Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977) – Burt Lancaster plays a former general, now a prison escapee, who takes over a nuclear missile silo in order to force the President (Charles Durning) to reveal dirty information from the beginning of the Vietnam War. It’s a tense (though overlong) bit of realpolitik; the current President has to deal with the fact that the former President and his security advisers (several of whom still serve) knew and signed off on the fact that America’s involvement in Vietnam was never meant to actually win the war, but to demonstrate to the USSR that the USA had the stomach to fight in brutal “limited conflicts” to counter Soviet expansionism. Yes, it’s terrible that America sent tens of thousands of their troops to their death with no hope of winning — but, as the advisers point out, the other options was at least equally horrific.
The movie’s also a smorgasbord of ’70s and ’80s character actors: Lancaster’s two hired guns are Burt Young and Paul Winfield (who gets a throwaway “Star Trek” line five years before he appeared in Star Trek 2), John Ratzenberger has a small but important role as a military bomb expert, and the President’s advisers include Joseph Cotten, William Marshall, Gerald S. O’Laughlin, and Leif Erickson. Somehow, I like the idea of the President’s advisers all being actual old character actors…
Assault Girls (2009) – I only made it 38 minutes into this one — which is more than half of this “feature’s” 70-minute running time. Even that 70 minutes is brutally padded. We’re treated to a full seven minutes of voiceover preamble, detailing how to world got to where it is (short version: “In the near future, many people will spend almost all of their lives in VR game worlds.” WAS THAT SO HARD???), then to counter that, we have another seven minutes of almost wordless images of a Japanese man in post-apocalyptic costume wandering across a barren landscape with a big-ass gun over his shoulders. Then, after four minutes of him firing his gun against CG sandworms and getting “killed” (in the game), we finally get the opening titles. Sheesh.
Then, we’re introduced to the other three characters, all Japanese girls in some sort of post-apocalyptic or other cosplay costumes, all playing in the same virtual world. It’s good that the dialogue for all four (communicating via radio etc. — no two are seen together) is negligible and vacuous, because their lines are all uttered (1) through facemasks which muffle their voices (no re-recording here), and (2) obviously memorized and delivered by rote; these four Japanese performers aren’t just English-as-a-second-language speakers, they’re just not English speakers period, and their pronunciation and inflection renders their dialogue so incomprehensible that I had to have the subtitles on to understand them.
I mean, nice costumes, but after 38 minutes of nothing happening, I decided that my time was worth more.
The Perfect Weapon (1991) – Jeff Speakman, the martial artist with the movie-star good looks, stars as a guy named Jeff (big stretch there) whose family friend that turned him on to kenpo karate as a troubled youth is killed by Little Korea gangsters. (Let’s not ask why a Korean pointed him toward kenpo instead of taekwando.) After an awkward beginning, where Jeff’s whole backstory is told through a belabored flashback while driving, the rest of the movie unfolds unremarkably but competently, with high kicks coming every few minutes. We’ve also got a Who’s Who of Hollywood Asians here: Mako, James Hong, Seth Sakai, Toru Tanaka, Clyde Kusatsu, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa… You can even see Al Leong for a split second as a nameless thug if you know where to look.