Tag: william forsythe

B Movie Glory: Larva

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I love a good, simple, blessedly cheesy SyFy creature feature flick, back when cable tv was around you could tune in any night of the week, settle in for the midnight hours and watch all kinds of monsters, ghouls, aliens and cryptid nightmares terrorize small towns. Whenever I get the chance these days I grab them on DVD where I can find them for sheer nostalgic value and Larva is a great example of that. Set in blessed small town Americana, we meet a farmer (the great William Forsythe) who is having trouble with his cows getting sick and dying of some mysterious and very deadly parasite. He contacts the environmental board who sends a representative (Vincent Ventresca) who discovers that the animals are falling prey to a brand new subspecies that is aggressive and altogether catastrophic to the region, especially when it starts infecting humans and we are treated to an impressive array of gut busting, chest bursting, skull exploding gore as these beasties grow from their larval state and bust loose from human hosts into these weird leathery winged, tooth ‘n fang adorned monsters that fly, crawl through tight spaces and kill with speed and ferocity. There’s a neat subplot about the dangers of outsourcing agricultural and livestock resources to big experimental corporations that don’t follow the rules until nature bites back which is a nice touch too. Forsythe is terrific as the stoic, capable farmer who keeps an arsenal of ‘just in case’ weaponry in his barn for occasions such as these and gets to blast many a monster to smithereens. The effects are terrific in the close quarters gore department and perfectly serviceable as far as visuals of the full grown creatures go and overall this is exactly the kind of good, splattery, brainless fun you’d expect from stuff like this. Good times.

-Nate Hill

Rob Zombie’s CSI Miami: L.A.

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Usually television shows employ ‘gun for hire’ directors who are expected to not so much have their own vision, but carry on the style, spirit and elemental energy of the show overall for tonal consistency. Every once in a while they’ll deviate though and hire a renowned artist for an episode’s departure into their own specific style, or a melding of both for something that feels fresh, exciting and unmistakably ‘that director.’ This allows for my periodic enjoyment of a particular show’s window of escape into something creative beyond the weekly slog of predictable monotony and let me tell you, CSI:Miami was the worst show monotony. Thankfully Rob Zombie not only peppered his unique, pop-art retro baroque elements into the scheme but the the network also decided to shift the episode’s action from Miami over to LA, flying in David Caruso’s Caine and his term of regulars to interact with a host of fresh new characters, all casted from the Zombie pool of underused cult and character actor icons. Caine & Co have travelled to LA on the trail of a shady pornographer (Paul Blackthorne) who was tried and acquitted of killing his wife and an additional girl back in Miami, prompting them to join forces with a no nonsense LAPD Captain (the great William Forsythe) and interrogate various sideshow suspects who range from cooperative to obstinate. Michael Madsen is in slick tough guy mode as the amoral former football star turned bodyguard for the porn kingpin, Sheri Moon Zombie is relaxed and down to earth as ever playing a good natured photographer with key intel on the case, and other Zombie troupe regulars briefly show up including Kristina Klebe and Jeff Daniel Philips. Perhaps the least cooperative person involved is a nasty, scumbag defends attorney played to the absolute scene stealing hilt by the unmistakable Malcom McDowell at his devilish best. It’s terrific seeing these kind of underground, Midnite Movie type faces all together in the same episode of a glossy, otherwise blandly routine piece of cable TV fluff, and I wish they’d gone this route more often and hired distinct, auteur talents to augment the proceedings. This is a terrific episode laced with dark humour (thanks to McDowell), moral ambiguity (Madsen is a real snake in disguise) and genuine pathos for the victims (Forsythe’s cop shows striking empathy and compassion in his actions). This episode (which almost feels like a standalone mini-film) also reinforces what some people refuse to admit about Zombie: he’s a smart, versatile, adaptable artist who is more than capable of calibrating his toolset beyond the raucous, rowdy and raunchy aesthetic sandbox he’s used to playing in and doing something different with his boundless creative spirit, which admittedly he doesn’t often do, but this is a terrific example of.

-Nate Hill

B Movie Glory: The Last Marshal

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Alright, it’s 90’s cheesy Scott Glenn shit-kicker action time. The Last Marshal is low budget cheese of the highest order, a broad, violent and deliriously politically incorrect story of Texas lawman Cole McLeary (Glenn), a racist, homophobic, asshole, dickhead old school cowboy who travels to Miami pursuing two vicious killers (Vincent Castellanous and Raymond Cruz) who shot up a church in his town. His brittle persona clashes hilariously with the uber-liberal culture climate of Miami and he makes friction for himself pretty much anywhere he goes as he works with a local unit to take down a strange German drug kingpin played by the great William Forsythe, who clearly has no idea what a German accent sounds like but I love the big guy so much I didn’t care. This one gets points for having Glenn’s character be a complete insensitive douche who never changed his ways or accounts for his atrocious behaviour, there are several key scenes of character development that give him a turnaround and make him a really likeable guy under all that gruff. Just stick with it past the first scene of the film where he manages to heinously insult both Mexicans and Natives in one breath, it’s a startling first impression, but he softens up as the film goes. In terms of action it’s pretty cool, some neat fights, gun battles and a cool boat chase. It’s essentially action background noise, a cool trophy to put on the DVD shelf for Scott Glenn completists, as it’s pretty tough to get your hands on a copy.

-Nate Hill

B Movie Glory: Big City Blues

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Burt Reynolds did a lot of, shall we say, odd films throughout his career but the weirdest by far has to be Big City Blues, and the experience of sitting though it is akin to dunking your head in a bucket of piss and raw concrete. Ugly, murky, choppily edited, clumsily acted and shot through with more lens grain than aforementioned concrete bucket, this is the definition of leaving a bad taste in your mouth. Burt and character actor William Forsythe are Connor and Hudson, two mafia hitman in some shit-hole urban nightmare of a city. They find themselves in various jumbled misadventures presented in ramshackle vignette style, including their boss potentially betraying them, freaky underground sadists, a devil worshipping cult, psychotic doctors, duplicitous transvestites and a strange hooker (Georgina Cates) who believes her doppelgänger is somewhere out there in the city and won’t stop obsessing over the notion. Giancarlo and Balthazar Getty also show up here and there but don’t really have much to add. Reynolds gives one weird performance here, shambling about like a hungover Bassett hound and mumbling like he’s already ten drinks into hair of the dog, he seems listless, hilariously disinterested and looks like he just wants to collect his paycheque and go for day pints in a brighter, less depressing city than this (it was filmed in Miami, but you’d never guess and no other film out there has managed to make that colourful hub look as drab and run down as here). Forsythe has a bit more edge to his work and at least tries, but he’s always game no matter the material, even so he can’t save this thing from rolling into the gutter. There’s just too much bloody, gross shock value stuff that seems to have come out of left field in the script and I couldn’t tell if the psycho aspect was disturbing in itself or because it seemed to have ran in from another film and rudely hijacked this one. It also really tries to do the episodic Sin City/Pulp Fiction shtick where stories overlap, intertwine and wrap around each other seamlessly but it fails there too and these random, unpleasant and boring encounters just trip all over each other like they’re as many drinks in as Burt. This is the first film he made after his legendary turn in Boogie Nights and I wonder why, you’d think he’d have gone for something with a little more pedigree. More like Big City Poos.

-Nate Hill

B Movie Glory: Savage Dawn

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

It’s time for some schlocky 80’s biker trash. Savage Dawn is a cheap, sleazy, exceedingly noisy, obnoxious piece of dustbowl highway exploitation and I love every minute of it. Lance Henriksen is stoic ex green beret Stryker who drifts past a small town to visit his old army buddy (George Kennedy). Also blowing through the area is a pack of evil, vicious bikers led by sadistic Pigiron (William Forsythe, living up to that name and then some). Stryker just wants to chill out and have beers with his ol’ bud but Pigiron & Co. have other plans and the film is basically a loose, untethered series of ultra-violent run-ins with the gang, while other weirdo backwoods locals run in and out of the scenes all silly billy. Henriksen is the only actor here to play it remotely seriously, keeping that stone faced glare stolidly in place and dishing out beatdowns left and right. Forsythe is downright maniacal here, doing one of the best versions of his ‘psycho snarling hick shtick’ and chewing scenery like an evil tornado of redneck rambunctiousness. This was the first time these two tussled in a biker picture and would reunite again for Stone Cold in the 90’s, but that’s another story. The late Richard Lynch shows up as a feeble, horn-dog local preacher who gets in the way and the great Karen Black has a memorable turn as the loopy local slut. This ain’t nothing but bottom of the barrel street grease, there’s no way around it. But the actors sell it and there’s enough of them letting off steam to make this enjoyable, albeit fairly WTF in places. Gotta keep in mind that gnarly little nuggets like this were commonplace back then and sometimes I miss em.

-Nate Hill

Michael Bay’s The Rock

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Who loves Michael Bay’s The Rock? I think a better question is who doesn’t. It was one of my first introductions to the action genre as a kid and I sat there in Saturday morning disbelief at just what was possible in the realms of cinema. Alcatraz Island, nuclear warheads filled with horrific poison gas, Nicolas Cage in charismatic goofball mode, Sean Connery basically reprising his 007 role one last time, a rogues gallery of gnarly character actors all hamming it up to high heaven, a score from Hans Zimmer that soars and invoked both emotion and adrenaline, what’s there not to fall in love with.

The plot here is besides the point: angry rogue military general Ed Harris takes Alcatraz hostage, threatens to launch warheads across harbour into crowded San Fran. Chemistry guru Nic Cage, ex MI6 super-spy Sean Connery and a team of Navy Seals covertly lead a siege on the rock to stop him. Many guns are fired, a lot of shit blows up and endless one liners are uttered. That’s the nutshell version though, the actual experience is something blissful and perfectly pitched in terms of the recipe for a great action film. Connery is intense yet somehow laid back and steals the show as the pissed off, blacklisted agent who really doesn’t care about the threat towards the city, or at least pretends not to. Cage, whether strumming his guitar, banging his super hot Italian American wife (Vanessa Marcel) or referencing Elton John right before killing a bad guy, is comic dynamite and a source of desperate, scenery chewing energy that somehow works despite how ridiculous his performance is (it’s like the antithesis of his work in Con Air, the sister film to this). What I love about Harris’s villain here is that, unlike many huge budget action flicks, you actually care about this guy and what he wants, despite the extreme measures he’s gone to get them. He’s calm, resolute and sorrowful and not much about his performance suggests an antagonist except for the situation the character is written into and it’s an interesting, thoughtful choice for the film’s baddie. The real nasty characters are the mercenaries he hires to carry out his mission, who include the more subdued likes of David Morse and John C. McGinley, the less subdued Bokeem Woodbine and Gregory Sorlader and the positively psychotic Tony Todd as Captain Darrow, the last guy you’d want on either side of the moral fence as his seems to be absent. On the other side of the action we get John Spencer as a cranky FBI bigwig, legendary Michael Biehn as the Seal commando, always awesome William Forsythe as the one FBI agent with a brain in his head and cameos from Pat Skipper, Claire Forlani, Danny Nucci, Tom Towles, Jim Caviesel, Stanley Anderson, Raymond Cruz, Xander Berkeley, Philip Baker Hall and Stuart Wilson.

From the moment Harris’s team steals the rockets to the explosive sequence where Cage flags down the military in a sly Platoon reference, this thing fires with everything it’s got. Connery’s escape and car chase through the streets of San Fran goes on needlessly long and exists only for the purpose of an action sequence, making it all the more awesome. Harris and Biehn’s utterly badass stare down and frantic chicken fight over who will order a stand-down first always gets me. It’s such a well made action film that even the Bay haters sound like ignoramuses when they bash it. Roger Ebert, who has routinely torn Bay new assholes over the years in his reviews, loved it. Zimmer’s theme is the perfect symphony for fighter jets, commandos, yellow hummers’ (“You shtole my humvee!”), trolley cars, assault weapons and high powered rockets to thunder across the harbour in spectacular fashion. The Rock rocks.

-Nate Hill

Jon Avnet’s 88 Minutes

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

It takes less than 88 Minutes into Jon Avnet’s aptly titled Al Pacino thriller vehicle to realize you’ve kind of waded into a mess, but the viciously bad reputation this one has is kind of overblown, at least for me. Yes it’s a big implausible house of mirrors but instead of mirrors there’s cliches and WTF plot turns, there’s absolutely way too many characters running about and the pace is all across the board, but I enjoyed it anyways, in a fun TV movie kind of way.

Pacino and his pacemaker play Jack Gramm, an FBI profiling guru who is forced to marathon run around Seattle (naturally Vancouver, cue eye roll) overturning stones, under which there may be murder suspects. There’s a nasty serial killer (the always awesome Neal McDonough) who is sitting on death row, days away from execution. He proclaims himself innocent and whaddya know, an hour or so after that some incredibly convenient copycat murders start happening, giving him the seeds of reprieve. It’s up to ol’ Al, his tough guy Bureau boss (William Forsythe, again always an awesome familiar face to see) and others to smoke out this co-conspiracy… or something like that.

Pacino is still trying to do the ladies man shtick here with a shock of grey hair and a leather coat hide, but if you ask me it never really worked for him anyways, at least not in the traditional sense. Take Taylor Hackford’s The Devil’s Advocate for example, where he naturally plays The Devil. There’s a scary, untrustworthy glint in this actor’s eye that makes him most at home in arch villain and sort of renegade roles, but when he tries to play the straight arrow type thing, it feels off. He’s serviceable here though, doing a lot of running, shouting and gun waving and mugging for the camera like a curb-side mine. McDonough does most of his mugging from behind a newsroom camera as some network does a special on his last few days and he barks thinly veiled threats to the masses. Forsythe does his stalwart G-Man thing and the rest of the roster is actually pretty impressive and includes Benjamin Mackenzie, Amy Brenneman, Stephen Moyer, Alicia Witt, the great Deborah Kara Unger and eternally babyfaced Leelee Sobieski as one of Pacino’s students who, inexplicably, has the hots for him.

Speaking of all things inexplicable, the plot traffics in them like currency and by the end we wonder just how long the writers can manipulate these chess piece suspects around the board before we begin to call bullshit on this bonkers narrative. All silliness aside though I had fun with this one, it’s like Agatha Christie by way of Criminal Minds with so much extra gobbledygook thrown at the wall that I couldn’t help have fun despite not following the plot at any given minute. Give it a go on beer night.

-Nate Hill

Hans Petter Moland’s Cold Pursuit

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Cold Pursuit won’t be what audiences are expecting it to be, and these days in Hollywood, that’s a really good thing. There’s a whole string of Liam Neeson genre films since Taken that for the most part are generic vehicles for him to run around in and beat people up. Fortunately, every so often one breaks the mould and turns out to be a fresh, distinguished animal from the rest of the pack, and this is one of them. Yes it’s about a snow plow driver in a small mountain town whose son is murdered by drug dealers. Yes, Neeson plays him as the lone man who takes his revenge in a series of violent encounters and action sequences. But that’s just the blueprint, and honestly director Hans Petter Moland, remaking his own 2014 film, seems far more interested in showing us the casual eccentricities and personal lives of all of these characters, particularly the dealers, than focusing on action alone. Neeson’s initial rampage causes quite a bunch of confusion in the ranks when the local outfit mistakes his mayhem for the actions of a rival Native American gang from Denver, and that’s when the snow really hits the fan. Tom Bateman is a coked up dervish as Viking, head of the local boys, the kind of guy who caps off his own people before breakfast and encourages his son to hit bullies back harder, ‘just for starters.’ The Native American dealers are my favourite part, adding a mystic deadpan quality and distinct class that makes the film seem just this side of a regular action flick. Tom Jackson is charismatic and scary as their leader White Bull, and Raoul Trujillo does a hilarious turn as Thorpe, his second in command. Emmy Rossum is good but slightly underused as an enthusiastic local cop, while John Doman gets a few of the film’s funniest scenes as her less enthusiastic partner. It’s terrific to see the great William Forsythe on the big screen again as Neeson’s ex criminal brother Wingman, an old dog who knows the ropes and seems both worried and amused at his brother’s drastic actions. Speaking of underused though, they’ve thrown Laura Dern a thankless role as Neeson’s wife who simply disappears from the plot like halfway through. A little Dern goes a long way, but she’s given almost nothing to do here. As Liam picks these guys off one by one and they all wonder just what the shit is happening, I found myself much more entertained by the precious little sideshow moments concerning all the criminals, narrative excursions that take huge liberties with the film’s pacing, a choice that I have no problem with. Viking has intense squabbles with his ex wife (Wind River’s Julia Jones) over their son’s ridiculous diet, Thorpe and his crew have a hilarious interaction with a hotel clerk who uses the word ‘reservation’ in a context that makes for the funniest joke in the film, and one of Viking’s boys has interesting ideas about how to bang hotel maids. My favourite is when the film stops dead in its tracks to show White Bull and his guys simply playing in the snow, watching skiers practice and getting one of their guys to hang-glide off the mountain. It’s that sense of playfulness, the care in stepping off the beaten path and giving us something we don’t often see in Hollywood films that sets this aside and makes it something special. It doesn’t particularly work as a thriller because it’s too funny, and won’t land with an emotional impact for the same reason. That doesn’t matter much though, because it’s just fine as a screwy black comedy full of really interesting side characters, offbeat situational comedy and high spirited, naturalistic comedic timing. A barrel of fun if you’re tuned into the abstract frequency. One last thought: I really wish they’d kept the title ‘Hard Powder’ instead of the much less tongue in cheek Cold Pursuit, which feels too run of the mill for a film this idiosyncratic.

-Nate Hill

Joe Roth’s Freedomland j

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Freedomland is a dark, strange drama about events spiraling out of control following the disappearance of a young boy, the distraught nature of his mother (Julianne Moore) and the subsequent search that takes two detectives (Samuel L. Jackson and William Forsythe) into a heated black community and the surrounding wilderness nearby. Moore’s character is a notoriously unstable woman and not the most reliable mother, her story just doesn’t seem to add up, especially when she claims she saw a black man take off with her car with her kid in it. Jackson’s charismatic cop knows the community well and does his best to ease mounting racial tension, while Moore is a basket case who can barely function, and the whole thing feels sort of meandering and purgatorial until a third act revelation that puts an entirely new spin on the film but also kind of thematically negates everything that came before. Is is a slightly political interpersonal drama? Somewhat. Is it a twisty abduction thriller? Not really me, but I feel like it wants to be. Is it a character study of a broken woman? Could have been with more development. It’s an odd mix that doesn’t really gel with much that it tries except when it focuses on Moore, who is fascinating damaged goods, but again more time should have been spent cultivating that angle. Jackson is fine in his authoritarian mediator role, normally boisterous Forsythe is pretty laid back as the trusty sidekick, Edie Falco plays a concerned activist looking to help out and Ron Eldard is terrific as Moore’s brother, an emotional firebrand who calls her right out on her ongoing bullshit. This film tries to be more than it ultimately ends up being, if that at all makes sense. Elements are in place for it to be great and some of them do in fact work, but the script needed some tweaks, especially in how the bulk of the film and the conflict there relate to and clash with that twist ending, which needed to be revealed way sooner to set up a moving, provocative final act. Not terrible for the effort that was made.

-Nate Hill

B Movie Glory: The Librarians aka Strike Force

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Exterior, Miami Beach. A hardened mercenary (everyone’s favourite tough guy, William Forsythe) has just returned the kidnaped daughter of a businessman, and the guy says “I don’t even know what to call you guys.” Forsythe’s Simon replies “Just call us the Librarians… lets just say we return overdue books”, with a straighter face than David Caruso’s Horatio Cain on CSI, another ludicrous Miami tough guy. Anyways, that’s the kind of knowingly asinine B Movie Glory (trademarked at this point) that we have here, but it’s a good bit of fun, to quote a certain Tarantino character. Forsythe’s off the books squad deals in locating the victims of human trafficking, and bringing the pain to those who perpetrate it. He’s joined by Prison Break’s Amaury Nolasco, martial arts star Daniel Bernhardt and former playboy bunny turned B movie maiden Erika Eleniak. Their next task: rescue the kidnaped daughter of a mysterious billionaire (Michael Parks Skypes in a cameo that contains more gravity than the rest of the film combined, not to mention more than it deserves) from the clutches of a slimy crime lord (Andrew Divoff in full villain mode). It’s routine and predictable, punctuated by off the wall one liners, porno lit sex scenes, low grade gunfight last and sloppy hand to hand combat. I still can’t get over that aforementioned snippet of dialogue though, it sums up what glorious little gems like this are all about, encapsulates the B action film and Forsythe delivers it with that knowing little smirk that’s says it all. Watch for familiar faces like Ed Lauter, Forsythe’s own daughter Rebecca, Christopher Atkins and more. Oh yeah, and Burt Reynolds shows up briefly as a shady character credited (he actually had his name removed from the roster, understandably) as ‘Irish’. His first and middle names could be ‘Not’ and ‘Actually’, because the brogue he uses here is worse than Tommy Lee Jones I’m Blown Away and Dennis Hopper in Ticker combined, it’s a perplexing, cringy cameo. Hilarious stuff.

-Nate Hill