Worth Mentioning - It Pays to Be More Than Human

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning. 

Low budget sci-fi and some very popular comedy and martial arts.

NEMESIS (1992)

Director Albert Pyun packs so much into the first 20 minutes of the sci-fi action movie Nemesis, the story of those minutes could have been expanded into a feature on its own, a separate prequel to what happens in the film's remaining 76 minutes. We're introduced to our hero Alex Raine (Olivier Gruner) when he's working for the LAPD in 2027, dealing with bio-enhanced gangsters, information terrorists, and cyborg outlaws. Alex is a bit enhanced with some cyborg elements himself; at this point, he's still 86.5% natural, but still worries about losing his humanity. Then he encounters a group of terrorists called the Red Army Hammerheads, and that goes really bad for him. He gets so messed up by the terrorist Rosaria (Jennifer Gatti), it's reminiscent of Peter Weller getting blown apart in RoboCop.

Jump ahead six months. Alex has been nursed back to health, rebuilt with synthetic flesh and bio-engineered organs. And he wants revenge. That could have been the focus of an entire movie, but Alex tracks Rosaria down to Baja, New America and kills her real quick. Then he walks away from his job with the LAPD and heads down to New Rio in Brazil (it's comforting to know that New Rio will still be represented through aerial shots of the Christ the Redeemer statue, as Rio de Janeiro usually is) to make some money in a shadier way. Then we're told it's one year later... It's really crazy how many story shifts and time jumps there are in the opening stretch of this movie. Strap yourself in before you try to watch it, or you could get whiplash.

In a scene that could have been the start of a sequel to the story of Alex getting revenge on Rosaria, Alex is informed by a man named Marion (Thom Mathews of Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI, Return of the Living Dead parts 1 and 2, Kickboxer 4, etc.) that the LAPD needs him to carry out an assignment for them. Alex is reluctant to work for the LAPD, represented by the likes of Trancers star Tim Thomerson as Commissioner Farnsworth and character actor Brion James as Maritz, but he doesn't have much choice: while he was being fixed up after his first encounter with Rosaria, they stuck a bomb in his heart that will be detonated if he doesn't follow orders.

So Alex is ordered to go to the island of Shang-Lu to stop his ex Jared (Marjorie Monaghan), a cyborg who used to work for the LAPD herself, from selling important information to Red Army Hammerheads leader Angie-Liv (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa). You may have noticed that Pyun decided to give some of the male characters names we associate with females, and female characters names we associate with males. There's a man named Michelle, a woman named Julian. Plus gender neutral names like Alex, Sam, and Max. The Max in question is a character whose full name is Max Impact. Played by Merle Kennedy, she has a prominent role in the second half of the movie.

The story remains focused after Alex reaches Shang-Lu, but there are some twists and turns and more questioning of whether or not it pays to be more than human, and how synthetic a person can get before they lose their soul. There are bad cyborgs who want to take over the world by replacing humans with cell-for-cell duplicates, there are good cyborgs who want to stop this from happening, and in the middle of it all is Alex, who has to fend off numerous attacks. Nemesis was clearly a low budget movie, but Pyun still managed to bring some impressive bursts of action to the screen. The movie seems so cheap, it's almost surprising when some cool action breaks out - and it does frequently. It's also surprising that Gruner wasn't given many physical altercations to participate in, since he was a kickboxer before becoming an actor. Most of the action scenes are shootouts rather than fights.

Nemesis is an entertaining movie to sit through, and it's one I have a degree of nostalgia for because it I would see it playing on the premium movie channels with some regularity when I was a kid. I don't know how often I watched the whole thing, but I definitely saw bits and pieces of Nemesis playing out on my TV quite a few times.

THE SECOND ARRIVAL (1998)

A sequel to the 1996 sci-fi film The Arrival (and therefore also known as Arrival II), The Second Arrival does the protagonist of the previous film really dirty in an effort to justify its own existence. Were you rooting for Charlie Sheen's character Zane Zaminsky in The Arrival? Did you think he had won at the end when he managed to send out a global television broadcast revealing that aliens are living among us, disguised as people, working to destroy the environment to make Earth more hospitable for themselves? Well, The Second Arrival is here to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, informing us that not only was Zane's broadcast brushed off as a hoax, but he has also died while on the run from the aliens.

So now our protagonist is Zane's previously unmentioned stepbrother Jack Addison (Patrick Muldoon), who hadn't spoken to Zane in years before his death. After Zane is reported to be dead, Jack and four other people receive letters that provide information on the world's alien infestation and tell them to meet up. This meeting doesn't go very well for them; soon two of the five are dead, another has been revealed to be an alien, and now Jack and reporter Bridget Riordan (Jane Sibbett) are being targeted by the rest of the alien race. And they can't just run for their lives, they have to face the aliens head-on so they can stop them from speeding up their plans for the environment by causing a nuclear meltdown at a power plant.

Fans who really loved The Arrival might want to ignore the existence of The Second Arrival, and I'm not sure why it was made in the first place, since The Arrival was a box office failure. Still, Muldoon and Sibbett do fine work in their roles here, and the film moves through its 105 minutes at a nice pace, with plenty of suspense and spikes of action, like chases, alien spider machine attacks, and scenes involving the detonation of "black hole bombs" that cause a powerful vacuum that sucks all of the people and things around it into it before disappearing. A black hole bomb detonation near the end may be the most memorable thing about the entire movie.

The flick isn't bad when taken on its own merits, but the only reason I have any interest in it is because it was directed by Kevin S. Tenney (working from a screenplay by Mark David Perry). I'm a fan of Tenney's from his work on classics like Witchboard, Night of the Demons, Peacemaker, and Witchboard 2, so I thought it was cool that he got this gig.

AUSTIN POWERS: THE SPY WHO SHAGGED ME (1999)

When I wrote about Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, I mentioned that while I enjoyed that movie, there came a time when Austin Powers (played by Mike Myers) lost his charm for me - and not just because so many people were doing obnoxious impersonations of the character. I think he lost his charm for me when I was in the midst of watching the first sequel, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.

I had been intrigued by the ads for the first movie, but didn't catch it until it was released on video. I liked that one enough, I did go to see The Spy Who Shagged Me in the theatre... but I wasn't very impressed with it. The humor didn't work as well for me this time around, and I was put off by the way the film handles the character Vanessa Kensington (Elizabeth Hurley) at the beginning of the film. The first movie had been something of a love story for Powers and Vanessa, then the sequel comes along and during their honeymoon it's revealed that Vanessa is a killer robot, which made no sense for the way she was presented in the previous movie. She had a human mother, who used to work with Powers in the '60s. She couldn't have been a robot the entire time. Of course, these movies are totally ridiculous, you're not supposed to take anything about them seriously, you're just meant to have a mindless good time. But the Vanessa thing bugged me nonetheless. What is it with comedic sequels fridging women named Vanessa? Deadpool 2 did it too.

It is kind of fitting that Austin Powers lost his charm for me in this movie, because the story Myers wrote with Michael McCullers is about Powers' nemesis Dr. Evil (also played by Myers) traveling back in time from 1999 to 1969, a time when Powers was cryogenically frozen, and stealing his "mojo" from his frozen body. Without his mojo, Powers won't be able to thwart Evil's latest evil scheme. At least, that's the idea. So Powers has to go back to '69 to retrieve his mojo, and there he's partnered with CIA agent Felicity Shagwell (Heather Graham). A character who isn't nearly as good as Vanessa Kensington was.

You'd think that anyone who liked International Man of Mystery would also like The Spy Who Shagged Me, since it's the same thing all over again. That probably is the case for many viewers, but not even the addition of new fan favorite characters Fat Bastard (Myers again) and Evil's little person clone Mini-Me (Verne Troyer) won me over. Revisiting the movie more than twenty years later, I think it's fine. It's not as much of a step down as I thought it was in '99, I just don't find this one to be as funny as its predecessor. Maybe that's because it feels like there's less Bond to it overall, even though there are nods to Dr. No, Goldfinger, Thunderball, You Only Live Twice, Moonraker, and of course The Spy Who Loved Me. It needed more!

ENTER THE DRAGON (1973)

My father and I were very different kinds of people. Our only real common ground is that we both enjoyed watching movies. He would stay out in his workshop all day every day (when he wasn't out trucking), but every evening he would be sure to be in the house to have supper and shower in time to watch whatever movies would be shown on either HBO or Cinemax at 8pm. He would kick back with a snack - usually either popcorn, ice cream, grapes, or plums - and watch movies through the night. And this is when our daily schedule would meet up, as I would join him for the movie watching. One of the movies I most clearly remember watching with my father during my childhood, and this was when I was very young, is the Bruce Lee classic Enter the Dragon.

I don't remember a lot about that viewing, but one specific sequence has stuck with me through the decades: the flashback sequence where Bruce Lee's character, named Lee, learns that his sister Su Lin (Angela Mao Ying) was killed by men working for the film's villain Han (Shih Kien, dubbed by Keye Luke). Before her death, Su Lin does a good job of holding her own against the men attacking her, and little me was in awe of this ass-kicking lady who had suddenly taken over the screen. I asked my father, "Who is she?" He said, "Bruce Lee's sister." I was shocked, not realizing he meant she was his character's sister, thinking he meant that Bruce Lee had a sister who was also an action star. "Bruce Lee has a sister?!" I have never seen another movie with Angela Mao Ying in it, but apparently she was "one of the most prominent martial arts actresses of her time" and was "positioned as a female version of Bruce Lee". I'm going to have to seek out some of her other work.

Su Lin is only in Enter the Dragon for a brief period of time. Most of the film centers on Lee and the mission he has been sent on by both the Shaolin monks who have taught him martial arts and a British intelligence agent: infiltrate the private island of monk-turned-human-trafficker Han by participating in the martial arts tournament he's hosting there, something he does every three years, and while on the island try to find evidence of his criminal activities so the authorities will have reason to conduct a raid. Between tournament matches, Lee snoops around the island and fights his way through Han's many guards.

Other notable fighters on the island include John Saxon and Jim Kelly (Black Belt Jones himself) as Vietnam veterans who also find themselves on Han's bad side, and Bob Wall and Yang Sze (a.k.a. Bolo Yeung) as a couple of Han's lackeys. Sammo Hung and Jackie Chan are also among the fighters who are defeated by Lee over the course of the film.

Enter the Dragon is one of the most popular martial arts movies ever made, and it's easy to see why. The story is perfectly simple, there are plenty of cool fight scenes, and it's fun to watch all of these talented martial artists do their thing. (And that includes Saxon, the dad from A Nightmare on Elm Street!) As Han tells Lee at one point, "Your battle with the guards was magnificent. Your skill is extraordinary!" It's true. Plus it all builds up to a climactic fight between Lee and a villain with steel claws in a room full of mirrors. Action set pieces can't get much better than that.