...and then there's Footloose.

There's just not enough homoerotic dance montages in movies these days, not like in the 80's when you had Kevin Bacon teaching Chris Penn how to bust chick-winning moves like 'skipping' and 'forward rolls' to the incredibly manly tune of 'Let's Hear It For The Boy' by Denice Williams. Who could resist ?

Dispelling all doubts about how gay Top Gun is...

Rambo Trailer

Sooner than I expected, but eagerly anticipated, here is the first trailer from the upcoming Rambo movie, John Rambo. Enjoy.

Heath Ledger's Joker: First Pics

The first picture of the joker from next years Batman Begins sequel, The Dark Knight has been released as part of a subtle advertising campaign for Gotham City District Attorney candidate, Harvey Dent. The first ad shows the campaign poster and the second, a vandalised version that dissolves into the face of The Joker himself.

The plot summary for the movie, according to IMDB is:

'Batman and Lt. Gordan work together to bring all the inmates and Crane back to justice. They soon find alliance with the new DA official, Harvey Dent who's Rachel Dawes' new partner. Out of all the escaped inmates, only one hasn't been captured. His name is Jack Napier, but refers to himself as the Joker. He becomes obsessed with Batman and uses his sick, twisted sense of humor to lure Batman out into the open by killing all that are close to him. Will Batman Bring him to Justice or has the Joker had the last laugh?'

For batman fans, this should be a good one. Batman Begins was a return to the darkness started with the 1989 Michael Keaton Batman movie, which unfortunately got lost with the following Batman Returns despite writing input from Bob Kane himself. We won't even go into (or link to) the awful Batman Forever or Batman & Robin.

Long live the Christian Bale/Michael Caine Batman & Alfred partnership.

Rambo IV

The first few stills from the forthcoming John Rambo movie have been released. The premise behind this movie is that Rambo has been recruited by a group of Christian human rights missionaries to protect them against pirates. After some of the missionaries are taken prisoner by sadistic Burmese soldiers, Rambo gets a second impossible job: to assemble a team of mercenaries to rescue the surviving relief workers. Hell yeah. See the pics and the site that I stole most of this post from here.

In a Dark Underworld, Ruled by Fear...

Vaguely remeniscent of John Woo's 'The Killer' is this fiesta of ridiculous kung fu and explosions starring Jet Li, Jason Statham and the lovely Devon Aoki, this is War. Jet Li plays an assassin bent on starting the aforementioned war, presumably between two lots of bad guys, or one lot of bad guys and the cops (not that it matters) and Statham is a renegade FBI agent bent on getting revenge.

If you're not hooked by the time the first line of intro is done, then you must be gay.

Trailerama...

Rob Zombie Vs The SS She-Wolves

Whilst reading the Wikipedia entry for Rob Zombie I discovered the following reference:

Also in the song "Living Dead Girl", Zombie sings "Operation Filth they love to love the wealth of an SS whore making scary sounds." This is possibly a reference to the notorious 1974 film Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS,

I can only assume that this is where the inspiration came for the 'Werewolf Women of the SS' trailer he directed for Grindhouse (I'd be very surprised if it came from another source, there can't be many SS Were-Women movies out there.

Must get me a copy.

Grindhouse

As many ActionClub posts are becoming, this is not a review of an 80s Action movie, but 'Grindhouse' is so remeniscent of the era that it must have a mention.

This is the new Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez movie. Now, as you may or may not know, this movie is a two-part double feature with three trailers separating. First off is Rodriguez 'Planet Terror'.

PT is essentially a zombie movie centering around go-go dancer Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan) and her dark loner ex-boyfriend, El Wray (Freddie Rodriguez - usually, I would put links to all the cast mentioned, but these two movies are so heavily populated that it will take far too long - you'll just have to go the the IMDB 'Grindhouse' page yourself and check out the incredible cast). Without giving anything away, Cherry loses her leg and has an assault rifle fitted by Wray for zombie killing action. There is loads of silly gore, a sex scene interrupted by a 'missing reel' apology card, incredible performances by Bruce Willis (as Lt. Muldoon), Naveen Andrews (as a ridiculous criminal genetic engineer) and Tarantino himself (who comes to a suitably sticky end). All in all, it's great fun and accurately represents loads of terrible movies I remember renting out during the 80's.

As mentioned before, the two movies were split by three spoof trailers: 'Werewolf Women of the SS' directed by Rob Zombie (which can be seen below); 'Don't' directed by Edgar Wright (which came as a nice surprise, featuring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost) and 'Thanksgiving' directed by Eli Roth (who cameos in 'Deathproof'). Probably the best bit of the movie, but I won't spoil them by talking about them here. Needless to say, they are genius and complement the rest of the feature beautifully. The following is the whole of Rob Zombie's Werewolf Women trailer (spoiler alert).



After the interval comes Tarantino's 'Death Proof'. Kurt Russell plays the character of 'Stuntman Mike (who could almost be a pastiche of 'Snake' from 'The Simpsons'). DP is firmly split into two acts, both of which feature long scenes of characteristic Tarantino dialogue - by this I mean waffling that has little to do with plot and everything to do with character establishment. Sometimes taking a bit longer than they possibly should, contributing to making this the weaker of the two halves. Again, without giving anything away, Mike is a bad guy who gets his come-uppance just before the movie abruptly ends.

Rumour has it that Grindhouse is going to be split into two movies when released in the UK due to it's long running time of over 3 hours. Not sure why anyone would want do this as it is perfectly set up to have an interval in the middle, unlike some other freakishly long movies such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, JFK or the god-awful King Kong. If you do decide to see just one, I would recommend 'Planet Terror' but both are very entertaining and worth seeing.

Check out the official Grindhouse website and the trailer below.

Lost Boys 2: Loster Boys

Looks like filming is about to start on a long-anticipated sequel to the 1987 ActionClub favourite, The Lost Boys.

According to Moviehole.net and MovieWeb, Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangmans Daughter director P J Pesce is down to direct with an entirely new cast. Nothing to be found on IMDB yet though.

According MovieWeb:

'Titled The Lost Boys: The Tribe, this sequel will be one of Warner Brothers direct to DVD efforts. Shooting starts June 11th.'

Straight to DVD eh ? This sounds like it could go to either the 'utter dogshit' or 'cult classic' end of the ActionClub swingometer. Another love-it-or-hate-it in the making.

Be great if this one is the Lost Boys/24 crossover with an undead, blood-sucking Jack Bauer in the hunt for werewolves intent on destroying America. That would be cool.

Resident Evil in the Desert

I'm sorry that so many of these posts are non-80's based. This is the trailer for the next installment of the Resident Evil movie franchise, Resident Evil: Extinction. This time directed by Highlander director and pop video supremo, Russell Mulcahy (there's the 80s action connection for you) but still with original director Paul W S Anderson writing. Hopefully it'll be more Resident Evil than Resident Evil: Apocalypse.

It's all gone a bit Mad Max 2 by the looks of it, here s the official site and the trailer.

Collateral Damage

My favourite bit from the movie Collateral. Not strictly an 80's movie, but it was directed by Michael Mann who has his roots firmly in the 80s action of Miami Vice and LA Takedown and features one of the gods of the 80s movie scene, Tom Cruise. Great pistol work too from 'The Cruiser'.

Tribute to the work of John McClane

Happy Star Wars Day

May the Fourth be with you.

Lethal Weapon on Paper

Whilst surfing the world wide t'internet, I came across the script for Lethal Weapon so I thought I'd share it.

Digital Communism

Seen the 80's mini-series Wild Palms ? Think William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and Neal Stephenson are a pretty cool authors ? Like the idea of Apocalypse Now crossed with The Matrix ? If so, Harsh Realm is probably right up your street. Don't be mistaken in thinking that this is a Matrix rip-off though. This Chris Carter series was written and produced before The Matrix, but not released until three months after in 1999.

This is not the best thing that Chris Carter has ever written though, far from it. The X-Files and Millennium are both infinitely superior (although I can't say the same for the limp X-Files spin-off, The Lone Gunmen). HR is far from original. Fans of the cyberpunk genre will get a kick out of it despite weak characters and a thin plot as the eponymous 'Harsh Realm' is a textbook dystopian virtual reality society with the privaleged living inside a clean, prosperous mega-city at the expense of the less fortunate on the outside of the fence in the almost post-apocalyptic wasteland. In this respect it has a lot of similarities to James Cameron's Dark Angel in many ways. A great opening sequence and interesting symbolism typical of Chris Carter should, however, keep you watching.

Lost's Terry O'Quinn plays the series bad guy and Colonel Kurz-a-like, General Omar Santiago, and Max Martini (yes fols, that's his real name, sometimes known as Maximillian) from The Unit is his right-hand man and one-time best friend to the protagonist/hero, Lt Thomas Hobbes (Scott Bairstow). Also worthy of note is the cool, misunderstood sidekick with the shady past (I did say it was far from original), Mike Pinnochio (DB Sweeney, who has the coolest leg holster for his H&K MP5K).

If you give it the benefit of the doubt and sit back to watch the decent effects and think of it as a comic (it was heavily influenced, and (proven in court to have been) plagiarised from the graphic novel of the same name), then it an enjoyable nine episodes of well shot cyberpunk drama.

B-, could try harder.

Here is a link to an interesting Harsh Realm fansite and below is a clip from the first episode...