ARSENAL (2017) ***

Arsenal is as good as you could hope from a 23 years later DTV sequel to Deadfall.  Like Deadfall, it is a solid neo-noir crime drama that is punctuated with hilarious moments from a scenery-chewing Nicolas Cage.  That film dealt with conmen working a big grift.  This one features a kidnapping gone awry.  Both films feature sturdy enough noir tropes that can sustain themselves during the Cage-less stretches.  I can’t exactly say it filled the big shoes left by Deadfall, but it is an entertaining thriller and required viewing for fans of crazed Cage antics.

The use of Cage’s character, Eddie King was a bit restrained.  He’s only seen sparingly throughout the early going of the film, and even when he is front and center, Cage seemed to be holding back.  Luckily for the audience, once he kills his brother (played by his real life brother and Deadfall director Christopher Coppola), Cage goes off his rocker and does so in glorious slow motion.  He also gets a funny scene where he writes a letter to his dead brother and the speech he gives about the effects of eating Drano is worth the price of admission alone.

Speaking of which, director Steven C. Miller does some cool stuff with slow motion in the final act.  He gives us a few Dredd-style bullet time shot of bullets whizzing around and going through cheeks and nut sacs.  He also delivers an awesome exploding head gag that is as good as anything you’d see in a Scaners movie.

The strong performances by Adrian Grenier and Jonathon Schaech anchor the film.  Their scenes of brotherly devotion keep you involved.  Even though you want to see Nic Cage completely lose his shit, you’re still rooting for the brothers to take him down.  John Cusack also shows up wearing basically the same get-up he wore in Drive Hard.  From beneath his sunglasses and baseball hat, he comes this close to phoning it in, but stops short.

Now, I know what you’re thinking.  How the hell did Eddie survive his memorable death scene from the first film?  Honestly, I don't really care.  It's just good to have Nic back behind the moustache and false nose again.  Do I wish he went a bit crazier and went into full-on Deadfall levels of insanity?  Sure, but he still has enough memorable moments to keep you entertained.

 

Oh, and there's no reason for this to be called Arsenal.  There's one scene near the end where Grenier opens a safe and pulls out… one single gun.  That’s not much of an arsenal, if you ask me.

 

AKA:  Philly Fury.  AKA:  Southern Fury.

HYPOTHERMIA (2012) * ½

 

Michael Rooker stars as a sportsman who goes on vacation to a frozen pond to do a little ice fishing with his family.  Once there, he has to put up with an obnoxious father and son team who blare their music too loud and run their snowmobiles around.  When they are menaced by a monster that lurks just below the ice, they team up and try to capture it.

 

Hypothermia starts off as kind of like a low budget winterized version of Tremors, minus the laughs and fun.  It’s OK when the characters have to be wary of their movements on the ice (the monster can sense their vibrations), but the stuff with the victims having a psychic link to the monster doesn’t really work.  The red and orange POV shots of the monsters get on your nerves pretty quick too. 

 

It also doesn’t help that the filmmakers endlessly tease the appearance of the monster.  When we finally see it, it’s a helluva of a letdown.  While I like the idea of using a man in a cheesy rubber suit, it runs across the grain of the serious tone the filmmakers had already established.  Had this been a Troma film, the monster would’ve looked right at home.  Seriously, I’ve seen Larry Buchanan movies with more convincing creatures. 

 

At least the gore is decent.  We get to see a gnarly chewed-up corpse and there’s a juicy throat-ripping scene too.  Luckily, the running time is only 72 minutes, so you don’t have to suffer through it for too long.

 

Rooker’s performance is the only legitimately good thing about Hypothermia.  He classes up the movie way more than it deserves.  Too bad no one else in the cast comes close to matching him.

 

AKA:  Hypothermia:  The Coldest Prey.

GALAXY QUEST (1999) ****

 

I avoided this like the plague when it first came out.  The previews looked terrible and made it  look like a kid’s movie.  Besides, the ‘90s were full of bad Tim Allen movies, and I had no intention of sitting through another one.  One day, I happened to catch it on TV and I was almost instantly hooked.

 

Basically, it's Three Amigos, but with Star Trek, except they had to call it “Galaxy Quest” because they couldn’t get the original crew together.  In fact, there’s a small part of me that kind of wishes they got the original Trek cast.  However, everyone is so good (even Allen) that it's a moot point.  They create likeable characters that immediately grow on you.  While the characters aren’t too far removed from their Trek predecessors, they still feel fresh enough to make them feel like something new.

 

The film is a blast, mostly because it simultaneously makes fun of and embraces the conventions of the show.  By “conventions” I mean the clichés that always seem to crop up and go unnoticed by the crew (like the Captain’s tendency to lose his shirt while battling an alien).  Although, since a lot of the film takes place at a fan convention and pokes fun at (but lovingly so) the Trekkie culture, I guess it does the same for the literal conventions of the show too. 

 

Allen has never been better.  There’s a tinge of Shatner in his performance, but only the faintest wisps (there are a few dramatic pauses, but not nearly as many as I was expecting).  He creates a character that is likeable, poignant, and ultimately heroic.  I was actually shocked how good he was in this.  Alan Rickman was awesome too as the Shakespearian trained actor who must play second banana to Allen while wearing a funny latex headpiece.  Sigourney Weaver, whose boobs are hanging out half the time, is both sexy and funny as the crew member whose basic job is to repeat what the computer says and have her boobs hang out half the time.  Sam Rockwell and Tony Shalhoub have their own moments to shine as the other crew members.  Justin Long is also excellent as a nerdy Trekkie who is called upon in the end to help save the day with his extensive knowledge of the show.

 

The crazy thing about Galaxy Quest is that it captures the spirit of the show better than most of the actual Star Trek films.  In fact, I’d go so far as to say that this is better than twelve of the thirteen Star Trek movies.  Hell, I even got kinda choked up when Rickman said his most hated catchphrase to bolster the spirit of a dying crew member.  The only Star Trek that had that same effect on me was Wrath of Khan.  That is to say, Galaxy Quest is in some rather stellar company.

 

 

THE SERPENT’S EGG (1978) **

David Carradine stars as an alcoholic, out of work Jewish circus performer who heads to Germany to live with his dead brother’s ex-wife, played by Liv Ullmann.  Meanwhile, a cagey police inspector (Goldfinger himself Gert Frobe) thinks Carradine might’ve had a hand in his brother’s death, not to mention some other unexplained murders.  One night, Carradine heads to a brothel where he uncovers a secret headquarters that specializes in bizarre experiments.

Most Ingmar Bergman scholars and critics sort of look down their nose at this film and treat it as one of his lesser works.  They usually cite the involvement of Hollywood producer Dino De Laurentiis and the use of big name stars as the reason for its failure.  To me, this really wasn’t any better or worse than Bergman’s typical snoozefests.

What sort of makes this interesting is the setting.  It takes place in Germany just before Hitler’s rise to power.  We’ve seen plenty of Nazisploitation movies before, but this is a rare instance of Pre-Naziploitation.  There are some elements here that would make this fit right in with any offering of the genre (the morgue visit is pretty gory and the brothel scene is fairly graphic).  However, you have to wait an awful long time until you get to anything remotely gruesome or exploitative.

Carradine (the same year he was in Deathsport) seems a bit miscast, but he’s not bad as the sleepy-eyed acrobat.  I’m not even sure he could’ve saved this dreary mess even if he was at the top of his game.  Frobe is pretty good as the police inspector too.  In the end, it’s just too muddled and overlong to really work.

THE CHALLENGER (1979) ** ½

A guy goes around challenging Kung Fu masters in hopes of finding the man he holds responsible for killing his wife.  He crosses paths with a crooked gambler and they wind up getting into a fight.  Afterwards, both men have to admit they respect each other's style.  Eventually, the gambler agrees to help him on his quest for revenge.

The Challenger suffers from some hit-and-miss fight scenes.  The finale is strong and there's a solid fight in a pond.  The sequences that rely heavily on comedy are weak (like the scene where our hero shoves a bunch of chopsticks into a guy's mouth) and don’t generate many laughs.

It also doesn’t help that a lot of the comedy is misplaced or done in poor taste.  There’s one scene where the Kung Fu master bares his soul and tells the gambler all about his pregnant wife's murder and he pictures it in his mind as if it were a silent comedy.  (His wife is shown with a balloon under her shirt and it accidentally pops.)  Another weird scene involves the gambler grabbing a guy's dick during a fight and asking him, “Feels good, doesn't it?”

Speaking of dicks, I have to say the best scene is when the villain kills the female lead by punching her in the face with his crotch.  You don't see that every day.  For that and that alone, I can’t bear to give The Challenger any less than ** ½.

AKA:  Deadly Challenger.

JAVA HEAT (2013) **

With a name like Java Heat, I fully expected this to be about a couple of cops hanging out in a trendy coffeehouse.  Actually, it’s just a low rent direct-to-DVD actioner that takes place in Indonesia.  Honest mistake. 

Kellan Lutz stars as an Ivy League teaching assistant.  He attends a party in Java where he hits on an Indonesian princess.  Later on, she is presumably killed by a suicide bomber, but Lutz does some digging and figures out that the body in the morgue is an imposter.  He teams up with a detective (who quickly realizes Lutz is actually an undercover agent) to rescue the princess.

Java Heat is a ho-hum Stranger in a Strange Land thriller.  The xenophobic hero is uncomfortable in a Muslim country and doesn’t understand the local customs and culture.  (He chastises a detective for eating ethnic food because it’s not gluten free.)  It is adequate for the most part.  Lutz goes through all the motions your typical action lead would go through.  The action, while it suffers from the lack of a decent budget, is competent, but generic.  Memorable, engaging, and exciting, it is not.

Mickey Rourke plays the slimy villain who wears loud shirts, cheap suits, and speaks with an odd accent.  Sometimes he slurs his words so much that they have to use subtitles, even though he’s speaking English.  Okay, so maybe that part was slightly memorable.  Even though he brightens things up somewhat, he’s not in it nearly enough to make it all worthwhile.

AKA:  Good Evening.  AKA:  Good Night.  AKA:  Nightlife.

KILL THE SCREAM QUEEN (2004) * ½

Kill the Scream Queen is a neo-snuff movie that tries to be edgy and realistic, but only succeeds in being repetitive and boring.  It follows the exploits of a killer (writer/director Bill Zebub) as he lures women to an abandoned strip club, makes them disrobe for the camera, ties them up, rapes them, and kills them.  That’s about it as far as the “plot” goes.

 

Although it features a lot of nudity, none of this is remotely sexy.  It also contains a lot of blood, but it’s not scary either.  The skull mask the killer wears is pretty stupid too.  (It looks like Skeletor’s drunk cousin.)

 

For a movie called Kill the Scream Queen, the film is woefully light on actual Scream Queens.  The only legitimate Scream Queen in the cast is Debbie Dutch.  Unfortunately, she doesn’t stick around long enough for you to get your Scream Queen fix.

 

The movie is only 75 minutes long, but you’ll swear it was longer.  To pad out the running time, Zebub uses a lot of slow motion, puts in a lot of useless outtakes during the end credits, and spends a long time lingering on the artwork of the club (it looks like something off the side of a detailed van from the ‘70s).  Even though it’s cruddy in just about every respect, the sheer amount of boobs in this thing is enough to save it from being a One Star flick.