No.237 : The Hitcher (2007)

 

The Hitcher (2007) at the IMDb

Why bother with classic Definite Article films when there’s a crappy remake to look over? I’ve not seen the Rutger Hauer version in ages, but I remember it to be a slow burn, with subtle malevolent terror building before a satisfying climax. This remake had none of that but it did have a man being pulled apart by a truck and an non-exploding helicopter.

Our hero couple are Grace and Jim. They are headed across country for spring break, with their early character traits being he’s a bit of a douche and she likes going to the toilet a lot. The opening credits meander along for ages as they slowly leave the city and head into New Mexico where the roads are quiet and the filming incentives seemingly quite generous.

They narrowly avoid hitting a man hitching for a lift by his broken down car and drive off as he approaches them for assistance. This seems a wise move but they then stop at a local gas station as she needs the toilet - again! Inevitably the hitchhiker catches up with them and don’t you know it, it’s good old affable Sean Bean. Jim agrees to take Sean to a nearby hotel despite Grace giving him the stink eye for offering - well Bean is notorious for hogging the stereo.

Grace’s misgivings prove correct when Sean, after asking after the couple’s sex life, pulls a knife and a struggle ensures. The couple manage to kick Sean out of their fast moving car but unfortunately for them they have already divulged their travel plans and he has Grace‘s old Nokia phone.

As you’d probably guess he stalks their every move, with their car soon getting totalled after a failed attempt to warn a family about Sean’s stabbing ways. The two continue on foot and are soon picked up by the police. Safety at last! Not really, as Sean Terminators his way through the whole station causing our kids to flee into the wilderness. After some more gratuitous blood letting the police, with their leader Neil McDonough , arrest our pair as Sean has cleverly framed them.

Sean doesn’t want to leave the film however, so he explodes all the police cars and a helicopter (off screen) and again our kids are fighting for their lives. How many more must die? Can the scriptwriter be next?!

This was a total waste of time and derivative trash but it will probably raise the odd smile with you as it did with me. It is so ridiculous and over the top it was no surprise to see Michael Bay’s name in the credits. There is a great scene where Sean roars up in his black Trans-am and takes on three fully laden cop cars and a helicopter. Unfortunately for the police their cars weren’t fitted with gravity as they immediately start flying in the air as Sean pops his pistol at them.

Bean is a decent actor but he lacks the presence of Rutger and his character’s lack of backstory just made him dull rather than enigmatic. The two leads were forgettable with the girl especially poor as she tried to kick ass with a shotgun but only managed to pull off ‘slightly daft looking’ instead.

There were plenty of killings and gore if that’s your thing, but for me it was a bit too on the nose with Bean being a force of nature, killing everyone with a single shot whilst being invulnerable himself.

This one pales next to the original, but as a throwaway on Amazon Prime it does have its moments and doesn’t ask too much of you as it delivers them.

The Tag Line : Give It a Ride!  55%

No.225 : The Wizard (1989)

 

The Wizard at the IMDb

This film was suggested to me on Netflix after I had finished watching the 80’s video game documentary ‘High Score’. The documentary I enjoyed, this film not so much. It was OK for what it was, but ultimately it was an unsatisfying piece of family schmaltz.

Fred Savage gets an over the titles credit as he was at the height of his ‘Wonder Years’ fame when the film came out. He obviously squeezed this into his schedule as he has the same haircut and you are half expecting to get that voice-over to offer you some background.

Savage has a dysfunctional family with Christian Slater as his brother and Beau Bridges as his casserole burning Dad. He also has a brother Jimmy who is a bit different - he's probably meant to be autistic but nothing concrete is ever said. Jimmy lives with his Mum and step dad and does’t say much.

One day Jimmy runs away from home and is soon joined by Savage who can't be outwith the limelight. In ‘Rain man’ style they learn that Jimmy is great at video games and soon they start to hustle all the grown men who seem to be hanging around video game arcades. They also meet up with tom boy Wendy and the three decide to head to California where there is a $50k, winner takes all, video game tournament.

Mild peril is added in the shape of Lucas an ass hole rival game player, and a suspect bounty hunter who seems a bit too keen to be running down kids for it to be comfortable. Added to the mix are Bridges and Slater who are also in pursuit of the errant trio.

After an hour or so they arrive at the tournament - can they win the cash? and what is in Jimmy’s case that he holds so dearly? Can this family come together via the medium of Super Mario Brothers?

You have to look at this film in the manner it was intended and by that metric it is OK. By any other it is a lame piece of family drama with no peril or surprises.

The film has the feeling of a Disney offering and apart from a rather suspect conversation about a young girl’s breasts there is nothing here to worry even a Ned Flanders type censor. There are bullies and shady characters but these are all easily beaten by our savvy kids and at no point did you feel they were in any danger.

There was no doubt that they were getting to the video game contest which made the first hour of getting there rather pointless. Bridges and Slater’s arc was particularly weak with the only development being that Bridges started to like video games.

Slater made this in the same year as ‘Heathers’ and you can only assume he read the pay cheque before the script.

The big video game showdown was a letdown with the game somewhat confusing, with our man winning despite losing more men than Kitchener. The final resolution about a lost twin seemed taped on and offered nothing in the way of salvation or justification for 100 minutes of running around playing Nintendo.

You may get a few retro thrills from this, but if that’s your quest I’d stick to ‘High Score’ if I were you.

THE Tag Line : Game Over man 55%

No.197 : The Replacements (2000)

The Replacements at the IMDb

Time for a bit of sporting fun now as we try to cram every cliché possible into this unsatisfying American football romp.

We meet our hero Shane Falco (Keanu Reeves) as he clears barnacles off the hull of a boat whilst scuba diving. He finds an old American Football trophy discarded on the sea bed and relives a moment of glory before going back to his work. We learn he was a former star who froze during his big chance at the Sugar Bowl a few years back. They didn’t explore why he didn’t use his time travel phone box to fix things, which may have made for a more exciting film.

His chance of redemption comes along pretty quickly, as all the overpaid football stars are going on strike. The producers must have been a bunch of commies as the players were made out to be the bad guys with one moaning about the price of Ferrari insurance. Too bad it’s a short career that leaves most with brain damage!

Local team, the Washington Sentinels, are an outside bet to make the playoffs - if they can win 3 out of their last 4 games they qualify. The club’s owner gets washed up boss Gene Hackman to take over the team and to recruit a posse of replacement players to win the day. We get a quick montage of loads of characters who might, just might, be the greatest players you’ve ever seen.

Strangely the cheerleaders are also recruiting - must be out in support of the players- , with the ladies getting a ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ style montage of all the losers making a tit of themselves. A full stable of cheerleaders is however found in the strip joint with their leader definitely not going to fall for Keanu’s quarterback, as she doesn’t date players. Well for about five minutes she doesn’t.

The team go through training, fights and then bonding and soon the first game looms. Can they win  3 out of 4 after losing the first? - 3 out of 3 then Duh! And will the various misfits find the redemption they crave?

This was a strange kind of film that had no interest in the labour laws situation and it didn’t address things like crossing a picket line or undermining the original players’ genuine grievances. I’m no Ted the Red (Cuba!) but it seemed a bit strange for a blue collar film to side with the management - it was ‘Carry on at Your Convenience’ all over again.

The reasonable cast fared badly with some poor material. Reeves was OK in the lead but Jon Faverau was wasted as an annoying character who just ran into people. Rhys Ifans was better as soccer player Nigel from Wales who could kick massive field goals whilst smoking a fag. It looks like he was let down in the edit as his arc didn’t make any sense at all. There was also a lot of shoving and name calling and, most regrettably, dance numbers.

Hackman phoned it in and showed no passion at all - compare him to Pacino in ‘Any Given Sunday’ and you’ll see a lightweight getting smashed by a heavyweight in the 'down at heel football coach' role.

The games were poorly scripted with each of the four games coming down to the last seconds with our guys just behind. There was very little in the way of actual game play, the kind you see most Sundays, with every point being either a comical mishap or a death defying kick or throw.

It was OK in places but ultimately it was an uneven mess with unengaging characters and a suspect premise.

THE Tag Line : Strike it off your list!   55%

No.151 : The Outsider (2018)

The Outsider at the IMDb

The regular reader of this blog will remember that we have twice before visited the genre of ‘round eye in Japan’ in The Challenge and The Yakuza. Both these films were decent with the usual cultural differences played out to give a bit of drama as well as stuff being chopped off.

This entry in to the increasingly busy genre stars Jared Leto as the only non-Japanese in an Osaka prison. We don’t know his back-story but he has a bushy beard so it may be something to do with razor blades. He has a lowly job in the prison and has to defer to the Yakuza gangster inmates who are identifiable by their extensive tattoos.

Leto’s character ‘Nick’ saves one man from a hanging and later assists in an escape attempt when he helpfully calls the guards when his cell mate slices open his belly. The local Yakuza clan thank Nick for his efforts and get him out of jail. They also give him a job, but not one with many prospects as it involves braining an unhelpful American factory owner with a typewriter.

His new bosses are impressed and soon Leto has a suit and a tattoo of his own. His clan aren’t the strongest however, with some rivals trying to muscle in on their territory. Nick stops one incursion but has to give up two fingers when his ageing boss send over the digits as an apology rather than risk a war. That’ll be the end of his fledgling ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’ career.

Nick’s family’s troubles suggest there is a rat in the camp and when it’s revealed to be his boss there is no surprise whatsoever. This nasty piece of work also makes moves on Nick’s girlfriend who is pregnant and is also involved in a big pow-wow at the docks which was a bad plan from the off. Elsewhere Nick’s back story is touched upon when he bumps into an old army colleague who suggests Nick’s appearance is a surprise and may be of interest to the military. I wouldn’t be taking any invites home if I was that guy!

With a big showdown looming who can we trust and will Nick manage to win the respect of a frankly odious bunch of gangsters?

This film started out well but lost it’s way, with the ending being a right load of old cobblers. The main failing was the character of Nick himself. It’s thinly written with no backstory at all. This starts off OK with Nick being all intense and mysterious but later on, with nothing revealed, you can be forgiven for wondering ‘Why should I care?’. We don’t know why Nick is in jail , looking like the ghost of David Bellamy, and we don’t know why he’s attracted to the Yakuza - maybe it’s the suits and the staring.

Although a Netflix film, the production is lavish with post war Japan brilliantly realised. There are plenty of gory slayings and some brutal finger choppings, none of which I could watch. Even the ‘thunk’ as the blade slices through - urrgh!

It’s not clear what the girl sees in Nick who is clearly certifiable. The Yakuza all seem quite welcoming too apart from the usual ‘white dog’ insults. Maybe they just see him as someone not scared of doing the dirty work.

I don’t think I learned anything here and the entertainment value was negligible. None of the characters engaged with me and for all his starey silences Nick just came across as a rudderless psycho with the charisma of a stale won-ton. The Japanese henchmen were mostly subtitled apart from when they tried a bit of English, but you wished those bits had been subtitled too.

You get all the usual gubblins about honour, but of course they are all stabbing each other in the back, or slicing the throat to be more exact, every chance they get.

The film is nice to look at but a strong win for style over substance.

The Tag Line : I’ll just slice that for you…

55%

No.138 : The Colony (2015)

The Colony at the IMDb

My regular reader will remember that we have already reviewed a film called ‘The Colony' way back in Episode 114.

Fear not, no repeats on this channel, unless you are talking about the jokes. This is an entirely different ’The Colony’ and stars her off the Harry Potters. Which is the best Colony? Well read and find out. (it’s the other one).

Hermione plays an air stewardess  heading to Chile. The airline isn’t named and her nationality isn’t revealed so I’m guessing she’s English given no attempts are made at an accent. This is one of these inspired by true events’ films so they can basically make up what they like. Hernione, or ‘Lena’ to give her name in this is, paying a bootie call to her German boyfriend (Daniel Bruhl) whose character is conveniently called Daniel.

Daniel (the character) is a political activist and keeps himself busy designing posters for revolutionaries and attending rallies. Lena spots him from the airport bus and soon they are back at his apartment having very modest foo-foo. Their four days of delight are cut short when a military coup begins (well it is 1973) and they get rounded up. A man with a bag on his head grasses Daniel up and he gets carted off to the ‘Colony of Dignity’.

Lena makes some enquiries and after two minutes she is at the gate of said colony resplendent in a grey cardigan, a crucifix and slut shoes. They don’t do anything in the way of background checks at The Colony and she is immediately put to work peeling spuds. Daniel meanwhile is tired about being tortured all the time and pretends that the electric shocks have made him a mentalist. HUGE mistake. Next day the military show up and ask for a subject to test out the poison gas that The Colony is mixing up for them - and Daniel is the prime candidate.

Despite segregation the two manage to meet up and make plans to escape. Will they get away in an ending ripped off from ‘Argo’ or will they remain captive? (It’s the first one).

This was a decent enough film that passed the time but was in no way memorable or as statement making as it thought. Half an hour in they started a ‘Day 1’ caption that went up to Day 132. Although some were skipped it felt like we lived them all. There was no real point to this timetable as most of the stuff happened at the start or in the last few days.

The Colony was quite well realised but ‘The Cult’ would have been more appropriate - maybe they wanted to avoid confusion with the band? The cruel overlords led by Michael Nyqvist were good in a boo-hiss sense with his nastiness later being replaced by him being a total nonce. Boo hiss indeed.

Hermione was decent, but clearly the star of the show - even in the work camp she had nicely fitted blouses and platted hair to die for. She was also a bit stiff in the love scenes, with her main motivation being to keep the sheet as close to her chest as possible. Obviously this blog isn’t looking for titillation, but it does take you out of the scene when the character is coy about showing her boobs to the boyfriend she hasn’t seen for weeks. The Potter fan boys do get a couple of thrills especially when Lena is ordered to remove her blouse. A few expelianiouses in the fan boy pants there, I bet!

The eventual escape from the colony was a bit easy and the flight from Chile was too familiar. The closing captions said that basically nothing changed following the events of this film, which isn’t surprising as it appears to have been mostly made up. Worth a look, but no where near as much fun as the other ’The Colony’.

The Tag Line : 132 days of torture 55%

No.22 : The Manitou (1978)

The Manitou at the IMDb

Here’s a campy bit of sub Exorcist 70’s horror starring Tony Curtis as a phoney psychic who happens on an old curse in the shape of a foetus growing on his girlfriend’s neck. They don’t make them like that any more!

We open with a lady at the doctors. She mildly concerned that in three days a growth the size of a grapefruit has appeared on her neck. Strangely unconcerned the doctors send her home after they discover it’s just a baby growing on the back of her head. Meanwhile Tony Curtis in a funny cape is draining old women of their cash by giving them tarot readings. Well he has some Harry Hill style shirts to buy.

He gets a call from the grapefruit neck woman and after a fun day out in San Francisco he gets lucky in front of his open fire. But wait! The woman mutters something in her sleep that was probably meant to be as memorable as the bit out of ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’ but it totally isn’t as I’ve forgotten it already.

Lumpy heads in for surgery but she mutters stuff while under sedation which cause the surgeon to cut his own wrists - she probably told him her health insurance had lapsed. A further attempt with a big laser also goes wrong and it’s clear that it’s up to Tony to save the day with a lot of mystical gubbins that involve talking to wise Indians about ancient curses and the titular demonic spirits.

After getting some political stuff from an Indian named John Singing Rock Tony manages to enlist the redskin after agreeing to pay $100,000 to the downtrodden tribes and pretty soon Father Merrin, sorry Singing Rock begins his quest to rid the woman of her lump neck. His initial plan to put a circle around the bed fails when he fails to negotiate a wall and pretty soon Tony is wondering if he backed the wrong red skin or indeed script.

After flailing an orderly the Manitou emerges from the woman’s neck in a scary scene that looked a lot like a man getting out of a bag. How a fully grown man fitted in her neck is only covered by some talk of x-rays but largely you’re expected to run with it. Despite the place being wrecked and a body on the floor a sensible doctor is shouted down for foolishly suggesting that the police are called and we know that a lot more chanting lies ahead.

The Manitou starts to show off his skills of animating the dead but shows a strange aversion to a man tapping sticks in his general direction. With some remarkable straight faces in the face of some deathly dialogue and ropey effects our heroes have to muster all their strengths to see off the demon and his undead allies - and you will too if you are to stay for the whole 100 minutes.

This is an easy film to slag off but if you accept its limitations and enjoy the ride you won’t be that disappointed. Tony Curtis running in slow motion with a large mystic cape on is worth the rental alone and although it’s totally derivative of ‘The Exorcist’ it has a few side steps that offer a bit of interest and unintended amusements.

The pious Indian character is really annoying and he doesn’t miss a chance to bang on about his peoples’ injustices. He seems to make it up as he goes along with him immediately agreeing to Tony’s idea of turning the computers against the baddie - oh yeah the sprit world well up on Apple Macs are they?

They do try to expand on the possession angle with the spirit being made flesh and then summoning up his chums who turn the ward into ice and then space in some really unconvincing effects. Curtis’ character arc is non-existent but he deserved an award for keeping a straight face through some of the most far fetched dialogue you’ll ever hear.

As an oddity ‘The Manitou’ has a lot to recommend it but in truth it’s pretty dreadful and a guilty pleasure at best.

THE Tag Line : The Exorcist - With Explosions! 55%

No.12 : The Collector (2009)

The Collector at the IMDb

If someone asked you to draw up a list of slasher movie clichés’ you could save yourself a lot of time by just handing them the script for ‘The Collector’. It really does sweep the board from unkillable bad guys to lusty teens getting theirs to the lone cop showing up to save the day, but wait! You could argue it’s a winning and successful format but more correctly you could just say it’s lazy torture porn trash and you’d be right too!

Our hero is Arkin who is pretty unsympathetic from the off and gets less likable from there. He does odd jobs for cash and pays the mother of his daughter the cash she needs to keep the loan sharks off her back. It’s never enough however and things could get nasty if she doesn’t have the cash by midnight - I don’t know why maybe they’re vampire loan sharks - it isn’t really explained.

Anyway Arkin has seen a business card at his last job saying the home owner was owned a rich jeweller so he decides to break in and help himself to the contents of his safe. HUGE mistake! Arkin soon realises that he isn’t alone in the house and a trussed up man in a box from the pre-credit sequences says it’s The Collector, a strange villain who collects people and kills the ones he doesn’t like - a bit like a trading cards fan who only keeps the chase cards. Again it doesn’t explain why or how he ‘collects’ people and I guess it was just thrown in to justify the title.

Arkin soon finds that the house is done out like a set from ‘SAW’ and that’s where the similarities continue. Every room has an elaborate trap from being filled with razor wire, to bear traps, to having a knife chandelier - this collector dude fair plans ahead. He finds the man of the house tied up and the wife in the bath but not in a good way. He looks to escape but finds the 10 year old daughter is in danger too and having bonded earlier in the film with her at her Mermaid’s tea party he defies all his character development thus far and goes back to tangle once again with the man in the mask.

As you’d expect other people appear despite it being in the middle of the night but who’d say no to Madeline Zima off ‘Californication’ who shows up briefly to take her top off and get killed? We also get the solo policeman who may as well have worn a red shirt off Star Trek for all the good he was every going to do.

As you’d guess our hero starts to fight back by turning the traps on the bad guy but as ever he never quite finishes him off and - look out he’s getting up again!

This isn’t a terrible film, but it is a squalid and nasty one that seems to delight in gouging out bits of flesh with fish hooks and pruning tongues with clippers. I know the ‘Saw’ and ‘Hostel’ films do good business but what kind of people see these films and enjoy them? I’m not for censorship but I think if you buy this sort of DVD a light should go red on the local police computer!

It really has nothing new to say or offer and the traps that have been set up, although imaginative, are patently ridiculous. ‘Honey why is the pest control man bringing 20 bear traps into the house?’ ‘Shut up he charges $50 a hour!’. The bad guy was OK and I liked that his eyes were opaque like a rat’s. His motivations were never explained apart from the ridiculous ‘collecting’ angle spouted off by a man in a box - and he’d know!

The production values were decent enough with a few gory kills such as the man falling backwards into the bear trap room which was a real ‘ouch’ moment. The cast were OK although the lead didn’t really have what it took to carry our sympathies or indeed the film - he was a kind of a weedier Sean Penn so it was somewhat surprising to see him duke it out with the beastly Collector.

I wouldn’t recommend ‘The Collector’ but it did have its moments - it’s just a shame that you had to wade through so much nastiness and clichés to see the pair of them!

THE Tagline : Garbage Collector 55%