Thunder of a Distant Storm

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.

Martial arts, Matthau, and The Rock.

CHINA O’BRIEN (1990)

For six years, China O’Brien (Cynthia Rothrock) has been working as a police officer and teaching self-defense classes in the big city... but it all comes crashing down when she pulls a gun while being attacked by a gang – and is traumatized to find out that the gang member she shot was a young kid. She turns in her badge and heads back to her small hometown of Beaver Creek, Utah, where her father John (David Blackwell) is the sheriff. But there are still plenty of butts to kick in Beaver Creek, which has been overrun by a crime boss named Sommers (Steven Kerby). When Sommers takes Sheriff O’Brien out of the equation with a car bomb, China decides to run for sheriff herself and start cleaning up Beaver Creek with the help of her high school buddy (and former Special Forces soldier) Matt Conroy (Richard Norton) and a biker named Dakota (Keith Cooke) who’s out to avenge the death of his mother.

China O’Brien was written (from a story by producer Sandra Weintraub) and directed by Robert Clouse, who is best known for being at the helm of the Bruce Lee movie Enter the Dragon and the Jim Kelly movie Black Belt Jones – but don’t expect this one to be on the level of those classics. Still, it’s a fun, low budget action flick with small town Walking Tall vibes and plenty of action – which, as we know, Clouse could shoot quite well.

The movie was filmed back-to-back with its sequel on a production schedule of just six weeks, so that gives you an idea of how fast and cheap these were.

CHINA O’BRIEN II (1990)

Beaver Creek sheriff China O’Brien, with the help of her police force, has turned her small town into the safest community in the state. But now, former Special Forces soldier turned drug smuggler C.Z. Baskin (Harlow Marks) has escaped from prison for a mission of revenge, ordering the deaths of everyone who was responsible for putting him away. And one of his targets happens to be living in Beaver Creek, putting Baskin and his hired killers (a small army that includes an Indiana Jones wannabe, Billy Blanks, and a guy who wears steel claws on his hands) on a collision course with our heroes.

Even though the number of writers increased (Clouse wrote this one with Craig Clyde and James Hennessy), China O’Brien II is exactly the sort of sequel you would expect to result from a project where two movies were shot back-to-back in six weeks: shorter, simpler, and sloppier. That said, it’s still entertaining, with plenty of action and low budget charm on display. It’s recommended that you watch China O’Brien and China O’Brien II in the same way they were shot, back-to-back – and if you decide to have this double feature, you’ll probably have a good time with it.

Production company Golden Harvest was so pleased with these movies, they wanted to move ahead with two sequels that would, again, be shot back-to-back. The Utah sheriff who refuses to use a gun was going to have quite a franchise. But Rothrock was distracted with an offer to co-star in an adaptation of The Executioner novels that was going to star Sylvester Stallone and be directed by William Friedkin. So the China O’Brien III and IV idea was shelved... and The Executioner never happened, either.

I OUGHT TO BE IN PICTURES (1982)

From legendary playwright Neil Simon (The Odd Couple) comes the story of two very irritating characters – so it’s a good thing that director Herbert Ross (Footloose) hired to inherently likeable performers to bring those characters to the screen: Dinah Manoff, who previously played her character in the Broadway presentation of the story, and Walter Matthau.

Manoff plays 19-year-old Libby Tucker, who leaves Brooklyn for Hollywood with two goals in mind: she wants to become an actress in film and television, and she’s going to look up her screenwriter father Herbert (Matthau), who left his wife sixteen years ago and hasn’t seen or heard from his two children, that’s Libby and her younger brother, ever since.

As you might expect, Libby and Herbert’s reunion isn’t the perfect, ideal reunion between a father and daughter who haven’t seen each other in years. The majority of the film’s 108 minute running time consists of conversations these two have, and their conversations often turn into heated shouting matches. Libby is a loud, determined but confused character, and Herbert is exactly the sort of perpetually annoyed schlub that Matthau could play perfectly, and these two grate on each other’s nerves. They’ll probably grate on the nerves of a lot of viewers, too.

Neither Libby nor Herbert is a particularly great character, but Simon wrote some interesting dialogue for them to speak, and Manoff and Matthau are both great performers who played their characters as well as possible. Matthau is also reliably amusing to watch, which helps make the time go by in a more enjoyable way. Also in the mix is his future Grumpy Old Men and Grumpier Old Men co-star Ann-Margret as Herbert’s younger, single mother girlfriend Steffy, who puts up with more than she should.

I Ought to Be in Pictures is a fine comedic drama, they kind of movie you might have caught on TV in the middle of an afternoon back in the ‘80s or ‘90s, sat through because you didn’t have anything better do, and then probably never thought of again. I didn’t find it to be impactful or memorable, but I didn’t mind watching it.

BLACK ADAM (2022)

New Line Cinema, which was soon to become a subsidiary of Warner Bros., started developing a movie based on the DC Comics character Captain Marvel, who is better known as Shazam since Marvel Comics became a DC competitor and came up with their own Captain Marvel character, in the early 2000s, and by 2007 they already had Dwayne Johnson in mind to play Shazam’s arch-nemesis Black Adam. But as Shazam went in and out of development over the years, another idea arose: Johnson didn’t want to just play the villain in Shazam, he wanted to star in his own Black Adam movie. This seems like an ill-advised idea to me, largely because I had never even heard of Black Adam before the Shazam movie talks started, despite the fact that the character was ranked as IGN's 16th greatest comic book villain of all time, so maybe I’m just way out of the loop. But, Johnson is someone who can usually get a movie made, so it was not surprising that Warner Bros. actually went along with the idea and gave Black Adam his own movie. It was poorly received by critics and didn’t break even at the box office, even though it made almost $400 million, but it did get made.

After decades of being a villain, Black Adam was reimagined as an antihero in the ‘00s, and of course that’s the version of the character that ended up in the movie. Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra from a screenplay by Adam Sztykiel, Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani, the film begins in the country of Kahndaq in 2600 BC. Once a self-governed center for power and enlightenment, the country was taken over by a tyrannical king who enslaved the people and forced them to mine the mythical metal Eternium. His reign only lasted until a young slave boy was chosen by the Council of Wizards to become a superhero with the stamina of Shu, the swiftness of Heru, the strength of Amon, the wisdom of Zehuti, the power of Aten, and the courage of Mehen. A superhero called Teth-Adam, or Black Adam.

Unfortunately, things went tragically wrong after that, the powers of Black Adam shifted from one person to another, and the Council of Wizards decided the second person needed to be put on ice for a while.

Jump ahead to present day, when Kahndaq is occupied by the Intergang, a group of international mercenaries. Threatened by Intergang soldiers while searching a tomb, archaeologist Adrianna Tomaz (Sarah Shahi) reads an incantation that awakens Black Adam from thousands of years of slumber – and, of course, he instantly goes about taking out the mercenaries that have overrun his homeland. This doesn’t sit well with US government official Amanda Waller (Viola Davis), so she dispatches the superhero team Justice Society to Kahndaq to neutralize Black Adam and promote global stability. So not only do we get to see Black Adam wipe out mercenaries, but we also get to see him interact and fight with a pretty cool group of hero characters: the winged Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), the sorcerer Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan), the wind-manipulating Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell), and Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo), who can change size. Another person he interacts with is Adrianna’s son Amon (Bodhi Sabongui), and their relationship is reminiscent of Edward Furlong and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s in Terminator 2.

Black Adam has a fairly negative reputation, but I actually found it to be a reasonably entertaining, fast-paced movie for much of its 125 minute running time. It wasn’t until the last 35 minutes or so when it started to wear out its welcome, dragging things out by having a human villain (Marwan Kenzari as Ishmael Gregor / Sabbac) gain the powers of the six most powerful demons of Hell (Satan, Aym, Belial, Beelzebub, Asmodeus, and Crateis) and summon the Legions of Hell for some over-the-top climactic battles. Those got tiring – but before that, I was surprised at how much I was enjoying a movie about a villain-turned-anti-hero that I knew nothing about.