BOUNTY TRACKER (1993) **

Lorenzo Lamas stars as a bounty tracker in Boston who takes the money from his latest reward to visit his brother (Paul Regina) in Los Angeles.  Little does he know, his bro is about to drop the dime on some nefarious money launderers.  When a professional hit team led by Mattias Hues takes his brother out, Lorenzo puts his bounty tracking skills to the test to bring down the killers. 

The opening scene is a lot of fun and really got my expectations up.  Lamas worms his way into an all-black bar dressed like a librarian, complete with nerdy glasses, a chintzy suit, and a fake prissy English accent.  This scene is on par with any given SnakeEater movie.  Too bad things get thoroughly generic once Lamas goes to L.A.

Yes, from there, Bounty Tracker turns into your standard action/revenge flick.  It’s not exactly a terrible one.  The action is decent (there’s a scene where Lamas singlehandedly mops the floor with students in a karate school), but the plot isn’t anything special, and the villains are pretty weak.  Also, the subplot with Lamas teaming up with some at-risk youths whose mentor was also killed by Hues slows things down as the film enters the homestretch.  The flick would’ve went down much smoother had Lamas lone wolfed it instead of playing babysitter for a third of the running time. 

Lamas gives a fine performance all things considered.  I just wish the script gave him more opportunities to ham it up like he did in the early scenes.  I understand that his character is grief-stricken and seeking justice, but he could’ve at least had some good one-liners in his back pocket to carry the movie.  The supporting cast, which includes Whip Hubley, Judd Omen, and Remote Control’s Ken Ober is kind of interesting.  Too bad Hues makes for such a lackluster bad guy.

AKA:  Head Hunter.

TRAIN TO BUSAN PRESENTS: PENINSULA (2020) ** ½

Train to Busan was one of the better zombie movies in recent memory.  The animated prequel, Seoul Station was pretty good too, which made me eager to see what a live-action sequel would look like.  I guess we find out in the awkwardly titled, intermittently effective Train to Busan Presents:  Peninsula. 

A soldier tries to get his family out of Korea to escape the zombie virus.  While aboard a boat headed to Japan, an infected passenger kills his sister and nephew.  Four years later, he and his bitter brother in-law team up to sneak back to the zombie-infested mainland for a daring heist that could net them $20 million bucks.  Naturally, things do not go as planned. 

The idea of a zombie heist movie has potential.  (Zack Snyder is doing a similar thing with the upcoming Army of the Dead.)  The opening sequence works really well.  The scenes that set up the heist aren’t bad either.  It’s just that once the action switches over the mainland, things become rather uneven. 

The film works in fits and starts.  Whole sections feel like they have been taken from other (better) movies and stitched together a la Frankenstein.  There are moments that will remind you of Escape from New York (with zombies instead of roving gangs), Day of the Dead (the army captain who runs the place has a screw loose), and Land of the Dead (there’s an arena where humans fight zombies; not to mention the hero’s use of fireworks to distract the zombies).  The final car chase that feels a bit like Mad Max Meets Escape from New York has a few good action beats, but some of the CGI car stunts look awful phony.  Some moments are better than others, although they don’t exactly come together to make a satisfying whole. 

It may not quite click, but Train to Busan Presents:  Peninsula is more ambitious than many recent zombie flicks.  I certainly admire the attempts to open up the world of the first film.  It’s just that in doing so, you trade world-building for the concentrated dose of adrenaline-fueled suspense that the original had.  The bloated two-hour running time doesn’t help either.  Whatever qualms I had with this one, I’m still onboard for the next Train.

AKA:  Train to Busan 2.  AKA:  Peninsula.

CRUEL JAWS (1995) **

Bruno Mattei’s blatant Jaws rip-off Cruel Jaws recycles (ahem… STEALS) footage from not only Jaws, but all its sequels during the shark attack scenes.  Not to be outdone, Mattei also borrows (make that HIJACKS) footage from The Last Shark, another Jaws rip-off that’s almost as blatant as this one!  The results aren’t exactly “good”, but it’s worth watching just to marvel at all the ways Mattei cribs from Spielberg and his successors.

In fact, Mattei does a good job imitating Spielberg’s style as he captures the look of the original Jaws for many sequences.  He even copies a lot of the same camera moves.  Mattei also replicates the same beats Jaws 2 director Jeannot Szwarc put down.  And Jaws 3-D director, Joe Alves.  And Jaws the Revenge… you get the point.  Mattei also steals whole chunks of dialogue, scenarios, and camera set-ups from the franchise.  The results often look like an amateur playhouse company performing select scenes from the Jaws movies.  Unlike those directors, he shows no restraint when it comes to showing the half-eaten human leftovers of the shark’s victims, which is definitely appreciated by us gorehounds.

The owner of a marineland theme park is given notice to vacate the premises.  Meanwhile, a killer tiger shark is going around putting the bite on people.  The town officials and the asshole real estate guy don’t want to close the beaches because of the big regatta.  Naturally, the shark turns the big race into a hot lunch.

This is one of those movies where the star rating system doesn’t do it justice.  It’s not good in a conventional sense.  However, if you enjoy a terrible Italian rip-off like I do, you’re sure to have fun with Cruel Jaws.  Personally, I thought the gratuitous Mafia subplot (which I guess was cribbed from Peter Benchley’s original novel) got in the way of the fun in the third act.  Plus, the ending is way too abrupt to be completely satisfying.  That said, there are plenty of laughs and eye-rolling moments here to keep fans of WTF cinema entertained.

Since so much of the film rips off Jaws visually, it goes without saying that it also rips off John Williams’ Jaws theme.  What makes the music in Cruel Jaws so great is that it also steals from his score to Star Wars!  Also, get a load of the hero who resembles what Hulk Hogan would look like if he never lifted a weight in his entire life.  (“Whatchoo gonna do when anorexia runs wild on you?”)  Another hilarious highpoint is the scene where a pair of girls call some horny dudes “dick brain” again and again.  You don’t get that in a Spielberg movie, that’s for sure.  (Unless that was a poorly translated nod to the “penis breath” line from E.T.)

Which reminds me:  Come for the stolen footage and recycled plotlines.  Stay for the hilarious dialogue.  I think the best line came from the teenage fish expert’s girlfriend who gives him an ultimatum and says, “Once and for all, it’s the fish or me!”  That alone makes it better than Jaws the Revenge in my book.

AKA:  Jaws 5.  AKA:  Jaws 5:  Cruel Jaws.  AKA:  Shark Terror.  AKA:  The Beast.

THE IMMORAL MR. TEAS (1959) **

The Immoral Mr. Teas announced Russ Meyer as a force of exploitation moviemaking.  Even in this, his first movie, his style was already cemented.  The rapid-fire editing, the acerbic narration, the scenes of nude women frolicking in the wild, and the boobs.  Plenty of boobs.  They’re all here.  It’s as if he arrived on the scene as a fully formed filmmaker.  I can’t say it’s his best work though.  Even if it is fun to spot his various fetishes and idiosyncrasies on display so early, the movie itself leaves something to be desired. 

Then again, the first of its kind is always sort of like that.  While The Immoral Mr. Teas wasn’t the first nudie movie, it was the first one where the women were actually viewed as sexual objects and not passive nudists off playing volleyball or sunbathing or something.  Now, we get them doing such things as cooking, typing, canoeing, and playing guitar.  Ah, progress!

Mr. Teas (Bill Teas) is a meek deliveryman who spends most of his idle time looking down women’s blouses and/or peeping on them from afar.  After a trip to the dentist, he finds he has the power to imagine women naked as they go about their everyday tasks.  (A hypno-wheel is the special effect.)  He eventually spends less time at work and more time girl-watching.

While most of the humor is lame, there are a couple of okay gags.  My favorite bit is when Mr. Teas gets picked up by a woman he thinks is a hooker, but it turns out she’s… well… I wouldn’t want to spoil the joke.  The rest of it just isn’t that funny.  That wouldn’t matter if it managed to be sexy, but it’s much too innocent and tame to get your pulse racing.  The longest (and best) sequence is when Mr. Teas spies on three women out in the woods, although you have to wait a long time to get to it.  Also, the relatively short sixty-two-minute run time feels much longer due to the repetitive nature of the film.  (How many shots of Mr. Teas’ daily commute did we really need?)

Meyer (who can briefly be seen as one of the patrons at a burlesque show) got his start as a Playboy photographer, and many of his compositions feel like live-action photo spreads (especially the scene where Mr. Teas eats watermelon).  You can see that Meyer was still working at making a “real” movie out of what he knew best.  However, the results, as uneven as they are, are mildly enjoyable. 

AKA:  Mr. Teas and His Playthings.  AKA:  Steam Heat.

JIU JITSU (2020) *

You know, I was looking forward to Jiu Jitsu.  It had a wacky premise (it’s basically Mortal Kombat Meets Predator), a stacked cast (which includes Nicolas Cage, Alain Moussi, Tony Jaa, and Frank Grillo), and a director whose work I have enjoyed in the past (Dimitri Logothetis).  Nothing could’ve prepared me for how bad it really was. 

The first sign of trouble is the comic book panels and rotoscoping that make the various chapter breaks look like a graphic novel.  It’s one thing to make a movie with a comic book sensibility.  It’s another thing to gratuitously call attention to itself, saying, “Look at this!  It’s just like a comic book!”  That shit didn’t cut it in the director’s cut of The Warriors and it doesn’t cut it here. 

Another problem is the first-person fight scenes that occur early on.  If there’s anything worse than shaky-cam action sequences, it’s a first-person fight scene that makes the various shootouts, fistfights, and Kung Fu battles look like a video game.  What really gets annoying is how the action switches from the perspectives of Moussi and Jaa within the same scene.  All the hopping around back and forth from their POV just makes the action that much more disorienting. 

I was a fan of Moussi’s work in the Kickboxer movies (the second of which was also directed by Logothetis).  However, the plot does him a great disservice as it calls for him to have amnesia for much of the picture.  He has the potential to be a fine actor, but you’d never know it when all he gets to do in this movie is walk around in a daze and scowl like he’s got an ice cream headache.

Despite a promising premise, it’s more than a little sad that the movie just lazily copies and pastes the plots of Predator and Mortal Kombat together to make a clip art version of a movie instead of at least coming up with some sort of new slant on the material.  The monster is invisible and uses infrared scopes to hunt for his prey just like in Predator, and Cage’s character is obviously supposed to be the stand-in for the Christopher Lambert incarnation of Raiden. 

At least Cage brings some sort of energy to the movie.  He too seems to be borrowing freely from other films, as he sometimes plays his character as a slacker modeled on The Big Lebowski, while other times he rants and raves like Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now.  It’s enough to make you wish Cage starred in a legit Predator sequel and called it a day instead of popping up in a slightly-classier-than-an-Asylum-mockbuster knockoff.

It’s a shame that a movie starring Jaa, Cage, and Grillo turned out so dull.  Grillo is particularly wasted as he’s mostly around to bark orders and disparage Moussi’s amnesiac character for not “remembering the plan”.  When Jaa first came onto the scene in Ong Bak he proved he was the most exciting martial artist on the planet.  After the awesomeness of The Protector, he was never quite able to capitalize on that early promise.  Jiu Jitsu is not an ideal vehicle for his talents, but we do get one scene where he uses his patented knee attack to bash his enemies.  However, that’s not enough to make it worthwhile. 

Jiu Jitsu moves like lead, and when a burst of action does happen, it’s so chaotic that most of the joy is sucked right out of it.  (Many of the fight scenes feature way too much slow motion.)  Once we finally get to the fighting tournament, it’s nothing more than a series of repetitive matches with predictable outcomes.  You can only take so much of a guy in a cut-rate Guyver costume beating up on people before it gets dull.  The fights themselves are uninspired, interchangeable, and forgettable, which is perplexing as I thought Logothetis did a pretty solid job on Kickboxer:  Retaliation’s action sequences.

 In short, Jiu Jitsu is Jiu Shitsu.

IRON MASK (2020) *

“I’ve waited a long time for this”.

This line is spoken by Arnold Schwarzenegger just before he and Jackie Chan square off against one another in Iron Mask.  So have their fans.  The last time they met on screen (in Around the World in 80 Days), Arnold had little more than a glorified cameo.  Here, both men have very little screen time, but they are front and center just long enough to exchange fisticuffs with one another.  The results are underwhelming to say the least as the fight is hampered with some inane comedy and gratuitous 3-D moments.  As lame as the fight is, it still manages to be the best thing about the film, which has to rank among both stars’ worst. 

The fact that both of them are barely in it (Jackie gets the “With the Special Participation of” credit) is the first tip-off that this is going to suck.  Making things even more unbearable is the fact that it has about four other plots going on that feel like they came out of entirely different movies.  There’s a mapmaker (Bruiser’s Jason Flemyng) who travels through China while hanging out with a flying monkey, a princess who disguises herself in drag to avoid detection from her enemies, and a Russian prince (who wears the titular mask) who frees himself from the Tower of London and goes on a pirating adventure.  That’s not even mentioning the WTF prologue about white wizards making tea from the eyelashes of dragons or some such shit. 

The film was a Russian-Chinese co-production and it’s an overstuffed, bizarre affair.  It often feels like a ten-part mini-series that was edited into two hours.  Characters come and go, chaotic action sequences bluster on, and shitty CGI abounds.  The finale is particularly awful, and the film as a whole is a rather exhausting and excruciating affair.   

It’s not all bad though.  I liked the villainess’ henchmen.  One looked like a Rock Lords version of Super Shredder and the other resembles the love child of Doctor Fate and Tik-Tok from Return to Oz.  Really though, there’s no reason to see it other than for the participation (make that SPECIAL participation) of Schwarzenegger and Chan.  After all these years, they really deserve a better brawling platform than a shitty Russian-Chinese movie.  As an added bonus, you also get Rutger Hauer (in one of his last roles) in one scene wearing a powdered wig and looking as confused as the audience.

The sad thing is, there could’ve been a good movie made about the Chan and Schwarzenegger characters.  Imagine a tale of a wrongfully imprisoned man (Chan) and his jailer (Schwarzenegger) whose relationship spans decades.  First, they start off on the wrong foot and try to kick each other’s asses before they learn to respect one another, and over time, eventually become allies.  That’s a lot better than the “Hey, you’re a pretty good fighter, look me up whenever you’re in China so I can give you a long-winded propaganda-laced speech about Chinese nationalism!” shit that we wound up with. 

AKA:  Viy 2.  AKA:  The Mystery of the Dragon Seal:  Legend of the Dragon.  AKA:  The Mystery of the Dragon Seal.  AKA:  The Iron Mask:  Mystery of the Dragon Seal.  AKA:  The Dragon Seal.  AKA:  Journey to China:  Mystery of the Iron Mask.  AKA:  The Mystery of the Iron Mask:  Journey to China. 

HANZO THE RAZOR: THE SNARE (1973) ***

Shintaro Katsu returns as the badass samurai policeman Hanzo in this sequel to Hanzo the Razor:  Sword of Justice.  This time out, he’s investigating the death of a young woman.  He does some digging and discovers she had an illegal abortion.  He traces the operation back to a priestess who is in cahoots with a crooked treasurer who is jacking up the price of gold.  Hanzo, who abhors corrupt elected officials, sets out to see that justice is served. 

Director Yasuzo Masumura brings a lot of style to this entry.  The scene where the priestess preforms her abortion ceremony is eerie and colorful.  It almost feels like something out of a Mario Bava movie.  In another great scene, Hanzo is buried alive and heroically rises from the grave.  Masumura also delivers on the action as the sequence where Hanzo busts up the priestess’ den of iniquity is stellar.

If you liked the first movie, you will have fun seeing the hallmarks of the series playing out once again.  Hanzo is still beating his meat (literally) and ruffling the feathers of his superiors.  Bad guys are still getting torn to shreds in Hanzo’s booby-trapped rooms.  Hanzo is still dishing out his own unique brand of torture.  (One scene gives new meaning to the term “sit and spin”.)

Yes, like its predecessor, Hanzo the Razor:  The Snare features some pretty wild stuff.  There’s lots of sex, depravity, and violence to go around.  As in that film though, the third act gets a little too… conventional as the subplot about catching a thief who is planning to rob the Mint leaves Hanzo little time for his sexual and violent tendencies.  Still, if you’re a fan of the original, or Katsu’s Zatoichi movies, you’re sure to find plenty to enjoy here.

AKA:  Kung-Fu Hara Kiri.  AKA:  Fangs of the Detective:  Hanzo the Razor’s Tortures from Hell.  AKA:  Razor 2:  The Snare.  AKA:  Razor Hanzo’s Torture Hell.