The Black Hole (1979)

The first Disney movie to not get an 'all audiences' rating is not a success as a work of entertainment. It feels much longer than its 90 minute run time, and not in a good way. This is mostly due to the very talky and static first hour. Oh, the movie tries to enliven itself, with the actors often telling us how dangerous what's happening on screen is, or how weird and creepy, but the film's direction and pacing just lacks any intensity. Even when we get to the last half hour, and the movie breaks out its action sequences, it all feels very stiff and lifeless. Oh look, a row of identical robots standing perfectly still while firing at targets off screen. How exciting.

A few things save the film from utter tedium. The first is the sometimes howlingly stupid dialogue, such as 'Their mission was to find habitable life', and the second is the way it goes utterly bug nuts in the last ten minutes. BUG NUTS. The third is the model of the Cygnus spaceship. It's completely nonsensical, but kind of cool.

They're apparently planning to re-make this film sometime soon. I suspect the new version will have a lot more action, and probably be more entertaining to actually watch. But it won't have a search for habitable life, now will it?

Big Tits Zombie (2010)

About six years the film industry seemed to suddenly decide that bosoms + zombies = money. We had both Zombie Strippers and Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!  In later years they were followed by Zombies vs Strippers and Kyonyu Dragon.

If that last film sounds out of place, don't worry: the English language title is above, and is a lot more direct about the film's content. Not that it's actually got all that much nudity, despite the two leads being veterans of Japan's adult video industry. But we're revisiting the strippers vs zombies theme once more (with the option of 3D no less, though I watched in 2D as I always do).

Lena is a down on her luck exotic dancer who out of desperation takes a job with a disreputable promoter who's previously stiffed her on money. She's one of five dancers on the job, and they variously squabble, play dice, and lounge about being bored as there is a definite absence of punters in the run-down club they're in. This boredom leads them to investigate a strangely chilly corridor they find behind a pile of boxes (as you do), where they find the Necronomicon and read from it (as you do). And suddenly, zombies. Huzzah! Everything is better with the walking dead.

The strippers react to the zombie onslaught with different degrees of success. This not being the most serious of films, the two leads take katana and chainsaw up against zombie ninjas, zombie samurai, and all sorts of other wacky walking dead. There's lots of not terribly well staged fighting, gouts of CGI blood (and buckets of the old fashioned fake kind), and comedy of varying degrees of success.

One to check out if you're into the more gonzo Japanese films (The Machine Girl, RoboGeisha, and the like). If you don't have a taste for the seriously absurd, however, you won't like it.

100 reviews!

Cherry 2000 was my 100th review for the blog.  I'm going to celebrate by taking a semi-sabbitical this week.  Not a complete break; I'll still post a couple of reviews; but I won't be doing one every day.

Daily reviews will resume on February 1st.

Cherry 2000 (1987)

In the distant year of 2017 (gasp the futurism!) America has fragmented into enclaves of hugely over-legislated urban enclaves separated by apocalyptic wastelands. In one of the former lives a man and his beautiful, robot wife. Alas, a spot of canoodling in the overflowing soap suds from the sink leads to the sudden demise of Mrs Android. With the country more or less in pieces and industry largely at a standstill there is no one with the know how to fix her, and our intrepid hero's only chance is to hire a tracker who will take him into the wastes to find a replacement model.

I am sure you will not be shocked to learn that the tracker he finds is a woman, and that he's ultimately going to fall in love with her instead of the robot, but if you are shocked, then I apologise for spoiling it. But you probably don't even know what a 'movie' is, in that case, so I think I am safe.

The tracker is played by Melanie Griffith, who had not yet had her breakout role in Working Girl when this was made (though if I recall correctly, Cherry 2000 suddenly got a push on home video after the latter film's success). Frankly Griffith and the other lead are the weaker performers in the film, being constantly upstaged by ... well, by the performances of just about everyone they encounter. They're also upstaged by the set and costume design, which is kind of gleefully messed up.

I found this a fun bit of schlock, myself, and liked it more now than I did when I first saw it nearly a quarter century ago. If wackily absurd post apocalyptic action movies are something you like, then check it out. That's probably something of a niche taste, though.

American Beauty (1999)

When I first saw American Beauty, over a decade ago, I enjoyed it very much. I also knew it would not be to all tastes (I was sure my mother would hate it, for instance, and she did indeed). Sometime in the last ten years I picked up the DVD, but never watched it.

42-year old Lester (Kevin Spacey) is trapped in a loveless marriage, with a teenage daughter whose main emotion toward him is contempt, and a job he loathes. It seems we have joined him just as he decides 'I've had all I can stand, and I can't stand no more!', or words to that effect: he blackmails his employer into a severance package, starts buying dope from the kid next door, and gets a job slinging burgers. Meanwhile, his wife and daughter are also experiencing big changes in their lives.

I'm now pretty close to Lester's age now, rather than the late-20s I was when I first saw the film, and that definitely changes my perspective of the film. I sympathise more with the daughter's contempt for her father at the start of the film, and I had a more negative reaction to the characters in general than I originally did. While Lester makes a lot of positive changes in his own life, for instance, he's also kind of a douche to his wife and child in the process. Not that Lester's alone in having his bad points: pretty much every character in the movie is deeply flawed in one way or another.

I'm glad I rewatched the film, and I enjoyed it, but I suspect that if this had been my first viewing (say I'd caught it on TV or something), then I would not liked it enough to want to buy the DVD.

Pitch Black (2000)

An accident in deep space sends a starship hurtling toward a planet. As the two-person crew struggles to land safely, one of them wants to jettison the cargo - cryogenically frozen passengers - in order to improve their chances. She's stopped from doing so by her colleague, however. The ship crashes, with about a dozen survivors in all. These include the crew member who wanted to drump the passengers (but not the one who saved them), and also a dangerous criminal named Riddick.

At first, the planet on which they've crashed doesn't seem too bad. Their biggest worry is Riddick, who quickly gets free. Unfortunately, appearances can be deceiving, and they've picked a very bad time to land on this particular planet ...

Pitch Black was the first of the the three movies that cemented Vin Diesel as an action star (the others being XXX and The Fast and the Furious, which came out shortly afterward). It's a very fine science fiction thriller, with an excellent cast, decent effects, and a solid script. Frankly, it's the best Alien film of the last twenty years. Not that the hostile lifeforms in this movie are all that like everyone's favorite xenomorphs, other than their aggression, but the structure and feel of the film is quite similar.

This is a well-crafted, tense thriller with characters who grow and evolve in interresting ways over the course of the film, and whose actions are believable and consistent within the context of the film. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Streets of Fire (1984)

Walter Hill once said 'Every film I've done has been a Western'. That's certainly true of the wonderfully entertaining Streets of Fire, a film in which I could definitely see a young John Wayne having the lead role. This 1984 offering merges then-contemporary culture with 1950s bobby soxers, over the top action sequences with musical numbers, and hyper-stylised dialogue with a plot that's been pared down to the bone. I loved almost every second of it. I'm very sad that the planned sequels never happened: the film was a commercial failure at the time of its release. Sad, but not surprising. This is a movie with a very distinctive, non-standard look and feel and if you like naturalistic dialogue and acting you're going to have issues with it.

Rock diva Ellen Aim is kidnapped by biker gang 'The Bombers', who as a group look like they came straight out of The Wanderers. Ellen's former flame Tom Cody is summoned back to town to rescue her. Tom's as tough as they come, albeit a bit of a douche, and - along with Ellen's manager and a tough as nails, two fisted sidekick - sets out to do just that. People get beaten up, things explode all over the place at the slightest provocation, there are many scenes very reminiscent of Hill's earlier film The Warriors, and we cap things off with a big rock and roll number. As you do.

Look, just see it. You may love it like I did or hate it and think its failure was hugely deserved, but I doubt you'll be ambivalent about it.