I’ve been ending the year with a little bit of a John Woo fest and The Killer is one of his best. Nowadays his style has been adopted by just about every action director so these films don’t have quite the punch as they once did. Still, you gotta love the gritty characters and storytelling against that backdrop of slo-mo squib blasts.
My twenty-something daughter swears this is the greatest cinematic series ever committed to film, but to me it’s just a slightly better than average kid’s movie with a couple of moments (mostly thanks to Jim Carey) that will appeal to adults.
This the first Jodorowsky movie I’ve seen if you don’t count that Dune documentary. It’s the tale of a boy who grows up in the circus, sees his mother violently attacked, and then gets caught up in some seedy murders as an adult. It’s all very operatic, yet cheesy. I can see why the director is touted as a visionary, but it feels like a bit of a mess. And yet, the climax had me. I actually felt for the characters as the story wrapped itself up nicely.
I swear this is the last of the Lucky Stars movies I will watch. For the first ten minutes I thought that this one was going to be the one. The opens with Jackie Chan action stunt work and I thought, “Finally, they are going to tie the two stories together in a meaningful, action-packed way!” Nope. Action ends and it’s back to an hour of pervert antics as Sammo and crew are hired to find Jackie with, surprise surprise, a sexy female partner who all the middle aged dudes want to grope. I’ll admit there was one laugh-out-loud joke involving ordering Japanese food, but it was obviously a live-action retelling of one of Blanche Knott’s Truly Tasteless Jokes. Like every other entry in this series, it ends with some decent fight sequences but it’s too little, too late.
Blake Stone was based off the Wolfenstein 3-D engine and included many graphical and game play improvements. The floors and ceilings are textured, there are many more enemies, a automap, and you can move back-and-forth through levels. All that is great but those were baby steps compared to the seismic shift that Doom brought to the genre. “So what?” You might ask, but realize that Doom was released a week after Blake Stone. One could say the game was doomed from the start, har har har!
Taken on its own merits the game is still okay especially when compared to Wolfenstein. It’s fast-paced and offers a little more variety. It still feels more like navigating a maze than exploring a world. Each episode is book-ended with some flavor text but it doesn’t ever really amount to a story.
The game is best approached as a leisurely time killer more akin to an iPhone game than an epic PC experience. There is some challenge at the higher difficulty settings but that comes more in ammo management rather than tricky enemy A.I. I didn’t hate it, but it is not an essential retro FPS. Rise of the Triad is a much better bridge between Wolf 3-D and Doom.
Wheels on Meals is a 1984 Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung movie that is a precursor to the horrible Lucky Stars films that would follow. Fortunately, here the action take precedence over the uncomfortable comedy. It’s the story of two skateboarding food truck vendors in Barcelona who get caught up in Sammo’s investigation of a female pickpocket. The stunts are nowhere near as crazy as peak Jackie Chan, but the ending features so pretty good martial arts work.
It’s the origin story of the perverts from Twinkle Twinkle Lucky Stars! It really isn’t much better than the sequel but it has an incredible Jackie Chan stunt sequence in which he roller skates under a semi-truck and causes a thirty car pile-up. Of course, that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie which is comprised of mostly overly-long and incoherent “comedy” sequences.
Another film from the creator of Hundreds of Beavers. It used the same black and white old-timey style, but it’s even more home-made looking (and acted). I laughed out loud a couple of times which is more than I can say about most comedies these days. Not as good as Beavers but worth watching for the Milwaukee references alone.
A 1965 proto-giallo about a novelist who returns to an off-season resort in search of a girl he photographed the year before. Turns out she died and mystery shenanigans ensue. The atmosphere is moody and the pace is slow, but it is padded with an exceptionally rich score. The structure can be a bit too arty for its own good as visions, dreams and memories at inter-cut in a manner which only serves to confuse the viewer. It’s one of these mysteries where there are like five characters total, so the whodunnit reveal is never very surprising.
Sammo Hung directs and stars in this incoherent mess of a movie. You would never know he’s the star from the promotional images. They all prominently feature Jackie Chan instead of Sammo. Jackie does his stunt fight thing for a couple of scenes, but most of the story is about our heroes, The Lucky Stars: a group of pervy men trying to grope and peep women. The comedy is painfully unfunny and the premises always go on way too long. There are maybe three standard Hong Kong action sequences that seem like they were spliced in from another, better movie. After watching, I found out this is part three in a trilogy of films. This probably explains some lack of any development (or explanation) of the main characters. I guess now I will have to torture myself with the other two movies.
