These films are what I think of as the ‘new’ Bond films. The Connery/Lazenby ones are the classics, the Moore ones can be a bit annoying now but I remember them fondly as the ones being released while I was a teenager (at least the earlier ones). It was a bit of a shock then, an an increasingly common shock these days, to realise just how old some of these ‘new’ Bond films are now – The Living Daylights is 25 years old!

Anyway, watching them all retrospectively (and, for some bizarre reason, in reverse order) rather than as seeing them as they came out I was having a completely different reaction to them. While the Dalton films underwhelmed me a bit at the time I now think they may be my favourite films and that Dalton was an outstanding James Bond.

I think it is because the plots were just a bit more restrained and plausible – no megalomaniac hell-bent on world domination from his secret lair. There were still some touches of trademark Bond silliness, like the cello ride across the Austrian border, but mostly they were quite sensible – maybe why they were not received so well?

The other thing I realised was that Carey Lowell just has to be the best Bond girl ever. She must have a picture in the attic as well, because she still looks great now at 50. Mind you, Halle Berry runs her a close second.

I realised that, for all those reasons and more, Licence to Kill is a serious contender for my favourite James Bond film. Am I alone in this?

Steve Howe with his endless swapping of guitars – he used three different guitars during one song, and then later on used three other guitars during another song. Rick Wakeman surrounded on three sides by banks of keyboards and at one point stretching to play two that were 6 feet apart. Even Jon Anderson had at least three different tambourines to bash, when he wasn’t playing the harp. Chris Squires stuck to his trusty Rickenbacker most of the time but at one point did come out with a triple-necked bass and did actually play all three parts of it during the song. Alan White stuck to the one drum kit, but he did fget to play the crotales and I’m sure I heard a gong at one point.

So, I can see why some people don’t take them seriously, but really it was a treat to watch.

It is possible I only watched a bit of it before though – just the couple of older songs. I never did really like the Trevor Rabin version of Yes and have never owned or even listened much to either 90125 or Big Generator. This time I watched it all the way through, even the unfamilar songs, but didn’t enjoy it a lot. It certainly isn’t Steven Soderbergh’s best film either.

The weird thing is that I think of it as the ‘new Yes’ so it was a bit of a shock to realise this was from 27 years ago, which is more than a little scary. Its probably more of an 80s thing though, because I quite like some of the later Yes material. And it is a terribly 80s film. Not just the music, which is more straightforward and less proggy than before or since, but also the clothes and even the film style – loads of those cheap video effects and split screens: all the things that are worst about the Mike Mansfield-directed Jean-Michel Jarre concert videos.

I may have to go down later and watch one of the other concerts to clear my mind – perhaps the Live at Montreux or Keys to Ascension.

From the people who gave you The Machine Girl comes the even crazier Tokyo Gore Police! The makeup and special effects guru behind The Machine Girl, Exte, and Meatball Machine, director Nishimura Yoshihiro remakes his own award-winning 1995 indie short Anatomia Extinction into a gleeful splatter galore bound for cult classic status. Spilling buckets of blood and then some more, Tokyo Gore Police has all the gore, exploitation, action, and sickly inventive use of body parts you could possibly ask for. Eihi Shiina from Audition stands tall and beautiful in the midst of the sadistic mayhem as the vengeful monster slayer in a very short skirt. Living up to its billing with eye-popping gore, comically over-the-top perversions, and thoroughly entertaining madness, Tokyo Gore Police is a must-watch for fans of gore and extreme cinema.

“all the gore, exploitation, action, and sickly inventive use of body parts you could possibly ask for”? Tempting. I saw a similar film in HMV the other day, with an equally does-what-it-says-on-the-tin title: Robo-Geisha. It is summarised thus:

Get ready for the most unashamedly over-the-top and deliriously inventive cinematic experience of your life, as the Japanese masters of movie mayhem achieve a brand new level of jaw-dropping craziness. To help them achieve their goal of taking over the world, a megalomaniac Japanese businessman and his son recruit a vicious gang of Geisha assassins. These include two feisty sisters with an amazing range of surgically added weapons. But when one of these Robo-Geishas refuses to kill an innocent group of ex-employees, its butt-blades versus wig napalm and machine breasts against killer-cleaver socks as the assassins take on the Geisha’s in one of the most mind-bending movie battles of all time. Throw in the buildings that bleed, the Giant Castle Robot and the Breast Milk From Hell, and you have a wonderfully insane Kamikaze movie that will have you laughing out loud!

Apparently the film also features “rectal missiles of mass destruction”.

They sound like films to make Battle Royale seem like a Disney film in comparison. No idea if they are good, bad or so-bad-they-are-good, but I think I will have to find out some time this year. The whole genre is fertile ground for anybody looking for hardcore band names though.

Today I watched Cowboys and Zombies, which has been knocking around the house for a few weeks but which I kept putting off watching because it didn’t look like it would be very good. I was right. Although watchable it was not the best zombie film I have seen. It is not even the best one I have seen this month.

Afficianados will know what I mean if I sum it up with two words: fast zombies.I am a traditionalist, and much prefer my zombies to be shuffling Romero-style zombies than hyper 28 Days Later creatures. I’m not even sure they were zombies in the normal definition. Apart from the speed, they were not re-animated corpses who look basically human but with bits hanging off and a terrible complexion; they were really mutations. So more like Resident Evil then, except not mutated as a result of human experiments but because of some alien meteorite.

Also, it didn’t seem like anyone bitten by one would turn into a zombie themselves, which rules out the exponential terror of knowing that their numbers can only increase until nobody normal is left. Finite zombies are not as scary a prospect. Having said that, considering the main action happens in a small prospecting town that appears to have no more than a dozen buildings, there were an awful lot of the buggers.

Aside from those purist quibbles, it was entertaining enough, but a bit exploitative. There were few female characters but most of them had an excuse to get their top off at some point. The zombie, or pseudo-zombie element doesn’t even kick in until about half-way through the film. Up to then it is just a straightforward western. Fortunately I like westerns, and zombies so there was enough to keep me watching.

I would take issue with the description on Amazon though. It says “Cowboys and native Indians unite to fight the undead horde” which is stretching it a bit. There was one cowboy (really a bounty hunter so not an actual cowboy) and one native American.

I notice that Amazon also has a film called Cowboys and Vampires. It is from a different company, so not part of a series. Must just be two different studios trying to cash in on Cowboys and Aliens. Surprisingly neither of them are The Asylum who specialise in such ‘mockbusters’. The vampire one is not even set in the real wild west, just in a theme park. Mind you, the third Dusk Til Down film did the whole cowboys/vampires thing already.

A few good set pieces. I had forgotten all about the Bullitt homage car chase with the radio-controlled car in The Dead Pool, Harry with his BFG in Sudden Impact and the boardwalk shootout. Really it is a great car chase, managing to reference the famous Steve McQueen chase through the streets of San Francisco and yet still be original. Not as exciting as the chase in Ronin, but then what is?

I noticed that the end credits started to get longer on the 4th film though. Not as excessive as current films but still listing all sorts of bag-carriers. I think the credits should be limited to anybody who would be eligible for an Oscar for their work (i.e. music, direction, editing, and so on), producers because they stump up the cash, and those where there is a legal obligation or that the average viewer would find genuinely interesting, but that’s just a personal bug-bear.

One fascinating thing with the films was seeing various actors in early roles like Jim Carrey as a drugged up rock star miming to Guns & Roses in Dead Pool, Liam Neeson as an annoying film director, David Soul pre-Starsky & Hutch and Tyne Daley pre Cagney & Lacy.

Some of the cameos are interesting too. Apparently Guns & Roses all appear inthe background of The Dead Pool, though I only noticed Slash – the hat is a bit of a give-away. Famously, Albert Popwell appears in four of the films as different characters. He was the robber in the first film who Harry gives the famous “do I feel lucky?” speech to, which makes it mildly amusing when he turns up as a black activist in the third film and Harry greets him with “do I know you?”.

The best name in the whole set of films has to be the actor Woodrow Palfrey but the strangest small-part actor surely has to be Harry Demopoulos. In Sudden Impact he played a doctor in the county hospital in San Paulo, and then in the Dead Pool he turned up as a (presumably) different doctor in a San Francisco hospital. It was a bit of a surprise to see him there because I remembered thinking he was a bit wooden in Sudden Impact. I wondered why they went out of their way to use him again.

In the credits I noticed that he was listed as Harry Demopoulos MD, so he was a real doctor. It explains why he wasn’t a great actor, but it is kind or ironic that he didn’t come across as natural when playing a doctor. It turns out that he is a bit of a pioneer in free radical research and also appeared in the Stallone film Cobra as ‘Dr Demopoulos’. His only other film appearance was in City Heat – as a roman orgy patron. Probably an off-duty doctor patronising a roman orgy.

What a great little nugget though – a doctor and pioneering medical researcher also appearing with Clint Eastwood and Sylvester Stallone in a few movies.

The real bonus of watching all 5 Dirty Harry films over three nights is seeing the changes in San Francisco/America from 1971 to 1988. The clothes, the cars, the look of the city, all change over the films. By the time you get to film 4 and computers start popping up in the police offices it feels like a totally different time – but Harry still remains the same through it all.

Somehow it just wouldn’t have been the same if the studios had managed to go with the original plan to have Frank Sinatra as Harry Callahan.

More ravings about it below the fold…

This film must be one of the best-kept secrets of recent years. I had never heard of it, nor had my wife or anybody we have asked about it, but it deserves to be much better know because it is a pure pleasure to watch.

It is a gentle farce by a very good ensemble cast, led by Andy Garcia who generated quite a few out-loud laughs while playing it totally straight.  The real star of the piece may well be the location – a small fishing village in the Bronx, which sounds like a flight of fancy but turns out to be a real place.

With no prior knowledge of the film I was just hoping not to be bored, but quickly found myself completely hooked on the characters and situations, and I was not alone.  My wife sometimes just tolerates the films I watch, but with this one she watched it a second time the very next day with our daughter.

I won’t give examples of what I found so appealing: part of the appeal was the surprising little quirks and I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprises for anyone.  I think it struck the right balance between being weird and being plausible.

The extras are quite watchable too.  There is a feature called Dinner with the Rizzos which is the cast (minus the son) gathered round a table with the producer chatting about the filming and the location informally.  Such features are generally full of hyperbole about the film and cast, but this seems more genuine: the cast do seem to fit well together.  That might be because of the way they worked, with a fair bit of improvisation on-set, although having Andy Garcia’s daughter play his daughter must have helped.

The second feature is the now-familiar ‘deleted scenes’ – about thirty minutes’ worth.  Some of these are alternate takes of scenes in the film, and it ends with a very interesting sequence.  In the film there are a couple of pivotal meal scenes, and here we see several versions of them, each slightly different and illustrating the amount of improvisation going on.  The actor playing the teenage son was instructed to try and irritate and disrupt the others – be a teenage boy in other words – and you can see how well he was following his brief.  Showing just the footage from one camera shows you the bits he was doing when he would have been off-screen.

I would recommend this to anybody.  I’m sure it will bear repeat viewings so it is one to consider for buying as well as for renting, and the next time I go to New York I will be very tempted to headout to City Island itself.

Here is what I wrote about it:

Imagine taking The Office and mixing it up with Japanese cult film Battle Royale. You would probably end up with something like this.

This film features office politics of the worst kind. The workplace looks pretty normal but it is located in an underground complex deep beneath Washington and all the employees are secret government assassins, so when things get nasty they can get very nasty indeed.

Joe Anderson plays The Fool on his first day on the job – everybody there has a codename based on tarot cards. Before he has even had his first staff meeting his boss gets killed and the complex goes into lockdown mode: the only exit is sealed shut and the countdown starts for a whole pile of napalm to go off. The only way out is to find the legendary emergency exit, but the workforce is organised in two opposing teams and they take teamwork very seriously.

Despite the mayhem and bloody slayings with office equipment this is a comedy, albeit an off-beat and clever comedy, which had me laughing right the way through. A lot of the light relief comes from the security men upstairs who have the whole complex under surveillance and provide a sort of commentary on the action.

I’m not sure why this film had its name changed for the UK market. Its original title of Rogue’s Gallery suits it much better as a description of the ensemble cast. There are no big name stars except Ving Rhames who is very under-used in this film, but lots of faces that you half-recognise. I think it works better for this film than a big-name cast would do.

I started watching this with no preconceptions, was very quickly hooked by the quirky humour of it, and stayed hooked right to the end. Mind you, I may never be able to look at a staple remover or paper shredder the same way again!

The extras on the DVD are a very forgettable behind-the-scenes feature, an alternative ending and an alternative beginning, which are worth watching. Had the alternative beginning been used the film would have made a lot more sense but I don’t think it would have been as enjoyable. It really gives away far too much far too soon and would have spoiled the film so well done for chopping it off the finished product, but even more well done for putting it on the DVD.

I’m not sure why this film is not a whole lot better known as it is much more entertaining and intelligent than all the blockbusters out there.

What a strange, but ultimately enjoyable, film!

When Hollywood remakes this for a subtitle-hostile American audience (as surely they must) it will be interesting to see if they keep the supernatural element towards the end.

The film starts with a gritty portrayal of a failed armed robbery, ‘civilian’ casualties and all in Paris’ 18th arrondissement.  The only survivor gets a call from a cousin in Senegal about a big job there and takes the opportunity to get out of town.  Once in Senegal the film gets a bit lighter for a bit, with the planning for the jewel robbery being a bit like a traditional heist film.

Once in Africa the cast is almost exclusively black, apart from the pantomime villian and the hilariously cartoon-like Russian mercenary and his troops.  Fortunately the pace of the film stops you dwelling too long on just how poorly written and acted these characters are.

The hero, played by the wonderfully-named French rapper MC Jean Gab’1, holds it together well, teaming up with Carole Karemera as the female Interpol officer, while ever more groups of interested parties conspire to grab the gems. At no point are you more than a few minutes away from gunfire, car chases and explosions.

It all gets a bit weird at the end, which spoiled it a bit for me, but I think its safe to say this is the best French blaxploitation-action-witchcraft-caper-chase film I have seen for along time.

I’m still a little unsure whether anybody forming a gang of mercenaries or a special forces squad or whatever would go for having a martial arts expert, a knife-thrower, someone with a heavy weapon, a sniper and so on but that seems to be the template for all such films wight from the Magnificent Seven to Predator.  They never seem to make enough of the fact that, probably, everybody would be able to do everything to a decent level of competency.

And I’m sure they wouldn’t also end up with such comedy names as Hale Caesar.

The film has plenty of action of course, but maybe too much.  It got a bit tedious towards the end.  I still find it hard to believe that one bloke with a couple of pistols could run past a dozen other blokes with machine guns who are shooting at him and not get hit at least once.

Worst of all, the film’s advertising is a bit misleading.   On the box it says “the most awesome action cast ever assembled”.   Probably true, but Arnie, Bruce Willis and Micky O’Rourke don’t actually see any action and Arnie and Bruce effectively just have cameo roles. Of the actual gang two members are relatively unknown (in the UK anyway): Randy Couture and Terry Crews being (I think) ex-sportsmen.

Still, it could have been worse.  Terry Crews’ role had previously been offered to Wesley Snipes, Forrest Whittaker and 50 Cent.  Other actors approached for the film, apparently, were Steven Seagal, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Kurt Russell.

If only they had spent less time chasing big names and more on developing characters for them.  Still it was entertaining enough and I’ll probably watch the sequel.