Pointless exposition, redundant dialogue, hammy acting, racial paranoia, cartoonish action scenes, continuity problems, absurd sub-plots that go absolutely nowhere, if you’ve ever seen blaxploitation films before, you’ll realize that Scott Sanders “Black Dynamite” is a pretty brilliant satire of the grindhouse sub-genre that managed to influence dozens of filmmakers and actors across the board. While the Wayans brothers paid tribute to the genre in “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka,” director Scott Sanders manages to rise above their level providing a both a spoof, satire, and loving tribute to the sub-genre that takes every single device from the sub-genre that we love and hate and throws it in to a story that’s about as ridiculous as most of the blaxploitation films from the seventies. As most comedy should be, Sanders and Jai White don’t play this spoof with a wacky atmosphere.
Tag Archives: Gangster
Dark Blue: The Complete First Season (DVD)
I wish I could have loved “Dark Blue,” I really do, but as I’ve learned over the many many years of television addiction, finding an entertaining show about police officers working against the conventions of the law is often about as fun as watching paint dry. “Dark Blue” truly tries for grit and edge but is often much too polished to buy such a pitch. TNT has pretty much banked on creating television series that are just branches off of more successful franchises and “Dark Blue” is a mix of “The Shield” with some “CSI” for good measure. While it does make its money on being a procedural, it also manages to have an actual arc to it.
The Punisher Meets Archie
Around the time “Archie Meets the Punisher” was released in 1994, I was about eleven years old. I bought Wizard magazine and would buy just about every comic that came out at the time. I bought “Super Pro” and “Dark hawk” and even at the impressionable age of eleven I looked at the cover of “The Punisher Meets Archie” and thought to myself “Are you effing kidding me?” In all of the comic characters in all of the world to cross over they decided to cross over the most violent psychopathic anti-hero in the comics universe with the most inoffensive yet addictive cult comic book of all time to meet for a storyline that’s too heavy for an Archie comic book and too light hearted for a Punisher comic book.
Death Wish (1974)
Before “The Punisher” ever graced the big screen director Michael winner’s 1974 revenge flick brought to screen a psychotic man armed with a hand gun avenging his family who suffered a wicked fate by the hands of senseless crime. In a time where violence and rape was rampant in New York City, “Death Wish” is still a surprising little thriller that not only puts on display the grim and grimy depths of the Big Apple in the seventies, but the descent in to sheer lunacy one mild mannered man takes when his wife and daughter are attacked and raped in their apartment. The thugs get away but protagonist Paul Kersey’s wife dies and he’s forced to bear witness to his daughter lose her sanity due to the severity of the attack she and her mother endured.
Mortal Kombat: Rebirth (2010)
At the end of this, I don’t know if I’ll be writing a review for a fan film, a review for a promotional reel for a director shopping around to sell this new vision or just a glorified game promo for an up and coming new game of the “Mortal Kombat” universe, but as someone who played this game religiously, I had to offer up my thoughts. I can only imagine someone sat down in front of a monitor, was watching “The Dark Knight” and said: “We have to take this approach.” And what we inevitably have is a grim and grotesque take on the Mortal Kombat universe.
Frankenstein Unlimited (2009)
The folks at Sinema Saliba manage to concoct an interesting indie experimental anthology film around the theme of Frankenstein and rebirth with a series of short films that dabble in narratives revolving around mortality and death all of whom vary in tones of artistic to the utterly absurd. Director Matthew Saliba pulls out all the stops for this anthology picture that deconstructs the tale of Frankenstein and sets the framework down in assorted set pieces and flavors that help this movie feel like a varied buffet of vignettes that will manage to perfectly entice the viewer’s imagination and rethink the concept of the mad doctor and the monster.
Kick-Ass (2010)
One of the saving graces of “Kick Ass” is the casting of Chloe Moretz, a young girl who manages to completely and utterly steal the show from every single cast member here including Clark Duke, and she’s managed to spawn an unlikely legion of admirers who came to the movie to see a little girl mutilate everyone in her path. While “Kick Ass” never quite manages to muster up the sympathetic story it did in the comics, Matthew Vaughn completely wins over the crowd with Hit Girl aka Mindy, the most interesting character in the bunch who is given the most interesting conflict in the film as this character whose own life manages to play out like a typical hero origin. Little girl loses her mom after her dad is framed for a crime, she’s trained by him to become a killer, the dad dies and she avenges him in cruel and unusual ways. I assumed the girl would hit the big time after seeing her steal scenes from Joseph Gordon Levitt in “(500) Days of Summer” but here Matthew Vaughn shows that he takes the character very seriously and never dodges her sheer brutality in the face of schmoes who happen to come across her blade.