WarHunt (2022)

The tail end of World War II. A US plane crashes in the German Schwarzwald thanks to what looks a lot like supernatural intervention to me.

Sergeant Brewster (Robert Knepper) and his squad of tired veterans are tasked to wander into the forest, find the plane wreck and rescue possible survivors. For mysterious reasons, one Major Johnson (Mickey Rourke), probably of the BPRD, orders Brewster to take one of his own men, Walsh (Jackson Rathbone) with him as some kind of vaguely defined specialist for something or other.

Brewster is not amused, but it’s the military, so he doesn’t have much of a choice. Walsh will turn out to be a definite asset, what with him being the only one who actually knows what’s going on in the forest. Which is rather useful once the squad is slowly whittled down in numbers, driven crazy or changed by a coven of witches with a bit of a raven fetish.

As regular readers (hi, Mom!) will know, I have a bit of a weakness for pulpy movies about soldiers versus the supernatural, so Mauro Borrelli’s shot in Latvia WarHunt does push some of my favourite buttons.

As it turns out not just because it knows its genre and the tropes and beats it really needs to hit to function in it pretty well, but because it is simply a genuinely entertaining bit of low budget horror that tends to use its minor budget with quite a bit of creativity, perhaps even enthusiasm. At the very least, Borelli (who also co-wrote with Reggie Keyohara III and Scott Svatos) has some good ideas for using bits and pieces of witch folklore in a creative manner, so that the mix of a bit of body horror, some psychological stuff and the action elements that belong to this particular sub-genre go down pretty satisfyingly and feels consistent.

Borrelli’s always at least a competent director here, regularly hitting on a clever piece of framing or presentation, properly spooky lighting or a neat bit of production design to make some scenes rather more than they would be in less invested hands. I’m particularly fond of a genuinely creepy sequence concerning some roasted pig; the set for the climactic fight below a windmill (which is a pretty perfect place for a witches’ lair going by folklore about millers in Europe) is surprisingly wonderful, too.

The films also adds some Hellboy-esque lore to up the stakes the protagonists are fighting for that make decent sense for its kind of pulp universe, and keeps the film away from the problem of having some random soldiers just randomly stumbling on the witches.

Really, the only thing to criticize realistically – this is a low budget pulp horror/action film, so it not being an A24 joint is not actually a point against the film – about WarHunt is the artistically pointless inclusion of Mickey Rourke, whose scenes mostly seem to be in the film to make the most of the couple of shooting days he was available for them, and have little use beyond slowing things down. Though, to be fair, Borrelli does keep the “star”-induced drag I’ve come to detect and loathe through oh so many direct to whatever action movies to a minimum by keeping the Rourke show scenes relatively short and adding them in places where they do not get too annoying. And Knepper, Rathbone and the rest of the film’s actual cast are not only actually in the movie we are watching, but do give perfectly good performances for the kind of film this is.

Hard Target 2 (2016)

After he has killed his best friend in an MMA championship match – and was thrown out by the officials of his league – guilt-ridden Wes Baylor (Scott Adkins) is fighting illegal underground matches in Southeast Asia, clearly looking for a way to die but unwilling to do the deed himself.

When one Jonah Aldrich (Robert Knepper) offers Baylor the opportunity for one last big fight in Myanmar worth a million dollars, the fighter has vague dreams of using that money for some kind of redemption that’ll come in the uncommon form of a beach house (don’t ask). Unfortunately, though not terribly surprising given the film’s title and prologue, that “fight” isn’t so much a fight but rather a big game hunt through a part of Myanmar’s jungle kept free of pesky villagers by corrupt military, with Baylor as the prey. If he makes it the hundred miles to the border of Thailand, he’s home free with a bag full of rubies, supposedly. Of course, the hunting group consisting of Aldrich, his partner Madden (Temuera Morrison) and a bunch of rich assholes – killed off too early to have any character traits Gigi Velicitat, rich girl in leather pants Rhona Mitra, torero Adam Saunders, rich redneck Peter Hardy and wavering rich redneck son Sean Keenan, and gamer dude Jamie Timony – have vehicles where Baylor is on foot, military assistance, drones, and all kinds of weapons.

Yet that might still not be enough to kill one very angry Baylor, particularly once he meets Tha (Ann Truong) in the jungle, the sister of one of Aldrich’s former victims, and borrows a cause to fight for apart from mere survival from her.

There may be people who think the John Woo directed Jean-Claude Van Damme-starring Hard Target didn’t need a very belated direct to streaming (home video?) sequel, hell, there may even be people who believe the original wasn’t terribly great. Spoilers: both of these groups are wrong, the latter even horribly wrong.

This film’s a sequel to Hard Target only very freely anyway; it’s simply another Most Dangerous Game variation that found a sexier (or at least some decades more modern) title to use, so the producers might just as well have called this one a reboot. Director Roel Reiné does clearly love his John Woo, too, so the film includes about half a dozen direct homages to certain Woo tics used in the original film, naturally including those frigging doves. Otherwise, Reiné is no John Woo, but he’s certainly one of the more talented guys working in the low budget action sphere at the moment, showing a sense of pacing, a clear understanding of how to use the camera to create physical spaces for the characters to fight in, and an obvious appreciation for the fighters and stunt people involved that uses editing and whooshing noises to emphasise their efforts instead of distracting from them.

It does of course help that Scott Adkins is the contemporary king of this kind of movie – a decent actor and a great screen fighter, and by now also an experienced workhorse who is having a slow year when he’s doing only three films in it. The more important parts of the cast are rather great low budget movie people, too. Knepper, Mitra and Morrison all have a couple of action scenes to sink their teeth into as well as more than enough opportunities for some rather delightful scenery chewing.

Speaking of the action, while the film obviously puts the emphasis on the very fine martial arts fights, you also get a variety of fun vehicle stunts, a bit of shooting, as well as a lot of running; there’s even what I think counts as an exploding hut. Reiné does well by all of it.

What further elevates the film about the lower tiers of the contemporary low budget action crowd is a script that’s not written around some one shooting day cameos and so hangs together well without having to ruin its pacing to accommodate Bruce Willis’s need to buy cigars. The character work is pretty obvious, but pretty obvious is what a film where motorcycles are inevitably carrying machine guns needs.


Also wonderful is the film’s complete lack of warehouse sets. Shot in Thailand (with a mostly Thai crew in the technical on-set roles), Reiné has rather a lot of very picturesque jungle, a few ruins, waterways and bridges to work with, which does of course help enable the variety of action scenes I’ve already praised and provides the film with a sense of place and space always useful in action cinema. It’s what turns Hard Target 2 into a much better film than you’ll probably hope for going in.

Renegades (1989)

Buster McHenry (Kiefer Sutherland), 80s action movie cop by trade, spends his vacation on a private undercover mission, trying to puzzle out the identity of the crooked cop helping violent dirt bag Marino (Robert Knepper when he was still Rob in an excellently lizard-like outing) do his violent deeds. Unfortunately, Buster’s plan to achieve this goal consists of planning the robbery of a jewellery store with Marino, in the hopes off convincing Marino to let him meet the bad cop in person before the robbery can actually take place. However, idiotic plans like this can go wrong rather easily, and soon Buster finds himself indeed committing the robbery with Marino and his gang, and still without the information he seeks. Dead civilians and quite a bit of property damage result.

On the flight, the gang and the idiot cop stumble into an exhibition where Marino finds the time and inclination to grab the holy lance of the Lakota, and shoot one of the Lakota men watching over it. That man’s brother, Hank Storm (Lou Diamond Phillips), promises to get back the lance and take revenge for his brother. A fine opportunity to start on this work opens up to Hank when his mystical Indian tracking powers (seriously, that’s how the film plays it and will continue to play it) lead him to Buster, who is in rather bad shape after Moreno ended their short-lived partnership by shooting him.

Luckily for Buster, Hank’s dad (Floyd “Red Crow” Westerman himself) is a capable shaman and takes time out of his busy schedule to pray his gunshot wound a bit better. Who needs a physician, right? Once that’s over, Hank and Buster will have to team up, at first (of course) very reluctantly but increasingly (of course) with full 80s buddy movie man love.

I am not the greatest fan of 80s buddy movies but it’s pretty difficult not to like a film whose future buddies are young Kiefer Sutherland (in his pre-“torture is awesome” phase) and Lou Diamond Phillips (in his pre-“Sheriff roles only” phase). Together, in good 80s action movies tradition, they fight slightly more crime than they commit themselves, crash cars, smash a large amount of things, and hurt or kill a lot of people in hilarious and improbable ways.

Director Jack Sholder’s just the right kind of guy at the right kind of place here, shooting the insipid, the hilarious and the exciting all in the straightforward and unpretentious manner this kind of thing demands, until nothing made of glass isn’t broken. It’s such a bunch of merry carnage (not terribly brutal as these films go) broken up by semi-embarrassing Indian (that’s the word the film prefers to use, even though it has the perfectly good word “Lakota” right there in the script; Buster of course is racist dickhead enough to always call Hank “chief”) mysticism, and general nonsense that it’s easy to miss that the script actually has some perfectly neat ideas beside the nonsense.

For once, the captain character in this sort of film (given by cop specialist Bill Smitrovich) does have an actual role to play in the plot apart from reaming out the insane, violent cop working for him, and even Buster’s absurd crusade against crooked cops has a reason to it. It’s nothing original, mind you, but I do think including some bits and pieces that actually make a degree of sense and hint at the real world in a plot only helps to make the general outrageousness of your typical action movies that decisive bit more interesting. Characters for their part are seldom not improved by adding some motivation for their actions either.

SyFy vs. The Mynd: Earth’s Final Hours (2011)

aka Armageddon 2012

Uh-oh! A rude white hole spits dense matter at the Earth, which goes right through the planet, destroys the magnetosphere and stops our favourite planet’s rotation. It looks very much as if it’s time for the end of the world again.

CIA agent John Streich (Robert Knepper) is on the scene when the matter strikes, and soon it’s up to him, scientist Chloe Edwards (Julia Benson), his hacker son Andy (Cameron Bright), and Andy’s best friend Michelle (Julia Maxwell) to save the world with a very secret scientific method developed by one Dr. Rothman (Bruce Davison).

Unfortunately, the actual world-saving method Rothman devised has never been tested or investigated much, because the CIA under Streich’s evil boss Lockman (Michael Kopsa) and his evil boss’s evil boss, the doubly evil Arnett (Roark Critchlow), a) wanted to use it as a weapon (of course) and b) preferred the simpler plan of only saving a small part of the world full of the Important People™. Consequently, Rothman has spent the last fifteen years in a secret CIA prison masked as a mental institution.

Streich and his friends are a “let’s save everyone” kind of gang, though, so soon they are not only involved in a race against time (and some mighty destructive solar storms) to save the world, but also against Lockman’s attempts to only save a very small part of it, and kill everyone getting in the way.

Here I thought I had by now seen all SyFy movies actually worth seeing, and then along comes W.D Hogan’s (him of the execrable Independence Daysaster and the excellent Behemoth) Earth’s Final Hours to prove me wrong. Of course (and do I even need to say this?) the plot is patently ridiculous, the science is preposterous, and the way the film’s world works has nothing whatsoever to do with any part of consensus reality, but then, that’s really not what anyone (except IMDB reviewers and other people with a desperate need to prove their superiority over innocent little films like this) looks for in this kind of film.

What we – or at the very least I – do look for in a SyFy disaster movie is the joy of witnessing yet another silly yet imaginative way of destroying the Earth, and the comfortable and even more silly way the given film will go about saving it. We generally also enter with a degree of hope concerning as much destruction as the budget will provide and perhaps even one or two fun performances.

Final Hours doesn’t disappoint here, for the way the world (doesn’t – spoiler!) ends here is indeed silly yet imaginative, gives reason to much movie science nonsense speak (pleasantly disconnected from any of your established scientific facts), the world is saved in an improbable, cheap yet awesome way that to my great surprise doesn’t involve exploding the white hole or Earth, and the little bit of destruction the sun storms wreak is very fun to look at.

As are Knepper’s, Kopsa’s and Davison’s performances, so the surprisingly well done action sequences Hogan provides are a bit of an overachievement (not that I’m complaining), as is the visual (and plot-logical) cleverness of having the whole thing take place in the brightest of sunlight. It’s quite impossible for me to argue with any of this, so Earth’s Final Hours gets my seal of approval.

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