Category Archives: Action Packed April

Double Dragon (1994)

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I don’t know how the hell you screw up “Double Dragon.” It’s a beat em up video game set in the future where two warriors Jimmy and Billy (or Bimmy if you’ve played the video game) have to save their girlfriend from a humongous crime syndicate. There could have been so much to go on with this concept, and it might have made for a wicked great apocalyptic action film. Instead, much like “Mortal Kombat,” it’s neutered for kids, and sucked of all of its originality. Even at eleven years old I knew “Double Dragon” sucked. And I liked everything, back then. Even the Marvel Comics mini-series had more of a toothy, edgy vision of the video games than this movie did.

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Hercules (2014)

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If you can forgive the fact that Director Brett Ratner completely knocks off the Kevin Sorbo “Hercules” series by presenting a lighter more satirical tone behind the myth of Hercules, his treatment of the character isn’t a complete loss of time. In actuality, “Hercules” is a solid action comedy that takes the wind out of the Greek Myths, in favor of a more grounded tale of the warrior Hercules, whose entire legacy is built around fantastic tales and illusion. Much like Sorbo’s Hercules, Dwayne Johnson plays the character with a tongue in cheek and self awareness all the while thrust in to fantastic situations that require he actually step up to play the hero.

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Hercules (1997)

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Watching “Hercules,” feels almost like what Disney would have done to Superman if DC ever let them turn the character in to an animated feature film. It has all the hallmarks of the Superman mythos. Not to mention it embraces the classic hero’s journey, and is one of the few Disney features based around mythology rather than an age old story. Disney could very well have approached the tale of a young God in training with an animation style that could have rendered the film bland and forgettable. Instead, “Hercules” is one of their more unique and outside the box animated adaptations.

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Hercules in New York (1970)

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I’d be willing to bet that even the most hardcore Arnold Schwarzenneger (billed as Arnold Strong) fan will tap out after thirty minutes of “Hercules in New York.” It’s a brutally awful attempt to cash in on the Hercules logo, while also failing to turn Schwarzenneger in to a star. It also doesn’t help that whether it’s Arnold with an English dub, or Arnold in his original voice, “Hercules in New York” is impossible to sit through. It’s almost kind of fun to see Arnold try to enunciate English, though, as he plays Hercules, a young demi-God who lives in paradise with women at his feet, and is still bored.

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Super Zero (2014)

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Zombie movies are the order of the moment for so many filmmakers working right now, and it’s tough to really find any good zombie entertainment. How do you take a pretty tired concept and turn it in to something interesting or worth investing your time in? Shockingly director and writer Mitch Cohen found a way. Rather than basing his entire short zombie movie on zombies, he instead explores the more humanistic element of the apocalypse, centering on a small group of people trying to survive, and how one seemingly irrelevant young man becomes their savior.

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Mercenaries (2014)

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You have to give it to the Asylum. Not only did they beat the studios to the punch on the female “Expendables” movie, but they cast actual brawlers for the roles of their titular Mercenaries. While Hollywood may be going for wafer thin women on their own version, “Mercenaries” brings aboard a lot of the obvious suspects of what a female “Expendables” movie should rightfully be composed of. Cynthia Rothrock is the leader, and the heroes of the film are Zoë Bell, Vivica A. Fox, Nicole Bilderback, and Kristanna Loken, while Brigitte Nielsen pulls up the rear as the film’s villainess. It’s a very impressive line up for a movie with seemingly half the budget of “The Expendables.”

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Tekken 2: Kazuya’s Revenge (2014)

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Good news, everyone! We got a “Tekken” sequel! We didn’t ask for one, and it’s likely a lot of people forgot there was a live action movie, in the first place, but we got a “Tekken” sequel, anyway. This isn’t so much a sequel, though, as it is the production company taking all the left over parts and producing a follow up with almost no plot, or characterization. Not that the “Tekken” games had much of the former, anyway. But fans of “Tekken” (all five of them) will be annoyed to see that Jin is nowhere to be seen, Heihachi is only a small player in the narrative, and now series antagonist Kazuya is the main hero of the sequel. Hey, no one’s paying attention, so why be loyal to the games?

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