Gleaming the Cube (1989)

Orange County kid Brian Kelly (Christian Slater) is a skateboarding mad professional outsider with a nice line in semi-nihilist philosophy. Part of the reason for his mad-on, apart from the always deplorable state of the world and teenage hormones, is clearly his not completely untrue impression that his parents (Ed Lauter and Micole Mercurio) do rather prefer his adopted brother Vinh (Art Chudabala) to him. Vinh being a kind of near-genius golden boy (which the film does suggest is his way of coping with the whole “being a Vietnamese kid adopted into a very white family” thing) does certainly make him easier to like. The relationship between the two brothers isn’t really all that acrimonious, mind you.

When Vinh is found dead in an apparent suicide in a motel room Brian doesn’t believe his brother truly killed himself right from the start, and when he starts poking around in Vinh’s stuff, he begins to find hints pointing to the truth. A truth the audience knows right from the start: Vinh found evidence for Colonel Trac (Le Tuan), a big shot in the local Vietnamese community he did some part time bookkeeping work for and whose daughter Tina (Min Luong) he dated, being involved in plans of smuggling weapons provided by one Mr Lawndale (Richard Herd) into Vietnam to arm a supposed anti-Communist uprising, and the conspirators accidentally killed him for it. Brian’s not exactly subtle investigation will bring himself into danger right quick, but it turns out that skateboarding and a near-sociopathic ruthlessness can be very useful survival traits in this sort of situation.

I am pretty sure Graeme Clifford’s Gleaming the Cube is the only entry into the sub-genre of the 80s skateboarding neo noir conspiracy thriller, but given how surprising, interesting and gripping most of the film turns out to be, I rather wish there was more of the sub-genre.

Clifford works as your typically slick late-80s director here, though one making skateboarding look rather more interesting and exciting than I usually think of it. Even though it’s not the kind of direction style that terribly excites me, it is effective at pulling in the threads of all the very different genre bits and pieces the film uses and turning them – until the climax, at least – into an organic whole. Plus, Clifford does know how to stage very classic suspense set-ups very well, so scenes like Brian’s witnessing of the second murder while he’s hiding in the backseat of a car that could have turned out rather ridiculous in the wrong hands work as well as they should.

The star’s the script by Michael Tolkin, though. Tolkin manages to juggle all sorts of very different and a bit ridiculous ideas, include a bunch of skateboarding, said suspense scenes, suburban teen drama turning noirish, and turn them into an actual story about actual people with actual stakes. One truly impressive thing about the script is how it avoids being as cartoonish as a description of the film may sound, at least until the climax, instead sure-handedly creating characters coming from believable social circumstances like the Brian/Vinh relationship. Equally impressive is that the film clearly realizes how Brian’s outsider-dom is self-constructed by a young guy for whom it is safe to do that because he’s from polite suburbia, with all the get out of jail free cards this place provides him with. Thanks to an eye for social details like this, and an actual ability to find depth in the characters, the plot doesn’t so much feel like a highly constructed thriller but like the natural consequences of these people’s lives.

At the same time, Gleaming’s tendency to shift between genre codes keeps it surprising instead of feeling like algebra made of people. There’s a true moment of shock when Brian starts doing a preppy make-over to get Tina to trust him, so he can better spy on her father, and acts more ruthless the longer this goes on, apparently using her without realizing – or perhaps simply not caring - how much he does. Though, at this point, the film actually pulls its punches and Tina is perfectly alright with being betrayed into hurting her father, which for my tastes is the script’s greatest misstep.

The film even expands this approach of always being deeper as well as more interesting than it needs to be to its villains. This trio of idiots who think they are much cleverer than they actually are comes right out of a Coen Brothers film, and consequently, most of the film’s somewhat escalating violence comes from their incompetence and their unwillingness to stop and think instead of turning to increasingly stupid plans, which of course plays very nicely with Brian’s own willingness to escalate.


Speaking of escalation, there is the little thing of the film’s climax, when this very well written, constructed and clever film does indeed turn into the cartoon its basic set-up promised from the start, so expect an absurdly chipper, and absolutely insane, final fifteen minutes, with a ridiculous – and very fun – highway chase involving Slater catching a skateboard ride on a sport scar, a game of chicken with a Pizza Hut truck, and no grounding whatsoever in reality, apart from the reality of a very weird action film. It’s not really the ending I’d have chosen for Gleaming the Cube (in my movie, everybody dies), but it’s certainly one nobody watching will soon forget.

In short: Hard Rain (1998)

A violent storm is raging over a US small town. The nearby levee is bound to break rather sooner than later, and most of the people have already been evacuated apart from local sheriff – soon to be a civilian because the populace has voted him out - Mike Collins (Randy Quaid) and his two men, a couple of elderly holdouts (Betty White and Richard Dysart), and Karen (Minnie Driver) who tries to save some church windows.

Close by, an armoured truck transporting three million dollars is halted by four amateur robbers lead by Jim (Morgan Freeman). Despite anyone getting killed certainly not being part of the plan, the youngest, dumbest, member of the robbers shoots one of the security guards (oh, no, it was Edward Asner!). The other guard, Tom (Christian Slater), manages to escape with the money and hides it in the graveyard of the flooding town. A cat and mouse game between him and the robbers ensues, but the locals are going to get involved soon enough. Turns out a sheriff who got the boot might very well be willing to murder a few strangers when it comes to a million dollar prize, so Tom and Jim – as the least murderous people on screen – will eventually find themselves on the same side.

I know, Mikael Salomon’s Hard Rain is not a terribly well loved film, but I do think it is a pretty great film that uses elements of 90s US action cinema, neo noir and disaster movie rather well. The script by Graham Yost is the sort of simple looking thing that can’t be all that simple to realize, creating characters out of a handful of pithy lines and situations, trusting in an audience to understand motivations and the implications of the characters’ actions and then letting these people loose on the simple but not stupid plot. Adding to this particular joy of a straightforward genre tale told with craftsmanship and intelligence is how many different set-pieces the film manages to create from a single flooded town without repeating itself.

Unlike most US action films of this era, Hard Rain doesn’t have much of an air of excess surrounding it, preferring to base the action on characters instead of explosions. This doesn’t mean the action isn’t larger than life and a bit improbable – it’s just the kind of largeness and improbability that feels grounded in something human, in this case humanity as presented by a bunch of fine actors doing fine work despite being soaked to the bone in every single shot.


Even though a lot of what Salomon does here visually is pretty much to the standards of professional filmmaking in 1998, he uses these standard set-ups to create a mood of…well, wetness, bringing the drowning town to life as exactly the sort of place where the natures of people like the Sheriff, Jim and Tom (I’m not mentioning Driver’s Karen much because she just doesn’t get much to do beyond turning on the Driver charm on command, except for a pretty badass moment where she saves Tom from drowning) will be revealed.

Mindhunters (2004)

Warning: there are some structural spoilers ahead!

Controversial FBI profiling guru Jake Harris (Val Kilmer) is just about through with the newest bunch of psychologically highly volatiles trainees trying to become profilers. Their final test after training exercises that seem to have fuck all to do with profiling (which is a somewhat dubious “science” anyhow, but I digress) is to be dumped on an island for a weekend where they are supposed to hunt a fake serial killer.

The can of meat (Christian Slater, Kathryn Morris, Jonny Lee Miller, Will Kemp, Clifton Collins Jr., Eion Bailey, and Patricia Velasquez with bonus LL Cool J as a cop who’s there as an observer) will soon learn that that there’s something more going on than just a training exercise when a real serial killer starts picking them off one by one, apparently following their greatest strengths, or weaknesses or whatever. Will they soon turn on one another in the way that makes the least possible sense? You betcha!

Ah, the early oughts serial killer thriller, a genre that has caused more pain and suffering than the fictional serial killers in it ever could. How many films about improbably competent killers murdering a bunch of people in absurd and contrived ways do you need to screw in a light bulb, exactly? Clearly, director Renny Harlin wasn’t too sure about the genre being enough to carry another film either, so his Mindhunters does go on a spree of crosspollination with other genres. Most obviously, this is also a bit of a mystery in the And Then There Were None manner, bringing together a bunch of characters in an isolated place trying to figure out who is killing them off one by one. Just without characterisation, which is replaced by rather more unconvincing digital body parts flying hither and yon than you usually encounter in Aggie Christie’s work. And with no butlers in sight. The killings, though very much in the same spirit as Saw - which may or may not be a coincidence, since both films must have been shot at about the same time – also from time to time suggest the way Death in the Final Destination series works, only without the supernatural agency that makes their complicated and contrived manner plausible.

Because that’s clearly not enough of a melange, Mindhunters also aspires to be a twist-laden thriller, with mixed results. On one hand, one early character death in the spirit of Psycho does play well with an audience’s expectations about who is the lead character and star in this particular piece, when the film kills off the character that must seem most threatening to the killer first. On the other hand, the final twist regarding the identity of the killer is absolutely idiotic, making the way LL Cool J’s character acts in the scenes just before that completely inexplicable. That’s a sort of thing all too common in twist-heavy thrillers, but here it seems particularly egregious because it’s not just preparing the final sting but the actual finale. A finale, by the way, that consists mostly of two characters having a shoot-out underwater, for of course, there’s a bit of Renny Harlin-style action movie in the film too.

If you haven’t noticed by now, imaginary reader, Mindhunters is a film that very much wallows in the absurd and the contrived, seemingly on purpose choosing the least plausible and believable elements of all the genres it pilfers, so that Harlin can shoot them in a nearly absurdly slick mid-budget style. Turns out that adding gloss might not make anything going on in the movie more believable, but it sure makes it fun to look at.

And while the film really is as dumb as a whole congregation of rocks (having a rock party together on a rock island, I presume), it is not just fun to look at but indeed very fun to watch, for Harlin uses practically every single stupid idea in the script (and there are legions of stupid ideas in there) as the basis for some kind of exciting set piece, or at least a moment whose idiocy makes a guy like me chuckle in delighted disbelief. That last description also fits the clunky dialogue rather well, where no sentence sound good, or like anything an actual human being would say. Unless it’s a one-liner, then all bets are really off.


All these joys do make Mindhunters a highly entertaining watch, but the most glorious thing here is Jonny Lee Miller’s attempt at what I think must be meant to be some kind of US accent – Texan, perhaps? – as dreamed up by somebody who has only read about the way Americans talk. It is quite the thing to hear.

Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990)

Every horror anthology TV show should have its place in the silver screen sun, so the movie gods gifted us with this one, directed by John Harrison. In the framing story, a witch (Debbie Harry with line delivery that makes me cringe) is just about to bake a little boy (Matthew Lawrence, whose line delivery is not much better than Harry’s, but what the heck, he’s a kid). To distract her, little Timmy tells her stories from her favourite book – obviously called “Tales from the Darkside”.

The first of the stories turns Arthur Conan Doyle’s seminal mummy tale “Lot 249” into an EC revenge story. It’s an effective one at that, seeing as it is paced very sprightly (nothing kills EC style horror easier than dragging), does feature a cool looking mummy murdering its victims by bad imitations of the mummification process, and confuses the viewer with what to today’s eyes looks like a preposterous cast for the sort of thing it is – Christian Slater (!), Steve Buscemi (!!), and Julianne Moore (!!!).

The second tale is a (George Romero-penned) adaptation of Steven King’s “Cat from Hell”. An old rich man (William Hickey) hires a professional killer (David Johansen, because someone involved here apparently did like his New York New Wave and Punk scene) to get rid of the cat that killed all of his relatives. At first, the segment mostly recommends itself through the cool and stylish way its (blueish) flashbacks to the cat’s killing spree and the old man relating it flow into each other, but soon, we not just start off on the duel between the killer and a rather small and cute black cat but can also enjoy a hilarious scenes of an obviously fake cat imitating the face hugger from Alien to smother someone before the segment finishes on a special effects bit that is as gruesome as it is absurd – and it’s very, very absurd.

Last but not least, the film comes to “Lover’s Vow”, a segment that doesn’t directly adapt a literary source but places a variation of the traditional tale wherein a man encounters a supernatural creature, is spared his life in exchange for never telling of his encounter to anyone, and then unwittingly marries the supernatural creature in female form in contemporary New York. Usually, they’ll have children, but in the end, the man will tell his wife of the supernatural encounter in the end, most often losing her and only getting away with his life because the wife doesn’t want to rob their children of their father. Because this is Tales from the Darkside, there’s rather more blood involved in the tale, and the ending is pretty gruesome, but otherwise, this effectively puts its old tale into a still grubby New York, using a gargoyle (turning into Rae Dawn Chong) as its monster (and given that it introduces itself with a decapitation, it is a monster), and James Remar as the poor stupid bastard who marries her.


So, even though there certainly are more artfully made horror anthologies (as well as a bunch of very inferior ones), Tales from the Darkside: The Movie is a good time for the discerning horror fan. If nothing else, it is surprisingly well directed given that Harrison is mostly a TV guy from an era when TV directors really weren’t allowed to do much, and that rare case of an anthology film without a weak segment. Unlike your usual bro horror anthology of today that generally has only one segment that isn’t weak.

Three Films Make A Post: Quick on the Draw - And He Always 'Gets' His Man!

Soldiers of Fortune (2012): Despite a perfectly great idiotic action movie plot idea about rich people getting their kicks in a warzone, and an absurdly overqualified cast including Christian Slater, Sean Bean, Ving Rhames, Dominic Monaghan, James Cromwell and Colm Meaney, this is not the joyful return of Cannon-size action cinema dumbness. Instead, this is one of those action films that thinks it is a good idea to keep all its better action sequences for the final twenty minutes or so, instead trusting on bad characterisation and boring back and forth to keep its audience awake. Director Maxim Korostyshevsky does at least make the film look slick but he never really goes all out on the kind of crazy a film needs if it wants to sell Slater as a former special forces operative or Meaney as his evil nemesis. It’s all much too blandly realized for how stupid it is, making neither that part of its audience happy that might have gone in expecting a serious action film, nor those (like me) expecting entertaining crap.

The Bishop Murder Case (1930): The only Philo Vance adaptation starring Basil Rathbone (quite a few years before he became the iconic Holmes with the worst of all possible Watsons) falls into the difficult time period when most Hollywood filmmaking was still very much transitioning into sound film. Consequently, half of the actors involved mug like your worst idea of silent movie acting, others shout as if everyone around them were deaf, while only one third of the cast – thankfully including most of the major players – has already assumed the more workable idea of screenacting that would dominate screens for the next fifteen, twenty years. That’s a liveable enough quota, but unfortunately, directors David Burton and Nick Grinde fall into that early – and quite avoidable – talkie style of stiff, unimaginative visuals full of characters set up into stiff, unnatural tableaus, declaiming much of what they have to say visibly into the direction of the camera. The mystery at the film’s core is actually pretty okay if you like this sort of thing but thanks to the visual blandness and the general sluggishness of the affair, using the word “entertaining” to describe the film would be rather too much unless you are a much more patient soul than I am.

I’d say it might still be interesting for historical reasons, but then there are early talkies in the genre that are actually fun too watch, so why not watch one of them instead?

The Legend of Barney Thomson (2015): Robert Carlyle’s debut as a feature film director – he does take on the title role too – is rather fun if you like Douglas Lindsay’s source novel (and sequels), like our humour on the macabre side, or just want to hear people say all those dulcet sounding curses the Scottish are known and loved for. It also happens to be rather funny, showing off Emma Thompson and Carlyle himself in particularly good form. The film does a lot of clever stuff with the quotidian grotesque (Scottish gothic?) and uses stereotypes in a way that’s actually funny instead of lazy.

In short: Stranded (2013)

The near future. A small US mining base on the moon, crewed by only four people - Gerard (Christian Slater), Ava (Amy Matysio), Lance (Brendan Fehr), and Bruce (Michael Therriault) - is hit by a sudden meteor shower that knocks out pretty much everything, from solar panels, through communications, half of the base's escape pods (and yes, this is the sort of base that has exactly enough escape pods for everyone on board, too bad if one of the pods breaks), to oxygen filters. If they don't have a very lucky hand with repairs in the next tens of hours, work that isn't exactly made easier by the fact that the moon base is designed by somebody unacquainted with the concepts of "contingency" and "fail safes", there won't be anyone left alive for any hopeful rescue mission.

To make a bad situation worse, one of the meteors that struck the base contained some sort of alien spores that infect Ava, induce an ultra-quick pregnancy, and result in a lot of crawling through air vents; that is, after the characters finally decide their problem isn't carbon monoxide poisoning.

Yes, yes, I know, Roger Christian is the visionary art director of Alien, but as a director, he's not only the man who made Scientologist wet dream and bane of eyes everywhere Battlefield Earth, but also a director whose other films aren't much better. Now, Stranded isn't as bad as Battlefield, which has a lot to do with the fact that this is a scrappy little low budget movie instead of a waste of money so painful it has become immoral.

Good, on the other hand, Stranded ain't. I don't blame it for its lack of originality (imagine exactly the film you assume it to be, and you'll not be surprised - well, perhaps by the unfortunate lack of man-in-a-suit-action), but I do blame the film for its lame execution of old genre standards. The problem isn't that I've seen all this before, it's that I've seen all this realized in a much less boring and drab manner.

While Christian's bland direction sure isn't helping much, Stranded's main problem is a script that seems hell-bent on prolonging the boring bits as much as possible: all that faffing about with hallucinations as an explanation becomes rather boring when the audience learns very early on that the alien menace actually exists; it's never a good idea when the audience has to wait for a film's characters to finally catch up and realize what we've known all along. The whole paranoia and etc angle is further weakened by the script never having established a baseline of what rational behaviour means with these characters, or really, the script never establishing any character traits for its characters at all. Half of the film consists of characters we know nothing about acting off, with no way to discern if they're going insane or if the script just can't produce believable human beings. Of course, given how little sense the set-up of the moon base makes, one generally tends to the latter interpretation.

But even once the traditional "people running through corridors" part of the movie has finally begun, there's little of actual interest happening on screen; suspense, excitement, or even action are clearly living elsewhere, leaving Stranded quite alone..

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