Category Archives: Action/Adventure

Action/Adventure, Imaginary US Cinema, Science Fiction

#64 – Beyond the Stars

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(1954, US, 123 min) Dir Hal Douglas. Cast Jim Thorn, Alice Patrick, Ed Dietrich.

The best that can be said about Beyond the Stars is that it’s right. If you wanted to go into space yourself then you could watch it and take notes and construct the same rockets and use the same methods that are used in the movie and it would work. The problem with that is that the film will be super exciting to rocket scientists but to your average Joe and Sally on a Saturday afternoon it may as well be filmed in Snooze-A-Rama. And that’s just the plot – you can have the dullest script sold to you by the magnetism of a bona fide star but Thorn, Patrick and Dietrich seem to have been cast on the size of their jaws rather than on their ability to react before a camera better than a slab of aged steak. Add that all together and you’ve got a film that plays at two hours plus but feels like a year. The title’s a con too by the way – they get to Mars by the halfway point and waste precious celluloid standing around in the dirt for the rest of the film. Avoid like a holiday in a vacuum.

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Action/Adventure, Horror, Imaginary Italian Cinema, Science Fiction

#63 – Coffin Orbit

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(1982, It, 115 min) Dir Paolo Andreotti. Cast Kirk Douglas, Carl Weathers, Candy Brown.

It’s 1982. Star Wars busted all the blocks five years ago and then Alien did the same two years after that. The studios are tarting up the schlock in trade of the likes of White Star Films so White Star Films, in turn, have to start pumping in the cash to compete. Trouble is they’ve only got so much to go around. Easy – bet it all on one, a sure-fire winner, and with the profits you make two and with the profits from that… Next stop, success! It’s a sure-fire recipe for sure but a meal’s only as good as it’s ingredients, right? So what have we got here? Andreotti knows how to direct a film, sure, but the man’s getting old and he’s coming off Vendetta di Zombie, a film that doesn’t display the kind of common touch a blockbuster needs. Who’s starring too? Kirk Douglas? Didn’t he learn anything from Saturn 3? What about plot? An previously unnoticed object is detected in orbit around our sun and NASA send Captain Dale (Douglas) and his crew to investigate. Turns out this thing is a colossal coffin for some humongous space creature and something else is in there too. Something deadly. Okay, so Coffin Orbit is no Star Wars. Yes, it’s plot is basically Alien and no, it didn’t get the blockbuster market either, but every once in a while someone spends a ton of money on something mad like this and that should be cherished, even if it sunk White Star Films in the process. Just watch it for all the money up there on-screen behind the awful acting and you’ll be fine.

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Action/Adventure, Imaginary Hong Kong Cinema, Science Fiction

#58 – Cyborg Hamlet

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(1983, HK, 105 min) Dir Jackie Woo. Cast Jackie Woo, Rosamund Kwan, Phillip Ko.

No real need for a synopsis here as it’s basically, as above, Hamlet with a cyborg. Okay, yeah, so what’s the deal, I hear you say: why’s the guy a cyborg? Fair enough, maybe it’s a bit different. Okay, so John Hamlet runs the biggest electronics company in Hong Kong and his proudest achievement is his cyborg son. Young Hamlet (director Woo) was on death’s doorstep when his father, apparently without repercussion, grafted a load of metal to him in order to save his life. Of course his father dies in mysterious circumstances, his electronics empire being taken over by the shifty Tony Claudius (Ko) who is also having his way with Hamlet’s mum, in case murdering his dad weren’t enough. Cyborg Hamlet is thus all sad in a rainy alley one night when the genuinely terrifying ghost of his father appears and demands bloody vengeance. Who is Cyborg Hamlet to decline? It all goes a bit off-piste from there – slaughtered henchmen didn’t play the biggest part in Shakespeare’s original text from what I can recall. Between crushing skulls in his metal hands there’s still time for some romance with Rosamund Kwan’s Ophelia before she goes mad (which is the bad guy’s fault too of course) and then it all comes to a bloody head at the wedding of Claudius and Hamlet’s mum which involves a massive martial arts rumble across three floors, a daring rooftop chase and someone getting a big metal pole like a javelin through the face. Great fun but no good for revision, kids!

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Action/Adventure, Black and White, Drama, Imaginary British Cinema, Silent

#56 – Captain Clock & Co.

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(1938, GB, 42 min, b/w) Dir Albert Clock. Cast Albert Clock, Samuel Teats, the Workers of Yew Street Pot Factory.

By 1938 the film world had been taken over by sound and even holdouts like Japan had been converted. The islands of resistance were few. One such island was that of Northern Irish auteur Albert Clock who quietly produced sixty films from his base in the city of Belfast from 1910 to 1942, all of them silent. “Sound perverts the purity of the medium,” he once said and while the ideal is shared by many, it seems unusual for Clock to be invoking the notion of purity when his films are of the quality he achieved. Albert Clock was the last in the line of the once great Clock family who sold his inheritance so that he could realise his dream of becoming to Belfast what the studios were for Hollywood. The only difference was that while the studios made films made by lots of different people, Clock’s studio had only the one artist – Albert Clock himself. On the one hand Clock had a firm grip on the medium technically, deploying all the tricks that would have Griffith revered but lacking the populist touch for sure, being that all of his films depicted usually made up tales from Clock family history. In Captain Clock & Co his grandfather (played by Clock) is portrayed fighting the Zulu (local pot makers in blackface) at the Battle of Blueford (which is made up). Despite the variable quality of the acting and the fact that the battles take place mostly on the beaches of Murlough Bay (for the sand, presumably) it’s stirring stuff with the kind of grit and realism that would be commendable were it in the service of actual history.

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Action/Adventure, Comedy, Imaginary US Cinema

#32 – S.P.O.T.S.

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(2013, US, 117 min) Dir Roger Bertle. Cast Elle Fanning, Will Poulter, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Ed Harris, Sam Elliott.

“S.P.O.T.S. stands for Special Protection Organisation, Teenage Service,” says Sam Elliott’s General Macey, pacing before his new adolescent recruits, “And yes, we did do that on purpose. So what is it for, this organisation? Well let me tell you – if we were to send in a bus full of students into North Korea or Iran on a cross-cultural exchange then nobody would bat an eyelid, not really. If those students were to be highly trained assassins? Well then, that’d be an advantage, wouldn’t it? The perfect cover for the perfect killers.” Think Kick-Ass meets Mission: Impossible. Will Poulter’s troubled Danny is spirited away to the S.P.O.T.S. training camp following the death of his parents and finds himself being trained as the ‘Cleaner’ for his assassin’s cell that includes Fanning’s trained killer Mindy and Brodie-Sangster’s tech head Patch. Their mission, following the obligatory training montage, is to use a school trip to the fictional Eastern European country of Ezkhazia to kill its West-unfriendly premier who is played by Ed Harris and, despite all appearances and biographical similarities, is definitely not Vladimir Putin. No sir. Ex-ad man Bertle’s flashy, bubbly direction and the film’s appealing leads helps to ease the moral issues of the ensuing underage bloodbath even though the whole thing’s totally reprehensible.

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Action/Adventure, Imaginary British Cinema

#23 – Fire in the Dunes

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(1979, GB, 102 mins) Dir Peter Hunt. Cast Roger Moore, Edward Fox, Barbara Carrera, Donald Pleasance.

In an unnamed oil-rich Middle Eastern country, aging guns for hire Moore and Fox are hired for a covert sabotage mission by the sultan’s envoy (Carrera) for reasons vague enough to give me pause, were I a mercenary, but doesn’t seem to faze these two. Of course it’s all a con and before long the hunters become the hunted. Though it’s a little sluggish in the opening stretch, director Hunt still betrays some of the panache of his sole Bond entry and before long gun battles, quips and explosions are ten a penny. Both leads seem to be enjoying themselves and Pleasance makes for an entertaining, if inexplicably German, adversary. The happy ending – where our heroes toast a successful mission that, as a side-effect, causes a massive oil spill in the clear blue waters of the gulf – seems a trifle odd to these eyes and not necessarily the cause for celebration but then perhaps this is why I’ve never succeeded as a cold-hearted mercenary. Enjoyable stuff for a Sunday afternoon but it’d probably be best to have disengaged the brain some first.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms