by ·Comments Off on Flesh + Blood (1985, Paul Verhoeven) +2

Oddball adventure movie post-Conan the Barbarian with modern slang/language, setting up a love triangle for young JJ Leigh between dim warlord Rutger Hauer and rich wannabe-scholar Tom Burlinson (title role in The Time Guardian), both of whom are dicks to her anyway. Sure it’s full of raping and pillaging, and a nun gets conked in the brain, and plague meat is catapulted over the walls, but most of the fun is in guessing Leigh’s intentions as she goes from captor to queen of the gang after they conquer a castle, earning Rutger’s respect by teaching him to eat with a fork, then trying to rescue both of her men during the final showdown.

Rutger vs. Octopus:

Untrustworthy bounty hunter Jack Thompson is in all the big Australian movies I haven’t seen (Breaker Morant, Wake in Fright, Jimmie Blacksmith), Rutger’s ex-pregnant ex-queen Susan Tyrrell specialized in weirdo comedies (Forbidden Zone, Cry-Baby, Big Top Pee-Wee). Brion James pops up a fair amount. Matt Lynch: “an incredibly skeptical story of superstition & tradition giving way to pragmatism & capital. Money, religion, love, sex, class; spoiler alert: power is power, everyone’s full of shit, survival is the only cause.”

Displaced Barbarian Queen Susan:

Brion James fate foretold:

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Starship Troopers (1997)

“Oh Johnny it’s us… it’s home.” All the kids are supposedly South American but no two people can agree how to pronounce “Ibanez.” Holds up, never looks cheap, Verhoeven firing on more cylinders than on the 1985 movie. Neil Bahadur: “One gets the sense that Verhoeven took this god-awful script and flipped it without changing a word.”

Where’d these people end up? Jake “Son of Gary” Busey played murderers in The Frighteners and Contact. Dizzy was a cop in the first four Saw movies. Caspar has only ever appeared in two other movies: Sleepy Hollow and Alita, both of which are due a rewatch, and Denise was in Edmond and Wild Things, which, same. Sgt Clancy “Mr. Krabs” Brown has achieved Vaguely Recognizable status after I’ve seen him in twelve movies. Michael Ironside is so cool that I might actually watch that Bob Odenkirk revenge movie now that I know he’s in it.

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Mission: Impossible III (2006)

Semi-rewatch while assembling furniture, really much better than part two if you’re not looking directly at the screen, despite tediously starting with the final showdown instead of making up a cool secondary pre-credits adventure.

by ·Comments Off on The Hitcher (1986, Robert Harmon)

Thought I’d watch a Classic and Current horror double feature with Talk To Me, then had to admit I’m very old now and the mid-’80s counts as classic. Feels like a Duel remake amped up to self-parody… kid discovers that the hitcher is murdering people, the hitcher knows he knows, and becomes an invincible revenge spirit to destroy the kid and everyone he meets. Of course Rutger Hauer is our hitcher and eventually his Flesh + Blood costar JJ Leigh appears as a waitress who believes the kid’s crazy story and joins the chase only to get horribly murdered (offscreen) in the end. I kept waiting for C. Thomas Howell to show up since that’s an old man’s name, but it’s the kid – he’d been one of the Outsiders and a Red Dawn-er in the past few years. I think his character is a cross-country car deliveryman, like in Vanishing Point. Harmon has also made a JCVD action film and a string of Tom Selleck TV movies. Adam Nayman’s review is good.

I love the wide shots:

by ·Comments Off on Blade Runner (1982, Ridley Scott)

“It’s not an easy thing to meet your maker.”

I remembered noir detective Harrison Ford tracking rogue artificial humans Rutger Hauer and Daryl Hannah through a future city, but did not remember the replicants convincing childlike inventor/toymaker William Sanderson to bring them to their maker Terrell (Joe Turkel wearing stop-sign glasses). First time watching the “final cut” edition on blu-ray, and it was glorious.

by ·Comments Off on Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017, Luc Besson)

A John Carter-like attempt to film an influential comic which many sci-fi movies (including Besson’s own Fifth Element) have been ripping off for decades. I’ll bet this was better in 3D. The movie seems to want to be in VR, having Valerian put on special glasses when he wants to see into other dimensions (recalling Freddy’s Dead).

The Pearls, a peaceful race of white Na’vi, live on Shell Beach with their pets who can shit dark matter, until their planet is destroyed as collateral damage in a space war led by Commander Clive Owen. Survivors have invaded the International Space Station (now a massive free-floating city of a thousand alien races) and learned all the alien techs to built themselves a supership Shell Beach simulator. Commander Clive sees all this as a threat, and sends soldiers to stop them, or something.

But first, Major Tom Valerian (Dane DeHaan: Lawless, A Cure for Wellness) is sexually harassing his coworker Laureline (Cara Delevingne: London Fields, Paper Towns). According to my Alamo Drafthouse waiter, their relationship made some kind of sense in the original comics, but human behavior isn’t Besson’s strong suit, so he’s botched it. These two are sent to interrupt a trade between Pearls and a Hutt unmistakably voiced by John Goodman, and during their escape a bulletproof rhinobeast wipes out their team.

Valerian’s boss, the General, looks like a Weasley but is actually Sam Spruell of Snow White and the Huntsman… then there are a series of higher-ups played by Rutger Hauer and Herbie Hancock who we barely see. Our team is eventually separated, and Laureline goes underwater with a beardy submariner named Bob (Alain Chabat of The Science of Sleep) while Valerian gets help from a shapeshifting Rihanna (after murdering her pimp Ethan Hawke), who does a dance which will be my most-watched scene on netflix once it comes out.

Some effects shots are very cartoony, not fooling anyone, and the action choreography is quite bad when viewed the day after Atomic Blonde. The very long info-dump ending is bad, the plot is mostly bad, the teaching Valerian about the meaning of love is bad, so I spaced out in the last half hour and tried to figure who Dane DeHaan reminds me of – is it Nicolas Cage? He’s fine, don’t get me wrong – all the acting and filmmaking is generally spot-on, just in service of a poor script. There is one great bit in the ending: Laureline is left alone with Commander Clive and just keeps punching him.

by ·Comments Off on The Mill and the Cross (2011, Lech Majewski)

Rutger Hauer plays Bruegel planning his painting “The Way to Calvary,” as Majewski uses CG backdrops a la The Lady and the Duke, posing actors (including Charlotte Rampling and Michael “Basil Exposition” York) to create a series of motion tableaus instead of relying on dialogue and story. Like living inside a painting for a couple hours, a series of smaller compositions forming a part of a climactic larger one. I’m glad that at least in Poland it won costume and production design awards, which it richly deserved.

by ·Comments Off on Hobo with a Shotgun (2011, Jason Eisener)

The Black Dynamite of trashy 80’s action/revenge flicks. Gets all the details right, but skips the boring parts – a trick House of the Devil could have learned.

Our hero Rutger Hauer rides the rails to the worst town in the world, which is controlled by super baddie Drake (Brian Downey of the show Lexx) and sons Slick and Ivan. He tries to stay out of trouble, meets a friendly prostitute named Abby. But one day they push him too far, and Rutger grabs a shotgun and cleans up this town. The dialogue could’ve been better but otherwise it’s a hella fun flick.