Deep Blue Sea (1999) – At least this movie proposes a reason for breeding super-smart sharks that isn’t the standard “EE-vil military uses” one: Because shark brains show no deterioration due to age, this research project in the middle of the ocean is conducting experiments to see how those effects can hold true in more sophisticated brains.
That’s the good part. The bad part is the rest: apparently smart sharks have an intuitive grasp of fluid dynamics, structural mechanics, and human behavior under duress. They apparently also have no sign of the extreme claustrophobia that characterizes real sharks, which means they’re okey-dokey with swimming through flooded corridors.
And slo-mo shots… so many slo-mo shots…
Death Rides a Horse (1967) – Lee Van Cleef is an outlaw finally out of jail, out to get payback from his old gang that set him up to take the fall; John Phillip Law is a driven young man who’s trained himself into a flawless gunfighter to take revenge on the robbers that killed his family fifteen years ago. They’re after the same men, but since Van Cleef wants them to cough up money and Law wants them to cough up blood they keep ending up at cross purposes. A solid example of the genre, with Van Cleef playing the tough-as-nails old gun that, thanks to his premature aging (he was forty-two (!) when this came out), he was able to play very spryly.
Gamma People (1956) – The setup seems like it was meant for a comedy: the train car carrying an American reporter (which means he’s brash and impatient) and a British reporter (which means he’s an effete skirt-chaser) separates from the rest of the train, and rather than getting them to Salzburg it comes to rest in the tiny, unrecognized Eastern European country of Gudavia — tiny enough that it seems to consist of a single small town of lederhosen-wearing locals who all speak English to make it easy for the reporters to overhear them. The whole town is run behind the scenes by Dr. Bronski, a renegade biologist who uses gamma rays to accelerate the evolution of the local children; sometimes they turn into geniuses, sometimes they turn into dead-eyed automatons, and at least one turned into uberbrat Hugo, who runs around decrying sentimentality while dressed in Aryan Youth shorts. Very much a product of the Cold War, and not really memorable otherwise.