THE BAD BUNCH (1973) ** ½

Jim (writer/director Greydon Clark) returns home from Vietnam.  His first order of business is to honor the memory of his fallen soldier friend by going to Watts and deliver his last letter home to his father.  His brother Tom (Tom Johnigarn) has become a black militant who calls himself “Makimba” and wants no part of the white man and his war.  The two butt heads on the topics of race and Vietnam, and their confrontation draws the attention of two racist cops (played by Aldo Ray and Jock Mahoney) who perpetually harass him.  Blaming Jim for his problems with The Man, Makimba decides to get payback on his perceived enemy. 

Clark’s approach to the hot-button topics of race and Vietnam is earnest, but clunky.  He tries to show both sides of racial inequality with uneven results.  He even takes time to show that his own character isn’t exactly a good guy as he pushes away his fiancée (played by Clark’s wife Jaqulin Cole) for another woman (ill-fated sexploitation star Bambi Allen) and drinks heavily.  He also paints the character as idealistic, but ultimately stupid as he wants Makimba to understand where he’s coming from but is too naive to take the hint that he’s not wanted. 

Makimba is equally stubborn as he refuses to accept help from Clark or his own father.  Still, his actions are understandable, especially once he’s been pushed so much by the cops.  Naturally, it all ends tragically, accompanied by a Martin Luther King, Jr. quote. 

Clark certainly knows his way around the Blaxploitation genre.  His next picture was the much better Black Shampoo, which was a lot more fun.  Even though he’s trying to make a sensitive, thought-provoking picture, he still manages to deliver on the exploitation goods as there’s plenty of nudity on display.  (In the film’s best scene, Makimba and his crew crash a ritzy white party and start skinny-dipping.)  This was an honest attempt to make a message picture wrapped inside of exploitation trappings, but it’s never wholly successful.  When it does work, you can see what Clark was trying to achieve.  It’s not bad though, and it’s certainly ambitious.  It’s just the cast (many of whom are amateurish) wasn’t quite skilled enough to bring it all together.

AKA:  Tom.  AKA:  The Brothers.

THE FINAL COUNTDOWN (1980) **

Kirk Douglas stars as the captain of the U.S.S. Nimitz.  While out in the ocean on maneuvers, the ship goes through a wormhole and winds up in 1941 on the eve of the Pearl Harbor attack.  Together with his commanders (James Farentino and Ron “Superfly” O’Neal) and a naval observer (Martin Sheen), Douglas must decide if they should try to stop the attack.

This is your basic paradoxical conundrum.  If you act, you change the course of history.  If you stand idly by, hundreds of people are going to be killed. 

The answer the characters come up with is somewhere in the middle.  They decide to play it safe and not to rock the boat too much (no pun intended).  Unfortunately, so does the movie. 

The Final Countdown has a great idea for a movie, but unfortunately, that’s all it ever is, an idea.  This plot could’ve easily filled a half-hour Twilight Zone episode.  At over 100 minutes, it’s just too dull to take advantage of its admittedly intriguing concept.  It also takes forever to unfurl its premise.  You’ll probably find your patience dwindling even before the crew figures out what’s happened and where they are.  You know you’re in trouble when the characters’ hypothetical historical conversations are more engaging than what little action occurs.

Much of the problem stems from having to sit through a lot of aircraft carrier bullshit.  If you’re fascinated by naval procedures and protocols, then you’ll probably love it.  To me though, all the shots of helicopters taking off and jets landing were tedious.  It’s as if the filmmakers thought watching the routine of Navy pilots and personnel walking around the ship could be substituted for “character development”.  (If you think these scenes feel like something out of a naval recruitment video; you’re half right:  The movie wars later used to lure people into joining up.)

Oh well, at least future president of Troma, Lloyd Kaufman has a bit part as a crewman.  

AKA:  U.S.S. Nimitz:  Lost in the Pacific.

FEMALE SLAVES’ REVENGE (1997) * ½

Right from the get-go, you know you’re in for… something.   Director Ted V. Mikels appears on screen to introduce the movie, stating:  “This film is about man’s inhumanity to man!”  Then we get a long scene of wildlife footage superimposed over a globe.  After that, there’s an even longer opening crawl set against some cheesy CGI flames that sets up the premise. 

A slave revolt in an unnamed African nation leads to a decree that says all white plantation owners must flee and relinquish their land to their servants. A white landowner played by Mikels, in what is probably his biggest role, refuses to leave and continues to treat his servants cruelly.  Before long, they capture him and put him on trial (in his living room) for his assorted injustices. 

Female Slaves’ Revenge is thematically similar to Mikels’ The Black Klansman, but it’s sorely lacking the gut punch fun (not to mention basic competency) of that film. There’s so much whipping, bondage, and trampling going on here that you have to wonder if the movie was just an excuse for Mikels to act out his kinky fantasies on film.  The chintzy on-screen titles and crappy camcorder cinematography makes it feel more like a cheap bondage video than a real motion picture.  A cheap bondage video with an anti-apartheid message that caters to the white guilt race play market.  That is one very specific kink.

Mikels also throws in a lot of random cutaways to a torrential downpour that’s occurring around the property.  I don’t know why it’s important to let us know it’s raining every five minutes.  The footage is so gratuitous, it makes me suspect Mikels took an old video of flood damage he made for insurance purposes and edited it into the movie. 

All this goes on for an excruciating 83 minutes.  It might’ve sneaked by with a ** rating, but the long vote-casting scenes when the women decide Mikes’ fate go on forever.  Still, if you’ve sat through as many bad Mikels movies as I have, you might enjoy seeing him being whipped and abused.  

As bad as Female Slaves’ Revenge is, I don’t think anyone else could’ve made it.  It’s distinctly Mikels in just about every way.  If that isn’t a sign of a true auteur filmmaker, I don’t know what is. 

AKA:  Apartheid Slave-Women’s Justice.

T2: TRAINSPOTTING (2017) **

After seeing Ewan McGregor in the decades-too-late sequel to a classic, Doctor Sleep, I figured I’d watch him in another decades-too-late sequel to a classic, T2:  Trainspotting.  Far be it from me to give anyone career advice, but Ewan McGregor needs to stop starring in decades-too-late sequels to classics.  He needs to stick to what he does best:  Starring in decades-too-late prequels to a classic.

McGregor yet again plays Renton, the role that made him a star.   He returns home after twenty years to make amends with the friends he left behind.  Broke, and with nothing better to do, he winds up helping his pals in their latest get-rich-quick scheme of building a brothel.

Despite the presence of all the original cast members and the return of director Danny Boyle and writer John Hodge, T2 is kind of a hollow, soulless affair.  It almost plays more like a filmed class reunion than an actual movie.  There doesn’t seem to be much drive to the plot or motivation for the characters to even warrant a sequel.  It also takes an inordinate amount of time to get going, and when it runs out of gas (which is often) Boyle falls back on scenes that echo (or just blatantly rip-off) the original.  All he succeeds in doing is reminding you how fresh and vibrant the first film was.  This one just feels sad and tired.  

I don’t know.  Maybe that’s the entire point.  Maybe Boyle and company are saying it’s better to burn out than fade away.  Jonny Lee Miller’s Sick Boy says a line about the dangers of nostalgia and “being a tourist in your own youth”.  Maybe that’s the message.  Maybe we should look forward and not backward.  Too bad the movie didn’t heed its own advice. 

MOTHER, MAY I SLEEP WITH DANGER? (1996) ** ½

Ivan Sergei bludgeons his girlfriend to death with a cutting board.  He then skips town under an assumed name and instantly falls in love with a college student with an eating disorder, played by Tori Spelling.  She doesn’t seem to mind his controlling ways at first, even when he starts to try to make her over like his dead girlfriend.  Once he kidnaps her and tries to keep her all to himself, her frantic mother (Lisa Bane) sets out to save her.

I hate the term “guilty pleasure”, but I will say that I have a certain weakness for a good (or bad) Lifetime movie.  Mother, May I Sleep with Danger? is one of the rare Lifetime Originals that has gone on to have a second life as a cult classic.  It’s easy to see why as the hysterical acting is often priceless.  Spelling is overwrought as the college student in peril, Sergei is hilarious as the overbearing and overprotective psycho boyfriend, and Bane is over the top as Spelling’s bitchy mother.  It also has the benefit of some serious ‘90s nostalgia as the fashions and hairdos are very of the time.

Other than the amped-up performances, there’s not a lot here that sets it apart from any other Lifetime film.  I mean the opening scene is campy, and the finale (which manages to rip off not only The Shining, but Friday the 13^th) is kind of fun.  However, all the stuff in between is thoroughly middling.  (The scenes of Bane playing junior detective as she tries find Spelling slow things down considerably.)  Still, for someone who enjoys these kinds of things, I was reasonably entertained.

James Franco (of all people) remade it twenty years later. 

AKA:  The Stalker.

DOCTOR SLEEP (2019) **

I’ve liked every Mike Flanagan movie I’ve seen so far.  Yes, that includes Ouija:  Origin of Evil (mostly).  I particularly enjoyed his Stephen King adaptation, Gerald’s Game.  When he was announced as the director of Doctor Sleep, the sequel to King’s The Shining, I thought he’d be the perfect choice.  I guess I was wrong.  

Flanagan excels when he’s given a small, claustrophobic setting.  Oculus, Hush, and Gerald’s Game really show what the man can do with a smallish budget and a single location.  I think maybe Doctor Sleep was a little too sprawling for him to handle as it takes place in multiple states, crisscrossing around the country.  He also uses a multitude of special effects to show the use of the characters’ various extrasensory powers.  These range from hokey (like the Peter Pan flying scenes) to mildly effective, but the spirit-eating sequences just get too repetitive for their own good.  

I think the biggest problem is that Flanagan wants to serve two masters.  He wants to appease the fickle King who famously lambasted Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 version of his novel.  He also wants to worship at the altar of Kubrick, staging recreations of that film’s most iconic set pieces in almost a slavish manner.  Unfortunately, he never figures out whose dick he wants to suck; King’s or Kubrick’s.  Instead, he tries to service both cocks by going back and forth.  In doing so, all he succeeds in doing is jerking the audience off for nearly three hours.  

I want to state for the record that there are flashes of what could’ve been.  Ewan McGregor is excellent as the now-grown Danny Torrance, the young survivor of the first film.  The best scenes are of him sobering up and wrestling with the metaphorical demons of his past.  (The worst ones are when he wrestles with them literally.)  

The stuff with the caravan of gypsy astral-projecting, soul-sucking psychic vampires led by one of the members of 4 Non Blondes is… OK… I… guess?  I mean King had FORTY YEARS to come up with a sequel to The Shining and THIS is what he came up with?  It’s like he waited to the last minute of his deadline and wrote it on the car ride to his publisher like a kid turning in his homework on Monday morning.  Still, Rebecca Ferguson has an odd energy about her that makes her character, Rose the Hat a formidable villain.  

The film semi-works to a point.  Once it goes to The Overlook, it all goes downhill in cringe-inducing fashion.  That’s mostly due to Flanagan’s need to constantly remind viewers of how great The Shining was.  I mean most of the final act feels like a Parade of Homes version of The Overlook.  I mean there’s one scene where the elevators open up and the blood comes cascading out, and a character walks by, sees it, and kinda shrugs like, “Oh yeah.  That,” and keeps walking.  

What’s worse are the recreations of Kubrick’s 1980 film.  I know the de-aging CGI is a bit spotty nowadays, but I would’ve gladly taken some video game-looking footage of Jack Nicholson than the shit we get here.  I don’t want to spoil anything for you, but… HOOOOOOOOOOO BOY!  Is it ever bad.  Hell, I would’ve taken Steven Weber from the fucking TV remake version of The Shining than the shit Flanagan hands us.  

Fuck it.  Imma spoil it.  Leave now before the spoiling starts.  Okay, so when Danny goes into the Overlook Bar, he runs face to face with the Bartender, who is no longer the character Joe Turkel memorably played in the original, but… Jack Torrance.  The problem is, the role of Jack Torrance is one that very few people could fill, especially seeing as Jack Nicholson gave one of the all-time great performances in the 1980 original.  Instead of relying on CGI, or heck, letting Nicholson essay the role playing his age, they went out and got… HENRY THOMAS.  Elliott from E.T.?  Let me tell you, on a short list of people to inherit the role of Jack Torrance, Henry Thomas would be about my 675^th choice, right between Shaquille O’Neal and Steve Guttenberg.  

Plus, it doesn’t even make any fucking sense.  I mean, why would he be the bartender?  Yes, I know he’s just there to make Danny fall off the wagon by offering him booze, but shouldn’t he really be THE CARETAKER?  I mean, he’s ALWAYS been the caretaker, remember?  Did they forget about that shit?  

Is it my fault?  Am I holding the movie version of The Shining in too high of a regard?  Maybe my expectations are too high.  Thinking anyone could ever come closing to matching the brilliance of Kubrick is dumb of me, I know.  In fact, the stuff with the psychic vampires, bizarre as it is, was acceptable, mostly because, at the very least, it was giving Danny a chance to pass the torch to the next generation of Shiners while still allowing him to confront the trauma in his past.  However, tacking on a film student version of The Shining with a community theater-level set of players while trying to cram in shit that Kubrick (wisely) left out of King’s book doesn’t do anyone any favors whatsoever.   All it does is show (once again) that Kubrick was right and King was wrong when it came to what should and should not be on screen.  The fact that Flanagan tries to ape Kubrick so hard in the end just about singlehandedly derails the whole movie.  You also get a sense that no one would’ve dared done this when Kubrick was alive.  I mean, it’s one thing to wear grandma’s jewelry after she’s dead.  It’s another thing to fuck her corpse.

It kind of reminded me a little of another sequel to a great Kubrick classic, 2010.  That movie is a lot of fun when it’s doing its own thing and propelling the story forward.  When it’s gratuitously playing homage to the original, it just grinds to a fucking halt.  The only thing is, 2010 is a lot more entertaining than Doctor Sleep.

Another problem is that there are just too many subplots that gum up the works.  The shit with Danny getting sober and guiding dying old folks through to the other side in a hospice center are just fine.  The shit with the little psychic girl Abra (Kyliegh Curran) playing detective aren’t bad either, although some of her psychic shenanigans get to be a bit repetitive by the end.  Rose is a memorably weird character, but she gets way too much screen time, which ruins a bit of her mystery.  We honestly didn’t need to know all the ins and outs of her recruiting people to her ranks.  (They could’ve easily cut out all the shit with “Snakebite Andi’ and her indoctrination into the tribe and not missed a single beat.)

I can’t say I hated Doctor Sleep.  Ewan’s too good to completely dismiss it, even when it all turns to shit in the third act.  I just don’t thing I’ll be chopping down the door to see it again.  

TERMINATOR: DARK FATE (2019) ***

Terminator:  Dark Fate is basically The Force Awakens… but with Terminators.  It’s the same shit, new generation.  It really doesn’t offer die-hard Terminator fans anything we haven’t already seen before.  Well, except that the new Terminator (Gabriel Luna) looks like shit.  I don’t mean that in a derogatory manner.  I mean it literally looks like shit.  Like the T-1000 in T2, it squirts, leaks, and drizzles around, but instead of being a cool silver color, it’s diarrhea black.   The Terminator’s target, Dani (Natalia Reyes) isn’t much different than the Sarah Connor of old, and her protector, Grace (Mackenzie Davis) is only a slight variation on Sam Worthington’s character from Terminator:  Salvation. 

The one thing we haven’t seen in a Terminator flick happens early on.  I won’t spoil it, but it’s a pretty ballsy move.  Too bad that’s about as ballsy as the movie gets.  From then on, it just becomes another retread.  An entertaining retread, to be sure, and yet the feeling of déjà vu is still unshakeable.

It’s just so good having Linda Hamilton back as Sarah Connor that it’s easy to overlook some of the film’s flaws.  She’s been away for a while, but she hasn’t lost a step as she immediately shows she can still kick major ass.  There’s enough built-in goodwill from her presence alone to carry Dark Fate over its clunkier passages.  

The movie, unfortunately, has a few of those.  The good news is, it picks up considerably once Arnold finally shows up, and when he does, he steals the show.  You wouldn’t guess what he’s been up to all those years and I wouldn’t dream of spoiling it for you.  All I’ll say is that his present vocation makes for some of the biggest laughs in the entire film.  His tense scenes with Hamilton give Dark Fate an edge the last few sequels have sorely lacked.

The problem is, like The Force Awakens, the new characters aren’t nearly as endearing as their elders.  I guess it doesn’t help that they spend most of their time running around.  Still, Michael Biehn did the same thing back in ’84 and he managed to give us a fully fleshed-out character you could root for.  

As portrayed by Luna, the new Terminator lacks the menace of the previous incarnations.  Grace does what she can with her underwritten role and handles herself just fine in the action sequences.  Likewise, Reyes makes for a serviceable lead, even if her big change of character feels a bit rushed in the finale.

I know we’ve waited a long time for James Cameron to come back to the franchise.  Unfortunately, what he has to offer are only tweaked reworkings of not only his films,  but the sequels he had nothing to do with.  Then again, maybe that’s the point.  Because of its very nature, the Terminator timeline is doomed to keep repeating itself again and again.  The alternate timelines will keep skewing further and further into the future until everyone involved with the original is long gone.

There’s a good chance of that happening too as there’s enough rousing moments here to remind us there’s still some life in the long-running franchise.  While Dark Fate lacks the wham-bam action of T3, the grittiness of Salvation, and the sheer goofiness of Genisys, it has its own identity, even when it’s recycling bits from the previous films.  Despite his abbreviated screen time, Arnold still gets some good lines and kicks ass (albeit belatedly), and for many Terminator fans (or at least me), that’s ultimately what matters most.