Doomsdayer

For every hero, there must be a villain. And, as the cinematic canon expands, the need for ever more colourful baddies – with grander and more ingenious schemes with which to threaten the world – only grows.

Bravely rising to this challenge, Hollywood has exploited every possible reason and unlikely motive for villainous skulduggery, giving us a memorable rogues’ gallery of scoundrels in the process.

We’ve had terrorists out for a spot of nuclear blackmail (think Art Malik in True Lies), disgruntled ex-employees out to avenge themselves with oriental elaborateness on their old boss (Javier Bardem in Skyfall), even attempts by intergalactic-beings to enslave the human race (Terence Stamp in Superman II). 

Why, we’ve even seen Nazi war criminals try to recreate the Third Reich by populating the world with infants cloned from Hitler (hats off to Gregory Peck in The Boys From Brazil, featuring a plot so epically bonkers you almost want it to succeed. Well, almost). 

So where could Hollywood’s dark, twisted imagination go next? Surely the pool of poisonous evil-doers intent on destroying the world has been exhausted?

Oh, happy day – it is not so. There does remain, it would appear, one last group whose potential for unspeakable evil has yet to be utilised on celluloid. A twisted coven whose veneer of respectability harbours a secret desire for global Gotterdammerung.

But who are these evil masterminds, I hear you ask? Well, let me tell you. They are…philanthropists.
Yes, that’s right: philanthropists. Do-gooders. Charity types. People with spectacles and no shoulder muscles. Who, according to Doomsdayer (2000), apparently want to tear the world apart – presumably between tea breaks and reading The Guardian.

Udo Kier: millionaire and mentalist

Meet Max Gast (Udo Kier): a millionaire businessman and bleeding heart liberal who has already spanked away great chunks of his fortune funding good causes aimed at preventing disease, protecting the environment, promoting global peace and saving furry little animals.

Nothing to worry about there, you might think. But unfortunately, the world’s population are proving to be an ungrateful lot. And, much to Gast’s frustration, they’ve continued waging deadly conflicts and plundering the planet’s resources.

Now, men of more limited imagination would simply mutter bitterly about the ingratitude of mankind, put away their cheque book and get on with racking up a few more ka-squillion quid.

But our Max isn’t afraid to think big, and instead conceives of a bigger and altogether more radical plan. The basic idea, taken from page one of the Megalomaniac’s Guide to Really Getting Your Point Across, is thus: to create, first one must destroy.

To this end, Gast develops the ‘doomsdayer’ – a device capable of causing the simultaneous meltdown of every nuclear weapon and power plant on Earth. According to Gast’s wonky logic, the few thousand souls who manage to survive the subsequent cataclysmic Armageddon will be so chastened by the experience, they will build a new, better world - one more in tune with his own utopian vision.

It’s a lot to take in. And if you’re struggling to get your head round the rotten madness of this idea, just try and imagine Bill Gates suddenly deciding: ‘To hell with curing polio, what I really want to do is blow everything up, kill billions of people, and keep my fingers crossed that somehow magically solves everything‘. Think of it as a kind of ‘control, alt, delete’ moment for the human race.

Fortunately, a secret security unit run by the United Nations learns of Gast’s plans. Naturally, given the literally world-threatening nature of the evil plan, they opt for a softly-softly approach and send their top agent Jack Logan (Joe Lara) to infiltrate Gast’s base and stop the launch of the ‘doomsdayer’.

Cool African poster design

With a villain this unlikely, it’s obviously going to take one hell of an actor to sell the whole lunatic premise to the viewer. Luckily, in Udo Kier (Blade, Iron Sky), Doomsdayer has the perfect salesman for the job.

With an eerie, aloof demeanour, Kier delightfully portrays his character’s slowly-pickled evil.  His mellifluous German accent and purring delivery are wonderfully complemented by his pale grey eyes, which have all the humanity of a paving slab.

There’s an excellent scene early in the film where Kier chairs what turns out to be the final (in fact, very final for some) meeting of his charitable foundation. After running through its assorted failures, he outlines with chilling placidity his ‘doomsdayer’ scheme to the assembled trustees.

The earnest charity types are naturally appalled and start to protest. But Kier – having no further use for them – has had the forethought to poison their drinks. Before they can start droning earnest objections to his homicidal scheme, they all slump down dead on the boardroom table. It’s a hell of a way to chair a meeting. I guess they should have read the agenda more carefully.

Unfortunately, the vivid camp of Kier’s performance contrasts sharply with the hero, here played by Joe Lara. He’s a thoroughly bland presence. In fact, he rather started to remind me of a toaster: something that pops up every couple of minutes with a dry, plain, and unutterably dull product.

Still, aside from saving the world, Lara does serve one useful function in the film – and that’s to help explode that all important helicopter.

Trying to break into Gast’s headquarters, Lara is discovered and pursued by the villain’s private army. To stop the pesky protagonist, Gast despatches his attack helicopter – the sexily named Black Widow.

The rather white looking 'Black Widow' chopper

Quite why the chopper is called the Black Widow is somewhat mysterious. Not least because said whirlybird is completely white in colour. Anyway, the viewer has little time to quibble over this as the chopper fires a succession of rockets at Lara, who tries to escape in a truck.

It looks like only a matter of time before our hero is cremated. But luckily, the Black, White or Whatever Widow is fitted with a remote control, the purpose of which (like the confusing colour of the livery) remains obscure.

Still, said device does allow Lara’s buddy to hack into the chopper’s controls and command it to dump all its fuel. Sans petrol, the pursuing chopper plummets from the sky and crashes into the ground. No more Black Widow.

Artistic merit

Disgraceful. Despite an impressive amount of pyrotechnics throughout the film, the producer’s piggybank was clearly empty by this point.

Given that they couldn’t even afford a coat of paint to make their white helicopter look a little more, well, black, there was obviously little prospect of them being able to afford to blow the thing up properly.

To avoid showing a crash or explosion, the director cuts to what’s supposed to be the view from the helicopter’s cockpit. We see trees rushing towards the camera, while some poorly dubbed in, off-camera voices shout in fear, before we cut to a generic explosion which we‘re supposed to believe is the helicopter exploding. 

It’s a sorry, shoddy, sequence. In the general canon of chopper fireballs, Doomsdayer stands out as a larcenous crime, a permanent stain on the rich tapestry of cinematic helicopter explosions. Shocking.

Exploding helicopter innovation

The destruction of remote-controlled helicopters is not without precedent. We’ve previously seen it in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cloning thriller The 6th Day and dire sequel Lawnmower Man 2.
But in the Black/White Widow, we do have the destruction of the most misnamed helicopter of all-time – a first of some sort.

Positives

Time was that no car chase would be complete without one of the pursuing vehicles smashing into a petrol tanker that just happened, with startling convenience, to be pulling out of a side road. This generic trope provided the perfect excuse to deliver many an audience-pleasing huge explosion.

Sadly, there then came a time, around the mid-Nineties, when even Hollywood – never usually overly embarrassed on the subject of clichés – felt even they couldn’t get away with that one anymore.

So, imagine my retro delight when Doomsdayer served up a superb, late example of the art, having a car crash into a fuel truck which was inexplicably parked in the middle of nowhere. Some pleasures never get old.

Negatives

Brigitte Nielsen or possibly Dolph Lundgren in drag

Brigitte Nielsen plays Gast's wife and co-conspirator in the ‘doomsdayer‘ scheme. Unquestionably a striking beauty in her Eighties heyday, the Teutonic Titaness always had an imposing physique which made her look just a little bit like a man.

Made at the turn of the millennium, there's noticeable rust round the Nielsen chassis. It’s probably the last time we see Brigitte before her looks completely disintegrated into the ‘Dolph Lundgren in drag’ look we know and love today.

Favourite quote

I loved this statement of the bleeding obvious when a top brass military type answers a telephone call in a packed conference room: “Yes, Prime Minister…Certainly, Prime Minister…Of course, Prime Minister…At once, Prime Minister.”

Grizzled general then replaces handset, before announcing to the surprise of no-one: “That was the Prime Minister.”

Review by: Jafo

A Good Day To Die Hard

…aka A Bad Day To Go To The Cinema.

Expectations were never high for the fifth instalment of the Die Hard franchise – Bruce is getting old, and the basic premise was creaking badly even last time round – but this risible tosh is a whole new kind of bad. It’s the cinematic equivalent of being tea-bagged by portly, minor-bothering Liberal MP Cyril Smith for and hour and a half. Only worse.

Given Willis’ age, they’ve inevitably gone for the ‘lost son’ angle. The what, you ask? Basically, this means the producers have employed a young beefcake to do all the ‘action’ stuff that Bruce, as the nominal star of this action movie, is meant to be doing.

(Anyone who saw Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, and witnessed the unedifying sight of Harrison Ford gingerly treading about in the background while the always-punchable Shia Lebouf threw himself under lorries and off cliff ledges, will recognise the form.)

The story, as always, involves our chrome-domed hero blundering unawares into the middle of bullet-strewn bedlam. This time, Bruce goes to Moscow to rescue his son, who’s been arrested as a terrorist but is really a top secret agent. Yippe-ki-CI-Yay, in fact.

Obviously, everything starts blowing up as soon as Willis sets foot at the scene, then the usual terrorists-apparently-wanting-nuclear-armagedon-but-really-just-thieves-after-all plot (copyright: Alan Rickman, 25 years ago) cranks into gear once more.

Exploding Helicopter has no idea who the actor playing the son is, having never seen him in a movie before. And on this evidence, it may well be some time before he troubles our screens again. Indeed, one of the less bearable aspects of the movie is watching the estranged pair’s torturous journey from flinty awkwardness to ‘I love you too, Dad’, delivered on both sides with a copper-bottomed lack of conviction.

But here’s the really troubling thing: the more the son punches and shoots and falls and gets stabbed, the louder grows that nagging, existential question: what does an action hero do when he has next to no action in his own movie?

Bruce Willis: Occasionally acts in his own movie

The answer: stand around uncomfortably while occasionally firing a machine-gun or delivering yet another lame quip. That’s largely why this is such a terrible movie. These days, Brucie chirping ‘Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker’ (yes, he does) has all the grace and novelty of Chesney Hawkes getting up at a pub karaoke night to belt out ‘The One and Only’.

Put it this way: if you showed this film to someone who didn’t know who Bruce Willis was, they’d wonder who that old bald guy was who kept standing around in the middle of all the scenes?

He’s become like one of those drunk fans who run on to the pitch in the middle of a Premiership game – right in the centre of things but not really part of it at all. Aged 57, he’s a spectator in his own movie and it’s painful to watch.

And sadly, no-one else is there to take up the slack. Granted, they probably cast an unknown as the son because the famously prickly and egocentric Willis didn’t want a younger star stealing his fading limelight, but you could always at least count on a colourful baddie in the Die Hard movies. The absence here of a ‘name’ villain speaks volumes about the franchise’s decreasing power. Where Rickman and Irons led, there’s now an assortment of beardy Russians from central casting. Nyet, thanks.

Incredibly, Willis has already confirmed there will be a Die Hard 6 – and it won’t necessarily see that it will end there. Mock if you like, but one day you’ll most likely pay good money to see Die Hard 9, where Bruce’s no-name grandson biffs the baddies while a wheelchair-bound Brucie, looking entirely like one of his own octegenerian testicles, pulls off his oxygen mask and yells ‘Yippee-ki-kolostomy-bag!’

The weird thing is, that would probably be more entertaining than this steaming pile of ordure.

Exploding helicopter innovation

So, to the explosion. It might be pertinent to warn there are spoilers ahead, but it’s doubtful anyone could ruin the plot any more than the writer already has, so let’s plough on.

The beardy Russian conscientious objector incredibly turns out to be the baddie, so – in a moment typical of the film – the no-name son gets shot and does the actual legwork of throwing him off the top of a building in Chernobyl (don’t ask) while Bruce skulks off camera somewhere having a fag / phoning his agent / demanding a bigger trailer.

Beardface plummets to a splatty end. Outraged, his sexy villainess daughter gets all Al Quaeda on our heroes’ asses and deliberately rams a huge military helicopter straight into the glass-fronted building where they stand helpless. And misses them. As the chopper smashes in to the building and explodes, Bruce and No-name jump out beside it and naturally land in a swimming pool that happens to be directly below them. The whole scene looks like the computer-generated nonsense it so patently is.

Positives

Do you know this man?

For the first time ever, Exploding Helicopter actually fell asleep for five minutes in a cinema during this movie – and has to report it was the most fulfilling five minutes of the whole enterprise.

Negatives

How long have you got? Let’s just do the script. Exploding Helicopter has seen a lot of bad movies, both blockbusters and small fry, but never one where such a huge budget has been coupled with such a piss-poor script. It makes The Chronicles of Riddick look like Citizen Kane. Every single aspect of the plot is so by-the-numbers, it seems to have been written by a computer programme – possibly an Amstrad home computer, circa 1985.

Special mention goes to the scene where Bruce starts emotionally unloading to a Russian bloke he’s literally only just met about how he wishes he’d been a better dad but still can’t express his paternal love, while the lumpen son listens in round the corner trying to pull off a ‘looking emotional’ expression. I’ve seen school plays with more conviction.

Favourite quote

“You know what I hate about Americans? Everything.”

Interesting fact

In the week of the UK premiere, Bruce put in a notoriously foul-tempered tour of British TV and radio studios, snipping at interviewers and petulantly refusing to answer questions across a variety of formats. It all sounds much more interesting than the film.

Review by: Chopper

The Losers

New comic book adaptations come around quicker than Usain Bolt searching for the stadium toilet after a particularly spicy Vindaloo. Following that trend comes The Losers (2010), a tongue-in-cheek actioner from the Vertigo stable, a company who make comics for people old enough to have moved on to real books by now.

The Losers are not a bunch of spandex clad superheroes though, but a crack commando unit declared M.I.A for a crime they didn’t commit. These men promptly aim to get revenge on their C.I.A superior after returning from Bolivia to the Los Angeles underground. Today still wanted by the Government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem hiring The A-Team on DVD, maybe you can hire, The Losers.

The motley crew consist of rugged platoon leader Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan looking like Raul Julia’s long-lost son), a no-nonsense black guy (Idris Elba as Roque), a good looking ladies man (Chris Evans as Jensen) and a crazy, wise cracking pilot (Columbus Short as Howling Mad Murdo….sorry…Pooch).

Is this set up ringing any bells for you? It should be, because The Losers is a transparent attempt to cash in on the A-Team template with clearly defined squad members screwed over by the system and aiming to clear their names (albeit with noticeably less panache).

Unfortunately, no amount of flashy direction, courtesy of Sylvain White, or high production values can mask the fact that this is a misfiring, derivative actioner with as much charm as a case of Chlamydia.

If you have a problem hiring The A Team on DVD,
maybe you can hire The Losers

For once though, the chopper explosion isn’t just there as eye candy, but an integral part of the “story”. After a botched attempt to take out a Bolivian drug lord the team inadvertently stumble across a gaggle of child slaves who they decide to rescue from his compound. There isn’t enough room in the evac-chopper for the entire group, so The Losers do the decent thing and let the kids fly off first.

For reasons not clearly explained evil C.I.A honcho Max, then decides to kill off The Losers once the drug lord is dispatched. Thinking they are on board the chopper, he orders it to be shot down. A missile is launched from a passing fighter jet which snakes across the sky and arrows towards the helicopter with only one possible outcome.

Artistic merit

This is a very nicely framed set piece. Shot from the ground, you see the tiny jet in the corner of the screen fire its missile. We follow its trail as it snakes across the sky into the large Chinook on the other side of the screen. The missile thuds into the fuselage and the explosion bursts the chopper apart like a ripe orange, its fiery contents spilling in slow motion to the ground below.

There are some nice shots of The Losers picking through the charred debris and finding a burnt up bunny rabbit belonging to one of the kids, you know, just to ram home the pathos. Overall, it’s first class helicopter explosion.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan, or possibly
Raul Julia

Having sat through countless hours of indigestible boloney – including two more hours here - I have come to the conclusion that the quality of a helicopter explosion is inversely proportional to the quality of the film. The boffins at Exploding Helicopter HQ are crunching the numbers as we speak to establish if there are any cold hard facts to back up my hunch. We will keep you posted on the results.

Exploding helicopter innovation

Nothing much really. Whilst it’s very nicely done, it’s a standard missile vs helicopter face off done with CGI (you will do well to see an old school honest to goodness explosion these days such are the quality of computer effects in modern cinema).

Do passengers survive?

All 25 Bolivian refugee children are blown to pieces in an agonising, fiery death. Still, what a pretty way to go eh?

Positives

Visually the film is very easy on the eye with a strong colour scheme that emphasises its comic book credentials. The action is well staged and the final showdown is ludicrous but attractively presented in all its CGI finery.

Negatives

Much of the dialogue is desperately unfunny and formulaic “paybacks a bitch, we got a situation here” stuff. The actors would have got more laughs had they recited an FSA report on financial mismanagement in the banking sector.

This isn’t helped by Jason Patric as C.I.A kingpin Max who was a badly misjudged piece of casting. Neither quirky, evil or funny enough to be a villain, you feel he took a wrong turn at the set of Nip/Tuck and ended up here by accident.

Idris Elba has made some curious choices since his break out performance in The Wire. His roles have been very hit and miss and proven beyond doubt that the real star of that show was writer/creator David Simon.

Ever the optimists, writers Peter Berg and James Vanderbilt left room left for a sequel.  Fortunately the movie underperformed at the box office and hopefully it will never see the light of day.

Sample quote

Jensen: Legless Pooch and I are on it!
Pooch: Call me 'Legless Pooch' again, and you're gonna be 'Headless Jensen'
Jensen: I think it's a cool name, makes ya sound like a pirate.
Pooch: Ya mama's a pirate.

Interesting fact

Even though various scenes from the film are set in Bolivia, Dubai, Mumbai and L.A. respectively the bulk of the movie was actually shot in Puerto Rico.  The producers managed to save money this way as the country’s variable terrain doubled up nicely for the jungle, desert, beach and city scenes needed.  I was in P.R. in November and can strongly recommend the rum.

Review by: Neon Messiah

Green Zone

Many men have a man crush on Matt Damon. By many men, I of course mean me. Now that I think about it, it’s not so much a man crush on Matt Damon as it is Jason Bourne. A lone wolf assassin possessed with superhuman abilities, fighting his own demons as well as the entire CIA – but underneath it all, a good man, a man of his word and ripped. Who doesn’t have a crush on Bourne?

But sadly this isn’t a review of Jason Bourne (I’m still to find the niche film review site that will let me write lengthy homages to everyone’s favourite blank faced, amnesiac killer) but it’s not far off though.

Directed by Paul Greengrass, who also helmed The Bourne Ultimatum (the third instalment in the series), Green Zone (2010) features Damon playing a character that has more than a trace of Jason Bourne: Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller is a tough, relentless and hard man, in a race against time. Nothing will get in his way, not even jerky, handheld camera work.

The plot is an interesting premise and based on a collection of real life events relating to the US invasion of Iraq and the search for weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Roy Miller heads a team tasked to search WMD sites based on CIA and military intelligence. After turning up potless several times, he begins to dig deeper into the source of the intelligence, an Iraqi insider codenamed Magellan. What he uncovers is a deal brokered with a senior Iraqi general who confirmed the absence of WMD and has kept quiet in return for a place in the ‘new Iraq’ after the invasion. Instead, he ends up becoming a patsy for the conspiracy and on the Army’s deck of playing cards as a key figure for kill or capture.

So begins a race to get to him first. It’s a conspiracy within a conspiracy, if you will. Miller wants to find him and expose the knowingly false reasons for the invasion; meanwhile, Jason Isaacs’ special ops commander Major Briggs – in cahoots with a Pentagon puppeteer played by Greg Kinnear- is out to kill him. There’s a suitably weary and battle hardened look about all of them. Isaacs, in particular, appears to come straight off the set of Black Hawk Down, and grown a Village People themed handlebar moustache on the way.
It’s a well shot movie with an intriguing premise.

It’s also excellently cast – Yigal Naor who plays General Al-Rawi (Magellan), will be familiar to many for his portrayal of Saddam Hussein in the BBC/HBO House of Saddam mini-series. He is to Middle Eastern army generals what Danny Trejo is to South American street villains.

However, there’s a problem at the heart of it all. The film constantly flits between action blockbuster and a thought provoking, fact based, political thriller. Is it Syriana? Or is it an extension of Bourne? It’s confusing. I recall once seeing the Russell Crowe vehicle Master & Commander described as ‘Maximus Gets A Boat’. Green Zone suffers from the same problem. It smacks of ‘Bourne Goes To Iraq’ or ‘Bourne Hunts WMD’.

Still, Greengrass knows how to explode a helicopter. When Miller finally manages to find Al-Rawi in a hostile part of Baghdad, he’s hotly pursued by Briggs and his special ops team, including a unit in an attack helicopter. Al-Rawi flees and Miller pursues through the streets at night, whilst Briggs and his team close in, all the while watched by the helicopter overhead. With Miller getting close to the general, the ‘copter moves to intercept when Iraqi fighters appear on a rooftop with an RPG….

Artistic merit 

It scores pretty highly. The RPG catches the helicopter flush on the mid-tail section, sending it cartwheeling across the night skies above a Baghdad suburb. There’s a terrific looking explosion as it clips two rooftops and then disappears out of sight. This wasn’t done on the cheap.

What happens next?

An angry mob of local fighters armed with automatic rifles, converge on the unseen crash site, while Miller watches them from his hiding place. When one group of rebels screech to a halt in a hatchback and run off towards the downed chopper, Miller immediately makes a dash for the car – and takes the opportunity to steal a Peugeot 205. It’s as if all those years on a Moss Side council estate finally paid off for Major Miller. The chase scene in the car is tasty although patently copied from the Bourne films.

Exploding helicopter innovation

None at all. RPG is probably the weapon of choice for rotor kill. And even the average cinema goer will recall similar scenes of an American military helicopter spinning across a dark foreign city. That’s right – Black Hawk Down was an entire film dedicated to this premise.

Positives 

The sight of Matt Damon, tough marine, pinching a Peugeot 205 and joyriding through Baghdad is really quite entertaining.

Negatives 

A confused mix of genres. It’s clearly a well-researched film based on some incredible real events (see below) but would have benefitted from choosing either more action or more intrigue.

Parting thought 

The background real events that inspired the film are worth reading up on. I haven’t read the book that the film was based on (Imperial Life In The Emerald City), but the Magellan character was based on a real CIA insider in Iraq known as Curveball, realn name Rafid Ahmed Alwan.

As a supposed chemical engineer within the Iraqi nuclear program, he claimed to offer details of mobile WMD labs in return for political asylum – this was a key component of the reasons for invasion. His testimony was soon discredited by German, British and American intelligence agencies, and he was shown to be a wholly unreliable source (his friends described him as a “congenital liar” and it was suspected that he was an alcoholic).

Yet despite these concerns, his claims appeared in over 110 US government reports relating to the Iraq war, including Colin Powell’s speech to the UN. Alwan later admitted that he had lied and the CIA acknowledged that he was in fact a con artist with some engineering knowledge but who actually drove a taxi in Iraq. If it wasn’t true, it would be funny.

Review by: Jindy

Meteor Storm

Watch the Syfy Channel for long enough and you’ll likely end up writing your will, kissing your loved ones goodbye and then getting very, very drunk.

That’s because their film output almost exclusively features doomsday scenarios where the Earth is faced with imminent destruction by a natural disaster of some far-fetched description.

Over the years, this enterprising channel has churned out just about every possible permutation on a disaster movie genre. From tornados, floods, ice ages and earthquakes to brimming volcanoes, there isn’t an apocalyptic set-up that hasn’t been exploited to instil some end-of-days’ anxiety in to the long-suffering viewer.

Having thus exhausted all earthly possibilities, the geniuses behind Meteor Storm (2010) turn their gaze to the stars for inspiration. And for this particular movie, camera-friendly San Francisco has become the target for the titular deluge of space rubble.

But as destruction is wrought on the city, the scientific and military bigwigs tasked to deal with the crisis quickly realise there’s an even bigger problem: the bothersome meteor storm is merely a prelude to a jumbo-sized space rock that could send the entire human race the way of the dinosaurs.

Will homo sapiens become extinct – or will a way to avert disaster be found? Frankly, a way to avert disaster will in all likelihood be found.

Having made so many of these doomsday films, the Syfy Channel has by now finessed a basic story template into which any new disaster can be simply inserted. It’s a one-story-fits-all approach to movie-making.

So imagine the audience’s lack of surprise when the film’s heroes turn out to be an estranged husband and wife who, in having to work together to save the world, decide that ‘Hey, if we can save the planet, maybe we’ll save our relationship as well’. Maybe they’ve seen Twister…

And if these loathsome lovebirds weren’t enough to contend with, they predictably have some irritating progeny whose only role is to put themselves into entirely avoidable jeopardy.

Michael Trucco looks as interested as I was watching

Also phoning in a performance is the obligatory minor character who, for no obvious reason, can’t help but be obnoxious and callous. Yes, he does suffer a fatal asteroid-related accident. I know, what were the odds?

And yet, despite being the product of a well-oiled story machine, this is a strangely tame effort. Oddly, for a film first and foremost about the end of the world, the meteor storm only ever feels like a minor inconvenience in the lives of the characters.

Mom and Pop, for example, seem more concerned about their daughter‘s new boyfriend than the end of civilisation. Well, what’s the fate of six billion people compared to whether your little girl’s been playing hide-the-salami with the school football captain?

The whole film seems bone-achingly tired, wearily trudging through the genre tropes with the enthusiasm of a condemned prisoner thrown a shovel and told to start digging his own grave.

Against such a depressing backdrop, I was in desperately hoping the helicopter explosion might in some small way redeem the film. Unfortunately, I was cruelly wrong.

What happens is this: trying to figure out why the meteors are exclusively targeting San Francisco (other than a mediocre filming budget), a bunch of boffins head off in a chopper to take samples from the fallen space rock. As they fly back to base, they’re hit by some astrological debris and crash-land.

Or at least that’s what I think happened, because all this occurs off-screen. Presumably as a result of budgetary constraints, the viewer only arrives at the scene after the helicopter has crashed – having been first filled in on events via a radio report.

We do at least arrive in time to see the chopper smouldering whilst the occupants are pulled from the fuselage. Conveniently, after everyone has made it to a safe distance the helicopter explodes.

Artistic merit

Truly abysmal. The helicopter doesn’t explode so much as become obscured behind a curiously green-hued CGI smudge. It’s so brief, you can only assume that even the filmmakers were embarrassed by the utter poverty of their efforts.

Exploding helicopter innovation

As loathe as I am to give this film any credit, this is still the first known destruction of a helicopter by a meteor.

Do passengers survive?

Yes. As the helicopter crash-lands prior to explosion, there’s time for all passengers to be rescued.

Positives

In an otherwise turgid production, I did enjoy the gung-ho General in charge of the military response. He spends the entire film demanding a full-scale nuclear assault on the meteor, repeatedly barking: “Get me a missile firing solution now!”

His rabid aggression reminded me of George C Scott’s bonkers Commie-hating General in Cold War classic Dr Strangelove. It’s almost as if he believes the whole situation has been cooked up by the Russkies and, were you to cut open the meteors, a hammer and sickle would run all the way through them like a stick of communist Blackpool rock.

Negatives

Where to start? The acting? The script? The direction? The special effects? Every aspect of this film is uniformly awful.

Favourite quote

“Gentlemen, it’s my theory that the entire Bay Area was created by an asteroid strike from millions of years ago.”

“That may explain the Bay Area’s historically bad cell phone coverage.”

Interesting fact

Not that interesting, but Meteor Storm shouldn’t be confused with Meteor Apocalypse released in the same year.

Review by: Jafo

The Swarm

So here we are: not so much a disaster movie, as a disastrous movie.

The Swarm (1978) is a film of such unspeakable awfulness that director Irwin Allen, scarred by the critical and commercial evisceration it received, banned anyone who worked with him from ever mentioning its name again.

Even The Swarm’s star Sir Michael Caine, one of the towering figures of bad cinema (and a man, incidentally, who makes no apology for Jaws 4: The Revenge), considers this the worst film he has ever made.

But before we speak about the disaster that is the film, what about the disaster it’s meant to depict?

As the film’s title suggests, the source of terrifying peril are bees. Not your honey-producing, flower-pollinating common or garden variety, but deadly African killer bees.

So, when a swarm of the lethal insects invades the USA, Caine’s top entomologist – or bug expert to the uneducated likes of you and me – is put in charge of saving the day.

Not a premise entirely without promise, you might think – especially with Irwin ‘Master of Disaster’ Allen, the producer of The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno at the helm. Well, you’d be wrong. Very, very, wrong.

The film barely begins before taking the first of many catastrophic mis-steps. We enter the story with the swarm having overwhelmed a nuclear missile base. The military personnel lie dead and America’s nuclear arsenal sits unguarded and unmanned.

The nadir of Caine's career. Not a lot of people know that.

Having seen the cutting edge of Uncle Sam’s weapons technology rendered useless by one blistering attack, the viewer giddily waits to find out how the drama will be escalated.

Will there be a nuclear meltdown? Will the bees head for Washington to continue their assault on the USA’s military infrastructure? Perhaps they’ll take over the White House and transform it into a massive hive from which they can busily – and buzzily – rule the country?

No. Instead, Allen has the bees – and all the action – lurch sideways to a small, white picket-fenced town that, with ill-timed misfortune, just happens to be holding a flower festival.

Rarely has tremulous expectation been scythed so swiftly. One minute we’re worrying about the readiness of the United States’ intercontinental ballistic missiles, the next it’s all about whether the town’s mayor will have to call off the begonia competition.

This non-development is symptomatic of the way the film blindly staggers about under Allen’s scattergun direction. His previous disaster epics had the sense to confine their drama within, respectively, the walls of a burning tower block and an upturned cruise ship.

In this movie, without the natural constraints of a tight location, Allen seems clueless as to whether he should be providing grand spectacle or keeping the danger up close and personal.

Such confusion results in a unholy hodge-podge of scenes, seemingly from entirely different films. The story jack-knifes from large-scale destruction at a nuclear power station and the ensuing deaths of thousands, to picnickers impotently trying to fight off the swarm with a can of fly spray they‘ve puzzlingly packed along with the cheese triangles.

"It's behind you!"

This ever changing kaleidoscope of calamity simply serves to emphasise how none of the action is either a) frightening or b) remotely believable.

The whole thing enters through-the-looking-glass territory when our heroes, not content with having the deadly bees to deal with, start to inflict entirely avoidable disaster upon themselves.

For example, take the scene where Henry Fonda’s saintly old Professor – the only man in the world who can develop an antidote to the bee venom – tests out an experimental cure on himself. And promptly dies. Wasn’t there something a little less irreplaceable – a hamster, maybe – they could have tested it on first?

Or how about when the bungling soldiers, trying to fight off a bee attack, set fire to their own headquarters by using flame-throwers indoors. Like, totally, duh!

The same dunderheaded idiocy again rears its head in the exploding helicopter sequence. This occurs early in the film, before the nature of the threat has been established, when a couple of military helicopters encounter the swarm.

Unsure what to make of the black, buzzing mass in front of them, the hapless pilots naturally decide against trying to ascertain the potential threat from a safe distance. No, instead the gung-ho aviators choose to fly headlong into the swirling unidentified phenomenon.

While this recklessness does indeed allow the pilots to correctly identify their enemy as bees, the manoeuvre predictably causes an unspecified aerodynamic problem for the helicopters. The pilots lose control and the choppers plummet from the sky, crash into the ground and burst into flame.

Artistic merit

If you ever wanted to see a Airfix helicopter kit blow up, then this is the film for you’ve been waiting for.

Without any CGI, the filmmakers had to rely on scale models to create their special effects.

So, as the small plastic chopper meets its fiery demise, one should spare a little sympathy for the poor bugger who must have spent painstaking hours intricately gluing together the flimsy model. His handiwork is only briefly seen before the special effects team to blow it all to smithereens.

Sadly, it’s one of the least convincing chopper explosions on record: even the ground and the plant-life looks totally wrong.

Exploding helicopter innovation

Without doubt, the first known apiary-related destruction of a helicopter.

Positives

The single positive aspect of The Swarm is that it is so epically bad. Such ripe terribleness has a richness that elevates the film’s copious failings to the level of high art.

The only way to truly appreciate what a Herculean achievement of appalling awfulness this film is to watch it.

Negatives

That thought that repeatedly nags away at the back of your mind for much of the film, as death and disaster lays waste to whole communities, is this: why didn’t people simply stay indoors and keep their windows closed? Amazingly, despite the presence of so many top scientists and military generals, no-one ever seems to have thought of this.

Favourite quote

In a film filled to brimming with lumpen dialogue, my favourite exchange comes right at the end of the film. Caine’s plan to stop the bees involves luring the swarm out to sea where the army intend to blow them up. (Please, don’t ask.)

To do this, Sir Michael fits out a couple of helicopters with megaphones through which he intends to broadcast a special frequency the bees will be helplessly drawn to. Aware of the ridiculousness of such cod-science, the scriptwriters try to make a lame apology and have Caine’s helper say: “Won’t the noise of the helicopter drown out your sound?”

Caine’s reply is majestic: “No, it’s on an entirely different sonic level.”

Oh, okay. That’s alright then.

Interesting fact

Real bees were used to film The Swarm. Legend has it that Sir Michael, upon finding small yellow blobs on his clothes during filming assumed it was honey and began eating it, unaware that it was actually bee excrement.

Having inflicted this cack on the world, it’s probably only fitting that he had to eat some too.

Review by: Jafo

Still want more? Then listen to the Exploding Helicopter podcast on The Swarm. Listen on iTunes, Podomatic or YourListen. 

The Secret Agent Club

Success breeds imitation. In Hollywood this means that, whenever a big box office hit rakes in the readies, it is swiftly followed by a slew of thinly disguised, cheap and cheerless knock-offs.

So when the Arnold Schwarzenegger spy caper True Lies became a global mega hit, originality-adverse Hollywood producers rushed to cash in, and The Secret Agent Club (1996) was born.

Inferior in execution and ambition, the film steals True Lies’ central premise, re-works it as a kids’ film, and replaces Arnie with Z-grade action star Hulk Hogan – possibly the only man alive who could make the lumbering Austrian look like Sir Laurence Olivier.

Hogan plays Ray Chase, the remarkably unlikely owner of a toy shop, who appears to be living a dull and innocuous life in small-town suburbia. When he isn’t selling water pistols and whoopee cushions, he’s the klutzy and bumbling father to Jeremy (Matthew McCurley) to whom he’s a permanent embarrassment. However, quelle surprise, Hogan’s day job is merely a cover for his secret life as an agent for a shadowy intelligence service called, erm, SHADOW.

Inevitably, Hogan’s private and professional lives become messily entwined when his efforts to retrieve a deadly laser weapon from a campy villainess (Lesley Anne Down) go awry. And when she takes Hogan captive, it falls to the Hulk-ster’s son and his pre-teen friends to rescue him and the weapon.

So, just to summarise: where True Lies offered Jamie-Lee Curtis frolicking in her drawers and being genuinely funny, this film gives you a bunch of highly punchable pre-teen brats. Genius.

The story limps along like a three-legged dog, the action having as much bite as a toothless chihuahua. In fact, if this film were a dog, most viewers would surely have little compunction about taking it for a long, one-way walk in the woods.

Hogan, in particular, reeks to high heaven. Rarely has so awkward a screen presence ever graced the silver screen (and remember, this is someone whose performance – by definition – is here being measured against that human oak-tree of inexprssion, Schwarzenegger). Slowed by his muscle-bound body and advancing years, he labours through each progressing scene with the grace and subtlety of a collapsing building.

That said, Hulk does bank some credit for being the only unapologetically bald action star. Not for him the designer pates of Bruce Willis or Vin Diesel – whose grade zero shaves almost look cool. No, Hogan frames his folically-challenged scalp with a lustrous, blonde mullet. Sir, we salute you. In many respects, the peroxide mullet gives the best performance of the movie.

Curiously, for such a flawed film, the supporting cast are surprisingly good. As the chief villain, Lesley-Anne Down eats up her role with pantomime gusto, providing what little entertainment there is to be gleaned.

There are also game performances from Jack Nance as a mad scientist, Barry Bostwick as a double-dealing secret agent, and the ever reliable James Hong. It’s just a pity the flaccid script gives them so little to work with.

The exploding helicopter scene opens with Lesley Anne Down auctioning off the laser to a roomful of terrorists and war-mongering dictators. (No, George Bush and Tony Blair aren’t present, before you ask.)

To demonstrate the weapon’s unique power, Down incinerates an expendable member of her retinue. (I hear he was a trifle slow circulating the canapés at the pre-auction soiree, but I digress). Unimpressed by the casual murder of a mere underling, one of the assembled audience of evil-doers calls for a more substantive demonstration.

Irritated at having the credentials of her wares questioned, Down walks to a nearby balcony and fries the baddie’s helicopter, which is parked in the courtyard outside. “I’ll guess you’ll be walking home now,” she quips.
Artistic merit

In common with much else in the film, this scene is entirely bereft of both artistry and merit. We don’t witness an explosion so much as a white cloud of smoke, which partially clears to reveal some non-descript, easy-on-the-budget wreckage.

Frankly, it was only professional diligence that made this reviewer watch the whole film. And had I realised at this point that there would be no further helicopter action, it’s unlikely the closing credits would have been reached. From woeful beginning to lamentable end, it is utterly uninspired stuff.

Positives

I'll have to get back to you on those.

Negatives

Jeremy’s friends – who band together to rescue Hogan – are the kind of central casting, identikit younglings (the nerd, the girl, the fat one, the cool one) that you’ll be familiar with from a thousand other teen-centric comedies and dramas.

Perhaps it’s just the advancing years, but I invariably find children in films irritating. Unless of course they’re tortured, killed and eaten.

Favourite quote

James Hong gets to utter the cod-Chinese proverb: “Even a one-legged man sometimes kicks butt.”

Interesting fact

The continuity in this film is risible. The most shockingly example comes at the end of the film when Hogan and his little helpers, attempting to escape from the villain’s lair, are confronted by Down.

All Hogan has to do to escape is blast Down with the laser. But suddenly the action jumps forward, missing out an entire sequence. We then resume the action with Down now holding the weapon, which has somehow been set to self-destruct.

How any of that happened remains a mystery to the viewer. Assuming they care by that point.

Review by: Jafo