Eye-popping projects featuring Van Damme, Bruce Campbell, and voracious creatures.
JAWS 3-D (1983)
After the massive success of Jaws in 1975, it's understandable that Universal wanted to build a franchise out of the concept. But how do you make a sensible franchise out of the idea of sharks attacking people? Although they had a couple interesting options for Jaws 2 stories presented to them, like a prequel about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis in 1945 or replacing the 25 foot Great White with a much bigger Megalodon, they decided to just do the same thing all over again: Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) had to deal with another man-eating Great White swimming around in the water around Amity Island. For the third film the studio decided to shake things up a bit - and they almost did something very different.
The National Lampoon guys were brought in to make a spoof called Jaws 3 / People 0, with John Hughes co-writing the script and Joe Dante in consideration to direct. A couple drafts were written before Universal chickened out, feeling that making a Jaws spoof would tarnish the brand. Personally, I would have seen a movie titled "National Lampoon's Jaws 3 / People 0" as being separate enough from the previous two movies that I wouldn't be comparing it to them, and I think a bad sequel that takes itself seriously can hurt a franchise's reputation worse than a spoof. Universal definitely didn't do the brand any favors with the two serious sequels they proceeded to make.
The third Jaws is the only directorial credit for Joe Alves, who worked as production designer on the previous movies and was second unit director on Jaws 2. To make his debut even more of a challenge, Universal to decided to make this film part of the 3-D resurgence of the early '80s. Guerdon Trueblood receives a story credit on the film because he had an idea about a shark that swims upstream and gets stuck in a saltwater lake. That basically does happen in Jaws 3-D, but instead of a saltwater lake it's a man-made lagoon at a Sea World theme park in Florida. Author Richard Matheson was hired to write the screenplay and was given some guidelines: Scheider wasn't going to come back, so Universal wanted Brody's sons to be characters in the movie, making the ridiculous decision that people with the last name "Brody" were as important to this series as sharks. Universal also wanted Matheson to write a character for Mickey Rooney, because clearly the one thing the Jaws movies were always lacking was Mickey Rooney... Well, Rooney didn't end up being in the movie, and Matheson's script was reworked by script doctors, including Jaws 1 and 2 co-writer Carl Gottlieb.
As mentioned, Jaws 3-D moves the action from Amity Island in New England down to Florida, where a Sea World has a gated man-made lagoon that's connected to the open ocean through a channel. In that lagoon is the park's big draw: the "Undersea Kingdom", an attraction that will allow people to walk around in acrylic tunnels 40 feet beneath the surface of the water and dine in a restaurant down there. Mike Brody is now an adult played by Dennis Quaid and oversees maintenance issues at the park, and he's dating marine biologist Kay Morgan (Bess Armstrong), who has a bond with the park's pair of dolphins.
The film begins by giving us a preview of how atrocious the dimension-breaking special effects are going to be, showing a shark chomp a fish and leave its head to float into the screen. The shark then swims around right outside the Sea World location while the water ski stunt team - including Lea Thompson as Kelly Ann Bukowski - do some practicing. When the team heads back into the lagoon, the shark follows, making it through the gate just in time.
After the dolphins start acting nervous and an employee gets chomped, the park realizes they have a Great White shark in their lagoon. A smaller one than we're used to in these movies, a 10 footer. Having seen two Great Whites go on rampages before, Mike wants the shark out of there. But Kay convinces the head of the park, Louis Gossett Jr. as Calvin Bouchard, to let her and hot shot oceanographer Philip FitzRoyce (Simon MacCorkindale) catch the shark and keep it in captivity. It will be the only Great White in captivity in the world. There really aren't any Great Whites in captivity, as they don't take well to being contained and will often start starving themselves to death. This plot might have been inspired by an actual case of a Sea World attempting to keep a Great White in captivity in 1981; they had to let it go after just 16 days because it wouldn't eat.
All that takes up most of the film's running time, padded out with some gratuitous drama over Mike and Kay worrying whether their relationship will last when he takes a job in Venezuela and she stays in the States, and Mike's visiting brother Sean (John Putch) being afraid of water but attempting to romance the water-loving Kelly Ann.
Then the Great White dies in its little pool. So there we have it, Jaws 3-D wraps up in just under an hour because its shark dies from being put in captivity... Oh wait, there's 40 minutes of movie left. Because there's another shark. The biggest one a Jaws movie has featured yet. That 10 footer was the offspring of a 35 footer who has also made its way into the lagoon and is ready to wreak havoc at the park on opening day.
Although I have seen Jaws 3-D several times, most of those viewings occurred during my childhood, when I felt it necessary to watch entire franchises all the time instead of just revisiting the installments I liked the most. I have never had a positive outlook on 3 and for the last couple decades have been ignoring its existence for the most part. But while watching it again this year, I began to think I've been overly negative about Jaws 3-D. It's not really that bad of a movie, especially not when compared to the sequel that came next. It's just dull and underwhelming. The first hour is mostly focused on uninteresting people doing uninteresting thing - the inclusion of the Brody boys was completely unnecessary and adds very little to the story. Mike barely has anything to do, being overshadowed by Kay and FitzRoyce, and Sean isn't around much at all.
Things do liven up substantially in the final 30 minutes or so, with the mama shark causing all sorts of destruction and injuries. Unfortunately, the movie has to showcase its terrible effects to show us that action, which takes away from it unless you enjoy laughing at the effects.
Jaws 3-D is a sadly huge step down from its predecessors and I'm not saying I've been missing out by not watching it much over the last twenty years, I just think I should be easier on it than I have been. I still don't need to watch it with any regularity, but it's not a disaster... And it does have a huge shark trying to batter its way into acrylic underwater tunnels packed with people, which is a terrifying concept.
KNOCK OFF (1998)
Jean-Claude Van Damme and director Tsui Hark made two "bad idea" flops in a row, which is a shame because much higher quality movies should have come out of their collaborations. You have Van Damme's on screen fighting skills and Hark is a respected director for his work in Chinese film, plus on their second movie together Sammo Hung was the second unit director. This combination of elements should have resulted in a martial arts movie classic.
Unfortunately, Van Damme and Hark's first movie together, Double Team, was based on the bad idea of teaming Van Damme up with basketball player Dennis Rodman. Their follow-up Knock Off is based on the bad idea of teaming Van Damme up with comedic actor Rob Schneider, and they were working from a script by Steven E. de Souza, who wrote and directed the disappointing Street Fighter adaptation Van Damme starred in a few years earlier.
Unlike Double Team, where I wanted to listen to podcast commentary for the movie and thus finally had to get around to watching it in 2008, eleven years after it was released, I never had a reason to go back to Knock Off after skipping it when it was first released. Now I'm watching my way through Van Damme's filmography and this one came up... So twenty-one years after it was released, I finally watched it.
Before 2019, I had only seen a couple minutes of Knock Off. My sister rented it when it first came out on VHS and I saw part of it while she was watching it - a scene in which Van Damme's character Marcus Ray and Schneider's character Tommy Hendricks are competing in a pulled rickshaw race, with Ray pulling Tommy. I got a sample of the film's sense of humor, I saw Schneider whipping Van Damme with an eel and Van Damme looking back at him in humorous anger... My sister was laughing, but I was out.
I recently learned that the movie is just as wrong-headed as I always assumed it was, and that it features a plot so nonsensical it can be hard to keep up with. Ray and Tommy work for the Hong Kong branch of V Six jeans, and an American representative of the company (Lela Rochon as Karen Lee) arrives when the company notices that many pairs of jeans in their latest shipment were cheap knock-offs. This discovery that bootleg items are coming out of China leads the film down a path that includes double and triple crosses, CIA agents, the Russian mob, and "nanobombs" hidden in clothing. Paul Sorvino shows up now and then, too.
Knock Off is a ridiculous movie, and Hark directed the hell out of it, filling every scene with crazy camera movements and angles. It doesn't have much going for it, but the fight sequences are pretty cool. Ray may only be in fashion sales, but he still has all of Van Damme's skills.
The fight sequences aren't all they were meant to be, though, because the studio chose to cut them down. A baffling decision. People watch martial arts movies to see the martial arts fight scenes...
Maybe if they had left in more of the impressive action more people would have gone to see this movie. Even though it looks quite cheap at times (the title comes up looking like something you'd see at the head of a TV show on basic cable back in those days), this apparently had a slightly higher budget than Double Team somehow. And it was a slightly worse box office failure.
TIMECOP (1997)
Timecop, a big screen adaptation of a Dark Horse comic book created by Mark Verheiden and Mike Richardson, was a hit in 1994 - but rather than go forward with a sequel that would have brought Timecop star Jean-Claude Van Damme back as Time Enforcement Commission officer Max Walker, the powers that be instead chose to take the concept to television. I believe Van Damme was disappointed by that decision, but around that time he had just sabotaged his own career by demanding too much money... Knocking himself down into lesser films like Double Team and Knock Off.
Verheiden developed the Timecop idea for television, and the set-up for the show was explained with a voiceover that played during the title sequence on most episodes: "The year 2007. Time travel is a reality and it's fallen into criminal hands. With history itself at risk, the United States has formed the Time Enforcement Commission, a top secret agency responsible for policing the temporal stream. An elite team of agents track unlawful travelers across time. Their mission: protect the past, preserve the future. These agents are known as Timecops."
The show follows TEC officer Jack Logan (Ted King), who's your standard generic hero. The show only ran on ABC for 9 episodes before getting cancelled, and in that time Logan never did impress me much as a character, but he was likeable enough and got the job done.
Logan's supporting cast included Don Stark as his boss Eugene Matuzek; Cristi Conaway as Claire Hemmings, a fellow officer Logan has a "will they or won't they?" sort of interaction with (and the show answers that question surprisingly early); and Kurt Fuller as tech expert Dale Easter. They're a decent bunch to spend some time with.
Over the course of the 9 episodes that were made, Logan and his cohorts deal with problems like time traveler Ian Pascoe (Tom O'Brien) going to 1888 London so he can murder Jack the Ripper and take over his killing spree (and while working this case, Logan also meets a man related to H.G. Wells); a thief going back to relive a diamond robbery in 1977; Pascoe attempting to assassinate an actress in the 1950s who will go on to give birth to the 44th President of the United States, Albert Baker Warren; Pascoe - this guy was such a pain, a third of the series was dedicated to trying to stop him - teaming up with Al Capone; someone (not Pascoe!) trying to give Hitler an atomic bomb; a criminal with a grudge attempting to kill a teenage Logan in 1989; and a hijacking of the Empress of the Americas ship in 1939.
There were also episodes in which Logan has 10 hours to solve his own murder, and another where Bruce Campbell shows up as a wild card TEC officer named Tommy Maddox. Campbell guest starring on this show just made me think of how much more I probably would have enjoyed it if he had been playing the lead character. Verheiden and Campbell would go on to work together again on My Name Is Bruce and the third season of Ash vs. Evil Dead.
William Devane and Ron Livingston also made notable guest appearances.
The Timecop series told some interesting stories, and there are some fun sequences where we get to see how changing things in the past can affect the future. My favorite example of this came in the World War II episode, in which Logan returns to 2007 to find that he has gone into an alternate timeline where Germany won the war. There are some fun, Back to the Future Part II sort of scenes in this episode where we see scenes from the perspectives of two different Logans on two different missions as he tries to stop that bad alternate future from happening.
Although the show was entertaining, I can see why it didn't last. There may be a lot of times and places Logan could have gone to, but it just would have been the same thing over and over again. Within its 9 episodes, the show already met most of the potential it was ever going to have.
PIRANHA PART TWO: THE SPAWNING (1981)
Three years after director Joe Dante and producer Roger Corman brought us the best Jaws cash-in ever made with Piranha, Italian producer Ovidio G. Assonitis got his hands on the rights to make a sequel to Piranha without the involvement of Dante or Corman. The result was sort of a minor disaster, but it did serve as the feature directorial debut of James Cameron, who had been working in the visual effects and art departments up to that point. For example, he worked on the visual effects of John Carpenter's Escape from New York.
Cameron wasn't the first choice to direct the Piranha sequel, that was Miller Drake, who did post-production work for Corman. The major selling point of the sequel is that it features piranha that have wings and the ability to fly, and that idea originated with Drake and screenwriter Charles H. Eglee. However, Assonitis was apparently not impressed with Drake and removed him from the project, promoting special effects guy Cameron into the director's chair. Cameron then rewrote the script himself, keeping the idea of flying piranha.
But that wasn't the end of the trouble. Piranha Part Two: The Spawning had only been filming for one week when Assonitis took control and began dictating directorial decisions to Cameron. So while Cameron does get his first director credit on this movie, he was only doing what Assonitis told him to and didn't have any control over what was done with the footage in post-production. Assonitis couldn't just fire him because the movie was contractually obligated to have an American director.
But at least Cameron officially became a director with this movie. Drake never did end up directing a film.
Set on and around a small island in the Caribbean, The Spawning begins with a diving couple discovering a shipwreck and swimming inside to have some underwater sex. Unfortunately for them, this shipwreck happens to be the new home to a school of genetically modified piranha that were accidentally dropped into the sea by the military scientists who created them to be "the ultimate killer organism". Which means the divers are screwed, in a different way than they intended.
The piranha continue to kill people throughout the film, and since they're able to launch themselves out of the water and fly around they don't just have to chew on divers and swimmers. They also attack fishermen and boaters. One of my favorite moments in the film comes when a piranha is revealed to still be inside the body of one of their victims after the body is taken to the morgue. That's just a minor inconvenience for this fish. It kills another person in the morgue and escapes by flying out a window, smashing through the glass.
The human characters who have to save humanity from this flying fish situation getting out of control are Tricia O'Neil as Anne Kimbrough, a former marine biology student who now works as a dive instructor at a beachside resort called Club Elysium; Lance Henriksen as Anne's ex-husband Steve Kimbrough, the local police chief who wears a uniform Henriksen had to put together himself because the producer didn't want to pay for it; and Steve Marachuk as biochemist Tyler Sherman, who becomes a sort of love interest for Anne as they investigate all these piranha deaths together. It's kind of sleazy that Tyler waits until after Anne has slept with him before he admits that he helped create these flying killer fish.
Also in the mix is Anne and Steve's teenage son Chris (Ricky Paull Goldin, a.k.a. Ricky G. Paull), who of course ends up in a perilous situation that his parents have to rescue him from.
They have less luck preventing the piranha from carrying out an attack on tourists staying at Club Elysium. That's the film's standout sequence, offering the sight of flying fish attacking a bunch of people on a beach just outside a hotel. The entire film exists just to bring us that 2 and a half minute scene.
I don't enjoy Piranha Part Two half as much as I enjoy its predecessor, but the film has the reputation of being horrible and I wouldn't go that far. There was a time when I would have gone that far, it wasn't until recent years that I gained any appreciation for this movie at all. It was screened at a Cinema Wasteland convention and I was in the room for part of that screening. When the morgue scene came up, Piranha Part Two won me over for the first time ever... And I just found out that was the October 2007 Cinema Wasteland. It sure doesn't feel like it has been more than eleven years since that moment.
I still find the movie to be rather dull overall, but it has its charms. It's just not as cool as you would hope the mixture of James Cameron and flying piranha would be.
No comments:
Post a Comment