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.

Should be interesting because I think I have only seen the last two once, wheras I have seen the first three so many times all the set pieces are so familiar I can join in. I wonder if it will be a case of diminishing returns for the rest; are the first three so memorable just because I have seen them many times or because they do actually contain all the most memorable Dirty Harry Moments?

The first film is still a favourite for me. I don’t so much see it as the start of the Dirty Harry movies but as the culmination of the Don Siegel/Clint Eastwood partnership (Escape From Alcatraz doesn’t really count for me) which has to be one of the great creative partnerships. All the best Siegel films have Clint in them and all the best Clint Eastwood films were directed by Don Siegel.

One thing modern films could learn from these films is to stick to two or three pages of credits at the end. All the important non-acting credits pop up during the opening sequence and the end credits are mostly the cast and pop up while people are actually still watching. Modern films have an endless sequence of credits for catering, accountants, assistants to the producers’ accountants’ caterers, wig-makers and all sorts. It isn’t necessary is it?

I am still tickled by Harry’s line in The Enforcer when he is told that he is being transferred to Personnel: “Personnel? That’s for assholes.” Just the warm memory of that line always gets me through meetings with HR at work.

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.

All I knew about it was that it was another film from The Asylum, who made that truly awful Sherlock Holmes rip-off film, so I was expecting some something spectacularly bad, but this surpassed even those expectations.

To get some idea of scale of the badness, this is a small excerpt from Wikipedia’s plot summary:

The megapiranhas continue to move north, consuming two battleships and a nuclear submarine. They eventually reach south Florida, where they kill at least five Puerto Ricans on a beach and manage to blow up two hotels.

The IMDb has a page for ‘goofs’ where it lists continuity errors and other mistakes.  I think they ran out of steam on this film, or maybe the internet is just not big enough to list them all.  They listed some spectacular things like the mountains of Florida, the way the scientist manages to connect a small oxygen tank to power a helicopter when its fuel line was shot, or the presence of coral reefs at the bottom of a freshwater river, but still missed plenty.

My favourite bit was the idea that a nuclear submarine would have nuclear torpedos…

The biggest surprise was in the end credits, where it turned out that the middle-aged scientist with enormous breasts was actually Tiffany – yes; that Tiffany, the one who did I Think We’re Alone Now.

The thing is, I would thoroughly recommend watching this film, preferably in large groups where you can compete for spotting the biggest scientific errors, worst acting, or least special effects.   I have seen more realistic visual effects on home-made films on YouTube.   Some of them even made the efects in Blake’s Seven look sophisticated.  You haven’t lived until you have seen giant piranhas launching themselves out of the water to embed themselves seven stories up in a hotel wall.

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.

Both were sent to me by Amazon, as part of their Vine programme so I’ll have to write proper reviews of them sometime, at the moment I’m just pondering on the coincidence of getting two films with such a similar synopsis.I Spit On Your Grave is a remake of a 1978  film which was one of the notorious ‘video nasties’ .  I haven’t seen the original, but by all accounts this is faithful to the main points of an author going into the middle of nowhere to write her book, getting gang-raped by a bunch of locals and then systematically hunting them down later.  Even the poster is just an update of the original.  The big differences are that there are five locals instead of the original four and the violence is up to the levels you would expect in a post-Saw world.

The rape scene is quite graphic and disturbing, and the revenge killings are no less graphic and disturbing.  I think its safe to say that anybody who doesn’t like films like Hostel or Saw is not going to like this one either.

I thought it was OK but too long by 20 or 30 minutes.  The entire plot can be stated in one sentence and is given away on the publicicty so you know what is going to happen you are just wondering when and how, and it felt like a long time before anything really started.

If there is one lesson from this film it is: get a sat-nav if you are going to stay in a remote cabin. That way you won’t have to stop at an out-of-the-way gas station for directions and thus tell the rednecks there where you are going.

22 Bullets is different in that much of it takes place among crowds rather than the wilds of the US.  Also the victim is not an innocent turned psychotic by their experience, but someone with a history of violence themselves. It is a French film, produced by Luc Besson and starring Jean Reno so an altogether classier and glossier production, and with more themes to it

Jean Reno plays a Marseilles mafia boss who has retired but gets gunned down and left for dead with 22 bullets in him.  He survives, of course, and tracks down the people who carried out and ordered the hit.

The DVD is a bit sneaky as it doesn’t mention, except in tiny smallprint on the back, that it is a French language film with English subtitles.  I don’t mind foreign language films, but I know a lot of people do.  The cover of the DVD highlights the names of Jean Reno, who is well-known for various American films, and the director Richard Berry, who has an English-sounding name).  It has a tagline of “The professional returns” making it sound like a sequel to Leon and the title is totally different to what it is in French (The Immortal).

Not a bad film.  Unfortunately, being set in Marseilles and having a pompous police inspector in it I kept expecting Sammy Naceri to turn up in his pimped Peugot. Mind you, that was also a Luc Besson film so maybe that explains it.  All I know is that this doesn’t do anything to make me want to go to Marseilles any time soon.

Of the two films I am probably more likely to watch 22 Bullets a second time, but they are both worth a viewing, but only if you don’t mind a bit of blood & guts.

Nazis. Zombies. Zombie Nazis!

This evening I grew impatient waiting for the snow that keeps getting predicted here and turned to the DVD for some guaranteed white stuff, in the form of the film Dead Snow.

I picked this up a while ago on the strength of the cover. Not that it is a great cover but it had the word ‘zombies’ on it which is always a good sign.

One word that didn’t feature prominently on the cover was ‘Norwegian’.  In fact you have to read the very small smallprint on the back to learn that it is a Norwegian film with English subtitles.  A bit naughty really.  Personally I have no problem with sub-titles and usually prefer them to the dubbing of foreign language films but I know that a lot of people have an aversion to them and they might feel a little bit cheated.All that is academic really, because once the film gets going there isn’t a lot of dialogue to sub-title because at the climax the film is in the international language of blood, intestines, gouged eyeballs and buckets of blood, and before that it follows the formula for friends-take-a-holiday-in-a-remote-cabin films anyway.  Actually it is more of a FTAHIARC film than a zombie film, despite the presence of zombie Nazis.

In a ‘proper’ zombie film all the dead are rising with one aim – to eat the living and/or turn them into zombies.  In this case it is one small group of German soldiers rising after more than 60 years to get their treasure back, and the logic of the film doesn’t stand a close scrutiny.  Why are they so well-preserved after so long?  Why come back now?  Actually I have just thought of a plausible reason for that so scrub that.

But none of that matters because the action is brilliant, especially when you consider the budget and circumstances.  I don’t know if there is more blood & guts than the average horror film or if it just seems that way because of the effect of blood on snow, but there is a lot.   Erland’s end is particularly gruesome, leading to a loud cry of “no way!” from me when it happened.

All very entertaining.  I suspect I will watch this again some time.  The only problem is that when it does snow here I may well be afraid to leave the house in case an eye-gouging Nazi zombie ambushes me.

I probably will not watch the extras again, but they are very good.  The main one is a 48-minute ‘making-of’ documentary.  We are used to this sort of thing, but usually from Hollywood films with experienced cast and crew and a decent budget.  This film is really a small independent one, by a director with one proper film behind him – a Kill Bill parody with an even smaller budget – so the production is not a typical one.  The people involved are a mixture of friends and overworked technicians, with the star of the documentary undoubtably being the production assistant who was an actor in the previous film, has a degree in archaeology, and wasn’t told that production assistant means stopping traffic so it doesn’t drive past the set during a take.

Most of these documentaries are predictable and interchangeable, but this one has a bit of character.  The filming was done up in Finnmark with weather going from bright sunshine to full blizzards within minutes, causing all sorts of filming and continuity problems.  At one point in the film a log cabin burns down.  In a Hollywood film there would have been planned special effects.  In Norway they just splash petrol around the walls of a real log cabin and set fire to it – all done by a bloke who is seen on the roof with a petrol can saying “I’m no expert on fire, but I reckon this should work”.   It doesn’t, and so he ends up going into the smouldering building to splash more petrol around in a way that would have the guys from Jackass calling for a health & safety officer.

A fascinating little documentary really.  Less fascinating but still quite fun was the 17-minute film about the cast and director going to the Sundance festival for the showing of the film.