Golan-Globus’s “American Ninja” from 1985 is the perfect Regan Era action movie cum franchise starter that offers up the right amount of camp and action, along with the ninja glorification that dominated the eighties. Directed well by Sam Firstenberg, “American Ninja” is the introduction of action star Michael Dudikoff whose debut is rather memorable and dynamic. Despite the fact Dudikoff has about ten lines of dialogue in the entirety of “American Ninja,” he is pretty much the ideal American action hero. He looks like James Dean, he fights like Bruce Lee, and he’s a one man army from the military like John Rambo. The icing on the cake is that his name is Joe. Joe Armstrong. Get it? He’s an American Joe with the skills of the ancient Ninja.
Tag Archives: Action
3 Great “Harry Potter” Fan Films to Prep for “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them”
Pictured: The OMEN Chronicles
With “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” coming to theaters this week, some will binge watch (or read) the Harry Potter series (which in film form is just under 20 hours without breaks) while others won’t have time. That does not mean there’s nothing out there for those with less time to get hyped about going back into the magical world created by J.K. Rowling.
One quick search will give you hundreds of Harry Potter related videos and shorts that you can watch on You Tube. Of course, the quality of these varies greatly from “I can’t believe this is fan made” to “I can’t believe they’re letting people watch this” which is why we went through a ton of them to bring you some of the best ones out there.
Green Room (2016)
Jeremy Saulnier has a habit for taking the characters he writes and literally throwing them in to the furnace to be scorched. With “Blue Ruin” he set his character down a path of destructive revenge, and in “Green Room” he takes absolutely zero prisoners. He doesn’t just build on four characters that end up in the wrong place in the wrong time, but he punishes them severely. “Green Room” is yet another superb dramatic thriller about innocence succumbing to evil that’s beyond pure emotion and impulse. Patrick Stewart’s character is a villain who works with a horrific sense of swiftness and cold instruction like a businessman trying to clean up an insignificant spill. The moment we meet him he’s a man unencumbered by emotion or anger, despite the fact every move he makes could mean the end of his lifestyle as he knows it.
Space Jam (1996): 20th Anniversary Steelbook [Blu-ray/DVD/Digital]
Your enjoyment of “Space Jam” may depend on your nostalgia factor and your love for Michael Jordan. Ultimately, “Space Jam” is a serviceable kids and family animation hybrid that teams up one of the most iconic sports heroes of the nineties with one of the most iconic animated characters of all time. Michael Jordan’s popularity was somewhat waning in 1996 thanks to his stint playing baseball, and “Space Jam” is something of an image boost that also happened to be a pretty huge marketing success during the mid-nineties. With toys, music, VHS tapes, and everything else, “Space Jam” was a pretty big pop culture storm that built a larger and loyal audience.
Kammati Paadam (2016) [Ithaca Fantastik 2016]
After a friend’s frantic call, Krishnan returns to his childhood and teenage years’ village to find his friend and what happened to him. Through a series of flashbacks, their lives are shown through school age, teen years, early adulthood, etc. With a script written by P. Balachandran with collaborative writing by Ajithkumar and G. Sethunath and directed by Rajeev Ravi, the film weaves back and forth through time showing more and more of lead Krishnan’s live as well as his friends and love’s lives. The way the years are mixed together with different actors for only a section of them requires one to pay attention to film as only details such as more white hair show the time passing. Even with this, the film is fairly easy to follow until the search for Ganga really heats up and more characters are added.
Miruthan (2016) [Ithaca Fantastik 2016]
In the small town of Ooty, India, a toxic spill transforms people into blood-thirsty, fast running, wire-stunt performing zombies. Director Shakti Soundar Rajan takes a fairly typical zombie story, mixes in an unrequited love story, a dash of political observation, a Bollywood musical number, wire-stunts, and a good sense of humor about the whole thing to create a zombie film that doesn’t feel like it’s just hitting the tropes and its marks mechanically, it’s fast paced and fun while adding a special touch to its subject. The idea of mixing Bollywood style film with zombies might not seem like an obvious choice but here it works of course, the humor being quite on point adds to this and to the enjoyment overall.
Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders (2016) [Blu-Ray/DVD/Digital]
I’m still not sure what to make of “Return of the Caped Crusaders” even hours after it’s ended. It wants to be both a love letter to Adam West’s “Batman,” and a spoof of it, so the movie sometimes celebrates the show’s inherent absurdities. The next moment it’s not just mocking the series’ idiocy, but also most of the Batman franchise. After “The Killing Joke” we definitely need a lighter Batman with some entertainment value, but “Return of the Caped Crusaders” is so confused about its intent I was never sure whether I was supposed to laugh with it or at it.