Dragon Fighter (2003) – There used to be some standards around Aliens ripoffs, didn’t there? Nope. In this one, Dean Cain and a bunch of people you’ve never heard of star in a pseudo-government-funded cloning facility deep underground where the project manager is tired of mice and puppies and instead clones… a dragon. Yup. One hours and twenty-five minutes of Dean Cain running around darkened corridors with a flashlight on the end of his shotgun, ineffectually shooting at a mediocre CG dragon and narrowly having his ass flame-roasted time after time. The science is like Jurassic Park three generations removed, the characters don’t have much reason to exist except to die periodically, and the ending is one of the worst sequel setups ever.
(Although considering how much I’ve hated some other movies from director Phillip Roth, like A.P.E.X. (1992) and Prototype (1994)…)
Sharks in Venice (2008) – I would have been really proud to come up with this concept for my bogus B-movies. Then they went and ruined it by actually making the movie…
Surprisingly, the sharks themselves are the least sketchy thing about this movie. Gotta give props to the editor — he managed to take bunches of Shark Week footage and, with quick juxtaposition, make it almost seem like sharks were attacking divers. Even the requisite cheap CGI was rendered almost adequate by being used sparingly, with the same quick edits.
The main problem is that the sharks are almost an afterthought to the story, which revolves around professional wreck diver Stephen Baldwin going to Venice to find his father, who disappeared on a dive financed by a shady millionaire. It tries for some “Indiana Jones” flavor by bringing in the hunt for the fabled “Medici treasure,” which can only be found by divers in Venice… menaced, as I mentioned, by sharks.
Among the biggest annoyances:
- If your script calls for divers to be able to speak by radio, could you give the divers helmets with faceplates, or at very least NOT aim the camera right at the regulators in their mouths?
- With Bulgarian locations filling in for Venice whenever stock footage wasn’t available, apparently they could only afford to rent one rustic street for exteriors… and reused it so often during a chase scene that I felt I was watching The Flintstones.
- The only way that Stephen Baldwin could be a less charismatic action star is if he changed his last name to “Seagal.”
Shalako (1968) – The strangest part of the casting for this Western isn’t Sean Connery as a former colonel turned rover whose accent is never explained, or even Brigitte Bardott as a French countess on a hunting trip on the American frontier who falls in love with Connery; it’s Woody Strode, the “designated black man” in plenty of Westerns, here playing the Apache (!) warrior Chato.
Beyond that, and the flash of sideboob that you expect with Brigitte Bardot, there’s really nothing remarkable.
Abandoned movies: New York Calling Superdragon (1966), Seven Golden Men Strike Again (1966), The Sheriff and the Satellite Kid (1979)