Barbarians, swords, sorcery and sandals - Part 1

I needed to watch some barbarian and sword & sorcery movies for a project I'm working on, so I bought 11 more or less classics from the genre. That being the 80's Conan copies and of course the Conan movies themselves. Here's my thoughts on the first six of them in no particular order. As a warning for the fans of this genre, I must say I'm not a big fan of them so don't hold it against me if I fail to see the greatness of some of these movies.













Red Sonja (1985)

Brigitte Nielsen is Red Sonja, a master sword swinger who seeks revenge on the evil queen who killed her family. The queen has also stolen a magical orb with destructive powers and Red Sonja tries to retrieve it. Joining her in this adventure is Arnold Schwarzenegger as Kalidor, a warrior on a quest to destroy the orb. They are also joined by an annoying kid prince and his servant, serving as the comic sidekicks I guess. This movie follows very predictable paths, bit of sword swinging and adventure with of course a bit of romance in there as well. The acting is quite bad most of the time, but then again the cast is there for their looks not because of their acting talents. I guess the real reason this movie was made was that Brigitte Nielsen looked hot in that tight warrior outfit. Highlights of this movie was Ennio Morricone's music, but unfortunately not much else. At parts the movie gets so bad it becomes funny, but then it just becomes bad again, so can't really recommend it as a campy fun movie either. Anyway it had it's moments and kept me somewhat entertained despite it's flaws.
40%

The Blade Master (1984)

From a barbarian movie by Joe D'Amato you'd expect quite a bit of sexploitation. Much to my surprise there was basically none, if you don't count the nice outfit of Mila. Well anyway, this is a bad movie and unfortunately it's not the kind which turns into great comedy for being so bad, so I won't waste much time for it. Apparently this is a sequel for Ator the Fighting Eagle (1982), though absolutely nothing is this one made me want to see what the first, or the third for that matter, are about. Ator (Miles O'Keeffe) is this some sort of a great warrior who is living at the far edge of the world which seems to be about a day away from everywhere. One day Mila (Lisa Foster) brings bad news about his mentor who is captured by a bad guy named Zor (David Brandon). So off they go with their mute Asian sidekick, funnily named Thong (Kiro Wehara), to rescue the mentor. Bad effects, horrible acting and a nonsense plot follows. A few scenes cracked me up in laughter, like the snake fight and the hang gliding scene with those hand grenades for example, but mostly the only excitement this movie offered was watching the incredibly short skirt of Mila. So it's not really anything more than just a bad movie. I'm just wondering why did someone make this in the first place? Why did someone finance this horrible excuse of a movie? Why did someone release it as a DVD? And most of all why did I buy it? Well luckily it was cheap, but I'd still rather have my 3.95 back and most importantly my one and a half hours back.
10%

Ironmaster (1983)

Umberto Lenzi is more known from his violent crime movies and cannibal films, but like most Italian exploitation directors, he too wanted to cash in with the success of Conan the Barbarian (1982) and this is what he made. It's basically not a barbarian movie as it's a story about cave men who discover iron, but the themes are quite barbarian. Vood (George Eastman) kills his tribe leader and the hero of the movie, Ela (Sam Pasco), drives him out of the tribe. But Vood discovers an iron blade and comes back to claim the leadership of the tribe by force. Then Ela is cast out while Vood decides to take rule over all of the neighboring tribes. Ela then joins forces with a peace loving tribe of hippies and they of course have a bloody battle. That's the story in a nut shell, but there's plenty more than that. There's lions, men in monkey costumes, disease ridden people who look like zombies and of course the horribly bad acting. The fights are clumsy as usual but this time, this one being an Umberto Lenzi movie, there's some gore effects to spice things up a bit. The music was quite horrible and annoyingly repetitive. For most parts this was just a bad movie, but there were quite a few absolutely brilliant moments that were so horribly bad they were great comedy. So I must say I was surprisingly entertained and in the end this was quite an ok campy trash movie.
48%

The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982)

This is the first feature length movie of Albert Pyun, the self proclaimed master of cheap b-class action movies. True to his filmography and the genre in question this movie is not good either. The story in this one goes something like this, an evil guy called Cromwell (Richard Lynch) resurrects an evil sorcerer just to kill him moments later. Then Cromwell goes on to kill the king and become the king himself. The son and the daughter of the king escape and years later try to take over the kingdom from Cromwell. There's some twists I guess I shouldn't mention in order to not spoil it, even though I wouldn't really recommend watching this movie in the first place. It clearly shows that Pyun is trying to go for the feel of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) with the hero, the music, the dialog and the action, but of course missing the mark by a mile. Though I must say the hero, played by Lee Horsley, was by far the best thus far out of these movies, well at least he tries to bring some comedy into it if nothing else. There are some scenes which were absolutely brilliant in how idiotic they were. For example a scene where an evil jailer gets his head slowly pushed into a grinding wheel which is powered by his own legs. Still makes me laugh to think about it, I mean if your head is about to get grinded out maybe it would be wise to stop pedalling the damn thing. Anyway that's just one example, there are more of those, but unfortunately they are few and far between. So in the end this is not really worth watching, unless you want to waste your time on garbage for a few hilarious scenes.
36%

The Warrior and the Sorceress (1984)

Thus far this is the only movie I might consider leaving to my collection out of this bunch. Don't get me wrong, this is a bad movie, but it's so bad it's simply hilarious. The story is basically a copy of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961), this time set on planet Ura. Two groups are fighting over the control of a village's only water well, in comes a strange warrior called Kain (David Carradine) who has other plans for the village. You can guess the rest. Anyway, the fighting was bad, the tits were plenty, the acting horrible, the creatures were oddly cute, the effects hilarious, the dialog ridiculous and did I mention the tits already? The movie is horribly edited, it looked like someone did some cuts to the final print of the movie as even the music cuts from time to time and not only between scenes, but within a scene as well. Though that only helped the goofy feeling of the movie. I must say I wasn't bored and I did get some nice laughs, even though I kind of doubt I'll be watching this one again any time soon. Maybe I'll save this one for some hangover morning in the future.
65%

Can't find a linkable trailer for this one, so here's the opening credits, for what ever that's worth...

Deathstalker (1983)

Deathstalker (Rick Hill) is a sword swinging warrior whose goals in life are to have sex with as many ladies as possible and to obtain the three powers of creation. He gets one power, a sword, from an old witch, the other two are held by an evil magician Munkar (Bernard Erhard) who just so happens to arrange a big tournament where the winner gets them. So Deathstalker heads to the tournament and is joined by Kaira (Lana Clarkson) a warrior woman in probably the most ridiculous and sexist outfits I've ever seen. That's about all there is to the story, some sword swinging and plenty of tits to follow. I must say the entertainment values were quite high in this movie, especially during the first half, but unfortunately the second half focuses too much on the story and the sword fights, which of course are not much to go with. Apart from the outfit of Kaira there were quite a few hilariously weird moments, for example a funny sex scene which might give homophobes some very bad nightmares. All in all this was an ok bad movie, had some good laughs and it kept me entertained throughout. Though in the end there are so many better good bad movies out there that this one will just vanish in the vast averageness.
50%

That's it for the first part, the second part with the Conan movies and a few other 80's exploitation flicks, will follow eventually when I get the time and mood to watch them. Might end up watching the Conan remake as well, but don't hold your breath for it.

There's something fishy going on in Detroit

Crimewave (1985)

A movie written by Joel and Ethan Coen, directed by Sam Raimi and starring Bruce Campbell and Brion James amongst others must be good, right? Well not exactly, but one crazy goofball comedy it surely is. Vic (Reed Birney) is a convict on his way to the electric chair, as the officers are dragging him to meet his maker he is screaming for innocence. Then we are told as a flashback a devious tale of deception and murder, in the form of an action packed slapstick comedy. Sam Raimi himself wants to disown this movie and reading about the troubles he went through while making it, I can't blame him. Having his lead actor, editor and composer replaced by the studio is not exactly a great way to make a movie. Anyway this movie is not as bad as it at start seems. The cartoon-like over acting is a bit tedious and as it's boosted with wacky sound effects it goes so much over the top I didn't know wether to laugh or cry. But as the story goes over the top as well, it turns into a quite an entertaining goofball comedy. The acting is rather bad, though mostly deliberately so. The soundtrack is quite annoying at times and the silly sound effects didn't help it at all. But the movie looks quite good and manages to set a great mood for the crazy things happening on the screen. That's the reason why this movie squeezes above the average of it's kind.
66%

The pains of growing up as a wallflower

The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)

I guess I'm not the target audience for these high school coming of age movies, but that didn't stop me from watching this one as I had heard quite a many good comments about it. It's a story about Charlie (Logan Lerman), a quiet introverted freshman who becomes friends with Patrick (Ezra Miller) and Sam (Emma Watson) who pretty much teach him to live his life. That's it in short, of course there's the first love and the usual things you'd expect from a movie like this. Great thing about this one is that it handles some darker themes of life in middle of it all, but that's also the biggest problem of this movie. There's just too many themes squeezed into it so most of them end up staying way too superficial. So the themes of mental illness, child abuse, suicide, drugs and so on are just scratched a bit on the surface in hopes of trying to give depth to this otherwise quite light hearted drama. Another problem was that I couldn't really relate to anyone in this movie, I mean sure school life and growing up is rather universal and easy to relate to, but the people felt very distant to me, so it left me more as a bystander. Though that wasn't such a big problem as the movie was still quite entertaining and well made. It pushes the right buttons at the right times. The cast was quite ok, nothing to complain about them. Tom Savini as the shop teacher was quite a nice surprise. I bet people closer to the high school age will get more out of this movie than I did, but at least I wasn't bored, even though it didn't rock my world either.
65%

Harrison Ford lost in Paris

Frantic (1988)

Funnily enough this is one of the best thrillers ever made but it's also one of the dumbest ones as well. Roman Polanski knows how to build tension and the story telling is the best part of this movie. Too bad the story is so ridiculously unbelievable that I just can't watch this one with a straight face. I need to spoil it a bit, but believe me it doesn't affect the viewing much at all as you'll still see a technically brilliant thriller and how idiotic the story is, even if you know the part which kind of makes the whole movie seem ridiculous. It's of course the whole elaborate plan of switching suitcases to smuggle something into the country but then instead of switching them back they rather kidnap the wife and of course without telling the husband about it, so he's left there to figure things out himself. I mean come on, that feels almost like an insult towards the intelligence of the viewer or then the bad guys are deliberately portrayed as idiots, which would be kind of like saying that your movie is not worth taking seriously. Either way, that's the downfall of this movie. And it's a shame as otherwise this one is a brilliant Hitchcockian thriller. Harrison Ford is great as the doctor lost in Paris while trying to find his wife and Emmanuelle Seigner is a perfect counter part for him. That with Polanski's style and great score by Ennio Morricone make this a highly enjoyable thriller. Too bad I just can't see past the stupid plot on this one, especially since the movie reminds you of it in every turn on the way.

67%

There's more to Sharon Stone's crotch than meets the eye

Basic Instinct (1992)

This movie is funny because the only thing that everyone seems to remember about it is Sharon Stone's crotch. And to be honest after so many years since I last saw it, that's about all I could remember as well. So as I just watched Showgirls (1995) I thought it's about time to give this one another try as I remember I didn't really like it when I last saw it back in the 90's. Well turns out there's quite a bit more to this than Sharon Stone's crotch, though I didn't remember how brilliant that scene actually was, hilariously genius moment. Anyway this turned out to be quite a gripping thriller and definitely kept me guessing all the way to the end. Funnily enough I didn't even remember who the murderer was, but Sharon Stone's crotch I couldn't forget, go figure... Another thing I noticed was that the nudity wasn't as explicit as I remembered, I guess it has just become more common in the movies since the early 90's so a movie like this doesn't have as strong of an impact anymore as it most likely had back then. I also didn't remember that Sharon Stone did a brilliant performance in this one, probably the best of her career right after Casino (1995). So I did enjoy this one a lot more this time around as I did back then, but it's not without problems. Even though Sharon Stone is brilliant and Michael Douglas was quite ok as well, the supporting cast is rather bad. Jeanne Tripplehorn as a psychiatrist was about as believable as a flying cow and George Dzundza as Gus was surprisingly weak as well. But with the sometimes not that great acting I can live with, it's the story which is the weakest point in this movie. It's highly interesting with plenty of twists to keep you entertained, but if you stop to think about it for even a second you can see that it's full of huge plot holes. In that light all the twists take a bit of unintentionally comic theme on them and that waters down the thriller part quite badly. With a bit more effort on the plot holes and a better supporting cast this would actually be a brilliant thriller. Now it's just above the average mostly because of a few single scenes and Sharon Stone's performance which live up to higher standards than the rest of the movie.

65%

The Bronx Warriors Trilogy

When movies like The Warriors (1979), Mad Max (1979) and Escape from New York (1981) hit gold at the box office, Italy was soon to answer the call for “post apocalyptic” movies. Enzo G. Castellari was the one who brought us this series here for what ever that's worth.

The Bronx Warriors (1982)

Well this movie is bad, but it's so bad it's actually not bad as it's so funny. The plot is pretty much nonsense, the idea is that in the near future, which was 1990, the Bronx has been turned into a free zone for the criminals where the gangs can roam free and the police rather stay out of there. One day a woman (Stefania Girolami) escapes from some corporate conspiracy into Bronx and ends up stirring things into an all out war between the different gangs. The main gang of this movie is The Riders, who are supposed to be this motorcycle gang and the ruling authority down there, but most of them look like your average office workers dressed in denim and leather. Apparently some of them were played by the real Hell's Angels and indeed some of the lesser characters look quite believable, but anyone with a few lines dialogue is most certainly not. Their leader is Trash (Mark Gregory). He's supposed to be this fearless leader, but he looks more like a gay kid who forgot the butt plug from last night still in his ass which makes him prance around like a fairy. And it didn't really help that he's also crying like a little girl. The other “gangs” are just as hilarious. There's the “gentlemen” gang, dressed in fancy clothing and who seem to be surprisingly wealthy for a slum like this. There's the roller skating hockey gang, which just leaves you wondering how do they get around this ruined city with their small skates. There's a tap dancing gang wearing flashy costumes and makeup who of course fight with only dance maneuvers. Then there's some pale faced zombie gang with with nothing but wooden planks as weapons. Not to forget the all leather wearing police forces in motorcycle helmets wielding flamethrowers while riding on horses. So yes, it's crazy. It's cheaply made which shows in many places, but then again that only adds to the camp values of it all. The acting is from crap to horrible and the fighting isn't much better. Luckily there were some nice gore effects to keep the entertainment values up. Even though I wasn't bored watching this as a campy fun ride, I must say it still wasn't a good movie. So as a proper post apocalyptic action movie it's just garbage and as a fun campy trash flick it's just ok.

52%

Escape from the Bronx (1983)

As the first part seemed to do a decent business on the box office, Castellari didn't waste time with the sequel and actually made two of them a year after the original. Even though the other one wasn't a direct sequel, it's still in the same category. Anyway, this time it's complete extermination as the corporate folk decide to clean up the Bronx, by killing everyone of course. Trash is unfortunately back, though this time he doesn't seem as feminine as in the first one, but it's not exactly a great improvement. His parents get killed so he decides to take revenge by kidnapping the president of the corporation tearing down the Bronx, in hopes of holding him hostage for the freedom of the Bronx. He's joined by a pre-school explosives expert and his dad. The story is ridiculous to say the least, but again that's not the main thing, it's the campy exploitative fun of it all. I must say the action was well in hand in this one, the body count must be close to 200 in this movie. So that combined with the horrible acting and the ridiculous plot ensure that the entertainment values are high with this one. The music was horribly 80's disco-like electronic beats which was rather annoying most of the time. Even though this was worse than the original I still enjoyed this more. Go figure...

63%

The New Barbarians (1983)

This is actually the only part which is post apocalyptic as in the previous two the “apocalypse” was merely a decay in the Bronx, but this one it's an actual nuclear winter aftermath. And to be honest it doesn't have much to do with the other two, except the general idea of ripping off these post apocalyptic box office hits. But as it's in The BronxWarriors Trilogy and done by Castellari, that's why it's here as well. The story in this one is like from any spaghetti western, the setting are just futuristic instead of the old west. A group of bandits, called Templars, are terrorizing the people who are trying to build another civilization after the nuclear apocalypse. Scorpion (Giancarlo Prete) is a lone wanderer with a righteous mind who gets mixed up in the mess and well you basically can guess the rest. But it's the little things that made me have a constant “what the fuck?” expression on my face. The costumes are ridiculous with their over the top shoulder toppings and especially the transparent armors were more than weird. The Templars, who are all men for obvious reasons, blame literature for the apocalypse and seemingly just want to kill everyone still alive. They also seem to be an openly gay society as raping a woman is not their ball park, but raping a man is a group event, good for them I guess. The props are just silly, the cars look like modified golf carts and the laser rifles are standard M-16's shooting fireballs. So it's clear the budget was small, luckily most of it went to the explosions and gore effects so the entertainment values are good. I must say I was quite disappointed in the soundtrack by Claudio Simonetti, usually his name is a guarantee for something good, but this time it was a miss. This movie has tons of unintentionally funny moments which made me laugh out loud. Especially the not so subtle hint at the end where the butt raped hero seemingly rejects a woman who fancies him but instead takes the hand of a young boy left me quite troubled. I really hope I misunderstood the meaning. I'd say this is the best out of the three, at least it's the funniest, though that doesn't mean it's a great movie no matter how you see it.

66%

Like always with these ripoffs, there's plenty of other unofficial sequels as well, like Endgame - Bronx lotta finale (1983), Bronx Executioner (1989) and others as well, but I'll leave those to another time, after all there's only so much I can take of bad movies at once.

The fury of the damned camera

Baba Yaga - Kiss Me Kill Me (1973)

Weird would be an understatement for this movie. I most likely had a constant “what the fuck?” expression on my face while watching this one. These “fumetti” (Italian term for comics for adults) adaptations were very popular in the late 60's and early 70's and this movie is among the better ones of it's kind. The movie starts out with probably the weirdest scene I have ever seen, I still can't understand what it was about, but there's some half naked people playing Native-Americans and some cowboys driving in cars killing each other and some Jesus impersonator burning American flag until the police come to stop it all. I guess it was some kind of reality theater or something, all I know is I couldn't understand it at all. Anyway that's soon forgotten after the titles and the actual story is about Valentina (Isabelle De Funes), a photographer who gets her camera spellbound by a witch called Baba Yaga (Carroll Baker). The people who get photographed by the camera seem to end up hurt or dead. Then there's Arno (George Eastman) a director friend of Valentina and a living doll called Annette, played by the great Ely Galleani. And then things get very weird, can't say much about it in fear of spoiling it, but then again I didn't really understand most of it anyway so I guess it doesn't matter one way or the other. Anyway I really liked the haunting mood of the movie and the seemingly nonsense script actually made it even more intense. The movie looked great and there's some very nice shots as you'd expect from Italian genre films, but the use of music surprisingly wasn't that impressive. I mean it wasn't bad, but definitely not great either. This Shameless release of the film was a bit confusing as it's a restored director's cut of the movie and it's made mainly from an English print and the cut parts are added from a lesser quality Italian print with an Italian soundtrack. So from time to time the picture quality goes down and people just start to talk Italian and then switch back to English. It's actually not as distracting as it sounds, even though it was extremely notable, after all it's better to see the director's original vision than some cut done by a studio. Fumetti friends will get more out of this movie than I did, I was surely intrigued and mostly entertained throughout it, but in the end it left me with a ton of questions and not much else to go with.

69%

The return of the buzzz

The Texas ChainsawMassacre 2 (1986)

I wanted to watch this one again after seeing the unbelievably bad Texas Chainsaw 3D (2013) to see if this was as funny as I remembered. As there's so many versions of this one, I got the “Gruesome Edition” which should be the one Tobe Hooper intended to have. Well it wasn't as good as I remembered, but it wasn't bad either. It continues some years after the original, the family is back in business again but this time they have a lieutenant (Dennis Hopper) after them. A radio station host (Caroline Williams) gets mixed into the manhunt as she records a phone call where two yuppies get killed. There's a few twists to the story, but it's rather simple in the end. The comedy ranged from horribly bad to very good. The cast was surprisingly good, but no one really stood out. Didn't really like the music, it was a bit too repetitive, even though I do understand the comedic aspect of it, but it just didn't work for me. Without the effects by Tom Savini and the set designs this would be just an average horror comedy. Funnily enough the best scene of the whole movie was left at the cutting room floor and is only on the DVD as an extra without proper sound and with crappy image quality. That scene is the now infamous parking lot scene where the family goes to get some “prime meat” from some youngsters trashing cars in a parking lot. With just that scene in the movie this would have been a good movie, now it's just an above average horror comedy.

66%

An escape from conventional story telling

The Escape Artist (1982)

Danny (Griffin O'Neal) is the son of a famous escape artist who after his father's death tries to follow in his footsteps. He ends up mixed in a scheme with the mayors crazy son Stu (Raul Julia). That's about all I can say about the story without spoiling it too much. Raul Julia does a great job with his role and Griffin O'Neal wasn't bad either. Rest of the cast were fine as well, even though no one really stood up from the crowd despite there being some big names in there as well. Caleb Deschanel is more known as a cinematographer and this is his first feature, unfortunately that shows in the pacing of the movie. It lingers on some shots a bit too much and rushes through others way too quickly. And to be honest the movie doesn't look that great to justify the slow pacing at times. Another thing that bothered me was the story or more how it's told. The motives of the characters are left mostly unexplained and that makes it rather confusing. Like I've always said not everything needs to be told, but really the key motives are quite essential for a good movie. As the movie mixes timelines a bit as well I guess the director saw it as a different way of telling a conventional story. Well different it was but unfortunately not really effective. There are some individual scenes which were absolutely brilliant, but the glue between them seemed to be missing. However I really liked the mood of the movie and the music carried it nicely. That managed to keep my interest up throughout even though in the end it didn't really leave much to go with.

65%

Childhood traumas can be released by breaking a mirror

 










 The Boogeyman (1980)

Ulli Lommel is like the poor man's Uwe Boll, both of them do horrible movies but where Boll occasionally manages to get some big names in his projects Lommel seemingly uses people he finds from the street. This one here is one of his better movies and seeing how bad this one was you get the idea what the rest of them are. As a young girl Lacey sees her brother murder the seemingly violent boyfriend of their mother. Years later the "ghost" of that boyfriend comes back to seek revenge. The idea is that as the murder was witnessed through a mirror the soul of the victim got trapped inside it and years later Lacey breaks the mirror and the evil soul is set free, or something like that. I honestly didn't even care as the movie had already alienated me far enough to not give a shit about the plot. But that's part of the beauty of this movie, it really is so bad it starts being good. I haven't laughed this hard in a long time at a horror movie which at least seemingly tries to be serious. Pretty much every time someone gets killed it's funny in one way or another. Simply hilariously horrible. The effects are bad, the acting is horrible, the story is insane and the music is annoyingly loud. And yet it was quite entertaining. I didn't like the letterboxing on the DVD print, but I must say some of the shots in this one looked surprisingly good. Also need to give some props for the attempt to build suspense rather than just going for the gore shocks. So there was some effort in there as well, but too bad it's wasted with all the other nonsense. As a horror movie it's bad, as a trashy fun flick it was quite ok.
65%

A brilliant movie, until it came out of the shelter

Take Shelter (2011)

I'm in quite a dilemma here, first of all how to rate a movie which is absolutely brilliant for the first 110 (give or take a few) minutes and the last 10 minutes basically destroy everything that came before it. Another problem I have is how to say what's wrong with this movie without spoiling it for everyone who hasn't seen it. I'll try my best. It's a story about Curtis, a father and a husband, who one night starts to see visions of an apocalyptic storm. He thinks he's going crazy and seeks professional help, but just as a precaution he also starts to build an expensive storm shelter in his backyard. As the family's money is already tight things get complicated, all the while the marriage and friendships start to crack because of his visions. The story is interesting to say the least and it's very well crafted so you won't lose interest for a second. The acting is pretty much perfect, especially Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain both do a brilliant job as the troubled family. Also the direction is solid and there's plenty of room for the characters to develop. So far this sounds great, but the ending is where this movie falls apart big time. There's actually a shot to which this movie should have ended, it's the one where a certain individual opens the shelter door in a very dramatic scene. That should not spoil it for anyone and everyone who has seen this should know what I mean. The movie should have ended there and it would have been absolutely brilliant. Now as it continues onwards it undermines everything it built before that. And I seriously can't understand why do some people want certainty and answers to every question, some should be left open for the viewer to ponder on. After the incredibly stupid ending to otherwise very intriguing drama, I was ready to bash this movie to the ground, but I really can't. It was still well worth the watch even though the ending left a bad taste.

65%

Lost my mind in Berlin

Unknown (2011)

Doctor Martin Harris (Liam Neeson) and his wife Elizabeth (January Jones) arrive to Berlin for a conference on biotechnology. As they arrive to their hotel Martin notices that he has left his briefcase at the airport and takes a taxi to retrieve it. However the taxi gets into an accident and ends up to the bottom of a lake and Martin wakes up four days later in a hospital. His memory is a bit vague but he remembers all the important things to him. But as he returns to the hotel he notices that someone else has taken his spot and even his own wife doesn't seem to know him. He begins to wonder wether he really is losing his mind or if this is some kind of conspiracy. He of course goes for the conspiracy theory and sets out to expose the whole thing with the help of the taxi driver (Diane Kruger) and an ex Stasi agent (Bruno Ganz). The story is actually quite intriguing, even though towards the end it falls apart quite a bit. It keeps you guessing and even though it doesn't offer that much new to the genre, it actually manages to bring some surprises. The cast is very strong and they are given enough space to shine through. Especially Bruno Ganz steals the show as the old Stasi agent, though I did see some similar manners he did as Hitler, but then again they fit the role quite well. The direction is quite good and the mood fits the story very well. And Berlin as a setting looked quite brilliant. This would have been a great action packed thriller, but too bad it gets a bit silly towards the end. It loses it's edge and turns into a naive formulaic thriller, which is a shame as the first half promised a lot better movie.
64%

The filmography of Michael Bay

I was thinking which director's filmography I should go through next and at first I thought I'd take some other master of the art out of the best of the best. But then I thought it's not good to just focus on the brilliant directors as watching a masterpiece after a masterpiece tends to raise the bar too high for everyone else. So that's why I decided to take a look at Michael Bay. The man who is associated with explosive hyper active action, racist type casting without any character development and idolizing Americana. Not forgetting helicopters flying slow motion in the sunset, the light streaks and flares to spice up dull conversations or the camera that just doesn't stand still for a second. I must say I have a hate/love relationship towards the man. At best he does properly funny action movies which are very entertaining, but at the same time he has no idea how to tell a good story or build drama or characters for that matter. Even the action has been bad in his later films where it's just a CGI mess with no sense of what's going on. But I must say they are still fun, intentionally or not. His commercial and music video background shines through his movies, and that's what they basically are, a mix of commercial product placement and music video. So for what ever it's worth here's Michael Bay's filmography.



Bad Boys (1995)

His first movie actually already has everything he became famous for. There's the sunset, the low flying helicopter, no character development, product placement, light streaks and big explosions. The story is simple crap and surprisingly even Bay himself has said that he didn't like the script. But that's not the point in this movie, it's the action and the comedy. Which it has plenty of both. The chemistry between Will Smith and Martin Lawrence is quite great and they actually put up a buddy act that's one of the better ones I've ever seen. And that's the real driving force of this movie, without it this would be just another crappy B-action flick. Speaking about the action, it's nice to see that at start Bay didn't have his hyper active shooting style and the action actually makes sense on screen. So yes the action worked quite well also. What didn't work in addition to the thin story was the character development. Or the lack of it, there is absolutely none. Luckily the characters are so strong to begin with that you really don't need it that much, but that did leave the characters way too one dimentional to bring any drama into the action. The main duo is certainly great and Joe Pantoliano and Tcheky Karyo were quite ok as well. But the damsel in distress, Tea Leoni, was completely useless, her role was basically to look good. It's actually hilarious in the end where she's inserted in all those slow motion shots where the two cops walk with their guns drawn. Just what's her purpose there? Well that gave me laughs, even though I guess it wasn't intended that way. Despite it's quite serious flaws, it's still an entertaining and especially fun action movie. So it does what it's supposed to do even though it doesn't give you anything extra.
66%



The Rock (1996)

Say what you will but this is one of the best action movies ever made. Having said that, this movie is also the movie where Bay first introduced his frantic editing style with most of the shots not more than 2 seconds long and rarely visiting the same angle twice. Something I've later started to hate from the bottom of my heart. But for some reason this is one of the very few movies where it actually doesn't matter at all. This movie is just tons of fun. The overly cheesy patriotism of USA turns into comedy and supports the movie as an extra comic punch very nicely. And believe it or not I really like the story behind all the explosions. I don't mean the story of a lab rat and an old fart fighting a team of highly trained marines, that's pure comedy, but the driving force behind the characters. The bad guy is actually a good guy with a noble cause but with bad means for it, the old Brittish agent wrongfully imprisoned for most of his life and even the lab rat were all genuinely interesting characters. Something you can rarely say in a movie like this. The casting is one of the best of it's kind, Ed Harris, Sean Connery, David Morse and even Nicolas Cage back in the days when he at least still tried to put some effort into acting. Add to those the old legends like John Spencer and Philip Baker Hall and of course my favourite hero actor from the 80's, Michael Biehn, and you have a stellar casting. Another thing that I absolutely love about this movie is the soundtrack, Hans Zimmer's best by far and one of the best I've ever heard. Pure brilliance every note of it. The movie has some idiotic moments that are not saved even by the comedy, but to tell you the truth I can't remember them even though I've seen this movie about 10 times already. That's saying something about the entertainment values. And even though this movie kind of populised the highly annoying fast cutting in action movies, I still can't stop liking this movie, it just works.
98%



Armageddon (1998)

So after making one of the best action movies of the 90's, Bay decided to make a movie about rednecks saving the world. I could write a novel on how hideously horrible this movie is, but to be honest it stinks so much that I don't want to waste my time and energy on it too much. First of all the whole concept of the movie that astronauts, some of the world's smartest and most technically trained men, couldn't drill one god damn hole in the ground is just silly beyond belief. But no, rednecks are the guys who can drill anything, drilling holes is an art after all, so they rather send them in space. The rednecks are of course stereotypes with no depth at all to them, you have your over protective father, reckless hero type, a cowboy, a divorced father with a gambling problem, a sex addict, a dumb fatso who lives with his mother and a big black man right from the days of slavery. It actually made me angry how insulting this movie is towards people, if Bay's world would be the world we live in, then please just let the asteroid wipe us all out. And it's just not the rednecks and the racism towards black people and rednecks themselves, the Russian cosmonaut was just as appalling. It says a lot about the movie that Billy Bob Thornton, a great actor but quite characterized as a redneck, is cast as the director of NASA. Fuck yeh! Ok, so the characters are horrible and even though there are some good actors in this most of the cast is horrible as well. Though at most parts I blame the script and the direction, not the cast. Of course Ben Affleck is hopeless no matter what, but for example I have never seen Steve Buscemi giving out a worse performance. He's a fucking character actor, usually playing himself, so that has to be an achievement. And when I say the script is bad I mean it stinks so bad it makes dog shit smell like roses. Just one example, the pilot pulls a gun on Harry and Chick says "What are you doing with a gun in space?". Nothing wrong with that except that they have freaking miniguns on their spacebuggythingies. Oops, guess they forgot... Well it's just one example out of hundreds, but as I said I'm not going to waste more time on this shit. It's one of the worst movies I've ever seen and actually now seeing it for the second time it borders on being brilliant as it really is so bad that it becomes funny. But I'm not going to give it that honour just yet. Though one thing I must still mention, for some weird reason this movie is in The Criterion Collection, a collection of historically important movies from around the world. The Rock (1996) is in there also from Michael Bay and that I can understand why as it really is one of the best action movies, but why this movie is in there I have no idea. Maybe those people at Criterion have a very twisted sense of humour or something.
1%



Pearl Harbor (2001)

Ok, this movie is supposed to be some kind of a big homage to the soldiers of the war and the people involved with it. I saw an overly long cheesy piece of crap that does nothing even remotely like that. It's just about the same as if Bay would have taken a dump on the entombed U.S.S. Arizona. The thing is that the only sympathetic characters in this movie are the Japanese, now I must say I was surprised that they weren't depicted as monsters and for that I have to give it some credit. But really everyone else seems to be one dimentional obnoxious idiots. Anyway, the movie starts off with a quick buddy establishment, we are given glimpses of the past to make us belive that Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett are good friends. Well I kind of missed that part which should bind them together, at a later point it didn't matter much as they are supposed to be mad at eachother, but then they are supposed to be buddies again and it just doesn't work. The buddy bit just a small problem compared to the "romance" that is what I would imagine a 12 year old girl might write in her diary. And we have to endure this torture for the next hour or so. I can see that they are trying to go for the 40's romantic movies with that, but really why would someone even try to do that? The modern audience expects a bit more depth to the romance than they did back then. The concept of a romance hasn't changed one bit since then, but the way people buy it surely has, so I just have to wonder what the hell were they thinking with this horse shit. So then the bombs start to fall and all hell breaks lose. Luckily the sound effects were loud enough so people who fell asleep in the first hour and a half should wake up by now. But what we get is not a dramatic recreation of the attack, there's certainly no drama in it, hell there's no feeling at all. It's nothing but an explosive war masturbation by Bay. I can imagine him getting all excited like a little kid about all the shit he can blow up while making it look as "cool" as he can. What's "cool" about an attack that killed more than 3000 people? Well unfortunately after the overly long action sequence the movie isn't over and we have to endure an hour more of this utter garbage. There of course needs to be a payback from the attack so the movie can end with an up note, not that there was any tragedy in the attack in this movie in the first place, but lets just imagine there would have been for good sport. Well the two "buddies" are supposed to bind together again, but again I missed it. Was it after they beat eachother up and woke up in the car? Was it while they were killing the Japanese in the air? Was it when they got recruited for the secret mission? Or was it when Doolittle asked them if everything was ok? I mean come on, the viewer has already lost every bit of interest to these characters at this point so why even bother going further. Well they bomb some Japanese factory, Hartnett gets killed, Affleck gets the girl and USA kicks ass, woo-fucking-hoo. They conviniently "forgot" to mention the real reason why Japan surrendered, the two a-bombs. But then again as that would make the audience see how the mighty US of A answered a sucker punch with quite an inhumane act of monstrosity and you can't have that in a movie about heroes. Saddest thing of it all is that the total amount of money spent on production and promotion of this movie roughly equaled the amount of damage caused in the actual attack. They would have made a better homage by spending that money on the veterans themselves and some new history books for the schools.
2%



Bad Boys II (2003)

Bay takes another swing at the Bad Boys and of course the budget is now a lot bigger so there's tons more of everything. After the last two monstrosities this movie actually feels like a breath of fresh air and seeing it right after Pearl Harbor (2001) it feels like a masterpiece. But it's certainly not a masterpiece, it's just an ok action flick. So how does it compare to the first part? Surprisingly well actually. The chemistry between Will Smith and Martin Lawrence is still there, even though it not as funny as it was in the first part. They are clearly trying too hard at parts and it goes a bit overboard, but they still have their moments and give out plenty of laughs. The story was still crap, but maybe a tad better than the first part. Not like anyone would have expected a realistic take on things anyways so it doesn't matter that much. I didn't like the main villain, played by Jordi Molla, he was lacking charisma needed for the part and thus it was kind of a miss. Rest of the cast is quite ok with some familiar faces from the first part. Even though it can't top the first part in the buddy act, the action in this one is so over the top that it's crazy. There's three huge car chases all well worth mentioning. The first one with the car transport truck is quite great with all of it's carnage. The second one is brilliant in it's macabre dark comedy with all the bodies flying around. But the third one is just insane with the Hummer crashing into everything in it's path. Total destruction and that's what I liked about this. Michael Bay likes to blow shit up and call me crazy but I enjoy watching that money burn. So this is a good sequel and even better than the first part, but still it's lacking in too many other departments except action, so it's nowhere near as good as The Rock (1996). The saddest thing is that after this movie the big budget R-rated movies pretty much died. Well they didn't die, but only a very few were made since. Which is a shame of course.
69%



The Island (2005)

After the explosive violent and surprisingly brutal fun ride Bay went back to the more easy going action. This is a story about a man and a woman who find out they are clones, made only to act as spare parts for the people who ordered them. The company which breeds the clones assures the public that the clones are vegetables without any feelings, but yet they must raise them as "normal" humans because of some nonsense about the parts not working if the person is kept sedated. The two clones escape and set on a mission to uncover the whole business of cloning people for medical purposes. I actually liked the story quite a bit, the moral dilemma of taking "spare parts" from a copy of yourself to extend your own life. Also the vanity of mankind that a woman would buy a copy of herself to give birth to a baby so she could keep her form. But that whole cloning dilemma isn't really a new idea and actually it was ripped straight from The Clonus Horror (1979). Now this movie is actually better than The Clonus Horror (1979), but as this movie doesn't mention any connection to it, it's basically the same as a stealing the idea which kind of watered it down. Anyway into the nice idea there's inserted this absolutely ridiculous action adventure plot that is just too silly to keep the interest up. Sure there's tons of action and explosions, it's Michael Bay after all, but I really got just bored watching it as there was no feeling to it. Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson try to do their best with the crappy dialog they are given and do a fairly ok job regarding the script. Rest of the cast were quite disposable. The ultra fast editing gets very boring and the movie looks like a Michael Bay movie looks, tons of light streaks, overly saturated contrasty imagery and the camera doesn't stay put for long. Quite a waste of time and money.
23%



Transformers (2007)

I loved Transformers as a kid in the 80's. I had pretty much all of the toys and the cartoon show was the high point of the week. Then of course I grew up and got other interests so Transformers was left behind. Even though I knew I wouldn't be the target group of this movie anymore, I still wanted to see it. My expectations for it were very low, mostly because of Michael Bay. And surely enough it wasn't a good movie, but much to my surprise it wasn't a bad one either. This is a movie I would have loved to death when I was 10, it has everything I loved in movies back then. But now as it takes a bit more than explosive action to get my attention I saw a bit too many things I didn't like. First of all this movie is racist. I mean if a guy like me who is whiter than white from a country like Finland can see that, then there really has to be something wrong with it. All the black people in this movie are portrayed as one dimentional stereotypes who are there just for entertainment values for the white folk so they can feel better about themselves. Even the robot, Jazz, that's clearly another black stereotype is the only one to be killed. Only black person who doesn't seem to be type cast is the soldier with the credit card, though his character's biggest moment is screaming "left cheek!" over and over again after which he disappears. Not exactly a world image you want to give to your children. That being said I still liked Bernie Mac as the used car salesman, he was simply hilarious. And in general the comedy in the movie was actually quite good. John Turturro's character was also hilarious and he did a great job with the part. Shia LaBeouf was also a nice surprise and pulled off the hero role quite well. Which can't be said about Megan Fox, sure she looks great but can't act at all. Also Jon Voight was quite bland, though the dialog given to the character wasn't helping the part one bit. Then the main thing, the robots. Well I think they looked somewhat ok. I mean I would have hoped for a bit cleaner versions of them, now they just had too much going on in details that it was hard to make sense of them. But that being said they did look a lot more realistic than the smooth cartoon or toy versions. The reason why I would have hoped for a bit cleaner versions is that they are never really introduced apart from Bumblebee and Optimus Prime. Now they just tend to blend in with each other and it makes it sometimes hard to tell them apart. And that's where one of the major problems of the movie lies, the way the action is shot. It's just one big CGI mess. There's tons of stuff going on and it's shot with a hyper active shooting style, that results in a total chaos which makes absolutely no sense at all. Sure the kids might like it, but the thing is when you have no idea who hits who and where, you really lose interest and just watch the fireworks without any idea of what you are supposed to see. And what's up with the Autobots, am I the only one who thinks everyone else but Optimus Prime were completely useless? Sure they shoot, do flips and set up a show, but mostly they just got their asses kicked while Optimus was the only one who managed to actually kill the Decepticons. This movie also features one of the most annoying characters I've ever seen, right up there with Jar Jar Binks, that little robot that just doesn't seem to die. So there are huge problems with the movie, but still I didn't get bored and had some fun with it. It even managed to raise the little kid in me as I almost cheered when we see Optimus Prime for the first time. But unfortunately in the end it's still a bad movie with some quite good moments.
42%



Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

Didn't see this one when it came out, but decided to watch it now as I'm going through Michael Bay's filmography. Being a sequel to a big action movie it of course tries to top it by being even bigger. There's more robots, more army, more action, more explosions, more goofy characters, more product placement and more "Bayhem". And of course the robots are bigger, the army has bigger weapons, the explosions are bigger and the goofy characters of course are a bigger nuisance. But the movie just doesn't go bigger, it also goes smaller with tons of smaller little robot critters which are there to show how diverse their race is or some other nonsense like that. Just as I had declared that little robot in the first one as one of the most annoying characters in the history of movies, this one goes better. There's actually 3 robots that all are way more annoying than the one in the first part. There's the "twins", two robots that make you want to go and get a can of gasoline so you can burn yourself from the misery of watching them. And for fucks sake they even have goofy teeth, one with a golden tooth for that matter, what the hell does a robot do with teeth anyways? That little toy car robot is no better, even worse actually, but luckily it spends quite a bit of time in a box so we don't have to watch it. Apart from those the new robots seemed quite ok, even that old fart Jetfire who was also idiotically stereotyped, but at least he didn't make me want to go on a killing frenzy. But as before it really doesn't matter much how good the new robots were as you don't really see them, only glimpses of them spinning around while fighting. So the annoying CGI mess action continues right where it left on the first part and is actually even worse on this one. Most of the time I had no idea what was going on when shit blew up and CGI mess was spinning on the screen. I'm not a young kid with ADHD so I can't keep up with this lightning cutting pace. Then again if it was a bit slower and smoother it would bring out all the mistakes and inconsistencies of the action, so I kind of understand why they use it. But instead of covering up the mistakes, maybe they could have just properly planned them and shot them in a way that they would look good. That's Michael Bay's worst problem (well in addition of being a racist and sexist and all the other stuff), he just can't direct action. I actually watched the extras of the blu-ray i rented and there was a big segment on this huge explosion that made the Guiness book of records as the biggest explosion ever shot with live actors next to it. In the movie it's nothing special, you've watched non stop effect assault for the last 30 minutes with a hideous fast pace cutting. So when this big bang comes it looks like a nice breath of some easy action, not spectacular or huge or anything like that, only that it's nice that we actually get to watch a shot more than 2 seconds. On the extras however it looks absolutely brilliant, but in the movie it's simply lost in the "Bayhem". Not going to go into the story, it's what it is, not like you could write anything about the meaning of life in a movie about transforming robots so lets leave it to what it is, entertainment. The cast is the same and those who were good on the first one are good here as well and Megan Fox didn't learn how to act in the two years in between so nothing has changed. I must mention the huge amount of mistakes there are in the movie. It clearly was rushed to get finished as you see the cameraman's shadow on multiple occasions and that one slow motion explosion where Megan Fox goes transparent is just something hideous. Also many of the effect shots are very poor. For example when the Devastator is digging up the machine from the pyramid, the falling "stones" look like something I could do better on my own computer. I would love to bash this movie to the ground for the horrible piece of garbage it is with all of it's product placements and formulaic exploitative nature. But I still found it to be somewhat entertaining, however a good movie it surely isn't.
30%


After watching all of the Bay movies again I must say I'm more on the hate side, despite him making one of the best action movies of the 90's and two fairly good action flicks. The thing is that the shit he has also poured out smells so bad it tarnishes the glory of those few good ones. Well anyway that's something to think about when Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011) comes out. I'm not going to see it in the theatre as I'm planning on keeping my promise of not watching any sequel/prequel/comicbook/cartoon/toy/remake/etc. movies in the theatre this year.