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.
Sword and sorcery, Rothrock, and wildness.
DEATHSTALKER IV: MATCH OF THE TITANS (1991)
If someone had asked me how I thought the Deathstalker series of sword and sorcery films was constructed, I would have guessed that each one of the four films came from a different writer and director. The director part is accurate, but surprisingly, the scripts for three of the four films actually came from the same writer – Howard Cohen, who only missed out on Deathstalker II. And when the series got to part 4, Cohen was given the chance to take the helm and bring his own story to the screen.
John Terlesky played the title character in Deathstalker II and John Allen Nelson took on the role for Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell, but when Cohen needed to cast the character for Deathstalker IV, he turned to the actor who had played him in the original film: Rick Hill. Given that the franchise went dormant for more than thirty years after the release of this movie, it does feel quite fitting that it was book-ended with Rick Hill performances. Thankfully, he sports a better hair style in this movie than he had in the first one.
The plot of Deathstalker IV: Match of the Titans, not to be confused with Deathstalker II: Duel of the Titans, kicks off when Deathstalker and a fellow fighter accidentally exchange swords in the heat of battle while defending a village under siege. While searching for his sword, Deathstalker learns that the raiders were sent by Kana (Michelle Moffett), an evil sorceress who regularly has villages attacked and the place’s strongest warriors abducted for an unknown purpose. Now, Kana has decided to put on a tournament and invite warriors to come to her castle willingly. The man who has his sword was going to the tournament, so Deathstalker heads that way to find out what’s going on, accompanied by a woman he meets along the way, Maria Ford as Dionara, who intends to compete in the tournament.
While the third movie had a serious lack of creature-human hybrids like the pig-men we saw in the first two films, such creatures make a welcome return in this one, where we get lion-men and a bear-man. The low budget makes it quite obvious that the creatures are just people wearing cheap masks, but at least Cohen made an honest attempt to bring this mythical world to the screen in the proper way.
A large portion of the movie is made up of tournament matches. As the tournament goes on, Deathstalker and Dionara (who, of course, turns out to be a Princess in disguise) fall for each other and Deathstalker befriends a virgin, straight edge warrior named Vaniat (Brett Baxter Clark). Our heroes also discover that Kana has created a wine that gradually turns people into stone – a wine that she is using to turn tournament competitors into her own stone army. They can’t just stand by and let this happen, so they aim to take Kana down in the climactic moments.
Cohen brought a comedic edge to his movie that adds to the entertainment – it’s not as goofy as Deathstalker II was, but it’s more amusing than the first and third movies were. There’s plenty of action and it has a decent, economical set-up (made even more economical by the fact that the movie is packed with stock footage from the previous films). It’s not on the level of the first two Deathstalkers, but it’s a step up from the third one and ended the franchise (for the time being) on a positive note.
SWORN TO JUSTICE (1996)
From the late ‘80s through the start of the ‘00s, Paul Maslak – a project planner at Disney theme parks and editor of Inside Kung Fu magazine – went on a streak of making cool low budget action movies, even working as the fight coordinator on some of them. Among his credits were Blackbelt, Angel of Destruction, and Bloodfist parts 3, 4, and 5. In 1996, he produced, directed, and wrote (with Robert Easter and Neva Friedenn) the Cynthia Rothrock action flick Sworn to Justice, in which Rothrock plays criminal defense psychologist Janna Dane.
At the start of the movie, Janna comes home to find that her sister and nephew have been murdered in a home invasion – and the perpetrators are still there! When they attack her, Janna shows off some of her martial arts self-defense skills, then takes a dive from the high-rise balcony, smacking into some tree limbs on the way down. A head injury leaves her with extra-sensory perception; she can now see psychic visions while handling objects that were involved in intense situations. She uses this ability not only to see the truth in court cases she’s working on, but also to seek out criminals when she starts patrolling the streets as an ass-kicking vigilante. She’s sort of like a female Daredevil, but with ESP instead of radar sense.
When she’s not avenging the deaths of her loved ones, Janna enters a relationship with a man named Nicholas (Kurt McKinney), who proves to have some impressive fighting skills of his own. He also has some serious wooing skills. If you have a crush on Rothrock, this is the movie to check out, because Maslak shows off her body more than the average directors of her movies would. She has lingerie / underwear scenes, and even has two sex scenes with McKinney. This was a change of pace for Rothrock - and if you don’t have a crush on the actress going into Sworn to Justice, you might develop one by the time the end credits start rolling. But the movie isn't just about showing skin; Rothrock picks this film as her personal favorite of her work in America because the script also gave her more challenging dramatic scenes to perform.
This one has a fun set-up for a low budget action movie and some cool action moments. It also features Mako in a supporting role as a blind newspaper vendor, Brad Dourif as a courtroom defendant, Walter Koenig as the doctor who helps Janna confirm that she now has ESP, and Ninja Turtle Kenn Scott out of the turtle costume to play a villain.
SOMETHING WILD (1986)
I have to admit, I don’t really “get” director Jonathan Demme’s comedy thriller Something Wild. Although it barely scraped by at the box office when it was released near the end of 1986, it was very well received by critics at the time, and has a strong following among cinephiles. I’ve seen people rave about this movie many times on forums and film-focused websites over the years – and when I first had the opportunity to watch it sometime in the early 2000s, I did not enjoy it at all. That’s why it took me twenty years to get around to giving it another chance... and when I did, I still wasn’t overly impressed, but I did gain a slightly better understanding of why it has so many fans.
My biggest issue with the film is the entire first half. Jeff Daniels stars as New York City-based investment banker Charlie Driggs, who is caught by a wig-wearing woman called Lulu (Melanie Griffith) when he walks out of a diner without paying. Within minutes, he has been talked into catching a ride with Lulu in her convertible with a garish interior, and seconds later she has tossed his beeper out the window. She disrupts his work day, hangs up the phone when he calls the office, drives him into New Jersey while drinking alcohol straight from the bottle, she robs a liquor store, she uses up the money Charlie has on him. Even though he’s wearing a wedding ring, she has sex with him in the hotel room they check into, and in the midst of the act she calls Charlie’s boss so he’s forced to talk to his higher-up while she’s performing sex acts on him. Somehow, we’re apparently supposed to find all of her actions endearing and come to like the character, but as far as I’m concerned, she’s an absolute nightmare. I guess that’s where I part with the fans who really love this movie.
Charlie falls for Lulu, who turns out to be named Audrey. We’ll come to learn that she has abducted Charlie from his life simply because she was looking for a respectable man she could use to impress her mother and former high school classmates at her 10-year reunion. How fun and sane. For me, none of this really works until Charlie and Audrey reach that high school reunion, which is where Audrey’s criminal ex-husband Ray (Ray Liotta) enters the picture. Ray brings a whole new energy to the film – and a reason to actually be interested in what’s going on.
The gun-packing Ray robs a store while Charlie in two, breaks Charlie’s nose, disrupts the relationship Charlie and Audrey have going on (by revealing that Charlie’s not married; he’s recently divorced), and takes Audrey on the road with him. But Charlie is so into Audrey at this point that he follows them and risks his life to get her back.
Daniels, Griffith, and Liotta all deliver great performances in the movie, with Liotta pretty much stealing the show out from under his co-stars. My problem is that I just don’t really understand the characters that writer E. Max Frye created for them to bring to life. I enjoyed the movie more the second time than I did the first time and I can understand to some degree why so many viewers like it so much, but I’m never going to be one of the Something Wild super-fans. It seems it’s not for me, so this is as positive as I can be about it.
THE PRESIDENT’S ANALYST (1967)
Given the situations that Presidents have to deal with and the stress of holding such a powerful position – since, after all, the fate of the world could rest in your hands – it should be standard operating procedure that every President have a therapist. There doesn’t seem to be any information available revealing whether or not this is the case, but it should be. And back in 1967, Theodore J. Flicker wrote and directed a wild comedy – the sort of movie where you say “This only could have some out the ‘60s” while watching it – about the concept of the President enlisting the aid of a therapist.
The doctor in question is psychiatrist Sidney Schaefer, played by James Coburn. When Sidney is first recruited for the job by a CEA agent (Flicker changed the CIA to the CEA and the FBI to the FBR for this movie), he’s thrilled by the idea and fascinated by the information that he learns through his therapy sessions with the President, who is never represented on screen in any way or even named. But soon, complications enter the picture. The job turns out to be very demanding, as the President requires frequent sessions. The FBR sends Sidney’s live-in girlfriend Nan (Joan Delaney) to live in a hotel because he talks and gives away national secrets in his sleep. And then, the paranoia sets in as Sidney decides he wants out of the job – and realizes that the CEA and FBR will never let him just walk away from it, as he knows too much now.
Sidney goes on the run 40 minutes into the film’s 103 minute running time, and it’s the remaining hour of story when things get really crazy. While Sidney is pursued by government assassins, he first seeks shelter from a gun-packing suburban family (the parents are played by William Daniels and Joan Darling), then from a group of nomadic hippies, which includes Jill Banner from Spider Baby as a character called Snow White. This is around the time when the movie descends into full 1960s madness, which is also the point at which is started to lose me. My attention started to wander, but the movie kept drawing me back in with its goofy scenes, which include Canadian spies undercover as a British pop group, a friendly KGB agent, and the revelation that the Phone Company may be the most dangerous organization of all.
While some elements of The President’s Analyst haven’t aged well and might not be of interest to modern viewers, the core concept of the film is clever and interesting, and there are some laughs to be had along the way.
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