B Plus Movies

I studied the martial arts for a couple of years formally and have had an interest in them all my life. The grace, power and majesty of a person well trained to do extraordinary things is something to admire regardless of what those things are. When the thing is turning an opponent into a crumpled ragdoll who should be reviewing his life choices while his bones knit, that’s just bonus.

The glory of the martial arts is something that many have tried to convey on film.  When it’s done poorly, you see a few guys beat up on other guys in over extravagant or lame fashion and hold that action up like it’s enough to keep you in your seat for 90 minutes. When it’s done well, you get something like Redbelt.

Redbelt focuses on Brazilian Jui-Jitsu instructor Mike Terry (played by the amazing Chiwitel Ejiofor of Serenity and Love Actually). Terry takes his art seriously and sees it as a way to a better life as much or more than a way to dismantle his fellow man. His school is barely hanging on financially, partially because of his idealism which sits none too well with his wife and business partner.

Terry stops a bar fight and in the process impresses an action movie star, a situation that leads to some lucrative possibilites for Terry and his wife. The light at the end of the tunnel, turns into an oncoming train and Terry finds himself forced to do something he did not want to do: Enter a Mixed Martial Arts tournament, which holds the promise of a full purse and the end to his financial difficulties but also tests his resolve as a man and a warrior. Whether the tournament will be his triumph or downfall is the question driving the whole story.

Redbelt is not your standard kung fu flick (aside from the fact that the main character doesn’t practice Kung Fu, but a form of South American wrestling). It’s not a martial arts film, but a drama that happens to include martial arts. If taken from this perspective, it’s a moving and powerful movie but unfortunately not a perfect one.

The movie’s pacing is a bit odd. The first two thirds of the film is basically the set up, which gives us a great deal of time to get to know the characters but at the same time makes us wonder if they’re getting to a point. Also, while much of the interactions between characters is vibrant and realistic, many passages of the dialogue (especially when it turned to direct plot exposition) seemed if not forced then a little too plain.

Terry as a character is very morally black and white, but the villians are also black and white and have little problem saying it, up to almost directly coming out with “Yes, I’m a villian. Here is how my villiany works. Here is why I think you will not be able to overcome my villiany.” With a character built on principle, this makes him seem more iconic. With a villian supposedly corrupt and double dealing, it comes off as simplistic.

These sticking points aside, Redbelt includes some wonderful acting, delivered with integrety worthy of the characters being portrayed. The action in the film is very realistic, virutally without embelishment. The story is honest, forthright,  and subtle; a tale of a knightly crusader in an environment hostile to his very nature, yet never overcoming him completely.

This movie had a host of real fighters in it, from MMA champion Randy Couture  to Guru Dan Inosanto, a man who has been a respected name in martial arts for over 40 years. The movie at times seems almost directed at the martial artists in the audience more than the average moviegoer, but never inaccessable to anyone. It’s a story about being true to one’s self, and that is something you never have to throw a punch to relate to.

I wanted to love this movie and I do, but as a reviewer I cannot say that it’s flawless. Redbelt is transparent, which lets you see it’s misses easily, but it also keeps it’s high points undisguised. As a result, it get’s a B from me. I would recommend this movie to anyone who’s stuidied the martial arts, anyone who has felt the practical infringe upon principal and anyone that hopes that at the end of the fight, skill is still required to take home the prize, but just as much it requires heart.

Monday, I talked about Japanese Animation and gave a very easily accessible and understandable example of the medium. Today, I’d like to talk about another classic of Anime that’s just a bit less accessable.

I speak of fanboy favorite Akira.

Akira is the sort of anime that makes it hard for westerners to accept cartoons as serious stories. It’s a very pretty film, but the story has a steep learning curve that gets even steeper if you have no clue about Japanese culture. The fact that it’s one of the three or four movies that’s on everyone’s Anime 101 list attests to its importantce, but it’s as likely to leave you scratching your head  as pumping your fist.

The story of Akira starts with three very different groups. The first is a bunch of pill popping juvenille delinquent bikers, the second is the military government and the third is a group of revolutionaries and/or terrorists. The three come together when a biker (named Tetsuo) crashes into an albino toddler (formerly in the care of the government) that had been sprung from incarceration by the revolutionaries. Everyone involved survives, but Tetsuo gets dragged off by the government along with the escapee. Another biker, the alpha delinquent Kenada, joins up with the revolutionaries, his motivations more that he wants to sleep with one of them than he’s trying to find his friend and gangmate.

Somewhere in here is where the psychic powers come in.

You see, the albino toddler is part of a small group of powerful psychics. Coming into contact with him awakens Tetsuo’s hidden potential. Tetsuo also has a major case of self esteem issues which once combined with ridiculous amounts of ability to do cool and vicious things rapidly turns into a bloody mess.

In the meantime, the government is collapsing, cults are on the rise and giant teddy bears are showing up for no good reason. And all of this has something to do with Akira, who may be a god or may be a bomb or may be just a guy but is definately responsible for blowing up Tokyo at some point in the past.

Confused? Right there with you.

What makes this movie worth watching, first and foremost, is the the amazing visuals used to tell the story. The streets of Neo-Tokyo are very real, even if they contain guys with laser rifles and punks on electric bikes. The characters are beliveable, with understandable motivations and reasonable reactions to situations both fantastic and mundane.

If you can get past the premise, Akira is worth watching once or twice. I won’t debate on dubbed versus subtitles, though the remastered version from 2001 may be worth a look. Also, this might not be a bad one to experience before they do a live action version, a project that has been in the works for some time and currently scheduled for 2011.

Akira gets a B from me, mostly for being almost incomprehensibly weird even if it is held together by unimanigable coolness. Check it out  for the experience, but if at the end you’re sitting on the couch wondering what exactly it was you just saw, don’t feel bad. Most of us, even those who liked it, felt just the same way.

Roger Ebert, undoubtedly one of the most influential movie critics of my lifetime, was ragged on for reviewing a movie of which he watched only 8 minutes. Now while it’s said one never has a second chance to make a first impression, seeing less than 10% doesn’t usually constitute a proper basis to judge its merits, even if you have seen every movie since the invention of celluloid. Ebert went back, watched the film and apologized for cheating on his first try, basically I think to maintain his cred as a reliable critic.

This is why I usually don’t review movies I’ve not sat entirely through… until today. This friday’s blog gets you a three for one sale, the length of each review corresponding to about how much time I spent watching it.

First up is Strangeland, a film made by Dee Snider, former lead of the band Twisted Sister and hair metal DJ of 2009. I’d been interested in seeing this film, but only caught the last half. The story centers around a sadistic madman calling himself Captain Howdy who likes to play BDSM games with people but isn’t necessarily big on getting their consent first. According to the media I saw about it before hand, it starts with a young girl (the daughter of a cop) meeting the Captain online and getting sucked into his world.

Where I picked it up Howdy had gotten caught, incarcerated, determined to be insane and then released after he forgoes the Captain Howdy persona for his more mild mannered real name. The normal folk of the town can’t stand the thought of leaving him alone which inadvertently brings Howdy back to the surface and starts another string of violence, peircing and seeking after the teen girl from the half of the movie I didn’t see. Her father, the police officer, must once again leap to action and save his little girl from the tattooed and pierced monster that is Captain Howdy.

Dee Snider plays the  villian of Strangeland and does it well. Captain Howdy is genuinely creepy, threatening and believably threatening with just a touch of visionary madman, enough to make you think he’s kinda cool if he wasn’t raping girls and poking people with long needles. On the other hand, the movie makes use two contradictory cliches, marring its edgy, avante garde nature, namely that 1)People into bondage and peircings are always bad and 2)the freaks are always persecuted by the rednecky straights. Both cliches are presented in such a blatant, over the top fashion that you take them for granted (partially due to the excellent talents of Robert Englund) and it’s only until later that your preconceptions have been prayed up.

Strangeland, despite its flaws, gets a B+ from me. Go Dee Snider. Next.

The Devil’s Rejects is the sequel to the 70’s horror homage House of 1000 Corpses. Rockstar/Producer/Director Rob Zombie put this retro, ready-for-grindhouse movie onto screens at a time when I was already becoming bored with torture porn like Saw and Hostel, not because they’d lost their bite, but because watching people be savaged for two hours just seemed less enjoyable than other things people might do on film.

Picking up where it’s predecessor left off, The Devil’s Recjects starts with a family we met in House of 1000 Corpses of sadistic rednecks who have killed enough hapless teenagers to finally bring down upon them a fanatical cop who wants to see them dead more than he wants to see them arrested. Many of the family are caught or killed in the first few minutes of the film, leaving three to hit the road and go on the run.

Featuring Sid Haig (B movie god), Bill Mosely (also of B+ Movie Repo: The Genetic Opera) and Sheri Moon-Zombie (Rob’s wife), The Devil’s Rejects has some intense and believable performances. It also has just enough gore to remind you of the first movie and enough gun play to distinguish itself from it’s origins. The movie attempts to blur the line between the heroes and the villians of the piece, but when one of your main characters has a thing for cutting off people’s faces and wearing them, such lines are less likely to be blurry and much more likely to simply denote the people in the movie we despise from the people we simply dislike.

I only saw the first half, up until the point where the audience is supposed to start relating to the murderous trio and while I’m told the finale is kind of touching, I don’t think I’ll be missing out by not going back for the rest of it.

Rob Zombie did succeed though, in making the grade of movie he wanted. This is one reason the half watched The Devil’s Rejects earns a B from me.

And finally…

I caught about fifteen minutes of Never Cry Werewolf on the Sci-Fi channel one night. It was enough to make me convinced that whoever green-lit a remake of Fright Night with Kevin Sorbo as the most notable actor and a werewolf instead of a vampire as the villian might not have been completely in the wrong, but whoever then let them take this concept and make a poorly acted, poorly shot and poorly scripted monster movie afterwords should be tied up with leg warmers and pelted with Rubik’s cubes for assaulting one of my teenage favorites.

Never Cry Werewolf gets a D from me, not sinking any lower because I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt that the majority of the movie that I didn’t see contains something of redeeming value.

Any of these you think would have gotten a better rating if I’d watched the whole thing? Feel free to comment below.

 Being a white male in 2009 America, I occasionally feel uncomfortable. To some, I’m the enemy, lumped in with oppressors, exploiters and opportunists. And sadly, growing up in deepest, darkest South Carolina, I understand where some of the stereotype comes from and have seen all too closely the reality of bigotry and a sense of misplaced entitlement based upon race.

To some extent, that’s why I felt myself laughing one minute and wincing the next at CSA: The Confederate States of America.

Done as a fictional documentary, CSA: The Confederate States of America is an alternate history in which the South won the American Civil War. We are given news clips, scenes from fictional films and commentary by a pair of “scholars” detailing a United States in which slavery remained legal to modern times and the Stars and Bars replaced Old Glory. Perhaps most disturbing of all are the commercials, about half of which show products that were at one time sold in America and that feature slave imagery in their marketing.

The film takes its inspiration both from real events of the civil war and moments in history and blends them with a healthy dose of conjecture to craft its setting. The TV show Cops is replaced by Runaways, where cops catch escaped slaves. America didn’t enter into World War I, but did invade South America. Hitler was an ally and when JFK won, it was on an anti-slavery platform.

CSA: The Confederate States of America asks more “What if?” rather than stating ”Could have been”. At times, it’s a cautionary reminder of just how recently America was just fine with slave labor and at other times, it’s a parody of the attitudes that keep bigotry alive today. Not faint hearted, it embraces its suppositions and follows them to their logical conclusions even when it requires being patently offensive.

CSA: The Confederate States of America isn’t exactly the sort of film you just pop in because you’re bored. The N word gets said quite a lot and there are many comedic scenes that are hard to laugh at because of the injustices they use as gag material. That aside, the acting in it is done well, even if sometimes the actors seem about to burst out laughing while reciting the more ridiculous claims once really voiced by whites about blacks. The cinematography is stripped down, as suits the film’s premise and stands in stark contrast to the fake movie clips and news reels combined into the narrative.

CSA: The Confederate States of America gets a B from me, even if it made me nervous and ashamed to watch it: nervous because of the truth of it and ashamed because the truth was about people and places I know well. One would hope that we’ve moved on as a country from the time that we accepted the sale of one human being to another, but if we ever underestimate how important it was that we left that behind or how far civil rights have come, then its movies like this that in their simplicity and frankness serve to show the dark paths we could have traveled.

I don’t normally review movies that were made on any sort of three digit budget or major ad campaign. But today, I feel I need to make an exception for a film that belongs in the B+ Catalog mostly for its subject matter, the stuff of geek discussions for decades. The source material, a ground breaking comic mini series that later was collected as a graphic novel, was called unfilmable and even by the most rabid fans was something that was thought to be best left to a cable serial and even then could only be expected to be presented in some watered down form.

I’m talking about Watchmen.

Describing the plot of Watchmen  is difficult because in its shortest explanation, it’s misleading and any description that does it justice is better given by just handing someone the book. Trying to meet these challenges in the middle, I’ll try to summarize thusly: The Watchmen are a group of superheroes, only second group of their kind in a world very much like our own, at least up until the 1940’s in which the first group of superheroes became active. The Watchmen are mostly retired, forced to hang up their masks by an act of congress outlawing costumed vigilanttes.  The members include:

• Nite Owl, a gadgeteer and idealist.
• Silk Spectre, a second generation crimefighter.
• The Comedian, who goes on to work black ops for the government.
• Rorschach, a nigh-psychopathic crusader who refused to retire.
• Dr. Manhattan, a former physicist given godlike powers who works for the government on scientific projects even as he slowly is losing touch with his humanity.

In the first few minutes of the story, the Comedian dies. Rorschach investigates and starts tracking down his former team mates to warn them someone might be targeting heroes. As the members of the team come to grips with both who they are and who they were, a plot unfolds that may be either the key to ending… or starting… world war III.

The world of Watchmen is a rich one and has a steep learning curve as we must accept in a glance that it’s the 80’s, Richard Nixon is still president and that America won in Vietnam. The director does an excellent job of summing this up in the opening credits, one of the best cinematic sequences of the film,  but still there’s a lot for the viewer to take in with only a short mentions and glances to convey it.

The story, too, has a steep learning curve. This story doesn’t hold back or pull punches, presenting to us an attempted rape, graphic consensual sex, gruesome violence, nudity both male and female, all of which is used to immerse you in a time and place of moral greys, devoid of easy choices.

Watchmen provides a counterpoint to the ugliness in its world with very human characters with very understandable motivations, from Nite Owl’s struggle to overcome the mediocrity in his life as a retired superhero to a former supervillian struggling with the fact he’s dieing of cancer. The people we meet are extreme personalities, but their outlook seems appropriate given the extremes of the world in which they live. If you watch this movie, you will not like all of the characters, but you will get where they are coming from.

Visually, the movie is amazing, lifting images straight off the page and setting them in motion. The gritty streets, spotless boardrooms and warm-but-dull apartments each move the story along as much as the dialog, the plot or the more spectacular effects. Watchmen is  as much an experience as a piece of cinema, something you must more surrender to than watch.

I was a fan of the book well before I saw the movie and while I was in the theater, this let me overlook some of the movie’s flaws. A couple of weeks later, I can see the holes in the work, from simple things like a character producing a gun that they had no reason to have to the moments in the dialog (mostly from Silk Spectre’s mom) that were not delivered as convincingly as they really could have been. There are moments whose signifigance goes unexplained, places where the pacing could be better and scenes where we get close ups when a short glimpse would have served just as well.

Watchmen is proving to be a commerical failure, which is sad because it’s a bold experiment and as edgy as movies get. It rivals Sin City and Pulp Fiction in it’s willingess to point you towards the unthinkable and not flinch. It rivals The Dark Knight in making the superhero acessable and real. It will be a movie that might be remembered for its brave choices if it is not overlooked for its spectacal.

For all its successes and all its failures, I give Watchmen a B.  I’m not sure I’m ready to go back into the theater and watch it again, but I will be waiting eagerly for the DVD release and the eventual, inevitable extended cut. This is not a movie for everyone but is more than just a movie for the comic book geeks like me. It’s B movie subject matter with an A list budget and a script that I won’t even try to rate, because I don’t feel up to juding the classics.

I trained for about a year and a half at an amazing martial arts school in Atlanta, once upon a time. The school, named the Francis Fong Academy, taught at least six or seven styles from Filipino stick fighting to  Brazilian jujitsu to Wing Chun Kung Fu. The classes were intense at times, always enjoyable and challenging, but there was one class, one art taught at the school that, while I admired it, I would look at and say “those guys are crazy.” Specifically, it was Muay Thai kickboxing.

If you’ve never seen it performed, I recommend checking out Ong-Bak: Muay Thai Warrior.

Ong-Bak: Muay Thai Warrior is a primarily a vehicle to display the considerable talents of Tony Jaa, an up and coming martial arts star. This man does things with his body that most people only think possible in video games. In the tradition of one of his inspirations, Jackie Chan, he did all his own stunts in Ong-Bak,  including doing running jumps through hoops about the diameter of a hubcap and leaping over people using other people as launchpads.

But enough with the fanboy talk. Let’s talk about the movie.

Ong-Bak starts with Tony’s character living in a remote village and respected as the town’s golden boy, the protector of it’s golden Buddha statue, the title referenced Ong-Bak. The statue gets stolen by art smugglers and Tony has to go into the city to get it back. He hooks up with a cousin living in the city, a small time hustler who seems to be trying to forget his country past. The cousin helps Tony reluctantly, mostly because he thinks he can use Tony’s skills to make a lot of money in boxing matches, and after a few sidetracks, they eventually find out that their statue’s theives are headed up by a Bond worthy villian (complete with wheel chair and implanted voicebox) and his drug injecting psycho second in command badass. The two will face them (well mostly Tony) to return the village treasure and prove that good guys still win.

Ong-Bak has a lot of the hallmarks of a freshman movie. It goes down well trod roads in terms of plot and the characters are not exactly vast conudrums of personality.  The action is beautiful to watch but in some scenes appears forced and practically screams “hey, watch this… it’s going to be cool,” which would be really obnoxious if wasn’t actually so bloody cool.

I’ve seen precisely two Thai made movies, this and Monday’s murky gunplay drama Bangkok Dangerous. Based on those two extremes, I’m gladlly looking forward to exposing my eyeballs to more Thai work because of the potential and gutsy film making that they represent. Ong-Bak: Muay Thai Warrior is not as challenging as some other films, but it is fun and visually interesting, a popcorn flick with a side of drunken noodles. Take a look at monday’s review to see what I thought of Bangkok Dangerous, but as for Ong-Bak, I give it a very enthusiastic B.

But I wouldn’t say that to Tony Jaa’s face. That guy could beat the crap out of me.

And now announcing, the very first B+ Poll:
I recently saw Watchmen in the theater, and now having had a week or so to brew the details in my head, I think it might be worth reviewing here. My reservation is that it’s a big budget movie that everyone has heard about, so not exactly the sort of thing I usually review here. Would you like to see me break character for Friday’s review and pass on my opinion of the movie or would you like another movie reviewed from the bargain bin?

Please leave comments below.

American film makers crib a lot of notes off of the works of other cultures. Reservoir Dogs, which starts with a bunch of criminals in a warehouse after a jewel heist gone wrong has a lot in common with the Chinese film City on Fire, which towards the end has bunch of criminals in a warehouse after a jewel heist gone wrong. Even the film giant that is Star Wars bears a remarkable semblance to the Japanese film The Hidden Fortress. And as you might not have heard of the Asian films I just mentioned, it goes without saying that the Asian inspiration for films in the states doesn’t always get the mention it deserves.So imagine when I found out that when I thought I was recording Nic Cage’s 2008 movie Bangkok Dangerous I was in fact recording a Thai film called Bangkok Dangerous.

A little internet research and found out that Cage’s film was a remake of the Thai movie I’d found on cable. I was happy either way, as the 2008 movie got mediocre reviews but this one I had no warnings about to influence my opinon. So what did I find?

Bangkok Dangerous features a deaf and mute hitman named Kong. He lives a simple life, drinking beer and eating food from street vendors and supporting his best friend Joe, a semi-retired hitman who has to let jobs pass because he took a bullet through the hand. Joe’s ex-girlfriend Aom is their go between, meeting Kong and Joe at a seedy strip club to hand them their assignments.

The movie takes a lot of efforts to explain to us who these people are, what their life is like and how a deaf kid got into the business of killing people for money. The blood spatters and moral grays are juxtaposed against a believable innocence in Kong’s personality, most apparent as we see him fall in love with someone completely outside his usual world. This part of the movie moves a bit slow, but does a good job of making us care about the characters without letting us forget that they are criminals and thugs.

But this is the sort of story that doesn’t move along until something goes wrong.

Aom gets a lot of unwelcome attention from a brutal member of the gang. Joe kills the wrong person. And eventually, Kong has to turn his guns on those who employed him.

I’ve seen more dialogue in some restaurant menus than in this film, but that didn’t hurt it. The director told the story through images and subtleties, taking the full advantage of the visuals to tell us a visual story. Facial expressions and lighting take the place of plot exposition, helping us identify with a main character that lives without sound.

The images we’re shown help accentuate the fact that this is in no way a happy film, sometimes generating disgust and horror with a glimpse in ways other movies do with broad panoramas. One character is the victim of a rape, which we’re shown at first in flashes, a technique that communicates the chaos of the moment so that when later we see it plainly it almost seems redundant.

More morality tale than popcorn flick, Bangkok Dangerous is not an easy movie to watch, but once you commit to it, it brings you into the streets of Bangkok fully and surrounds you with the world the director wants to show you. Sometimes a little slow, sometimes going too far with interesting camera angles, it’s not a perfect film but something that a fan of Asian, Noir or even just gritty cinema can enjoy. For its flaws, it rises only to a B rating in my scale, but a B I give without reservation to a movie I never expected. 

Some movies start off looking like they are going to be normal and then twist into something strange and wonderful, like Fight Club. Some movies start off weird and then become something more approachable, like Moulin Rouge. Still others start off weird and just keep going with it.

It is in the third category I place the 1998 cult film, Six-String Samurai.

The film starts in a setting that is one part alternate history and one part allegory: In the fifties, the Russians bombed the United States leaving it a desolate, barren landscape full of warring gangs and the desicated husk of the American Dream. To the west lies the Kingdom of Elvis, and as the movie begins Elvis has left the building died. Hopefuls from all over the country converge on Vegas to be crowned the next King of Rock and Roll.

Enter Buddy, as in Holly (horned rimed glasses and all), who is said to be able to “kill over a hundred men and play a mean six string at the same time”. With katana and Les Paul in hand, he heads towards Vegas to make his bid, but along the way meets a orphaned kid who Buddy reluctantly takes into his protection. As he walks on towards his destiny, Buddy will face suburban zombies, rock star wannabes, the Red Army and even Death himself.

Once you’ve accepted that this isn’t the history they taught you in school, Six-String Samurai is fun movie.  While I’m calling it Sci-Fi, it has elements of a martial arts film, a western, post-apocalyptic action and modern fantasy. The movie’s sword fights and bluesy guitar riffs are edged with comedy and thickly coated with symbols of an America that never really existed save on glossy magazine pages and black and white TV screens. The film uses rock and roll as a metaphor, representing what is best and fine in the culture of the US as well as what fuels the dreams of those who start off humble but hope to make something grand of themselves by the end of the story.

Six-String Samurai was made on a shoestring budget but that in no way hurts the movie. What does hurt the movie is that the fights get a little repetitive and that the strangeness of things like a guitar duel with Death threaten to alienate the less dedicated viewer. This movie looks at it’s subject matter like a kid with a pinhole camera watching an eclipse, a perspective that makes it interesting but at the same time obscures the film’s impact.

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being a biology class documentary on bees and 10 being a David Lynch film, Six-String Samurai falls at about 8.2 for weirdness.  It’s not a film I’d recommend just for background noise, but more if you’re willing to let yourself get sucked in to a movie and also willing to hang with it when the allure wears thin for a scene or two. In my more usual ranking system, that means Six-String Samurai gets a B.

But I don’t expect this movie to care that it didn’t get my top honors. It’s just too cool for that.

Monday, I reviewed a movie called Gangs of the Dead and spoke of the deep level of suck to which it managed to delve. What sticks with me about that film was how close it came to being cool and how much it had to work with versus what it actually did with it. This made me think of other zombie movies and what they did, both wrong and right.

Take for instance an 80’s classic, Night of the Comet.

Night of the Comet starts with a couple of Valley Girls, the prototypical 80’s girl who spent inordinate amounts of time at the mall, sported leg warmers and spoke in one of the most contagious slang dialects of the twentieth century (I’m sure there’s evidence to back me up on that last one somewhere). One is a cheerleader, the other works at a movie theater and at the opening of our film, they have no more concerns that shopping, having sex with their boyfriends and topping the high score on an arcade game (if you have to ask me what an arcade game is, I’ll have to slap you.)

As the opening exposition is kind enough to tell us, there’s a comet on the way and Earth is going to pass through it’s tail. This is cause for the masses to party in public and for a few more cautious souls to hide in bunkers. Turns out, of course, that the latter took the wiser path. The comet’s mojo turns people in to zombies, doomed to disintegrate but not before trying to maul the small remaining non-zombie population.

The girls manage to escape this fate by spending the night behind steel walls (the projection booth for one, the backseat of a car for the other). They meet up with a trucker who also survived and then go to fetch weapons from the National Guard Armory, which they know how to use because their dad is in the military.

The guns turn out to be necessary for more than mulching zombies as a group of scientists now want to capture the girls and figure out how to make a cure for the zombie disease out of their blood. Between zombies and rogue scientists, the girls and the audience are in for a bit of a ride.

The thing that made this stand out from other zombie movies, for me at least, was that it was more a period piece than a horror movie. It used the 80’s kitsch to connect with the audience and highlight some of the sillier aspects of the Valley Girl chic. This is true for about the first third of the movie, but that’s enough to set the tone.

Where the movie slacks off is in the last two thirds, in which it becomes more of a standard sci fi piece. If they’d kept the focus of the first part of the movie, it might have stepped beyond B movie territory and gone straight into genius. It didn’t, though and instead remained cute and entertaining.

While not a perfect film by any stretch of the imagination,  Night of the Comet is a very watchable, enjoyable movie. It has almost no gore factor though which makes it more of an action film than horror, even if it does provide some deeply creepy scenes in the process (the guys in the mall and the game of “scary noises” stand out).

As of 2009, the 80’s are back in full force as evidenced by the teenage girls I’ve seen bopping about the mall in ripped jeans, tiger striped spandex pants and side ponytails. If anyone needed reference material for the look, this is one of the films I’d consider required viewing. Night of the Comet get’s a B from me, and a deserved one at that. Totally. I mean like gag me with a spoon.

The death of a sequel is in its inability to bring anything new to the table. Sure, we want enough of whatever the original story was that we get the same feeling, the same magic and emotion brought on by that introductory tale, but we also want to see something else. Play it too close to the original and you risk boring the audience by taking them over well tread ground.

And fear of innovation is not anything I can pin on The Crow: Salvation.

The last movie to review in my four part retrospective of The Crow franchise, The Crow: Salvation had a lot going against it from the beginning. It would invariably be compared to The Crow and it would be hard to capture that depth of story again using the same plot. Also, critics were less than impressed with The Crow: City of Angels, so not only would be compared to a very well liked movie, but also a less than well liked movie.

Seemingly destined for failure, the movie failed to bring us back to where we started but it didn’t just stop and die either.

The Crow: Salvation begins with the classic formula that made us fall in love with the series. Take two lovers, add some tragedy and sprinkle with an unkillable thirst of for justice and once again, you get an undead vigilante in black and white makeup ready to pass out the butt kickings to all comers. In this case, we have Alex Corvis who was framed for the death of his lover and spots the killer (by way of a plot provided identifying mark) as one of the members of the gallery watching him be electrocuted. He comes back and along the way must not only find his killer but also look after his girlfriend’s sister, played by a pre-Spider-Man Kirsten Dunst.

What this movie does right is that it doesn’t directly try to be the first movie, just with a different actor in the lead. It plays with the plot devices, requiring Alex to believe in the purity of his mission and his own innocence to keep going. This adds a vulnerability and introspective twist to the character that means there’s a chance that the unstoppable can be stopped. This in turns builds tension and at least for me, made me engage the story and really wonder how the character was going to finish his quest.

The less than perfect parts of this tale are in its framing, like a complete lack of understanding about how electrocutions take place. Also, the acting by the main villain (played by Fred Ward) left just a bit to be desired. Despite it’s curves, there are few framed shots where it’s pretty obvious they were trying to copy scenes from The Crow. Not enough to make me get bored, but enough that I said to myself “yep, I guess it’s time for him to get shot by a line of guys in a bar”.

The Crow: Salvation was neither the best movie I’ve ever seen nor even the best comic book movie but it was the best of the three sequels, I felt. While this is faint praise, in the B+ rating system, this means that I give it a B. There will never be another movie, I fear, that will completely capture the magic of the first movie but if they keep making sequels, future filmmakers wishing to take up this tale would do well to look at the third installment and see exactly how much you can push the formula and still make a movie worthy of the pre colon title The Crow.