The Van Dammeathon - "Black Eagle"

Ooooh boy.
That last one was something of a classic, a true cult film and a showcase for what the man and myth (and Canon) could do. Worlds started opening up for Van Damme at this point, his star began to climb: he was a man who could kick, and starred in a big action movie, there's always a space for that on the videostore shelves. This coincided with a rise in a supposed "Ninja Phenomenon" that I am thoughtlessly regurgitating here. To be fair, people were getting the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a lot of Godfrey Ho stuff was being pumped out, cartoons and shows seemed to have a ninja character, the classic "Neuromancer" told tales under a sky tuned to the channel of television static with a ninja bodyguard against the backdrop of "the rise of Japan" (a common thing in fiction of the 80s to be fair, Zaibatsus and "Japanese Superpower" are common tropes in cyberpunk.) Hell, I distinctly remember watching a movie on telly as a kid where a purple-clad ninja uses handguns to slide down the cable of a lift and I can never remember what it was, and may have hallucinated it. If you know which movie that is, I would be extremely grateful.

Credit: Rotten Tomatoes. Holy fuck it may be "The Phantom"!
The king of these was Sho Kosugi: he starred in the utterly ridiculous Canon trilogy of "Enter the Ninja", "Revenge of the Ninja" (the best one, a hilariously good trash time), and "Ninja 3: The Domination", and was something of a cult B-movie star of his own niche at the time (I like him in "Blind Fury" - that movie's fun if you get a chance). This is a vehicle for him, and for his son Kane Kosugi (who would later appear in "Cat's Eye", "Godzilla Final Wars" and "DOA: Dead or Alive" - fuck yeah), coming at the tail end of the ninja craze in 1988... Our man Van Damme gets to play the villain here!
I give you, after much preamble: "Black Eagle".

(Photo Credit: Rotten Tomatoes, and apparently every dad's video shelf)

So, the concept!
A plane goes down over Malta, and it has a missile guidance system aboard. The Americans want it, but so do the Russians. The Russians (under Colonel Klimenko) have sent their best man (our boy!) Andrei to retrieve it; so does CIA bigwig Rickert (William Bassett)

(Jim Houseman from "Metal Gear Solid"! He only died last year, bloody hell. RIP Dude.)
Not to be outdone: they need to send their best man: Ken "Black Eagle" Tani (Sho Kosugi) to go get it, but he's on his mandatory holiday with his kids: thus they scoop up his two sons (Kane and Shane Kosugi, no notes on naming your children there Sho: perfect) to join him in Malta, make a holiday of it, and beat the Russians to the prize! He is accompanied by a reticent former agent/priest (Bruce French) and a current agent (Doran Clark), on a wacky Bond-esque race to the jet!
This fucking sucks as a premise. If you told me this was a knock-off of a knock-off (like a Weng Weng movie, or an Italian copyright case waiting to happen), which had somehow found its way to the desk of Sho Kosugi's agent, I'd believe you. I'm 400% certain that Kosugi did this not to make a family comedy or spy movie, but to hang out with his kids, so it gets a point for that:

But when I'm getting a Sho Kosugi movie, I at least want a premise where I am guaranteed he'll kick some ass, especially if I'm doing a Van Damme movie night and the premise is "he's the goon." But more on that later.
Concept: 2 (I'm generous because him being with his kids is wholesome)
Execution.
Fuck me.

Alright, aside from summing it up with that admittedly awesome image, I'll let you know now that that colour grade and tone is what you're in for. This film commits the worst possible sin, particularly for "dad-violence" action movies and Van Damme kick-athons with Sho Kosugi as a super spy, in that it's incredibly dull. We mostly have half-hearted "Casino Royale" spy shenanigans in the hotel, and the action sequences are Sho Kosugi luring a guy round a corner, shivving him, and maybe a half-finished martial arts fight WITHOUT MUSIC. I have taken the liberty of taking screen shots for you here:

Hell yeah, right?!
That comes an hour and ten minutes in, lasts maybe a minute, and isn't even the final fight. The majority of the movie is this:

And then shots of Malta.
Plus it makes other weird choices too: our hencheman Andrei (Van Damme) keeps flirting with a nice lady on the Russian boat, and they seem to get along! He seduces her, and they get to hook up, but then in the finale (spoilers I guess) he saves her life when the boat explodes, and there's been this whole "honorable henchman" fight going on between him and Kosugi, the kind of thing which is part and parcel in these movies (immaculately done in "Hard Boiled" and "The Raid"), only for Kosugi to attach Andrei to a boat propellor and mince him in the water, and for the love interest to scream. It's weirdly off-kilter and unpleasant.
And our hero finds the plane 45 minutes in, gets the thing and gives it to Rickert, and the mission should be over! Only Rickert pulls a new objective out of his arse, the two kids get sent home (thus even tossing out the potential conflict of Kosugi having to go and do spy stuff in time to get back to his holiday with kids he doesn't see enough of, which the movie has been attending with the effort of an AI advocate writing something) and the movie spins its wheels further, remembering that we're supposed to have a battle between martial artists at some point.

Stellar work, straight out of the choreography of a Danny Dyer fight in a car park.
The closest I get to good filmaking is the beginning when we get a contrast between the CIA outpost and the KGB ones:

They look like a poorer, grittier outpost (likely a result of the lower budget) and then we meet Rickert in a restaurant ordering wine. I'll fucking take it.
Execution: 1.
Charm.
Okey dokey, there are a couple of... standouts.

Aside from that, I do get a little bit of glee from seeing the most conspicuous henchmen yet, pictured here spying on the heroes in the airport of Malta:

Brilliant, I kind of respect the audacity there, that's actually a baller move. Just you guys wait, we have an entry coming later which is even more brazen...
I suppose we do get Van Damme chasing Sho with a bit of wood ala Shaun's stepdad Phillip after 2 kicks and some circling 20 seconds into their fight, which does make me giggle:

The finest in "kids on the playground" choreography.
Charm: 2.

Villain Time!
i cannot remember the name of the main villain, or even if he died at the end, and I am writing the review... I suppose Van Damme plays the villain's henchman, but there isn't enough of him:

Him, and the bit of wood are the best bits to me, you can watch his scenes online, and your cup of tea will still not have finished brewing.
Villain: 1.
So the score stands at 6.
Bonus points round!
We get splits:

And here:

There is a sex scene, but Van Damme doesn't get his arse out, so what's the point? And there are no other collaborators: he never worked with Kosugi again, which is a shame, they deserved a chance to kick some ass.
Final Score: 7.
A disappointing effort, and a stumbling block in terms of potential, but they can't all be winners, and I'm glad we're getting them out of the way early...

"Wasteman" - Review

Taylor (David Jonsson) is an inmate working in the prison kitchens, informed that he is eligible for early release due to the strain on the system. As he prepares for release, and keeps his head down, he is given a new cellmate in the form of Dee (Tom Blyth) - an impulsive, violent, arrogant man intent on becoming the new contraband master of the cells.

(Credit: Big Issue)
A remarkable, tense prison movie. It opens on a 70s wide shot of the bars Taylor peers out of, and some harrowing mobile phone footage of a beating, so we know exactly what we are in for. Jonsson, basically proving himself to be "cheat mode" for actors, continues his home run of diverse, interesting, fantastic performances with a nuanced, physical squirrelly Taylor. As always he is fantastic. The film is simultaneously a well-written boiling point movie (from writers Eoin Doran and Hunter Andrews), with impeccable use of mobile phone and surveillance footage to add a gritter, seedier look at the grit behind bars (but never grit for the sake of it: the opening is genuinely nasty and unpleasant but establishes the sky-high stakes of messing with the sneering Paul, a change of pace for Alex Hassell, and Gaz played by Corin Silva with a subtler unpredictability; whilst the anarchic nihilism of people "on the album tour of the wings" and showing off machetes is such specific absurdity that it must be from a real story); and also a damning look at the prison system: unerstaffing, crumbling infrastructure, rampant drug use and no time to care or stop anything due to the underpayment (I liked the little detail of a guard finishing his packet of crisps with resignation as an alarm goes off, cutting off his break) and understaffing. It's a grimy, gritty, lower budget fare, and the escalation is brilliant, handled impeccably by director Cal McMau and carried effortlessly by Jonsson.
For me, however, a true sign of talent was Tom Blyth: an actor who managed to go toe-to-toe, blow-for-blow, scene for scene with David Jonsson is not only worthy of respect and admiration, but paying atention to for the future. He makes Dee not simply terrifying, unpredictable and genuinely a force of menace on screen whom you know is lurking in the alleyways of less-privileged neighbourhoods without resorting to anything cartoony, but he and the other more feral bastards' moments of humanity imbue with with a darker, horrifying amplification of their menace: he genuinely looks out for Taylor when he finds out he has a son, you can see them actually maybe one day being friends, and he has tears in his eyes when he is asked what he did to be placed behind bars; is it a remorse, or a realisation that he has placed himself in a death spiral and is losing the humanity he sees in Taylor? Impeccable lightning rod performances from both he and Jonsson, the best of the year so far aside from maybe Rose Byrne.
A brutal, gruelling watch, and an audacious debut which I will not watch again for some time.

"If I Had Legs I'd Kick You" - Review of a Waking Nightmare

Therapist Linda (Rose Byrne) is struggling to take her awful daughter (who requires a feeding tube) to hospital appointments whilst her husband is away, whilst a hole opens up in her flat and the landlord cannot be arsed to fix it, and her clients are getting ever needier and clingier...

(Photo Credit: The New Yorker)
Rose Byrne is quite rightly gettign acclaim for this: a white knuckle stress cascade, where the entire world is buffetting you. She's utterly mesmerising in this, and the praise is well earned. I've liked Rose Byrne for a while, and seeing her cut loose? Fantastic. The film itself is also incredibly well-made: tight enclosed corridors, lots of close ups, a wickedly dark sense of humour, never seeing the daughter's face (much like in "Good Boy") because she's not a person: she's a presence, an all consuming void, a FUCKING NIGHTMARE (seriously: Linda is woman worthy of "Mother of the Year" Award for not murdering this wretched goblin) and the choke around her neck she must pretend to be proud of living for with gritted teeth. The countless injustices and minor annoyances and great problems piled upon her like the cloaks of Draco in mythos never feel like a misery porn parade, and more like a stress wildfire burning through the soul: oh COME THE FUCK ON! WHAT NOW?! It's twisting and turning and unpredictable, and Rose Byrne is remarkably good at keeping us on Linda's side throughout, how she doesn't die of stress-induced heart attacks is a miracle. An excellent film about the impossible decks stacked against working mothers in society.
Fun to see Christian Slater (doing a pretty good Albert Brooks impression), A$AP Rocky, Ivy Wolk from "Anora" and, for some bloody reason, Conan O'Brien too!
I want to kill that child with a shoe.
It's the sort of horror which challenges and confronts you: it makes me question my kneejerk decisions and reactions, examine the depths of a soul..
Don't watch "Scream 7".
Watch something which is art for the sake of art.

"Little Amelie or the Character of Rain" - Review

Amelia is born in a vegetative state. As she dreams and wonders, life goes on for her parents and two siblings. One day, aged 3, she awakens.

(Credit: imdb)
Beautifully animated, with parts of Amelie's world looking like crayon drawings done by a child, and with an excellently edited sequence in a kitchen as a parallel to a character's story as she cooks, for example: it's a rather pretty film.
Unfortunately the film succumbs to the worst of its precocious child impulses after straddling two lanes for too long: we open on the child describing herself as God, and how God is a cylinder, then she awakens and is internally furious that her Godlike impulses are not indulged. It's an interesting start to proceedings, and makes one curious about the existentialism which may follow, but then the film settles into a standard coming-of-age story, but with the backdrop of expats in rural Japan. That story doesn't settle or thrive as much as it should, through the eyes of a precocious child, and thus the promised existentialism and longing and loss when people leave their life never soars, and instead comes off as middle class whining. It has a lovely score, and a few nice pieces of symbolism, and the story is clearly personal to the author, but could have been so much more.

"Crime 101" - Review

A jewel thief is committing robberies along the 101 Highway in Los Angeles. Mike (Chris Hemsworth) doesn't use violence, is meticulous, and always hits high value targets. His story collides with the burnt out aging Lou (Mark Ruffalo), a detective unravelling and becoming obsessed with the robberies as his own life falls apart; and that of Sharon (Halle Berry): an insurance broker hitting a brick wall in her life. With another job on the horizon, and a new thief (Barry Keoghan) also on the loose, Mike's perfectly planned little world begins to come apart...

(Credit: Showcase Cinemas)
It's nothing you've not seen before, but the execution is astounding. Director Bart Layton (weirdly NOT adapting Don Westlake, as I thought from the trailer, as it feels very much like an adaptation of "Parker") throws "Thief" (a LOT of that movie), "The Driver", "Drive", "Heat" and any other number of cops and robbers movies into a blender and hits puree. The ingredients are familiar (Ruffalo's detective is a pile of cliches heaped into a suit, Nick Nolte unfortunately shows up to grumble-mumble his way through a scene, Barry Keoghan plays the psychotic young upstart who changes the game), with a brilliantly composed thief unable to make human connections and a cop on the edge whilst "one last job" brews and our thief meets a girl and yadda-yadda... But the result is actually fantastically well shot and put together: lots of parallel edits, Mike shot in boxes and lines to match his possible future in prison and his orderly life, little details to flesh out the characters and their worlds, touches and flourishes, great lighting and use of mood and atmosphere. Despite mentally ticking off a list of things I'd logged and registered, I felt my butthole puckered tight during the finale as it genuinely gripped me and threw a few curveballs in the last act. Keoghan steals the show with a fantastic brazen daylight robbery, a pink motorcycle jacket and a great chase; but Ruffalo and Berry really worked in the leads and elevated their characters, whilst Hemsworth suits this nicely. Jennifer Jason Leigh is utterly wasted in a thankless 2 scene role.
I enjoyed this more than I thought.

"Send Help" - But Not For Me!

Underappreciated, underfucked and underestimated for the last time, meek "Planning and Strategy" lady Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) is at the end of her rope when her consultancy firm's new shithead boss Bradley Preston (Dylan O'Brien) passes her over for the promotion promised to her by his father, in favour of one of his dickhead friends in braces. When a flight they are on runs aground, however, and both Linda and Bradley are the only survivors, the tables turn as Linda reveals just how capable she is...

(Photo credit: Bedford Playhouse)
I've missed you Sam Raimi, you son of a bitch.
His first directorial effort since "Dr Strange and the Multiverse of Madness" (which I honestly would not have known was a Raimi movie had you not told me: what was the point in getting him to do it if you were sanding off the edges and having him make placeholder stuff? I know why, "name" and "brand!" fucking Disney), it has the halmarks and tricks I love from him.
We get a focus in the intro on details, closeups of eyes and mouths and noses and bits of food left over; we get an utterly twisted, bloody, wicked sense of humour; Looney Toons violence, that swooping camera shot we know him for, even a Bruce Campbell cameo! All it's missing is Ted Raimi, and is all the lesser for it, though we do get his daughter! Sam's, not Ted's. We're all daughters of Ted.
Rachel McAdams is a fucking delight in this, relishing the material, tearing into the flesh of the character as she evolves and devolves, a true gift for an actor. Dylan O'Brien is a fucking shithead and Pantomime evil in this, and I respect the excellent job he does. I'm not familiar with his work but great job man! Raimi embraces the turns and twists of the script, which would otherwise be a joke in the wrong hands, and goes helter-skelter with it. This is stupendous, bloody fun and I had an excellent time. My cinema was crowded and howling, loving life.
Two guys behind me went "oh FUCK YOU Sam, we should have seen that coming" with glee and affection. He's been missed.
And great use of Blondie, even if it's not "Dreaming".
Rachel McAdams fights a boar, film of the year.

"Iron Lung" - Review

The stars have gone out. As humanity's fleshy remnants corrode, a convict (Mark Fischbach) is sealed into a metal submarine and set forth onto a mysterious world where the oceans are made of blood, in order to find something, anything which could save them...

(Credit: The Equinox)
A passon project written by, starring and directed by Mark Fischbach (a YouTuber known as "Markiplier", whose work I am unfamiliar with) who funded it himself (refreshingly and unusually: there are no production logos at the start, it's straight into the opening credits after the BBFC logo) and insisted on a cinematic release. Good for him, this is a triumph of the underdog and independent art: it's doing well, and is clearly a passion project for him.
As a directorial debut it's overly long, far too bloated, and Fischbah does not have a great grasp of tension, so the pacing is dog rough and leads to boredom rather than any rising dread. I for one was a sucker for the "Poltergeist" TV shot however. Fischbach is a fair actor, far better than expected for a YouTube content monkey, and acquits himself well enough, but is not strong enough for a premise such as this, though he does a solid enough job with a monologue towards the end. The support are fine (you can tell Troy Baker is in this because he advocates yanking a ladder up) with Caroline Rose Kaplan doing rather well, and the low budget is used impeccably: it's the kind of filmmaking I respect right there, well done. Andrew Hulshult's soundtrack is understated and rather good.
The film's cosmic horror and yo-yoing between genres feels less like unpredictability and more throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. Funnily enough this creates an inverse problem of most modern horror movies in that the build up is tedious and uninspiring, but the ending blows it out of the park with the kind of madness and horror I would expect and need from a project like this. It does some Gibson-esque world building with a couple of its lines (not quite "They set a slamhound on Turner’s trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair." or "flew a Gullfire over the fires of Leningrad" but things about the last tree burning for example are good) and uses the cost-saving lower budget aesthetic to build a world where humanity is on its last legs. However it wants to have its cake and eat it too: a casualty of the overlong runtime. It could strip back the dialogue and leave things to stew and dwell, but also does flashbacks and conversations which aren't as fleshed out as they should be, like trying to split the metaphors of a difference engine.
However.
As a debut project it is certainly ambitious, and more interesting to discuss than most. I always appreciate a swing and a miss more than something playing it safe.
There are enough sparks of interesting ideas here (the details of the submarine and processes of his investigation are highlights: they feel like an adventure game, and show a twinkle of craft) that I would like to see Fischbach (who seems like a lovely bloke, and I am ELATED somebody with as large a platform as he seems to have supporting cinema and art) move forward as a filmmaker. Would I buy it on DVD? Probably not. Would I urge you to support this art which seems to be resonating with a huge fanbase (and honestly if it gets them into any sort of smaller budget bottle movie horror and cosmic ideas or hell, gets somebody to watch the very reminiscent "Event Horizon" then fan-fucking-tastic) and is an earnest expression of a person in their form? Absolutely. This is the kind of art we need. I didn't like it, found it quite weak in fact, but holy hell what a swing. Good for you man!