The last movie you saw was . .

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The British film industry has quietly been responsible for a mini-wave of low budget, direct-to-DVD viking movies during the last few years: Vikings: The Darkest Day (2013), Vikings: The Beserkers (2014) Viking Legacy (2016), Viking Siege (2017) The Lost Viking (2018), etc. The latest was filmed as Viking Destiny (and is being released in the US under that title) but underwent a last minute name change in the UK and was released as Of Gods And Warriors (personally, I prefer the original title). It boasts crisp photography, effective and well directed action scenes, and good performances from the entire cast, apart from a clearly bored Terence Stamp as Odin, who recites his lines in a flat monotone and does just enough to earn his pay-cheque. The narrative mostly moves along briskly, though there are some pacing problems during the second half of the film, when the on-the-run heroine encounters a co-operative of happy-clappy, vegetarian flower-people and understandably everything goes rather flat. But that minor quibble aside, this is an enjoyable watch. The final scene hints at a sequel, and I hope we get one.

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Recently saw The Predator. Liked it, but with reservations. The editing is so choppy in places that when a couple of the action scenes ended I had trouble working out what the hell had just happened (or maybe my addled middle-aged brain just can't process a rapid influx of visual information the way it used to). And the ending seemed 'off' - it reminded me of the complete tone-change that Universal Soldier: The Return sprang on us, by expecting us to believe that Jean-Claude Van Damme's character was now happily an employee and vocal defender of the same Uni-Sol program that he'd previously been an unwilling victim of. I got the strong impression that another ending was originally filmed, scored badly at test screenings, and the ending that we got instead was something quickly cobbled together (a key character is conspicuous by their absence).

However, I like the fact that The Predator does try to do something different with Predator mythology, as opposed to being just another re-heated 'hunting humans' movie. The fact that it's apparently been confirmed as being set before the events of Predators also means that it hints at possible answers as to how the internal Predator conflict portrayed in the earlier film came about, and the ending - flawed though it is - also suggests why the larger species of Predators started bringing their prey to another world instead of continuing to venture to Earth.

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Whereas the various entries in the post-Scream slasher revival were made by filmmakers who spent their formative years enjoying the slasher boom that followed in the wake of the original Halloween, time marches on, and we're now seeing slasher movies made by people who grew up watching those post-Scream movies. Case in point: low budget effort Braxton (2015), which was re-titled The Butchering in the US, initially released straight to DVD in the UK as Braxton Butcher a couple of years ago, and has recently been re-released under it's original title.

Shot in Northern Ireland with a local cast, when it's writer/editor/producer/director Leo McGuigan was only nineteen years old, Braxton cheerfully references Natural Born Killers (1994) and the Scream franchise in it's dialogue, while the storyline borrows heavily from the My Bloody Valentine remake (2009), and visually it pays homage to Urban Legend (1998) with a fur-lined hooded parka-clad killer and the faithful recreation of a key moment.

It's not perfect - at an hour & fifty minutes in length, it's too long, and accordingly the narrative drags in places. Some occasional lines of dialogue also feel out-of-place, too clearly the product of a screenwriter sitting at this desk instead of something a real person would actually say. And the final revelational scene when the killer reveals all, contains one unnecessary twist too many. But Braxton had more pluses than minuses: the young cast look like ordinary, ache-ridden teenagers instead of the impossibly good-looking hunks and Victoria's Secret models that populate American slashers. And it's genuinely difficult to predict who's going to survive - the character who I initially thought was the Final Girl wasn't, and an individual who clearly had 'Victim' written all over her proved otherwise. Special mention to Laura Pyper lookalike Vicky Allen, who steals every scene she's in as the school's resident self-obsessed, two-timing bitch. Remarkably, according to the IMDB it's her only on-screen role so far.
My score: 3 out of 5.

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Legendary just can't win, can they? When Godzilla (2014) was released, audiences complained there wasn't enough Godzilla and not enough monster battles. So, with Godzilla: King of the Monsters Legendary have given the public what they said they wanted, and people are griping that it's all sound & fury without enough story and development of the human characters.

Personally, I liked Godzilla and I like the new film. The whole point of the franchise is that we humans and our dramas & concerns are unimportant and insignificant. Ultimately the monsters will fight it out amongst themselves to decide the fate of the world, while Mankind watches helplessly on the sidelines, completely impotent and having no way of influencing the outcome.

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Having already seen Godzilla (2014) and Godzilla: King of the Monsters, recently watched Kong: Skull Island for the first time. Liked it, with some minor reservations. Despite being quite different in tone to the other two films, visually it's still recognisably part of the same universe. Legendary clearly took to heart some of the main criticisms made about Godzilla - namely that it was (i.) too dark and (ii.) didn't feature enough of the title creature - by having all but one of the action scenes take place in broad daylight, with Kong debuting in the first five minutes. The human characters played a larger role in the proceedings (loved the moment when Mason shot a flare into The Big One's eye), probably reflecting Kong's lesser status within the Monsterverse: he may be a god on Skull Island, but place him outside in the wider world and Kong is just an oversized ape, whereas Godzilla and his fellow Titans truly are gods and 'the rightful rulers of Earth.'

My one big disappointment with Skull Island was that it's 1973 setting was ultimately just window dressing. You could replace the Hueys with Blackhawks, update the soldiers' uniforms and equipment, portray them as veterans of the Iraq war or Syrian conflict instead of Vietnam, and tell the exact same story. I was hoping the immediate post-Nam setting would be more relevant.

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Wasn't planning to watch the latest DC Expanded Universe movie Birds of Prey at the cinema, but a friend asked if I wanted to see it with him, and since he and I don't get many opportunities to hang out together these days, I went along. My verdict: it's well made and adequately entertaining, but utterly inconsequential. It's the cinematic equivalent of candy floss - bright, colourful and tastes good while you're consuming it, but afterwards you're still hungry and in need of actual proper food. It's completely Margot Robbie's movie - despite the Birds of Prey getting top billing in the title, the film should more accurately be called 'Harley Quinn: The Movie' - and the fanbases of both the actress and the character won't be disappointed. That said, most of the other main cast-members are given the chance to shine, though Mary Elizabeth Winstead draws the short straw - as Huntress, she's only properly introduced four-fifths of the way through the film, isn't given enough time to make any kind of impression, and only seems to be there to take part in the all-action climax. Speaking of the action scenes, they're particularly well-executed, with Harley's solo Terminator-style assault on a police station being the highlight, followed by her dispatching of a team of mercenaries in the evidence room while Echo Chamber's cover of 'Black Betty' blares out on the soundtrack. Unfortunately, the climactic battle between all the Birds and Black Mask's amassed henchmen in an abandoned & forgotten amusement park funhouse is disappointingly somewhat messy and disorientated in comparison.

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Over the last few days I've been having a Nineties straight-to-video movie binge. Here are some of the films I've watched;

Doctor Mordrid (1992). Back in the early Nineties, Full Moon unsuccessfully tried to secure the movie rights for Dr. Strange, so they just made this instead. Despite being low budget, it's clear that a respectable amount of money was spent - there are impressive sets, props and some delightful stop motion animation courtesy of David Allen and Randall Cook. Jeffery Combs plays the title character, and it's great to see him in a heroic leading role. Brian Thompson provides some reliable villainy, and there's fine support from Yvette Nipar (a talented and extremely pretty actress who sadly never had the career she deserved) as the police consultant and neighbour who become Mordrid's sidekick and romantic interest. Considering the numerous Puppet Master, Trancers and Killjoy movies that Full Moon has churned out, it's a crying shame they never made a single sequel to this.

T Force (1994). Inspired by Robocop and Universal Soldier, and also including a Die Hard-themed skyscraper siege and a Terminator-style police station massacre, there's nothing in this movie you haven't seen before - but that turns out to be one of it's strengths. T Force knows how unoriginal it is, doesn't pretend not to be, and is all the better for it. In the near-future, a super-SWAT team of robot law enforcers goes rogue, and a bigoted, robot-hating cop has to stop them while unhappily partnered with another robot - the only team-member who didn't rebel. An enjoyable film from PM Entertainment, who kept entire armies of stuntpeople and pyrotechnic experts in gainful employment during the Nineties making straight-to-video action fare. This is actually more restrained than some of their subsequent films, such as Hologram Man (1995), Dark Breed (1996) and The Silencers (1996), and in my opinion works better as a result. Special mention to actress Jennifer MacDonald, who manages to inject a surprising amount of pathos into her role as the female member of T Force.

Hologram Man (1995). Another effort from PM Entertainment, this is their version of Demolition Man. In the near-future, a convicted terrorist held in suspended animation manages to escape by having his consciousness downloaded into a hologram (?!) and is pursued by the cop who originally captured him. Even by B movie standards, the science is extremely wonky, but if you can overlook that, this actually starts out quite strongly. However, during the last half-hour the narrative just descends into repeated action scenes that consist of groups of cops and terrorists endlessly firing automatic weapons at each other, and instead of being exciting it's just repetitive and numbing. The final confrontation between the film's hero and villain is also too short and anti-climatic. A frustrating misfire.

Virtual Combat (1995, aka Grid Runners). A shameless cash-in on the major studio movie Virtuosity (1995), this is a rare example of a copy being better than the original. In the near-future (yes, again) Don 'The Dragon' Wilson plays a cop who - while investigating his partner's murder - stumbles upon a conspiracy to bring the impossibly-perfect women from a virtual reality sex program into the real world by re-writing synthetic DNA so it matches the coding of the girls' design, and then selling them as sex slaves to the highest bidder. An additional big problem is that an AI named 'Dante' that is the lethal & unbeatable final level boss opponent of a virtual reality combat game, has hijacked the technology to also create a body for himself, and intends to do the same for dozens of his dangerous VR brethren. I'm not usually a fan of martial art movies, and Virtual Combat is set in an America where firearms have been banned, and so cops and criminals - even low level street punks - all rely on high-kicking chop-socky instead. But while all the fight scenes (and there are a lot) do get a bit tiring, this movie held my interest. Dante makes for a fine supervillain, and particularly welcome is the ridiculously gorgeous Athena Massey as the main VR sex siren.

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"What does it take to kill you, Mr. Sparks?"

A gritty and stylish low budget superhero-noir movie that amazingly was apparently filmed in just twelve days, Sparks (2013) tells the tale - spread over two decades, but mostly taking place in the late 1940s - of masked vigilante Ian Sparks (played by Chase Williamson), as he goes from an earnest, naive, idealistic do-gooder, to disgraced, bitter and angry pariah consumed with self-loathing, until finally - when he has nothing left to lose - he heads with grim and resigned determination into a final confrontation with the various supervillains who have clouded & blighted his entire life. Williamson excels portraying Sparks' early days as an eager novice crimefighter, but tends to struggle during the scenes when the character hits rock bottom. However, he regains the right tone as Sparks approaches his final reckoning. Also giving strong performances are Ashley Bell and especially Marina Squerciati as the women in Sparks' life, both also providing some classic Forties-style glamour. And familar faces such as Cliff Howard, Jake Busey, Clancy Brown and William Katt appear in key roles. Despite only being ninety minutes long, Sparks somehow packs an impressively complex, multi-layered storyline filled with plentiful characterization, incident, and several twists into it's relatively brief running time, without the narrative ever seeming rushed or crowded. While watching it, I got the strong impression that instead of treating Sparks as just another job, everyone involved - on both sides of the camera - were personally invested in this movie and accordingly brought their A games to the proceedings. Quite simply, this is a great film.

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Midnight Kiss (1993) is a semi-obscure low budget effort, clearly made for the VHS rental market, that was re-titled Vampire Cop in the UK, meaning that it often gets confused with a 1990 movie with the same title that starred Nineties scream queen Melissa Moore. Midnight Kiss focuses on plainclothes detective Carrie Bliss (played by Michelle Owens). Her captain openly expects the female officers under his command to sleep with him, and her male colleagues are all sexist morons who drink at strip bars after work and think the best way to get a witness statement out of a traumatised rape victim is to shout at her. When a serial killer starts murdering women and draining their blood, Carrie is assigned to act as bait in a series of stakeouts. She eventually gets attacked and bitten by the cocky, long-haired, rockstar-looking killer (Gregory A. Greer), who laughs off Cassie shooting him in the chest and head, and promptly escapes. When Cassie subsequently begins to feel sick, crave blood, and develop superhuman strength enabling her to effortlessly throw muggers about and graphically snap their arms, she realises that not only is the killer a genuine, honest-to-god vampire, but she's rapidly turning into one as well.
To be honest, there's nothing particularly outstanding or remarkable about Midnight Kiss, but it's a perfectly competent and professionally well made movie that is more than watchable. It feels like the Nineties equivalent of some noteworthy Seventies vampire films such as The Night Stalker (1972) and the Count Yorga movies. Shot on location in Los Angeles, the Chinese Theatre makes a brief cameo. One especially nice touch is having the vampire sleep in a body bag instead of the traditional coffin, and using an electronic alarm clock to wake himself up, but the best and most unnerving sequence has a starving Cassie hunting her own pet cat around her apartment. On the down side, the film's main action setpiece - a fight between Cassie and another victim who's turned full vampire - is so badly lit (the only illumination is a torch Cassie's holding) that it's struggle to tell what's happening. As heroine and villain, Owens and Greer both turn in fine, more-than-capable performances, so it's truly bizarre that according to the IMDB this film was the only on-screen appearance for both of them.

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Recently watched Street Hunter (1990), a movie that's noteworthy for having a rare leading role for Steve James, an actor who had regular work throughout the Eighties, but was mostly stuck playing the sidekick in films such as the American Ninja series and a handful of Chuck Norris movies. In Street Hunter, James proved to have all the necessary requirements to be a major action movie star (even if only in straight-to-video fare): he convincingly looks and acts like someone you wouldn't want to mess with, has the martial arts moves (though his character in this film mostly relies on firearms), and possesses on-screen presence, charm and charisma to burn.
James plays an ex-New York cop turned modern-day bounty hunter with a great action hero name: Logan Blade. He's maintained his friendships with his former police colleagues and has built up a wide network of street-level contacts - various snitches and lowlifes who are prepared to talk to him, but not to the NYPD. My only compliant is that Blade is portrayed as being somewhat too smooth and too good to be true. But James (who also co-wrote the script) manages to make him more real, fully rounded and likeable than the various characters being played by the likes of Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Norris, etc, at the time. He also lets Blade be shown as vulnerable, especially in regards to his relationship with his longtime girlfriend, a nightclub singer who complains (understandably) that during their five years together, Blade has been living in a van, prowling the streets looking for highly dangerous scumbags, and she doesn't think this is the basis for a longterm future.
Street Hunter also boasts an excellent villain, played by another cult B movie favourite, Reb Brown. He's an ex-military hardcase named Walsh, who served in Special Forces in 'Nam, was given a dishonourable discharge, and has spent the years since as a mercenary, working for warlords and death squads in various Third World hellholes. He's currently employed by a Latino street gang called the Diablos, who have formed an alliance with a Columbian drug cartel and are challenging the Mafia for control of New York's drugs trade, with Walsh as their game-changing secret weapon. Brown gives a restrained and highly effective performance, portraying Walsh as clearly unhinged, but also unnervingly calm, quiet, softly spoken and always in total control of his emotions. He's also obsessed with military history, and there are great scenes where he lectures the Latino street punks under his command (who are totally bemused and have no idea what he's talking about) regarding 'honour' and 'glory', and keeps equating their grubby drugs war with the great military campaigns carried out by Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. Also in the cast is a young John Leguizamo as Angel, the Diablos' leader - a cocky, motor-mouthed and utterly worthless piece of human vermin, who's so dumb he doesn't realise that Walsh is openly taking over control of the gang, right in front of him.
Street Hunter most reminded me of The Punisher (1989) and the Maniac Cop trilogy (1988 - 1992), and while not as good as those movies (also set in New York), it's not embarrassed to stand in their company. Apparently James hoped that Street Hunter would spawn a franchise, but it was not to be. He died of cancer in 1993 at the too-young age of 41.

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I have a new favourite low budget superhero movie - The Demolitionist (1995). It's a shameless copy of Robocop (1987) with a title designed to make VHS renters think it was either a sequel or spin-off to Demolition Man (1993), but none of that matters. This is a film that contains that rare indefinable element of B movie magic, with great (if understandably small scale) action scenes, impressive visuals, and a cast that's a who's who of familiar genre veterans. There are some slight pacing problems (the title character doesn't don her body armour and start superheroing until the film's halfway point), but otherwise this is enormous comic book-style fun.

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On-line reviews for Devils of War (2013) are almost overwhelming negative, dismissing it as cheaply made with a ridiculous script, bad characterization, poor special effects, etc. But most people seem to be missing the point - that Devils of War this is clearly intended as a homage/celebration/semi-parody of the trashy exploitation films of yesteryear. It's a gleeful genre-melding mash-up of war, action, horror, Blaxploitation, Naziploitation, sexploitation and martial arts/ninja movies. The storyline has a elite four man team of American commandos parachuted into Nazi-occupied Poland, where the SS are rounding up the local female virgins to be sacrificed in occult ceremonies, invoking demons that possess Aryan troopers and transform them into unstoppable super-soldiers. Amongst the movie's deliberately outlandish elements are the female Nazi commander, a blonde lesbian dominatrix who strides around her headquarters in high-heeled boots, black mini-skirt, and a white shirt that's half-unbuttoned and at least two-sizes too small, barking out orders such as "Get me more virgins!" and fondling her equally blonde and busty assistant; one of the American commandos is nicknamed 'Black Hercules' and takes out opponents with a katana; the aforementioned assistant is secretly an undercover Allied agent equipped with a spy-camera hidden in her formidable cleavage; and a young virgin whom the commandos rescue from the Germans asks to be deflowered for her future protection. 
The film's all-action climax features a swordfight, an exorcism, a pitched battle against a super-soldier armed (for no discernible reason) with a huge double-headed battleaxe, and - of course - the heroes dashing out of the Nazi facility as it explodes around them. The only thing missing is a blonde-on-blonde catfight between the Nazi commander and the female agent, and it does seem a mystifying and hugely glaring oversight by the film-makers.     

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Godzilla vs Kong (2021). Liked it, with reservations. It's almost entirely a Kong movie, with Godzilla reduced to a handful of guest appearances, and the science is extremely wonky, even for a kaiju movie. Where does the light come from in the Hollow Earth? And how do you instantly artificially replicate a natural energy source by just taking a reading?
As for the human villains, their characterization and motivation (the latter just a vague desire to 'put humans back in charge') is so sketchy that both must have fallen victim to either a script re-write or brutal edit. And although I'm a fan of Mecha-Godzilla, his design here (seemingly inspired by his appearance when he cameoed in Ready Player One) was hugely disappointing. He's too thin, lanky, and Meccano-looking, like a pile of components merely bolted together, instead of the visually impressive metal titan of the original Toho movies. And while in Godzilla (2014) and Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) you felt that you were watching ancient gods battling to decide the fight of the Earth, the confrontations this time are reminiscent of those in Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018): two large opponents repeatedly ploughing each other through skyscrapers - visually pleasing but with no sense of anything actually being at stake.
But although I consider it to be the weakest film in the series, Godzilla vs Kong is still a solid and enjoyable movie. If it does turn out to be the final instalment in the Monsterverse (at the time of writing, Son of Kong is being considered as a possible next entry) then the franchise will still have produced four highly entertaining films, which is more than most other movie sagas can claim.

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Monster Force Zero (2020). Recently got to watch this movie, having previously posted about it in the No films at Halloween thread. The storyline has a group of friends trying to promote their self-published comic book by cosplaying as their own characters on the comic con circuit (the film was partly shot at a genuine con, GalaxyFest in Colorado). They get challenged to take part in a cosplaying contest by reigning champions the Destroyers of Destruction, only for both teams to discover that the contest is actually a Last Starfighter-style process being held by benevolent aliens to find warriors capable of saving the universe. Thus, Monster Force Zero are granted their characters' actual superpowers and weaponry: A.I. (Adam Singer) gets goggles that shoot energy beams; Kadabra (Dalena Nguyen) receives telekinetic abilities so strong she can levitate and teleport; and Ammo (Aeon Cruz) is given an energy-infused baseball bat and a BFG. They need an extra member to compete against the four-strong Destroyers, so they recruit a random stranger in a yeti costume (Shale Le Page) whom Ammo dubs 'Boots' due to the LCD-equipped moonboots he's wearing. And in case you're wondering why aliens are entrusting the fate of the universe to a bunch of cosplayers, it's neatly explained in a surprise twist three-quarters of the way through the film.
This movie was clearly made by sci-fi and comic book fans and self-confessed geeks for other sci-fi and comic book fans and self-confessed geeks, and accordingly I enjoyed it immensely. I particularly admired the fact it also addresses the negative side of fandom, in the form of the Destroyers of Destruction, a physical, in-the-flesh representation of every on-line troll and hater who's ever launched a rabid boycott campaign against a not-yet-broadcast TV show or movie that's still in pre-production simply because they disagree with a single casting, or who has ever obsessively flamed anyone who's dared to express an opinion that differs from their's. The filmmakers even use the Destroyers to subtly target the toxic masculinity often displayed by such trolls (as evidenced by the notorious on-line reaction to the all-female Ghostbusters remake and the CW's lesbian-led Batwoman series): the team consists of macho alpha male-wannabes Gunns Lazer (Heath C. Heine) whose costume appears based on Flash Gordon as played by Sam Jones, the Assassin's Creed-inspired Quiplash (Omid Harrison), and atypical opponent in a fighting game Final Boss (Dmitri Raskes), plus token female/generic supervillainess Hot Babe (Cali June) - imagine a Killer Frost who generates heat & fire instead of cold & ice. It's quietly implied that the male Destroyers only recruited Hot Babe because they didn't think they stood a chance of winning any contests without an attractive young woman in a sexy outfit on board, and consider her to be 'just a girl' - there's a poignant running joke in which she's always left out of their group high-fives, and her attempts to gain superpowers are repeatedly sabotaged by the other Destroyers selfishly grabbing them for themselves.
In addition to the Destroyers, the movie boasts some enjoyable, fun villains called The Unidentified, an organization lead by a female mad scientist called Dr. Eeche, equipped with a hench-Bigfoot named Squatch and an alien T-Rex from another dimension that can fire laser beams from it's eyes (the standard of special effects is very impressive for a film of such a low budget - it was partly crowdfunded). It's all totally, gleefully, unapologetically bonkers, but very much in a good way. Special mention to Aeon Cruz, who has such natural screen presence that she steals scenes even when just standing to one side, listening to another character talking.
I'm a fan of the superteam movies in The Asylum's 'Looking Glass' universe (two Avengers Grimm films and Sinister Squad), but considering that every studio and production company is currently trying like crazy to create their own interconnected movie universes, The Asylum seem positively resistant to the idea, and there's been no new 'Looking Glass' entries since 2018. Monster Force Zero is the next best thing, a more-than-capable substitute, and I hope we get to see the sequel hinted at in it's final scene.