Anvil and Sprocket Movie Review

Look. I respect gymnasts. I really do. Any sport that requires you to be flexible and beautiful and yet also requires you to be strong enough that your muscles threaten to pull your skeleton apart deserves respect, if not horror. But I’m not responsible for Gymkata. I have to imagine that anything I can possibly say about the sport pales in comparison to the damage this movie’s done.

“I concur, Dr. Hellfire. eBay is sweet.”

One of the emerging short-term results of digital video technology is a punk, DIY aesthetic that populates small indie films – particularly small indie comedies. What was once an expensive proposition involving specialized technology and education has become something that a regular consumer can now pull off with only a few hundred dollars of investment and fifteen minutes to learn the equipment. It also leads to a world where content is rarely an issue. At a time when every National Lampoon wannabe (and even the most recent National Lampoon movies, themselves) contains at least one erupting toilet or uncontrollable diarrhea gag, mainstream comedy still censors its content to remain marketable. When you shot on a budget of under $1000, however, it’s not really that much of an issue.

Is it live or is it Memorex?

Kurt Wimmer strikes again, delving deeper into the mysteries of Gun Kata: the martial art of using firearms to dispatch circular firing squads most effectively. Ultraviolet cranks up the action (and tactical illiteracy) discarding such fripperies as original dialog, plot, common-sense, or even sets. It is a movie that makes you sound like a four-year-old: “Why did her hair turn purple?” “Why did her suit turn red?” “Why is Nick Chinlund wearing an itty bra on his nose?” And so on in a fit of interrogative lalomania.

The kind of easy that makes you want to send back your check.

John Preston (Christian Bale), dressed in a pure white high-necked uniform, enters the inner sanctum carrying an assault rifle. Bodies of men in black body-armor litter the hall behind him. Dupont (Angus Macfadyen) grins from behind his desk. “You really should learn to knock,” he says, as Preston drops the rifle and saunters into the room. From behind columns, six more soldiers surround him. They are dressed in post-fascist gray and keep their swords sheathed, hilts angled menacingly towards Preston. Preston smiles his dreamy smile, then lunges for the hilts of two of the swords. And thus falls the purely ornamental honor guard.

Oooooo! I am so mad right now!

About fifteen minutes after watching the end of Underworld: Evolution I was on my knees in the bathroom, hugging the toilet as though it were my prodigal son returned. In between retches, I mourned that this golden narrative opportunity was wasted on such a movie; how much more appropriate to imply that Eyes of the Serpent or Tom Cruise’s Cocktail inspired such distress. Or even the first Underworld Alas, it was only Underworld: Evolution. U:E doesn’t deserve such treatment; is a significant improvement over the first film in the franchise, primarily because it cut a lot of the dialog and added a couple of scary castles.

O, look at all the baby sequels.

Occasionally when watching a movie I am gripped by deep dread and disappointment. This tends to happen just after the film announces it has been executively produced by Roger Corman.

A mad scientist Doctor Hyde (Corbin Bernsen, and yes: Hyde) re-animates dinosaurs near a small desert town. Unfortunately, some of them escape leading Sheriff Tanner (Eric Roberts) and an animal control officer Melissa Brasselle (Barbara Phillips and her two close friends) to Hyde’s compound. The compound is, of course, ultimately stormed by the U.S. Military. But the military is rapidly outmatched by the raptors leaving Tanner to battle a T. Rex with a Bobcat track loader while Brasselle jiggles. Meanwhile, Corbin Bernsen does his best Alton Brown impersonation.

Corman is also credited as part of the writing staff on this film, and I think I can recognize his work: he wrote the scene where the woman with the huge breast implants takes her top off. He also probably wrote the scene where the other woman with the gazongas trots to the truck.

The dinosaurs are rubber, which suits me just fine.

Should I tell him he looks like a cartoon coyote in a bat suit?

For years my friends and I have joked about how many points particular pedestrians were worth. We’d sit stopped while people crossed in the crosswalk and argue over scores should be based on how difficult the target would be to catch (bicyclers score high) or how obnoxious they were (Rollerbladers score high). I don’t know which one of us came up with this slightly disconcerting game, but I was surprised to discover that it was, basically, the setup for a mid-seventies David Carradine / Sylvester Stallone film called Death Race 2000.

District B13 (A.K.A. B13 – Banlieue 13) is a French near-future buddy-movie slugfest. By 2010, The French government has essentially abandoned the inner cities, building walls around the slums to keep the violence and crime in. Leïto (sleepy-looking traceur David Belle) is a do-gooder trying to clean up his neighborhood in B13, but when the police not only refuse to help but even make a gift of his sister to B13’s crime lord Taha (Larbi Naceri) Leïto loses it.

Oh, you wish Keanu was in this one.

This movie about Glaswegian martial arts street gangs in a dystopian near future is irredeemably bad and awful.

One down, three to go.

This is a movie that seriously hates men. There’s are two violent abusive boyfriends, a violent bigshot brother of an abusive boyfriend, and a corrupt cop who’s not above rape. In the midst of these four are Dorothy and Petula, women who we care about more primarily because they are not these other despicable people. Roger Ebert says “Flip the genders in this screenplay, and there would not be the slightest doubt that the characters named Petula and Dorothy are monsters.” Which is a fair criticism, since the movie never gets around to filling out their characters.