Zeiram (1991) – Given how cool the premise is — an alien bounty hunter and her A.I. sidekick trap a fugitive alien on Earth — there’s little chance that the movie could cash the check. Instead, it feels about as sophisticated as an overlong Power Rangers episode, with more gore and a few “jeez Japan is WEIRD” details.
30 Miles From Nowhere (2018) – One of the characters said it best: “This is very Big Chill.” A bunch of old college friends who haven’t kept good touch in the intervening decades come together for the funeral of one of their circle. Staying in the guest house in the widow’s (also from their college circle) remote Wisconsin property, they get drunk and reacquainted, toy with some “for-old-time’s-sake” bed-hopping… and then storms hit, things get spooky, and maybe their dead friend isn’t as dead as they thought.
I’ve become very fond of “ensemble horror” movies, where the character interactions of a well-acted cast of characters provides good drama in between the jump scares. Of course, too many writers and directors think they can pull this off when they can’t, which results in all those “unlikable characters being belligerent to each other” horror movies that I complain about frequently. (I can only assume that those IMDb users who gave it 1- and 2-star reviews like those “unlikable characters” movies because then they don’t feel bad when a hockey-masked-killer starts carving them up.)
Heroes Shed No Tears (1984) – This was John Woo’s first movie to really focus on gunplay action… I mean REALLY focus on it, to the detriment of character and plot; by the end of the movie, you wonder if all of the characters forgot what the beginning was. But there are plenty of well choreographed explosions, bloody bullet wounds, and other expressions of entertaining violence.
Here’s a trivia fact from the IMDb:
To simulate bullet hits on walls, grass, etc., instead of using squibs, spots were marked for snipers to shoot on, even when actors were near. This method (which is common practice in Thailand, where this movie was shot) was used, because the setting up of squibs were thought to be too time consuming. Actor Eddy Ko still has a scar on his chest because one bullet ricocheted and hit him there.
I’m kinda glad I saw that before I watched it, as it made the firefight scenes just THAT MUCH MORE INSANE.
Abandoned movies:
Agent For H.A.R.M. (1966) – A poor James Bond wanna-be that’s as bad as everyone says. It looks so impoverished I wondered whether it was a TV pilot that wasn’t picked up.
Black Friday (1940) – Yes, I know, it’s one of those few movies starring both Karloff and Lugosi… But when Karloff’s surgeon character transplants a gangster’s brain into a dying friend’s body thinking he’s somehow saving the friend’s life, I just couldn’t.
Journey to the Center of the Earth (1993) – More “vaguely suggested by a poorly-remember drunken synopsis of” than “based on” Verne’s novel. The script is so A-to-B-to-C that it feels like it was trimmed down from a four-hour miniseries, and even for a TV-movie the production looks cheap (like, sitcom cheap).