Author: capcom

The Job (2003)

The Job 2003 movie posterJust about every A-list Hollywood star sees their career fade, and the quality if projects they are involved in decrease. Just ask Bruce Willis. But, there is slumming it, and then there is SLUMMING IT.

The Job, the 2003 direct-to-video magnum opus from writer/director Kenny Golde, is a very dark, character-driven crime story starring Daryl Hannah as freelance mob assassin CJ March.

CJ is a damaged character. Her mother was a prostitute who seemed unable to hire a babysitter when CJ was a child, and who was then killed in front of CJ. In her adult life, when she’s not whacking people for mobster Vernon Cray (Alex Rocco), she’s downing shots of warm well vodka and banging strangers. She’s a self-destructive alcoholic who is in a deep funk, and she looks it. Hannah is done up in a ragged, disheveled manner that fits the character well, and her hangdog face looks as if it’s never smiled once in her life. I was skeptical at the casting at first. There is no believability when it comes to CJ being a hired killer, but the even more fucked up side of CJ is near-perfect. Continue reading “The Job (2003)”

Death Race 2000

I’ve been cheated! The last, and only, time I saw Death Race 2000 before this latest viewing was in the far distant days of my youth, before the World Wide Web, when all snark had to be shared with those close to us. Friends, family, enemies, casual acquaintances — all near at hand to listen to our bullshit. Now, we are in the merciless grip of the Information Age, and I can share with the world the crime to which many, not just I, were subjected. For, the print I saw on television sometime during the Reagan administration had been ruthlessly cut for television. Gone was all the gratuitous nudity (understandable), but in its place, whoever prepared the film for TV had decided to just repeat footage. A viewer would watch David Carradine or Sly Stallone plow his car through a line of extras only to see the same footage again soon after. This happened many, many times. Continue reading “Death Race 2000”

The Blackout, aka The Blackout: Invasion Earth

Blackout movie posterJust to prove that the United States and China aren’t the only nations that can produce a jingoistic alien invasion flick, Russia has given us The Blackout, wherein an alien invasion blacks out power over the entire planet, except for a circle centered around Moscow.

From screenwriter Ilya Kulikov and director Egor Baranov, The Blackout follows a small group of Russian soldiers as they try to stave off the invasion and keep Moscow safe. This flick didn’t have much of a budget, but Baranov and company still managed to put together a film with an expansive plot and some decent explosions here and there. Look closely, and one will notice how few real locations there really are, but that’s not worth bothering about, especially with all the other shit thrown a viewer’s way.

The main focus, if this scatterbrained flick can be said to have a focus, is on Oleg and Yuriy (Aleksey Chadov and Pyotr Fyodorov), a pair of world-weary soldiers who are on the front lines of the invasion. The filmmakers also crammed in some love interests for the pair, in TV journalist Olga (Svetlana Ivanova) and army doctor Alyona (Lukerya Ilyashenko). It’s these four that garner most of the screen time, so potential viewers should be prepared for some poorly written romance. The good news is, all that nonsense is on the periphery. What this movie is really about, is throwing every plot idea they had against the wall and seeing what sticks. Continue reading “The Blackout, aka The Blackout: Invasion Earth”

Naked Angels

These old biker gang flicks are hilarious. They use as a subject one of their time’s silliest moral panics — rampaging biker gangs are coming for you! — but then make an extreme effort to avoid the use of profanity. Today’s film, Naked Angels, was released in 1969. That’s well past the time when blood, gore, and nudity had become commonplace in movies made for grownups, yet the harshest word Bruce D. Clark and Marc Siegler could muster for their screenplay was ‘bitch.’ By my count, ‘bitch’ was said five times in this film, while viewers were treated to no less than six exposed breasts. Contrast that with something like Goodfellas, which had 300 ‘fucks’ and all its derivations, plus all the other profanity, but only the briefest of glances at a single nipple. What conclusions can we draw from this? Had Naked Angel gone with 1,800 ‘fucks’ to balance out its breasts, it could have had an Oscar nomination. Continue reading “Naked Angels”

Speed Kills

Last week Missile Test heaped praise upon William Shatner, for his lifetime contribution to shitty cinema. This week features a different flavor of shitty movie actor — one whose star shined brightly in Hollywood, but whose latter career has been spent in direct-to-video schlock. Who could it be? Bruce Willis? Mel Gibson? Samuel L. Jackson? Morgan Freeman? Denzel Washington? All of those men, some with Academy hardware, have seen their careers drift away from the type of blockbusters that made them famous, but they are not the star of today’s reviewed film. Today’s film stars John Travolta, the one and only 21st century shitty movie actor who can give Nicolas Cage a run for his money. Continue reading “Speed Kills”