My love for The Room has not been an easy road. It took months of fine tuning, refinement, some conformity and skipping doses of my meds to get down to the level of Tommy Wiseau and his unmitigated cult masterpiece. Whether you’ve seen the movie in its true form, whether you’ve seen it play on the April Fool’s Day airings on cable television here in America, whether you were there during the great tirade of Wiseau on online critics, “The Room” and its charms are almost impossible to ignore. It’s a movie so bad, so inept, so unbelievably painful, it’s almost impossible to comprehend anyone thought it would be great on-screen, “The Room” is a film I constantly quote to this day–ohai Mark!
Tag Archives: Crime
Blind Fury (1989)
One of my first introductions to the Zatoichi series was through the 1989 samurai action film “Blind Fury” which established the blind samurai to American audiences through actor Rutger Hauer. Since Hauer was king back in the eighties, this is one of the rare instances where he plays not just a hero, but a hero with an immense ability for good who is unbelievably charming. ‘Blind Fury” is a modernized and altered adaptation of the seventeenth “Zatoichi” film entitled “Zatoichi Challenged” which is in many ways fixed for the eighties set pieces, but possesses some of the same moments from the original film series. Including the moment where Zatoichi’s young ward tries to pass off a rock as a piece of candy to Zatoichi who surprises him by spitting it back in his face.
The Dead Pool (1988)
And it ends not with a bang, but with a thud. “The Dead Pool” is a truly anti-climactic end for a man who has spent all of his five films running around and blasting assholes with his hand cannon without remorse and finally finds that he’s really not chasing much of an enemy in the end. “The Dead Pool” has some considerable mystery to it but the villain that is supplied for Harry Callahan’s last romp is not only boring, but doesn’t have much to do for the entirety of the film.
Sudden Impact (1983)
You can almost sense the series winding down as the writers almost seem to be running out of villains for Dirty Harry Callahan to face down. “Sudden Impact” is probably the weakest of the Dirty Harry series not because it suffers from a lack of villains but because it has too much going on. There are so many sub-plots thrown our way that it’s almost too much to keep up with at times. Dirty Harry is considered a dinosaur among a new generation of officers who don’t believe in excessive force as a means of justice and Harry almost always faces consequences for his rash violent behavior. It’s almost comical in “Sudden Impact” where Harry does something and the next scene involves some police official chewing Harry out.
The Enforcer (1976)
Another day, another dead partner. By now Dirty Harry Callahan has learned that anyone and everyone who bothers to get remotely close to him will eventually turn up dead. And their deaths will be pretty painful. Harry is not a man concerned with self-pity and remorse as he spends most of the movie concerned with trying to stop an evil environmental terrorist organization rather than sulking about his latest partner who is brutally stabbed during a botched arrest of the vicious hippy terrorists. The villains in this piece aren’t as menacing as Scorpio of the vigilante cops in the first two films, and their presences are mainly forgettable for the most part. The real draw is watching Harry trying to find a lead in to the organization’s secret base. When they kidnap the mayor of the city and hold him for ransom, Harry finds he must step up his investigation.
Predator 2 (1990)
Bafflingly, the sequel to the classic action science fiction film opts out of following our man Dutch in his further adventures against this alien hunter menace and chooses instead to focus on a brand new series of characters. And rather than continue its trek in to the jungles of Central America, it zeroes in on the city. The inner city. The crime ridden inner city. The crime ridden gang infested inner city. The concrete jungle if you will. If you don’t get the symbolism, don’t worry, “Predator 2” clubs you over the head with the clunky message that this is a new kind of jungle. A concrete jungle. “Predator 2” is sadly a loud, ugly, and irritating film that doesn’t do much to set itself apart from other films of its ilk.
The Raid: Redemption (2012)
I said goddamn. If action movie buffs were concerned that the action genre was dying on its bed, then director Gareth Evans just stabbed it in the heart with adrenaline and revived it for a new audience. “The Raid Redemption” courtesy of Indonesia is one of the most frantic and ballistic action films I’ve ever seen, and director Gareth Evans delivers an action movie buffet of kicks, punches, and gashes that will leave audiences pumping their fists anxiously from beginning to end.

