BULLET HEAD (2018) ****

Tarantino rip-offs used to be all the rage in the mid-to-late ‘90s, but they are getting fewer and fewer as time goes on.  Here’s a nifty little variation on the tropes that QT made famous while offering a few new twists of its own.  With Bullet Head, writer/director Paul (Grace) Solet has crafted a fun crime/horror hybrid that almost plays like Reservoir Dogs Meets Cujo.   

A trio of thieves (John Malkovich, Adrien Brody, and Rory Culkin) on the lam from Johnny Law lay low in a seemingly abandoned warehouse waiting for the heat to cool off.  While they bide their time, they make small talk and share stories of previous robberies gone wrong.  Little do they know they are not alone.  Roaming the grounds is a virtually indestructible killer dog who is dead set on turning the thieves into a steaming bowl of human kibble. 

Usually in a movie like this when the plot starts making unnecessary detours via flashback, it just feels like an attempt to pad out the running time.  In Bullet Head, it’s more congruous with the plot, and helps to inform the audience on the characters’ backstories.  (I particularly liked Malkovich’s ill-fated goldfish heist story.)  Speaking of flashbacks, even the killer mutt gets flashbacks!  Usually, whenever a dog has flashbacks in a movie, it’s a big old red flag (anyone who’s ever seen The Hills Have Eyes 2 or Top Dog can attest to that), but they are quite well done here, as Solet manages to make you feel a little sorry for the mangy mongrel.    

The premise is simple.  The set-up is efficient.  The pacing is crackling.  The tension is high.  It would make a good double feature with Crawl.  That flick was a When Animals Attack movie melded with a disaster picture and this one is a When Animals Attack movie mixed with a heist thriller.  The final act where Brody squares off against not only the killer dog, but his despicable handler (Antonio Banderas, who is excellent) is some real white knuckle shit.   

I will say that while this thriller is top notch, it will certainly put you through the wringer.  If you are in any way squeamish when it comes to dramatized animal cruelty, stay far away from it.  However, if you enjoy a down and dirty action horror movie, this one not only has thrills and chills (there is at least one effective jump scare), but personality too.  And remember what Jules said in Pulp Fiction… personality goes a long way.

GENERAL COMMANDER (2019) **

General Commander apparently started life as a TV show.  It never got picked up and the episodes were then condensed into a feature length movie (which explains why it is credited to two different directors).  I assume it was to be a slight variation on Steven Seagal’s other program, True Justice as he once again is in charge of a team of law enforcement agents.  Basically, all he does is sit around barking orders while they do all the leg work, before he finally shows up for the fight scene finale.  The big difference here is that instead of working on the Seattle P.D., Seagal and his team are with the C.I.A.  True Justice yielded a handful of not-bad patched-together movies.  All I can say for this one is I’m glad the makers of General Commander only milked this show for one feature. 

Seagal and his team are on the trail of some black market organ harvesters in Cambodia.  When one of their own is killed during a sting operation, Seagal and his crew naturally want to go out for revenge.  The agency forbids any retaliation and orders the team to be disbanded.  They then defy their superiors and reassemble to get payback for their fallen friend. 

I feared the worst when I put this on, but it’s semi-competently put together.  It’s not nearly as bad as some of Seagal’s latter-day efforts, although it’s hardly noteworthy, that’s for sure.  If they were going to slap two episodes of a TV show together, I just wish they had picked ones that had more action in them.  Things particularly bog down in the second act where the team members go off and mourn the death of their dead pal.  The action we do get is far from Seagal’s worst, but there’s just not enough of it to make it worthwhile.  

The climax might’ve worked for an hour-long TV show, but it’s a little underwhelming for an action flick.  The final knife fight is over much too quickly and suffers from some poor editing.  That said, the first episode (err... half) moves at a fairly brisk pace.  Overall, it's mostly innocuous, if a tad forgettable.

TETSUO: THE BULLET MAN (2010) *

Director Shin’ya Tsukamoto returned eighteen years later with a (mostly) American cast for this third installment in the Tetsuo series.  Like most remakes/sequels aimed at American audiences, it gratuitously overexplains things.  We didn’t need the big long flashback that shows us WHY the hero is turning into a robot.  It’s totally unnecessary and only gets in the way of the transformation scenes and action sequences (which are unfortunately fucking awful this time around).

 

Gone is the gritty style of the original and the ridiculous flamboyance of the second film.  Instead, everything has been color timed down to look as drab as possible.  The effects lack inspiration too.  You’ll swear it wasn’t by the same director as the first two movies as it looks and feels exactly like a generic late ‘00s DTV American remake.  As with most DTV flicks, the action sequences are nearly incoherent thanks to the erratic editing and non-stop shaky-cam camerawork.  In fact, this has to feature some of the all-time worst camerawork when it comes to action, which is really saying something.  Another overly-American trait:  The laughable happy ending.

 

It’s all especially depressing seeing how creative and exuberant the previous films were.  This one feels like a cheap cash-in.  It just goes to show that some directors are at their best working with shoestring budgets where they have to rely on their own ingenuity.  Sometimes, when they are given more money and advanced technology, the results can turn out much worse.  

 

The plot is basically a rehash of part 2.  The big difference is that instead of kidnapping the hero’s kid, the bad guys run him over.  He tries to hide his inner rage, but his grieving wife wants him to stop whining and go out and get revenge.  Finally, he embraces his robotic nature and transforms into a cyborg to get the guys who killed his son.

 

The effects are watered down too.  This guy looks like a Power Rangers villain rather than a lunatic cyborg Gumby.  Also, Tsukamoto doesn’t come anywhere close to matching the inspired nightmarish transformations found in the other movies.

 

I guess this was made solely to show that Tsukamoto could work with an American cast.  There’s really no reason to watch it though.  It’s liable to only piss off fans of the first two movies and stupefy anyone else.  Out of all the painful transformations found in the series, its transformation into a shitty bastardized American sequel was the most painful of all.

TETSUO 2: BODY HAMMER (1992) *** ½

I’m a big fan of director Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s Japanese splatterpunk body horror classic Tetsuo:  The Iron Man.  Don’t ask why it took me so long to check this sequel out.  It’s flat-out nuts.   

Two men try to abduct a man’s son in broad daylight.  While he’s trying to get his child back, they shoot him with a strange bullet.  He soon finds that whenever he gets angry or is under extreme duress, his body twists into metallic forms.  When he is kidnapped by the mysterious underground faction, they hook him up to a giant headset which intensifies his powers and he turns into a gnarly, malformed cyborg hellbent on revenge.

Tetsuo:  The Iron Man was a low budget marvel that was sort of like a cyberpunk version of Eraserhead.  This time out, the inspiration seems to be American action movies, namely Terminator 2.  Whole scenes seem to copy that film (as well as C + C Music Factory’s music videos), but with a body horror edge.  Imagine if David Cronenberg was at the helm of T2 instead of James Cameron and that may give you an idea of what to expect.  (There are also nods to The Fly, Videodrome, and Aliens.)  The action sequences are pretty wild for the budget and some of the transformation scenes are downright insane. 

This is the part of the review where I admit the version I saw didn’t have subtitles.  That just enriched the overall lunacy of it all.  I didn’t need to follow the plot.  The images did all the heavy lifting for me.  I mean who needs plot when whole chunks of the movie are devoted to a large machine gun turret erupting out of your hero’s chest?  By the time the final act rolls around and your main character has morphed into what can only be described as Robo-Gumby, you just have to be in awe at the ingenious zaniness of it all.  

TENET (2020) **

Tenet is another entry in the Chris Nolan Thinks His Cinematic Shit Doesn’t Stink sweepstakes.  This time out, Nolan doubles down on the “I’m the smartest guy in the room” mentality of storytelling that botched much of his later post-Batman Begins work.  If Inception was his intellectual version of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3:  Dream Warriors, this is his riff on Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, as the overly simplistic logistics of time travel in both movies is awfully similar. 

John David Washington stars as “The Protagonist” (which gives you an idea of the level of pompousness involved), an agent who is recruited into a new Cold War.  His mission is to stop a nuclear holocaust that has already happened in the future.  Items from the future war are found and when properly used in the here and now, can sort of bind the future and the present together.  That means there are shootouts where the bullets go INTO the guns and fight scenes where guys start on the floor and then move backwards until their face lands right into the knuckles of the dude who (hasn’t) punched him (yet).   

All of this is gloriously sleek and shiny.  It looks like a million bucks, but they should’ve sprung for a better shotgun boom mic because most of the characters speak their dialogue in mutters, through thick accents, while wearing masks, or over crackling headsets full of static.  I think Nolan didn’t have the confidence in his worldbuilding, overly complicated, gobbledygook dialogue, so he fucked with the audio so people wouldn’t spend half the movie picking it apart. 

Washington is Denzel’s kid, and he looks and sounds enough like his old man.  He’s not bad.  It’s just that he really isn’t a movie star yet.  Since he’s missing some of the family swagger, he kind of gets lost in the shuffle amid all the flashy backwards effects.  Elizabeth Debicki does a fine job though as the heroine, although like most of the characters, a lot of her dialogue is unintelligible.  Many of the bright spots come courtesy of Robert Pattinson, whose shaggy dog demeanor makes it feel like he came out of a completely different (and better) movie.  At all times, he seems content knowing that he can do whatever the fuck he wants and Nolan would probably let it slide.  (He sometimes resembles Richard E. Grant after a bender.)   

I have to say as muddled as most of this is, it does have a certain allure to it.  Although it almost defies the audience to go along with the daffy plot, there are some sequences that work.  Nolan knows how to keep a story moving, which helps too.  However the results are simultaneously mind-boggling and curiously underwhelming, which in itself is quite a feat.  I just wish the overall picture wasn’t such a mishmash of heist sequences, showy action beats, and marathon exposition sessions. 

Ultimately, Tenet just feels like a mash-up of Nolan’s usual bullshit without a real singular throughline to make you care.  In Memento, he gave us a film that essentially played out backwards.  Here, we get action sequences that run in reverse.  Like Inception (the Nolan film this feels closest to), there are scenes where the scenery folds in on itself and the landscape changes before your eyes.  While some may enjoy seeing Nolan playing around with the same motifs yet again, in the end, it just feels kinda hollow.  I’d say it’s slightly better than Inception, but it’s certainly one of Nolan’s weakest efforts.

TURKISH STAR WARS (1982) ½ *

I’ve heard whispers about Turkish Star Wars ever since I was a kid.  As both a Star Wars junkie and a bad movie connoisseur, I knew I had to watch it some day.  Now that I’ve finally seen it, I have to say it’s even worse than I imagined.  Not only is it the worst Star Wars rip-off of all time, it’s one of the worst movies ever made. 

When I was a teenager, I made a Star Wars movie with some friends.  We got around doing elaborate special effects by having the actors sit in front of a TV.  Then, we put Star Wars in the VCR and cued it up to the final Death Star assault.  This way, it kinda sorta looked like they were sitting in the cockpit of a spaceship.  Much to my surprise, Turkish Star Wars pulls the same exact bullshit!  Not only that, but it uses footage from the movie for its nonsensical opening sequence.  The accompanying narration is just as confusing as the random assemblage of footage the filmmakers stole from George Lucas.

 

That confusion continues throughout the rest of the movie as the plot (and I use the word “plot” very loosely) is all chopped to hell.  It hops around so much that much of it is hard to follow.  Although it’s in Turkish with English subtitles, I have a feeling it might’ve made more sense WITHOUT the subtitles.  The sole highlight (and I use the word “highlight” very loosely) is the Turkish version of the Star Wars cantina scene.  The way the filmmakers (and I use the word “filmmakers” very loosely) incorporate footage from the original cantina scene with their new terrible-looking monsters is something else.  (One looks like a college football mascot.)  Instead of a quick-draw shootout, it ends with a Kung Fu brawl.  

At least you don’t have to worry if Turkish Han Solo shot first or not.  

Just so we’re clear, Turkish Star Wars isn’t merely content to rip off George Lucas’s iconic 1977 classic.  It also steals music from Raiders of the Lost Ark and Flash Gordon.  That’s to be expected since it was riding the wave of what was popular at the time.  Most befuddling is the fact that it borrows footage from Bert I. Gordon’s The Magic Sword and Robert Aldrich’s Sodom and Gomorah (which were both from 1962, a full two decades before this was released). 

I guess it goes without saying that the various action scenes and Kung Fu training montages are bad, and the shoddy costumes and special effects are laughable.  (The thing that’s supposed to pass as a lightsaber just looks like a Styrofoam cutout.)  The finale is the worst though.  It’s here where our hero karate chops the villain in half lengthwise, which sounds cool until you actually see it. (The effect is nothing more than the cameraman obscuring half the frame so only half of his face is visible.)   

Overall, Turkish Star Wars is pathetic.  I think the Star Wars movie I made as a kid was better than this.  Heck, your little sister could probably do better.  

AKA:  The Man Who Saved the World.

I WAS A TEENAGE ZOMBIE (1987) ***

I Was a Teenage Zombie is one of the more unlikely movies to wind up in the Criterion Collection.  I kind of understand why as it’s pretty good for a shot on 16mm low budget horror comedy.  What makes it stand out from the glut of similar pictures that were being churned out at the time is the fact that the comedy stuff is actually funny.  That’s good news too, since it takes an awful long time before the horror aspects kick in.  

 

A drug dealer named Mussolini (Steve McCoy) is desperate to move some tainted marijuana that has been laced with toxic waste.  Some teenage friends looking for a buzz, buy some of the deranged dope and smoke it.  After getting sick from inhaling the weird weed, they get revenge on the dealer by killing him and tossing his body into the river.  Little do the teens know the river just so happens to be contaminated with toxic waste.  Before long, Mussolini returns as a green-faced zombie and attacks the teens.  During the struggle, their leader Dan (Michael Ruben) is killed.  The only resort is to put Dan in the river too and hope that once he is resurrected, the teenage zombie will have what it takes to bring down the undead dope pusher.

 

I Was a Teenage Zombie feels like a slightly more polished version of a Troma movie (which is fitting because Lloyd Kaufman gets namechecked at one point).  The gore includes tongue tearing, neck twisting, and there’s a pretty great face ripping scene too.  At one point, the zombie gets it on with one of the heroes’ girlfriends, so fans of zombie hanky-panky will probably enjoy it.  

 

While it’s better than your typical low budget zombie comedy, it’s far from perfect.  There are some real lulls in between the highlights and the ninety-one minute running time is a bit unwieldy at times.  Ultimately, I think it would have benefitted from some tighter editing and a snappier pace (Dan doesn’t turn into a zombie until the film is two-thirds of the way over), but it’s an entertaining and amusing horror-comedy.

 

An acid head dealer gets the best line of the movie when he bemoans the modern music scene and says, “I played a Duran Duran record backwards, and you know what it said?  NOTHING!”