2019: After the Fall of New York: Don't Jaw With Anyone Who Won't Identify Themselves

The early ‘80s was a tough time for Italian exploitation cinema. The spaghetti western had long since rode into the sunset, audiences had become tired of increasingly nonsensical gialli by the mid-1970s and directors were finding it tough to top Fulci’s Zombi 2 for carnage and atmosphere. Then, suddenly, there was a windfall – The Road Warrior and Escape From New York were released the same year (1981), and Italian schlocksters were once again seeing lira signs.

Enter Sergio Martino (Torso, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Ward), whose meal ticket was punched when gialli were no longer chic. Although he was not the first director to capitalize on the post-apocalyptic epic, he was easily the best, as 2019: After the Fall of New York, his first foray into the genre, is the stick by which all other bad post-apocalyptic cinema should be judged.

Honestly, where do we begin with this one? It’s probably one of the nuttiest b-movies to ever come down the pipeline. Our story begins with the standard ominous text introduction, which informs us that yes, we did in fact nuke ourselves into oblivion, and that the superpowers have separated into two groups – the Pan-American confederacy, and the Euraks, or European-Asian union, who are responsible for this whole mess (it’s never the Americans, y’know). Furthermore, the human race is extra-fucked, as the women were all rendered sterile by the radiation. The credits roll over a very obvious model of a ruined New York City, setting the tone for the rest of the model work in the movie (and there’s a LOT of it).

The hero of the day is Parcifal (a poor man’s combination of Snake Plissken and Mad Max, played by the awesome Michael Sopkiw, of Massacre in Dinosaur Valley fame), who quit his work for the Pan-Americans to freelance in the American Southwest, winning loot by battling in demolition derbies involving bargain-basement automobile rejects from the sets of the Max films. He gets picked up by the confederacy and taken to their top-secret Antarctic base (another model!), where he is given little choice – he must sneak into New York City and rescue the last fertile woman on the planet, accompanied by the mysterious Bronx (“the strongest man in the confederacy”) and Ratchet (“a virtual map of New York City”).

Now, this is where the movie gets really crazy, as once they hit the city, they get into one wacky Eurotrashy adventure after another. They do battle with a Warriors-cloned street gang in an abandoned bus yard, meet and are captured by a colony of rat-eating mutants in the sewer, are forced to escape from Eurak HQ, run into a gang of midgets, run into ANOTHER gang, this time of guys who wandered off the set of Planet of the Apes, who are led by the always great George Eastman. They also have to escape through the Lincoln Tunnel in a DIY armored station wagon. After the apocalypse, the tunnel was apparently outfitted with glowing spikes and deadly guarded barricades.

Whew.

Everything about this movie is incredibly cheap, but it just looks so cool and imaginative that I couldn’t help but fall in love with the visual style. This type of movie reminds me of exactly why I love films done on shoestring budgets so much – they inspire wild creativity through compensation. I would rather watch this than the latest sterile, forgettable Michael Bay or Jerry Bruckheimer actioner any given day.

2019: After the Fall of New York is truly a movie that must be seen by anyone who claims to be a fan of b-cinema or science fiction. The pace never lets up, and the director knows what’s important in exploitation movies – giving the audience what they paid to see!

BLANKET STATEMENT ALERT – If you do not appreciate this movie, you are not a fan of bad cinema. In fact, I could re-watch this one more often than The Road Warrior or Escape From New York. Yes, they are better-made movies and are awesome in their own right, but I don’t care. On a side note, I couldn’t help but be reminded of this movie as I was watching Children of Men. This movie was released in 1984. The P.D. James book on which Children of Men was based was published in 1992, and the movie came out in 2007. Coincidence?

Is this movie worth your $2?:
UNEQUIVOCALLY - YES YES YES! It’s worth your $20. Own it! Love it!

Urban Justice: Seagalz in the Hood

In some ways, DTV Steven Seagal movies are the cinematic equivalent of an abusive relationship. Each one is terrible, but the next promises that things will be different. They never are, yet we find ourselves returning again and again. We want to make-up with you, Seagal, we really do!

This proves to be the case with Urban Justice, Seagal’s latest DTV affair. For all practical purposes, this one promised to be different more vehemently than before - finally, it was to be Seagal’s return-to-form after a slew of utterly execrable phoned-in DTV garbage. The criticisms from his dwindling fanbase are always the same – Seagal has gained too much weight, forcing him to rely on body doubles to film his fight scenes, he doesn’t do his own dubbing, the plots are sometimes changed after the movie has been made, the movie titles are no longer prepositional phrases. It has been a long, hard fall for the man who brought us entertaining antisocial brainlessness like Marked for Death and Out for Justice. Bad movie fans like us reminisce on the days when he took pride in knocking a scumbag’s teeth out with a cue ball wrapped in a towl, hacking off hands with meat cleavers and bending arms the wrong way.

So why, pray tell, did we expect Urban Justice to actually deliver on that mythical comeback? For starters, the plot was more in tune with his old movies – a bitter cop, bent on revenge. Many of the reviews online claimed that this time, Seagal actually seemed to care. “He isn’t badly dubbed! There’s lots of gore!” they trumpeted. Yes, he had still been enjoying a few too many carbs, but damnit, here was the quality that one comes to expect from action movies, especially those boasting our stoic, pony-tailed hero.

Steven Seagal is Simon Bannister, which isn’t anywhere near as tough as “Gino Felino” or “Mason Storm” (previous nom-de-plumes), but we can let it slide. His son, a cop, makes some discoveries and is ready to blow the whistle criminals in high places, which leads to his murder in a seedy East L.A. neighborhood at the beginning of the movie. As expected, Simon moves to the ‘hood to unravel the network of corrupt cops (really, it was just one cop - that's all the budget could afford) and low-rent drug pushers that did his son in. Along the way, he befriends a stereotypical “thug with a heart of gold” and the woman who owns the liquor store where he rents his room, who for some bizarre reason pops up during the movie’s final showdown. The villain is Undercover Brother’s Eddie Griffin, who chews through the scenery with gusto, but offers little in the way of screen presence or menace. He's a far cry from William Forsythe and Henry Silva.

There’s certainly not much characterization to be had here, but this is a Steven Seagal flick; the least we can hope for is some good sadistic violence. Unfortunately, it doesn’t deliver much of that, either. The action sequences are pretty darkly-shot, and this problem is compounded by that awful jerky shot-on-digital feel that many a bad cinema fan has come to hate. Most of the much-hyped gore in the movie looks to be some very obvious CGI. Physically, Seagal appears worse than ever here; yes, Charles Bronson had a really beat look to him, but it just doesn’t work for Steven – once again, the weight definitely is a negative factor. The dialogue and acting are dreadful, as well - try not to squirm in your seat when Seagal is using ebonics!

Urban Justice proved to be a tedious, by-the-numbers cop action movie. It may have been better than his other recent movies, but it’s nowhere near the level of entertainment that On Deadly Ground can provide.

Is this movie worth your $2?:
Buy yourself coffee instead, or just rent Out for Justice again.

In Hell: Van Damme finds his (Shawshank) Redemption

Along with Urban Justice, Seagal's latest shame, In Hell was part of our Christmas Eve DTV action movie marathon. When you're reviewing DTV Van Damme movies, you expect the crap detector to be working overtime. The Order, for instance, was more embarrassing to co-star Charlton Heston than that infamous Bowling for Columbine interview.

Why did we actually have hope for this one?

In Hell is directed by Hong Kong director Ringo Lam, who made several choice Chow Yun Fat films, which were every bit as good as "those" movies by John Woo. Classics like Full Contact, School on Fire, The Wild Search and City on Fire (Reservoir Dogs cloned City blantantly) were entertaining, if not somewhat derivative. More importantly for the purposes of our review, he made two excellent prison movies - Prison on Fire and its sequel.

That isn't to say that Ringo’s armor is not without its damage. He has still made excellent films in the last few years in Hong Kong, but it's going to be really hard to live down those two previous Van Damme misadventures. Not just two Van Damme movies, mind you, but a pair of Van Damme TWIN movies. The second of which, Replicant, is very much worth renting for Jean-Claude’s soul-searching commentary track. If you've ever wanted to hear the muscles from Brussels waxing about his declining career over a really bad sci-fi movie, look no further!

The plot here is simple - Van Damme is an American (with a strong accent) living in Russia. When his wife is murdered and the killer gets away on a technicality, the Dammster pulls out a gun and vetilates the guy right outside of the courtroom, winning him a life sentence in a brutal prison. The sadistic warden (where have we seen this before...) gets his kicks forcing the prisoners into "last man standing" fights, taking bribes to allow one prisoner to rape another, hanging people from handcuffs, putting them in "the hole" - you know, the usual exploitation movie prison shenanigans. There's also a pretty blatant Shawshank Redemption / Green Mile rip in the form of Van Damme's cellmate (football player Lawrence Taylor) and some amazing "Van Damme as Christ-figure" sequences. A scene featuring our star covered in blood, spazzing around on the ground and screaming maniacally had us in stitches. Thanks to these contrivances, it can be easily argued that this movie is basically a cross between Shawshank Redemption and Death Warrant, an earlier bad-action-in-prison Jean-Claude flick.

Predictability factor aside, In Hell is actually a solid film. We were not laughing as much as we usually do during these sorts of things. It's brutal, has some good fight scenes and Van Damme actually gives a decent performance, as his dialogue is kept to a bare minimum. Attention, future directors: the key to casting Van Damme and still turning out a good movie is to KEEP HIM FROM TALKING. We like dark films, and it has to be admitted that this one got pretty fucking bleak when Jean-Claude was Van Dammaging his head by slamming it against the cell wall. This is before the sadistic warden forces him into a fighting ring, mind you.

Jean-Claude has progressed some from being the guy doing the splits in every movie, or showing off his spandex-coated moose knuckle to his confused male fans. Out of all of the DTV action fodder that seems to pop up on a weekly basis, his movies tend to be the most watchable of the lot.

Is this movie worth your $2?:

Yes, for fans of bad action who yearn for the days of olde. Ringo Lam’s bleak prison movie gets an above-average performance out of a cheesy action workhorse and is leaps ahead of most other DTV action fare. Come to think of it, it's better than most of the action movies that get released to theaters nowadays.

The Losers: Bikesploitation Takes Nam by Storm

Also known as Nam's Angels, The Losers is a curious movie. How in the world could someone make a movie about Hell's Angels being conscripted by the U.S. for a secret mission in Vietnam boring? I'm not sure, either, but director Jack Starrett did just that. A quick look at his career over at the IMDB finds only one classic Blacksploitation film - Cleopatra Jones - and a few episodes of the Dukes of Hazard. Stellar.

While the plot is not exactly clear (there's a lot of boring expository dialog), we gathered that a mealy-mouthed American VIP is thrown into a Cambodian prison. The U.S. military's only option, it seems, is to give the mission to a gang of bikers called the "Devil's Advocates," one of whom sports a neon-green bandanna with a swastika drawn on it for most of the movie. It seemed as though they were veterans, but the movie didn't really do a good job of explaining this.

The Advocates ultimately spend most of their time making themselves tempting targets for the V.C. by zooming around the warzone in their motorcycles and hooting, chugging beers and smoking opium with prostitutes. I don't know if you could call this movie a cross between Easy Rider and The Dirty Dozen (it's not even on the same planet of filmmaking as those two), but I suppose that was the goal.

Most of the screentime is swallowed up by forty minutes of uncomfortable romance between the bikers and native women. While I'm sure all this crap was made to show that the boys were goodhearted and add some emotional weight to the proceedings, I simply wanted the battle to ensue. When it finally does come, the bikers have their motorcycles souped-up with mounted machine guns and missile launchers.

Is this movie worth your $2?:
The final battle, while not as steeped in mayhem as it could have been, does succeed somewhat, but it's not nearly enough payoff for making the audience suffer through so much dull "plot." This film is no Eastern Condors (stay tuned for review), but it's probably worth a rental to any bikesploitation or Vietnam War movie completists. We must point out that The Losers does feature one of the finest slow-motion gut punches ever committed to celluloid when a fat hesher gets punched with a satisfying "thwack" in mid-beer chug, causing said liquid to eject from his mouth.

Silent Rage: A Master’s Class in How NOT to Make a Film

On the surface, making a hybrid of the first two Halloween movies, Frankenstein and Walker: Texas Ranger sounds like a brilliant idea. How can anyone of discerning taste NOT be intrigued by this tagline: “Science created him. Only Chuck Norris can stop him.” Chuck Norris in a slasher movie sounds great, right? Wrong.

There are two separate films at work in Silent Rage, and neither of them is particularly good. The first revolves around a sweaty, axe-wielding psycho who, in the opening scenes, does the viewing audience a favor by chopping up a shrill woman who runs a boardinghouse. This “suspense” sequence, like most in the movie, is incredibly tedious and without any vestige of the emotional impact that is required for the audience to actually be in suspense. After being taken down by officer Norris, who basically gets his ass kicked in the process, the psycho is shipped off to a hospital where doctors, lead by real-life rightwing zealot Ron Silver, are strangely desperate to save his life. After he flat-lines, they inject him with a Reanimator-esque concoction that gives him superhuman strength and allows his wounds to heal almost immediately.

Following this, we suffer through heaps of trite dialogue and a completely different plot (apparently, the director thought that boredom would heighten the suspense). Chuck Norris is your average small-town cop, charged with keeping the rednecks down at the local drinking hole in line in a bad fight scene thrown like a bone to fans to make up for the fact that absolutely nothing seems to happen in this movie. I think it’s fair to say that Silent Rage makes cinematic history by having the most stereotypical, bumbling deputy sidekick of all-time, who provides out-of-place comic relief. I mean, this guy makes Barney Fife look like Dirty Harry. Not only is this guy bumbling, but he makes you uncomfortable when his first site of naked breasts makes him fall in love.

45 minutes of going to the bathroom, getting a drink, making food and watching the clock later, we FINALLY get back to the psycho killer, who begins to cut a path of destruction through the town and hospital. There are several slashings, a needle in the neck and lots of killer’s POV shots and minimalist synth music stolen straight from the Halloween movies. After another drawn-out, devoid-of-suspense chase sequence, Chuck finally manages to take him down. Fin.

Is this movie worth your $2?:
With the above-mentioned tagline, it’s obvious why we chose this. We reserved this section to talk about the movie’s one saving grace – a love story between Norris and a townie, who also happens to work at the hospital. This subplot allows for a jaw-dropping romantic montage, culminating in one of the most disgusting sex scenes that we as battle-scarred bad movie vets have yet seen. Chuck romances said woman by inviting her to his pad, taking off his shirt, draping a towel over his hairy chest and then throwing some porno music on the stereo (literally). This, alone, is worth your rental fee.

Seagal's Belly

There are two kinds of action movies – high-quality, intelligent action films such as The Professional, The Killer and Bourne Identity - all films that I love. Then, there are action films like Invasion USA and Commando, which are mind-bogglingly great in their over-the-top badness. Belly of the Beast may strive to be in the first category, but it remains in the “so-bad-they’re-great” realm with other Seagal milestones like On Deadly Ground, Out for Justice and Under Siege. I have watched a lot of Steven Seagal films (note: I call them films). While Exit Wounds was not as bad as Cradle to the Grave, my man has been going downhill since Fire Down Below. The "EPA with a license to kill angle" worked for me there, even when he was jamming with the awful country band at the county fair - this scene has to be witnessed to be understood.

There are lots of rules for bad action heroes to follow when their careers need boosts. Now that Seagal has gone to a Hong Kong director for help, the only thing left for him to do is a movie where he fights himself. Van Damme has been fighting himself for years; get with the program! The good news here is that Seagal got the best fight director possible. Ching Siu Tung, the man behind the action of Hero, Duel to the Death, The Killer and countless others would certainly be my top choice for fight scene choreography.

This time around Seagal is a recovering CIA agent whose daughter has been kidnapped by “terrorists,” forcing him to travel to Thailand to find her. Yes – the plot is as ridiculous as your average bad action-outing. As a low-brow action film, I found myself enjoying Belly of the Beast. If you can suspend your critical facilities and enjoy this kind of schlock, you will, too. I am sure many die-hards hated the showdown scene with the monks, but I thought it was original and even somewhat interesting, to say the least. It reminded me of Chinese Ghost Story (Ching Siu Tung-directed). It was also ballsy to have Muslim terrorists be innocent of the movie’s kidnapping, and to have the CIA behind it instead. For the uninitiated, Seagal is also the man who wrote a script implicating the CIA in the creation of AIDS; I can always appreciate a writer who blames the CIA for the world’s ills.

Unfortunately, the movie has some extreme drawbacks (outside of the fact that it’s a DTV action crapstravaganza). Belly of the Beast boasts an incredibly trite romance, tacked-on for hormonal action fans with Asian fetishes. Honestly, does anyone really believe that a young Asian woman would fall for a washed-up CIA agent with a gut nearly thirty years her senior and from a completely foreign culture? In addition, the body-double work has to be some of the worst I’ve ever seen since the Star Trek episode Enemy Within where Shatner fought himself. Every time Seagal leaps into action (aside from when he’s just shooting people, of course), he is instantly replaced by a much skinnier double whose face is always obscured. Seagal – dude – three words for you: DIET – EXERCISE - DISCIPLINE. I had a hard time with this, compounded by the fact that the movie is called Belly of the Beast. All in all, this was above-average DTV. If you’re a fan of bad action flicks, you could do much, much worse.

Is this movie worth your $2?:
Do you feel the need to keep up with the train wreck that is Seagal’s career? Seriously, though – there are some above-average scenes, good action choreography…nah, on second thought, it may not be worth your money...or your time.

UP NEXT: Silent Rage - starring Chuck Norris /The Losers - 1970s bikesploitation action epic