The Unholy (1988)

After young Catholic priest Father Michael (Ben Cross) against all reason survives being thrown out of a window by a supposed suicide without even the slightest injury, New Orleans’s archbishop Mosely (Hal Holbrook) and a blind, mysterious and hysterically overacted elderly priest we will later learn to be called Father Silva (Trevor Howard) look upon him with rather different eyes. Why, he might just be “the Chosen One”, which, as you know, is a very important part of Catholic doctrine that just happens to not be written down anywhere, certainly not in that book, whatsitcalled? Right, the Bible!

Anyway, his potential Chosen One status earns Michael his own parish, a church somewhere in what looks like one of the poorer, predominantly black, parts of New Orleans, yet which still harbours that whitest of things – a Satanist themed nightclub. The nightclub and its boss, one Luke (William Russ), aren’t too troubling for the rather modern Father Michael at first. He’s got worse problems to cope with: turns out his two predecessors in his church were both murdered right in front of the altar. The police were so helpless to solve the crimes they even asked the Church to close the place down; which they did before sending Father Michael. As the audience knows – and Michael will take quite a while to accept because he doesn’t believe in the devil or demons – the priests were murdered by a demon appearing as a pretty nude sexy (though curiously grown-up and female) woman (Nicole Fortier).

So clearly, some temptation of the flesh in form of one of Luke’s baristas is on the menu for Father Michael, as well as some theology lessons and other random nonsense.

Camilo Vila’s The Unholy is a deeply flawed film that I nonetheless love quite passionately. Its worst flaw is obviously the pacing: it starts, stops, starts, comes to a halt again, repeats plot points for no good reason to then get going again, and has about as much flow as a German rapper (don’t ask). I also can’t deny that it is much more talky than it needs to be, again tending to repeat ideas and plot beats for no good reason whatsoever. Then there’s the Ben Cross factor. While I don’t have anything against the man as an actor, the film’s slower parts could have used some enlivening by a leading men who is a bit more outwardly charismatic and whose acting style isn’t quite as dry as Cross’s.

Having said all that, here’s why The Unholy is awesome: living as we do in a time where all religiously themed horror (at least the Christian kind) seems to be inevitably about exorcisms, it is such a wonderful change of pace to see a film that just makes up some wacky bit of mythology it adds to Catholicism and then proceeds to tie things up with the sorts of things demons in the Christian interpretation are rather more interested in than possession. Temptation, particularly of priests (and saints) is rather a big thing in this mythology, and there aren’t too many films directly about it, even though this approach potentially adds fine opportunities for actually talking about morals, the complexities of the human heart and getting some nudity into your film.

The Unholy doesn’t stop there, though: in its final twenty minutes, it climaxes in (some might say devolves into) a very 80s horror concoction with multiple crucifixions, a thematically pertinent demonic parody of the Catholic mass, a ridiculous yet inspired demon (who also still looks like said sexy redhead in actually rather disquieting intercuts), his adorable assistant demon dwarfs, a short descent into hell with quick snippets of DEBAUCHERY! CANNIBALISM! LESBIANISM! ICKY STUFF!, and a sudden awakening of Cross’s inner scenery chewer. And while there’s certainly too much feet-dragging before, even earlier in the film there’s still space for fun stuff like Trevor Howard’s channelling of the spirit of Vincent Price in a really outrageous week, or the ten minutes in which Luke (who is only a fake Satanist for publicity reasons, by the way) turns into our short-term protagonist and visits a dramatic yet less than helpful medium who basically explains to the man afraid of the bad shit that’s going down that bad shit is going down and she’s utterly useless.


All of that is directed by Vila in spurts of somewhat stylish 80s colour, some dry ice fog, shot in some cool and some not so cool locations. What’s not to like (except for all that stuff I already mentioned)?

Universal Van Damme: The Order (2001)

Rudy Cafmeyer (Jean-Claude Van Damme) is one of those charming rogues and cat burglars one hears so often about, though with a side-line in kicking people in the face, because he’s JCVD. Rudy’s father Oscar (Vernon Dobtcheff), a professor of archaeology doesn’t approve of his son’s lifestyle, curiously enough.

Right now, Oscar is concerning himself with a mysterious and secret (so secret, we will later learn, they’re on the TV news in Israel) sect. He seems to have found the lost final part of the group’s holy book, so off he goes to Israel where he disappears without a trace.

Of course, Rudy travels to Israel to find his Dad, and soon finds himself chased through Jerusalem by bad people with guns as well as the Israeli police. During the course of his adventures, Rudy will team up with honest cop Dalia (Sofia Milos), watch Charlton Heston die, save his dad, fight crazy cultists, and will just perhaps also save the world from total destruction.

For at least the first half of its running time, Van Damme veteran Sheldon Lettich’s The Order is a pretty family friendly action adventure with broad comedic touches, the kind of film you could imagine watching with your imaginary children, at least if you are a desensitised monster like I am. Tonally, it’s an attempt to fuse classic Van Damme-isms like That Kick with elements of the post-Indiana Jones adventure movie and a bit of daft yet pleasant Da Vinci code historical conspiracy nonsense (which did exist long before Dan Brown descended from his spaceship).

The film does grow increasingly strange and a bit more violent the longer it goes on, though, with many a minor character dying while the whole affair’s tone – which started out quite comic-book like anyway – shifts into full-out, yet cost-conscious craziness, with a pretty stupid coup d'état among the sectarians that leaves Brian Thompson in charge to fulfil a dubious prophecy even after he knows the dubious prophecy is actually false, and stupid main henchmen Ben Cross deciding that he’ll still have use for money on his Swiss bank account after he has helped his boss start World War III, and all sorts of off-handed craziness.

The film’s strangest – and potentially offensive to the easily offended, which is to say at least half of the inhabitants of the Internet – part comes quite a bit earlier though, when Jean-Claude disguises himself as a Hasidic Jew to escape police attention only to end up in a prolonged chase sequence full of other dubious national stereotypes (also to be found in the curiously upmarket Pino Donaggio soundtrack) and some Jackie-Chan-lite choreography.

What all this adds up to is certainly not what Serious People will call a good film, but, as somebody perhaps not all that serious, I found myself rather charmed and certainly entertained by The Order’s comic book nonsense, the hammy acting (Jean-Claude is the most subdued actor on screen!), and the all-around cheap professionalism of the production.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,jean-claude van damme,action,adventure,comedy,sheldon lettich,sofia milos,charlton heston,brian thompson,ben cross

SyFy vs. The Mynd: S.S. Doomtrooper (2006)

France after the Allied landing in Normandy during the Second World War. Special ops specialist Captain Malloy (Corin Nemec) is charged to with destroying a secret Nazi lab in an old castle behind enemy lines where nuclear experiments for the enhancement of soldiers are taking place.

His last mission has decimated Malloy's usual squad, so he puts together the ever popular gang of misfits, freshly picked out of military jail for their helpful talents like sniping, impersonation, hitting people in the face, and being called "Parker Lewis" in a film starring Corin Nemec not as Parker Lewis. The only non-con of the team besides Malloy is demolition expert Digger (Harry Van Gorkum) but he makes up for this lack by being all crazy about demolition - and "comically" deaf until the script forgets it.

Soon after parachuting into their mission area, the team meets the problem that will stand between them and the lab even more than several squad of German soldiers: the first super soldier mad scientist Professor Ullman (Ben Cross) has created with the ever popular mix of nuclear magic and genetic magic. Think the Hulk with a railgun, an electrocuting touch and no interest in discerning between his side and the enemy. Even teaming up with the resistance cell of Marriette Martinet (Marian Filali) might not bring our heroes enough firepower to kill the thing without a clever, near-suicidal plan.

I am, and have always been, an easy mark. Include occult Nazi shenanigans or mad Nazi science in your pulp adventure movie, and you'll really have to work for my disapproval.

David Flores's S.S. Doomtrooper (curiously, the super soldier thing really was in the S.S. before he got hulked up) prefers to work for my approval, and hits many of the marks its kind of film is supposed to hit. So Germans usually speak English with bad German accents amongst themselves, unless they babble half or completely nonsensical German sentences probably constructed with the exclusive help of an English to German dictionary, or just mix up the two. This is indeed a film that seems to think (or at least likes to pretend it thinks) "Give me your Papiere!" is a German sentence. In other words, it has exactly the kind of portrayal of Nazis one hopes for in a pulp oriented movie, which is quite the opposite of the portrayal I hope for in a film going for a more serious tone (I am more often disappointed in the latter cases).

S.S. Doomtrooper further worms its way into my heart with Ben Cross's ridiculous mad scientist who is (of course!) the kind of guy having no problem at all with his creation killing indiscriminately, because further experiments will make that problem disappear, though it's not important anyway. Seriously, building a super soldier who kills whatever moves including Nazis is only the right and proper way to win the war for the Nazi cause.

Flores uses the CGI super soldier comparatively sparely - which is probably for the better when his heroes can't win a direct fight with it - and instead goes through all the pulp war movie clichés he can find, which are, more or less, all of them. So you get the coward who finds his courage when he is needed most, the tank kidnapping, the daring and misguided attempt to sneak into a German munitions depot by pretending to be Germans (inspired German speaking all around, there), the sniper who can't out-snipe death and the explosives expert who seems to be impervious to explosions. All of this and more is presented with enough charm and verve to be pretty damn entertaining, with muddy Bulgaria in form of some excellently ruined buildings, autumnal woods and grey slabs valiantly standing in for France. The landscape shots are not exactly beautiful to look at, but they gets the job done, and provide the film with at least a bit of visual variety. I don't think S.S. Doomtrooper would have had it quite as easy winning my heart if it had only taken place in the usual empty warehouses.

Now, I may very well be the only person on the Internet who likes S.S. Doomtrooper unironically (or at all), but this only goes to show that too many people just hate fun.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,syfy vs the mynd,war,adventure,david flores,corin nemec,ben cross,marian filali

The Mechanik (2005)

aka The Russian Specialist

After taking bloody vengeance on the men who killed his wife and son, former Speznaz soldier Nikolai Cherenko (Dolph Lundgren) leaves Russia to illegally work in the US as a mechanic. After years, a clearly very rich family seeks Nikolai out to convince him to return to Russia and rescue their daughter Julia (Olivia Lee) from the hands of kidnappers. At first, Nikolai isn't interested in doing this kind of thing anymore, but once he is told the leader of the kidnappers is Sasha Popov (Ivan Petrushinov), the guy mainly responsible for his family's death whom Nikolai left for dead in his vengeance spree, he's all in.

Nikolai hires British expatriate William Burton (Ben Cross) for information and organization purposes, grudgingly takes on a group of Russian redshirts as helpers, and off he goes to the rescue.

As it turns out, rescuing Julia isn't that dangerous (unless you're a redshirt) but then getting her over the border to Finland (rural Russia of course being played by Bulgaria) is quite a bit more difficult, particularly with Sasha and his men hot on our heroes' trail.

I'm rather often making fun of Dolph Lundgren but leave it to the often fake-Russian Swede to make a cheap yet excellent little action movie with himself in the leading role like a rather more likeable Kenneth Brannagh (I think I may have mentioned my loathing for that particular one-man-show once or twice, too). As a director, Lundgren isn't particularly showy when it comes to the action sequences. They're all shot with surprising restraint, and few attempts to show off by overusing stupid post-production effects. Lundgren seems to prefer a more direct and straightforward approach to action direction I generally prefer too, with a certain scruffiness in choreography and approach that reminded me of nothing so much as of certain US b-westerns.

That isn't to say Lundgren doesn't do anything beyond pointing the camera in the direction of the action. It's rather the case that Lundgren puts his direction in the service of his (maybe minimal yet pretty effective) plot and not the other way round. From time to time, he even does something subtle (nothing you see every day in a low budget action film) - I particularly liked the contrasting use of the usual bleached out colour scheme all films made after 2002 are bound by law to use and something slightly more colourful to enhance certain emotional moments.

Staying with the theme of subtlety, the director/actor's approach to emotional scenes is also more controlled than you can expect in a cheap action movie. While the film hits the expected emotional beats, it doesn't feel the need to hammer them home, in the clear knowledge that the audience has seen characters and narrative structures like this before and will be able to understand them even if you don't turn your melodrama to eleven. From time to time, I even had the impression the film mildly criticized the rituals of male violence and the dead women following them, though that might be me reading a bit much into a simple and straightforward film. At the very least, this is a film that doesn't go the "kidnap victim falls in love with her rescuer so that we can include a sex scene" road, and prefers a rather more believable moment of basic tenderness between the characters.

Anyway, if Lundgren ever directed a film not about Lundgren killing a lot of people (though he doesn't kill that many here: this is a movie where surviving a one to five shootout is seen as impressive badassery, which is good for the film's budget as well as its believability, really, and keeps the grand finale actually more tense because our heroes feel more human), I'd actually be quite excited to see it.

Until that day, I'll probably keep myself happy re-watching The Mechanik.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,german movies,reviews,action,dolph lundgren,ben cross,olivia lee,ivan petrushinov