Savate (1995)

Back in grad school, about three years ago, one of my buddies and I were having a conversation about bad movies and TV shows we liked. I talked about Highlander, and he told me how he annoyed his roommates with Walker: Texas Ranger. While we were supposed to be doing research on the PoliSci department computers, he was showing me the entry for this movie on imdb. It looked simply amazing, and I had heard of it. He and his friends loved it, it was like their Showdown in Little Tokyo.

Savate has French action star Olivier Gruner as a dude traveling through antebellum Texas looking for revenge. He runs into Ian Ziering and his hot sister-- the heroine from Warlock III-- and he learns how they're being squeezed by the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket into selling their land or paying a hefty tax. One way he can save them is to sign up for some fight tournament in the town. Just so happens the guy he wants revenge against, Marc Singer aka The Beastmaster, has been called into town by the drill sergeant to deal with him, so he can have his cake and eat it too.



I can totally see why someone would latch onto this gem. Gruner is great as a low-rent Van Damme. I'm not saying he is one now: he was great in Soft Target aka Crooked; but he delivers his lines like a young Van Damme did. He actually does poor man's Van Damme better than Bernhardt does. This also has your run-of-the-mill paint-by-numbers script that hits all its spots, which makes for great heckling. And the sheer volume of cameos and recognizables makes this a can't miss.

On the other hand, this is really bad, and if you can't see the charm in its badness, you could be in for a snoozefest. The fight scenes are not always the best choreographed, the bad Southern accents get difficult to listen to after a while, and the predictability, though good to mock, is still a tad hard on the soul. If you're going to tackle this, make sure you have some like-minded friends around.



This is the second Gruner film we've covered, and I must say I should be trying to get some more. He's a pretty solid action star. His imdb bio doesn't read like a potential hall of famer, but he could slot himself in on that Jerry Trimble/Evan Lurie level of guys we love. His final fight with Marc Singer wasn't too bad, especially when he stabbed Singer in the eye-- man's game, Gruner. Let's see how his next movie does.

I always got a kick out of 90210 when I was younger, and I still do. I'm just kind of a prime-time drama kinda cat. Don't ask me why, it's not something I can defend legitimately, and I'm plenty willing to be raked over the coals for it. Along with greats like "Donna Martin Graduates!" and "This is Dylan, you know the drill. Beep", I was always a huge fan of Steve Sanders. For me, he was always too ridiculous not to love. Now I'm questioning the validity of that opinion. Ian Ziering was pretty annoying in this movie. I do think that that was part of his character, but if that was so, then I was pretty stoked when his character was killed off, because I'd had enough of him. I'm afraid to go back to SOAPNet and watch the 90210 reruns, because if Ian Ziering annoys me as Steve Sanders, everything I thought I knew would be wrong.



Marc Singer in the house. The frickin' Beastmaster. Gotta love it. 61 years young. And I'm bitchin' about turning 30 in 22 days. Incidentally, he has a movie coming out the day before my big 3-0 called Dragonquest. It also stars Brian Thompson. You know I'll get to that as soon Netflix lets me. Rock on Marc Singer. And what about his cameos on The Beastmaster syndicated TV show? That show was the last bastion of great syndicated action. You just can't get crap like that at 2 AM on a Saturday night after getting a decent snap on anymore. If it was on DVD I'd buy it just for those occasions.

This is definitely worth it. I watched it on my Netflix player for my TV, so if you have Netflix, it's available to watch instantly. The problem is I'm not sure I'd call this a "kill some time on your computer" movie, as opposed to an "attack it with the support of your friends" kind of movie, so unless you have a way to watch your Netflix movies on your TV, you better get it on DVD or VHS.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111080/

Resurrection (1999)

Christopher Lamb-izzle. Lamb-eezy. The Lambinator. Lamba-damba-ding-dong. The big fella is back for his fourteenth movie here at the DTVC. Like another European hall of famer, Jean-Claude Van Damme, we're running out of movies of his to review. This one I found on Netflix to watch instantly on my new Netflix player for my TV. Quite a fun time.

Resurrection is a straight-up Seven rip-off, only here the killer is taking body parts to make his own Jesus Christ. That's pretty much it. Paint-by-numbers, same cinematography style as Seven, even the sets looked the same.



And that's it, baby. This sucked ten kinds of asscrack. The murders were as brutal as possible. The police station was as 70s newspaper building as possible. The plot twists were as predictable as possible. From start to finish, this was rip-off city. Sometimes rip-offs are good, like a nice Dolph Die Hard rip off. But when it's just brutal murders for the sake of brutal murders, I'll watch Jason beat a woman against a tree in her sleeping bag instead.

Like Van Damme, Lambert's accent is explained away by him being from New Orleans. I'm not sure I've ever seen that used on him. I think it's because Lambert's accent is harder to place. A lot of times his name is even pronounced LAM-birt, as opposed to LAM-bear like it should be, which assumes he's more Anglicized than he really is. I guess it doesn't matter where his hilarious voice comes from, just that he has it; and in this film, his voice is at its best. When he yells, when he becomes frantic, when he thinks he has a breakthrough in the case: it all sounds silly. It just would better if that hilarious voice was attached to a man wielding a samurai sword instead of a detective in a bad serial killer movie rip-off.



Last Christmas my mom bought me a Roku Netflix player so I could watch movies in my instant queue on my TV. Early on it wasn't such a great deal. I was using the wireless connection to hook up to the Internet through my router in the other room, and rather frequently throughout the movie, it would stop and have to reload. So I abandoned it for a month or so, and when I came back, they had updated the software, and now I can watch films completely uninterrupted. Not only that, but they updated the streaming player for the computer too, and that works better. It's still not as user friendly as a DVD as far as skipping ahead and rewinding goes, but what I like is that I can get images easier by just watching in Firefox, pausing, and hitting Print Screen.

Part of Lambert's character was that he was undergoing a crisis of faith, and he would see a priest played by director David Cronenberg. The same one that directed DTVC Hall of Famer Peter Weller in The Nude Lunch. I don't know which is more puzzling, the fact that he was in this, or how Viggo Mortensen has become his mainstay. Maybe he's friends with director Russell Mulcahy, but that still doesn't explain casting Viggo in his last two films.



Another big name in this is former pro basketball player Rick Fox. He was on the Lakers teams that won three championships in the early 2000s, and he also played for my Boston Celtics for a few years. It's funny watching basketball on TV, because all the players look like an average height, but when they're paired in a movie with non-basketball players, we get to see just how tall they are. No one came up to Fox's shoulders in this movie. And it's not like he was a center, he was a swingman. It's always hard to fathom that the point guard, who always looks so small, is in most cases taller than most of my friends.

There's really no reason to watch this. Seven is enough. Lambert doesn't bring enough to the table to make this rip-off worth doing. I didn't even really like Seven, actually. The problem is there isn't much else out there of Lambert's for me to review... or is there? According to imdb he's in Albert Pyun's Sword and the Sorcerer sequel Tales of an Ancient Empire, due out in June of this year. Can't wait for that.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0142804/

Raiders of the Sun (1992)

I first found out about this film when I saw a trailer for it on the DVD for the Don "The Dragon" Wilson film Operation Cobra. It just looked too fantastic not to give it a go. Mad Max rip-offs always work, especially when they have Richard Norton... okay, maybe they don't always work... in fact, they usually don't... but when they have Richard Norton they're more likely to.

Raiders of the Sun takes place after a nuclear war. People have grouped together for protection, and a democratic republic has formed. They have a solid army of soldiers in yellow uniforms, led by field officers in black leather vests with no shirt underneath. But not everyone is happy, and a colonel has committed treason, splitting off and attempting to take them over. His brother leads a criminal gang that terrorizes communities not protected by the republic, and now the two of them are joining forces. As this happens, Norton's buddy's wife is kidnapped by the gang leader, and the friend infiltrates the gang. Norton leaves him to get gunpowder so the republic can vanquish the traitor. That's pretty much it. Oh, and there's midgets that speak their own language.



This movie is not for the faint at heart. You think you got the chops to take it on? Are you up for the challenge? It's like hiking a mountain: it'll take a lot out of you, but when you reach the summit and see what you've accomplished, you feel like a more complete person. Now I'm not saying when I took down Mt. Washington in four hours and thirty-three minutes (that's up and down) last summer that that feeling is the same as when I got through watching Raiders of the Sun, just the same idea. It's a rough movie, but if you can crack enough jokes and get enough laughs, you'll gain plenty of enjoyment.

Where do I start? Maybe the whole premise of the movie: that gun powder of all things is the limited valuable commodity. What? Don't they know if they have bullets the bullets have the gun powder in them? I'd think manufacturing more ammo would be the problem. Or finding gas ("petrol" for my readers in the UK) to fuel their Mad Max style cars. I guess gun powder was meant to reinforce the primitiveness of the post-apocalypse, but it was just really silly. They aren't muzzle loaded uzis.



You wanna talk about silly, check this out. So Norton and his buddy are moving through the desert, and they find this woman tied to a boulder with a branch in her mouth being held by an extremely racist depiction of Native Americans. They free her and take her with them to this town to find out how to get to the gang. Once there, she chats it up with some dwarves. Here's the kicker: Norton joins them and says to her: "You can speak their language?" Their language? Dwarves have their own language after the apocalypse? And just what is this language? Spanish with a Mexican accent. That was just simply fantastic.

Another great thing was the way Norton's friend was initiated into the gang. He had to have a fight to the death with another member. Only in movies. You'd think after the apocalypse a gang would want a solid foundation of members in order to raise hell and plunder what they wanted without worrying about being outnumbered by the villages they were raiding. I could see taking a potential recruit and making him fight a sucky member to the death because it would be a win/win: if he wins, you don't have to waste supplies on the sucky guy, and if he loses, it turns out he probably wasn't worthy of the gang in the first place. But they didn't do that here. This guy was pretty high up. It just seems like a bad way to run a gang in the post-apocalypse.



I couldn't go through this entire post without telling you how Richard Norton did. He was the big name in this. First off, he's either completely topless or wearing only a leather vest throughout the film. If he wasn't so cut he'd double for a Bear at a gay bar. At the very least he doubles for a bartender at a gay bar. I'm not saying that in jest. I think it's awesome that he can pull that look off. It's like a flamboyant Han Solo. And he still kicks people's asses. (Did I mention above at all how bad this movie is?)

As I finish this blog, REO Speedwagon's "Take it on the Run" is winding up in the background. Heard it from a friend who... anyway, this movie is for real bad movie veterans. I thoroughly enjoyed it. If you watch this and find you don't enjoy it, it might just be that it's a tad too much for you right now. It also might be that the really bad movies just aren't your bag, and you may want to stick to the easier to swallow ones, like Road House.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105213/

Legionnaire (1998)

I actually thought I had already posted this film, but when I went through my posts, I found that I hadn't. That's a good thing, because I'm starting to run out of Van Damme films, and he doesn't spit them out as frequently anymore as Seagal and Dolph do. We're all eagerly awaiting JCVD to be released on DVD here in the States, and of course there's that Universal Soldiers thing he's doing with Dolph...

Legionnaire has Van Damme as a boxer in 1920s France who is paid to throw a fight, but doesn't, and ends up killing some bad guys in self defense. As a last resort, he runs to the French Foreign Legion to escape prosecution. His prize: he's sent to fight in Algeria. While he's there, he has to deal with the desert, the Berbers, and even bad guys from the crime boss he screwed over by not throwing the fight. Anyway, it all ends in a big blow out at a French fort that's under siege by the Berbers.



What the hell was this? Jean-Claude of Arabia? Really? He had like two decent fight scenes, and that was it. This was a bad war movie, but unlike say Sahara, which had Bogart, this had Van Damme, so there were no redeeming qualities. Had the people making it had half a brain, they would've rewrote the entire script so Van damme single-handedly took out the Berbers Die Hard-style. Maybe they overrun the fort, and he's like in the basement looking for something, and he avoids being taken in the initial sweep. Then he slowly takes them out one by one...

This is the unfortunate result when a great action actor tries to do something "serious". Why not just make another movie where you beat the crap out of Bolo Yeung? That's what we want to see. Why couldn't he have been the Berber leader? Van Damme's old nemesis leading Algerian tribesman against the oppressive French colonial force. It would've been great. Think of the conflict generated in the viewer's mind: root for Van Damme, and you're rooting for French colonial power; but root for the underdog Algerians, and you're rooting for the evil Bolo Yeung. That sounds like my kind of movie.



If you're wondering, there is the gratuitous Van Damme buttcheeks scene. Unlike many of his others, though, here he shares the buttcheek spotlight with a whole bunch of other buttcheeks. Here's the question for my female readers: is this enough for you? What I mean is, considering all the scantily to not-at-all clad women in action movies for us guys to look at, is the perennial Van Damme buttcheek shot enough? What about the Dolph pecs and abs shot? Or the Seagal in a baggy sweatshirt shot? Are you forced to turn to the romantic comedy for your eye candy? I can't say I blame you if you do. Matthew McConaughey is probably much better than Van Damme's buttcheeks.

I looked up the French Foreign Legion on Wikipedia just for my own personal edification. It is still an active force, and they currently have troops in places like Djibouti and Afghanistan. They could make a Legionnaire 2 where the grandson of the guy Van Damme played goes to Afghanistan or Djibouti and fights Bolo Yeung in order to right the wrongs of the previous film. It could be the Die Hard-esque film it always should've been. Who would play Sarkozy? Gary Busey, of course.



After this there are two more Van Damme films other than JCVD that qualify for inclusion on the DTVC: No Retreat, No Surrender, and Black Eagle. The kicker with both of these is Netflix doesn't have them, so I'd have to buy them on Amazon. The former isn't even on DVD. Considering JCVD is coming out on April, 28th, I probably won't get to the other two before then.

If you're a huge Van Damme fan, I imagine you've already seen this, so there's no need in me advising you on it. If you're a huge action fan, though, and you haven't seen this, I'd say skip it. It's just not what you need to be doing with your time. It's not an action film as much as it's a bad war movie. Go see The Shepherd: Border Patrol instead.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0126388/

Attack Force (2006)

Steven Seagal has had a Dolph-esque run here on the DTVC. Other than Flight of Fury, which was a misguided attempt to put Seagal in the cockpit as opposed to on the ground kicking ass, most of his films have been successes. Hopefully this one can keep up the momentum, especially since the film of his I'm watching next is Against the Dark, which has the potential to topple Blade as the best vampire flick ever.

Attack Force is about Seagal as a military commander whose attack force team is brutally taken out by a hooker after a night of partying. As he investigates, he uncovers a drug called CTX that turns people into super strong super fast killing machines with weird eyes. So, in fact, that was no ordinary hooker. As Seagal digs deeper, he finds out that a dude hired by the military to design the drug has gone rogue and intends to dump it into a European city's water supply (I must confess here that I wasn't paying attention too well, and I think it was in France, but it might have been in Eastern Europe too-- does it really matter?). He's already given it to tons of people, and now it's up to Seagal and another crack attack force to take these people down.



I must confess, a lot of this film made no sense. I got that people were super strong, but ordinary people also had super human abilities too. Like Seagal's partner was thrown through a stone wall-- like literally-- and after rolling over a bit, he was able to get up and dust himself off like nothing happened. Even crazier, the tiny female military officer they were working with was also tossed through a wall, and she endured it in a similar fashion. They never said, at least I never picked up on it, that Seagal took the serum. Nevertheless, he was as quick as the people on it, and he could also throw them through stone walls.

Speaking of Seagal, he was all right, but there was something else involving him that was way funnier. For certain scenes his voice was dubbed over by a man that sounded like Martin Sheen. I am not kidding. In some of these scenes, he even went back and forth between his own and the other. This had to be a joke. No one could've actually heard this guy speak and thought "Wow, he sounds exactly like Seagal. Sweet, now we don't have to call Steven back to do his voice overs." It had me wondering who would've been better to use to dub over Seagal's voice. Paul Hogan or Michael Hurst first come to mind. Jackie Chan is another. Governor Bobby Jindal might be the best one at the moment. Can you imagine that sing-songy voice coming out of Seagal's mouth? "Now I think we need to go to the cathedral, and stop these bad guys and their bad CTX. Let me tell you kids a story about big government..."



As far as Seagal's martial arts go, there's no real drop off in this. He doesn't fight often, but he fights well, and with bad guys that are sufficiently bad, I found myself actually hoping he'd come in and kick their asses. Now I did think because the bad guys had superhuman powers, there would be some sort of obstacle in Seagal's way when it came to fighting them, but there wasn't. All he had to do was show up and kick ass. He was as omnipotent as always. I'm not sure it worked here as far as making for a good plot, but it worked in sheer Seagal silliness.

That's where this movie fails and where Pistol Whipped and The Foreigner succeeded. Those films had some element of the Seagal silliness, but they were also very cool. This wasn't that cool, but had more silliness. On the other hand, it didn't have the amazing silliness that say Out For a Kill had, with that amazing scene where Seagal decapitates a man by throwing a samurai sword from a second story window. I still believe that was the single greatest moment in cinematic history.



Two posts ago I mentioned that Wesley Snipes' The Detonator was filmed in Romania, and that was something of a trend for a lot of DTV movies. Well, for Seagal it's more than a trend. If you count the upcoming vampire film Against the Dark, that will be four films he's done in Romania. Even better, he's done another four in Bulgaria. Making sure he keeps the numbers even so there's no animosity I guess. Looking on imdb, I've found about ten films I've reviewed that were shot there, and that's just titles that start with the letters A-D. I'd personally like to visit both countries to see what they're like, considering they pop up in so many DTV films. On the other hand, I've seen Hostel, and I'm not sure I could hack it in Eastern Europe.

All right, here's the what's what: this is pretty good if you're looking for some Seagal with your buddy's on a random movie night. It's not his best, but it's pretty close to what you'd expect from a Seagal DTV actioner. The real question is: will Against the Dark be as good as Blade, or even better? Keep rockin' with the DTVC to find out.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0493424/

Scorcher (2002)

This is not one of the fictitious films Ben Stiller's character starred in in Tropic Thunder. Though that would be awesome, instead I picked this 2002 film because it stars DTVC Hall of Famer Rutger Hauer, and future Hall of Famer Mark Dacascos. Really, if I could, I'd love to see the fake one in that movie with the monks that had Robert Downey jr.'s character and Toby McGuire. That was hilarious.

Scorcher is a disaster movie where all sorts of bad stuff is happening to the Earth, and if no one does anything to stop it, we'll all die. In this case, the Chinese have made the tectonic plates under the Pacific shift after some underground nuclear testing. John Rhys-Davies and his daughter are experts in the field, and they tell our president, Rutger Hauer, that a nuclear bomb must be set off in Los Angeles to stop them, or we'll all die after the Earth incinerates itself. Mark Dacascos is called in to make sure he and his team get the bomb down there after LA is evacuated. As an aside, Dacasos's daughter doesn't make it out of the city, and is stranded. She's captured by some nutjob with a burned face who wants to set her on fire. It's not a question of whether Dacascos will pull everything off, just a matter of how plausible it will be by the time the 91 minutes is up.



You want your answer? Not very. These kinds of low budget disaster films are usually crap anyway, but this one just got bogged down in the miasma of trying to fill 90 minutes worth of movie with 15 minutes worth of movie material. Really. Syndicated action shows have done more in 42 minutes. So to fill time, they had random ambushes, the thing with his daughter, and a conflict where this creepy guy who's been in every CBS crime drama is a bad guy sent to make sure Dacascos has a hard time. What we got was a total snoozefest.

Let's start where we always do, with the film's Hall of Famer, in this case Rutger Hauer. Amazing casting choice as the president. Almost as good as Jerry Springer in The Defender. In one scene, he says, after given an explanation by Davies of what's happening to the planet, "In English, please." You mean in Dutch, right? As is always the case, though, with movies like this, we see very little of Hauer. He gives a state of the union address that's pretty take-it-or-leave-it. For the most part he's just a dupe that has no idea what's going on and is easily swayed by his generals. Just not what I want from my Rutger Hauer president. He needs to kick ass, cut through the red tape, and get shit done. Good casting decision, but missed opportunity.



Dacascos isn't bad, but this is kind of a step backwards from I Am Omega and... and... wow, the last Dacascos film I did before I Am Omega was Redline back in June of '08, which also had Rutger Hauer. I didn't know it had been that long. He was definitely better in either of those than he was in this, but not for lack of trying. He was saddled with a bad script and poor plot premise. There just wasn't much for him to do. I also noticed he seemed to be trying to mask his Hawaiian accent some. Bad move. The Hawaiian accent, like the Southern or New York accent, is one of those ones that works, and doesn't need to be covered or changed. It's not like he's from Maine, like I am. Now that's not a cool accent. I do my best everyday to avoid dropping my "R's". I'm thinking after this picture it's time to go ahead and finally cover Kickboxer 5. I know what you're thinking "do you have to?" I do. Sorry.

The subplot with Dacascos's daughter was pretty superfluous and really annoying. First off, the guy that captured her had a gross face. Why? Second, we knew she wasn't going to be killed, so each scene where she tried to escape or tried to get her Blackberry or whatever was just exasperating. And finally, we knew that crap was only in the film because there wasn't much to tell about military guys taking a nuclear bomb to some place in LA and setting it off. The moment they started adding stupid crap to pad out the film should've been the moment they realized they needed to make something else. Maybe a post-apocalyptic actioner where Hauer is still president, and he and Dacascos are trying to hold together the remains of civilization. Sounds better already.



John Rhys-Davies is in this. I bring it up because he's not in the new Indiana Jones movie, at least according to imdb. I haven't actually seen the film yet, so I don't know. I plan on watching it, I just don't want to pay for it, because I saw it as a transparent cash-grab. Now, I must confess that I did, in fact, contribute to the film's earnings, when I had the Indiana Jones burger at Burger King. That was my one moment of weakness. No matter how principled I am, fast food will always bring me down. Ugh! I hate myself sometimes...

This might not be so bad if you see it on Sci-Fi or something, but to go out and rent it is a bad idea. There just isn't enough material to make a full length movie, and the stuff they add is just that, stuff they add, and it doesn't fit organically within the film. I'm sure at the drawing board it seemed like a good idea, and they did manage some grade A talent, but in the end it just doesn't come off, and worse over, it's just plain boring.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0303017/

The Detonator (2006)

This is the fifth Wesley Snipes film we've done, which isn't a lot considering he's up for DTVC Hall of Fame consideration in the future. On the one hand, I should probably watch more Snipes films, but on the other, the first couple he did that I reviewed weren't that good, and so he was pushed down the totem pole a bit. I'm sure he has other things to worry about, though, like serving time in a federal prison for tax evasion, so I doubt he'll raise too much of a stink for not being given enough recognition here at the DTVC.

The Detonator has Snipes as a federal agent or cop or something undercover in Romania buying AK-47s off a dealer. Things go bad, but he's given a shot to redeem himself if he protects a woman linked to a Romanian mob boss. Thing is, the mob boss is also looking to buy a biological weapon off a Ukrainian, and the woman is holding the bank codes so he can pay for it. Now Snipes is really in it, and every time he thinks he can trust someone, he ends up in the shitter.



This was okay. A couple okay car chases. A couple okay fight scenes. A couple okay shootouts. Just plain okay. I'm not saying it was bad. I liked it all right. But there was no "Oh my God... that was awesome!" feeling afterward. Not like the way I felt after watching Blade 2, for instance. When I think of a movie called Detonator, I'm definitely thinking more a bomb strapped to Ron Pearlman's head more than some biological weapon that Snipes really has nothing to do with. He should've at least been a detonator of some sort.

But what I did see was what made Snipes cool in Blade. He had the smooth martial arts skills that make him unique from his fellow action stars. There was one scene toward the end where the bad guys have him hand-cuffed in the back of a car, and he reveals to them that he's able to take them off, and as they're realizing that he's free, he takes them all out. This movie definitely had more of that than say The Contractor, which was a total plus, but to make the Hall of Fame, we need those seminal pics: his Bridge of Dragons, or Out for a Kill, or Fortress. What we need is Blade 4: DTV.



This is another Snipes in Romania film, the other I reviewed being 7 Seconds. He's not the only one going there to do films. Seagal, Van Damme, and Dolph have all had movies filmed there. They also seem to like Bulgaria. How does that work? Is there a rivalry between those two countries, like Sweden and Norway? Are they trying to one up each other as a destination for DTV action movie shoots? I know Romanians speak a Romance language, while Bulgarian is Slavic; throw the Hungarians in there, who speak a Uralic language, which isn't even from the Indo-European family, and you got quite an eclectic quite a mix. Is this the future of DTV action, filming in Eastern Europe? The Canadians must be up in arms. How will all those Stargate actors get work to pad their resumes?

There's some weird thing with the main baddie's club soccer team, where at the end they're playing for a spot in the world championships, which take place in Washington DC. What? First off, what European soccer tournament exists where Romanian teams dominate? Rapid Bucharest taking down Man U? I don't see it. I know it's a movie, but how hard would it be that this bad guy is taking a lowly Romanian team and bringing them prominence in the domestic league, and earning a Champion's League spot? Even better, maybe they play one of the bigger European clubs and upset them. Second, why bring the US into it? It's not like they ended up using the trip to DC as a front to get the bomb in. I'm a huge soccer fan, so it annoyed me quite a bit that they invented some tournament that the US hosts, and made these two Romanian teams compete for a shot in the finals, for no reason at all. It just made no sense. [What did make sense was just seeing Villa come from ahead to choke away a 2 goal lead to Stoke, leaving the door open for my Gunners to gain that coveted fourth spot in the league. Go Arsenal!]



The female lead is played by an Italian woman named Silvia Colloca. As you can imagine, she's extremely attractive. I'm not sure how warm it is in Bucharest, but she spent almost the entire film in a skimpy tank top that showed off her stomach. Anyway, I looked her up on imdb, and she's in a film that will be released soon in England called Lesbian Vampire Killers. It looks pretty sweet, but it also looks like a mainstream release kind of deal, so it may not turn up on the DTVC-- if it ever makes it to the US anyway.

The verdict is still out on Wesley Snipes. If this had been the first DTV film of his I'd seen, I'd think he's showing a lot of promise as a potential Hall of Famer. It's really not that bad, it's just not amazing. At the very least, we can say he flexes his martial arts muscles more than he has in all the other films of his I've reviewed here, except maybe The Art of War 2. The next film of his I'll look at is The Marksman, so we'll see what happens.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0345461/