Need for Speed (2014)

Need for Speed (2014) – Review

Mike Brooks | July 30, 2014 | Film, Reviews | No Comments

The car chase has been a staple of Hollywood movies almost since the inception of film but they really took off when 1968’s Bullitt hit theatres and since then directors have tried to make their chases even more thrilling. Now back then this meant hiring incredibly gifted stunt drivers and coordinators to pull of some really dangerous stuff but now with the aid of CGI and better compositing you can have your hero do any kind of stunt in a car without endangering anyone. I am of course fine with drivers not risking their lives just to make a movie but something has certainly been lost from the heyday of car movies. Sure today’s films still employee talented stunt teams but the results just don’t give you that same visceral thrill you got when watching something like The French Connection or The Road Warrior.

 

Apparently this is today’s car culture.

Enter director Scott Waugh who has made the transition from stunt man to director following in the steps of such legendary stuntmen as Hal Needham who gave us Smokey and the Bandit and Cannonball Run, but sadly though this Need for Speed relies more on real drivers, and not as much CGI enhancements as some films, it still isn’t even as good as Cannonball Run 2.

 

Lack of Burt Reynolds is your first problem.

This movie is of coursed based on a video game which has most movie audiences assuming it’s going to be crap right out of the gate, but being it is basically just a “car chase” movie all one has to do is slap on a simple plot, maybe a love interest and throw in a good villain to at least make an entertaining film. Scott Waugh fails at this in every way imaginable.

 

“I really miss Breaking Bad.”

Tobey Marshall (Aaron Paul) is a local gearhead god with a small group friends that work in his late father’s garage but when the bank threatens to foreclose he must make a deal with Dino Brewster (Dominic Cooper) an old nemesis from his past who escaped the small town to become a professional race car driver, and he also stole Tobey’s girl. We are told that be almost everyone that Tobey is the better driver but we never get an explanation as to why Dino went on to fame and fortune while Tobey stayed home to remain poor.

 

“I’m an evil race car driver because…damn, I got nothin.”

Tobey takes a job from Dino that consists of him and his team rebuilding a rare Ford Shelby Mustang which could sell as high as 3 million, but whatever they get Tobey will receive 25%. This is great until upon selling the car Dino and Tobey engage in a street race to finally settle who the better driver is with each of their shares from the sale as stakes. This clearly establishes to us that our hero is a moron. And because this movie need more drama than bank foreclosures and boyhood feuds one of Tobey’s younger groupies joins in on the race and is killed when Dino bumps his back wheel, sending his car flying off a bridge. Dino flees the scene but Tobey stays and ends up going to jail. Also no one of course believes him when he claims that Dino was there and responsible for the poor kids death. To add even more drama the dead kid is the little brother of the girlfriend that Dino stole from Tobey. If you think you need this much set-up for your silly car chase movie you’ve seriously misjudged your audience.

 

Hold L2 and R2 while hitting X.

Two years later and Tobey is released from on parole and decides to enter this super-exclusive and very illegal car race, but of course he needs a car so he borrows the incredibly expensive and rare Mustang because millionaires are known for lending out their expensive toys to ex-cons that were incarcerated for vehicular manslaughter. There is a catch though he must take along Julia Maddon (Imogen Poots) who is the millionaire’s aide or something. She is of course the films love interest but her an Aaron Paul have about zero chemistry.

 

“I’m British and that is my sole defining characteristic.”

The only way to find out where this super-secret race will be held is to make their way across country from New York to San Francisco in two days. Another wrinkle is that to the race is invitation only so Tobey must draw attention to himself by starting a continent spanning police chase so that maybe the race founder and racing legend Monarch (Michael Keaton) will be impressed. This kind of movie is of course going to require some suspension of disbelief but to expect the viewer to buy that a driver, even an awesome one, can evade the police for two straight days is bloody insulting. Watch any YouTube video of a police chase and you’ll notice that once air support is engaged by the authorities the fleeing driver is as good as caught, now expand that to a chase across several states and the strains of credulity snap.

 

At one point they are airlifted to escape Dino’s bounty hunters.

That level of stupidity aside there was an element of this movie that I found even more egregious, after making all the way across country in this amazing car it gets totalled by one Dino’s goons. So the car that our leads have tooling around in for the bulk of this movie is not going to be in the big race, which is some poor ass screenwriting, my friends. Tobey ends up driving the car that Dino used to kill his girlfriend’s brother. Yes, this movies villain stored the one piece of evidence against him in a garage halfway across the country, and kept photographic proof of the car’s existence and his guilt on his computer under a file named “personal” so that his girlfriend could discover it and hand it over to Tobey to drive in this stupid race, opposed to say giving it to the police so they could arrest her brother’s murderer. This is one vastly moronic movie.

Question: The race is between seven drivers and the winner gets all the pink slips of the opposing cars, but at the end of the race all six other cars are mostly totaled and the winner gets carted off to jail. What kind of an idiot would ever enter that race?

 

“We’ll settle this behind the wheel.”

That is actual dialogue from this movie that someone got paid to write and kind of sums up the problem with this film.  A thin premise over burdened by needless complications compounded by some of the worst acting this side of an Ed Wood film.

Sharknado (2013)

Tonight the SyFy Channel is airing the much anticipated sequel to Sharknado so as a public service I’m providing a quick recap in case anyone has missed this story that truly speaks to the hearts of men and woman and answers that age old question, “What would a tornado full of sharks look like?” Of course the bigger question is, “What the hell was John Heard doing in this film?”

 

“I’m in it for the bar snacks.”

• Some dudes are dealing in illegal shark fin harvesting. Both are eaten and thus ends that plot thread.
• Main hero of this shark movie is named Fin.
• One of our heroes has previous shark attack back story.
• Hero is divorced from April (Tara Reid) who has custody of his two children.
• Hero has hot waitress who is in love with him.
• Storm hits the coast and tosses shark through heroes bar window.
• Sharknado in homage to the film 1941 rolls a Ferris wheel down the boardwalk.
• Hero must race through the storm to save his ex and kids dragging along waitress and others for you know “reasons.”
• John Heard dies while fighting off a shark. His weapon of choice was a bar stool.
• April is living with an asshat who claims they are in no danger.
• Asshat is quickly eaten by a shark that attacked from a surging swimming pool.
• We meet the daughter who hates dad because he broke mom’s heart
• April’s house explode as a title wave of water bursts out of it.
• Hero finds out his son is in town and also in danger so they all hop in a truck to rescue him.
• Son is found hiding in a closet with a group of soon to die extras.
• Daughter warns waitress that her dad will break her heart.
• Waitress and son start looking at each other romantically as the plan to bomb the Sharknado from a helicopter.
• Waitress falls out of helicopter and is swallowed by a flying Great White Shark.
• Great White later swallows hero who is wielding an Excalibur level chainsaw.
• Hero cuts himself out of the belly of the beast with said chainsaw.
• Hero then reaches back inside the shark and pulls out the still living waitress.

 

“Hail to the King, Baby.”

Then the end credits roll and were left wondering if the hero is going to get back together with his family or will he cut in on his sons action and leave with the waitress he just saved? 

 

“It’s raining sharks, Hallelujah!”

This movie pits humans against aquatic foes, but Sharknado reaches levels of incompetency in film making that staggers the imagination. We expect bad CGI and effects in our SyFy original movies but the amount of continuity errors between practically every shot is simply astounding. One shot will show us black clouds and blowing rain and then the very next shot it’s calm and sunny, but what’s more unbelievable than the CGI sharks and silly storm is the family drama they tossed in because that is apparently a requirement in a disaster film.

 The Syfy Channel has become the madlibs of the film industry, they just reach into a bag, grab a couple of words, and then slap them together to find their title, it's about then that they decide to write the script. Sharknado is only entertaining on the "so bad it's good scale" and even then a few beers will go a long way to improve the viewing experience.

Lucy (2014)

A much visited element of science fiction is the exploration of where man has been and where he is going, whether it be the physical aspect such as space travel or time travel or in the exploration of human biology to show where man’s evolution could take us. Films like X-Men: Days of Future Past dabble in the “next step” in human evolution where we poor Homo Sapiens may find ourselves left behind by Homo Superior, and then there are films like Limitless and Luc Besson’s Lucy which has science giving evolution a helping hand.

 This film does contain one of the sillier science fiction tropes that man only uses 10% of his brain and that if he could tap more of it he would gain extra abilities. We all know this to be untrue. It makes no evolutionary sense for humans to develop larger brains and then only use a small portion of it, but in Lucy we have Professor Norman (Morgan Freeman) giving a lecture hypothesizing such ideas and because we are hearing it in Mister Morgan Freeman’s dulcet tones he almost makes it seem believable. Filmically it’s a conceit that allows Luc Besson to throw up title cards tracking Lucy’s progress towards 100% and because structurally speaking it works I can let the whole 10% thing slide. But please Hollywood let this be the last movie to toss out that old chestnut.

 

How can you doubt this guy?

The story begins with Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) an American living in Taipei, Taiwan and who, because of poor choices in boyfriend material, finds herself being forced to be a drug mule by a very evil cartel. Lucy and three other hapless souls have had drug packets surgically inserted into their abdomens with the intent that they were to be sent on their not so merry ways to their home cities where more cartel thugs would be waiting for them to then relieve them of their precious cargo. Unfortunately, or not depending on your point of view, one of the cartel thugs gets a bit rough with Lucy and after a kick to the belly her drug packet ruptures and her body is flooded with the synthetic cocktail.

 

“I’ll be your attempted rapist tonight.”

What follows is a jet fueled adrenaline ride as Lucy basically becomes an X-Men and starts kicking butt and taking names, often using her mental powers to rip said names right out of her enemy’s heads. Lucy has become completely in tune with her body on the cellular level so realizes that her life expectancy has decreased dramatically with this power upgrade and the only way to stop herself from fading away is to retrieve the other three packets from her fellow drug mules. The chase is on.

 

Gangsta Style

Along the way she contacts Professor Norman after reading up on his entire life’s work and it is the conversations with him and his fellow scientist that the film delves into some pretty heady theoretical ideas. In fact the last act combines gun battles and the nature of the cosmos which isn’t something you expect in your summer action flick. It’s while dancing around in this rarefied air that the story kind of loses its focus but really this movie is more about ideas than plot.

 

“I can see the Matrix.”

The film pretty much rests solely on the shoulders of Scarlett Johansson’s performance and she is certainly up to the task, as the drug increases Lucy’s potential we see her divorce herself bit by bit from humanity and Johansson nails this aspect perfectly.

So as an awesome action film it dishes out some great action sequences with a cool super-powered flair, and as a science fiction think piece it does a pretty decent job working outside the

Afflicted (2014)

Since 1999’s The Blair Witch Project found footage films have increased in quantity if not always quality, and the fact that they can be made on the cheap, relatively speaking of course, this format will probably never die. The Paranormal Activity series has turned into a multi-million dollar franchise and even though each film has increased in budget but not with the same amount of return (The first one cost $15,000 US and made $193 million worldwide while the latest one Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones cost $5 million but only took in $91 million worldwide) so even with the law of diminishing returns they are still making a serious profit for a low investment. What really sets this type of movie making apart from your traditional studio films is that it’s that they are mostly being done by a small group of individuals who love what they’re doing, have no studio interference to worry about, and basically have no one to please but themselves.

This is certainly the case here with Afflicted a film written, directed and starring two friends Derek Lee and Clif Prowse who with $300,000 dollars managed to create a horror film with some dazzling action and gruesome effects that even puts some major Hollywood films to shame.
Two friends Derek (Derek Lee) and Clif (Clif Prowse) have longed to see the world but have put it off for various reasons, but now that Derek has been diagnosed with AVM, which is basically a tangled bunch of arteries in his brain that could rupture at any time, they decide to make the year long journey around the world and video blog the entire thing.

Around the world in 365 days isn’t all that impressive guys.

 It’s while stopping over in Paris that their trip kind of goes off the rails. At club where a couple of their friends are playing a gig Derek meets Audrey (Baya Rehaz) a beautiful woman that he proceeds to chat up and then make-out with before eventually taking her back to his hotel room. Because his friends are dicks they plan to burst in on the two with operation “Cock-Block” but they are surprised to find Derek unconscious and bleeding and no sign of Audrey. Derek has no memory of what happened and refuses to go to the hospital.  He just patches up the nasty cut on his arm, chalking the whole thing up to bad luck.

 “Dear Penthouse, I never thought this could happen to me.”

 Derek and Clif proceed with their itinerary and arrive in sunny Italy but Derek seems the worse for wear and spends most his time in bed sleeping, this worries Clif greatly but Derek continues to insist on avoiding hospitals because he is afraid if he ever goes in one he will never be let out. Things start to get really strange as not only can Derek no longer hold down food but exposure to the sun badlyburns him. 

 

I’m guessing he needs SPF 5000

If by this point you have guess what Derek is afflicted with give yourself a cookie, but it’s not the mystery of the affliction that this film is about its how two long-time friends deal with it. At first it seems cool that Derek can punch through walls or karate chop a boulder in half, and leaping up the side of building has them wondering if superheroing is in his near future, but when his health starts to rapidly deteriorate Clif manages to convince his friend it’s time to go to the hospital. Sadly a confrontation with a couple of angry Italian motorists results in two crippled possibly dead Italians and footage of Derek licking their blood of his hand. They never make it to the hospital.

 “That’s totally coming out of our deposit.”

What follows is Clif doing his best to help his friend as he deteriorates to an almost feral state, documenting the whole thing because…well because this is a found footage movie and finding a reason for the main characters to keep filming as events spiral out of control has always been the hardest thing to justify. The two leads pay lip service to “reasons” but it has been done better in films like Chronicle and The Troll Hunter, here it’s not terrible just not all that convincing.

I’m not sure Blue Cross can even cover this.

 What works is the chemistry between the real life friends and the slowly increasing horror of their situation. The stunt work of Derek leaping across the piazza or running 60km an hour is fantastic as is the make-up for his ghastly transformation from nice guy to feral monster.  This is a found footage film that I can highly recommend, and hey it’s a Canadian film so let’s give them a shout out.

 

“Come out to the coast, we’ll get together, have a few laughs.”

Into the Storm (2014)

This does seem to be another year of disaster movie mania, earlier in the year we got Pompeii which was basically Gladiator meets Titanic on the slopes of Dante’s Peak, then we had Darren Aronofsky’s Noah that of course is about the world’s first disaster story and was kind of dreadful, but now we have Into the Storm which tops them all in the epic nature carnage category. This is the film Jan de Bont’s Twister wanted to be.

"Did you see Cary Elwes in there?"

Director Steven Quale decided to go the “found footage” route with this disaster flick and I must say it really makes the scenes much more visceral. What makes this stand out from most movies of that type is that we follow multiple sources; a group of storm chasers, redneck morons, high school kids, and then various security and news footage to flesh it out, but then he occasional abandons the found footage conceit for moments that would make no sense for a camera to be recording what we are seeing. I am totally okay with that.

“Thunderbolt and lightning, Very, very frightening me!” 

The story, and I use the term “story” in its broadest sense of the world here, mainly focuses on two groups of people as a massive storm front rages across the poor town of Silverton and that is spawning tornadoes faster than you can say “There’s no place like home.”

"Must drive faster!"

 The Storm Chasers: Pete (Matt Walsh) is a documentary filmmaker who specializes in tornado footage but it’s been a year since he got any good material and he’s about to lose his funding. He is this film’s Captain Ahab and who believes that with his super truck “The Titus” he can film from the inside of a tornadoes eye. Allison (Sarah Wayne Callies) is the meteorologist member of the team and whose main character trait is that she misses her daughter. They are accompanied by a small team of cameramen and drivers whose main jobs are to either be yelled at by Pete, get killed, or both. That the black guy survives to the end of the film earns this movie major points.

The Titus: Number one truck of choice for all Tornado Chasers.

 The Morris Family: Gary Morris (Richard Armitage) is a widower and dad to two teen-age sons. He is also the local schools vice principle and wound up a bit too tight. Donnie Morris (Max Deacon) is the resentful son who has become estranged from his father since the passing of their mother. Trey Morris (Nathan Kress) is the young son who basically would like everyone to just chill out. Thrown into that mix is Kaitlyn (Alycia Debnam Carey) the high school girl that Donnie has a crush on.  Note: Disasters are amazing relationship builders.

“So, we’ll just stand here then?”

The film does occasionally follow a couple of moronic rednecks whose apparent sole goal in life is to get a million YouTube hits and make tons of money off of it. That they constantly stand in front of oncoming tornadoes is not surprising.

 At one point a tornado rolls over a burning gas station and becomes a fiery finger of God.

 Now when it comes to tornado action this film does not mess around, it spends just enough time with our main characters so that when the shit does hit the fan we actually care about them. It doesn’t have rival storm chasers in black vans working against our heroes as in some films *cough* Twister, because when you’re talking Mother Nature’s fury laying waste to all in her path you really don’t need a human villain to spice things up.

The awesome power of an F5

 As for the films special effects I can’t praise them enough. I found myself holding my breath during many of the sequences where the main characters were either driving towards or fleeing the tornadoes and their destructive power. Wherever our heroes went they found themselves dodging tossed vehicles or various storm thrown debris but when the F5 passed through an airport and lifted jumbo jets as if they were Tinker Toys that was incredible to behold.

Damn!

Now sure some of the dialogue was a bit corny at times and a couple of the characters were a tad bit clichéd, but overall I found myself emotionally moved way beyond what I’d expect from a popcorn disaster flick, and there is a scene where Donnie and Kaitlynn are pretty sure their time is up that is just damn powerful. Kudos to those young actors.

Simply put Into the Storm was an E ticket thrill ride that should make any fan of the genre incredibly happy. Steven Quale has taken the found footage format and raised it to a whole new level.

The Hole (2009)

Director Joe Dante has been responsible for some of my favorite horror films such Piranha (1978) and The Howling while films like Gremlins and The Hole could be classified as being part of that rare subgenre of Horror/Family films. These are films that have very scary elements, intense thematic moments, but are able to dance close to the line of what parents are comfortable with their kids seeing. Now that line has moved greatly since I was a kid as television and home video has exposed children to scarier and scarier stuff over the years, but Joe Dante is still able to capture the thrills and chills that will keep even modern audiences of all ages on the edge of their seats.

The film begins with the Thompson family; Susan (Teri Polo) her two sons Dane (Chris Massoglia) and Lucas (Nathan Gamle) arriving at their new home in the boring town of Bensonville. They have moved around a lot, much two teen-age and hormone fueled Dane’s chagrin, resulting in him preferring to brood rather than play with this little brother. There are two things that shake him out of his funk, one is the cute girl next door Julie (Haley Bennett) and the other is that they have discovered what appears to be a bottomless pit in their basement.

 The hole was sealed by a trapdoor and secured by six padlocks but because these are kids in a horror film they quickly find the keys and open it. Julie has one suggestion as to what the hole could be.

“I know what you’ve got. You’ve got a gateway to hell under your house. And that is really cool.”

That Dane doesn’t throw her out of the house after making such an insane comment like that attests to just how cute she is. Dane is afraid that if his mom saw this “freaky bottomless pit” in their new home she’d have them packing faster than you could say “The Divine Comedy” so he decides to keep this from her and do the investigating themselves. I have a soft spot for films that exist primarily in the world of kids, showing them to be smart, brave and resourceful while the adults only exist on the periphery, much like the grown-ups in Charlie Brown. The Goonies, The Monster Squad and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Joe Dante’s own Explorers would be prime examples of this type.

Our Scooby Gang

Lucas is the first to encounter the darkness that comes from The Hole and it is in the form of a creep-ass clown puppet. You see Lucas has a clown phobia, and his older brother does tease him about it, so when he finds this freaky clown doll in his bed he assumes it’s just Dane screwing with him. That is until the doll appears in the basement after he just moved into Dane’s bed, and then it begins to terrorize him.

Nightmare fuel.

 Meanwhile Dane and Julie are out seeing the sights of Bensonville and that’s when Julie encounters a spine-chilling little ghost girl in the washroom of the local diner.

 It’s pretty clear that The Hole knows what scares you and targets you accordingly. When the trio encounter ghost girl later in the house, and watch in horror as it crawls headfirst into the pit, they realize that they may be in trouble.

Do you think paintball guns would be an effective weapon against ghosts?

 The kids go into full Nancy Drew mode and track down Creepy Carl (Bruce Dern) who was the previous owner of the house, who now lives in an abandoned shoe factory and in a room surrounded by a countless amount of lights. He is not pleased, to say the least, that the locks have been removed from the trapdoor that kept The Hole closed. When the kids ask if he built The Hole and what’s it about, his answer is unnerving.

“Nobody built the hole! The hole has been there since the world’s first scream.”

 From that point on the kids kind of want to forget about this mysterious power that seeks to destroy them and just enjoy the summer, but of course The Hole won’t let them.  As the film plays out we will uncover answers to three key questions; What connection does Julie have with that ghost girl?  Will Lucas overcome his fear of clowns?  And what is it that Dane is afraid of?

My guess is it’s fear of SATs.

 Joe Dante’s The Hole has everything you want in a horror movie, good scares centering on well written characters. The dialogue between the two brothers is fun and believable as is poor Dane’s difficulty in dealing with “girls.” The exact nature of The Hole is never fully explained, and is not needed, as forces of evil that strike at you through your fears isn’t anything new to the genre, but Dante hangs this idea on an exciting thrill ride of chills and laughs that is fun for the whole family. Now today the term “Family Film” mostly means “For Children” but not this one, this movie is truly entertaining no matter what your age, and I must say it’s nice to see a film about young protagonists and not getting a single fart or piss joke.  Thank you, Joe Dante.

And to quote young Lucas…

"I really hate clowns."

Deadly Eyes (1982)

The eighties were a great time to be a lover of horror movies. When I was a kid going down to the local video store was a weekly treat that most often than not resulted in at least one horror film as I wasn’t old enough to see them in the theatre. The key decision making elements were as follows:

1) How awesome looking was the box art?
2) Is there a chance of nudity?
3) Does it look to contain a good amount of gore?
4) Seriously, is there nudity?

Criteria met.

Director Robert Clouse, mostly known for his Golden Harvest produced Bruce Lee Films, seems an odd choice to helm a giant rat movie, but somehow it works and in a most cheesily charming way. Based on the novel The Rats by James Herbert this film is most notable for the use of dachshunds in little rat suits and in most cases it is quite effective, and certainly better than the poor coon dogs used in 1959s The Killer Shrews. Excellent rat puppets were used to augment the kills for close ups.

“Did someone say cheese?”

City health inspector Kelly Leonard (Sara Botsford) orders a shipment of infected grain destroyed and in so doing sends a large population of rats fleeing into the city.

“No, you can’t keep your roid raging rats here.”

The rats sneak into the suburbs and start hunting down food and man is on the top of their menu. A house full of teen-agers, that in a horror film you know are doomed to die at some point, but it’s not their time yet so the rats go for some more tender meat and take out a toddler left alone in her highchair.  The little tyke’s sister discovers the turned over highchair, a smeared blood trail leading into the basement and the poor kids bloody clothes, and before she can escape a dog sized rat jumps her.

That is some dark shit.

They also take out an old man walking through the park just to show they don’t have any age discrimination issues.

Feeding Frenzy

 The film’s other main lead is high school teacher Paul HFeeding Frenzyarris (Sam Groom) who is divorced and has to make due with weekends with his young son. He also has to deal with amorous student Trudy White (Lisa Langlois) who has a crush on the good teacher which ends up complicating his budding relationship with Kelly the health inspector. Trudy also has a high school sweet heart that she dumps so she can devout her time to chasing older more sophisticated men. All the romantic entanglements in this film go nowhere and serve no real purpose other than to throw our characters together for the rat smorgasbord.

 “I’m not bad I‘m just written that way.”

When one of Paul’s students is bitten and more and more reports of attacks pour into the Department of Health, Kelly sends her field officer George Foskins (Scatman Crothers) into the sewers to check things out. He doesn’t want to go because he’s seen some huge rats down there lately. She pooh poohs his fears and sends him off to get eaten.

“We loved you in The Shining!”

Paul has a professor friend and when he, Kelly and the good professor get together they discuss the possibility of a super-rat caused by the steroids in the grain. The professor at first scoffs at the idea saying that giant rats have been a common myth for ages but there is no scientific evidence to support such claims. He is shortly proven wrong and eaten.

“I fill my pipe with irony.”

Throughout the film Kelly has been getting flak from the Mayor’s Office for burning the grain, pumping rat poison into the sewers after her man was killed, and claiming they may have a nasty rat problem. She is told to meet with the Mayor at the gala opening of a new subway line. There is such a thing? She takes Paul’s son along because he likes trains. When Paul finally figures out that the killer rat problem is heading right into the city he races into action to save his boy but more importantly his love life.

The rat attacks go into high gear as they invade a bowling alley.

And wreak havoc at local theatre showing a Bruce Lee retrospective. In attendance are Trudy and her high school friends who we are all surprised lasted this long.

 They don’t last any longer.

The rats manage to chew through the transit power lines leaving the Mayor and his party trapped on a subway car. Not knowing how long the power we’ll be out the subway car driver urges his passengers into the tunnel where of course the rats are waiting and the feast kicks into high gear.

Mayor McCheese meets his untimely end.

Paul punches out a transit cop who tries to prevent him from crashing the gala and races to the rescue. He manages to get Kelly and his son out of the main tunnel and away from the ravenous rats but of course ends up leading his group right into the rats nest. Nice one Paul. But with some quick thinking he uses a small butane tank as a flamethrower and manages to back them away from the rats, he then rolls a drum of gasoline towards the nest and explodes it.

“Ratatouille flambé anyone?”

 The power is restored and for some reason they return to the subway car despite the fact there is no reason to believe that there aren’t still more rats running around the tunnels. With the help of Paul’s train knowledgeable son they get the subway car to the main station and the waiting gala. The party people are a bit put out when it pulls into the station and reveals that one of the cars is full of giant rats munching on some hapless dude. One of the bloody rats lunges at the window of the car. Freeze Frame.

The end?

 Nature run amok stories are a staple of horror films and Deadly Eyes is easily one of the more fun entries from that category. It’s a bit campy and the stock characters are barely two dimensional, but the film moves along at brisk pace and at an 87 minute running time it never outstays it’s welcome. Worth checking out just to see the adorable dachshunds in little rat costumes.

Whose a good puppy?