The Parallax Review - Cannon Corner

"Murphy's Law" by D. B. Bates

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 16:06:02 -0600

Bronson plays Jack Murphy, an alcoholic robbery-homicide detective whose wife has just left him. In a bizarre twist, Jan (Angel Tompkins) has left Murphy in order to live out her dream of stripping (she calls it “dancing”). Murphy has a habit of sitting in the back of her club, getting hammered, taunting Jan, and then following her back to her apartment to peep while she makes love with other men. Seriously.

"The Ultimate Solution of Grace Quigley" by D. B. Bates

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 13:25:21 -0600

The film’s writer, executive producer, and longtime champion, A. Martin Zweiback, took me up on that. As you may have seen, he sent me a videotape of the “writer’s cut,” which filled me simultaneously with fear and hope. Hope, because I believed a good film could come from the botched version I saw; fear, because, based on what I had seen, I didn’t know what could be done with the existing footage to substantially improve it.

To my great pleasure, The Ultimate Solution of Grace Quigley — Zweiback’s cut — is, indeed, the great film I wished Grace Quigley could have been.

"Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects" by D. B. Bates

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0600

Some might laugh at the depiction of Japanese culture here, but it’s no less silly or over-the-top than the portrayal of American culture. The movie works for two main reasons. First, as is often the case with Bronson’s late-period work, Nebenzal and director J. Lee Thompson create a crazy world that’s consistent within its own set of strange rules. In my review of Death Wish 2, I described it as “a paranoid fever dream where all the fears of the elderly have come true.” That about sums it up.

"Kickboxer" by D. B. Bates

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0600

And then there’s Kickboxer, a film that defies Van Damme’s budding persona and pretty much everything anyone thought they knew about action heroes. It’s not a great film by any stretch of the imagination, but it proved two things that made me respect Van Damme more than I ever thought I would: He takes risks, and he’s a better actor than his often confused franglais lets on. As Kurt Sloane, he allows himself to start the film as a petrified coward who slowly transforms into a master martial artist. He exhibits a much wider emotional rainbow than Bloodsport and Cyborg suggested he could, up to and including an incredibly silly dance sequence in which his goofy grin and disco splits win him the hearts of local women.

"10 to Midnight" by Matt Wedge

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0600

Obviously, I have an affection for Cannon films. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t bother taking part in this column. But their attempts to cash in on popular genres and knockoffs of bigger budgeted fare led to far more misses than hits. You can understand why I expected a film that plugged Charles Bronson into a Dirty Harry-esque scenario would be nothing more than Paul Kersey from the Death Wish films with a badge. But 10 to Midnight defies expectations, delivering a solid procedural with surprising twists and grounded, believable characters.

"Cyborg" by D. B. Bates

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 00:00:01 -0600

Not much happens during what screenwriters call “the second act,” which is kind of a problem, especially for a film this short. It’s relentlessly, almost nauseatingly violent (allegedly, Pyun had to cut nearly fifteen minutes to avoid an X rating, and what remains is still pretty nasty), more than any other Van Damme movie. Part of that comes from the queasy, post-apocalyptic environs; perhaps because it was rendered so cheaply, the world Pyun creates actually looks like many parts of this country right now, making it all too believable that poverty and despair can crush us. The bulk of the nastiness, however, comes from unnecessary flourishes like Gibson’s razor-tipped shoes, which allow him to slit throats while high-kicking. I suppose it’s effective, but not in an enjoyable way.

"Bloodsport" by D. B. Bates

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0600

Bloodsport ostensibly exists to dramatize the real-life exploits of martial artist Frank Dux (played in the film by Jean-Claude Van Damme), but it actually exists to show us 70 minutes of martial-arts fighting with 15 minutes of filler like plot and characters. As a stunt sequence delivery system, it succeeds admirably. As a film, it doesn’t quite hang together the way it should.

"Barfly" by D. B. Bates

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0600

It’s a small story focused on only a handful of characters, but Schroeder was absolutely the right choice to direct. Working with Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller (probably best known for shooting most of Jim Jarmusch’s films), Schroeder — like Bukowski’s writing — finds the beauty and poetry in the dive bars where much of the film’s action takes place. Every moment set in or around a bar looks like an Edward Hopper painting, giving otherwise dingy locales such glamor that would drive even the world’s biggest teetotaler to start drinking, just to be a part of it.

"Cobra" by Matt Wedge

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0600

Judging from the view of early 2011, it may be hard to believe, but in the late ’70s through the early ’80s, it was still possible for critics to take Sylvester Stallone seriously. Films like Rocky and First Blood were commercial and critical successes that found him taking on scripting duties, tailoring characters to fit his limited acting range. Yes, he had his share of misfires (F.I.S.T., Nighthawks), but at least they were ambitious misfires. But by the time 1986’s Cobra rolled around, Stallone had squandered any good will that the critical community had for him. The increasingly awful Rocky and Rambo sequels had made him box office gold and a critical punching bag. In other words, he was a perfect fit for the Cannon Group.

"Grace Quigley" by D. B. Bates

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0600

I’d love to know how the pitch for Grace Quigley went. It has one of the craziest plots I’ve ever seen in a film, and I sure love seeking out crazy movies. To hear a description of its story is to wonder how the hell such a movie got made. I wish I had an answer, but the film drifted into obscurity (despite being Katharine Hepburn’s last starring role) and thus, not much information is available. Maybe the mere presence of Hepburn and Nick Nolte made it a go picture.

"King Lear" by D. B. Bates

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0600

I’ve seen many, many, many bad movies over the years, but this is the first one I’ve seen that seemed intentional. Usually, bad movies happen on accident — even the notoriously reviled Manos, the Hands of Fate started its production with the hope of making a good movie. Here, Godard simply does whatever the hell he wants, whatever pops into his head at any given time, and trust me when I say the things popping into his head during its production couldn’t fill up a haiku, much less a feature film.

"Love Streams" by D. B. Bates

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0600

John Cassavetes did not make easy films to watch, and Love Streams is no exception. Like most of Cassavetes’s work, the film has very little in the way of plot and more than enough in the way of brutal, intense character study. Despite a slightly higher budget than he normally worked with (thought not by much — Cannon Films was not known for busting the budget on anything, especially not a challenging art film), it retains the rawness of his earlier, self-financed work. It’s the sort of movie that will make virtually anyone watching it disappointed in humanity, but that’s only because it’s so easy to believe characters like this exist in reality.

"Braddock: Missing in Action III" by D. B. Bates

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0600

The similarities between the three Missing in Action films made me feel like I’d witnessed the evolution of art (if one can call a Chuck Norris trilogy art). Remember that the production sequence went two, one, three. In that order, each film gets successively better as it moves away from wanton, meaningless violence and closer to something like a resonant emotional core. In Missing in Action (the “second” film made), Braddock’s guilt fuels his vengeance. In Braddock…, screenwriter Norris and longtime collaborator James Bruner give him a wife and child — something worth fighting for.

"Missing in Action 2: The Beginning" by D. B. Bates

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0600

But this film’s problems run deeper than a lack of strong characters. Plenty of action movies — especially those made by the Cannon Group — work with stereotypes more than actual characters, and they can still be fun and entertaining. Like the wave of torture porn currently infesting multiplexes, the film lingers on tawdry shock moments (up to and including a slow-motion closeup of a character getting shot in the head) that don’t add up to anything more meaningful. The film tries to use these moments to show Yin as a vile monster and illustrate the risk involved in Braddock escaping, but there are simply too many of them and they’re all too grim and exploitative to have any real artistic merit.

"Lifeforce" by Matt Wedge

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0600

Lifeforce is one of the first films that the Cannon Group rolled the dice on with a big budget. As with most of their grasping attempts to hit it big, their roll came up snake eyes. With a budget reported in excess of twenty-five million dollars, Tobe Hooper’s adaptation of Colin Wilson’s novel The Space Vampires is a sprawling, messy epic with moments of startling horror interspersed with silly plot twists, and characters acting in bizarre ways that somehow make sense when filtered through Hooper’s oddball view of the world.