CONTRACT TO KILL (2016) **

Steven Seagal has been Hard to Kill.  He’s gone Out for a Kill.  He’s even been Driven to Kill.  This time around, he's got a Contract to Kill. 

Seagal plays a former assassin who is lured out of retirement.  His mission:  Bust up a meeting between the Mexican drug cartel and an Islamic terrorist cell.  Seagal soon learns he and his team are merely a pawn in a bigger government scheme.

If you can get past the talky first half, you’ll be treated to some OK action.  Like most of the films Seagal makes for director Keoni Waxman, Contract to Kill has more action than many recent Seagal outings.  The fights are your typical Seagal slap-happy affairs.  Sometimes, the rapid-fire editing turns them into a near incoherent mess. The knife and sword fights are slightly better, if only because they're punctuated by someone getting a sword to the head or knife to the throat.  

Seagal is also more liable to get up and walk around for Waxman and does so again here.  There are only a handful of scenes of Seagal sitting around doing nothing.  (He does have one fight scene while sitting down though.)  Contract to Kill is a little low on late-era Seagal goofiness, but we do get a funny scene of a drone flying around carrying a machine gun. 

Waxman also has the uncanny ability to get Seagal to share scenes with other actors.  In most of his recent films, Seagal has been obviously inserted into the scene after the fact.  In Contract to Kill, he actually appears in several two-shots with other actors, which is a little jarring if you’ve become accustomed to seeing him awkwardly edited into dialogue scenes in recent years.  

Giving Seagal a team to work with is beneficial.  That way, he can delegate duties to others while sitting down.  Not only do these scenes help disguise the fact that Seagal has just spent five minutes of screen time sitting down, they also serve a plot function.  (These scenes are similar to the True Justice TV show in many ways.)  If filmmakers can find more justifiable reasons for Seagal to spend most of his screen time sitting down without being so obvious about it, I’d say he still has a long career ahead of him. 

THE ASIAN CONNECTION (2016) **

Steven Seagal stars as a shady crime boss in Cambodia.  A bank robber (John Edward Lee) steals from a bank that contains a hefty sum of Seagal’s cash.  Seagal’s right hand man (Sahajak Boonthanakit from Hard Target 2) tracks him down, but instead of killing him, he offers Lee a deal:  Continue to knock off the banks where Seagal keeps his cash and they’ll split the money down the middle.

The Asian Connection (which was co-written by Tom Sizemore of all people) is a mediocre, but watchable latter-day Seagal effort.  This one combines his recent love of playing villains with his penchant for wearing sunglasses, a doo rag, and a big bushy beard (although he still wears his more traditional Asian-inspired fashions).  As far as these things go, it’s not bad.  He spends a lot of his time sitting down (another new Seagal motif), but he does have a pretty good knife fight that opens the picture.

Since Seagal spends most of his screen time hanging around the edges of the plot, it’s up to Lee to do much of the heavy lifting.  Looking like Johnny Knoxville cosplaying as Tyler Durden, Lee makes for a serviceable leading man.  His romantic scenes are a bit dull, but he makes out just fine during the bank robbing sequences.  

Michael Jai White is around for one scene as an arms dealer who equips Lee.  He doesn’t get a lot of screen time, but he gives the movie a much-needed shot in the arm.  White delivers a solid performance, and is pretty funny too, which makes you wish he hung around longer.

DOCTOR DRACULA (1978) * ½

Producer Sam Sherman got a hold of the softcore skin flick Lucifer’s Women and hired cult director Al Adamson to take all the sex out and put in a bunch of new scenes. The new scenes feature members of his usual stock players such as John Carradine and Regina Carrol.  Because of that, it’s a lot more tolerable than Lucifer’s Women, which was filled with a lot of bad acting. 

The central premise of Lucifer’s Women is still there, but Adamson shoehorns a vampire subplot in there.  The narrative was already pretty jumbled to begin with.  The movie already has hypnotism, reincarnation, and Satanists in it.  It’s a small miracle that the new scenes are much more entertaining than the old footage.

If you’re a fan of Adamson, this should go down smooth enough.  I’ll admit, he’s not one of the most competent filmmakers out there, but he does a better-than-expected job at blending the new footage with the old.  It helps that they got Larry Hankin back for the new scenes, so the transitions between the old and new footage is hard to spot in some scenes.

Although most of the movie is bad, the scene where Dracula has sex in a coffin is kinkier and more inventive than anything in the X-Rated Lucifer’s Women.  Adamson also wisely dropped the Paul Thomas subplot, which allows the film to run much smoother.  You still have to sit through those long scenes from Lucifer’s Women though, and let me tell you, they’re twice as hard to get through the second time around.

It’s not all bad though.  I liked it when Carradine name-dropped Elvis in a list of Satanic messengers.  While the new stuff isn’t great, the scenes of Svengali holding seances and Dracula stalking his victims are more entertaining and atmospheric than the stuff the other director came up with.  However, the ending is really dumb and is about as stupid as anything found in Lucifer’s Women.  In fact, it was probably a Two Star movie until the shitty ending brought things to an abrupt halt.

AKA:  Lucifer’s Women.  AKA:  Svengali.

LUCIFER’S WOMEN (1974) *

It doesn’t get any better than the opening scene.  A magician does the old levitating woman trick, but this guy does the ancient gag one better.  He cuts the neckline of the floating woman’s dress, exposing her breasts to the audience.  No strings indeed!

Dr. Wainwright (Larry Hankin) is the living reincarnation of Svengali.  To maintain his powers, he must offer up a human sacrifice to a Satanist (Norman Pierce).  When the doctor falls in love with the woman meant to be sacrificed (Jane Brunel-Cohen), he struggles to break free of Svengali’s hold to save her.

Lucifer’s Women employed none other than Anton LaVey as its technical consultant.  I’m not sure how much he advised on the project because it looks like the same old sacrificial shit you’d see in a typical horror movie.  I don’t know how much time went into making the Satanist scenes accurate.  All I know is that they should’ve spent more time trying to make the film good.

The plot is just too stuffed to ever really work.  We’ve got possession, Satanism, human sacrifices, mysticism, and none of it gels into a cohesive whole.  The scenes with Hankin romancing Brunel-Cohen are dull and the sequences where he battles for his soul are weak.  The only parts worth a damn are the hypnotism scenes.  They have a She-Creature type of vibe to them, and the final magic trick is reminiscent of The Wizard of Gore.

To make matters worse, there’s an entire subplot about a small-time pimp (played by porn star Paul Thomas) with a lisping southern accent that’s practically unbearable.  Thomas acts surly to mimes and threatens to push Brunel-Cohen into a life of prostitution.  This subplot gets in the way of the Svengali stuff and more or less stops the movie on a dime.

Lucifer’s Women contains more skin that you’d expect to see in an otherwise tepid Satanism picture.  The majority of the scenes are lukewarm, although I did like the “Butterfly Girl’ striptease number.  The scene where Brunel-Cohen gets turned on while reading a lesbian porn comic is pretty funny too.

Credits Watch:  David Webb Peoples was the editor.  He later went on to write Blade Runner and Unforgiven!  I guess you’ve got to start somewhere.

TERROR OUT OF THE SKY (1978) * ½

Terror Out of the Sky starts off with an odd dream scene in which Tovah Feldshuh is attacked by killer bees while driving a Beetle.  At first, I thought this was supposed to be some half-assed dream symbolism.  Get it, because she was driving a BEE-tle?  

As it turns out, this is a Made for TV sequel to The Savage Bees.  I didn’t realize it till later because I haven’t seen that movie.  Even if I did, I probably wouldn’t have recognized the footage because Gretchen Corbett played Feldshuh’s role in the original.

Anyway, Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. works at The Center for Bees.  He mistakenly sends out a killer queen bee and must race against time to find all the shipments before the queens can mate and spawn thousands of killer bees.  He wants Tovah to go along with him, but she’s still skittish because of her rampant bee nightmares.  She gets her pilot boyfriend Dan Haggerty (who wears the same bracelet he wore in Elves) to help fly them around to the spots where the bee boxes have been sent.  Predictably, the last queen mates, and hundreds of bees descend on a baseball game in a small town.

The only part that’s worth a damn is when a guy at The Center for Bees gets a mouthful of bees.  This scene is pretty strong stuff for a Made for TV movie from the ‘70s.  Too bad nothing else in the film comes close to matching it.

The scene where our heroes try to save a bunch of boys from a school bus crawling with killer bees is the worst.  In fact, I think Terror from the Sky challenges Jeepers Creepers 2 for the worst horror sequel featuring a bunch of shirtless boys trapped aboard a school bus.  This rescue sequence is laborious and just goes on and on.  By the way, have you ever noticed how all these Made for TV killer insect movies always have that one longwinded scene of people being evacuated?  What’s with that? 

If director Lee H. (World Gone Wild) Katzin ended things after the bus rescue, it would’ve been okay.  Unfortunately, the movie continues on another twenty agonizing minutes.  It’s here where Zimbalist, Jr. wanders endlessly around in a beekeeper’s outfit walking down corridor after corridor while hundreds of bees crawl all over him.  

The most ridiculous part of the movie though is the fact that a woman could be caught in a love triangle with Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. and Dan Haggerty.  

AKA:  The Revenge of the Savage Bees.

ROBOT NINJA (1989) *** ½

I was a fan of J.R. Bookwalter’s Dead Next Door, but this might be his ultimate epic.  While that film had the help of Sam Raimi as producer, this one had David DeCoteau.  Because of DeCoteau’s influence, Linnea Quigley has a small role as Burt Ward’s secretary!

Michael Todd stars as a comic book artist who gets upset when a television producer (Ward) waters down his beloved creation, Robot Ninja for television.  He then gets his friend (Bogdan Pecic) to make him a real Robot Ninja costume (using royalties from the comic to bankroll the endeavor) and goes out and fights crime.  He crosses a gang of thugs led by a tough-talking woman (Maria Markovic) who take it upon themselves to destroy the Robot Ninja once and for all.

The thugs are low rent and cartoonish, but they make for a worthy adversary for a comic book artist with no formal martial arts or weapons training.  Bookwalter films the action in an efficient manner, especially considering the constraints of the miniscule budget.  He gets a lot of mileage out of the extreme gore too.  Eyes are clawed out, hands are cut off, and guts are ripped out.  There’s also a gnarly scene in which a gun is shoved into someone’s eyeball and the shots of the Robot Ninja performing self-surgery are disgusting.

Robot Ninja is a precursor to the likes of Super and Kick-Ass.  Not only was it ahead of its time, it’s probably ripe for a remake.  It was made in 1989 at the height of the second wave of Batmania and seeing nerds congregating in comic book shops wearing Batman T-shirts is like stepping into a time warp.  That is to say, I loved it.  Speaking of time warps, I dug Todd’s studio that had dozens of ‘80s movie posters (including some of Bookwalter’s own films) plastered on the wall.

BLACKHAT (2015) * ½

Blackhat is your typical Michael Mann film.  Well, typical except it sucks.  It follows his usual fetishes for cops and robbers stuff.  There are lots of police procedural scenes, frantic phone calls, and cops staying frustratingly one step behind their man for most of the movie.  Instead of a bank robber or a drug dealer, the bad guy the cops are chasing is a computer hacker.  

As Dirty Harry once said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”  Now, I’m not a tech guy.  I can barely blog.  Because of that, most of the computer gobbledygook went over my head.  It doesn’t matter if half the dialogue in the movie sounded like a foreign language to me, that doesn’t excuse the lethargic pacing and insurmountable running time.

Even with my computer illiterate handicap, I’m smart enough to know that the CGI shots of a virus running through a computer looked like the half-baked stepchild of Tron:  Legacy and an HBO promo from the ‘80s.

Hemsworth is good.  The sign of a quality actor is the ability to rise above the excruciating dialogue he’s been given and coast on charm alone.  He does that in spades.

Another big detractor for me was Mann’s continued use of digital video.  Although many of the exterior shots are slick and moody, the action scenes are often grainy and use a lot of irritating shaky-cam camerawork.   Seriously, it looks like Mann filmed half the action on his phone.  And I’m not talking an iPhone either.  Mann straight up Jitterbugged that shit.  

I’m not afraid to admit I was lost throughout most of this movie.  It’s one thing to be lost because you can’t understand what the characters are talking about.  It’s another thing when the camerawork is so bad you can’t tell what the hell is going on during the action.

What’s worse is that it takes an hour-and-forty-two minutes for Hemsworth to finally put on a black hat!  What the fuck?  By that point, I was rooting for Thor to pull out his hammer and smash his laptop to pieces.

AKA:  Hacker.