Barb Wire (1996)

Barb Wire (1996) has a reputation as a trashy Pamela Anderson action thriller. That’s OK. I like trashy thrillers. And it’s a post-apocalyptic dystopian cyberpunk action thriller. That’s OK by me as well. It’s based on a comic book.

It’s the aftermath of the Second American Civil War. Now Steel Harbor is the only free city. It’s city of crime, chaos, corruption, sleaze and depravity. You can have a lot of fun in Steel Harbor and you can get into a lot of trouble.

Barb Wire (Pamela Anderson) runs a bar there, called the Hammerhead. Curly (Udo Kier) manages it for her. 

Barb makes her living in various ways, some legal and some illegal, including bounty hunting and stripping.

She has an uneasy relationship with the local chief of police Willis (Xander Berkeley). Willis is moderately corrupt but Barb doesn’t mind that since she’s moderately crooked as well. There’s some erotic heat between them. An attraction of two morally compromised people.

There’s a totalitarian government and of course there’s a Resistance. There’s a genius scientist named Cora D with the antidote to the government’s most potent bioweapon. She’s on the run. And she needs some high-tech retinal contact lenses to escape detection.

Barb has the contact lenses and they’re worth big bucks and that could be her ticket out of Steel Harbor. But the bad guys (from the totalitarian Congressional government) are determined to get the lenses and to get Axel and Cora D (who are irritating starry-eyed idealists and not that bright).

Axel is helping her to escape. They want Barb’s help. Barb had loved Axel but he betrayed her. Barb has now had enough of causes.

Barb’s brother Charlie is with the Resistance and he’s idealistic and you just know he’s going to get himself into trouble.


Now at this stage you might be thinking that you’ve seen this film before. And if you’ve seen the 1989 Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Cyborg you have seen it before. The plot is pretty much identical. Barb Wire also owes a lot to Casablanca.

The bad guys are cardboard cutout villains.

The main thing wrong with Barb Wire is that the basic concept is not very original and the plot is very unoriginal.

On the plus side the action scenes are extremely good. I can’t really fault the job done by director David Hogan. He keeps things moving and as interesting visually as he can.

And there’s Udo Kier who is always a joy to watch.

In my view the movie’s biggest asset is Pamela Anderson. Barb is a larger-than-life outrageous comic-book kickass action heroine and that’s how Anderson plays her. And with impossibly voluptuous figure, her blonde hair, her leather gear and her corsets she doesn’t look real. She looks like a comic-book heroine. That’s how it should be.

It’s easy to point out this movie’s many faults (and they are many) but if you don’t worry about the plot you can just enjoy the mayhem. There’s very little gore and very little blood. It’s about excitement rather than gore. It’s also very tame where nudity and sex are concerned. Perhaps too tame.

Barb Wire is a comic-book B-movie with a comic-book B-movie heroine and that’s fine by me. Mindless entertainment but it’s not trying for anything more than that. I enjoyed it. Recommended.

And it looks nice on Blu-Ray.

Ninja III: The Domination (1985)

Whenever I see the Cannon Group logo at the beginning of a movie I get a feeling of confidence. Whether it turns out to be a great movie or a not-so-great movie it will be fun. Ninja III: The Domination belongs to the not-so-great category but in its own perverse way it achieves a kind of quasi-greatness.

This is a psycho ninja chick movie. And any psycho ninja chick movie has got to be worth watching.

It begins with a bunch of people playing golf. Then a ninja shows up and kills everybody. Then the cops show up. Lots and lots of cops. Dozens of cops. The ninja kills most of them. Finally, having been shot about 98 times the ninja has had enough and he’s about to expire. But his story is not yet finished. Christie (Lucinda Dickey), a perfectly ordinary young woman, finds him lying in the bushes about to die and something weird happens.

One thing that’s cool is that we never find out why the ninja ran amok on the golf course. We presume someone hired him. We have no idea who that someone could be. Writer James R. Silke knows that we don’t need to know. This is not a mystery or a police procedural, it’s a ninja action picture.

The cop who interviews Christie, Officer Secord (Jordan Bennett) takes a shine to her. Christie doesn’t date cops. But Secord isn’t a quitter and his desperation to get into her pants is finally rewarded with success. And soon there’s a thing between them.

Christie has a sword, a katana. We soon have reason to suspect it’s a magic sword.

The cops who shot that ninja start to die in rather grisly ways. Maybe there’s another ninja about.

There is, in a way. That evil dead ninja has possessed Christie. She now intermittently turns into an evil lady ninja.

And there’s another ninja, Yamada (Shô Kosugi). He has an eye patch. We don’t know if he’s a good ninja or an evil ninja.

More cops get sliced up. Poor Secord doesn’t know what’s going on. Christie doesn’t know either.

Truly immense quantities of mayhem follow.

This is not just a psycho ninja chick movie. It’s also an incredibly bad rip-off of The Exorcist. And it’s a bit of an 80s dance movie as well. Lots of aerobics. And a video game movie. If something was fashionable in the 80s it will show up somewhere in this movie.

The acting is terrible. If you’re wondering why Lucinda Dickey did not become a major star then watch this movie and you’ll have your answer. The gal just can’t act.

But then this is not exactly a character-driven movie so that doesn’t really matter. It’s all about the martial arts action and there’s plenty of that and it’s pretty entertaining with a very high body count. And Miss Dickey can dance and trained dancers always handle fight scenes pretty well.

There are some really bad special effects as well, which adds further layers of fun. I have no idea why some of these effects were even there except that I think they wanted a video game vibe.

What do you want in a psycho ninja chick movie? You want a cool lady ninja and you want her to be totally nuts and you want her to leave a path of death and destruction behind her. That’s what this movie offers. It doesn’t offer anything else. It doesn’t need to.

Ninja III: The Domination is in truth a very bad movie but that’s what makes it fun.

I have the Spanish Blu-Ray release which sadly doesn’t provide a very good transfer. On the other hand this is the sort of movie that is more enjoyable if it looks like you’re watching it on a VHS rental from Blockbuster back in the day.

Cyborg (1989)

Cyborg is a 1989 science fiction action movie starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and directed by Albert Pyun. While there is a cyborg in the film the character played by Van Damme is totally human.

The setting is your basic post-apocalyptic wasteland world. There’s been social, political and economic collapse and then a devastating plague.

The last remaining scientists are holed up in Atlanta and they’re working on a cure for the plague. They need some crucial data. That data is contained in a female cyborg, Pearl Prophet (Dayle Haddon). She has to make it to Atlanta.

The chief bad guy is an incredibly vicious pirate named Fender (Vincent Klyn). He wants that data. Not to save lives, but because he would give him unlimited wealth and power.

Gibson Rickenbacker (Jean-Claude Van Damme) is a Slinger - a kind of mercenary/hired gun/adventurer/freebooter. Slingers might not be solid law-abiding citizens but they’re not pirates and they’re not murderers. He doesn’t care about the data or the cyborg but he has a really big grudge against Fender (explained in a series of brief flashbacks). He’ll try to save the cyborg but what he wants is revenge.

He hooks up with Nady Simmons (Deborah Richter). She’s some kind of thief and she tries to kill our hero but he feels sorry for her and he doesn’t like hurting women and when she insists on tagging along he puts up with her. She has come over all idealistic and wants to save the cyborg.

She makes a likeable cute side-kick and gives Rickenbacker the chance to show that he has a gentle side. He’s not interested in getting her into bed but he does end up caring about her.

The plot is very sketchy but that doesn’t matter because it’s just an excuse for a series of extremely violent incredibly brutal action scenes but that’s OK because those action scenes are superbly staged.

This movie is a non-stop adrenalin rush.

Jean-Claude Van Damme was cast for his very considerable martial arts skills. As an actor he’s competent.

Fender is an evil villain with the emphasis on the evilness and he’s effectively scary and very very nasty.

This is a Cannon Group production and while the budget was limited and the concept of the post-apocalyptic world is routine it looks very impressive. Imagination and energy are more important than a big budget.

The presence of a cyborg suggests a cyberpunk influence but really she’s just there to add an extra coolness factor. Both the plague and the cyborg are just plot devices to make Rickenbacker’s quest about something more noble and important than mere revenge. There is however one major emotional twist towards the end.

The movie is totally focused on the action and Pyun wisely allows nothing to distract us from that. He’s not going to waste time on exposition. We don’t care where the plague came from. We don’t need a detailed history of the process of social collapse. We don’t even need to know exactly what a Slinger is. We just need to know that they’re basically good guys while the pirates are seriously evil. This is totally a good vs evil story. The villain has no redeeming features whatsoever.

Cyborg is pure action entertainment and it delivers the goods very impressively. There’s not a wasted minute in the movie. The plot probably has lots of holes in it but there’s no time to notice such details. Jean-Claude Van Damme is a badass action hero and his martial arts skills are pretty awesome. He doesn’t say much, but he doesn’t need to.

Cyborg is highly recommended.

I have the French Blu-Ray release and it looks terrific.

I’ve also reviewed another much less successful Albert Pyun-directed Cannon Group release, Alien from L.A., released a year earlier.

Guns (1990)

Guns is a 1990 Andy Sidaris movie so you know what to expect. And it delivers the goods. By this time he had the formula humming along very nicely indeed. 

As usual his wife Arlene was the producer.

The cast of this one includes no less than six Playboy Playmates.

Donna (Dona Speir) and Nicole (Roberta Vasquez) are undercover federal agents in Hawaii. They stumble onto something big when an innocent girl is the vicim of what was clearly a professional hit. The girl just happened to be wearing the exact same dress as Nicole. The girls figure that Nicole was the intended target.

The hit was ordered by a Juan Degas (Erik Estrada), who has a special grudge against Donna. He didn’t want Donna hit. He wants her to suffer first, before he takes care of her himself.

Degas is involved in gun-running, using Molokai as a staging point. But the girls are cleverly decoyed to Las Vegas.

Degas is obsessed by his quest for revenge, just as much as protecting his gun-running racket.

Donna doesn’t know who is out to get her since she thinks Degas is dead. She also hasn’t realised that her mother, who happens to be the Attorney-General of Nevada, is going to get mixed up in all this.

The Feds organise a team to take down Degas. Naturally it includes a member of the Abilene clan, in this case Shane Abilene (Michael J. Shane). Like all male members of the family Shane is a staggeringly bad shot, a running gag in the series which will be used very cleverly and wittily towards the end.

The team also includes professional magician (and Federal agent) Abe. He gets a delightful scene involving some very unusual interrogation methods.

There has to be a bad girl and this time around it’s Cash (Devin DeVasquez) and she’s a formidable and coldblooded hitwoman.

Typically for a Sidaris movie the bad guys all look like bad guys and the sexy bad girl looks like a sexy bad girl. The good guys look like good guys. It’s cartoonish but it’s part of the Sidaris style and it adds to the fun. You don’t watch Andy Sidaris movies for moral ambiguity.

Like all of Sidaris’s movies this one is technically very polished which helps to make it look more expensive than it is. Guns is beautifully shot.

Andy and Arlene Sidaris had a positive genius not just for finding good locations but for using them efficiently and economically, and for getting added production values from those locations. If you shoot scenes in a luxury hotel your movie will have the right aura of money and glamour even though you’ve spent hardly any money.

Since this is an Andy Sidaris movie there are action scenes involving motorcycles, aircraft, ultra-light aircraft, helicopters and boats. And there will be explosions. There’s a cool scene where Donna is under aerial attack. If only she had a shoulder-launched multiple rocket launcher with her. Then she remembers - she does have a shoulder-launched multiple rocket launcher in the back of the van. Sensible girls don’t go anywhere without a multiple rocket launcher.

Sidaris knew how to do impressive action set-pieces that are clever and imaginative as well as exciting. This movie has some fine examples.

Guns is just non-stop action and mayhem with lots of extraordinarily gorgeous women who manage to be frequently topless. This is such a fun movie and it’s highly recommended.

Andy and Arlene provide another of their delightful audio commentaries.

Guns is included in the Mill Creek Girls, Guns and G-Strings DVD boxed set. The 16:9 enhanced transfer are lovely are there’s an audio commentary for every movie. Most of thee movies are now on Blu-Ray as well.

Black Tight Killers (1966)

Yasuharu Hasebe’s Black Tight Killers was released in 1966 and it’s one of those movies that is perfectly in tune with the zeitgeist. The Swinging 60s were underway. London wasn’t the only place that was swinging. Tokyo was definitely swinging as well. Black Tight Killers is a wild crazy Pop Art-infused thriller that includes everything you could possibly desire in a 60s movie.

Daisuke Hondo (Akira Kobayashi) is a globe-trotting photojournalist who always manages to be in the thick of the action and the danger. On his return flight to Tokyo he meets a very pretty stewardess, Yoriko Sawanouchi (Chieko Matsubara). They’re hitting it off really well until Yoriko is kidnapped. There’s a gang led by a hoodlum named Lopez after her but the beautiful girl ninjas are after her as well. Of course you can never be sure if girl ninjas will turn out to be evil girl ninjas or good girl ninjas.

It all seems to have something to do with Yoriko’s father and the disappearance of a huge stash of gold during the war.

From this point on there’s non-stop mayhem. Fortunately Hondo can handle himself pretty well and he’s spent time at the Momoko Ninja Research Station so he knows a few ninja tricks himself. Although the ninja chewing gum bullet trick does come as a surprise to him.

Yoriko keeps falling into the hands of assorted bad guys. Hondo is still trying to figure out which side the girl ninjas are on. They do seem inclined to offer him at least a temporary alliance.

Yasuharu Hasebe has been an assistant to Seijun Suzuki and that’s significant. This was the very year in which Suzuki made his crazed masterpiece Tokyo Drifter. It’s clear that Suzuki and Hasebe were working along very similar lines, with plot coherence taking a back seat to energy, very cool visuals, Pop Art style, wild use of colour and major flirtations with surrealism. Black Tight Killers, like Tokyo Drifter, takes place in its own universe. Realism pretty much goes out the window. And both films display an obsessive interest in the use of colour to undermine realism. There’s an obvious comic-book influence. And there are hints of the psychedelic freak-out elements which were becoming increasing a feature of late 60s movie.

There’s also go-go dancing.

I love the fact that some of the supposedly exterior shots were deliberately done in the studio and that in the frequent driving scenes the rear projection is obviously intended to look as artificial as possible.

The sets are cool but they’re made to look a lot cooler with very nifty lighting effects.

There are some odd tonal shifts. Mostly the emphasis is on super-charged hyper-kinetic action fun but then there are periodic dark tragic gut-punch moments.

There are also some cynical moments.

Akira Kobayashi is a serviceable action hero. Chieko Matsubara is cute and likeable.

The action scenes have plenty of energy.

The movie is as sexy as you could get away with in 1966, with some very brief glimpses of nudity.

Black Tight Killers was clearly much in tune with international trends in pop cinema. The Bond movies obviously, but it’s closer in feel to eurospy movies like the wonderful French Fantomas (1964) and the amazing Italian heist movie Seven Golden Men (1965), the thoroughly enjoyable Lightning Bolt (1966) and one of the best of all the eurospy films, Special Mission Lady Chaplin (1966). And the German Kommissar X series kicked off in 1966 as well, with Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill.

And let’s face it - you can’t make a bad movie with beautiful girl ninjas.

Black Tight Killers has so much energy, so much fun and so much style. This is pure pop cinema. Highly recommended.

The Radiance Blu-Ray looks lovely. There are some decent extras.

Yasuharu Hasebe went on to direct several of the wonderful Stray Cat Rock movies - Stray Cat Rock: Delinquent Girl Boss (1970), Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter (1970) and Stray Cat Rock: Machine Animal (1970). These three movies are all quite different in tone but they’re all very enjoyable.

The Seventh Curse (1986)

Even by the standards of 1980s Hong Kong movies Golden Harvest’s The Seventh Curse (1986) is wild wild stuff.

It was inspired by the hugely popular novels of Ni Kuang. He wrote at least 300 wuxia and science fiction novels, being noted for working extraterrestrials into detective and mystery novels. His two most popular novel series were the Wisely series, about a wealthy adventurer named (obviously) Wisely, and the Dr Yuen series. The Seventh Curse is a Dr Yuen adventure but it’s an original story written for the film. And Wisely appears as a supporting character.

At a dinner party the famous novelist Ni Kuang (played by the famous novelist Ni Kuang) recounts the latest exploits of Dr Yuen.

The opening action scene is absolute mayhem. It’s a raid by the Hong Kong equivalent of a SWAT team. It’s a big operation - there must be a hundred cops involved. The police call on Dr Yuen for help. A doctor is needed to treat a hostage held in an office building. His job is to set off a flash bomb to distract the bad guys.

We soon learn that Dr Yuen is not just an everyday medical doctor. He’s a martial arts expert, a crack shot, a medical researcher and an adventurer.

This guy is a totally awesome all-round hero.

But he has a problem. It’s a deadly blood curse imposed on him in Thailand.

He was part of a scientific expedition into the jungle, an expedition that encountered a particularly hostile tribe. That’s where he met Bachu. She was bathing half-naked in a river. Both Dr Yuen and Bachu fell foul of an incredibly evil sorcerer. The sorcerer presides over human sacrifices. Dr Yuen escapes.

The blood curse is a delayed action time bomb. Nothing happens for a year, then it activates, and now it will kill him in seven days. His only chance is to return to Thailand to find a cure for himself, and for Bachu.

In that opening police siege sequence Dr Yuen first came across Feisty Girl Reporter Tsui Hung (Maggie Cheung). Feisty Girl Reporters can be irritating but Tsui Hung is cute, sexy and adorable. Now she insists on accompanying him to Thailand - she smells a big story here.

From this point on the mayhem is non-stop with one great action sequence after another. Martial arts fans will not be disappointed. There's a huge amount of gunplay as well, and explosions.

And lots of crazy over-the-top special effects and plenty of gore. There’s a very obvious influence from Alien with demonic babies popping out of people’s chests. The intention was clearly to make the special effects fun.

Chin Siu-ho is terrific as Dr Yuen. He doesn’t look like an action hero. He looks a bit geeky. But in reality he’s a kind of Chinese Indiana Jones. He’s also very likeable.

Maggie Cheung is delightful and amusing and Miss Tsui Hung participates gleefully in the mayhem.

The location shooting was done in Thailand.

There’s a very small amount of nudity and no sex. This is all about the crazy witchcraft stuff and the action. I believe it was one of the films later retrospectively given a Category III rating.

This is a good-natured adventure romp that doesn’t take itself at all seriously. It wants the audience to enjoy the ride.

Director Lam Ngai Kai does a great job here. He went on to helm the fabulous Erotic Ghost Story.

The Seventh Curse is insanely entertaining. It’s not just bonkers. It’s beyond bonkers. But it delivers everything it promises and then some. Not surprising it was a major commercial success.

This movie is very highly recommended.

The 88 Films Blu-Ray offers the original Hong Kong cut and the shorter Export Cut plus plenty of extras.

Cobra (1986)

Cobra is a 1986 action film produced by the Cannon Group. Sylvestor Stallone stars and he wrote the screenplay as well.

It’s a fine demonstration of the extent to which critics had by this time become out of touch with public tastes. While critics clutched their pearls and lamented the movie’s wickedness it proceeded to clean up at the box office. Audiences didn’t care what the critics thought - they loved this movie. Which enraged the critics even more.

This is not a subtle movie and it doesn’t try to be. It’s an adrenalin-charged action thriller. The bad guys are totally evil. The hero is totally heroic. The heroine is beautiful and likeable. Lots of stuff gets blown up. Thousands of rounds of small arms ammunition are discharged. Grenades get thrown. The action doesn’t stop.

A bunch of crazed psychos are on a rampage of murder and mayhem. The cops seem helpless. Except for Lieutenant Marion Cobretti (Sylvestor Stallone) and his partner Sergeant Tony Gonzales (Reni Santoni). Cobretti has gained the nickname the Cobra. He’s read the rulebook. He wasn’t impressed. You can’t catch dirtbags that way.

There is one useful lead. Fashion model Ingrid Knudsen (Brigitte Nielsen) saw something that didn’t seem important to her at the time. But since the crazed psychos are now trying to kill her Cobretti figures it really was important.

He and Gonzales are going to have to find a way to keep Ingrid alive.

And there’s a leak in the department. A cop who is part of the psycho gang. And the gang has hundreds of members, all crazy fanatical killers.

There’s pretty much it for the plot. What matters is the rollercoaster ride of mayhem, handled skilfully by director George P. Cosmatos.

Stallone wrote the screenplay and I have to say that the man knows how to write cool hardboiled dialogue.

This is an 80s action movie but not in the Die Hard or Lethal Weapon mode. This has some of the flavour of 1930s/40s pulp fiction, stuff like The Shadow. The bad guys are the kinds of bad guys you’d get in a 30s/40s movie serial. And there’s a definite Dick Tracy vibe. Not the Dick Tracy of the slightly later (and excellent) 1990 Warren Beatty movie but the Dick Tracy of the comic strips and movie serials.

This movie does not succumb to the temptation to present the crazies as a political or religious cult. In a comic book or a 1940s pulp story or a movie serial you would have a diabolical criminal mastermind aiming vaguely at world domination, with his own private army. And that’s what Cobra offers. Villains who are villains simply because they’re evil.

One great thing about this movie is that it’s from the pre-political correctness era. There’s an evil female cop, which you probably wouldn’t get away with today. And there’s no GirlPower! stuff. Ingrid is allowed to be a woman. She’s allowed to need a man to protect her. And she actually likes having a man to protect her.

Stallone knew he wasn’t going to win an Oscar for this film. He doesn’t worry too much about acting, he just relies on his charisma. And his mirrorshades.

Brigitte Nielsen looks great and she’s likeable.

There’s no characterisation to speak of. It’s not exactly a profound character study.

The movie has an 80s aesthetic with occasional retro 40s touches. I love Cobra’s car, a big mean customised 1950 Mercury that looks like it belongs in a comic book. I want a car like this.

Cobra is a big dumb action movie and it delivers as much mayhem and excitement as any reasonable person could ask for. Don’t try to think about it because there’s nothing here to think about. Just grab a few beers and some popcorn. I enjoyed it immensely. Highly recommended.

Cobra looks terrific on Blu-Ray, and the disc includes quite a few extras.

Fast Company (1979)

Fast Company is a lighthearted romantic action thriller drag-racing drive-in movie directed by David Cronenberg. This is definitely not the sort of thing one associates with Cronenberg.

This is a Canadian movie shot entirely in Canada.

Cronenberg was just finding his feet as a director at this time. This is a movie he did for a pay cheque but he is in fact a drag-racing fan.

Lonnie Johnson (William Smith) is a well-known popular drag racer. He drives the fastest dragsters, the “fuelers” which run on nitromethane and alcohol. Or he did, until his car exploded. Now he has to drive a “funny car” (front-engined dragsters with fibreglass body shells). Which means that his protégé Billy Booker (known as Billy the Kid) misses out. Lonnie feels bad about this. He likes Billy. But Lonnie had no choice. He races for the FastCo team and his boss Phil Adamson (John Saxon) insists.

We know Adamson is going to be the bad guy because he’s played by John Saxon. And Saxon is in full-on nasty slimy super-villain mode.

Lonnie’s chief rival is Gary "The Blacksmith" Black (Cedric Smith). Gary resents Lonnie’s success but while he’s hyper-competitive we should not jump to the conclusion that he’s going to be a bad guy.

Lonnie’ girlfriend is Sammy (Claudia Jennings). She’d like him to give up racing and she knows he won’t but she loves him anyway.

Billy the Kid is sleeping with Candy (Judy Foster), who is a kind of drag racing equivalent of a Formula 1 grid girl. Adamson is trying to force her to sleep with clients.

Adamson has plans to get rid of Lonnie because Lonnie won’t grovel to him but he has to have a plausible justification for firing him.

It all comes to a head with a big race for the Funny Car championship.

There’s some satire here about the corrupting effects of commercialism in sport but FastCo is not a giant corporation. Adamson has a private plane but it’s not a LearJet. It’s a little single-engined Cessna. FastCo and Adamson are just not big enough or important enough to be truly sinister, which makes the satire lighthearted and amusing. Despite his ruthlessness and unscrupulousness Adamson is ridiculous rather than truly scary.

There’s plenty of cool drag racing action. There are crashes and there are exploding dragsters. Lonnie is nicknamed Lucky Man because of his extraordinary knack for walking away unscathed from spectacular crashes. There’s some suspense. There’s an over-the-top villain. There’s a bit of humour. There’s a lighthearted feelgood vibe. There’s some romance. There are bare boobs. This is a total drive-in movie.

One thing I like about it is that it takes these people seriously. Drag racing is their life. The movie isn’t mocking them. Lonnie isn’t a ridiculous figure. Sammy isn’t made to seem ridiculous for loving him. Candy isn’t made to seem ridiculous for loving Billy. These people have a passion and they follow it. They are doing what they love. Sammy respects Lonnie for that.

With motor racing there’s always the sneaking suspicion that the attraction for the spectators is the possibility of witnessing a fiery crash. It’s a kind of primitive ritual - men courting violent death. It’s a dance of death. It’s interesting that although on the surface Fast Company doesn’t seem at all Cronenbergian 17 years later Cronenberg would deal with similar themes in a very Cronenbergian way in Crash. And while Fast Company doesn’t deal with the erotic aspect of this attraction overtly we do see some very hot babes who are obviously at least to some extent keen to have sex with men who may be marked for death.

John Saxon is delightfully fiendish. William Smith makes a good sympathetic hero. He’s not perfect but basically he’s a good guy. Claudia Jennings, a fine actress, is very good but isn’t given enough to do.

Fast Company is a fine above-average drive-in movie.

This movie looks great on Blu-Ray.

Darkman (1990)

Darkman, released in 1990, was one of a number of comic book or comic book-inspired action movies made in the early to mid 90s. Other notable examples being Dick Tracy, The Rocketeer, The Shadow and The Phantom. All were expected to launch franchises but for various reasons this didn’t happen (although there were a couple of direct-to-video Darkman movies). Darkman was in fact commercially very successful.

Sam Raimi directed and co-wrote the script.

Genius scientist Dr Peyton Westlake (Liam Neeson) is working on a new type of synthetic skin. His girlfriend Julie Hastings (Frances McDormand) is a lawyer but despite this she’s one of the good guys. She has tumbled upon a corruption scandal involving property developer Louis Strack (Colin Friels). She has an incriminating memo. A bunch of goons led by the sinister Robert Durant (Larry Drake) break into Peyton’s laboratory and then blow it up. Peyton is assumed to have perished but he survived, horribly disfigured. His new synthetic skin invention won’t help because it’s unstable. It disintegrates after a short period of time.

The skin however can be useful as a temporary measure and Peyton uses it it to get his revenge.

An enormous amount of mayhem ensues.

This movie was not based on an actual comic book. It was an original story by Sam Raimi. Comic books were a very obvious influence, along with 1930s pulp novels such as The Shadow, 1930/40s movie serials and the Universal gothic horror movies of the 30s. Darkman certainly achieves an extraordinary comic-book vibe. And since it’s an original story there were no pesky rights issues to worry about.

It was also clearly an attempt to ride on the coat-tails of Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman mega-hit. Darkman has some traces of the urban gothic feel of Batman but it has a flavour of its own. It has an aesthetic perfectly suited to a comic-book movie.

Liam Neeson is an actor I’ve never thought about one way or the other. He’s fine here and does the brooding tragic thing well.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with Frances McDormand’s performance but it’s too bland for a movie such as this which demands larger-than-life performances.

This movie is dominated by its villains. Colin Friels is deliciously oily and slimy. Larry Drake as Durant is properly menacing and sadistic.

What distinguishes Darkman from the other comic book style movies of the 90s is that Raimi was coming from a horror background so it has more overt horror moments, and the Darkman makeup effects are genuinely gruesome.

What makes it fun is that the horror is combined with so much goofiness and so many hyperactive action scenes.

You’re not meant to take his movie even a tiny bit seriously. There’s a lot of black comedy. It’s all very tongue-in-cheek.

Some of the action scenes are amazingly silly and totally unbelievable but it doesn’t matter. This is the world of comic books. The crazier the action scenes the better, as long as they’re done with energy. And this movie has immense amounts of energy. The suspended-from-a-helicopter scenes are ludicrously over-the-top and implausible but comic book heroes can do those sorts of things.

Raimi had a modest budget to work with. Some of the special effects are a bit iffy but Raimi figured that if they were done at sufficiently breakneck pace it wouldn’t matter, and he was right.

The production design, given the limited budget, is impressive. This is a cool dark fantasy world.

Don’t bother giving any thought to the plot. It’s a standard revenge plot and it’s full of holes but if you have plenty of beer and popcorn on hand you won’t care. There is an attempt to add a tragic aspect to the story and that works quite well.

Darkman is just pure hyperkinetic crazy fun. Just sit back and enjoy the ride. Highly recommended.

Darkman looks pretty good on Blu-Ray.

Firing Line (1988)

Firing Line is a very cheap 1988 jungle war action movie. I’ve recently become interested in exploring Shannon Tweed’s filmography and her movies are not easy to find so when I saw this one on DVD I grabbed it. But this is definitely not a typical Shannon Tweed movie.

The setting is an unnamed Central American republic. An American Mark Hardin (Reb Brown) has been captured by government soldiers. We have no real idea who Mark Hardin is except for a brief hint that he may have been a mercenary. We know no idea why the government had him arrested and we never find out.

e don’t know anything about the government except that we seem to be expected to see them as the bad guys. There’s a tough hardbitten American guy working with the government. He might be an American military advisor ie he might be C.I.A. or he might be a mercenary. We’re never told.

He has some kind of connection with a cute blonde American girl, Sandra Spencer (Shannon Tweed). We don’t know who she is or where she came from or why she’s in Central America or how she came to know Mark Hardin. We never find out. The government is after her as well, but we never find out why.

Mark and Sandra join a rebel group in the jungle-covered hills. We never find out what cause the rebels are fighting for. We never find out why Mark Hardin joins them but we assume he was a mercenary working for the government and he had a falling out with them.

The rebels are attacked by government troops. There’s lots of shooting and explosions.

Mark helps the rebels to bust Montiero out of gaol. We never find out why Montiero was arrested or why it’s important to rescue him. There’s lots of shooting and explosions.

Then the rebels attack a military post. There’s lots of shooting and explosions.

Later the rebels try to capture the radio station, but the attack doesn’t seem to achieve anything apart from offering the opportunity for lots of shooting and explosions.

At one stage Mark and Sandra wander off into the woods for a bit of recreation. We get an unbelievably brief unbelievably tame totally passionless love scene.

Then there’s more action centred on a bridge, and more shooting and explosions.

I won’t tell you whether the good guys or the bad guys eventually win and to be honest you may not care very much.

There are two credited screenwriters but there’s nothing in this movie to suggest that it ever had what you might call an actual script. Or even an actual director. We don’t learn anything about the motivations of any of the characters. We don’t know why any of the events happen.

The acting is terrible. I’ve now seen four of Shannon Tweed’s movies and I think she’s quite a good actress (yes, really) but this is the weakest performance I’ve seen from her. It’s not her fault. Her part is horribly underwritten. Since Mark Hardin’s part is horribly underwritten as well it’s difficult for these two to get any chemistry going. Apart from their brief roll in the hay and a brief swimming scene we don’t have enough of an idea how they feel about each other. We don’t see any scenes of tenderness or playfulness between them. If we knew they were madly in love we’d be a bit more invested in the story.

This is a movie that desperately needed some nudity and sex not only to break the monotony but to convince us that there’s some real fire and passion between Mark and Sandra. And casting Shannon Tweed and not giving her any opportunity to be seductive and sexy is eccentric to say the least.

Another problem is that you have a cute blonde babe here but she’s never put into any real danger so Mark doesn’t get to do anything brave and heroic to rescue her. He also never seems in any real danger so we don’t get to see Sandra desperately worrying about her man’s safety.

The action scenes are lively and relentless although not terribly inspired. It’s like the same basic action scene endlessly repeated.

This really is a total zero of a movie.

But don’t let this put you off Shannon Tweed. Given a decent role she could be very effective and deliver some genuinely interesting performances. Check her out in Illicit Dreams and especially her delightfully twisted performance in the excellent A Woman Scorned.