Horror and Hobbs, swords and sorcery.
DEMON OF PARADISE (1987)
Set in Hawaii but filmed in the Philippines, Demon of Paradise is an amusingly bad aquatic horror movie that was gifted to us by prolific B-movie director Cirio H. Santiago (TNT Jackson, Bloodfist 2050). The story takes place in a fishing community where some people have picked up the bad habit of doing their fishing with dynamite. This has stirred up the legendary humanoid reptile creature Akua, which the more superstitious locals believe has been chilling in the river for the last fifty years. Now Akua is back, and it's in a lousy mood.
Akua starts messing with the fishermen, attacking boats and killing people. Some people aren't quick to believe that Akua exists, but the viewer knows it's real. Even if we don't know exactly what it is. Maybe this thing is a demon like the title says, maybe it's something left over from the age of dinosaurs, a "missing link". Whatever it is, stopping it is going to take the combined efforts of lawman Keefer (William Steis), who had moved to the area to relax after dealing with a maniac in Reno, and herpetologist Annie (Kathryn Witt).
Along for the ride are wild man journalist Ike (screenwriter Frederick Bailey), who seems like he would have been in the Animal House frat when he went to college, and Laura Banks as Cahill, who runs a waterside resort that's in Akua's territory. In the Jaws knock-off tradition, there's some disagreement over whether or not the resort should shut down until this problem is dealt with.
What Akua really is, is a person in a goofy-looking costume, and the performer's idea of looking threatening is to just motion at an intended victim with one clawed hand. It almost looks like this monster is waving at people, and this motion had some friends (including blog contributor Priscilla) and I cracking up when we watched this movie together.
The silliness of the monster is the best thing about this movie. The second best thing about it is the fact that it's packed with explosions. The dynamite element of the story helps Santiago explain why so many things blow up here, but he doesn't always need the excuse. Sometimes the explosions don't make any sense at all, like when a helicopter explodes after a hard landing in the water. I'm not complaining.
Demon of Paradise is a shining example of a "so bad it's good" movie.
THE KISS (1988)
Director Pen Densham's The Kiss is an '80s horror oddity that I didn't catch up on until more than thirty years after its initial release. I had crossed paths with the movie from time to time over the years, I think I saw its rather uninspiring cover art on the shelves in local video stores back in the day, but when that lame cover was combined with a generic title and a concept that's not something I would usually be rushing to see (the idea of a supernatural curse being passed between the women in a family for generations), I chose to pass on The Kiss for a long while.
Watching it now, I wasn't exactly blown away by the movie, but I could appreciate how odd it is.
The story scripted by Stephen Volk and Tom Ropelewski begins in the Belgian Congo in 1963, when a young girl named Felice boards a train for a trip with her aunt, leaving her sister Hilary and their sister behind. Felice will never be herself again after this trip, because during the train ride her aunt freaks out and passes her life force to the girl through a bloody kiss. It's never fully explained how or why this sort of thing happens in this family, but it has been going on for generations.
Twenty-five years later, Hilary gets a call from Felice saying, "It's time." Which means it's time for Felice to pass her own life force into Hilary's teenage daughter Amy (Meredith Salenger). Hilary clearly doesn't like this idea, but she's killed in a gory car accident before she can do anything to stop her sister.
Soon Felice (Joanna Pacula), this aunt Amy didn't even know existed, shows up and starts surreptitiously wreaking havoc with supernatural spells. Felice is to blame for accidents that befall some of Amy's friends, like when one girl's necklace gets caught in a mall escalator. She has brought a demonic puppet cat into the home with her. And she seduces Amy's dad Jack (Nicholas Kilbertus). Nobody believes that Felice is causing all the bad things that are going on, but Amy can see right through her and instinctively distrusts her.
Demon cat attacks, spontaneous combustion, body horror, monstrous parasites ensue, and Felice proves to be quite tough to stop.
The Kiss is a movie that gets wackier and wackier as it goes along, building up to climactic sequence that is total insanity. It started to win me over with the inclusion of a demonic cat, and by the ending I was loving what I was seeing.
This isn't something I'm going to be watching very often, but I'm glad I finally saw it.
FAST & FURIOUS PRESENTS: HOBBS & SHAW (2019)
As far as I was concerned, the best part of The Fate of the Furious, the eighth film in the Fast & Furious franchise, involved the characters of DSS agent Luke Hobbs (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) and the previous film's villain, former MI6 agent Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), smashing their way through guards and prisoners during a prison break sequence. So I can totally understand the thought process behind Universal giving those two characters their own "buddy cop" style spin-off.
I do, however, wish that Drew Pearce (Iron Man 3, Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation) and veteran Fast & Furious writer Chris Morgan had come up with a more interesting story to bring Hobbs and Shaw back together with rather than just resorting to the cliché MacGuffin of a super virus, and I also wish that the action in the movie was more in line with the old school buddy cop movies rather than just being another overblown spectacle like the last couple Fast & Furious movies. Especially since the film was directed by John Wick co-director David Leitch. We've seen what Leitch can do with classic style stunt work and fight scenes, but Hobbs & Shaw didn't turn out to be nearly as cool or interesting as John Wick because the action scenes are CGI nonsense. I expect large scale CGI sequences when I go see a superhero movie, and frequently enjoy them, but I go into a movie like this hoping to see something a little more down-to-earth. Hobbs & Shaw is anything but down-to-earth. Its normal human characters are just as strong and capable as the average superhero. The title characters are even put up against a superhuman villain.
That villain is Idris Elba as Brixton Lore, a self-proclaimed "black Superman" with cybernetic enhancements and a transforming motorcycle. Brixton works for a terrorist organization called Eteon that aims to reboot humanity by killing off the weaker among us with a super virus. A virus that has ended up in the hands of Deckard's MI6 agent sister Hattie (Vanessa Kirby of Mission: Impossible - Fallout). This movie would like us to believe that Deckard and Hattie are only a couple years apart in age, even though Statham clearly has a good twenty years on Kirby.
Deckard sets out to help his sister avoid Brixton, and with a little push from a CIA agent (played by Leitch's Deadpool 2 collaborator Ryan Reynolds) Hobbs also gets involved in the situation... and starts to take a liking to Hattie over the course of the many action sequences that ensue. Battles between Hobbs, the two Shaws, Brixton, and Brixton's fellow Eteon henchmen take place in London and Moscow, leading up to a climactic sequence set in Hobbs's homeland of Samoa, where we meet his many badass family members.
I would have liked Hobbs & Shaw even more if it had been on the level of an '80s action movie rather than being as utterly ridiculous as it is, but even at this ridiculous level I found it to be entertaining. I had fun watching it for most of its running time, although I had a feeling Moscow really could have been the climax of the movie. Instead, it just kept on going.... which did allow us to meet Hobbs's family. That was fun.
The Netflix series The Witcher is based on a series of novels that author Andrzej Sapkowski has been working on since the 1980s, stories that have previously served as inspiration for comic books, a feature film and television series made in Poland, and some popular video games. So before we dive into my reaction to the first season of this show, I must admit that I have no familiarity with any previous iteration of The Witcher. I haven't read the books, haven't watched the Polish film or series, haven't played the video games or even seen gameplay footage. Everything in this show was completely new to me, so I can't say how it holds up to anything that came before. I can only say what I thought of the events and characters depicted in the eight episodes Netflix has made available.
Developed for Netflix by Lauren Schmidt Hissrich, The Witcher is set in a medeival world referred to as the Continent and stars Henry Cavill, sporting armor and a long grey wig, as the title character, also known as Geralt of Rivia. We're told that witchers are men who have been given mutant abilities, and that there aren't many of them left. They make their living wandering around the Continent, hunting monsters, and they're shunned by regular citizens - except when those citizens need to offer them some coin to deal with a monster problem. While I'm not a big fan of the films Cavill is most well known for, the DC Comics adaptations in which he plays Superman, I am a fan of the actor himself - I've always felt like he had the potential to play a better Superman than he was ever given the opportunity to, and I enjoyed his presence in Mission: Impossible - Fallout. His Geralt is a sword-wielding badass, a capable monster slayer and a man of few words who delivers the few words he does speak in a grumble that lets you know he's cool. People say witchers traded their emotions for their mutant abilities, but while Geralt does have a stony facade there is indication that he really does have some feelings going on in there.
My favorite aspect of the show were the "Geralt hunting monsters" stories, in which episodes simply follow him from place to place, taking monster hunting jobs. When episodes would focus on Geralt carrying out his latest jobs, The Witcher felt to me like a medeival version of Supernatural... which I hope doesn't sound like a put-down to fans of this franchise, because I love Supernatural. Over the course of the first season, we see Geralt hunting down such creatures as a kikimora, a djinn, a dragon, and (this was my favorite monster hunting adventure) a striga. On some of these jobs he's joined by a bard named Jaskier (Joey Batey), an entertaining comic relief character who composes songs about the things he experiences alongside Geralt.
Geralt also crosses swords with a whole lot of human beings. It was great fun watching him take on adversaries and deal with outlandish scenarios, while frequently saying "Hmm" and finding the right moment to deliver his catchphrase, the most simple catchphrase in history: "F*ck." It seemed like Geralt dropped an F-bomb in each episode, and it was great every time.
This isn't just a series about Geralt hunting monsters and cutting down enemies, though. He may be the title character, but there are times when he gets overshadowed on his own show by characters who pull him through an epic story while he's just trying to mind his own business. The other major characters the show follows are Princess Cirilla of Cintra (Freya Allan) and a witch named Yennefer (Anya Chalotra), and it's these two who keep this show from being a "monster of the week" deal.
We get to know quite a bit about Ciri, who has superhuman abilities of her own, and her family; her grandmother Queen Calanthe (Jodhi May) and step-grandfather King Eist (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson), her mother and her father, who was a cursed knight. When Cintra is invaded by an army from the land of Nilfgaard, Ciri is forced to flee into the wilderness alone - but before she goes, Calanthe tells her to find Geralt of Rivia, "He is your destiny." When we meet Yennefer, she's a poor peasant girl who is shunned by strangers and family alike because she has some deformities; a twisted spine, a hunchback, a protruding jaw. She is sold off to a witch, and soon learns to become a powerful witch herself. She also goes through a procedure that turns her into a flawless beauty who will become a love interest to Geralt, but she loses her uterus in the process.
It's Yennefer who nearly steals the show out from under the Witcher himself. In fact, the last couple episodes might as well have been called Yennefer. Yennefer is an interesting character, and there were times when I wasn't sure what to think of her. I started off feeling sympathy for her, then I didn't like her very much, then I came around to caring for her again. Still, it was odd that Geralt was given so little to do in the season finale in favor of her. I spent most of that episode's running time desperately hoping he would show up and do something heroic as Yennefer and her fellow witches went up against the Nilfgaard military (which has some witches of its own).
The lack of Geralt in that last episode was frustrating, but I did appreciate that the Nilfgaard mess brought some large scale battles to the show.
If you like monster hunting and sword and sorcery action, The Witcher has a whole lot to enjoy packed into the eight episodes of its first season. It has an awesome title character, good supporting characters, and a satisfying amount of action. There's bloodshed, gratuitous nudity, amusing profanity, and some intriguing storytelling. Viewers who aren't paying enough attention may get lost, because episodes start off telling separate stories that take place in different time periods - the Yennefer story begins roughly 30 years before the Geralt stories begin, and the Geralt stories begin roughly 30 years before Ciri's story starts. Their timelines will eventually converge, but there were points when I wasn't sure when scenes were taking place, especially since Geralt and Yennefer don't age.
The Witcher worked very well for me, and I'm sure Lauren Schmidt Hissrich and her collaborators would be glad to know that this first season left me anxious to see more. I would dive into season 2 right now if it existed - and thankfully, Netflix has already ordered a second season of the show.
Developed for Netflix by Lauren Schmidt Hissrich, The Witcher is set in a medeival world referred to as the Continent and stars Henry Cavill, sporting armor and a long grey wig, as the title character, also known as Geralt of Rivia. We're told that witchers are men who have been given mutant abilities, and that there aren't many of them left. They make their living wandering around the Continent, hunting monsters, and they're shunned by regular citizens - except when those citizens need to offer them some coin to deal with a monster problem. While I'm not a big fan of the films Cavill is most well known for, the DC Comics adaptations in which he plays Superman, I am a fan of the actor himself - I've always felt like he had the potential to play a better Superman than he was ever given the opportunity to, and I enjoyed his presence in Mission: Impossible - Fallout. His Geralt is a sword-wielding badass, a capable monster slayer and a man of few words who delivers the few words he does speak in a grumble that lets you know he's cool. People say witchers traded their emotions for their mutant abilities, but while Geralt does have a stony facade there is indication that he really does have some feelings going on in there.
My favorite aspect of the show were the "Geralt hunting monsters" stories, in which episodes simply follow him from place to place, taking monster hunting jobs. When episodes would focus on Geralt carrying out his latest jobs, The Witcher felt to me like a medeival version of Supernatural... which I hope doesn't sound like a put-down to fans of this franchise, because I love Supernatural. Over the course of the first season, we see Geralt hunting down such creatures as a kikimora, a djinn, a dragon, and (this was my favorite monster hunting adventure) a striga. On some of these jobs he's joined by a bard named Jaskier (Joey Batey), an entertaining comic relief character who composes songs about the things he experiences alongside Geralt.
Geralt also crosses swords with a whole lot of human beings. It was great fun watching him take on adversaries and deal with outlandish scenarios, while frequently saying "Hmm" and finding the right moment to deliver his catchphrase, the most simple catchphrase in history: "F*ck." It seemed like Geralt dropped an F-bomb in each episode, and it was great every time.
This isn't just a series about Geralt hunting monsters and cutting down enemies, though. He may be the title character, but there are times when he gets overshadowed on his own show by characters who pull him through an epic story while he's just trying to mind his own business. The other major characters the show follows are Princess Cirilla of Cintra (Freya Allan) and a witch named Yennefer (Anya Chalotra), and it's these two who keep this show from being a "monster of the week" deal.
We get to know quite a bit about Ciri, who has superhuman abilities of her own, and her family; her grandmother Queen Calanthe (Jodhi May) and step-grandfather King Eist (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson), her mother and her father, who was a cursed knight. When Cintra is invaded by an army from the land of Nilfgaard, Ciri is forced to flee into the wilderness alone - but before she goes, Calanthe tells her to find Geralt of Rivia, "He is your destiny." When we meet Yennefer, she's a poor peasant girl who is shunned by strangers and family alike because she has some deformities; a twisted spine, a hunchback, a protruding jaw. She is sold off to a witch, and soon learns to become a powerful witch herself. She also goes through a procedure that turns her into a flawless beauty who will become a love interest to Geralt, but she loses her uterus in the process.
It's Yennefer who nearly steals the show out from under the Witcher himself. In fact, the last couple episodes might as well have been called Yennefer. Yennefer is an interesting character, and there were times when I wasn't sure what to think of her. I started off feeling sympathy for her, then I didn't like her very much, then I came around to caring for her again. Still, it was odd that Geralt was given so little to do in the season finale in favor of her. I spent most of that episode's running time desperately hoping he would show up and do something heroic as Yennefer and her fellow witches went up against the Nilfgaard military (which has some witches of its own).
The lack of Geralt in that last episode was frustrating, but I did appreciate that the Nilfgaard mess brought some large scale battles to the show.
If you like monster hunting and sword and sorcery action, The Witcher has a whole lot to enjoy packed into the eight episodes of its first season. It has an awesome title character, good supporting characters, and a satisfying amount of action. There's bloodshed, gratuitous nudity, amusing profanity, and some intriguing storytelling. Viewers who aren't paying enough attention may get lost, because episodes start off telling separate stories that take place in different time periods - the Yennefer story begins roughly 30 years before the Geralt stories begin, and the Geralt stories begin roughly 30 years before Ciri's story starts. Their timelines will eventually converge, but there were points when I wasn't sure when scenes were taking place, especially since Geralt and Yennefer don't age.
The Witcher worked very well for me, and I'm sure Lauren Schmidt Hissrich and her collaborators would be glad to know that this first season left me anxious to see more. I would dive into season 2 right now if it existed - and thankfully, Netflix has already ordered a second season of the show.
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