Death Race - the 2008 Paul W.S. Anderson remake of Roger Corman's infamous, campy and satirical Death Race 2000. I was a bit lukewarm on it when it first came out, particularly as it only has one vehicle-vs-'pedestrian' moment, but a recent re-watch improved my general opinion of it. The mainstream release and budget did mean some of the meaner edges had to be smoothed off, but it's a solid action spectacle. 8/10
Death Race 2 - apparently the budget for the 2008 movie was somewhere in the region of $45 million, while this straight-to-video prequel had a mere $7 million. It certainly shows, and it suffers from some sloppy scripting at times (e.g. weak characterisation) and some faults in the direction (e.g. scene construction, making sense of certain action sequences), but it's actually not bad. It's got Luke Goss, Ving Rhames, Danny Trejo, Sean Bean, and a pre-Walking Dead Lauren Cohan in it, too. 6/10
Death Race 3: Inferno - shifting to an international Death Race set in South Africa (where the film was being shot for tax reasons, like numerous Universal 1440 Entertainment straight-to-video productions like Tremors 5 and 6), the budget is about the same as #2, but you get more bang for your buck this time around. Goss/Rhames/Trejo all return for this sequel-to-the-prequel-that-is-still-a-prequel-to-the-first-movie, with added Dougray Scott as the snarling corporate baddy. There's more car-based chaos in this one, and it ramps up the increased violence of the second flick. Quite enjoyable. 7/10
Death Race: Beyond Anarchy - the best of the sequels. Production shifted to Bulgaria, budget unknown, but you get a shedload more bang for your buck in this flick, which is like Death Race meets Escape From New York meets Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. Also features the most sex and violence of all four movies, although again there's precious little in the way of people getting gorily run over!!! The script is better than what we got with #2 and #3, but the clarity of the overall story could have used a bit of work. Danny Trejo returns and this time Danny Glover is on board. Lots of post-apoc-style production design and constuming, grease paint bikinis on naked start-line chicks, frequent explosions and so on ramp up the exploitation flick vibe most pleasingly. Apparently it's the final flick in the series, which is a damn shame, actually. I really enjoyed this one. 7/10
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Crystal Eyes - an Argentinian neo-giallo set in the world of fashion. I'll be honest, I ended up skimming through this on FreeVee as, to be blunt, the script was pretty bad. Characterisation was almost non-existent and the film frequently got bogged-down in rather underwhelming scenes of clunky exposition that doesn't really do much to keep your attention. Visually it's quite good, although the relentless thievery from the back catalogue of Dario Argento (Suspiria in particular) gets tiresome after a while. There was a much better movie in there somewhere. Disappointing.
Aquaslash - even at a mere 65 minutes (excluding credits), this neo-slasher flick plods like a four-hour Russian treatise on the futility of the the human existence. The characters are very thinly sketched and few, if any, have any real features that make them stand out in any way at all. About the only one I can remember is "Chad" because of a crap running-joke about how nobody remembers his name. A graduation party is taking place at a water park and someone's doing some murders because ... reasons??? The overall story is poorly told and we don't really understand why anything is happening, and we don't really understand the geography of the location either, which has little character unto itself. There's a few visual tricks in the director's bag, but the propensity to rely on dissolves during scenes suggests a lack of directorial skill in constructing a scene, again evidenced by a total lack of suspense/tension. The kills are pretty sparse, too, with a rather long wait for the movie's centrepiece with a waterslide fitted out with a double blade 'X' booby trap to hack unsuspecting watersliders into pieces. There's a good little bit of practical gore in there, but the poor storytelling and pacing and characterisation cause the bulk of this flick's problems. It's also on FreeVee.
It's frustrating to see films like Crystal Eyes and Aquaslash fall considerably short of their potential. The filmmakers obviously want to dive into these genres they love, but unfortunately they don't really have the skills to back it up.
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Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. [click for more]
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