Streets of Blood

Cost: £1.96 (Play.com)

Tag-line: Confront violence with violence

Sample dialogue: “The Big Easy ain’t so easy any more…”

OK, so… New Orleans. Long known as a city of great music, great food and a lot of sleaze, it has come to be dominated (or haunted) both in reality and in pop culture by the shadow of Hurricane Katrina. Any movie or TV show set in New Orleans today will inevitably define itself as being set in New Orleans “post-Katrina”. Some projects have tried to make the setting and the aftermath of the event the whole point of their existence. Most high-profile is probably Treme, the HBO show from The Wire creators which I think is generally well-regarded, though I personally couldn’t get on board with it. Then there was the cop show K-Ville, a failure which was cancelled pretty quickly. Much lesser known is the 2009 action drama Streets of Blood, which again aimed to address the social chaos and lawlessness that ran rife in post-Katrina New Orleans, but planned to get the job done in just 91 minutes.

Good frickin' luck...

I’m not going to keep you in suspense here. It fails. It fails as an action movie. It fails as a drama. It fails as an action-drama, but it most definitely fails as a social commentary piece, if that’s even what it originally set out to be. The opening credits – played out between helicopter shots of the flooded streets and news footage of the chaos, scored to clips of speeches from George Bush – certainly make it seem like the intention.

Stick with it to the end, though, and you’ll realise this is just another low rent dirty cop double-cross flick, only more miserable, cos everyone’s all disgusted all the time by what they and their city have become.

Our protagonist here is narcotics detective Val Kilmer, first seen wading through waist-deep waters in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane to reach the bloated body of his murdered partner. The back of the DVD case will tell you he “suspects foul play and launches a full investigation”, but he doesn’t. Apparently they can say whatever they like on the back of DVD covers. Kilmer immediately forgets all about his dead partner and recruits himself a new one in the form of crap rapper-turned-crap-actor Curtis ’50 Cent’ Jackson.

We never get to see him alive, but I like to imagine that in flashbacks he'd have been played by Tim Allen. That could've been fun.

Together the pair set about taking down the gangs of looters, drug addicts and violent psychopaths roaming the flooded streets and abandoned buildings. Except they don’t. We almost immediately cut to SIX MONTHS LATER (boo!) by which time the flood waters have receded and the only clue to anyone watching that we’re even in New Orleans are the God-awful southern accents attempted by non-southerners like Kilmer and Sharon Stone.

Oh yeah. Sharon Stone’s in this too, playing the police psychiatrist tasked with evaluating whether any of the men employed as detectives in the town are in any way capable of doing their jobs without stealing, lying, taking drugs, torturing suspects, having sex with witnesses and plain old murdering unarmed suspects and undercover DEA agents. And she is TERRIBLE at her job. Despite the fact every cop she interviews is obviously dirty as sin, she turns a blind eye to it and even works to protect them when an FBI investigation into dirty cops turns its attention on them.

And she wears this expression for the ENTIRE movie.

So despite the fact she achieves nothing, every so often the film’s actual plot is interrupted for scenes in which Stone interviews the four (apparently the ONLY four) narcotics detectives tasked with preventing an all-out gang war. These scenes are PAINFUL, don’t advance the plot and don’t offer any insight into any of the characters, since they all just stone-wall Stone (ha!) anyway. Everyone just rolls their eyes at each other all sarcastic and cynical, saying nothing of any merit for what seems like hours. The worst are the scenes between Kilmer and Stone, when each tries to out-drawl the other, like they’re in competition with each other to see how slowly they can speak a sentence.

I’m not going to lay into Val Kilmer too much. I actually like him as an actor. I know a lot of people don’t, for whatever reasons, but give him the right material and he can still give a great performance. This is not one of those. He at least looks the part, I think. He’s not in the same kind of shape he used to be back in the day, but it at least looks like he’s given up on that competition for Hollywood’s Widest Face. But in practice he makes for about as convincing a New Orleans cop as Steven Seagal: Lawman, with an indecipherable accent to boot (seriously, I had to switch on the subtitles).

That's him on the right.

So, OK, Val Kilmer pretty much sucks in this. Sharon Stone is worse. But the crown for worst actor in the entire film is Fiddy Cent. I know he’s had a lot of criticism in the past for his work in That One Movie He Did Where He Pretty Much Played Himself Only Not Really and That Other Thing He Was In That Time but I never saw any of those, so I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Would you believe it though, he really is a terrible actor. Just awful. Mumbly, blank-faced, monotone, just… just awful. It doesn’t help that they’ve handed him most of the worst lines in the script, mostly delivered in one-on-ones with Sharon Stone (acting master-class!) where he tells her “I don’t even know what the truth is any more,” or “I don’t even know what clean is any more,” or “I don’t even know what a Large Hadron Collider is any more…”

"I don't even know what acting is any more..."

So, something something gang war, something something dirty cops, something something DEA, something something mole in the department, oh WHO CARES? I was planning on writing a paragraph or two about the FBI investigation led by Michael Biehn, the film’s only saving grace, if it has one, but I can’t be bothered. I’m too pissed off now after writing about everything else that’s wrong with this piece of crap.

And sure, y’know what? Biehn does a good job, coming out of this clean even when no-one else can, but I’m not going to big him up because I don’t want people purchasing Streets of Blood and sitting through all the turgid scenes of Val Kilmer moralising and Sharon Stone being shit at psychiatry just for his performance, which is all too brief, anyway.

"Just gonna pretend I wasn't even here, are you? Man, this is like Terminator 2 all over again..."

In short, this film could have had a lot going for it, but it blows. If you want to see a good film about dirty cops and drug dealers running rings around each other in post-Katrina New Orleans, look up Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. It has all the fun, craziness and local colour Streets of Blood doesn’t, and it even has Val Kilmer and another rapper-turned-actor in Xzibit (he’s much better than Fiddy). Everyone wins!

Good movie, bad movie or beer movie: Bad movie

[John McNee]

The Alternate (2000)

Cost: £1.23 (Play.com)

Tag-line: “In the tradition of Die Hard…”

Sample Dialogue: “I’m getting tired of being killed…”

Film company Nu Image (now known as Millennium Films) have in recent years reached a certain level of respectability in the film industry thanks to movies such as The Expendables. But they are best known for picking up the market that had been left in the wake of the collapse of Golan-Globus/Cannon Films.

Make them cheap; get some famous people to come in for a few days between some proper gigs and have enough action to cut together a decent trailer is still the strategy of most B-moves. And thus it is here with The Alternate, featuring that old war horse, Eric Roberts.

Eric Roberts is one of those actors who you always enjoy seeing on the big screen, but who never really managed to rise above making cheap crap. He is perhaps best known to younger audience members for playing mob boss Maroni in The Dark Knight, and stealing the limelight from The Expendables.

Sadly he was never able to really trade in his chips that these two films gave him, and he has quickly gone back to playing roles such as that of the President of the United States in the movie First Dog, a movie about the President’s dog, which has gone missing. I hope he got a nice extension to his house for that one.

The Republican field of candidates for the 2012 election was somewhat weak...

In The Alternate he plays a character I am told is called The Replacement. This is frankly a bit up itself. I will call him Ralph instead.

The film begins with a long, long sequence in which Secret Agent Ice-T is testing the security of a building which the President is about to visit as part of his re-election campaign (which is not going well). But a team of super agents (which Ralph has just recently joined) who are there to test the security measures put in place, manage to beat the secret service and “kill” the fake-President. Ice-T is not a happy bunny. At least I don’t think he is. He isn’t a very good actor.

But none of this matters anyway, because the President’s Chief of Staff has come up with the brilliant idea of pretend kidnapping the real President to boost his election chances. To do this she recruits the team that Ralph is working for. Only problem is, the team decides that perhaps it might be better to hold him to ransom for reals. Thus the board is set, and Ralph has to take down his former partners…one by one.

The DVD proclaims that this film is in the tradition of Die Hard. A bold claim and one you know going in that it couldn’t possibly live up to. The “Hollywood DVD” banner on the cover should be enough of a clue.

But you have no idea how bad this film is.

The kidnapper’s big plan to take out the secret service? Smuggling in blow pipes with little darts and knocking them all out. There is what feels like a ten minute sequence of people running around blowing darts. None of the secret service agents, who are equipped with actual guns, notice this bunch of characters standing in front of them.

Ice-T leaves the film early, his weekend’s worth of shooting wrapped up quickly. Following him, Michael Madsen enters the frame, in the role of Cop On The Outside Who Talks to the Hero on a Walkie-Talkie.

What? I actully get to live with Frankie from the X-factor for 2 weeks!?! Sign me up!

But for the most part the film is Eric Roberts vs. the main bad guy, played by Bryan Genesse, who is also the films writer and fight coordinator.  What this means is never ending monologues from Genesse who either genuinely believes that this stuff is script writing gold, or knows he has to pad out the film to fulfil a 90 minute run time.

Writer. Poet. Action Hero.

There isn’t very much to talk about. The shoot outs are mostly in small rooms, and no one gets hurt. Roberts does get the snot beaten out of him in one, kind of decent, fight in which a female member of the team beats him with a pipe (I like to think Genesse thought that was clever subtext. He typed that scene, got himself a drink and relaxed for the rest of the day), but it is mostly just dull and cheap.

Part of the problem is that most of the bad guys are taken out early. If you are claiming that your film is like Die Hard, then you should appreciate that one of things that made Die Hard so good was Alan Rickman’s gang, and how their deaths were spread across the film in order to keep tensions high. If McClane had killed all the henchmen, and it was just him and Gruber running around Nakatomi Plaza for most of the running time then you get an idea about what this film is like.

Why have a burger when you can have steak?

Director Sam Firstenberg, who made the film Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, doesn’t seem much bothered by things such as continuity or moving the camera. Everything is directed in a flat unengaged style, which doesn’t help to hide the cheapness of the production.

I saw The Alternate over a month ago, and it has taken this long to actually type up the review because I was so utterly bored by it. On the Millennium Films website, they list the film, but do not provide a trailer. I cannot say that I blame them.

Good movie, bad movie or beer movie: Bad Movie

[Robert Girvan]

The Silencers

Cost: £1.26

Tag-line: The government denied they exist. The men in black are among us!

Sample dialogue: “So, you’re the human responsible for my delirious ride…”

There was a wonderful period some time between the late-80′s and mid-90′s when, for just a small amount of money, a Hollywood film director was able to smash up as many cars and blow up as much shit as he wanted, with hardly a single computer generated effect in sight.

The advent of CGI, while often lauded for making stunts and spectacle much cheaper, seems to a layman like me to have done the opposite. Recent stunts combining on-set vehicular destruction and CGI wizardry in films like Drive Angry, Transformers and Fast & Furious (I’m specifically thinking of the nonsense with the rolling oil truck) manage to be ludicrously expensive while looking fake as shit.

How great it is then, to discover a director like Richard Pepin, whose peak was in the early Nineties with a string of action B-movies, with the emphasis heavily on the action, at the expense of just about everything else.

Pictured: Action. And nothing else.

Take, by way of example, his hugely ambitious sci-fi conspiracy adventure The Silencers, which hit the shelves of video stores around the world in 1996. With what was, I’m sure, a fairly modest budget, Pepin adopted a very respectable strategy – don’t waste money on the script or on any big name movie stars. Spend it on car chases, gun fights and great big explosions.

To suggest that the plot of The Silencers doesn’t make sense would be unfair. The huge amount of exposition expunged in the five minute interludes between action sequences (only half of it in English, the rest in some invented and subtitled alien language) probably plugs up the plot holes about as well as you could hope. It’s difficult to say. After the first cow gets zapped into the air and hauled into a sinister space ship you’re probably going to stop paying attention to little things like plot.

"Ha-ha-ha! Did you see that bit with the cow? What the fuck are we even watching this shit for?"

In broadest possible terms, there are several members of an alien race called the Marcabians living in secret on Earth, in cahoots with the US government to open a portal to their own world and covering up all their evil deeds by masquerading as ‘Men In Black’, turning up at the scene of UFO sightings and wiping the memories of all involved.

We first see the MIB’s in action at a farmhouse in 1966, where some little green men have just murdered the male farmer and made off with one of his cattle, in that order. The cow, for her part, seems nonplussed. When the MIBs turn up, appearing out of a shimmering haze in a black sedan, they tell the farmer’s widow “This never happened”. Then they’re away again. I’d love to be able to tell you this prologue has any relevance for the rest of the film, but it doesn’t.

The movie doesn’t really kick off till we meet secret service agent Rafferty (Jack Scalia), assigned to protect a Senator attending a church choir performance who’s been receiving a whole heap of death threats. If I were a Senator receiving shit-loads of death threats, I might just go ahead and skip the church performance, but this chap won’t be dissuaded. He’s only been in the church a matter of moments though, when a team of heavily-armed assassins burst in, led by the evil alien Lekin, who looks and dresses like Michael Jackson circa ‘You Rock My World’.

Hey, we'd all like to just forget this happened. Amiright?

What follows is the first of many extended, over-the-top action sequences, as Rafferty’s men face off against Lekin in hand-to-hand combat and gunfights within the church, out on the street, into a shopping mall, finally climaxing on a runaway subway train (because when the senator your assigned to protect is under gunfire, the obvious thing to do is hurry him onto some public transport and just forget about the ten or so limos sitting right outside). As I said, it’s an ambitious film.

And if you enjoy that, you’re gonna just love the nearly ten-minute-long highway chase, as the MIB’s black sedans and helicopters descend on Rafferty’s military convoy (delivering a super secret payload), switching lanes into oncoming traffic and wrecking what feels like fifty cars in the process. It’s deliriously smash-happy stuff. The kind of action scene I would frequently create on the rug with my own toy cars when I was 5, but never got to see so accurately and lovingly recreated on film.

It's better than this photo makes it look. Seriously.

At the end of this exhausting sequence, Rafferty appears to be the only survivor, when out of the wreckage comes Comdor (Dennis Christopher), the super-secret payload I mentioned. Comdor is a noble warrior from another alien race, sent to Earth to defeat the evil Marcabians. At this point, The Silencers gives up almost any pretence to being a gloom-laden sci-fi conspiracy thriller and becomes a mismatched buddy movie, with Rafferty and Comdor teaming up to take down Michael Jackson, Clarence Williams III’s plastic doppelganger and anyone else connected to the Marcabians’ invasion plan. Hooray!

If I sound like I’m being remarkably kind to The Silencers, that’s only because the film is so much damn fun! For all the exposition-heavy clunk, it employs a very successful formula, which demands that every five minutes of dialogue scenes be followed immediately by five minutes of explosions, car chases and gunfights. And once Rafferty and Comdor are introduced, the dialogue scenes become much more bearable. Dennis Christopher genuinely puts his all into the role as the endlessly polite and enthusiastic Comdor, ridiculous as he is, while Jack Scalia… well, Jack Scalia can scream “NOOOOO!” really well and cocks a cynical eyebrow like nobody’s business.

See?

There’s plenty of stuff here that’s not great. The plot is ridiculous, the dialogue stupid, the acting, (beyond Christopher) is pretty terrible. The action, too, while hyper-energetic and always well-shot, is often not very well edited, leading to some pretty confusing sequences, though for anyone familiar with modern frenetic chop-editing techniques this is nothing new.

But there’s just so much going on and it’s all as entertaining as holy hell. I’ve not even got space to go into the sub-plots about Rafferty’s home life, the hot journalist working to uncover the conspiracy, the second act detour into a ufologists convention, or the infuriatingly hypocritical scene where Comdor is disgusted by the sight of Rafferty’s young child playing with toy soldiers. After all, Comdor, he’s just a kid playing a game. You’re the one who’s shot about forty people dead in the last two hours. Be disgusted with yourself!

"ACTING!!! I'M AAAAAAAAACTING!!!!"

Worse yet is his pious lecture to the kid about finding things other than GI Joe to entertain himself: “Bobby there are so many things that you could play besides war games and pretend killing. There’s books and art, science and music. There are so many things.”

“But that’s boring,” says Bobby. And good for him. Nobody needs a stern talk about pursuing more intellectual pass-times in a film where you’re never more than five minutes from another gunfight. Don’t damn yourself, The Silencers. There’s plenty of people who’ll do that for you. Be proud of yourself. Books, art, science and music may be boring. But this ain’t.

Good movie, bad movie or beer movie: Beer movie

[John McNee]