The Bone Snatcher (2003) – I wanted to like this movie, and to a great degree I succeeded. You gotta cut some slack to low-budget sci-fi-horror flicks being made off the beaten path (in this case, a Canadian/South African co-production shot in Namibia). Granted, it’s almost all Anglo characters, including the fish-out-of-water Dr. Zack (Scott Bairstow), a young designer of extreme-environment-survival setups, is never adequately explained, except that there’s got to be a designated New Guy to whom standard operating procedure at this African diamond-prospecting firm can be explained. What can’t be explained to him, though, is the mysterious appearance of a deadly creature of folklore which can strip the flesh from bodies and incorporate the bones into itself. And when our half-dozen characters get stranded in the desert with it…
The solemn sterility of the Namib Desert is half of the power of this movie (although why nobody — including the newbie — is shown either putting on sunscreen or reddening like a lobster is a mystery); the other half is the creature design, at least in those shots when it’s rendered as a practical effect rather than substandard CGI.
Fugitive Mind (1999) – Yeoman low-budget director Fred Olen Ray gives us this poor man’s Total Recall, starring the American Ninja himself, Michael Dudikoff! Robert Dean (Dudikoff) is just a salt-of-the-earth maintenance guy at huge biotech conglomerate GenCom… Or is he??? He starts having nightmares about being chased down and experimented on, with his ever-so-loving wife (Michele Greene) as one of the labcoat-wearing spooks. When he breaks into a computer at work, he sees some mention of a memory implant. And then there’s the fact that he can fight (though sadly, for a Dudikoff movie, not often enough), and also break into computers, and on top of that his neighbor, whom he remembers living next to for six years, says Robert and his wife only moved in last week. And he must be onto some huge conspiracy, because the biotech firm’s chief problem solver (Judson Scott, Khan’s main henchman from Star Trek II) is out to get him! And what’s with Heather Langenkamp hanging out around the edges? And how about that senator who seems poised to make himself some powerful enemies? Is Robert Dean who he remembers himself to be?
That probably sounds more exciting that it is. This is a representative sample of Late ’90s Direct-To-Video Action Product, made competently and professionally but not enthusiastically. As such, it probably has more value as a nostalgia product for those of us who lived through those times (and lived on those Products) than as entertainment as such. And I had forgotten the degree to which Heather Langenkamp can’t act.
The Warrior (aka Jaka Sembung) (1981) – Indonesian action star Barry Prima fills the title role in this absolutely crazy pseudo-historical epic — “historical” because it obviously takes place during the recent past when the Dutch had made Indonesia a colony, and “pseudo” because it’s just wacky. After the titular warrior and rebel leader Jaka Sembung stages a daring jailbreak, the Dutch hire a bulletproof mercenary who breathes fire to bring him in (that’s right, read that sentence again)… and when Jaka Sembung vanquishes him, they work with a voodoo priest to unite the head and body of a notorious sorcerer who proceeds to beat the Warrior into a pulp using long-distance kung-fu power.
Notable highlights include: More springboard-assisted flips and rewound-footage high jumps than in a half-dozen Five Venoms movies; reattaching voodoo limbs; an eye transplant from a cadaver; and much growsing about Christians from the repressed Muslim rebels. But by far the most enchanting feature of this movie are the actors playing the Dutch who are (aside from one minor character) Indonesians in unconvincing wigs or bleached hair. I guess it’s turnabout for all of those “yellow face” roles that Caucasian actors have played…
Abandoned Movies: Doctor Blood’s Coffin, The Other Side, The Devil’s Well, Kill Chain.