Three Films Make A Post: An Old Man and his Mule Go West

A Perfect Enemy (2020): Don’t you just hate it when a film clearly thinks it is oh so very very clever, but actually confuses cleverness with being contrived and far-fetched? Case in point (at least for me) is this example of the type by Kike Maíllo, one of those films that thinks they are twisty and formally complex, when in fact they are a bit tedious and increasingly obvious. The plot, such as it is, would – after judicious rewrites to get rid of the faux cleverness - have made for a nice thirty minute episode of something like Inside No. 9, but is stretched out to ninety minutes full of pointless detail and the film shouting “look how clever I am!”.

There’s a nice, scenery chewing lead performance by Athena Strates without whose efforts the whole thing would become completely tedious, but her counterpart Tomasz Kot approaches his role so low key, she might as well not have bothered, while their surroundings scream of technical achievement in the filmmaking arts without any idea how to properly apply it.

Terror and Black Lace aka Terror y encajes negros (1986): Keeping with the tediousness, how about this sleazy Mexican number that starts as a sex comedy and continues in that way for way too long, until it turns into a mock giallo about a serial killing hair fetishist. From time to time, there’s a genuinely creepy scene popping up, and the hetero pervs among us will not complain about all the ways the film comes up with to show off attractive women with little or nothing on. Alas, even the latter gets tedious after a while, while the former’s mostly used to keep the audience awake through all the tedium. If I were a nicer guy, I’d probably suggest that Luis Alcoriza is trying to satirize the Mid-80s Mexican bourgeoisie like a cut-rate Chabrol during the sex comedy parts, but Chabrol was never this relentlessly boring.

An added minus is that every single character here is thoroughly unlikeable, either a serial killer, an abusive husband, or women trading sex for material goods, with no complexity to help a viewer tolerate them.

Abduction (2019): Last but certainly best today is this direct to home entertainment science fiction and action movie by the dependable Ernie Barbarash, starring Scott Adkins and Andy On. Adkins is laying it on a bit too thick this time around for my tastes, but then, the action is surrounded by a lot of weird to totally cracked alien abduction business that’s at least partially expressed through the language of martial arts cinema (so the aliens are really into chi-driven dimensional travel because this is a Chinese production after all), so subtlety clearly isn’t asked for. If you think that sounds a bit dumb but also rather a lot of fun, you have the film pegged perfectly; and if you’re like me, and always wanted your cheap but well-staged action (Barbarash and his leads know what they’re doing in this regard) paired with affordable interdimensional shenanigans (see On run through the same patch of park again and again, trapped in a loop, watch Adkins realize he’s been abducted for decades etc), you’re going to enjoy this just fine.

Past Misdeeds: 6 Bullets (2012)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

MMA fighter Andrew Fayden (Joe Flanigan), his wife Monica (Anna-Louise Plowman) and their daughter Becky (Charlotte Beaumont) have barely arrived in Bucharest in preparation for Andrew's big comeback fight when Becky is snatched by criminals. What exactly they want with the kid is unclear: the kidnappers don't ask for a ransom, but the case seems dangerously high profile for "just" selling Becky into child prostitution.

Because the local police don't find their daughter in about a day, the Faydens ask the US embassy for help. Someone at the embassy who will later turn out to be Selwyn Gaul (Jean-Claude Van Damme's real-life son Kristopher Van Varenberg playing Jean-Claude Van Damme's on-screen son), sends them to former French Foreign Legionnaire Samson Gaul (Jean-Claude Van Damme) for help. At the moment, Gaul is an alcoholic hallucinating dead children in his butcher shop, but just a few months ago, he was specialized in finding and rescuing kidnapped children by slaughtering child slavers left and right; until he made a terrible mistake caused by his love of explosions which cost the life of four kids. Cue his hallucinations.

At first, Gaul - perhaps quite realistically - doesn't want to take on the Faydens' job; only, if he doesn't try to help them, who will, and is his guilty conscience not in dire need of some redemptive action? Gaul just barely changes his mind fast enough to save Andrew, who starts to try and find his daughter on his own, from a possibly deadly beating. Unfortunately, while Gaul is really, really good at the violent part in "violent investigation", his own lack of subtlety does lead to turns of event that look rather catastrophic, particularly since the whole kidnapping affair is a bit more complicated than anyone could have expected, even involving a part of the Romanian government.

So, is Jean-Claude Van Damme now some kind of reborn Sho Kosugi, providing acting roles for his family wherever he goes? 6 Bullets certainly suggests it, what with the involvement of JCVD's son Kristopher as well as his daughter Bianca Bree (here as Bianca Van Varenberg, for nothing is better for an acting career than using a different name in each movie one is in). Both aren't exactly brilliant thespians but perfectly serviceable for direct-to-DVD action cinema and quite easy on the eyes, so at least in that regard Van Damme's nepotism is a step up from Kosugi's.

Anyway, 6 Bullets is a bit too good to follow cynical lines of thought for too long, so let's talk about something beyond the Van Damme family business. Ernie Barbarash's film hits most of the beats of contemporary direct-to-DVD cinema, though it does avoid the cheap irony popularized by The Expendables and so does take itself quite seriously throughout. Barbarash's action direction is on the steady side, which is to say, you can actually tell what's going on and see enough to realize the choreography of the action sequences is on the more exciting side of competence. Van Damme - fitting for his increasing age - isn't involved in too many hand-to-hand fights anymore, though the ones he is in are pretty cool, and lets guns do most of the violence. This may disappoint major fans of THAT KICK, but I find this approach much more dignified than the magic editing that keeps someone like Steven Seagal alive as if he were the last martial arts fighting whale in sunglasses. Not to worry: unlike Seagal, Van Damme does look like a very fit middle-aged man (fitter than I ever imagined to look, at least), and also isn't involved in nauseating right-wing politics as far as I know. Please don’t tell me otherwise.

Chad and Evan Law's script provides Van Damme with more than enough opportunity to show off his acting talents, too. Now, I know, we all have made fun of young Jean-Claude some time or the other, but at this stage, JCVD has learned to use his limited acting range really well. If it comes to depressed brooding or really disquieting staring into cameras, Van Damme is the action actor you want to cast, and films like 6 Bullets know this and use it to their advantage, giving their killing machine a human dimension, even understandable human motivations.

The Laws' script is rather good and definitely interesting in other regards too. It does contain its share of cheap tricks and silly action movie shortcuts in its plotting, yet it also takes its time to actually build characters, dares to make its plot slightly more complicated than strictly necessary, and even surprises with slight twists on certain genre standards.

I'm particularly glad about 6 Bullets' interest in its female characters. Monica and Becky are at the very least given more character and more lines than usual in direct-to-DVD action films. In a particularly surprising turn of events, the girls in the victim roles - as well as Monica, whose role in a movie like this would normally be to cry and then cry some more - do generally have a larger degree of agency here than you'd expect. Not typical for an exploitation movie (with a plot like this you can't actually avoid exploiting at least the concept of child prostitution), 6 Bullets seems to go out of its way to treat women and children with the same respect as its male characters, without making a big thing out of it.


Combined with Barbarash's steady direction, the solid acting, and the fun violence, this makes 6 Bullets a worthwhile addition to Van Damme's body of work, the kind of film that doesn't need to be all self-ironic about genre tropes because it prefers to do something about the ones it doesn't care for, at least to a degree.

Hardwired (2009)

Welcome to a cyberpunky, corporate-owned future, where even the Pyramids have an ad banner stuck on them. Former special forces badass Luke Gibson (Cuba Gooding Jr.) has relaxed quite nicely into civilian life. His wife and he are clearly happy, and a child’s going to pop any day now. Alas, their car is hit by a truck, killing his wife and child. Because his insurance very suddenly expires, things wouldn’t look terribly great for Luke’s survival either, but a couple of corporate goons working for tech company high-up Virgil (Val “Doesn’t give a shit” Kilmer) convince his surgeon to save our hero by hardwiring an illegal experimental chip into his brain, as per the film’s title.

The procedure does indeed save Luke’s life, but he also loses large parts of his memory and starts to see things that suggest the chip is beaming ads right into his brain, a prospect that would most probably convince ad executives in our world to break a few laws, too. Worse, there’s also a kill switch installed that’ll blow up his head when he gets too uppity.

Fortunately, the mandatory semi-heroic group of hackers – tough yet avuncular Hal (Michael Ironside!), his paraplegic hacker son Keyboard (Chad Krowchuk), and the adorably named Punk Red (a pre-Orphan Black Tatiana Maslany) and Punk Blue (Juan Riedinger) – hack into Luke’s brain to for some well-needed ad-blocking and recruit him to their cause by showing him rage-inducing pictures of the family he lost. Turns out a multinational corporation is no match for badass Cuba Gooding Jr. and a couple of hackers with idiotic names.

Fun fact: I just love the direct to home video action movie phase of Cuba Gooding Jr.’s career much more than most of what he did in his Oscar-baiting time. As I have mentioned before, the wonderful thing about Gooding in this context is that he doesn’t act like a guy who is slumming at all, but applies his not inconsiderable talents fully to whatever bizarre crap the film at hand asks of him. Consequently, Gooding plays the silly bits, the trite bits, and the parts where he interacts with the horror of the ads beamed into his brain totally serious, with admirable professionalism, really making much of what we see doubly enjoyable. His performance – and those of the cast of fresh young actors and low budget veteran aces like the always great Ironside – stand in extreme contrast to Val Kilmer’s usual pay check grab. One could have put his absurd wig onto a life-sized doll and put his dialogue through a computer and have gotten the same performance for considerable less money. Fortunately, Kilmer isn’t actually doing much, so his lazy diva crap isn’t doing too much damage beyond adding one more embarrassment to a career that could have been great.

Anyway, while the plot is obviously silly, there’s quite a bit more to enjoy here than bashing Kilmer and watching Gooding and co. Director Ernie Barbarash is certainly one of the more talented people working in the direct to your couch action space, here as usual demonstrating a sense of pacing that’s good enough to convince a viewer there’s more action happening in the movie than there actually is. The action sequences that are there are indeed fine, mind you.

What’s most fun about the film – at least to me – is its somewhat early 80s Corman-esque sense of sledgehammer satire. Luke’s brain ads are truly hilarious, as are the branded landmarks in the intro and many another idea of the sort. Plus, who doesn’t like a movie that’s so down on ads?


There’s also something to be said for the somewhat thrown together look of Hardwired’s near future that mixes the mildly science fictional with the grubbily contemporary as of its making, and a handful of dubious aesthetic ideas, and probably ends up on a more realistic look for its future than the completely designed one of a film with a budget would have been. After all, whose outer reality consists exclusively out of objects made during the last two or three years?

Three Films Make A Post: HEAVEN IS FALLING, SO EARTH MUST MOVE

Apocalyptic (2014): Are all contemporary films about apocalypse cults the same? Discuss! But seriously, Apocalyptic’s big problem isn’t that it’s a bad film – it certainly isn’t – it’s that I’ve seen more or less exactly the same film more than once before, which can’t help but make the very low survival skills of the protagonists even less believable, nor make the same damn twist ending (where “twist” means “something utterly predictable”) all these movies have any more interesting.

But hey, if you haven’t seen one of these before, you might as well watch this one.

Falcon Rising (2014): Ernie Barbarash’s Michael Jai White vehicle is a perfectly decent low budget movie with all the problems that entails – the often a bit too cartoony characters, the plot that jumps from nearly having something interesting to say about power structures to utter nonsense (and never back again), and creativity in the set-up of the action scenes that is at times visibly constrained by the available money. Barbarash’s direction tends towards the decent instead of the excellent here, while the action choreography is good. The film moves along at a nice enough pace for the most part, and Michael Jai White is – as has been often the case in his career – generally better than whatever surrounds him.

There’s really little else to say about the film. It’s like the movie equivalent of fast food, probably not very nourishing, never too exciting, yet pleasant enough while it lasts.

Game of Assassins aka The Gauntlet (2013): A bunch of people who have killed before find themselves in a cardboard dungeon set even copious amounts of dry ice can’t make more convincing. They have to survive a series of contrived and deeply idiotic tests that have a moral dilemma aspect so flat many videogames would be ashamed to use it. Characters babble clichéd nonsense about their past. Some violence happens. Then, some more violence happens until the whole stupid affair climaxes in a twist-y ending so dumb yet played with so much seriousness and conviction it does become funny enough I suddenly found myself kind of liking the film for it, despite having reacted to what came before mostly with yawning, eye-rolling and damning the influence bad RPG trap design seems to have had on the script.

Technorati-Markierungen: in short,american movies,horror,action,ernie barbarash,michael jai white,bai ling,matt eskandari

On Exploder Button: Universal Van Damme: 6 Bullets (2012)

The thing about a contemporary direct-to-DVD movies featuring our old friend Jean-Claude Van Damme is that you never know what you get: a cameo movie that doesn't really feature Van Damme, or a horrible piece of crap, or something like 6 Bullets, a movie that doesn't use its low budget and nature as an excuse but rather as an opportunity.

My column on Exploder Button does - of course - go into more details about the film. Will Jean-Claude use THAT KICK?

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,ernie barbarash,jean-claude van damme,joe flanigan,anna-louise plowman,action,other places