Jungleground (1995)

Vice police Lieutenant Jake Cornell (Roddy Piper) takes part in an undercover operation in the part of his city that is so bad, people call it “Jungleground”. The operation goes very bad indeed, Jake’s colleagues are killed, and Jake finds himself the object of the tender mercies of the leader of a local gang who has been killing off drug dealers as well as his colleagues left and right, the Ragna Rockers.

While parts of his multi-racial gang think they are indeed drug dealer murdering vigilantes (that’d be the Punisher Rockers, guys), their leader Odin (JR Bourne), as he’s not surprisingly called, is actually planning to just put the whole local drug business in better hands, namely his own. Still, he enjoys a good little sadist game, so instead of just killing Jake, he goes all most dangerous game on him, setting our hero loose unarmed and underdressed in Jungleground, and putting a team lead by one Dragon (Peter Williams) on his trail. As an added incentive, Odin has put two of his men on Jake’s girlfriend, sculptor and surprise woman of action Sammy Woods (Torri Higginson). If Jake doesn’t reach her, and the safe part of down, before sunrise, she’s going to die.

I am sure, a Most Dangerous Game/The Warriors variant with a bit of ye olde “white man caught in the ghetto” added to the mix is exactly what the Canadian youth was clamouring after – though, I suspect they did that rather a few years before director Don Allan finally made these dreams finally come true in the glorious year of 1995.

Snark aside, for what it is, Jungleground is a perfectly entertaining film, crafted reasonably well as it is, and starring the always agreeable “Rowdy” Roddy Piper in the main ass-kicking role as it does. Because it’s a Canadian film, it also gives the object of Roddy’s rescue aspirations a bit more agency and personality than usual in direct-to-video action fodder, delighting its audience (well, me) with a really fun scene where she laughs a gallery owner with casting couch aspirations out of her studio, and a MacGyver style interlude concerning an escape attempt from the baddies, which might not sound like much – or sensible – but does give Higginson’s Sammy about three times as much personality as is typical of these kinds of roles. I also couldn’t help but notice that the film’s evil gang isn’t just multi-racial but also practicing gender equality outside of its leading circle, and because I’m all about absurd essentialist explanations today, that’s now officially part of Jungleground’s Canadian-ness too.

Apart from that, the film consists of a series of decent action scenes taking place in crummy sets and on dark, crummy streets, some scenery chewing by Bourne, Piper doing Piper as well as he always does, and from time to time a bit of enjoyable nonsense. Of the last, I particularly liked the delectable way in which the Ragna Rockers (at least gang name of the month) execute one of their own, namely by driving a car through the window of their warehouse headquarters (of course called Valhalla), throwing a plate-o’-spikes onto the car’s roof, and then throwing their intended victim onto that now spiked roof. It’s certainly a thing. If there’s something I really dislike about this comparatively pleasant little movie, then it’s the fact that it doesn’t have too many elements quite as silly as that scene. Add another comment on the film’s supposed Canadianness here, if you like.

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SyFy vs. The Mynd: Stonehenge Apocalypse (2010)

Poking around in a hidden ancient site somewhere in Maine by archaeologist Joseph Leshem (Hill Harper) activates some curious mechanisms in Stonehenge that begin sucking large amounts of electromagnetic energy out of the planet's "energy grid" and fry a few tourists. The British government at once quarantines the area and sends in a team of scientists led by Dr. Trousdale (Peter Wingfield) and Dr. Kaycee Leeds (Torri Higginson) to investigate the phenomenon.

When former genius astrophysicist and now crackpot radio show host Jacob Glaser (Misha Collins) hears about the situation - which is of course kept hidden from the public - he at once jets over to England to do a bit of investigating of his own.

The Stonehenge situation further deteriorates when the rather chipper stones activate other ancient sites all around the globe that start a series of volcanic eruptions killing millions. Jacob soon becomes convinced Stonehenge is the core of a global terraforming mechanism (which makes no sense given the age of the sites compared to that of the planet, but hey, if nobody mentions it, we don't have to think about it…), and even theorizes an artefact kept in an archaeological collection in the US might just be the only way to stop the annihilation of the whole of humanity. It's just too bad that nobody except Kaycee takes the word of a guy who once rambled about the robot head NASA found on the moon seriously, so Jacob's attempt to save the world becomes rather more difficult.

Then there's the little fact that Joseph - who just happens to be an old friend of Jacob's, as proven by him calling Jacob "my friend" at least once per sentence - might just be the leader of a doomsday cult who started the Apocalypse on purpose to cleanse the Earth etc and so on. Heroism sure isn't simple.

Stonehenge Apocalypse, Paul Ziller's epic of apocalyptic bullshit doesn't start very well. There's way too much not very interesting woo-woo talk about energy lines and how horrible mean it is of people to doubt the words of a man who is convinced NASA found a robot head on the moon and the US government covered it up (the film's running gag is that everyone remembers him talking of aliens on the moon, not of a robot head - humour!). At the same time, the early film spends too little time with silly wonders like its rotating Stonehenge.

Fortunately, once the film's first half or so has passed, Ziller goes to the serious business of squeezing every bit of fun nonsense out of the plot's improbable basic set-up, and suddenly it's all ancient terraforming device, exploding pyramids and a cult out to destroy mankind to purify the Earth whose main site just happens to be situated in the good old US of A, while the plotting becomes increasingly pulpy on top of its stupidity. This of course means that what starts out as a pretty lame showing becomes an increasingly fun piece of pulp entertainment (unless you can't overlook Stonehenge Apocalypse's nonsense science, but then, you'll hopefully avoid movies with titles like "Stonehenge Apocalypse" as a matter of course).

Once the film gets going, Ziller demonstrates how much pulp doomsday thriller nonsense you can put up on screen on a SyFy budget. It's more than I'd have expected, I gotta say. Not to spoil the film's ending, but this is a movie that climaxes with its hero racing against a countdown back to Stonehenge before it can activate the final cataclysm that'll destroy the world, while also racing against an h-bomb being dropped on the place, while also having to fight off an insane double agent cultist. There isn't anything I could or would want to say against that.

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