Best of the Best 3: No Turning Back (1995) – This movie is much better than the third installment in a kickboxing franchise has any right to be. The first two installments starred Eric Roberts, with Phillip Rhee as the sidekick, and were fairly standard “tournament by revenge” movies (from what I can tell — I’ve never actually seen them), with Rhee as co-producer. This third one switches it all up: Rhee stars as Tommy Lee (he also co-produces and directs), coming to visit his sister who’s married to the sheriff of a small southern town — one in which a white supremacist group is gaining a militant skinhead army and starting to cause real trouble.
There’s some real insight on display here; some of the skinheads are merely disaffect blue-collar youth looking for a future, and the preacher who ostensibly leads the Aryan church merely thinks that racial separation is the path to peace. But his right-hand man and his staunchest cronies are people who’ve gotten a taste for assholish domination, and want to foment a race war to prove that their followers should march in lockstep with them.
A lot of people need to watch this movie and take notes: THIS is what white supremacists look like. They aren’t subtle or unconscious. They aren’t 99.99% of Trump voters. (And if you watch this and think, “But that’s just what Trump voters ARE like!”, you need to turn MSNBC off, leave the gated community or the campus, pull your head out of your ass, and actually meet some of the people whom you so blithely malign.)
Also: The are few better ways to spend 90 minutes than watching a Korean martial artist kick the asses of White Power jackasses.
Just Like Heaven (2005) – Reese Witherspoon is a workaholic MD who gets plowed by a truck on the day she finally gets residency; three months later, Mark Ruffalo is the scarred introvert who sublets her apartment and finds her spirit there, demanding and unaware that she’s dead. It’s a fun little rom-com, and everyone acquits themselves well. Perfect for date night.
Massacre Time (aka tempo di massacro) (1966) – Franco Nero stars in this spaghetti western helmed by Lucio Fulci, which means it’s visually interesting and makes very little sense, and unintentional comedy abounds. I watched this with my son who appreciates spaghetti westerns, and what tickled our jollies the most was a little kid who sat behind a wagon wheel playing a mournful harmonica during an early scene; every time that a harmonica showed on the score thereafter (which was often), we speculated on what the kid was hiding behind.
Abandoned movies: Zombie Ninjas vs. Black Ops, The End of All Things, Kickboxer 3: The Art of War, The Man From Hong Kong, Inquisition.