DEAD OR ALIVE (2001) **

Takashi Miike’s Dead or Alive begins with an orgy of violence, fast-cutting editing, and off the wall imagery.  Most directors could take an idea like two guys having sex in a public bathroom until one of them has their throat cut and sprays blood all over the other one in a suggestive manner and make a whole scene about it.  Miike is so amped-up that this bit is just a random slice of side business in a larger piece of rapid-fire mayhem.

After a wild set-up, things become a bit more conventional.  A plot emerges about a ruthless yakuza gang violently staging a coup and waging a war on the old-timey traditional bosses.  Meanwhile, an honest cop tries to track them down and make sense of all the carnage.

Dead or Alive is only about a hundred minutes long, but it’s often a tough slog.  Despite that, there are moments of sheer insanity peppered throughout the flick that will make jaded exploitation movie vets sit up and take notice.  The opening alone is almost worth the price of admission.

Unfortunately, once it settles down, Dead or Alive turns into an interminable bore, alternating between long, slow-moving scenes where nothing much happens to perverse outbursts of disgustingness.  These punctuations certainly grab your attention.  If only you gave a shit about the stuff that occurred in between them.

Speaking of giving shits, there is a scene involving a hooker being drowned in her own enema excess in a kiddie pool that must be seen to be believed.  It’s that kind of movie.  The bad news is for every deranged snippet like this, you’ve got to sit through A LOT of dull yakuza drama.

AKA:  D.O.A.  

KILLER FISH (1979) * ½

An all-star cast flounder alongside killer piranha in this mishmash of Jaws rip-off and heist movie from Italian schlockmeister Antonio (Cannibal Apocalypse) Margheriti.  You would think an exploitation flick about man-eating fish attacking the likes of Lee Majors, Karen Black, and James Franciscus would be a sure thing.  Too bad the whole thing is so damned toothless.   

Franciscus masterminds an elaborate jewel heist in a beachside resort in Brazil.  While Majors, Black, and the rest of the crew are risking their lives for the diamonds, Franciscus is living it up back at the hotel playing backgammon.  Franciscus plans to cover his tracks by hiding the loot near a school of hungry piranha.  Naturally, Lee and Karen become living bait as the double and triple crosses begin to pile up. 

The cast mostly wasted.  Franciscus acts more snotty than menacing, and Black looks like she’s barely there.  We are also subjected to a thoroughly worthless subplot where Majors tries to woo a raspy-voiced model, played by Margaux Hemmingway.  

The stuff with the jewel thieves is pretty dull and all the backstabbing among the crew is predictable.  In fact, the piranha attacks are the only thing worth a damn.  In addition to scenes of the killer fish swarming around character actors and nipping at their heels, there’s a gnarly scene where the scuba-diving Black stumbles upon a couple of chewed up corpses.  These moments are fleeting in the long run as Killer Fish needed more sequences of this caliber to make it worthwhile. 

AKA:  The Naked Sun.  AKA:  Piranhas 2.  AKA:  Treasure of the Piranha.  

LORDS OF THE DEEP (1989) *

Before he became king of the world with Titanic, James Cameron got his start working for Roger Corman.  One of his first jobs was on Corman’s Star Wars rip-off, Battle Beyond the Stars.  Nearly a decade later, Corman was ripping off Cameron’s The Abyss with this mind-numbingly shitty flick.  

Like The Abyss, Lords of the Deep is about scientists who come into contact with a friendly, possibly alien underwater species.  For The Abyss, Cameron used the latest advancements in special effects technology.  For Lords of the Deep, Corman used what looks to be a boogie board with a wet blanket Duct-taped to it.  Other times, it looks like a Styrofoam hand puppet.

Seriously, I have seen some bad monsters in my time, but the so-called Lords of the Deep in this movie are among the worst.

The human villain is Bradford Dillman, whose big villainous act is to make the crew sign non-disclosure agreements.  Meanwhile, the lead scientist (Priscilla Barnes) wants to save the species.  She also spends a lot of time sticking her hand into some Nickelodeon slime and having 2001-inspired freak-out scenes.  

All of this is handled clumsily, and the good-natured Spielbergian ending will cause you to slap your forehead in disbelief.  It’s only 79 minutes, but it feels so much longer.  The underwater scenes are a complete joke too, and the subs all look like bath toys.

Dillman overacts to embarrassing levels.  It’s almost like he wandered in from a Shakespeare festival.  Barnes is equally awful as the hippie-dippy scientist.  The acting is so bad that when Roger Corman pops up for a small cameo as the head of the underwater operation, he accidentally manages to give the best performance in the entire movie.  

MURDER ON THE EMERALD SEAS (1974) ** ½

Sherwood Gates (Roberts Blossom) is an eccentric millionaire who holds an annual beauty pageant.  Unfortunately, a killer has been picking off the pageant winners for the past three years.  In an effort to discourage the killer, Gates moves the next pageant aboard a luxurious ocean liner.  The chief (Frank Logan) remains skeptical and sets out to nab the murderer by convincing a boyishly handsome detective (Robert Perault) to go undercover dressed in drag as one of the contestants. 

Murder on the Emerald Seas was directed by the great Alan Ormsby the same year he made the classic Deranged.  If you’re a fan of Ormsby’s work, you’ll enjoy spotting many of the familiar faces that appear in his other films.  There’s also cameo appearances by Henny Youngman and Johnny Weissmuller too, which are more random than anything.

Ormsby’s approach seems to be throw anything against the wall and see if it sticks.  There are comic cartoon title cards, visual representations of old (bad) jokes, and there are even moments that borrow shamelessly from the Keystone Kops.  The broad comedy often falls flat, but the healthy doses of nudity assure that you’ll never be bored.  

The scenes that hew close to a straight-up slasher work.  I liked the part where the killer (dressed in a clown costume) chases a nude body painting model through the ship while Dixieland jazz plays, as well as the Psycho homage.  As uneven as all this is, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Murder on the Emerald Seas never really comes together in the end.  What is surprising is that the film treats its gay and/or female impersonator characters in a (mostly) respectful manner, so it comes off feeling (slightly) more progressive that many of its contemporaries.  

AKA:  The Great Masquerade.  AKA:  The AC/DC Caper.  

ATLANTIC RIM (2013) **

Giant prehistoric monsters arise from the Atlantic Ocean and attack an oil rig.  America’s last line of defense is three knuckleheads in giant robots who battle the monsters under the sea.  When the monsters finally make it to the shoreline, the robots follow in hot pursuit, effectively blowing the lid off their top-secret organization.

Atlantic Rim is, of course, The Asylum’s cheapjack version of Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim.  It’s obvious and clunky, but it’s far from the lowest rungs of The Asylum’s ladder.  It’s just competent enough to keep you watching and be marginally invested in, yet it’s not “bad” enough to make it a camp classic.  

The only real unintentional laughs come from seeing Dances with Wolves’ Graham Greene earning a paycheck as the general in charge of the operation.  The rest of the cast (which include “Treach” from Naughty by Nature) are barely characters and the love triangle subplot is perfunctory at best.  David Chokachi is especially obnoxious as “Red”, the cocky robo-pilot.  

Once the pilots get into their mech suits and begin pounding on monsters, Atlantic Rim is sort of fun.  There’s a part of my lizard brain that just eats this stuff up.  Is it dumb?  Yes, but it’s also mildly amusing.  I was also anticipating the effects to be much worse.  To my surprise, they manage to get the job done. 

Overall, Atlantic Rim won’t fool anyone into thinking they’re watching Guillermo Del Toro’s flick, but it doesn’t deserve to sink to the bottom of the ocean either.

AKA:  From the Sea.  AKA:  5,000 Fathoms Deep.  AKA:  Atlantic Rim:  World’s End.  AKA:  Attack from Beneath.  AKA:  Attack from the Atlantic Rim.  AKA:  Battle of Atlantis.  

CREED 2 (2018) ****

Creed was a one in a million shot.  I mean how can you make a Rocky movie without Rocky as the main character and make it work?  Somehow Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan delivered a film that was every bit as good, if not better than the other Rocky sequels.  Even with the runaway success of Creed, I walked into this sequel with a sense of trepidation.  I mean, how can you make lightning strike twice?  Like the main character, Creed 2 beats the odds.  

Creed 2 sort of functions as Rocky 4 Part 2.  Ivan Drago (Dolph Lungren), the man who killed Apollo Creed, brings his son Viktor (Florian Munteanu) to America to challenge Apollo’s son Adonis (Jordan) for the heavyweight championship of the world.  Adonis turns to his trainer (and the only one to defeat Drago) Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) for help.  And that’s where I’ll stop, because seeing how the plot unfolds is one of the movie’s many joys.

Creed 2 cherry picks the best elements of all the Rocky movies and weaves them into one rich tapestry.  The obvious one is Rocky 4, but there are also shades of 2, 3, and even 5 at play here.  Even if some of the plot seems a bit familiar, it’s still full of surprises that I wouldn’t dream of revealing. 

Creed was such a treasure.  I wondered how they’d ever top it.  That’s the secret of 2’s success.  It feels the same way.  Just as Adonis is living in the shadow of his father, Creed 2 is living in the shadow of the original.  Adonis, like the movie itself, realizes in order to escape that shadow, you must forge your own path.

Creed 2 keeps an eye in the rear-view mirror, honoring what came before, but never loses sight of the future as it blazes down its own road of discovery.  It’s a movie about fathers and sons and how the legacy of the father can lead to unrealistic expectations for the son.  It’s about trying to rewrite history while at the same time securing the future.  It’s about doing the right thing for the right reasons.  There are scenes that pull at your heartstrings and make you pump your fist; sometimes at the same time.  That is to say, it’s a Rocky movie, and a great one at that. 

The performances are stellar.  Jordan once again essays the role of Creed with confidence, swagger, and heart.  He’s especially good whenever he’s on screen with Tessa Thompson.  Their chemistry during their domestic scenes are the foundation of their journey together, one that I can’t wait to see flourish as the series goes on.  Stallone does another fine job as Rocky.  He has a little less to do here than he did in Creed, but he is nevertheless excellent, particularly when professing the guilt he still feels for not stopping Apollo’s fight with Drago.  Speaking of Drago, all I can say is that Dolph Lundgren is a revelation.  

God damn it.  I didn’t think it could happen.  Dolph Lundgren made me cry. 

Director Steven Caple, Jr. doesn’t do any of the long-take cinematic gymnastics of Ryan Coogler.  He brings his own style to the proceedings and carves out his own niche in the Rocky franchise.  He has made a film that stands shoulder to shoulder alongside the original as a shining example of what the Rocky movies, and what cinema itself, are all about.

Naturally, Rocky gets the best line of the movie when he says, “He broke things in me that ain’t never been fixed!”

LIQUID SKY (1983) **

Avant-garde, oddball, bizarre.  Those were the first three words I wrote down to describe Liquid Sky.  Even after writing that sentence, I’m having trouble to find the words to do this movie justice, but I’ll try.

Aliens looking for heroin land their ship (it’s the size of a dinner plate) on top of an apartment building in New York.  They observe a gaggle of weirdo performance art types doing drugs and having sex.  They soon determine the combination of sex and drugs adds to the high and wait till the punks, artsy-fartsy people, and hooligans are in the throes of passion to strike.  Meanwhile a scientist from Germany investigates the aliens and spies on the punks fornicating.

Anne Carlisle stars in the dual role of Margaret and Jimmy.  In the film’s most memorable scene, she gives herself (himself?) a blowjob in front of a bunch of partygoers.  It’s moments like this that keep you glued to Liquid Sky.  Even though you’re forced to wade through a LOT of crude, weird, and confounding stuff, there are just enough rewarding bits here to justify its cult status.

I guess one of the things that irks me about Liquid Sky is that it was consciously made to be a midnight movie.  It’s like the filmmakers looked at all the other cult films at the time and tried to make their own version of it.  There’s obviously John Waters, Andy Warhol, and Rocky Horror influences running throughout the picture, along with a punk rock type of attitude towards androgyny, rape, and necrophilia, but it never quite works.  With its garish lighting, colorful costumes, and purposefully absurd line readings of trashy dialogue like “I kill with my cunt!”, it’s easy to see why some cult film fanatics would take to it.    

Liquid Sky doesn’t endear itself to the audience by making most of the characters drug-addicted loonies.  The disjointed editing is also really distracting, and the irritating and repetitive score gets on your nerves as well.  I think I may have been able to handle all of that, warts and all, but the sheer oppressive length (112 minutes) ultimately sinks it.

It’s certainly visually appealing.  Some of the colorful, neon-bathed shots are trippy, but the infrared POV shots of the aliens are random and annoying.  It’s hard to take your eyes off it, even if it is way too long, aggressively weird, and sometimes dumb.

As a lover of cult films in general, Liquid Sky has been on my radar for a long time.  Now that I’ve finally seen it, I have to say I’m glad I saw it, and I probably don’t ever have to see it again.