Reviews

This movie suffers from the fact that for years Hollywood had no clue as to how to package Jackie Chan for the masses. His low-budget Hong Kong movies were all fast-paced kinetic thrillers that highlight his amazing gymnastic skills and talent for light comedy. His early Hollywood films stuck him in the same movies that were being packaged for Stallone or Chuck Norris. There is nothing about Chan's character in this movie that requires the character to be Asian except for his being the star. In his Hong Kong films Chan is never dull, with the movies being one rapid-fire martial arts sequence after another, but "The Protector" is lifeless throughout. Danny Aiello isn't given much to work with either and the lacking chemistry between the two probably is more a result of the script and direction than how the two actors got on together. Both have been better in worse movies. The best thing about the movie is the Hong Kong settings. The worst part is the appalling way that Jackie Chan comes off so colorless and drab. It wouldn't be until the made-in-Canada "Rumble in the Bronx" that the west would finally figure out how to make a good Jackie Chan movie.

Horribly unfunny sitcom that pretty much ended McLean Stevenson's TV career. An on-their-way-down white family live next door to an up-and-coming Hispanic family. Crude racist humor seems even more crude when coming from the formerly cuddly and inoffensive Mac. As uncomfortable to watch as it was unfunny the show was only memorable for the beautiful Julie Carmen as the Hispanic daughter married to the white bigot's son. This show will probably never be seen again in our lifetime, for good reason.

This movie was way cool when it came out in 1985. It was part of the whole MTV generation thing, where movies had to have soundtracks with two or three killer MTV videos to hit it big. Unfortunately like most of the 80s it hasn't dated terribly well. The "special" effects used to produce the "glow" during the kung-fu scenes is laughably bad now. Still it's undeniably cute and a harmless entertainment. When the 80s becomes retro cool again this will probably be a big hit on DVD.

"The Practice" is unique among lawyer shows focusing on the defense side of the table in that virtually all of their clients are guilty and they're defending them not because of any social injustice but because that's what defense attorneys do. In the early seasons Lindsey was on retainer to a drug lord and her character was almost predatory. It was refreshing to see attorneys who knew their clients were guilty as hell and spent their time trying to get evidence suppressed and ruthlessly attack witnesses (including a rape victim) to obtain reasonable doubt.

Unfortunately what was early on a fascinating drama of how the law is twisted and manipulated bogged down into a soap opera dreck where one character is being stalked and another character is on trial for murder and another is presented with some personal ethical dilemma. The writing over the last two seasons has gotten more idiotic and surreal with each new episode. With virtually the entire cast leaving the show, Kelly should fold his tent and disband "The Practice."

Follow-up to Andy Griffith's big hit in "No Time for Sergeants" moves the action to the Coast Guard and WW II. Though more of a serious role this movie is usually advertised as a comedy when it crops up on TV even though there is none of the broad farce from the earlier film. The title concerns Griffith's character's hair falling out and having an onion mixture applied to it to promote hair growth. All around unmemorable.

NASA spends billions to send a manned mission to Mars, which consists of three astronauts, only one of whom goes down to the surface, and apparently stays a whopping ten minutes before bringing back three samples in thermos flasks? Geez, at least Mission to Mars and Red Planet sent teams who expected to be there weeks if not months. And why did the Mars mission need to take a space shuttle with them? I won't even get started on the rest of the crap. Any movie that starts with this much bad science is a complete failure. 0 out of *****

"Hello Larry" was part of Fred Silverman's attempt to ruin, er, resurrect NBC from the ratings doldrums. Amongst other great works he begat "Supertrain," "Turnabout," "Diffrent Strokes," and "Hello Larry." Despite it's abysmal badness, the show ran for two seasons simply because so many of the network's offerings bombed that they had nothing better to run, a fact that beleagured network execs cheerfully admitted to. While the show was lousy and never drew good ratings (despite often being paired with "Diffrent Strokes") Mac at least was a "name" actor and supposedly a proven commodity. Poor McLean Stevenson, so loveable as the boob Henry on "M*A*S*H" never again found material as good. Unfortunately unlike fiascoes like "In the Beginning," "Condo," or even "The McLean Stevenson Show," "Hello Larry" ran long enough for people to remember it as the series that wouldn't die, and poor Mac is now probably as well remembered for being trapped in TV purgatory there than he will be for "M*A*S*H."

Painfully unfunny "religious" comedy pitting stuffed shirt conservative dopey dad, er, minister against liberal minded daughter, er, nun. McLean Stevenson had a brief run in this before being stuck in the hell that was "Hello Larry" for what seemed like forever. Network execs (CBS)actually had high hopes for "In the Beginning" before it aired. Priscilla Lopez was a Tony award winner on Broadway and McLean Stevenson was still only recently removed from his success on "M*A*S*H." Ironically as bad as it was this show was quickly axed while the arguably worse "Hello Larry" ran forever because network execs cheerfully admitted that as bad as it was they didn't have anything any better to run. For a network (NBC) whose flagship show at the time was "Diffrent Strokes" this was undoubtedly true.

What an incomprehensible mess of a movie. Something about a cop who extracts bullets from himself after he gets shot and keeps them in a glass jar in his bathroom (and from the size of the jar he's been shot about fifty times by now) and a top secret tank guarded by five or six incompetent soldiers who for some reason drive it into Mexico. Whether they were sent there intentionally or just got really really lost is never made clear. And you'll never hear another screenplay feature the word "butthorn" either. Gary Busey tries out the Mel Gibson role from "Lethal Weapon" and while Busey is a serviceable actor the screenplay damns the whole movie to mediocrity. William Smith does another turn as a Russian soldier, the same character he played in "Red Dawn" a few years earlier. After playing biker heavies for most of the 70s it was sort of nice to see him expand his range playing Communist heavies. Sadly he'll probably always be remembered best as the guy who Clint Eastwood whupped in "Every Which Way You Can."

A group of soldiers go through a sleep-deprivation experiment designed to increase combat availability. Using a drug concoction called "juice" the soldiers perform mission after mission flawlessly for three weeks with incredible efficiency until they began seeing "freaks," hallucinations induced by the combination of drugs and sleep deprivation. After a training accident kills one trooper a scientist is sent to evaluate the program. By the time she begins her investigation the remaining troopers are beginning to have difficulty separating reality from hallucination.

The first half of the movie is the more interesting as the problems are gradually uncovered, but the second half lags as it turns into an X-Files style cover-up/conspiracy flick. The low-budget is covered well for most of the film but shows glaringly at times. Definitely worth a watch. All the actors are pretty convincing, particularly Richard Tyson as the senior NCO who looks and sounds exactly like what a hard-assed senior NCO should look like and sound like. Ron Perlman has played the evil guy enough times to do it sleepwalking and does enough to pull it off here. But Mary Ward as the scientist sent in ostensibly to rubber-stamp her approval on the project comes off best as she slowly discovers what is wrong and also realizes she is virtually powerless to prevent what is happening. *** out of *****

Peter Sellers' turns as inspector Clouseau often came dangerously close to inane, but his turn here as Fu Manchu is simply awful. His alter-ego Nayland Smith is also given little to do except appear feeble-minded. Sad that this movie followed his brilliant turn in "Being There." One has to wonder if Sellers was simply too ill to give the film his best effort or if it was merely a terrible idea badly executed. Unwatchable. 0 out of *****

Who thought this up? It must have looked brilliant when they got Sean and Madonna in the same movie. Unfortunately Sean goes through the whole movie looking like a kid pretending he's in a movie and Madonna as usual just plays herself, badly. Nothing to see here, move along folks...

Docudrama about the North Hollywood shootout where two heavily armed and armored gunmen held police at bay seemingly impervious to the bullets the police fired at them. Told with dramatic license it is a sobering tale of what happens when the bad guys have more firepower than the police sent to contain them.

An interesting premise, where scientists send time-traveling robots to do research with the caveat that they must not leave any traces of their presence in the past, including witnesses. An accident involving the elimination of said witnesses causes a paradox where one of the scientists in charge of the time-travel experiment finds himself in a parallel post-apocalyptic world where soldiers constantly battle a seemingly never-ending supply of time-traveling robots. The low budget shows and the tactics employed to eliminate the robots (gunfire at close quarters for the most part) seem silly, but the movie's an entertaining weekend time-filler.

Low-budget special effects in Godzilla movies are part of their charm, where the rest of the movie is just filler for in between the scenes where a big guy in a rubber suit stomps on a model train set until he either gets beaten up by the good-guy monster or perishes at the hands of plucky young children in short pants.

Here all you have is the filler, and it isn't much. Vic Morrow tries to interject a little dignity and professionalism into the flick, but is done in by wretched special effects and a terrible script that may have been better in Japanese but I wouldn't wager by much. This movie was made about fifteen years too late, after "2001" showed that the future could be realistic and without huge tail fins.

This movie is even worse than the abysmal "Fugitive Alien" flicks shown on MST3K. (which was edited from a TV series, which probably explains a lot) And it has a robot that is so annoying that it makes Twiki from Buck Rogers seem like Obi Wan Kenobi by comparison.

Tone down the violence a notch and this could play forever on Lifetime. J-Lo marries hunky Bill Campbell and they have a kid. Then years later she finds out he's cheating so he commences to beat the snot out of her, completely out of nowhere, and turn into a total jerk/psycho. Clue to the screenwriter: human behavior doesn't turn on a dime like that. If a person is abusive, they don't wait five or six years before they start. Then Bill becomes one of those invincible/invisible stalker guys who outwits her at every turn and employs some shadowy guys to scare her and threaten everybody she turns to for help.

So J-Lo, with some help from a sagging Fred Ward (the best thing in the movie, and that's saying a lot) goes and Rocky-ups in the best style, learning martial arts and cat burglar techniques so she can beat the holy moses out of Bill, only to falter at the moment of truth, so instead of crushing his skull with a stone cutting board instead she has to spare him so he can get the drop on her and then plunge to his death like a Disney villain. That way J-Lo gets to have her cake and eat it too: she gets the moral high ground because she decided not to kill him, but he ended up dead anyway.

This movie was made using the straight idiot plot. Nothing but an excuse for J-Lo to whoop ass at the end. zero out of *****

Movies like this seem to be the staple of the Lifetime cable network. Do women really enjoy these endlessly repetitive women-in-jeopardy flicks? Utterly forgettable by-the-numbers trash. In movies like this the cops always claim there's nothing they can do so the "victim" can take the law into their own hands. I guess that's called empowerment. Jere Burns is a creepy slimy stalker, but the rest of the cast, and movie, are forgettable. * out of *****

If Michael Moore wanted to make a documentary he should have stuck to the facts instead of manufacturing quotes by NRA president Charlton Heston designed to make him look ignorant and insensitive. Or not staged the scene where the bank hands over a rifle when he opens an account. These scenes completely undermine any credibility the rest of the film might have. And Moore should have withdrawn his film from Oscar contention since he knew it was not completely factual, but that wouldn't have allowed him to pontificate at the academy awards when he won his ill-deserved Oscar.

Clue to celebrities everywhere: your political power is derived from your popularity with your fans. If you say things they disagree with, don't be surprised when they stop buying your music or watching your movies.

Typical battered wife movie overlooks the main point in that it offers virtually no corroboration for Donna Yaklich's supposed abuse at the hands of her husband, a decorated police officer, and instead attempts to justify her decision to hire two bumbling petty crooks to gun him down in cold blood by showing, well, nothing. A scene of the husband forcibly removing her from a battered woman shelter begs the question: did no one at the shelter make any attempt to notify the authorities that he had essentially assaulted and kidnapped her? Isn't that what shelters are for? Endless scenes of him lifting weights (and obviously not Brad Johnson) and steroid taking do little except pad out the running time. The story is obviously told from one point of view only, but then since the other point of view was gunned down by the first POV there isn't much to tell.

Is it really that easy to become the legal guardian of a baby? Somebody hands the kid to you at the airport and gets back on a plane? Somehow I don't think it really works that way. The movie loses all it's momentum at that moment and delves into cliche-city. Since there's no way in hell that this upwardly mobile career woman would have taken the kid except in the absurd fashion that it was thrust upon her the rest of the movie simply doesn't work.

The opening third of the flick is by far the best part. Frank Martin lives by his three rules: never alter the deal, no names, never open the package. Up until he breaks one of his rules the movie is an interesting look at a man who lives by his own terms in an extremely violent and dangerous portion of the world. Unfortunately after he finds the girl the movie breaks down into a series of cliches and explosions that are less interesting. The girl in particular, Qi Shu, is not a terribly good actress and is better as eye candy than whenever she speaks. In fairness it's probably her first English language movie. Still it's a solid action flick with a lot of high-powered stunts and a winning performance by Jason Statham in the lead, though one wonders what sort of movie would have resulted had Frank just closed the trunk again.

This movie takes the point of view that all recovered memories of sexual abuse are factual. In fact recovered memories, particularly ones recovered via hypnosis, are extremely prone to error and suggestion. And it is also a fact that therapists often encourage patients to remember sexual abuse even if the patient denies any abuse happened. This movie is more sexual abuse paranoia in the McMartin Day Care case vein and obviously slanted toward the opinion that sexual abuse is as common as blowing one's nose. No evidence that the main character was ever molested is ever offered except for some vague and unclear "memories" of her father. No corroboration of other family members is offered, but the fact that her sister did not agree with her is dismissed as denial on her part. It is possible that the story occurred in the way shown, but lack of correlating evidence or opposing POVs make the film a propaganda piece.

This used to turn up at 3AM on those stations you had to stick a coat hanger in the back of your TV to get semi-clearly, but I haven't seen it crop up in twenty years now. Aliens conquer the Earth, but the twist is that they bring peace and prosperity and the population rebels against it. Based on a book by Keith Laumer one of the movies more memorable moments are the recurring commercials promoting the Monitors that begin with a chorus singing "the moooo-nitors mmmm-mmmmmm....." Worth a look if you ever stumble across it.

Starts by ripping off "Raiders of the Lost Ark," then rips of "Jurassic Park" a little, then finishes by shamelessly ripping "Predator." All three were better movies. Fairly interesting beginning runs out of steam and turns into "mutant chases victims through endless tunnels/hallways/jungles" flick. Jurgen Prochnow totally wasted here, as is the guy who played "The Crow" on TV, who is the de-facto hero here. Creature wasn't bad, but nonexistent budget shows. Helicopter crash so bad it must be seen to be believed. Only enjoyment was for wife who got a kick out of listening to the "native" dialect, which is really a Filipino dialect she speaks called Warai. Otherwise, just awful.

Offbeat film about a kid who runs away from home and steals a vintage Mustang and treks across a surrealistic version of the southwest collecting cards for an oil company promotional game called Motorama. Most of the performances in the film amount to cameos by recognizable actors and actresses, with only the kid getting any real screen time. Although ultimately the film doesn't really go anywhere it's an interesting trip to watch. Be warned that although Drew Barrymore appears on the video box she's only in the movie for about eight seconds. *** out of *****