UNHINGED (2020) ** ½

Unhinged was the first major release of the pandemic and it’s easy to see why because it’s a thoroughly disposable (but mostly enjoyable) little thriller.  While at first glance it may seem like a loose remake of Duel, it’s actually closer in spirit to those ‘90s “From Hell” thrillers in which the protagonist finds themselves at the mercy of a psycho who intends to make their life a living Hell.  In this case, it’s the Road Rage Driver From Hell. 

 

Single mom Rachel (Caren Pistorius) finds herself running late on her way to work.  In a rush, she honks the horn at a truck who refuses to go at a green light.  When the driver (Russell Crowe) demands an apology for her rudeness, she ignores him, and takes off.  He soon follows her and sets out to terrorize her both on and off the highway. 

 

Unhinged is a perfectly serviceable thriller.  It would’ve looked right at home on video store shelves twenty-five years ago next to the likes of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Unlawful Entry, and The Temp.  It played just fine for me at home with zero expectations and little fanfare.  I think I might’ve been a little pissed if I paid money to see it in a theater during a global pandemic though.   

 

Pistorius is a solid heroine.  What’s interesting is that she probably could’ve diffused the situation early on.  Instead, she only enraged the driver more.  I know she was having a bad day and running late, but his day was even worse (he killed his ex-wife and her lover and burned their house down).  They say you should always be kind to others because you never know what they are going through.  This isn’t exactly what they meant by that, but I guess it is the extreme version of that proverb. 

 

Crowe packed on the pounds and sports a shaggy beard as the aggressive driver.  I’m not sure if this was his test run for an eventual DTV career or if he was just looking to sink his teeth into a villain role, but he’s not bad.  It might’ve been better if they went with someone who really knew how to chew the scenery though. 

 

The first and third acts work the best.  It’s here where the film leans heavy on Duel for inspiration as the cat and mouse chase plays out on the highway.  These sequences also give us a few quality vehicular homicides and crashes.  The middle section where Crowe makes a couple of pit stops to terrorize Pistorius’ nearest and dearest are kind of unnecessary and help drag the pace down.  However, whenever Unhinged keeps it on the road, it’s a decent flick. 

THE CUTTER (2006) **

Daniel Bernhardt kills a bunch of archaeologists in Egypt and steals some priceless jewels from a mummy’s tomb.  He then travels to Spokane, Washington and kidnaps the only diamond cutter (The Love Boat’s Bernie Kopell!) capable of cutting the stones.  His niece (Joanna Pacula) then hires an experienced private investigator (Chuck Norris) to find her father and recover the jewels.   

 

The Cutter finds Norris in fine form.  He’s a little older and not quite as spry as he used to be, but he delivers a good performance.  The supporting cast is equally good.  Bernhardt fares pretty well as the villain, who in addition to being a martial artist and assassin, is a master of disguise and is fluent in several languages.  He usually seems stiff and uncomfortable in a lot of his movies, but he makes for a solid adversary this time around.  Pacula is a strong (and age-appropriate) leading lady, and it was fun seeing Tracy Scoggins popping up in the mix as a sexy cop.  Love Boat fans will probably enjoy it just to see Kopell in his largest role in some time as the titular cutter.   

 

While The Cutter contains some solid performances and a decent premise, the shitty action sequences really take the wind out of the movie’s sails.  In addition to the lackluster fights, shootouts, and car chases, there’s also a bunch of unnecessary zoom ins and outs, rapid fire editing, shaky-cam camerawork, and camera shuttering during many of the action moments and/or transition scenes that will almost immediately get on your nerves.  I know, I know, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a DTV action flick with terrible editing quirks in the ‘00s, but every time I see one it just further reinforces why so many of these things are sometimes painful to watch.  Fortunately, these little ticks become less and less frequent as the film wears on.  It’s just a shame that the big Bernhardt vs. Norris fights are close quarters affairs with uninspired choreography. 

 

Also, the flick is filled with a lot of unnecessary flashbacks that help pad out the running time.  It’s one thing for Chuck to have nightmares about the girl he couldn’t save early in the movie.  It’s another thing to have Bernhardt flashing back to killing the archaeologists, especially when we just saw him do it fifteen minutes earlier in the film.  If these moments had been cut, The Cutter would’ve moved along at a tighter clip. 

FOREST WARRIOR (1996) **

A lot of the same people responsible for Top Dog were also behind Forest Warrior.  They must’ve thought that the only way they could top pairing Chuck Norris with a dog was to have him share the screen with bears, wolves, and eagles.  Like Top Dog, it’s pretty much a dumb kid’s movie, but at least it’s consistently corny and doesn’t have a weird mean streak. 

 

Norris plays a mountain man who was killed by some dastardly villains in his beloved forest in the nineteenth century.  His spirit then became one with nature and has spent over a century guarding the forest from harm.  When a greedy lumber tycoon (Terry Kiser from Weekend at Bernie’s) wants to strip the woods for profit, it’s up to Chuck to make him see the forest for the trees.   

 

Like a lot of Chuck’s movies, Forest Warrior has way too many characters and subplots that get in the way of Chuck kicking ass.  All the sub-Goonies shit with the kid characters camping in the extreme treehouse and stumbling upon the tycoon’s plot feels like some real Disney Channel type crap.  The flashbacks to townsfolk’s encounters with the forest spirit also eat up precious screen time, and the mini-musical number is completely gratuitous.  You also have to put up with some lame Home Alone-inspired gags where the kids plant booby traps in the woods to deter the loggers.   

 

I will admit that I admire the film’s earnestness.  It’s not very good, but it wears its heart on its sleeve.  If anything, it plays better as a throwback to the days of environmentally conscious fare like Billy Jack and Grizzly Adams than as a traditional Chuck Norris actioner. 

 

The supporting cast is solid too.  While Kiser gamely chews the scenery as the villain, Roscoe Lee Browne lends the proceedings a touch of class as the owner of the old timey general store who knows the legend of the Forest Warrior.  We also have Loretta Swit as one of the kid’s moms, Michael Beck as a drunk dad, and William Sanderson as a sniveling lawyer.   

 

Unfortunately, Norris doesn’t get a lot of screen time in this one as much of the focus is on the kids and their misadventures.  On the plus side, he gives a good performance as he is clearly invested in the role.  Much of Forest Warrior is kiddie fodder, but where else are you going to get to see Chuck Norris transforming into wolves and eagles, karate kicking loggers, and resurrecting dead kids using forest magic?  I mean, any movie that ends with Chuck Norris morphing into a grizzly bear can’t be all bad.  In fact, more movies should end that way, in my opinion.    

 

As far as environmental themed action movies from the ‘90s go, Forest Warrior is a lot better than On Deadly Ground, that’s for sure.   

 

AKA:  Action Warrior.   

TOP DOG (1995) *

This week, I was a guest on Ty and Brett’s Comeuppance Reviews Podcast talking about our favorite and not-so favorite Chuck Norris movies.  You can hear the entire discussion here: The Chuck Wagon (podbean.com).  To prepare for our chat, I went ahead and watched a couple of Chuck flicks that I somehow hadn’t got around to watching.  Much to my surprise, that wasn’t many.  (I still need to see An Eye for an Eye and Bells of Innocence, but other than that, I’ve seen them all.)   

 

First up on my Chuck binge watch was Top Dog, and boy, is it a tonal nightmare from start to finish.  It is a sorry retread of the Cop and his Dog Partner motif that was already mined by Turner and Hooch and K-9.  It’s also got a little bit of the Mad Bomber plotline that was popular in the early ‘90s with such films as Speed, Blown Away, and Die Hard with a Vengeance.  (There’s even a bomb-diffusing finale.)  The fact that it premiered around the same time as the Oklahoma bombing further soured moviegoers on this, which for my money, has to be Chuck’s worst.   

 

Reno the dog (himself) is one of the best cops on the force.  When his partner is murdered by some white supremacists, he is saddled with a grumpy, slovenly cop named Jake Wilder (Chuck Norris).  The mismatched pair eventually learn to accept each other on their own terms in order to stop the bad guys from blowing up “The Collation for Racial Unity”.    

 

On the surface, Top Dog looks like a kid’s movie.  The scenes of Chuck Norris and the pooch feel like something out of a Disney flick, and the comedic reaction shots of the dog whenever Chuck is fighting are particularly lame.  Despite all the kid-friendly dog stuff, it is much too violent for most children and way too cutesy for fans of Chuck.  Also, it features some rather despicable white supremacist villains who really feel out of place in a dumb film aimed at kids.   

 

The stuff with Chuck getting to know the dog is painfully unfunny.  The constant dog POV shots are especially hard to take.  The action beats aren’t exactly bad, but just seem like they came out of a different movie.  The subplot with Chuck and his nagging mother also feels like a set-up for a Stop or My Mom Will Shoot-style action-comedy that nobody asked for.  Plus, it’s unnecessarily mean-spirited, which I’m sure will turn many viewers off.  I mean the dog gets shot in the first five minutes!  At least Turner and Hooch waited till the end to pull that shit.   

SKYLIN3S (2020) *

Skyline was an OK, but forgettable low budget sci-fi survival flick.  Its sequel, Beyond Skyline upped the budget and spectacle, and yet it failed to really stick in my memory banks either.  The best thing I can say about the third film in the franchise, Skylin3s is that I’ve almost forgotten everything about it, and I just watched it.

This one picks up a few years after Beyond.  The alien/human hybrid Rose (Lindsey Morgan) is now the leader of the human resistance.  Unfortunately, the alien warriors she converted to her cause have caught a virus that threatens to turn them back into their original human-hating state.  She then must take a ragtag team of grunts into space and bring down the alien mothership once and for all. 

I’m glad the movie started off with a recap of Beyond Skyline because I had already forgotten most of it.  Afterwards, there’s a big chunk of the film where not a whole lot happens, which made me wish they had cut out the first half-hour and rolled highlights of it into the opening recap.  That would’ve gotten the show on the road a lot sooner.  Even then, the show, such as it is, is a dull slog.  What’s worse is that the monsters, ships, and various other special effects are often dark, ugly, and cheap looking.  (The alien sidekick whose sole schtick is to curse in his native tongue is really annoying.)  The whole thing resembles a bad ‘90s DTV sci-fi flick.  (Or maybe a bad early ‘00s Sci-Fi Channel show.)  The fact that Daniel Bernhardt is one of the main actors, sort of adds to that feeling. 

Maybe if the alien action was cool, I could’ve let a lot of this slide, but it’s well below average.  What’s worse is that Mad Dog himself, Yayan Ruhian is completely wasted in what is essentially a glorified cameo.  I’m not even sure why they decided to bring him back because he’s only in it for a minute or two in what amounts to be half an action scene.  To be fair, that’s more than he got to do in The Force Awakens, but still.

Heck, I might’ve been more forgiving if the flick clocked in at eighty minutes or so.  However, it runs a whopping one-hundred-and-thirteen minutes.  Much of the running time could’ve easily been scrapped.  It might’ve worked if the script stuck to Rose’s adventure in space, because the earthbound ground assault scenes add nothing to the plot and only help to bring Skylin3s to a crashing halt.

AKA:  Skylines.

GIRL (2020) **

Bella Thorne stars as the titular girl who returns to her shithole hometown, hatchet in hand, on a mission to kill the abusive father she hasn’t seen for several years.  (This girl REALLY wants to bury the hatchet if you know what I mean.)  Almost immediately, she pops up on the radar of the creepy sheriff (Mickey Rourke) who presides over the town.  When she finally confronts her father, it doesn’t go nearly the way she expected, and she soon finds herself at the mercy of the despicable sheriff. 

Girl, like the unimaginative title suggests, is a thoroughly ordinary and unmemorable little crime thriller.  It was sold as a horror movie, but it’s more of a redneck drama with some occasional bloodletting.  It’s fine, I guess.  It’s just that director Chad Faust (who also plays Rourke’s psycho brother) never really manages to ratchet up the tension.  While it’s a perfectly watchable affair, Faust just can’t seem to squeeze any suspense out of the admittedly thin script (that was surprise, surprise, also written by Faust).  Even the big plot twist (which isn’t really all that surprising) falls flat, which is just as much the fault of Faust’s writing as his direction.

If the movie has an ace up its sleeve, it’s Thorne.  With her permanent scowl, stringy crimson locks, and facial piercings up and down her profile, she really sells her character’s predicament and makes for a tough, likeable, able-bodied, and resourceful heroine.  Too bad the material she’s been given to work with is so weak. 

As big of a Mickey Rourke fan as I am, it pains me to say that I was a little disappointed by his portrayal of the sheriff.  He really underplayed the character’s menace and didn’t act nearly as weird as I was expecting/hoping.  I’m not saying a top-shelf Rourke performance could’ve singlehandedly saved Girl, but it certainly would’ve given you a reason to watch it.

HOT TOUCH (1981) **

Wayne (M*A*S*H) Rogers stars as an art forger who makes bank pawning off fake Picassos.  When he’s not off hoodwinking clients with his business partner Patrick Macnee, he’s making time with a married woman (Cousin Cousine’s Marie-France Pisier).  Things begin to get hairy when an art dealer (Samantha Eggar) gets wind of his scheme and blackmails him into taking on another forgery.  He then has to outthink his new clients and double-cross them before they do it to him. 

Rogers is miscast in the role of a suave forger, but he isn’t bad, all things considered.  Macnee is fun to watch though and lends the film a touch of class and charm.  Speaking of class, Melvyn Douglas also pops up in a cameo (it looks like they filmed his limo ride to the set).  Lloyd Bochner is rather memorable too as Eggar’s sleazy henchman. 

Hot Touch was directed by Roger (Barbarella) Vadim, and for a while, it seems like an ill fit for his filmography as much of the art forgery plot has the look and feel of an unsold television pilot.  However, once Rogers’ gratuitous sex scene with Pisier comes around, it finally starts to feel like a Vadim film.  Shortly thereafter, it goes back to feeling like a Made for TV movie.  Pisier is a little weak as the love interest, and despite her big nude scene, she doesn’t really leave much of an impression.  She also gets a nude chess scene that starts off well, but it’s much too short to really titillate. 

The big con finale leaves something to be desired too.  The build-up isn’t bad, but you should at least feel something when Rogers and company finally pull the wool over his new employers’ eyes.  Luckily, Bochner’s eventual comeuppance is fairly gruesome, which at least ends things on a memorable note.

There was a decent idea here.  However, with Vadim at the helm, you just expect a little bit more skin.  If he had added two or three more love scenes of the same caliber as Pisier’s first scene, he might’ve had a winner on his hands.  As it is, Hot Touch is rather cool to the touch.

AKA:  The Hot Touch.  AKA:  Manhattan Gang.