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.

THE NEW MUTANTS (2020) ***

The New Mutants seemingly couldn’t catch a break.  It was originally supposed by be released in 2018 but had to be postponed for planned reshoots that never occurred.  It then became a casualty of Fox’s merger with Disney and was pushed back yet again.  Once it seemed like it was finally going to see the light of a projector, the pandemic hit, and its release was shuffled yet again.  It eventually hit theaters last August, but I wasn’t about to venture out during COVID to see it.  Honestly, I kind of forgot about it until it miraculously showed up on HBO Max to little fanfare last week.  Now that I have finally seen it, I have to say that it probably works best on the small screen.  Although it’s easily the least of the X-Men movies, I still sort of dug it. 

An unseen force wipes out an entire Native American reservation.  The sole survivor is a teenager named Dani Moonstar (Blu Hunt) whose fledgling mutant abilities might’ve been the cause of the disaster.  She is sent to a hospital for young mutants where the other rebellious mutant teens are learning to come to grips with their burgeoning powers.  Before long, they are beset by an evil presence that turns their worst fears against them and they must band together and work as a team to fight it.

While it lacks the unadulterated fun of the main X-Men series, The New Mutants accomplishes what it sets out to do, namely tell a claustrophobic horror story within the realm of a superhero movie.  I for one thought the lower stakes and character-driven plot worked well for the material.  I mean, when you’ve seen as many superhero flicks as I have, it’s a refreshing change of pace when the fate of the world isn’t hanging in the balance.  It’s nice when all the heroes have to worry about is not being mauled by an enormous psychically projected bear.  I also have a soft spot for superhero flicks in which the characters have C-grade powers.  (In this one, the heroes:  Bounce off walls, turn into a werewolf, use a lightsaber, and there’s a Human Torch knockoff too.)

If I had saw this in the theater (especially during the pandemic), I probably would’ve been underwhelmed.  If I saw it then, I might’ve suggested it would’ve been better suited as a TV show.  Seeing it at home, years after the bad buzz that soured its release has died down, it made for a perfectly acceptable evening of entertainment. 

Another bonus is that it’s only an hour and a half, which is a relief after so many superhero flicks with unnecessarily inflated running times (cough… The Snyder Cut… cough).  It’s nice to find one that actually knows when to quit.  It might’ve made for an anticlimactic swan song to Fox’s run of X-Men movies, but it’s really a lot better than I had anticipated. 

Besides, any movie that is essentially A Nightmare on Elm Street 3:  Dream Warriors Meets Grizzly 2 is OK in my book. 

AKA:  X-Men:  The New Mutants.

X-MEN MOVIE SCORECARD:

X-Men: Apocalypse: ****

Deadpool: ****

X-Men: Days of Future Past: ****

X-Men 2: X-Men United: ****

X-Men: ****

X-Men 3: The Last Stand: ****

Logan:  ****

X-Men: First Class: *** ½

Deadpool 2: *** ½

X-Men: Origins: Wolverine: *** ½

Dark Phoenix: ***

The Wolverine: ***

The New Mutants: ***

DEATH SMILES ON A MURDERER (1973) ***

A carriage overturns in front of the home of Dr. von Ravensbruck (Giacomo Rossi Stuart) and his wife Eva (Angela Bo), leaving the driver dead and the sole passenger, Greta (Ewa Aulin from Candy) with a bump on the head.  She winds up with amnesia and the couple, feeling sorry for her, take her in.  Before long, Greta is seducing not only the man of the house, but his wife too.  Meanwhile, visitors to the castle wind up getting bumped off by a mysterious killer. 

Death Smiles on a Murderer was directed by the legendary Italian exploitation maverick, Joe D’Amato.  Unlike a lot of his sleazier efforts, this one is a lot artier than you might expect as there are passages that have an otherworldly dreamlike quality.  He even manages to give us a few shocks that feels like something out of a waking nightmare.  While some of these moments are effective (like the scene where the maid keeps seeing a strange man in her room), or at the very least, interesting, they never really gel into a cohesive whole. 

The plot jumps around a lot too, which some will find frustrating.  However, if you surrender yourself to the dreamlike logic of the film, it will make for a rewarding (although quite possibly baffling) experience.  Some of D’Amato’s extreme close-ups, odd angles, and deliberately off-kilter camerawork can get a little annoying, but the eerie score is often effective. 

There are stretches of the film that feel like D’Amato riffing on a Jess Franco movie, while others play out like his version of a Jean Rollin flick.  After a strong first act involving the strange love triangle between the couple and their uninvited houseguest, the second act turns into a hodgepodge of Poe-influenced cliches.  (Think The Masque of the Red Death Meets the Black Cat.)  From there, things sort of morph into a macabre ghost story by the final third. 

With such distinct and disparate sequences, Death Smiles on a Murderer kind of resembles an anthology film that has intertwining characters and plotlines.  Although it might not have been intended as such, the movie might play better for you if you view it with that in mind.  It doesn’t quite excuse the unevenness of the overall picture, but it may be the key to enjoying it.

Aulin is lovely and gets naked quite a bit.  Her scenes with Bo are especially memorable.  It’s Klaus Kinski who leaves the biggest impression as the doctor who makes a house call to Aulin’s character.  Unfortunately, like most of the cast members, he doesn’t stick around for very long.

AKA:  Death Smiles on Murder.