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.
Dolph Lundgren, Quatermass, Dexter, and Hercules.
SILENT TRIGGER (1996)
Sergio Altieri wrote the screenplay for the action thriller Silent Trigger in the back half of the 1980s, and at one point Rutger Hauer was attached to not only star in the movie, but also make it his feature directorial debut. But that idea fell apart, so the story ended up being brought to the screen in 1996 by director Russell Mulcahy, with Dolph Lundgren in the lead role... and the finished film kind of feels like a theatrical action movie and its low budget, straight-to-video sequel got mixed together into one 94 minute running time.
The section of the story that feels, for the most part, big enough to be a theatrical release is actually told through flashbacks. Lundgren plays a sniper assassin, working for a mysterious and dangerous agency. He was assigned to take out a female politician in some unspecified European country, but he hesitated when the politician lifted a child – and then he had his spotter (played by Gina Bellman), who was on her first job for the agency, had to run and fight for their lives, having shootouts with soldiers and bringing down a helicopter.
The “current time” portion of the story has a cheaper feeling in comparison. It’s economical, playing out entirely within the confines of an under-construction skyscraper called Algonquin, with Mulcahy soaking the interiors in deep shadows and blue and yellow lights. The sniper and the spotter have been assigned to work together again, to take a shot from a penthouse apartment. There are two security guards in the building, one of them being an over-the-top, drug-addled idiot named O’Hara (Christopher Heyerdahl), who makes it his mission in life to rape and kill the spotter. This idiot is around for a bit too much of the movie, and I found that the Algonquin section of the film dragged at times... but thankfully, we have the European flashbacks to liven things up every once in a while, and things get more eventful in the Algonquin toward the end.
Silent Trigger is an odd film, but decently entertaining B-movie action flick overall, with some cool action sequences. I’m a Dolph Lundgren fan – how could I not be, since the guy was He-Man and The Punisher when I was child – and it’s always cool to see him knock around some villains. I wasn’t engaged with the story for the entire duration, but it had its moments.
QUATERMASS 2 (1957)
Hammer Films had been around for more than twenty years (although that includes an eleven year hiatus) before they had their first major international success with the sci-fi horror film The Quatermass Xperiment, which was released in 1955 and was based on a mini-series that had aired on BBC Television two years earlier. Writer/director Val Guest and Richard Landau had taken a story that mini-series creator Nigel Kneale told over the course of six thirty minute episodes and condensed it into an 80 minute feature. Quatermass was such a hit, it changed the director of Hammer, which is why the company is primarily known for making horror movies to this day... And lucky for them, Kneale had written a second mini-series that centered on the character of Professor Bernard Quatermass from the British Experimental Rocket Group. That mini-series, Quartermass II, aired in 1955... and two years later, Hammer got their 85 minute film adaptation into theatres.
This time around, they also had Kneale write the initial draft of the screenplay so he could help decide how his story would be condensed. Then returning Val Guest stepped in to do his own rewrite. The result, I feel, was a sequel that managed to be even more interesting and exciting than its predecessor.
This time around, Quatermass is struggling to get the British government to support his moon colonization project. He has a rocket built and all ready to fire off to the moon, he just hasn’t been able to test the thing yet. When a spot in the countryside is hit by a strange shower of meteorites one night, it leads Quatermass to a shocking discovery: in the small town of Winnerden Flats, there seems to be a replica of his moon colony mock-up! That’s just the start of the strangeness. When one of the meteorites splits open, it releases a gas that leaves an odd mark on the face of his colleague Marsh, who is then apprehended by armed guards with similar marks, who take him to that facility in Winnerden Flats. When Quatermass tries to get to the bottom of this, he’s told that this facility is a government project and they’re producing synthetic food there – but it doesn’t take long for him to figure out that everyone associated with the facility is under the control of aliens, and the food being produced there is actually alien chow!
So what Kneale and Guest have crafted here is a body snatcher story, and there are elements of Quatermass 2 that are quite reminiscent of the story Kneale wrote when he was brought in to write a “witchcraft meets the computer age” story for Halloween III: Season of the Witch. Director Tommy Lee Wallace, who rewrote Kneale’s Halloween III script (as did producer John Carpenter, but he went uncredited), describes Halloween III as a “pod people” movie, or a body snatcher movie, and Kneale or the people who rewrote him definitely brought over some Quatermass 2 set-ups when they were working on the script. Even though the movies are very different overall.
The Quatermass Xperiment was a bit slow for a good portion of its running time, and Quatermass 2 moves along at a much faster pace, with more going on. There’s even a shootout between our heroes and the alien servants at the climax of the film, which is much livelier than the climax of Xperiment, where people have to figure out how to electrocute an alien blob that’s just sitting in a church. Returning from Xperiment, Brian Donlevy was also able to make the Quatermass character more likeable in this film, and it’s nice when you don’t have to think your lead character is a cold jerk.
The Quatermass Xperiment is a good time, but I felt that Quatermass 2 was an even better time.
DEXTER SEASON FIVE (2010)
For its first four seasons, the Showtime series Dexter was brought to the screen under the guidance of showrunner Clyde Phillips... but for the fifth season, Phillips stepped back into a consultant role and passed showrunner duties over to Chip Johannessen – who wasn’t an existing staff member getting a promotion, but rather a completely new addition to the show. That could have been a recipe for disaster, and there are post-Phillips seasons of Dexter that fans do seem to think were something of a disaster, but in this case, it worked out. From what I can tell, longtime fans appear to be generally positive about season 5 – and I thought it was great.
Dexter stars Michael C. Hall as Dexter Morgan, a blood splatter analyst for the homicide division of the Miami Metro police department. For as long as he can remember, Dexter has felt compelled to commit murder, but his foster father recognized this in him and raised him to follow a strict code: Dexter only kills the deserving, people who have committed murders of their own. So he’s basically a serial killer vigilante, and the fifth season of the show leans into the vigilante aspect of the character in a major way. Sure, he does murder a person in cold blood right up front because he’s dealing with some serious emotional issues, the loss of a loved one, but soon enough he’s in vigilante mode, and that’s because of a woman with the strange name of Lumen.
Several women have been tortured and murdered, their bodies sealed in barrels filled with formalin that are then dumped in a swamp. Dexter thinks he has taken out the man responsible – but when he finds Lumen (Julia Stiles) being kept captive in the man’s house, he finds out he was only one of several people who have done these terrible things. Lumen wants to wipe out the whole group and Dexter dedicates himself to helping her do so... and along the way, the character who once believed that he was incapable of having feelings but has been evolving throughout the series starts to have some serious feelings for the woman he’s helping. It was very interesting to watch Dexter and Lumen’s interactions and how they change as the season goes on, and it was also quite interesting to follow their quest of vengeance, which takes some twists and turns as it goes.
While Dexter and Lumen are taking out horrible people, Jonny Lee Miller makes an intriguing addition to the cast as questionable self-help guru Jordan Chase, homicide detective Joey Quinn (Desmond Harrington) gets suspicious of Dexter while striking up a romantic relationship with Dexter’s homicide detective sister Debra (Jennifer Carpenter), Sergeant Angel Batista (David Zayas) and Lieutenant María LaGuerta (Lauren Vélez) have a bumpy start to their marriage, and a disgraced cop played by RoboCop himself, Peter Weller, gets uncomfortably close to figuring out exactly what Dexter is up to.
Clyde Phillips may not have been calling the shots, but Dexter hasn’t lost anything as of season 5. This batch of episodes still made for a great viewing experience and I was fascinated by the story of Dexter and Lumen every step of the way.
HERCULES (1958)
I know next to nothing about Roman mythology or about the Greek mythology that inspired some of it, but thanks to movies and comic books I am aware that Hercules is a legendary demi-god known for his great strength and his many adventures. Writer/director Pietro Francisci and co-writers Ennio De Concini and Gaio Frattini mixed together some of the classic myths with their 1958 Italian production Hercules, which cast American bodybuilder Steve Reeves in the title role, and while their telling of the stories isn’t exactly captivating (at least not to the eyes of this adult, watching the movie for the first time in 2024), they certainly managed to pack a lot of different of adventures into the movie’s 103 minute running time. The movie is so eventful and episodic, it’s easy to see why it earned a lot of young fans when it was first released, turning Steve Reeves into an international star for a brief period of time... which was long enough to inspire a young Arnold Schwarzenegger to get into body building.
The film begins with Hercules saving the life of Princess Iole of Iolcus when the horses pulling her chariot go wild. Hercules and Iole will quickly fall in love, but their relationship is complicated by the fact that Hercules suspects her father, King Pelius, of winning the throne by murdering the former king, his brother. Hercules is right to be suspicious because Pelius is responsible for his brother’s death, since he wanted to make sure his worthless son Ephesus would eventually become king. But the man who Pelius blames for the crime is Hercules’ mentor Chirone, who has been missing (along with the king’s son Jason) ever since the murder. When Hercules and Iole arrive in Iolcus, Pelius asks Hercules to train Ephesus and prepare him to become king – but Ephesus is a tool, so the training doesn’t go well. And when Hercules sets out to take care of a man-eating lion problem, Ephesus tags along and gets himself killed.
So Hercules is tasked with taking down the Cretan Bull to redeem himself, and while he’s out doing that he crosses paths with Chirone and Jason, who should have taken his father’s place on the throne instead of Pelius, but he can’t do so until they recover the royal symbol known as the Golden Fleece, which was lost at sea when Chirone and Jason went on the run. Hercules, Jason, and the Argonauts head out on the quest for the golden fleece, which takes up the second half of the movie and includes encounters with Amazons, beast men, and a dragon / dinosaur that sounds suspiciously like Godzilla. There’s also a scene where the immortal Hercules asks the gods to grant him mortality so he can love Iole like a normal man, but the fact that he becomes mortal doesn’t have much bearing on what happens in the rest of the movie. He still survives some tough situations and remains incredibly strong.
Hercules isn’t a great sword and sandal adventure, but what was mind-blowing for kids in ‘58 still has a cheesy charm and entertainment value today (the battles with the lion and the bull are especially amusing). It’s a fun, goofy way to pass some time, and features some nice visuals because Mario Bava was the cinematographer.
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