Tag: Thriller Flick

The New Gladiators, aka Warriors of the Year 2072, aka I guerrieri dell’anno 2072

Warriors of the Year 2072Television is a tough racket. Just ask the employees of WBS TV. In the future, the year 2072, to be precise, WBS has a hit show on their hands. It’s called The Danger Game, where contestants are hooked up to a machine that pumps visions of bloody torture directly into their brains. If they endure the torture without panicking, they win. It’s a successful show for the discerning TV consumer of the dystopian future, but it’s still getting beaten in the ratings by Kill Bike — a show featuring riders on motorbikes engaging in some poorly filmed jousting.

The mysterious head of WBS, Sam (Giovanni Di Benedetto), has a new idea for a show that should get WBS back on top of the ratings. Essentially, WBS is going to steal the idea of Kill Bike, but WBS will increase the stakes. The contestants will all be convicted murderers, and they will battle to the death in the famed Coliseum of Rome.

The New Gladiators was released in 1984, and is part of the wave of cheap Italian sci-fi that found inspiration following the successes of the Mad Max films and Escape from New York, among many others. This particular film, from famed b-movie auteur Lucio Fulci, borrows from those two films, while still finding enough room to cram in heaping amounts of Rollerball, Blade Runner, and A Clockwork Orange. Most impressively, Fulci was able to reach forward through time and steal ideas from The Running Man (all joking aside, the similarities are enough that I have to think the people behind The Running Man were Fulci fans). Continue reading “The New Gladiators, aka Warriors of the Year 2072, aka I guerrieri dell’anno 2072”

The Raid 2

Despite how much I liked The Raid, my review of the film ended up being a little thin. That’s because, while there was much to recommend, the film was overwhelmed by its violence. It took all the hard work that went into the sets, the music, the costumes, even the acting of the leads, and rendered it subservient to the majesty of the violence. As it turns out, that’s because the only thing to survive writer/director Gareth Evans sprawling vision of crime, police corruption, and kickass martial arts, was the violence, owing to a budget that precluded any grand scope. The success of The Raid opened the taps more for the follow-up, and allowed Evans to explore in-depth themes that were forced to remain on the periphery in the first film. Continue reading “The Raid 2”

Psychomania, aka The Death Wheelers

Tom Latham thinks that life could only get better if he just kills himself. Turns out, he’s right! Tom (Nicky Henson) isn’t suffering from depression, nor is he a deluded youth who is incapable of processing the permanence of death. He’s the leader of an outlaw biker gang called The Living Dead. They get their kicks by driving mildly quickly on the roads of rural England and occasionally tipping over vendor’s carts at the local shopping center. How dreadfully frightful. But Tom has an idea that can make his little band of nihilists even more of a public nuisance. Continue reading “Psychomania, aka The Death Wheelers”

When Time Ran Out, or, The Poseidon Volcano

Irwin Allen had been producing motion pictures for over twenty years before he wandered into the disaster genre. He had a pair of genre-defining hits with The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, but that was about all the water Allen could draw from that well before bringing up sludge. Next came The Swarm (dreadful), then Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (sickening), and finally When Time Ran Out. According to the internet, so it must be true, Paul Newman, star of When Time Ran Out, was once asked if he regretted making any film. He answered, “That volcano movie.” Continue reading “When Time Ran Out, or, The Poseidon Volcano”

Seven Days in May

This may have been the wrong film for me to watch while there’s a lunatic in the White House. Seven Days in May, the classic political thriller from 1964, tells the story of a Marine Colonel who stumbles upon a military plot to overthrow the president. It’s a gripping story, full of the opposing ideologies of the Atomic Age, and of deterministic governance. Its ideas are grand, and yet simple. The nuance of true politics is lacking, as are the skeletons in every president’s closet that make declarations about fairness and the will of the people awkward to hear, but that doesn’t matter. The story is amazing. Continue reading “Seven Days in May”

Outland

Outland, the 1981 film written and directed by Peter Hyams, is two movies in one. Most of it is a crime story, heavy on the grit and with a fair amount of menace (helped along by Jerry Goldsmith’s grim score). Then in the final act audiences are given a western, evocative of the film High Noon. And all of it is wrapped in a sci-fi setting. Continue reading “Outland”

The Third Man

The Third ManHow presumptuous of me. I didn’t realize how classic this film was when I decided to watch it for a review. How does one review an acknowledged work of art? What more could I add to the conversation but my own ignorance? Academic papers have been written about this movie. In contrast, I have no credentials or expertise. I have never been employed as a film critic. This film, and its potential viewers, do not need me to affirm that it is indeed an indispensable piece of cinematic history. Were I to point out flaws or even offer gentle criticism, it could be dismissed out of hand as the scribblings of an amateur. That’s how good The Third Man is.

Directed by Carol Reed, The Third Man is an adaptation of the novella by the same name by Graham Greene, who also wrote the screenplay. In the film, Joseph Cotten plays Holly Martins, a down on his luck writer of cheap Western novels. He arrives in post-war Vienna, 1949, after receiving a message from an old friend, Harry Lime (Orson Welles), offering employment. Being only a few years since the close of the war, Vienna is still an occupied city, divided into four sectors run by the Americans, Russians, British, and French. Its streets are clear and clean, but there is nary a block to be seen that doesn’t have a pile of rubble or the shell of a building — the remains of the Allied bombing campaign. Continue reading “The Third Man”

Hush

A film doesn’t have to have a boatload of jump scares or shocking moments to be frightening. I’ve found that jump scares in particular, when overused, to be detrimental to the quality of a horror film. But Hush, the 2016 film co-written and directed by Mike Flanagan, and starring fellow co-writer Kate Siegel, does not rely on quick instances of surprise to juice up its fright with adrenaline. Rather, Flanagan and Siegel place their protagonist in a situation that is naturally horrifying, and use the tension that creates to settle a viewer into deep, feature-length unease. Continue reading “Hush”

Jaws 3-D

Jaws 3-DWhat a putrid mess. Jaws 3-D has about all the care one would expect from a film that was originally pitched as Jaws 3, People 0. That’s right. This movie, the second sequel to a great film that redefined the industry’s business model, was planned as a spoof flick. Had that film been made, it would probably have been no better than Airplane II: The Sequel, but could not have been much worse than what actually came to be made.

Jaws 3-D, released in 1983, follows Mike Brody (Dennis Quaid), Sherriff Martin Brody’s oldest son from the first two films. There’s a little trickery when it comes to Mike’s age in this film, as with his younger brother, Sean (John Putch). Eagle-eyed viewers will wonder how Mike is in his late twenties and Sean is in college, when, only eight years earlier, when the original Jaws was released, Mike was around twelve years old and Sean looked like he was just about ready to start elementary school. This far away from both films’ releases, it barely registers as an issue, but I remember this bugging the hell out me when I saw this movie as a kid. Continue reading “Jaws 3-D”