy. Anyway, a bad accident leaves the bad Lamas dead, and the good one in need of plastic surgery. FBI agent Billy Dee Williams figured, since you're going under the knife anyway, why don't you look like this bad guy you already look like and help us bring the rest of his friends down. Of course, undercover, the good Lamas realizes there are things he has to do that the bad Lamas did, but make his skin crawl. He kills a rat who might have given up his cover. He kills a cop to make himself look badder. He may be doing police work, but is he losing his identity in the process?



It turns out the beginning of this film is head and shoulders the best part. Seeing Lorenzo Lamas in a bad wig with a bad moustache is too much. The film makers must've been big Jeff Foxworthy fans. I want to excoriate them for making Lamas look so ridiculous, but it was so funny, I'd feel dumb if I did. It gave the film an overall silliness that it wouldn't have had without it; and I know from having seen the film from the middle on without the silliness how much it added. "If you go out of your way to watch bad Lorenzo Lamas films... you might be a redneck."

The rest of the film was probably even slower than I remembered. The first time I watched it while I was doing something else like writing a paper or perusing the Internet. This time I showed it with a group of friends. The initial hilarity of the Jeff Foxworthy get-up died as the film became mired down in a slow moving plot with predictable action. We could only keep making those jokes so long before we just wanted the movie to end so we could all go to bed.



Billy Dee Williams is in this, which on its own isn't all that spectacular, but when you add him with Rae Dawn Chong you get the second film she's done with a Star Wars alum (the first being Time Runner with Mark Hamill-- unless you count Soul Man with James Earl Jones). I wonder if she's trying to lock them all up. Was she pissed when Lucas made three more? Especially with A-List actors she'd have more trouble working with? Not that Billy Dee isn't ten times cooler than everyone but one actor in the new ones, and probably five times cooler than that one, Samuel L. Jackson. I read in GQ recently and had it reaffirmed on imdb that he's 70 years old. He was 59 when he did this. Wow. Colt 45: It works everytime!

Tom Cavanagh of Ed and whatnot fame is in this as an annoying lower level gangster that Lamas dispatches in an applause moment in the film. I never got the whole Cavanagh appeal. I've disliked him since I saw him D-ing up Justin Timberlake in a celebrity basketball game like his life depended on it. What kind of loser thinks he has something to prove at a celebrity basketball game? There's a reason why his shows get canceled early in their lifespans, and it's not because their too off the beaten path for the mainstream; it's because they think they are, but are just crappy shows with an even crappier Tom Cavanagh. As far as this movie went, they'd have been better off with Steve Buscemi, because all Cavanagh did was a poor imitation of Mr. Pink. (Someone just informed me that Ed was on for four years, from 2000-2004, and not the single year that I thought it was. That just doesn't make any sense to me. What was I doing all that time that I'd missed that?)



One interesting Dolph connection in this film. The bad guy Lamas is trying to take out is played by Conrad Dunn, who also played a security guard/special agent in Dolph's Silent Trigger. Conrad was involved in the infamous Chris Heyerdahl drug induced freak-out where he ripped off his shirt and screamed about his tattooed spiders. If you haven't seen Silent Trigger and are unfamiliar with Chris Heyerdahl's work in it, check it out. You won't be disppointed.

This film is only worth watching really for the Lamas as Jeff Foxworthy. The rest is take it or leave it. If you've got Netflix like I do, it might be worth blowing a rental if you have an unlimited monthly plan just for that. Otherwise, you gotta ask yourself if it's worth the money to rent Mask of Death just for the first fifteen minutes. For me and my friends, it probably was, but we're sick like that. Are you?

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117003/

Until Death (2007)

This is the most recent effort from The Muscles from Brussels. I think I keep giving him a chance in the hopes that he'll eventually come back to that 1990s form that won us all over. His last five films or so, with the exception of Wake of Death, have all been truly uninspired and difficult to watch. Yet, as long as he keeps making them, I'll probably keep watching them, just to see if he's good again.

Until Death has Van Damme as a low-life cop who's addicted to heroin and losing his wife to another man. He does some really shitty things to the people around him, and it's starting to catch up. Stephen Rea (V for Vendetta, The Crying Game) is his former partner. Van Damme ratted him out for being a drug dealer, and now he's on a crime spree to try and take over the city (New Orleans) and become its greatest crime lord. Only Van Damme stands in his way, so he sets up a hit on him. Van Damme survives, but is left in a coma. When he comes out, he tries to make himself a better man. Slowly-- and I mean slowly-- he regains the love of his wife, his job on the force, the respect of those he wronged, and finally, vanquishes Rea.



This film plays out like a more violent and dirtier Lifetime crime drama than it does a Van Damme film. Replace him with Valerie Bertinelli, and I think you're all set. That being said, this wasn't all bad. There were some great shoot-outs, including in the end when Van Damme goes after Rea who has his wife. If the spurts of great action weren't separated by such long periods of exposition and inactivity, you might have had something here.

Van Damme does a great job playing an asshole. Looking over his movie history, I think he's really only played a baddie once or twice, Black Eagle being perhaps the best. (I'm not sure you count Replicant, because he plays both a good guy and a bad guy in that one.) I think this is a good look for him, and I'd like to see him do it more often. I'm sure if he was a baddie, he'd have to have it in the contract that he couldn't be beaten in a fair fight, just to assuage his ego. I'm good with that. Maybe whoever the hero is could drop an anvil on his head or something.



As the real bad guy, Steven Rea did an excellent job. He's not as one-dimensional a baddie as say a Bruce Payne, but the subtle nuance he brings to the job is a pleasant change of pace from the norm. I've often wondered how these sophisticated British actors feel doing a bad action movie with a guy like Van Damme, but I guess they grin and bear it and think of cute vanity plates for the new sports car they'll buy with the money they earned. I could almost see Rea doing it in this one when he had a gun to Van Damme's wife's head: "GDHLPME"!

One thing we know about Van Damme is how much he feels he has to show his audience how well he does with the ladies. As such, it was to no one's surprise that he eventually wins his wife back after he wakes from his coma. Also to no one's surprise was when he redeems a bad pre-coma sexual performance with a hooker by satisfying his estranged wife later on. I think out of every action hero, Van Damme's the one who insists the most on demonstrating his manhood through his on-screen prowess with the ladies. I've yet to view one of his films with anyone, guy or girl, who really gives a shit. It might have to do with the Pride film he did very early on in his career, but he needs to get over that. It's the New Millennium, baby, you gotta be more open minded.



Van Damme had some hilarious faces in this. When he was banging the hooker in the back room of a bar was one. Then there was the one he had when some guys duct taped him to a work-out bench and almost used a power drill on him. Even better was when he was being operated on after getting shot in the head. One of my personal favorites was when he shot some heroin, and a transvestite visited his car while he was high. There was something very Fellini-esque about that one.

I don't know what to tell people about this one. If you like Van Damme, you may find some redeeming qualities. It's another in his attempt to distance himself from the straight-up action films he did earlier in his career, and though it's not so bad, it's not anywhere as good as the stuff he did back then. The long periods of inactivity when the film thought it had a plot it needed to explain to us made for a pretty boring hour-and-a-half, and the action scenes that were solid just made me wonder why they couldn't do that for the entire movie. At this point I'm hoping his next film, The Shepherd, is good, but I'm not too optimistic.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0783598/

BloodRayne II: Deliverance (2007)

After seeing the first BloodRayne and knowing how bad it was, I should've steered clear of this bad boy when I saw it in the video store. But I'm a glutton for pain when it comes to bad movies, and try as I might, I had to watch this. Man, did it hurt.

BloodRayne II: Deliverance has Rayne tracking the vampire Billy the Kid to a town named Deliverance that's waiting for the railroad to be built through it. After he takes over the town and fortifies his position, Rayne tries unsuccessfully to fight him on her own. She fails and is almost killed, and has to come back with Michael Pare-- who's Pat Garrett, and a member of vampire fighters Brimstone-- and two other dudes he recruits: a hired killer with bad teeth and a reverend who swindles people out of their money with the promise of salvation. With well-manicured nails and a professional make-up job in a town full of hygienically challenged individuals, Rayne makes the Wild West safe again and vampire free.

Wow, this was bad. Not like the first BloodRayne bad, but like Skin-a-max film quality bad. The acting, other than Pare, was tough to deal with. The whole thing was so amateurish I could envision the set and crew around the actors. I wanted to yell cut after each scene. The reason a Skin-a-max movie can get away with such poor production value is its high soft-core porn sex content. Without that you're left with a bad film school student's final project.



Painkiller Jane took a pass on this because she had to do Painkiller Jane. That's her story, and she's sticking with it. I'd like to think she saw how much of a stinker the first one was, and without great actors like Michael Madsen and Ban Kingsley to entice her to get on board, she stopped returning their phone calls. To replace Painkiller, they got a chick named Natassia Malthe, who you may remember as Typhoid Mary in an even poorer film called Electra. She was also in the shortly lived (as in one weekend in the theaters) DOA. As an actress, I can see bad film adaptations of video games as her thing: she has the physical attributes with none of the acting ability. She'd make a good Kitana if they make another Mortal Kombat movie.

The idea of marrying the western and the vampire genres is interesting. It'd be nice to see it done in a good movie. Here we get the director's lame attempts to emulate Peckinpah and Leone. The close-ups of weapons and facial features didn't create the tension we'd get from a good western, but rather created annoyance because we just wanted the movie to get on with it. Also, the pauses before action sequences where we'd get these close-ups and whatnot happen at times that don't work in the film, like when the vampires would have guns trained on people and should've shot them but didn't just so the film can have it's "tension". If you're going to make a vampire/action film, just do it, and don't try to get cute with it. If you were a good enough director to get cute, you wouldn't be directing BloodRayne II.



The Billy the Kidd character sucked as a bad guy. In real life the guy who played him looks kind of cool, but in the movie he had this gross stringy hair and beady little eyes. He was no Ben Kingsly. Nor was he any Emilio Estevez. Was Bruce Payne or Wings Hauser that busy? Or even better, were they that far above such a horrible project? You know you're bad when you can't get them to be your bad guy. A semi-decent baddie would've made this film bearable considering the chick playing Rayne wasn't bad on the eyes. But instead he, and the extras they had playing his henchman, all sucked.

Perhaps the worst character was the fat little newspaper guy who suddenly can handle a gun and guilts/bullies the townsfolk into fighting the vampires. The character was annoying as hell when he was the meek reporter, and even worse when he berated people who probably weren't in the mood to die to go get killed. What script writer liked this guy? Who thought his transformation when it was convenient to the plot would play well? Why do movies have annoying fat guys with high pitched voices in them anyway? Just another aspect of the film that made my skin crawl.



This film is chock full of bad lines. Early on, Rayne plays cards with some guys, and one has an Irish accent. He asks her if she knows what an Irishman sounds like, and she says "the cross between an asshole and a dead man." When she goes to fight them, the mayor tells her she doesn't know what she's up against, and she says "that's fair, because neither do they." When she's captured by the vampire sheriff and put in jail, she's scheduled to be hanged at "high midnight". Then my favorite came at the end, when Michael Pare tells the newspaperman: "Life is like a penis. When it's hard, you get screwed, and when it's limp, you can't beat it." To go the Pare route, I'd say: "BloodRayne II is like a bad dick or fart joke. It's crass, immature, and only makes you laugh because it's so stupid."

There was plenty of other bad stuff in this. imdb said the budget was ten million US dollars. If that's true, they didn't use it for sound effects. When vampires were killed, they sounded like neighing horses or snorting pigs. When Rayne put her blade threateningly near Pare's crotch, it made the sound of steel hitting steel. In an attempt to put Rayne in a no win situation, Billy the Kid sets it up so the kids he's held hostage are all in nooses that are set off when Rayne enters his room, causing a large rock to be lifted up as a counterweight. For some reason if the stone's lifted, the kids immediately die of strangulation, which makes no sense. Finally she lets the rope holding the stone go and cuts the nooses off the kids all at once. Why she didn't do it the moment she entered the room is anyone's guess.

When it comes to bad movies, this is almost as bad as it gets. We're almost at the Bruce Penhall Julie Strain level. If this shows up on TV, I'd say maybe watch it with your friends because it is laughably funny. But don't spend any money on it, especially not new release money, because you'll feel the people who made it accosted you with a ski mask and a gun.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0896036/

Warlock: The Armageddon (1993)

I first saw this film back in high school when some buddies and I rented it. We heard there was this really cool scene where The Warlock turns a guy into a piece of art. Unfortunately, the scene didn't really live up to the hype. As a more mature viewer, I now appreciate the film for its silliness and Julian Sands, who's a pretty cool dude.

Warlock: The Armageddon is the second in the Warlock series, and it follows our hero Julian Sands, as he collects some stones in order to complete a ritual to bring Satan to Earth (The Devil, not the famous hockey player Miroslav Satan). In his way are a group of Druids in a small town in the US. Two of them have kids, and those two kids are supposed to be the warriors that'll stop Sands from fulfilling his mission. Though the two are in high school, one is the 29-year old Paula Marshall, and the other the 22-year old Chris Young (who you may remember as the kid going for the tour in PCU). All they needed was Luke Perry and Ian Ziering to make it perfect. Anyway, Sands comes close to bringing about the end of the world, if only he'd understood the invention of headlights for automobiles in the past 400 years.



The first Warlock was somewhat original and had some interesting death scenes and whatnot. This film tried to carry on that tradition, and failed miserably. When he turns the guy into an art sculpture it was more weird than it was cool. For some reason it didn't kill the guy, so the sculpture had blinking eyes, making it look like an element in a Peter Gabriel video. For me, the only thing close to as awesome as Julian Sands was the local jock who had a too sweet mullet.

I'm not sure what you can say about Julian Sands that hasn't already been said. He makes this movie. My favorite part was when he picked up this midget woman and threw her into an iron maiden. There was another pretty cool part when the old Druid guys try to shoot him with a shot gun, and he kills them by making a firearm out of his fingers. Then for good measure, he blows the smoke off them. I'm not surprised he left the series for the third movie, because he must've been bored with these silly scenes; but I have to say the silly scenes wouldn't have been as enjoyable without him involved.



Paula Marshall's in this. She's one of those actresses that looks better in her forties than she did in her twenties. Not that she didn't look good then, she just looks better now. I remember her as being pretty hot in a Diagnosis Murder episode my mom was watching recently. Anyway, her claim to fame seems to be killing shows, because everyone she's in dies out before the end of the first season, most notably Snoops with Gena Gershon, and Cupid with Entourage's Jeremy Piven. According to imdb, she's been guest starring on Nip/Tuck lately, so we'll see what happens there. Maybe she wouldn't mind killing a few of the ten or so crime dramas that've taken over the airwaves.

Speaking of Jeremy Piven, this film also has the kid from PCU who came to campus to take a tour. He's supposed to be a geek turned hero in this movie. I'm wondering if screenwriters who come up with this type of scenario are trying to right some wrong from their past, as if every heroic thing the geeky kid does removes one more wedgie, or relieves the pain of one more swirly. I'm not saying every hero should be some beefy Dolph Lundgren type with a character name like Smoke Man Musk (or maybe I am), I'd just rather not have to deal with the writer working out unresolved issues from his childhood when I'm trying to enjoy a bad Julian Sands film.



This film didn't a have a great opinion of organized religion. It painted a picture of it as this close-minded, out-dated, intolerant, belligerent institution. I'm not a very religious person myself, but I feel I'd be remiss in ignoring the same kind of monolithic approach to a subject that I berated in films like Hunt For Eagle One and Second in Command. It's like we have here an ultra liberal stance on religion like the ultra conservative ones on terrorism or communism in the other two films. I've always had a problem with being preached to when I watched movies, and it doesn't matter if it comes from the far left or the far right.

As a Julian Sands vehicle, this ain't half-bad, but beyond him, this is a poor film. It's no where near the seminal work the first Warlock is, and if you're considering renting something, try that first. If you see it on Sci-Fi like it was recently, you may want to TiVo it, but I wouldn't go much further. It's fun to make fun of, but you could probably do better renting something else. I personally got a kick out of it, but not enough to spend any money on it.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108517/