In short: Idle Hands (1999)

Teenage stoner Anton Tobias (Devon Sawa) has a little problem: a demon in the habit of possessing the body of the laziest sod it can find has taken possession of one of his hands, murdering people – including his parents but don’t you worry our hero will be more interested in his dating life than dead close relatives – while he’s sleeping the sleep of the stoned. Soon, his best stoner friends Mick (Seth Green) and Pnub (Elden Henson) are dead too but return as undead because they couldn’t be bothered to step into the light, sometimes assisting Anton in a fight better left to the Ashs of this world. On the plus side, the whole affair also finally scores Anton the sexual attention of his big crush, neighbour Molly (Jessica Alba).

The teenage horror comedy is an intriguing little sub-genre, seeing how it has the potential to dig into elements of your usual coming-of-age stories from a different perspective. In reality, it’s the same mix of stoner jokes and underdeveloped female characters as most of the – typically guy-centric – non-horror teen comedies feature, just with more blood. That doesn’t mean these films are necessary all not worth watching: they just practically never do anything that’s even mildly deep or really interesting. Case in point is Rodman Flender’s Idle Hands with actors playing characters very much like the ones they play in all other teen comedies, and a romance that is pure teenage male wishfulfilment and only suggests Jessica Alba’s character to have anything even vaguely amounting to agency (or truthfully, a brain) when she’s turning into something of a badass for five minutes just before the script turns her into the prize to be rescued by Devon Sawa’s dubious prince completely.

However, if you’re okay with the total lack of depth, empathy and originality the film displays, there are some redeeming qualities to it: while Sawa isn’t a Bruce Campbell (or even a Michael Cain) in the hand fighting business he displays good comic timing and is generally funny in the splatstick lite sequences the film features, as is most of the rest of the cast in one way or the other. Well, there’s Seth Green, but my (probably unfair) complete antipathy to his apathetic acting style isn’t the problem of my imaginary readers (or his). On the feminist side, Vivica A. Fox’s demon hunter character does have a bit more to do than Alba, though her scenes usually feel like filler more than anything else.


And while most of the humour is pretty misanthropic and low-brow, the jokes tend to be timed well enough they still work on a guy like me who isn’t at all into this style of humour.

SyFy vs. The Mynd: Sharknado 2: The Second One (2014)

Well, one really can’t say Anthony C. Ferrante and his The Asylum brethren aren’t doing their damndest to top the first film here, with triple the sharknados, quadruple the useless cameos, New York replacing Los Angeles, and about ten times about as much stupidity included (which certainly must have taken special effort). The resulting film perhaps doesn’t have ten times the entertainment value, but if you can roll with the over-excited, a few times somewhat smug, stupidity of an opus that starts out with a sharknado induced near-plane crash that gets its “near” pre-fix from the first film’s returning surfer dudes hero’s first act of improbable (even in context of, you know, sharknados and the head of the Statue of Liberty running amuck) heroism, and gets increasingly deranged from there.

Apart from all the fighting against flying sharks (and one lone bonus New York Sewer alligator, though not a flying one), there’s a lot of the sort of cliché New Yorker-dom you expect from this sort of thing, the usual stuff about cab drivers, how awesome New York is supposed to be, and so on. Every second minor character is a cameo by someone from the freakshow by-ways of American popular culture, so expect sightings of mythical creatures like Kurt Angle, Andy Dick and Billy Ray Cyrus while Vivica A. Fox, Ian Ziering and Kari Wuhrer – A-list material all from this perspective - are trying to keep their faces straight.

The real surprise to me here is how watchable and entertaining the whole load of crap stays despite the cameos of people you really don’t want to be reminded of (though I as a European at least get the kick of pointing and laughing at those exotic whacky Americans here), though I’m pretty sure the third Sharknado later this year will be a piling steam of self-satisfied smugness and completely unwatchable. This one though, it’s easy enough to have fun with.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,american tv,in short,syfy vs the mynd,anthony c. ferrante,ian ziering,vivica a. fox,kari wuhrer,disaster

Mercenaries (2014)

Evil Eastern European warlord Ulrika (Brigitte Nielsen) kidnaps the US president’s daughter Elise (Tiffany Panhilason) who is touring war-torn Kazakhstan on a humanitarian whatsit. Ulrika wants the US to make her president/queen/whatever of Kazakhstan, or else the president’s daughter dies.

Her intelligence suggests to CIA boss Mona (Cynthia Rothrock) that a rescue mission performed by female operatives will be much more likely to succeed, because Ulrika has a violent hatred of all men except for her main henchie Grigori (Tim Abell). Unfortunately, there’s nobody of the female persuasion on the actual government payroll available on this short notice, so Mona makes do with a quartet of highly talented women she kidnaps out of various prisons. Together, former special forces officer Clay (Zoë Bell), sniper Kat (Kristanna Loken), explosives expert Mei-Lin (Nicole Bilderback), and former CIA killer Raven (Vivica A. Fox) should be able to somehow infiltrate Ulrika’s compound and save the girl.

Of course, once on the ground, the quartet soon find themselves in a situation quickly getting out of control in a way that involves gunfire and explosions.

Production company The Asylum (and some parts of the Internet) are trying to sell Mercenaries as some kind of female Expendables clone, but the absence of thick, rotten smelling hunks of smug irony, and the fact that at best half of the actresses involved could be called female action movies veterans suggests that this is something rather more entertaining – a female dominated variation on the age-old Dirty Dozen formula.

But if The Asylum wants me to compare the film to the Expendables, I might as well oblige them in so far as to praise it for not carting out veteran actors with often bad luck in their careers for us to gawk and laugh at like the Expendables movies do, but for rather preferring an approach that shows working actresses mostly in the difficult middle-years of their careers (cue an annoyed sigh in the direction of a film industry that wants to have fuck all to do with middle-age actresses, however great they might be when working in a specific genre) doing the low budget action dance the Van Dammes and Lundgrens of the world know quite well, with a degree of dignity and personality you get when you’re not part of a freak show.

Obviously, Mercenaries’ less irony-laden approach to action film is much closer to my heart than that of the Expendables, as is its utter lack of shame for being the low budget action piece it is. We get all the staples of this particular genre: the idiotic plan of the scenery chewing bad guys (Brigitte really goes all out on the overacting, to highly entertaining effect), the just as dumb official reaction to it, the plot that’s an excuse to string cheap action sequences that defy the laws of physics as much as the budget allows and a cornucopia of bad one-liners and worse jokes that – at least in this particular case – somehow manage to end up more charming than annoying.

This sort of thing does fail as often as it succeeds but I found myself enjoying nearly every minute of Mercenaries. Not just because it avoids the typical low budget action movie problems of sluggish boredom and a lack of actual action but because Christopher Ray’s film seems to relish what it is and tries its hardest to transmit this relish to its audience, with a complete lack of shame making up for the script’s general weakness (though I like how it mostly lets its female badasses be female badasses without using the tired old “a guh, a guh, a girl!!!” nonsense). Enthusiasm and a willingness to escalate to stuff like a final punch-out in a plane with an open transport hatch make up for the actually not all that great action choreography. I also really appreciate how little leering the film does at the actresses, with exactly one inappropriate moment, and here, too, just goes with the typical action movie clichés for any given action film’s heroes.

Add to this a willingness to entertain even if your budget is the catering costs of The Expendables, Brigitte’s enthusiasm at chewing the scenery, Bell (who deserves many more lead roles in action films, given how generally likeable, competent at the acting part of acting, and awesome at the physical stuff she is), Loken, Fox, and Bilderback using four very different kinds of swagger, and some perfectly decent pacing, and you’ll have yourself another Asylum production that shows a company far from the disinterested vibe of its early years, still making what most people will consider crap, but now quite often crap with its own kind of dignity.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,action,christopher ray,zoë bell,kristanna loken,brigitte nielsen,vivica a. fox,cynthia rothrock,nicole bilderback