Dragon Wars (2007)

I'd be hard pushed to characterise this as a 'good' film.  The pacing's very wonky, the script is pretty much jam-packed with deux ex machina moments, and the acting ... well, let's be kind and call it 'uneven'.

I still thoroughly enjoyed it the first time I saw it, and quite liked it on the re-watch.  Why?  Four words: rocket launchers on dinosaurs.  There are two set piece battle sequences in the film, the first in 16th century Korea and the second in the modern day, and they're definitely the highlights of the film.  The latter in particular is a wonderfully over the top action sequence with helicopters and tanks dueling the saurian-equipped hordes of the evil snake god villain of the piece.

If you remember the poster for Reign of Fire, and felt you were been short-changed when the film didn't really deliver on its promise of machine vs monster mayhem, then you should check out this film, because it delivers on that promise very nicely indeed.

The film kicks off with a flashback within a flashback, with lots of fairly tedious narration around it.  This is not a smart call, even if it does give us our first battle scene.  It would have been better to kick off with the battle and then just jump to "500 years later".  Anyway, the flashback sets up that there's a good snake god and a bad snake god, and a girl with a dragon birthmark, and whichever snake god absorbs the energy of that birthmark will become a dragon.  Which is even better than being a snake god.

The girl in 16th century Korea dies before her energy can be absorbed, but 500 years later she is reborn in Los Angeles, as is her lover.  Cue return of the evil snake god (the good snake god overslept and will not be seen until the movie needs its final deus ex machina), who chases the not-so-happy couple.  For the rest of the movie.  Because honestly that's kind of the whole plot of the film: humans run away from big snake.

Then there's a big battle, which is great fun, and then the humans finally get caught by the big snake and there's a climactic fight between good and evil which is frankly rather less entertaining than the big battle was, but hey you can't win them all.

This is schlocktastic, but fun.  It's just a bit of a shame it peaks 15 minutes before it ends.

Firefly (2002)

This is a review where I commit geek heresy.

That heresy is not that I haven't given an unqualified recommendation to one of the few science fiction shows that is near-universally acclaimed among nerds.  I think I'm on solid ground there.  As much as I like the show - and I do like it a lot - it got cancelled after one short season, depriving it of a chance to explore most of its mysteries, and of a satisfying ending.  It's true it got an ending, if you factor in the movie sequel Serenity, but I wouldn't call it a satisfying one.

The show was focused around the crew of a small spaceship on the verges of civilized space.  It combined consciously western tropes and visuals: most frontier planets were dusty places where horses were still used as transport, despite the spaceships, while the weapons mostly resembled items from the 19th and 20th century, with the occasional laser or other high-tech gadget thrown in.  Honestly, it was a bit of an incoherent mess, setting-wise, but I can let it slide on rule of cool.  I do take issue with the show's Independents vs Alliance backstory though.  It too closely maps to the US Civil War in its rhetoric and uniforms, and I have serious issues with the Confederacy analogues being the good guys.

Anyway, where the show really shone was its cast - who were uniformly excellent - and the characters.  They were a rabscrabble bunch, living hand to mouth half the time and more than willing to take on an illegal job or three if it kept the ship running, while still retaining an ethical core.  The only one I'm ambivalent about is River, who got treated more as a plot device than an actual character for most of the series.  That was just beginning to change when the show got cancelled.

Why did such a 'universally acclaimed' show get cancelled?  Well, because it wasn't rating.  Passionate support from a small group of fans has kept a show afloat in the past (or got it a sequel film, like this one), but if it fails to find a mainstream audience then the major networks aren't likely to keep it around.  Fox gets a lot of flak for the failure of Firefly to find an audience.  I think some of that is deserved - certainly they failed to make me interested, in the lead up to the show's launch, and I was pretty much the definition of an easy sell when it came to SF TV back then - but some of it is not.  The financial failure of the feature film suggests that the wider audience just isn't going to go for quite so literal a 'cowboys and spaceships' fusion.

Ultimately, if you haven't seen the show and it sounds at all appealing, you should check it out.  If you do, I recommend starting with The Train Job, rather than the first episode on the discs.  Because that's my real geek heresy: one thing I think Fox did right is knocking back the original pilot and making them film The Train Job as a replacement.  It's a much snappier introduction to the series, fits the tone of the overall show better, and some of the characters come off better than in the original pilot.

Gang Bullets (1938)

A few weeks ago in my review of Don't Look in the Basement, I talked about how one good idea does not rescue a film if the rest of it is mediocre.

This is another such movie.  In fact I would say the 'one good idea' here is better than in the other film.  It's sadly let down by many aspects of the execution, however, not to mention some socio-political sentiments I found distasteful.

Those socio-political sentiments begin the film, when we get a text scrawl lamenting the ineffectual laws of American society, and in particular the laws that require presumption of innocence.  The law is a game of chance, it tells us, where the rules favour the criminal.

The film (which is also known as The Crooked Way) will return to this theme several times, with one of the characters explaining that those laws had made sense when a tyrant could murder a citizen for no reason, but that they had lost their meaning in modern society.  Keep in mind that this is 1938, and Hitler and Stalin are both in power, when thinking about how true that might be.

But enough of that: what of the plot?  Well basically a police chief gets fed up of being outwitted by mob boss Big Bill, so he stuffs him on a train out of town.  The film fails to explain why Bill couldn't just come back once he gets off the train, but as it happens he decides he likes the new town he is in well enough.

As you might imagine, the DA and cops of this new burg aren't real pleased to get someone else's trouble dumped on them, but there doesn't seem to be much they can do about it.  Big Bill and his lawyers run rings around them on every front, and soon the press is baying for them to be fired and printing accusations of corruption from an anonymous source.

The film's one good idea is in how they finally catch Big Bill.  I know it's good, because ten minutes into the film I thought "I'd get this guy by doing X", and lo and behold, that was their solution :)

Alas, like I said, even if we ignore the awkward political attitudes, the film's execution is not good.  The acting is stilted, and the script ... well to be fair the writer probably hacked it out in a matter of days, but it surely shows it.

The Firing Line (1988)

The film begins with a group of guerillas being attacked by overwhelming forces and all but annihilated.  Only one female guerilla survives to escape back to their base, while the commander of the unit and a second woman are captured alive.

That might sound like a pretty exciting way to kick things off, but there's literally no dialogue or anything else to give context to the scenes of nameless extras running through trees and dying when there's an explosion nearby them.  Even the fact that they are guerillas has to be inferred from their mismatched outfits, mixture of male and female troops, and lack of heavy equipment.

Then the dialog starts and people try to act, and you wish they'd let you infer the whole movie.

In any case, the rebel leader is brought before the American advisor who orchestrated the attack.  Said American is a stand up guy, of course.  But as soon as he is gone the authorities murder the rebel leader and then rape and murder the other captive.  Surprise!  The government is evil!

Well, duh.  It's the 80s and they have US backing.  Being anti-communist was much more important than not being brutal thug, especially in Central America, where this appears to me.  Google Rios Montt some time, if you doubt me, but don't say I didn't warn you.

Enjoying some R&R and flirting with an allegedly beautiful woman, Our Hero runs into a cynical journalist who sneers at the suggestion the rebel will get a fair trial, what with him being dead and all.  Our Hero ditches the woman and sets out to discover if this is true, and soon finds himself on the wrong side of the government he was just helping.

His escape ends up encompassing his earlier date for not every well-explained reasons, and the two of them end up in the jungle where they naturally hook up with the guerillas and engage in a series of poorly staged battles and one of the most perfunctory romances I have ever seen on screen (and I have seen a lot of perfunctory romances, let me tell you).

If you imagine a Schwarzenegger film from the same period, but with a lead who has 5% of the charisma and a script that's about 10% as good, you've pretty much got this film.  The main entertainment value comes from the frankly atrocious editing.  Hint to the film-makers: if you choose to show a character's face while we can hear them talking, you should choose a shot where their lips are moving.

Revenge of the Nerds (1984)

I loved this movie when I was 15.  After all, it had nerds triumphing over cool kids, and a bunch of naked bosoms.  It was like geek catnip.

I picked up the DVD about 7 years ago, because it was cheap and I had a rush of nostalgia.  Then I remembered some of the stuff in it, and felt bad.  Which is why it hasn't been watched until now.  But we'll get to the bad stuff in a bit.  Let's give credit where credit is due.

Because this does have some stuff going for it.  It has a surprisingly talented cast (seriously, what are Anthony Edwards and John Goodman doing in this?), and some refreshing inclusiveness, what with there being a gay nerd.  I mean sure, he's an over the top stereotype gay man, but at least he's there and not one of the bad guys.  Heck, the film's even mildly amusing: the script's jokes are generally pretty juvenile and obvious, but the actors have a pretty good command of physical and visual humour, and make a lot of it work better than it should.

Unfortunately, there are some major issues with the movie.  After the various persecutions of the cool kids finally become unbearable, the nerds decide to fight back.  I can overlook the 'comical' scene where they douse the football team's jockstraps in some version of deep heat.  Sure, it'd be recklessly dangerous in real life, but in a film I can pretend that's not true.

Installing cameras in the cheerleaders sorority house so they can spy on naked women, though?  That's way over the skeevy line.  And lets not even get to the part where one of them tricks a woman into sleeping with him (he's wearing a mask, and she thinks it is her boyfriend).  And these are the 'heroes' remember.

So yeah, there's a whole heaping mess of wrong in this. Even for the 80s, which were not exactly an enlightened time in cinema.

A Shriek in the Night (1933)

This film stars Ginger Rogers - pre Fred Astaire - as one of a pair of rival reporters after the same story.  There are no prizes for guessing that the two newsies will be a couple at the end of the movie.

We begin with the death - whether accident, suicide, or muder is unclear - of a wealthy businessman with shady friends.  Reporter Pat Morgan has been investigating the dead man for some time, and has spent the last three weeks as his secretary in attempt to learn more of his connections to organised crime.  Unfortunately, her scoop gets snatched out from under her by her rival Ted Rand, and she loses her job.

This doesn't exactly endear Ted to Pat (nor to me, since it's a rather jerky thing to do), but it does later lead to a rather nice Gift of the Magi moment later in the picture, so I will retroactively forgive it.

Alas, shortly after the Gift of the Magi moment, the film - which until then had been moving along in a quite satisfactory manner, if one overlooks the rampant racism and slightly less egregious sexism - stalls pretty badly.  It just feels like the momentum drains away.  Which is a shame, because the actual story behind the businessman's death isn't a bad one when it is finally revealed.  Alas, the movie doesn't do a good job of sustaining interest until we got there.

If you want one of those comedy/drama 'rivals who become lovers' kind of films, there are plenty of better examples.  This is interesting only because it is an example of the early work of a woman on the verge of becoming a star (Rogers would first team up with Astaire later the same year).

Beast from Haunted Cave (1959)

This is one of the scores of ultra-cheap movies Roger Corman produced in the 50s and 60s, often two or three at a time.  In this case, it was filmed alongside Ski Troop Attack, which I reviewed about six months ago.  The two films share the same four principal male cast members, though this one also has a fairly significant female role.

The basic plot: a group of criminals pretend to be tourists at an alpine resort, and book a cross-country skiing trip to an isolated cabin with local instructor Gil Jackson.  The crooks plan is to commit a burglary, then ski up to the cabin and ... lay low for a while, I guess.  Exactly what they are going to do isn't ever very clearly explained.

Anyway, the boss crook has a lady friend who is clearly taken with Gil, which causes some tension even before they set out on their journey.  Also causing tension is the wild story of one of the lesser crooks.  You see, this fellow took a local girl out for a date, but came back without her.  He claims some thing grabbed her, when they went for a look around a local mine, and he certainly seems pretty wild-eyed and shaky from whatever happened.  But his story is so preposterous it couldn't possibly be true, right?

Well this is a movie, so of course it could, and after arriving at the cabin, Gil and the crooks find themselves the target of the monster's hunger.  Not that a man-eating creature will stop Gil and Gypsy - the aforementioned lady friend - from their budding romance.  Said romance isn't badly done, actually.  Easily the best part of the film.

At its core, this film has exactly the same script as the later Creature from the Haunted Sea (which I reviewed in November).  Unlike that film's spoof approach however, it plays things as a straight critter-thriller.  If I didn't know before hand that the two films were both re-writes of the same script (originally shot as Naked Paradise), I probably wouldn't have picked up on it.

I'd say overall that this is technically a better film than Creature from the Haunted Sea , which perhaps makes it unfair that I give this a 'not recommended' when the other film got a qualified recommendation ... but the later movie had an irreverant attitude and silliness that allows me to overlook its flaws.  This one drags a little, and the monster - while not as clownish - is still not very scary.

Worth checking out only for afficiandos of ultra-cheap 50s monster films.