Cliff Notes

Gabe is a cliffhanger. He’s one of the best in the world. All of his friends are cliffhangers too. They love it more than anything—except each other. The movie Cliffhanger starts out with a majestic shot of a mountain chain hanging as long as the eye can see while an orchestra swells with the panoramic view. We see Gabe cliffhanging (of course!) 4,000 feet up in the air. Some of his cliffhanging friends wait at the top of a precipice to be rescued by Gabe. They are his friends Tucker and some girl that looks like Jennifer Grey but isn’t. A helicopter manned by Frank (more on him later) and Gabe’s main squeeze, Jessie, comes to pick them up. The only way the stranded cliffhangers can be rescued is to have them shimmy across a cable from the cliff they are on to the one Frank parked his chopper on.

Tucker gets across to the other side no problem. Jennifer Grey goes next, only to have her harness break. Then she drops the teddy bear she had in her backpack. This is not Jennifer Grey’s day. Gabe scurries out on the line to save her. He grabs her by the hand just in time. Things are going great until Jennifer Grey’s hand comes out of her glove and falls to her untimely death. Gabe couldn’t be more riddled with guilt. Tucker couldn’t be more upset at his friend for letting his best girl plummet to aforementioned death.

Distilled Awesomeness of Sly

I was very enthused to watch "Paradise Alley" starring Sylvester Stallone. My anticipation only heightened when I had to wait an extra few days because it wasn't available at my nearest netflix shipping facility.

Why was I excited? Because the netflix teaser says this:

Stallone makes his directorial debut and even sings the theme song.

Was it sufficiently awesome? I'll let you decide





Other brief points of note:
- Dennis and Sweet Dee's mom plays one of the female leads.
- There are two climactic physical scenes, one is an arm wrestling match that seriously lasts for about three minutes, the other is a body wrestling match in an outdoor ring so everytime someone gets slammed (which is frequently) there's a great splash effect.
- Largely forgettable plot aside I was actually pretty impressed with what a good job Young Sly did at creating a very genuine 1940s Hells Kitchen atmosphere. Not that I was ever a working class dago in the 40s, but it didn't feel like 1978 either so congrats, Sly.
- I'm beginning to think Sly might have some weird repressed sexuality. There's a throwaway gag in Paradise Alley where the villain is revealed to be wearing a thong and stockings. Couple that with the Nighthawks drag-fest and I'm on the edge of being weirded out. If there's drag in The Expendables I may have to walk out.

You Can Change Your Face, But You Can't Change Your Evil

HERE'S THE SKINNY ON THIS PHAT BLOG: The Good and Jay!!! enjoy regular communication via email. Through this electronic mail they've discussed the ending of LOST (which was good--haters), the Wire (which was awesome--haters), and the need for cheap Mexican robot labor (just kidding).  Below are excerpts from that communication focusing on Sylvester Stallone's 1981 classic, "Nighthawks."  

The Goob: I'm going to lay it out there right away: my favorite thing, retrospectively, was that the opening scene featured Sly in drag conducting a sting operation.


Jay!!!: My favorite part about the opening drag sting operation is that it actually paid off in the end. I would have never guessed that such a throwaway scene would ultimately end up helping Sly stop terror. I also love that the movie had a really dark late 70s feel, yet Sly dressed as a woman twice. Good for him.  You know what else this movie made me miss? When the go to terrorists in movies were the IRA or knock offs of the IRA. Why did we ever fear the Irish or anyone from Britain?

Dear Boy, You Aren't The Rock and It's Called Acting

There's a famous Hollywood story about a conversation between Dustin Hoffman and Sir Laurence Olivier when they were filming the movie Marathon Man back in the 1970s.  Dustin Hoffman was/is a "method" actor, meaning (sort of) that he does in real life whatever his character does in the movie to help him "feel" the character.  Sir Laurence Olivier was an "actor" actor, meaning he understood it was make believe and actually acted his scenes and acted them well.  At one point during the movie (SPOILER) Dustin Hoffman's character doesn't sleep for something like 48 straight hours.  That meant real life Dustin Hoffman stayed up for something like 48 straight hours before shooting.  When Dustin showed up on set, disheveled, tired, and near useless, Sir Laurence, disgusted, told him, "Dear boy, it's called acting."  Sir Laurence Olivier, sometimes called the greatest actor to ever live, thought actors should act.  I wonder what he would have thought about Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Warrior if he was still alive? He probably would have thought this: I wish I were dead, so I could spin in my grave. I wonder what Sir Laurence Olivier thinks now that he's dead. Probably nothing. I don't think the dead can think. It's sort of part of being dead.

That was a good paragraph. I don't really know what it means, but it was good. You know what isn't good? Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Warrior. Full disclosure: I, Jay!!!, was a professional wrestling fan.  A HUGE professional wrestling fan. I loved every minute of Monday Night Raw. I was very passionate. If I didn't like the scripted outcome of a match, I would say, "These people don't know anything. Clearly the other combatant should have one the fake battle of supremacy because it's so important." I wanted them all to have nice leotards. One of my favorite wrestlers was the Rock. He was the best. He's still the best. He makes movies now. His movies are for kids and are sort of stupid but not bad. He's actually an okay actor. ANYWAYS: when Scorpion King 1: No Tagline Needed came out it starred the Rock, a professional wrestling god, in his first big-screen starring role. He had previously appeared in Mummy Returns as the Scorpion King…a selfish, evil king who sold his soul to some strange devil creature, so he could obtain unlimited power only to be taken down by Brendan Fraser thousands of years later. Classic yarn.

Batman Ruins Everything? Batman Ruins Everything.

http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/movie-talk-sylvester-stallone-blames-batman.html

Universal Soldier 3 (or 1.5?): Regeneration (Whatever That Means)

Okay, so, um, this movie was really good? I did not expect that, like, at all.

This franchise makes absolutely no sense. The first movie comes out and is your spectacular late 80's/early 90's actioness (that's how you describe a female lion action movie). The second and third movie come out on TV and are reportedly so awful that they are erased from existence, so a new second movie is released with Jean Claude, the star of the first movie. The second movie was awful, but evidently not as awful as the first second movie, so it "counted." Then they needed to make a new third movie to replace the bad third movie but it was really the fifth movie, and it is AWESOME but also ignores the second second movie completely even though that one was supposed to count dammit! Also, this movie advances time like sixteen years and pretends that we are still at war with Russia.

Like I said, this movie once again decides to ignore pretty much everything that has happened before it. The second movie, where Jean Claude was inexplicably no longer a zombie robot shoulder but now a father and a man, either didn't happen or hasn't happened yet. I don't know. In this movie, Jean Claude is in a secluded Russian house being coached on how to become human. I don't think he has a daughter. Nor does he like boobs that much. He's indifferent towards them. He has a problem: he doesn't know how to become human because that would be way too much of a stretch for Jean Claude, so he beats up a guy in a restaurant for some reason. Then the US Army kidnaps him and says, "No human for you!" and makes him a zombie soldier again. This was good for Jean Claude (who, as it happens, has really done a decent job in the two "post-cocaine-addiction" era movies I've seen him in).

The Deadly Chemical Medley part II

After reading this and watching this, how could I read the tease for Crank: High Voltage ("After surviving the brush with death that ended the first Crank film, top assassin Chev Chelios returns in this action-packed sequel to track down a ruthless Chinese mobster who has stolen his most prized possession: his heart.... he must continually jolt the mechanical ticker that beats within his chest") and not just plow ahead with the double feature? Per the blurb, its not exactly a chemical situation in this case, but the jist is the same.

It seems most appropriate to present my review in the same format as Dallas did. Plus that saves me having to come up with yet another way to vary my incessant posts. ONWARD!


1. Ridiculous Premise. After falling out of the sky (literally) some chinamen abscond with Chev to a mysterious back room where his heart, amongst other organs, are removed for transplant. Keeping Chev alive: a mechanical heart designed only to support minimal human activity for a couple days until the subject gets a transplant. Perhaps not as outlandish as the original, in this one Chev is constantly in search of some batteries or other clever way to get a shock. Naturally getting his electrical fix won't be enough for Chev; he's  going to get revenge on the motherfuckers responsible for stealing his heart while he's at it. Given the limits already set out, not a bad storyline. At the same time, given the limits already set out it probably wasn't too hard to say "lets take his heart".
Other plot notes of interest: Amongst the side characters: a guy with "full body tourrettes" (apparently the brother of the gay guy in Crank) (like they needed a reason for more jerky camera work and ridiculous spasticity) and some skinny asian bitch who just won't die, even when she's run over by a car going 50 mph. For some reason in the midst of a bunch of transformers, Chev and his Chinese nemesis grow to 50 feet tall and battle like King Kong, replete with bizarre facial prosthetics and building smashing. It's a hysterical scene. The buxom chocolate-skinned lady riding Doc's lap at the start of the movie helps Chev find the guy with his heart by playing a prostitute. A true hooker with a heart of gold story. At one point Chev comes face to face with the disembodied but still living head of one of his prior victims. This happens just before the gay guys come kill the ferret and save Chev from a super homoerotic cat-o-nine-tails lashing.
2 Stallones and a Statham for the storyline.
2. Earnest over-acting. One of the ways Doc tells Chev to get revved up is to use friction ("the rubbing of two like objects causes the transfer of electrons"). For some reason it takes him the better part of seven minutes to figure out that this can be accomplished not just by dry-humping an old lady, but also by sex. As he's about to lose it before the redemptive sex scene, he throws us a gloriously over-acted "Friiiictioooon" as his body wilts from his failing heart. Generally though, Statham's breed of grimace-and-run is just a different kind of action from the Stallone "It's like a switch" school of acting. 1 Stallone, 2 Stathams.
3. Ka-blooey! We open with Chev falling from the sky onto a Cadillac. It doesn't explode, but the peeling-his-body-off-the-cement sound effect was pretty swell. The rest of the movie, sadly, follows a very similar path. Lots of fighting, lots of jolting, lots of running around, but the ka-blooeys are few and far between. What it lacks in splosions it tries to make up for in blood, like when they cut off the tip of a guy's elbow, or when a failed cronie is forced to cut off his own nipples. However, this does not make up for the lack of explosions. Its just terribly disturbing. Yech. 2 Stathams.
4. Ka-boobie For some reason or another, Chev pops into a strip club. So, boobies abound, especially when the Mexicans come in and startle the strippers into bouncing their jubblies all over the place. Importantly, he also hooks up with Amy Smart there, and this time there's no doubt at all about the fact that she spends the next fifteen minutes with nothing but electrical taped X's covering her nips. So, incidental tits + leading character breasts (minus nipples) + occasional frontal nudity during the final poolside shootout gives us an upgrade over the original: three Stallones. However, minus one Statham for the scene later where Chev and Amy do it on the horse track in the middle of a race and expose nothing but Statham's buttcheeks. Net: 2 Stallones, 2 Stathams. It is a pretty awesome protracted ridiculous sex scene though.
5. Cheesy one liners. They're not one liners, but the film's repeated use of little graphical ploys is at least thematically entertaining and accomplishes what it sets out to do in making the film feel like a comic book. Chev tries a one-liner once with "Chicken and broccoli" after he kills a bunch of Chinese, causing their limo to crash, but that really doesn't make any damn sense. One Stallone.


It's certainly no Over the Top; its pretty much just a shadow of Crank. What do you expect though? It was a hell of a lot more entertaining than War or Death Race; they're all foregone conclusions but at least this one gets from A to B by way of breasts, flaming dream hugs, Journey, and SoA-approved awesomeness.

The Deadly Chemical Medley part I

At the beginning of the Summer of Action, I had no idea who the hell Gary Daniels was or why he was being included in The Expendables. I'm still not sure who the hell he is or why etc. etc. I did find out, however, that in 1995 he was in a movie called Rage, in which the netflix blurb describes him as a school teacher who is "forced to consume a deadly chemical that causes extreme violence in those who ingest it." Since this sounded a lot like the premise of Crank I decided it would be fun to pull a "dangerous chemical which causes unruly, SoA-approved behavior" marathon. However, I already watched the original Crank because of this technically convincing piece on a site I dabbled with doing some writing for. Also, Dally-Wally and I, like all of my co-conspirators here, had a very detailed plan of who was going to watch which movies. Right. That's it.

So, here in part I of The Deadly Chemical Medley I will discuss Rage. Wasn't Dally-Wally's flambeing of Crank part I? you ask. Well, he didn't call it The Deadly Chemical Medley part I now, did he? DID HE? If you're that worried about continuity, just think of it as the prelude.

It's clear from the outset of RAGE (starring Gary Daniels) that his character, Alex, is a little too happy with life for things to go well for him. He appears to be happy with his job as a 2nd grade teacher wherein he gets to hold forth with bizarre, winding discourses all day. At the start of the lesson it appears as though he's teaching the children to read by writing the word "Monkey" on the board.

Universal Soldier 2 (or 4): The Return (Unfortunately)

Let’s be frank, the first Universal Soldier movie is one of the greatest movies of all time. It ranks with the Godfather 3s and the Star Wars Episode 1s of the world. I mean, a guy makes a necklace out of ears. Honest to goodness: human ears! That’s great. I know that guy is bad. I know he is bad because of the necklace of human ears he made and wore.

Let’s be henry, the second Universal Soldier movie is one of the worst movies of all time. It ranks with Shakespeare in Love and Slumdog Millionaire. I mean, the bad guy is bad just because. I don’t know why. Also, the bad guy is really a computer. He’s a computer because it’s the nineties. We were all so scared of computers back then. We thought they’d eventually get smart and take over the world. Little did we know computers wouldn’t get smarter. They’d become a place where people post videos of themselves dancing to pop songs and making fart noises.

Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day? -OR- Statham v. Stallone

When I first saw the cast listing for the Expendables, my first thought (other than Oscar bait!) was Jason Statham? Wha tha fuh? I was aware of him from Snatch and from the Italian Job, but somehow I had missed each and every one of his (I'm sure) adrenalin pumping, action-esque epics. So, long story short, I rented Crank, because it was a much dumber title for a movie than "Transporter," though I'll admit both are pretty dumb. Here's how Crank performed in the five most important action movie categories. For grading purposes, three Stathams equals one Stallone.

1. Ridiculous Premise. Oh my, yes. Statham plays an unlikable ass that is (probably justifiably) poisoned before the first scene of the movie. The poison will kill him unless he keeps his adrenalin up, so he's forced to snort coke, chug Red Bull, and instigate one senseless action scene after another to keep from dying. In a sense, it is a fairly genius premise in that it justifies the lack of rationale behind every scene in the movie. In a more real sense, however, it is just lazy screen writing.

Lost opportunities

Why have I never seen Riot before? Because it was never made directly available to me. What situatino would have made it directly available to me? If TBS was always showing it in the middle of the afternoon so I could watch fights while taking a nap or recovering from a hangover. Why did TBS not buy the rights to it? Apparently the budget of showing Very Funny reruns all the time did not allow them to spend $120 to purchase the rights to show Riot.

Here are the great in a Saturday-afternoon-as-a-child-or-adult-drifting-in-and-out-of-consciousness-great way things about Riot:

• Importantly it stars Gary Daniels, who, when he appears in The Expendables, will make everyone 90s action movie fans say, "Hey it's the 17th biggest action draw of the 90s! I'm so glad he's in this movie and not Jean Claude Van Damme or Steven Seagal!"

A hypothetical situation

If I was to tell you that Jason Statham, a brooding tough action hero, and Jet Li, a quick, flashy, talented martial arts hero, were to make a movie, and to give it a title which implies combat and put them face to face staring at each other on the poster, what would expect the movie to be like?

Conan the Barbarian – The Director's Commentary Commentary

I’m a little late to the summer of action party, but I thought I would kick things off properly with a running commentary of the director’s commentary of Conan the Barbarian.

If you are unfamiliar with Conan the Barbarian you really should go watch it. It’s a legitimately good film and is considered to be the acting breakthrough of Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s also got a creepy looking James Earl Jones in it and a lot of boobs and violence. I’d recommend never watching the sequel (which is on the other side of my Conan disc) as it is terrible.

Tiger Hi-Line Entertainment Review: Tango & Cash

Now this is it! When Mrs. Timmons gave us the information on this summer internship, watching movies like Tango and Cash is exactly what I wanted to do! I don't know why they had me watching some namby-pamby thing for my first review, or why they wouldn't give me a contributor account of my own. But now I'm here, and I'm here to talk about STUFF BLOWING UP!

Sylvester Stallone plays Ray Tango. Randy Feldman, the writer of the movie Tango & Cash, did a really clever thing there- turns out that TANGO is in his own way obsessed with CASH- he dresses like a businessman with geeky glasses and trades stocks! Cash marches to his own drumline a little more; he's played by Kurt Russell. I've heard some crazy stories about how much Kurt Russell used to drink!

Well, these two make like Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan in the recent smash Cop Out. Actually its not much like that because unlike Monroe and Hodges, they don't like each other too much. Well, they're the best cops in LA, which really bugs the bad guys who set them up and put them in general population of a prison. You can't keep a good man down though, so Tango and Cash one-line their way right out of jail. Then the figure out who put them behind bars in the first place, and go kill him. Revenge is a cold dish!

I'm really glad Mr. Feldman wrote this movie. It was probably a good training point for people who wanted to write buddy movies in the future so they could learn from his script about having the characters speak only with awesome cliches that I can't wait to use if I hopefully get into a fraternity when I get to move out of my parents and go to school far, far away from Mr. Deines. I'm just kidding, I love my school! But being in college is going to be awesome. Like Ray Tango says, Rambo is a pussy!

The guys wanted me to tell you this: this fall I'll be a junior at Cedar Falls High School in Iowa. I'm going to watch some movies during summer break and tell you all about them.

Joe Santo Hits the Jackpot

This two month-ish movie quest began as I got inordinately excited about it while engaged in a typical stream of consciousness email to JAY!!. As will be revealed in some short order, we econverse pretty much on the daily. Hooray technology! The summer of action was spawned out of a number of factors:

• The Expendables is coming out, which is awesome. I don't know how the movie is going to be, but just that it's coming out, that's awesome right there.
• Since I moved 2000 miles from the Exquisite Brigitte and my fat and becoming-fat cats, I have a considerable amount of free time. During my nightly free time I watch a lot of movies. After six months of watching a lot of movies I was starting to get to a pretty weird place in my quqeueueeeueueue where I was watching a lot, I mean, A LOT of foreign movies. So I was open to suggestions, shall we say.
• I thought it would be fun to collectively produce some form of entertainment with my fellow contributors, as we are downright hilarious any time we're together. However, aside from Jay and Joe, none of us technically live in the same city. (Yes, Jay and Dream Joe, you win the proximity contest. The Viceroy and I are a mere 5.9 miles from each other, but in are governed by different local agencies.) So the web, and a loose theme, seem a good place to start a collaboration.
• I was really excited to watch a bunch of classics that I shamefully hadn't seen, to make fun of Sly's awful acting, Arnold's terrible accent, and the lame plots of Jason Statham movies, and I was excited to see a lot of people get kicked in the face and have stuff gloriously blown up.
• And as I built my SoA ququeueueuwueuuwwue, I was tickled every time I added an early-career movie by Sly or Arnold. I like quality films, but as evidenced by my crush on Best of the Best 2, I'm 100% game for camp as well.

I have no idea where the Viceroy gets this "Son of Hercules" business, as from my trusty interweb sources Arnold's first credited role is "Hercules in New York." I saw part of this movie in college. It included the line "Hey, stop that chariot!" being yelled in the middle of New York. It was spectacular. However, due to his thick accent, Arnold's voice was dubbed right out of the film. The first Arnold movie available on netflix was "Stay Hungry". So under the guise of my last bullet point, I was elated to add it to my queueeeueueueue, and aside from some mid-week work fatigue and the after effects of laboriously recapping "The Fist of the North Star", delighted to receive it and throw it in my video disc spinner.

With so much to offer, you can't afford to miss it!

Ever wanted to know who Gary Daniels, costar of The Expendables, is? Watch The Fist of the North Star!

Ever wanted to know what happened to Rufio after Hook? Watch The Fist of the North Star!

Ever wanted to see another Chris Penn movie during the Summer of Action? Watch The Fist of the North Star!

Ever wanted to see how 90s filmmakers would do at making adaptations of graphic novels? Watch The Fist of the North Star!

Ever need a Downtown Julie Brown fix and can't get your hands on Club MTV tapes? Watch The Fist of the North Star!

BEST OF THE 5Qs 2

As promised at the tail end of BEST OF THE 5Qs, the touching conclusion of Best of the Best inspired me to immediately queuuequequeqeeueueueueueueue up its imaginatively titled sequel, Best of the Best 2. It came in on the very same day that the good viceroy of West LA leant me the footage of the goings on at The Party at Kitty & Stud's. Having already expended quite a bit of energy getting all erotic'd up with Italian Stallion, I was having second thoughts about rocking another SoA double feature. However, when the netflix envelope told me this:

My fate was obviously sealed. And so I partook of the fantastical revenge of Alex and Tommy...

Universal Soldiering is an Imperfect Science

Soldier on soldier!

Inspired by Sean's near nude picture of Jean Claude, and inspired by Dolph Lundgren's gripping performance in Rocky IV, and inspired by my love for ear necklaces, and inspired by everything awesome that ever existed, I decided to Netflix (is that officially a verb now?) Universal Soldier.  I used to love this movie.  According to wikipedia, it is a trilogy now.  This excites me a great deal. They are also making a FOURTH Universal Soldier starring the original leads and set in a "more modern setting" than, um, the early 90's?  The first Universal Soldier was not a period action piece.  It was awesome though.

Here's pretty much what happened:

The movie starts with Jean Claude standing in a rain-soaked Vietnam. That war had so much rain. Then, Jean Claude tells everyone to leave.  Except they can't leave because they are all dead.  Dolph Lundgren killed them.  He then cut off their ears and made a necklace out of them.  His ear fetish was not explained.  Nor was his hysteria.  We just needed to know he thought everyone was a traitor, and that he was CRAZY.  His craziness was accentuated when he shot two innocent Vietnamese people.  Similarly, Jean Claude was not crazy because he wanted the Vietnamese people to live.  Unfortunately both Jean Claude and Dolph killed each other three minutes into the movie.

WHAT!?!?!  The leads can't die.

Hell, the Viceroy told me this was gonna be an art movie

The subheading of this blog, "Men across the nation search for greatness in action films" was penned as a sweeping and dramatic nod to the fact that the contributors are far flung. More realistically it should say "Men in the central time zone plus two in the western part of L.A. get giddy about shitty movies". This would more accurately reflect the identities of the participants (until we acquire a friend in the east) as well as the purpose of the quest.

So, anyway, I'm not sure where Sean lies his head after drinking a cube of delicious Old Mil Light, but the Viceroy and I may be the most closely located pair of contributors to this blog. This offered me the opportunity to snag "Italian Stallion" from him this morning before it need be returned to Cinefile. I won't belabor many points, as he covered it all quite nicely just a couple days ago, and the movie hasn't changed aside from perhaps being more grainy and poorly lit than it was when he put it on the spin cycle in his video-playing machine. In the interest of full disclosure of my habits, and further discussion of a momentous piece of film, however, I record here some supplementary thoughts.

* I would update "panty hamster" to "panty chinchilla". That, or those are some very ferocious hamsters.

PREDATOR 2010

What would happen if the loaded cast of the original Predator were to get back together today, knowing what they know? In what direction would the all-star, power-packed cast lead a sequel if it hadn't been handed to Danny Glover, Gary Busey, and Bill Paxton? How would they govern the downfall of the wicked-mouthed alien/reptile thing if it hadn't been spun off into a weird nostalgia-grab/FX orgy co-starring those scoop-headed Aliens?

Arnold: As the governor of America's most populous state, I hearby declare dat in Predata 2010 zere vil be seven times the asplosions and ve will hunt down seven of dose ugly motherfuckers! Ve vill flip da script of the original. I wanted to vork only with my team in zat one- in dis one we will have teams from all over ze world. A team from Mexico to cut off all ze tree branches so when he wears dat invisible suit it won't be zo trippy to see! A team of da Japs who vil be well educated by a state education system dat is bleeding money like za stuck goats in Austria!