Good Guys Wear Black (1978) – Chuck Norris tries to find out who is killing the old members of his covert ‘Nam team. In the course of such investigation, roundhouse kicks are deployed.
I swear I don’t go into mindless action flicks with my expectations too high — I do appreciate the “mindless,” after all — but the plot here was simply stupid. Here’s a scene that provides a representative sampling:
Chuck and his investigative gal-pal go to the outdoor train museum where one of his old cohorts works. Suddenly, while talking to him, the old Army buddy is shot and falls to the ground from his locomotive. So…
- The sniper thought that right in front of Chuck was a good time to shoot his target.
- …but he doesn’t also shoot at Chuck, even though Chuck is also on the hitlist.
- …but that’s okay because Chuck and gal-pal immediately check the pulse of the dead guy on the ground. No one acts like there’s an ACTIVE SHOOTER who might have, y’know, more than one bullet.
Sometimes the killer apparently wants to be subtle and surgical. Other times, he’s okay with blowing up an entire frigging plane just to kill one person not on the original hitlist who has some info. It’s all arbitrary, right down to the ending.
Legacy (2020) – Luke Goss is “Agent Gray,” a British intelligence agent who’s just taken a notorious Eastern European warlord into custody. Now he needs to find and protect said warlord’s teenage son, the child of one of many rapes, as evidence of the warlord’s depredations. That son (who has no idea who he really is) is off bow-hunting and camping with his adopted father, Louis Mandylor, and is also being hunted by the warlord’s longtime expert hitman.
What it all really boils down to is a “hunt the humans” story, a well worn but time-honored trope. There’s not too much to complain about, but the movie can’t decide whose story it really is: Is it Agent Gray’s? Is it the father’s and son’s? There’s even some sign that the hitman was supposed to have a character arc, but it’s only sketched in.
In fact, too much of what could have made this stand out is only sketchily visible — either the screenplay needed another pass to bring it into focus, or else that stuff was in the screenplay originally, and was watered down by the director and the editor.
Don’t feel bad if you end up watching this one, but also don’t feel bad if you miss it.
Subspecies (1991) – Vampiric half-brothers fighting over a family legacy! Brooding Romanian castles! Young chippies whose nipples have a habit of slipping out! And oh yeah, the titular little minions who really don’t contribute much.
Now that the long-awaited fifth installment of the Subspecies franchise has been announced (the fourth one was released in 1998 — that’s a full twenty-five years!), I’m going back to re-look at the originals. This was reputedly the first movie shot in Romania after the Iron Curtain came down, and the real star of the movie is the setting: the authentic Romanian ruins do more visually than any number of contrived sets could. (The other star is Danish actor Anders Hove as the evil vampire Radu, who messily mugs and chews scenery — and girls — with a captivating fervor.)
Admittedly, the titular little demonic minions — which grow from Radu’s long, Nosferatu-like fingers when he breaks them off (!!) — are peripheral to the action, largely because director Ted Nicolaou didn’t like how the Romanian stuntmen originally played the part on enlarged sets, and replaced them with stopmotion and rod puppets in post-production. Also, the Bloodstone (a holy relic dripping the blood of saints, which can sustain vampires in place of human blood) looks like a half-consumed Ring-Pop. But still, more pluses than minuses.
And I don’t think that I ever got as far as seeing the rest of the series anyway, so — onward!
Abandoned movies:
Territorial Behavior (2015) – This one starts out as a clever variation on “found footage,” as a wilderness survival coach films himself in an instructional survival trek. But then, when he’s on the phone to his wife in a destined-to-be-an-outtake moment, we see that his stilted delivery is actually just bad acting.
“Subspecies” is a series of movies? Really? Whoda thunk?
Anyone who spent any time looking at the SF/Horror rental walls back in the day, that’s who. 🙂
What can I tell ya. I freely admit that I think I’ve been in one video rental store in my life. Nope, not kidding. Sorry! I know, I’m a huge disappointment, but I do keep up with satellite and streaming!
Ah, you missed a true Golden Age…
Nah…I just got to it later than you folks. I’m still watching utter dreck from that period in time. 🙂 And some kinda-dreck, like that Amazon Chris Pratt movie you mentioned.
I remember Pratt on EVERGREEN and nope, in a bajillionty years, I would not have thought he’d land a role in any action-adventure films, much less GOTG, JP or the like. Shows ya what I know! Of all the players in that show (excluding the late great Treat Williams, RIP), he’s the only one to have really come along and kicked ass. All the rest have faded into the dark passage of time.
As Ryan George would put it while playing Producer Guy in his Pitch Meetings, “Oh, a very considerate sniper!”
“Whoops!”
“Whoopsie!”
Speakin’ of Chuckles, there–any of you into the martial arts, ‘back in the day’? *Before* he was Chuck Norris, star of film and tv? Damn, that guy was something. I mean, really something. Crushed his competition like Schwarzenegger in Conan–“…crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their [trainers].”
As he actually did say in one of his pitches involving a situation very much like that, “Oh, that’s super considerate!”