Tag: michael ironside

The Man in the Director’s Chair: An Interview with Michael Schroeder by Kent Hill

by Kent Hill, posted in Interviews

It was owning a fast car that booked a young Michael Schroeder his first trip onto a film set. With Chief Dan George (The Outlaw Josey Wales) in the seat next to him, Michael was instructed to drive as fast as he could toward camera. He took this request literally.

While no one was injured, and though this early encounter did not go exactly according to plan, the crew assembled in cowboy hats and shorts seemed to be having a lot more fun than the group of aging lawyers with whom Schroeder had spent this previous evening. So he quit trying to be become a lawyer and ran of to join the movie business.

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He began his professional career as an assistant director working on such films as Revenge of the Ninja, Lambada, Highlander 2 and Guests of the Emperor. In 1988 he would take the director’s chair on Mortuary Academy. Fourteen features would follow, among them Dead On: Relentless 2, Angelina Jolie’s debut Cyborg 2: Glass Shadow, Cyborg 3 (apparently Schroeder’s most lamentable experience) and his career high and passion project, the wonderful Man in the Chair.

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He is a talented director who came to movies late – but he has since established himself as a consummate artiste of the motion picture. He was a font of great stories, optimism, on top of being an eloquent gentleman.

It is my privilege to present to you this interview.

Ladies and Gentlemen . . . Michael Schroeder.

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B Movie Glory: Night Trap

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review


Night Trap is so old, obscure and out of print that I had to order an Amazon copy just to make sure it was even real, and not some dream I had as a kid. It’s real enough, and a glorious helping of low budget supernatural tomfoolery at that, with two charismatic character actors headlining. Robert Davi, in a rare lead role, plays a headstrong New Orleans cop who is hunting down a serial killer (Michael Ironside) that appears to have sold his soul to the devil in exchange for invincibility and a host of freaky deaky evil superpowers. Davi’s father was also a cop who pursued Ironside, and the monster likes to taunt both of them, leaving a trail of bodies in the hectic celebration of Mardi Gras. There’s a million of these type of movies, and they’re all across the board in terms of quality. It comes down to script and actors, really, as there’s never enough money to make any real visual magic. This one has a mile wide mean streak though, Ironside’s villain is a full on moustache twirling, nightmarish fiend and the veteran tough guy plays him as such. Matched against Davi, another notorious badass, it’s a B movie royal rumble that hits high notes of intensity, schlock and pulpy, violent delirium in all the right cues. Fun stuff if you’re a fan of these actors, and can actually locate a copy. 

-Nate Hill

Indie Gems with Nate: Guy X

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Guy X is one of those tonally disorientating black comedies whose madcap antics hide a deeper truth, visible only to those patient enough to sift through the meandering detritus. It also helps I your sense of humour is on the right frequency, one that is decidedly off key in this case. Think of a Terry Gilliam film, that mad rush of arbitration and deafening bureaucratic hubbub that serves as a smokescreen for something a little more grounded. Jason Biggs, keeping his dick out of pies this time around, plays Rudy, a low level army grunt who is accidentally sent to an outpost right in the the Arctic, and the middle of nowhere too, as we soon see by his fellow soldier’s boredom fuelled shenanigans. It’s fish out of water, but we get an uncanny sense that he’s also there for a reason, one that takes it’s painstaking time to emerge. Smitten by the beautiful commanding officer (the always lovely Natasha McElhone), hounded by her petty boyfriend  (Jeremy Northam) and constantly swept up in the feverish lack of discipline or coherence among the ranks. It’s all fun and games, to be sure, but there’s a melancholic aura that hangs around, especially when Rudy discovers the titular Guy X (Michael Ironside in a transfixing cameo), a lost and forgotten soul who hints at the futility of military operations, reminding us of how we all cloak our existential dread in frosty self depracation and ironic gallows humour. That’s the film, essentially, which I think many didn’t get. Most of the reviews I’ve seen on imdb are from folks who struggled deeply with the sharp, uncomfortable shift in tone, understandably jarred by a sobering rift between playful banter and troubling reflection. The important films are often more difficult for a idea audience to receive, they’re just constructed that way. This one is no exception, but there’s many a lighthearted moment and comedic situation to be enjoyed before the hammer of reality comes down. 

SCANNERS – A REVIEW BY J.D. LAFRANCE

by J.D., posted in Film Review

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For a good part of his career, David Cronenberg has been fascinated by secret societies, be it the New Age-y psychotherapist and his patients in The Brood (1979) or the people addicted to an immersive video game in eXistenZ (1999). With Scanners (1981), he explored a small, but growing number of people endowed with mental abilities that allowed them to read other people’s thoughts or literally blow their minds. This is evident in the film’s most iconic scene where a character blows up another’s head. This premise eerily mirrors Brian De Palma’s The Fury (1978), but where it was more of a conventional thriller, Scanners incorporated more cerebral ideas as some of Cronenberg’s characters see themselves as the next rung in the evolutionary ladder.

Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) leads a vagabond lifestyle and is kidnapped and brought to Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan) who works for a mysterious corporation called ConSec. He tells Vale that he is a “scanner”, someone with telepathic abilities and proceeds to teach him how to use his powers. Ruth soon finds himself at odds with Braedon Keller (Lawrence Dane), head of security at ConSec and who is secretly in cahoots with Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside), the leader of an underground group of scanners. Ruth sends Vale to infiltrate Revok’s group and the film builds to an inevitable confrontation between the two powerful scanners.

Stephen Lack, who came from a performance artist background, delivers a wonderfully idiosyncratic performance as Vale, a man who is initially uncomfortable in his own skin, but gradually becomes more confident as he learns how to control his abilities. In one of his career-defining roles, Michael Ironside is excellent as the malevolent Revok who sees himself as a Che Guevara-type figure. Lack and Ironside’s contrasting acting styles compliment their adversarial characters nicely.

Scanners was part of a fantastic run of early films that Cronenberg wrote and directed himself as he explored the dark intersection where the science fiction and horror genres converged. The success of this film spawned two lackluster sequels that Cronenberg wisely had no involvement in. Unlike The Fury, Scanners goes into much more detail about how these mental abilities work and how they can be harnessed as evident in a scene where Ruth teaches Vale how to accelerate a man’s heartbeat, almost killing him. Cronenberg goes further than simply pitting good scanners vs. bad, but also touching upon the notion that they may be the next step in human evolution.

Crime & Punishment In Suburbia: A Review by Nate Hill

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

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Crime & Punishment In Suburbia follows the theme and story just as loosely as you’d imagine by glancing at both title and poster. It’s It’s own little nasty deviation on the classic tale, set in a decadent white neighborhood, and full of characters who are barely hiding the decaying darkness behind their fake personalities. Having never read Dostoyefsky’s book myself, I can’t in fact tell you how much is different, but I could damn well know that it’s probably very much so. It concerns a hot young teen named Roseanne (Monica Keena, with a dash of Brittany Murphy in those eyes) who is outwardly a normal girl, but has elements in her life which start to taint that image and prompt violent behaviour. Her stepdad Fred (Michael Ironside, dialing up the drunken sleaze to a slow boil) is abusive towards her, and a alcoholic train wreck to boot. Her mother Maggie (Ellen Barkin in screeching cougar mode) is an unstable, clueless mess. Situations like that almost always end badly, which is an understatement here. One night when Fred gets too friendly with Roseanne, she snaps, something comes over her and Maggie and they both brutally murder him in an extended, grisly sequence that would give Oliver Stone bad dreams. From there on in its a dark and trashy morality play involving deception, false incarceration and manipulation on all the everyone’s part. The film seems to revel in the excessive bad behaviour of it’s characters, a decision which can be polarizing for audiences. It’s ugly, sleazy stuff, but it does that very well, with all the actors taking full advantage of the mean spirited script, especially Ironside and Barkin. Just don’t expect any pathos or straight arrow characters, this is a sociopath’s game, through and through.

B Movie Glory with Nate: Hardwired

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

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The first IMDB review to pop up when you look up Hardwired has the log line “wtf?”, which just about sums up the movie. It’s straight up cow dung, a stunningly bad attempt to emulate everything from Blade Runner to Minority Report, failing in all imaginable ways. It does, however, possess a few deranged qualities which are worth a look purely for your own mirth and amusement. Let’s start with Val Kilmer’s hairdo. He sports a getup that looks as if someone threw the head of a mop into a wheat thresher, put it on his head and tried to style it like an emo anime character. It’s baffling, shocking and the hairpiece gives a better performance than the former Bruce Wayne sitting beneath it. Now,here’s the curious thing: on the dvd cover, Kilmer has a garden variety haircut, with no trace of the horror to come once you hit play. This makes not a bit of sense to me;  if I were the filmmaker and it was my movie and I’d chosen that epic Goku hairdo for Kilmer, let alone get him to agree to it, I’d advertise it loud and proud, and put his image like nine different times all over the cover art. It’s ironic that a film about excessive commercialism is guilty of false advertising, but there you have it. Anywho, Kilmer and the hair play Virgil Killiger, a whacky PR manager of a mega corporation  whose main revenue comes from serial advertising, in a half assed future where society has reached the oft imagined 1984 dystopia. He’s tasked with harassing Luke Gibson (Cuba Gooding Jr.), a man who owes a heavy debt to the company due to their products saving his life following an accident. Only problem is, it doesn’t end there. The corporation gets greedy and tries to insinuate itself into every aspect of people’s lives. Gooding bands together with a group of cyberpunk hackers led by Michael Ironside, and together attempt to bring down the company once and for all. It’s al big dumb dumb of a flick that doesn’t even put a modicum of effort in most of the time. Lance Henriksen fans beware: despite a credit, he’s not even in the thing, except for a single recycled photograph which sets the film up for sequels that I will bet my left testicle will never get made.

B Movie Glory with Nate: Down, aka The Shaft

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

  
Ever briefly get stuck in an elevator thats messing with you, malfunctioning and seems to almost have a mischievous mind of its own? That’s the premise of Down, also known as The Shaft. It concerns an elevator in a huge residential/office building that has gone homicidally haywire. It traps, drops and tricks people no end, raising and lowering the interior temperature to dangerous effect and generally just being a great big meanie. No one seems so know what’s going on with it though, especially the mechanic who installed it (Twin Peak’s James Marshall). The incidents accumulate, attracting a perky tabloid reporter (Naomi Watts having a ball) who makes up all kinds of tall tales to explain the situation in sensationalistic terms. This infuriates the CEO of the elevator company (now there’s a job title) played by a snarky Ron Perlman who gets a rant towards Marshall that walked in from a way better script (which leads me to believe it was the spawn of Perlman’s legendary improv skills). There’s also a cop played by Dan Hedeya who can’t seem to figure it out wither. The truth is a lot more interesting than you might expect and has nothing to do with ghosts or spirits at all, but centers around a deranged research scientist (Michael Ironside, whacked out to kingdom come). It’s not the least bit scary, but it’s worth a watch simply for the fact that it’s a movie about a fucking elevator that kills people lol. Cujo and Christine ain’t got nothing on this bitch. The scene where a gaggle of pregnant ladies enter the thing is just priceless in its blatantly gross out manner. Fun, fun stuff and great research to embarrass Watts with sometime down the road if you ever find yourself interviewing her on the red carpet hehe.