Train to Busan (2016) – Review

Do you know what’s worse than snakes on a plane? Zombies on a train, that’s what. It’s in this film that South Korean director Yeon Sang-ho brings true to horror to commuting, even more so than that time a guy with terrible body odor sat next to you on the subway, but what Train to Busan does bring is a fresh take on the walking or should we say running dead.

It’s clear that we are still living during a zombie renaissance; just flip the channels a few times and you’ll most likely stumble across three or more television shows about zombies, and because unlike your average superhero flick you don’t need a massive special effects budget and thus more varied artists are allowed a crack at them. Then there is the fact that some of the best horror movies of the last decade or so have come from foreign shores; Australia had one of the most original zombie movies in the form of Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead as well as the creepy psychological horror film Goodnight Mommy, and South Korea delivered a bizarre twist on the vampire genre with Thirst, so it should be a surprise to no one that one of the best zombies out there wouldn’t be from Hollywood.

What is surprising is how well Train to Busan works when it’s basically just a straight survival story littered with overused tropes and caricatures, and if there is one character trope I’d like to see retired it would be the dad who “Works to much and thus neglects his family” as if working hard to put food on the table is some heinous crime. This movie not only has the main character being a workaholic dad but the company he works for is at least partially responsible for the zombie outbreak, and he’s also a bit of a selfish asshole with terrible people skills. Yet somehow writer/director Yeon Sang-ho manages to build and explore facets of society through this jerk, all while dealing with a flesh eating mob of zombies, which puts him on the path of the hero's journey.

 

And he’s a hedge fund manager just to make us hate him more.

The movie starts simple enough with a bitching truck driver being let through a road block set up because of some kind of chemical spill, and while “distracted driving” the guy hits a deer, but what he doesn’t notice, as he drives away like the callous bastard he is, was the deer getting back up all zombified. We then spend the next little while getting to know our cast of victims…I mean fellow passengers; first there is Seok-Woo (Gong Yoo), the workaholic dad who had missed his daughter Soo-an’s (Kim Su-an) school recital (he also bought her a Wii for her birthday completely forgetting he'd already bought one for her last year) which results in this train trip to visit his ex-wife/her mother to make up for him being a forgetful dick, then we have two elderly sisters In-gil (Ye Soo-jung) and Jon-gil (Park Myung-sin) who argue that one can be too nice at times, next we have a blue collar worker named Sang-hwa (Ma Dong-seok) and his pregnant wife Sung Gyeong (Yu-mi Jeong) who haven't decided on a name for their unborn child, there's a high school baseball team and a cheerleader to add some youth to the mix, and last but not least we have CEO Yon-suk (Eui-sung Kim), whose apparent job in this movie is to be a bigger dick than the hero is. This is your standard disaster movie opening, we've seen it in every Irwin Allen flick, but at least the director here manages to handled it economically. The movie then kicks into high gear when an injured, and clearly infected, young woman boards the train just as it leaves the station.

 

“I wouldn’t ask to see her ticket if I was you.”

The zombies of Train to Busan are not the shambling monsters of the Romero movies; they are more akin to Danny Boyle’s rage fueled creatures of 28 Days Later with a liberal dose of World War Z.  In fact the basic premise of this movie makes me think that Yeon Sang-ho may have seen that terrific zombie scene aboard the airliner in World War Z and then decided that particular sequence could actually make for a good two hour movie. Strangely enough, he was right.

We are riveted as our cast of characters must fight car by car to find safety in world that is clearly far from safe; outnumbered in a matter of minutes by the newly undead, who pop up within seconds of dying to leap and gnash at their prey, and unlike most zombie films there is nary a gun in sight. Instead our heroes must fight through the hordes of undead with either baseball bats or their bare hands.  Which doesn’t seem like the best idea when even one bite is death sentence.

 

Wrapping your forearms in tape doesn’t seem all that safe of a measure.

I do love when a filmmaker is able to add new rule to a genre; in Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead it was that zombies are slow and shambling monsters during the day but can run like a bat out of a hell at night, and in this movie our heroes discover that the undead have terrible vision, that whenever the train enters a tunnel they lose track of where their prey is in the dark. This leads to some fantastically tense scenes with the survivors trying to quietly make it passed the ravenous hordes, and it also taught me that apparently there are a lot of very long tunnels in South Korea.

 

And when the light comes back, don’t make a sound.

Train to Busan isn’t just a zombie film; much like Romero’s Dawn of the Dead it provides a smart commentary on society. Seok-Woo, the self-centred workaholic dad, who at one point in the movie slams the door in the face of the man and his pregnant wife, thus trapping the pair in with the approaching zombies, comes to the conclusion that if you leave the weak behind you will find yourself alone and vulnerable in more ways the one. In one particular scene the phrase “United we stand, divided we fall” is bloodily illustrated, and our cast of characters have to listen on in horror as people are torn apart. This all results in a zombie film that though full of tropes and clichés, if the selfish CEO was any more two dimensional he could hide from the zombies by turning sideways, it miraculously comes together like a breath of fresh air in what is a pretty much played out genre by now.

 

Note: The film does include some CGI zombie hordes ala World War Z.

Overall Train to Busan is immensely fun horror/action flick; we get acts of despicable cowardice as well as moments of true heroism and self-sacrifice, all within a claustrophobic setting that will keep you at the edge of your seat. If you are a fan of zombie film this is a must see, and even if zombies aren’t your bag there is still a lot to offer here as the action is spellbinding and the performances are stellar. Get your boarding pass today.

Disney’s The Legend of Tarzan (2001-2003) – Review

With the success of their 1999 animated feature Tarzan it’s no surprise that the House of Mouse would bring the Ape Man to television as part of their Disney's One Saturday Morning lineup, but what was a little surprising is how good  it was. Often times Disney direct to video sequels were of less than stellar quality but when it came to their animated televisions series they tended to do a better job; the 1998 Hercules series ran two seasons and was far more interesting than the theatrically released movie it was based on. In the case of The Legend of Tarzan the writers had two problems; first they couldn’t stray too far from how the characters were depicted in their hit movie, and secondly none of the voice actors returned for this small screen venture. The second point turned out to be no problem at all as they managed to get a roster of great voice talent to fill out their roster, but in keeping with the way Disney depicted these classic characters in their feature film it was less than ideal, that is if one was trying to faithfully adapt the stories of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Of course no one should ever expect a Disney produced project to stay true to the source material; this is the studio that made Hercules mortal by inept poisoning instead of it being because Zeus just couldn’t keep it in his pants, and so a Disney Tarzan was never going to be the pulp adventure hero that Burroughs penned. Like the 1999 movie this series will have a Jane Porter (Olivia d'Abo) who is decidedly British, and a Tarzan (Michael T. Weiss) who spends much of his time scrambling around on all fours and speaking in somewhat halting English. Like the 1976 Filmation series Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle this Ape Man will not be a killer, not even in self-defence, but will defeat most enemies with the strength of his mighty limbs, but luckily by the 1990s Standards and Practices had lessened some of the restrictions on what violence could be included in a show for kids, and so Tarzan isn’t forced to spend all his time dodging opponents as he did in the Filmation series, he's able to properly fight back.

 

Though a knife would certainly come in handy here.

What stands out most when watching Disney’s The Legend of Tarzan is the quality of the animation, once again we are treated to Tarzan beautifully surfing the jungle like and Extreme Sports God, and nobody does character designs better than the people at Disney. As I mentioned earlier the writers of this show were rather hamstrung by the feature movie and so we get a slightly less civilized jungle man than Burroughs depicted in his books; Jane and Tarzan’s relationship in the first few books was fraught with misunderstandings and abductions, opposed to the Disney movie where they just kind of fell in love and decided to get married. The animated series picks up shortly after the movie ended with Jane now blissfully married to Tarzan and living with him in a fabulous treehouse (a treehouse more in keeping with the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films), and sharing their life in the jungle is Jane’s absent minded father Professor Archimedes Q. Porter (Jeff Bennett), the cowardly elephant friend Tantor (Jim Cummings), and Terk (April Winchell) Tarzan’s female gorilla pal. For those of you thought that the Rosie O’Donnell Terk in the movie was annoying it’s increased tenfold for the show. They have a running gag where Tantor is constantly falling on her, but instead of it killing her, as it would most living creatures, it just provides bad comedy.

 

Tantor and Terk, the Two Stooges.

A Few Words on the Language Barrier: One element really bothered me while watching this show was the use of talking animals. Terk, Tantor, and all the gorillas seem to be speaking colloquial English, but when visitors come to the jungle they ask about Tarzan’s amazing ability to speak to the animals. We apparently are supposed to assume that Tarzan taught Jane and her father to speak the language of the beast, yet at times we see Jane correcting Terk’s grammar on occasion. So are they speaking English or is Jane even a grammar Nazi in ape language?  Even stranger is that we often see Tarzan, Jane and even Terk going, “Ook, ook.” When speaking to monkeys. There is just no consistency on display here, but then again I’m probably over thinking what’s basically a show aimed at kids.

In my review of Filmation’s Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle I mentioned how impressed I was that they managed to use elements straight out of the books, not completely faithful but the spirit was there, and now in the case of Disney’s The Legend of Tarzan we see even more characters from the books brought to life, but sadly most of it seems like simple name dropping, and I doubt the writers of the show did more than glance at the chapter headings. One classic Tarzan location that appears in both the Filmation series and the Disney one is the lost city of Opar, and strangely enough both shows get it completely wrong. In the books Opar was a lost outpost of Atlantis; populated by beautiful women and hideous ape like men, and ruling over them was their queen and high priestess La. Any who fell into her clutches would quickly find themselves sacrificed to the Sun God; unless of course you were Tarzan because then you’d capture the heart of La, spurn her advances, and then loot the city’s vaults of the gold hidden there. In the Filmation series Opar is seen as an abandoned ruin, no hot tempered priestess to be seen, and certainly no spurning going on, but in the Disney series we do have Queen La (Diahann Carroll). She’s no Atlantean priestess but a sorceress with an army of leopard men.

Note: Her leopard men are not to be confused with the sadistic cult in the book Tarzan and the Leopard Men as these aren’t men in costumes but animals transformed by magic into bipedal monstrosities.

Queen La herself is not a descendant of fabled Atlantis; we learn she was once a member of the local Waziri tribe who was forced out due to her evil practitioning of forbidden magic; it’s her magic staff that allows her to transform animals into humanoids as well as turn humans into animals, and she can even animate giant stone statues to do her bidding. Like in the book The Return of Tarzan La falls in “love” with Tarzan and when he tells the Queen that he loves Jane things get a bit dicey. In the episode Tarzan and the Leopard Men Rebellion the titular leopard men kidnap Jane so that she can become their new queen and free them from being the abominations La had turned them into. When the magic staff is broken the leopard men revert to being just plain old leopards, and La herself turns to dust. Of course that isn’t the end of her evil ways for in the episode Tarzan and the Return of La the evil queen’s spirit manages to possess Jane. The book version of La is vastly more sympathetic, almost a tragic figure whose love for Tarzan is her only escape from her horrible life, but the Disney version of La is equally great in a totally different manner. This is the one thing Disney changed that I could get completely behind.

 

Also their version of Queen La is totally hot.

That she was once a member of the Waziri is a bit strange and unnecessary, but then again this show’s version of the Waziri is nothing like in the books. In the books the Waziri tribe are Tarzan’s closest allies and often provide numerical back-up if Tarzan finds himself against enemies of superior numbers, but the shows change to making them just a neighbouring tribe is probable a way to distance themselves from the racists overtones that Burroughs was sometimes accused of. In the books Tarzan often referred to the Waziri as “His children” and one could certainly take a white father figure commanding a group of blacks to be if not racist a little patronizing. So that change I will give Disney a pass on, but what I don’t understand is the name dropping of name Muviro in the episode Tarzan and the Eagle’s Feather. In this episode Muviro (Kevin Michael Richardson) is jealous Waziri warrior who hates Tarzan and tries to steal a woman betrothed to a fellow tribesman, but in the books Muviro is the leader of the Waziri and next to Paul D’Arnot is Tarzan’s closest friend. Why Disney would pick that particular name to make into an enemy for Tarzan is beyond me, why not just make one up?

This is something they did in the movie as well where they gave the head villain the name Clayton when in fact Clayton is actually Tarzan's real name, and it kind of drives me crazy.  Speaking of enemies the show does borrow; one of Tarzan’s most notorious enemies from the books, the nefarious Nikolas Rokoff (Ron Perlman), does make an appearance here.

 

Nicholas Rokoff and his henchman Alexis Paulvitch.

These two villains first appeared in the book The Return of Tarzan and they crossed paths with our hero when he foiled a plot they had to discredit a Count, and later Tarzan foils their espionage plans when the try to obtain classified military information. Then in the next book The Beasts of Tarzan Nicholas Rokoff kidnaps Tarzan’s wife and child, which puts him right at the top of any villainy list, but what is Rokoff doing in this Disney version? He’s in Africa looking for pirate treasure, and when he learns that the location of the buried treasure is fraught with danger he kidnaps Jane to force Tarzan to retrieve the treasure. So this Disneyfied Rokoff isn’t quite as well rounded and evil as his book counterpart, he’s more of the Snidely Whiplash School of Villainy type character.

Queen La and Rokoff are not the only villains to make the transition from the books to the show; we have Tublat (Keith David) who was a rival ape to Kerchak’s rule, and One Punch Mulligan, the World’s Heavyweight Champion, who visits Africa as a publicity stunt. When Tarzan accidentally knocks him down with “one punch” the fighter does everything he can to get a re-match with the Ape Man, but aside from the character’s name there is much from the book story collected in the book Tarzan and the Castaways. In story “Tarzan and the Champion" One Punch Mulligan comes to Africa to hunt and bag some trophies, but after machine gunning down any wildlife within range he finds an angry Tarzan on his trail. Unlike his animated counterpart the Mulligan in the book learns the value of all life, including animals, and becomes Tarzan’s friend. In the episode One Punch Mulligan he’s just a blowhard that leaves in disgrace after being accidentally punched out by both Tarzan and Terk.

 

Note: The reporter is voiced by the great Bruce Campbell.

Another strange change is that of Samuel T. Philander (Craig Fergusson) character who in the book was Professor Porters trusted assistant but in this show he’s his academic rival. Philander is depicted as a lying cheat whose achievements all stem from stealing the researcher of Jane’s father, and who has come to Africa in the hopes of discovering what Professor Porter is working on now and stealing that as well. You couldn’t get further from his character in the book unless you had him try and kill Professor Porter, oh wait he does that as well. In the episode Tarzan and the Hidden World Professor Porter convinces Tarzan to lead him to the subterranean world of Pellucidar and while there Philander tries to trap Porter and friends in this land of killer dinosaurs while making off with the proof of their existence. As in the Filmation series you can access Pellucidar by a crater like hole located near Tarzan’s home, but unlike the Tarzan at the Earth’s Core, or even the Filmation version, there are no Mahars or ape-like Sagoths. The Disney version doesn’t even give us cave men.

 

Tarzan does get to fight some dinosaurs though.

The Legend of Tarzan isn’t just a collection of re-worked characters from the books, there are quite a slew of original characters populating this series, and most of them are pretty fun. Renard Dumont (René Auberjonois) is introduced as an opportunistic French proprietor who opens up a trading post near Tarzan and Jane’s home, at first the relationship between our heroes and Dumont is a bit antagonistic, but later they become friends and the Frenchmen even helps Tarzan out of a jam or two. Then there is the villainous Lt. Colonel Staquait (Jim Cummings) whose draconian methods put him at odds with Tarzan; he who orders the burning of a village that contains women and children, and when two of his soldiers refuse the order, and flee execution, he tracks the pair into Tarzan’s neighbourhood.

 

“Sadly my moustache is too pencil thin to twirl.”

The two soldiers he tracks down in the episode The Fugitives are easily my favorite additions to the Tarzan cast; Hugo and Hooft (Dave Thomas and Joe Flaherty) are parodies of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby from the popular Road to…  movie series. Though the characters don’t quite resemble the legendary comic duo Thomas and Flaherty do pitch perfect impressions of them. Hugo and Hooft quickly become regulars on the show and bring some nice comic moments, opposed to the terrible ones provided by Terk, and their appearances makes one wonder why we never got a Bob Hope/Bing Crosby meet Tarzan movie.

 

Comic Legends meet Jungle God.

One of the major differences from the Disney cartoon and the books, and certainly from the Filmation series where she is completely absent, is the predominate use of Jane Porter. Aside from using Jane as a damsel in distress Burroughs often found himself at a loss as to what to do with her, even going so far as to dabble with the idea of killing her off, but in Disney’s The Legend of Tarzan Jane is front and center with her man through all their adventures. Not only does Jane appear in every episode she is most often integral to the story, and even saves the day once and awhile. How well she is portrayed in this series makes me almost forgive them for making her British.

 

Jane looking even hotter while possessed by the spirit of Queen La.

Disney’s The Legend of Tarzan is not a faithful representation of the Tarzan stories told by Burroughs, drop any as many characters from the books as you like and it’s still not going to be the boisterous pulp adventures from the original stories, but it's still loads of fun. Sure I wish they would stop making Tarzan scamper around on his knuckles and let him speak fluent English, but the stories we do get from this Disney series are mostly well written; the action is fun, the villains are properly villainous, and if seeing this series causes one child to track down the original stories then this show has more than served its purpose. The Legend of Tarzan may be guilty of not being faithful to the source material, but it's also quite entertaining.

In the Name of the King 2: Two Worlds (2011) – Review

I’m not sure who keeps giving Uwe Boll money to make films but after all these terrible movies he's made I’m starting to suspect he is pulling a Max Bialystock scam from The Producers, and that he is intentionally making flops. After the cinematic turd that was In the Name of the King, which surprising included such actors as Jason Statham, Ray Liotta, and Burt Reynolds, he released a straight to video sequel starring Dolph Lundgren and a cast of people no one has ever heard of. In the Name of the King 2: Two Worlds has pretty much nothing to do with the first film, and clearly has less than half its budget, but just how bad is it?

The movie opens with the Dolph Lundgren narrating over footage of a woman being chased by supposed group of assassins. The woman is the sorceress Elianna (Natalie Burn), who according to Dolph will save his life, and after she takes out one of the assassins with an exploding cupcake, and the remaining ones with her two knives, I ask the question, “Why in the hell was she running from these guys if she is such a badass?”

 

You can’t get good generic henchman these days.

Elianna then uses a magic amulet to open a portal to Vancouver, present day. So this is a movie with time travel, which I can get behind, but that raises the question, “Is the war-torn Kingdom of Ehb supposed to have been an actual historical place?” I’m no history major but I don’t recollect any such kingdom that consisted of sorcery, dragons and shoddily constructed castles ever existing. Why not make it another dimension like they did with Eternia in Dolph’s Masters of the Universe movie? Having this land supposedly from our past just adds to the script's stupidity and laziness. Regardless this trip to the “Present Day” properly introduces us to our hero Granger (Dolph Lundgren), who is a former Special Forces soldier now giving little kids martial arts training. During a demonstration he tells his eight year students that, “These nice gentlemen are after my money. They are not going to get it.” That these men are armed with baseball bats, wrenches and knives, and that he is teaching these kids anything other than “Hand over your money as quickly as possible” in this situation, has me wondering what the fuck kind of teacher is he?

 

"Don’t try this at home kids...seriously, it will get you killed."

When Granger gets home he is attacked by a group of sword wielding goons and is then pulled forcibly through the “Time Portal” by Elianna. He is then told that he is the chosen one of an ancient prophecy. Damn it, if the “Chosen One” cliché isn't one of the worst most overused thing to ever be created in fantasy/fiction I don’t know what else is, and in the case of this movie it doesn't even make sense. The typical chosen one is a person of seeming insignificance, plucked out of obscurity to face the dark challenges ahead, but in this movie we later learn that Granger is the son of the previous King, and that as a baby he was whisked off to the future for safe keeping. So he’s not so much a chosen one as he is the rightful heir to the throne.

 

“Can I choose to not participate in this cheap Ren Fair production?”

In this movie we have the evil King Raven (Lochlyn Munro) who sends Granger on his mission to kill the Holy Mother (Christina Jastrzembska), the mysterious leader who of the Dark ones that apparently are terrorizing the kingdom. Turns out of course that Raven is the true villain, and that he’d taken the throne by wiping out much of the kingdom with a biological weapon, one he plans to use again in Granger’s timeline. How unleashing a plague virus in the present day would allow a medieval king to conquer the modern world is something left unexplained here, as is almost anything that happens in this movie. The main love interest is Doctor Manhatten (Natassia Malthe), whose name I’m not sure is supposed to be a in-joke of some kind, but she starts out giving Granger the cold shoulder, treating his wounds with disdain, but then after she leaves his room she immediately returns, starts undressing and states, “If we should perish I will not die unfulfilled.” Uwe Boll manages to condense the “Will they won’t they” romantic subplot to roughly five minutes. That’s kind of impressive, completely idiotic, but impressive nevertheless.

 

I’m betting this happens to Dolph all the time.

In the Name of the King 2: Two Worlds consists mostly of Dolph and company traipsing through the woods of British Columbia where their hiking will be occasionally interrupted by a poorly choreographed fight sequence. The acting across the board is universally terrible, the King seems to be trying to do a Jason Statham impression for some reason, and Dolph himself is clearly in paycheck cashing mode. In fact Dolph initially turned down the role but when he needed quick cash to pay off lawyer fees for a divorce he was going through at the time he changed his mind.

 

One of the lawyers seen here visiting the set.

This movie isn’t as bad as Dolph’s recent foray into sequels, which was Kindergarten Cop 2, the scenery is rather nice, but it’s also not bad to be entertainingly bad. Most viewers will be as bored as Dolph looks, and he looks practically comatose at times. Needless to say it’s no surprise that he didn’t return for In the Name of the King 3: The Last Mission.

 

“If you could lose my phone number, that would be great.”

In the Name of the King 3: The Last Mission (2014) – Review

In this last installment of the In the Name of the King trilogy Uwe “Why do people keep giving me money?” Boll returns to make another nonsensical piece of cinematic trash. Once again we have a film that has nothing to do with its predecessor; no actors, locations or even characters from the two previous films make an appearance. The only difference here is that star Dominic Purcell seems to be putting an effort into his performance, something Dolph failed to do in In the Name of the King 2: Two Worlds, and being shot in Bulgaria they had access to some nice locations.

The movie opens with badass gun-for-hire Haven Kaine (Dominic Purcell) stalking the halls of a hotel, coldly murdering the security staff, and then he executes his primary target, who he finds hiding in the shower of his room. How cool and badass is Haven? Well after killing a half-dozen people he stops to drink a cup of coffee, and why not? It’s not as if you are in a hotel where a maid or a guest could across all the bodies strewn through the various hallways and raise an alarm. Maybe ruthless assassinations are just that commonplace in Bulgaria. Regardless this allows Haven to calmly leave and meet up with Ayavlo (Marian Valev), the man who hired him, to get paid. Despite being told “This was my last job” Ayavlo offers Haven two million dollars to kidnap two little girls belonging to the European royal family, and instead of saying, “I was quit before and you can consider me twice as quit now” he actually takes the job.

 

This is certainly a strange introduction to a film’s hero.

He locks the two girls in a cargo container, but not before stealing an amulet one of them was wearing. The girl claims it is magical but Haven is more interested in the fact that it resembles a tattoo on his arm, and when he places the amulet next to the tattoo a portal through time opens. Damn, if I had a dollar for every time that happened to me. Haven is sucked through and finds himself back in medieval times, and like the previous movie this version of medieval times has dragons.

 

Don’t show fear, dragons can totally smell it on you.

Haven flees to a local village where he joins the panicked people inside. He finally remembers he has a gun and unloads the clip at the fire-breathing beast, but it has no effect. Two sisters Arabella (Ralitsa Paskaleva), and Emeline (Daria Simeonova) notice this stranger and the loud device he wields and they bring him into their home for safety. Why they are impressed with his gun is beyond me. It went “Bang-bang” but did nothing to the attacking dragon; so we are to assume people here are very impressed with loud noises. They take him to see a shaman who of course tells him that the tattoo signifies that he is the "chosen one" to lead the people against the evil king. Who or why this is the case is never explained; he tells them the tattoo was just a design his late wife liked when there visited Venice Beach, but somehow it’s all “Destiny, foretold, bullshit, bullshit.” He at first wants no part of this “Destiny” racket but then decides to join them for some reason.

 

Hmmm, what could that reason be?

Arabella tells Haven that she and her sister are princesses and that their uncle Tervon murdered their mother and later killed their father and battle, all this because Arabella refused to marry him. So we have a dude who turns to fratricide/regicide just because his niece spurned him? Well that certainly qualifies him for chief villain status, and he even murders his own soldiers if they deliver bad news to solidify his position as evil, but what all this exposition does is make me feel that the film should have started with a narrator stating, “We now bring you In the Name of the King 3 already in progress.” Characters keep coming and going and just randomly spouting stuff that has no bearing on the plot…well as much of a plot as this film has. Arabella at first doesn’t like Haven but after seeing him being all heroic in battle she lowers her defenses and they start to develop a relationship. This is better than the “Will they won’t they?” relationship Dolph had in the previous film which went from hate to sex in about twenty seconds, but it still goes nowhere. Also just how is Haven such a great fighter with medieval weapons?

 

A sword or a Glock, what’s the difference?

It's one thing for an assassin to be proficient in multiple forms of combat but I doubt there is much call for sword fighting these days. What is also never explained is why the same actor who plays the evil King Tervon is also the guy who played Ayavlo, the man who hired Hazen to kidnap the little princesses. Are those two little girls supposed to be descendant of Princess Arabella and Princess Emeline, and Ayavolo is the descendant of Tervon, and somehow history is repeating itself? Which would mean Ayavolo wants to marry one of those girls, right?

 

King or gangster this guy is all kinds of creepy.

The script never makes a lick of sense; we learn that Tervon controls the dragon but not how this is possible.  Is it connected to the amulet he wears which is a duplicate of the one that brought Hazen through time? At one point Hazen and Tervon duel and when Hazen best him easily (And again how is this possible, did we miss a training montage or something?) Tervon calls the dragon to drive the heroes away. And then almost immediately after being routed Hazen and Arabella turn around and chase after Terzon. Do these two idiots have a short-term memory problem or something? Terzon has a fucking dragon and they are going to storm his castle, alone. Brilliant plan.

 

Good thing Terzon didn’t lock the castle door.

So Hazen duels Terzon again, and once again he easily defeats him, but the dragon is late this time so Hazen is able to run the douchebag through. For some reason Terzon’s death causes the time portal to open and despite her love for Hazen she urges him to go through to rescue the two girls who he had left locked in a metal cargo container. Unfortunately just as he goes through the dragon finally shows up and it swoops through the portal so that it can be in the final act. The beasts chases Hazen through the streets of Sofia, Bulgaria, and despite having tried to kill him numerous times, it attacks and carries away one of Ayavlo thugs who was about to shoot Hazen. So our “hero” is able to kill the villain…again, and return the girls to their father.

 

Oh, and there is still a dragon loose in modern Bulgaria.

In the Name of the King 3: The Last Mission is about as bad as one could expect. It certainly had a nice attempt at making a ruthless assassin become the hero, but the script never really got around to justifying his change of heart. Dominic Purcell is the only Hollywood actor in this film, all the other parts are filled by locals, and he does a decent enough job, but not enough to justify watching this thing. There is a fairly fun running gag about his inability to ride a horse, but that just highlights his strange ability to use a broadsword. That this time out the production had access to actual castles as locations certainly helped, and the CGI dragon was as good you’d expect from a straight-to-dvd production to look, but overall the movie cannot escape the smell of an Uwe Boll production. Let’s just hope the “Last Mission” subtitle stands and we see no more In the Name of the King movies.

Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle: The Filmation Cartoon Series

We’ve seen countless adaptations of Tarzan ranging from the monosyllabic Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan The Ape Man to the recent and more verbose Alexander Skarsgård in The Legend of Tarzan, but rarely have these “adaptations” done more than just borrow the origin story and then make up their own adventures. In this animated series Tarzan speaks perfect English, as well as the animal language created by Burroughs, and if you wanted to see Tarzan and his monkey friend Nkima finding lost cities, hanging around with the noble lion Jad-bal-ja or battling evil sorcerers you weren’t going to find those adventures in the cinema, but strangely enough you could find them here on the small screen. That is if you were a kid in 1976 because to date the 1970s Saturday morning cartoon still stands apart as the best adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s legendary ape man.

 

Lord of the Jungle

Created by Filmation for CBC Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle is easily the most faithful of all screen-based adaptations as the creators of this show drew heavily from the books. With artwork based heavily on the works of legendary comic strip artist Burne Hogarth the look of the show surpassed much of its Saturday morning contemporaries, with the use of rotoscoping it gave Tarzan a smooth and graceful look that meshed beautifully with the fantastic foreground and background paintings of the series’ talented art department. Sure if you watch these episodes back to back you will notice that the same shot would be used again and again, but as a kid that’s something you’d never pick up on.

The very first episode sets the tone of the series by somehow successfully adapting the book Tarzan and the City of Gold, of course it’s not a point for point adaptation, after all they only have 25 minutes to work with, but it hits all the high points of the story; Tarzan (voiced by Robert Ridgely) is washed down a river to the shores of Athne, a golden city ruled by the cruel Queen Nemone. He is imprisoned with the boastful Phobeg (voiced by the great Ted Cassidy who played Lurch on the Addams Family) who he easily defeats in the arena; his sparing of Phobeg’s life earns him a friend and later an aid to his escape. In just one short TV episode they were able to include Tarzan’s refusal to kneel before the Queen, her falling in love with Tarzan and her reaction to being rebuffed, the sneaky advisor Tomas whose afraid of the Ape Man’s influence over the Queen, and Tarzan tangling with lions of this magnificent lost city.  I'm still waiting for filmmakers to come even close to this episode when it comes to bringing forth pure Tarzan fun.

 

It's not really a Tarzan show without a lost city.

The show full utilizes Burroughs’s lexicon of ape languages as well as locations and characters straight out of the books. Tarzan is often aided by the great apes known as manginis, and he has to defeat the talking Bolmangani (gorillas) who live in the Palace of Diamonds and enslave the locals. He encounters the Knights of Nimmr, a lost city of crusaders, and though not much more than the name is taken from book Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle it still captures the flavor of Burroughs’s writings. The writers of this show didn’t just restrict themselves to the books as over the first season Tarzan encountered the evil Queen Nubia in "Tarzan and the City of Sorcery" whose clever stagecraft made her people believe she had magic powers, and in "Tarzan and the Vikings" our Ape Man ran into a village of Norsemen that needed a lesson in freedom.

In the Burroughs Tarzan books stories didn’t really venture into science fiction but on this show Tarzan encountered aliens that had come to Africa to collect specimens for their space zoo, and if Tarzan had ever seen an episode of The Twilight Zone he'd have known to avoid the whole situation.

 

Why does this saucer look like it's tied down like a circus tent?

One of the tropes that pops up in several of Tarzan books is a double or Tarzan look-a-like that causes our hero much grief, in this cartoon series we don’t get Esteban Miranda impersonating Tarzan as we did in Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, or actor playing a jungle hero in Tarzan and the Lion Man, but instead it’s a couple of villains using a robot Tarzan to discredit Tarzan among his jungle friends so that they can pillage the vaults of Opar.  Which puts Tarzan in a class with Steve Austin The Six Million Dollar Man when it comes to evil robot doubles.

 

"Look out Tarzan, it's Masketron!"

Note: This series is very in keeping with the bulk of the Tarzan books by it's complete absence of Jane.  Burroughs had a dickens of a time working Jane into his jungle adventures so he often left her out completely, and in this Filmation series Jane isn't even mentioned.

One popular reoccurring character from the books that is missing is La, the High Priestess who rules the lost Atlantean city of Opar.  Strangely enough the series visits Opar twice yet never do we see it occupied by the descendants of Atlantis or their high priestess. In Tarzan’s Rival it looks completely abandoned and in the episode Tarzan the Hated the Bolmangani Emperor wants to rebuild his city in the Opar region. I guess a half-naked woman who likes to sacrifice people to the Sun God wouldn’t go over to well with the censors of the time. Opar wasn’t the only location that got a bit of a short shrift as the episode based on Tarzan at the Earth’s Core has almost nothing from the source material. In this cartoon version the land of Pellucidar could be accessed from a crater in the middle of the African jungle, and no longer is Tarzan searching for the missing David Innes while aboard a dirigible he had commissioned for the job, instead we have him managing a Romeo & Juliet style relationship between two races of cave people. We did at least get Tarzan facing off against dinosaurs, so that was cool.

 

"Say ahhhh!"

As faithful to the spirit of the source material the people at Filmation wanted to be they had one major obstacle and that would be the Broadcast Standards and Practices. Studios were severerly hamstrung when it came to showing violence in shows that were marketed to children; this is not a big deal if your show is Scooby Doo or My Little Pony but if your show is based on a character who is known for fighting and killing his opponents with a knife or his bare hands that is a bit of a problem. This was also a huge and issue many will be familiar with in the case of the Super Friends where Batman was not allowed to punch people. That’s what Batman does, how do you work around that? So instead of stabbing lions or coldcocking this week’s villain Tarzan was relegated to Judo flips and dodging. So at times Tarzan comes across more as Jungle Pacifist than Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle.

Also this version of Tarzan is a friend to all animals and rarely actually has to fight one of his furry friends, and to make the show more palatable to parent’s group most episodes would have Tarzan giving a lesson on various topics such as freedom, the dangers of pride, greed, and the rights of others. This moralistic tag would become a staple for such cartoons as G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero.

 

“And knowing is half the battle.”

Filmation’s Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle ran for four seasons between 1976 and 1979 totaling 36 episodes in all, but only the first season was Tarzan on his own. In season two he became part of The Batman/Tarzan Adventure Hour and then later as Tarzan and the Super 7 which featured such characters as Batman & Robin, Web Woman, Isis, Super-Samurai, Sinbad, Merlin, and Hercules, Micro Woman and Super Stretch, Moray and Manta, and the live-action Jason and the Star Command.

 

Sadly Tarzan and Batman never actually team up to fight crime.

Decades later we got the decent Disney's The Legend of Tarzan series that was based on their hit animated movie, but as good as that show was it still strayed drastically from the source material, so it seems we may be waiting a while for the definitive adaptations of the Tarzan books by Edgar Rice Burroughs.  The Filmation series did a damn find job with the tools they had and with the restrictions they were under, and though closest to the feel of the books it's still not quite the Tarzan I grew up reading about.

Sadly only the first season is available on DVD  it’s something I highly recommend to fans of Tarzan as its loads of fun as well as being one of the more faithful versions of the character.

Rollercoaster (1977) – Review

With such films as Two Minute Warning and Black Sunday populating the theatres in the late 70s it’s a wonder people ever went out in public, it seemed that being killed by a mad sniper or similarly armed terrorist was almost a forgone conclusion, and if it wasn’t terrorists it was a Great White Shark terrorizing the local beaches. So for those who avoided sporting events and fled the seaside for the safety of a landlocked amusement parks they were in for a surprise as well, in the form of…Rollercoaster!

Meet Harry Calder (George Segal) a dedicated public servant who works for the governmental office of Safety and Standard Practices, a man who's not above blackmailing his corrupt boss (Henry Fonda) to get the job done. It’s when there is a terrible accident at the Ocean View Amusement Park involving a rollercoaster, one that Harry had signed off on as being safe mere months ago, that our “man of the people” goes into action. Harry was already skeptical that the rollercoaster disaster, which took several lives, was just an accident, but when one witnesses mentions seeing a maintenance working walking the track at a time when the man whose job it was would have been long in bed, he knows something is wrong in the state of Denmark. When a week later he learns of a mysterious fire at another amusement park he begins to investigate further, even though that park wasn’t in his jurisdiction.

 

Harry Calder, man of action.

And just who is the man behind these “accidents” that are plaguing America’s parks? Well the film gives him no name or even a motivation beyond money. In the credits he’s simply listed as Young Man (Timothy Bottoms), and though earlier versions had him doing this because the corporations that own the parks had put his family’s “mom and pop” amusement park out of business, that motive didn’t make the cut and now all we know is he wants, “One million dollars.” Some critics at the time pointed this out as a failing, but for me not getting into the head of the killer made him scarier. Is it really just the money? Could he being doing this because it turns him on? Did an amusement park molest him as a child? None of that mattered to me as Bottoms' cool and collected killer kept me at the edge of my seat with his calm professionalism and well thought out plans.

 

He’s kind of a Proto-Hans Gruber.

Calder discovers that several of the country’s top CEO’s that own amusement parks are having a secret meeting in Chicago so he decides to crash the meeting and find out what’s going on, but he’s not the only fly in the ointment as the killer has placed a bug in the room to overhear them as they listen to his tape containing his extortion demands, and when he hears Calder caution the CEOs to treat this extortionist like a credible threat, and that he tells them to notify the Feds, he decides to include Calder in his machinations. But when Special Agent in Charge Hoyt (Richard Widmark) arrives he thanks Calder for having the F.B.I called in but his services are no longer needed. That is until the extortionist calls and informs them that he wants Calder to be the one to deliver the money. Needless to say this does not thrill Calder.

 

That's Some Bad Hat Harry.

What follows is a brilliant cat and mouse game between the extortionist and the Feds, with poor Calder caught in the middle. The highlight of the film is Calder being run all over an amusement park, while carrying the million dollars around in a brief case, and with the cops doing their best to keep track of him as the extortionist sends the poor civil servant on a long wild goose chase. It’s how well thought out the plan to get the money, while making a fool of the cops, is what sells this movie.  This is a villain who clearly thinks four steps ahead everyone, and for this you can almost admire him and be on his side, that is if it wasn’t for the killing of all those innocent people that is. Rollercoaster is an excellent thriller, director James Goldstone does an excellent job of ratchetting up the tension while also relieving it with some nice humor provided by the ever talented George Segal, and if watched on a big enough television sets the rollercoaster POV footage is quite fun. Just make sure you get off before the bomb does, and remember you must be this tall to watch this ride.

Note: In the first attack they used stuntmen and dummies for the rollercoaster crash, and then the studio decided it was too graphic and toned down the gore and flying bodies.

Black Sunday (1977) – Review

One of America’s greatest pastimes is under threat in director John Frankenheimer's thriller Black Sunday; based on the novel by Thomas Harris which itself was inspired by the Munich massacre perpetrated by the Black September Group during the 1972 Summer Olympics Games.  What is truly frightening is how this film is even more topical today than it was when it was originally released back in the 70s. Unfortunately for Frankenheimer and Paramount Pictures the previous year saw the release of another thriller called Two-Minute Warning which was also about a major league football game under siege by terrorism, it also wasn’t very good and it mostly likely dampened ticket sales for Black Sunday.  Also not helping is that it came out the same year as Star Wars. Which is a shame because Black Sunday is a riveting thriller with a great cast and deserved a better reception, so let’s take a trip back to when terrorism was unique horror and not an everyday event.

Do you know what you won't find in many American films these days, a lead character who is an Israeli intelligence officer leading Mossad commando raids against Palestinian fanatics, but that is exactly what we get in Black Sunday in the form of Major David Kabakov (Robert Shaw), a man who will do almost anything to see the job done. He is aided by FBI agent in charge Sam Corely (Fritz Weaver) who would have been the lead character in most Hollywood movies, but instead we get Shaw’s tenacious and brutal Kabakov as he chases his prey from the explosive heights of Beirut to the dark streets of Washington DC and Los Angeles. Kabakov is almost a proto-Jack Bauer as he will cross almost any line to stop the terrorist plot.

 

“Where’s Marwan?”

What makes Black Sunday standout is that though it is obviously on the side of Robert Shaw’s character the villains of the piece are not just cardboard moustache twirling stereotypes. Behind the plot to wreak havoc during the Super Bowl is Dahlia Iyad (Marthe Keller), an operative from the Palestinian terrorist group Black September who lost most of her family to the conflict between Palestine and Israel. Her goal is to “Hit Americans where it hurts, where they feel most safe," so that they will stop supporting Israel. The plan is to detonate a bomb rigged to the Goodyear Blimp while it’s floating over the Super Bowl, which would then send a quarter million steel flechettes flying into the 80,000 fans watching the game, including the President of the United States (Jimmy Carter look-a-like). The weak link in her plan is her co-conspirator Michael Lander (Bruce Dern) who is a contract blimp pilot and Vietnam veteran who spent many years being tortured by the Viet Cong while he was a POW. Lander unfortunately isn’t the Chuck Norris type of Vietnam vet as he’s basically a walking basket case and probably suffering from every form of PTSD imaginable, and to make matters worse upon returning to America he faced a bitter court martial and a failed marriage. Now he’s ready to die in a way that will take as many fellow Americans with him.

 

Not an ideal partner to have for such a delicate terrorist plot.

The poster and ads clearly promoted the Super Bowl threat but most of the movie’s running time deals with Kabokov, his Mossad partner Robert Moshevsky (Steven Keats) and Agent Corely as they interrogate smugglers responsible for getting the explosives stateside, boat chases through Miami's crowded harbor, running gun battles with Dahlia’s operation’s chief Mohammed Fasil (Bekim Fehmiu), all while trying to figure out what the actual target is. Black Sunday is more a spy/thriller than the event disaster film its ad campaign suggested.

Note: Normally movies are forced to use fake team names and sporting events but Frankenheimer was actually allowed to film at Super Bowl X featuring the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Dallas Cowboy. The movie cameras that were used in filming during the game were disguised as TV cameras with CBS logos, of course during the climax when the Goodyear Blimp plunges into the stadium that was shot on a different day with extras.

Black Sunday is an excellent thriller which manages to juggle the mechanics of a tricky plot without skimping character development, and only someone with Frankenheimer’s skill could make a “Blimp Chase” into a suspense filled action sequence.  Which is more than can be said about a certain movie based on a true dirigible disaster. This is one of those rare terrorist plot movies that has both a compelling hero as well as fleshed out villains, something that is lacking in many films since. So if you need a good pre-game event for your Super Bowl party I suggest putting on this flick, you and your friends will not be disappointed.

Note: This is currently the only Thomas Harris book to not include Hannibal Lector, though I’m sure if this film was remade today they’d find some way to work him in.