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

Lasko - Death Train

Monks have never been stars of the silver screen.

Mostly commonly sighted in historical dramas, they act as a kind of period window dressing – generally portrayed as stout, jolly fellows, whose love of God is only matched by their love of mead.

True, Asian martial arts films in the 70s and 80s often featured monks of the Shaolin variety, kicking god-fearing ass while dispensing cryptic wisdom (usually with a badly-dubbed English accent). But in Europe, monks have only ever had a marginal presence – the only notable contribution being period murder mystery, The Name Of The Rose.

So, it’s against this unpromising backdrop that we come to Lasko: Death Train (2007), a film which bravely smashes the stone tablets of convention and preaches a new gospel: a ‘monk cinema’ for the 21st century. Say it loud: I’m a monk and I’m proud.

Naturally, though, our hero – Lasko (Mathis Landwehr) – isn’t just any old monk: that would be boring. Our man is a member of a secret order of deity botherers - known as the ’Fist of God’ - who are dedicated to protecting the church.

Just as well, really. Because, while accompanying a train-full of pilgrims on a trip to see the Pope, Lasko only finds himself caught up in a plot of international intrigue after terrorists steal a deadly virus.

Attempting to make a covert getaway after their theft, the terrorists - led by Arnold Vosloo - hitch a ride on the pilgrim train disguised as monks and nuns. However, when their plan is discovered it’s up to Lasko to stop Vosloo before he can release the virus.

Now, you might think a monk trying to stop terrorists poisoning a train full of nuns and priests sounds like a disastrous cocktail. But while these ingredients really shouldn’t gel together, the film – in some crazy, mixed up way – works. Proof, if ever you needed it, that God does indeed work in mysterious ways.

Fittingly for a member of a secret sect called the Fist of God, Lasko is a supernaturally good martial artist, and you’ll be unsurprised to hear he’s given bountiful opportunities to demonstrate his face-pummelling prowess as he tries to foil the terrorist plot.

This though, presents a problem: how to reconcile Lasko’s devout religious faith with the need to get biblical on villainous ass? Fortunately the scriptwriters, aware of this contradiction – and showing no little knowledge of the Catholic Church’s stance on confession and absolution – permit Lasko to briefly regret each life he takes by making the sign of the cross over the body while looking mournfully into the middle distance.

So, to recap: meet baddie, punch baddie repeatedly till face resembles a tenderised steak, snap baddie’s neck like it was a cheese-stick, stand over corpse and look a bit guilty for a second. Are we all up to speed? Good. On such logic are the great religions of the world built.

Director Diethard Kuster craftily takes the opportunity to run with various religious motifs throughout the film. So when Lasko has to dispense a vaccine for the lethal virus amongst the passengers, he administers it via holy wafers. Not so much the body of Christ, as the anti-bodies.

Despite the bonkers premise, Lasko: Death Train is a thoroughly entertaining film. As Lasko, Mathis Landwehr has got good martial arts chops and the fights are excitingly choreographed. Appropriately for a train-set thriller, the whole thing rattles along enjoyably, building up a satisfying head of steam courtesy of a director who keeps the story on track throughout.

Of course, as fun as this film is, I wouldn’t be telling you about it unless it contained an exploding helicopter or, in this case, two.

The first comes when the police attempt to stop Vosloo escaping with the virus. They order in a helicopter full of commandos to storm and seize the train. As the chopper hovers above the moving carriages, the brave commandos slide down ropes to try and get onboard.

Unfortunately, the villains are prepared for this eventuality and have sneakily brought along a rocket launcher as carry-on luggage for their journey. One of the baddies leans out a carriage window and fires a missile at the chopper. There’s no time for the pilot to take evasive action and the helicopter explodes in a huge fireball.

The second moment of chopper carnage happens near the end of the film. In order to make his escape, Vosloo whistles up his own helicopter to whisk him off the roof of the train and to safety.

Naturally, Lasko isn’t going to allow this, so after also clambering up onto the train’s roof the pair proceed to have their long awaited showdown.

Unsurprisingly, Lasko prevails in the fight leaving Vosloo (the scoundrel!) to resort to dirty tricks. He pulls out a pistol – rather begging the question why he didn’t do this earlier – to shoot our hero. But Vosloo’s aim is inexplicably bad and, in attempting to kill Lasko, he succeeds only in haplessly shooting the pilot of the chopper hovering nearby.

Vosloo leaps onto the rope ladder dangling from the chopper, in the expectation that he’ll be flown away. But the mortally wounded pilot can only manage to dimwittedly steer the chopper into the path of the onrushing train. Ka-boom.

Artistic merit

These are two absolutely first class chopper fireballs. There really isn’t anything like watching the real thing, and here the extravagantly huge explosions are clearly executed using pyrotechnics and without the use of CGI.

The second fireball is especially praiseworthy as we get to watch the train plough into the helicopter and, moments later, its debris. Lasko: Death Train was nominated for best action in a foreign film at the Taurus World Stunt Awards and it’s not hard to see why.

Exploding helicopter innovation 

While the quality of the helicopter explosions are beyond dispute, they’re not particularly innovative. Chopper destroyed by rocket launcher is a routine method of destruction and, though rare, we’ve seen helicopters destroyed by trains before, most notably in Blue Thunder.

Do passengers survive?

At least two commandos survive the first exploding helicopter. Realising that the chopper they’re dangling from is about to be destroyed, a couple of the quicker-thinking soldiers jump from their ropes. Two of them can clearly be seen in a later shot examining the helicopter’s wreckage.

Positives

Some comic relief is provided courtesy of two pilgrims travelling on the train – one blind and one with gout – who remain oblivious to the drama unfolding around them through a series of escalating coincidences.

The pair bring to mind the great double act of Caldicott and Charters from Hitchcock’s own train-based thriller, The Lady Vanishes. In that film, despite the murder and kidnapping taking place around them, the duo are amusingly only concerned with getting back to London in time for a cricket match.

While not in that league, the pair here do entertainingly compliment the main story.

Negatives

Unfortunately, director Diethard Kuster decides to use the film’s opening sequence to prove he’s completed a correspondence course in editing from the Michael Bay School of Retina Damage.

This renders the first action set-piece – the theft of the virus from a Government facility – into a dizzying, whirling, jumble of epilepsy-inducing edits.

The effect is compounded by Kuster’s love of showing the same event taking place from multiple camera angles. It creates a kind of Groundhog Day feeling, where you begin to feel you’re trapped in a permanent loop of the same events.

Thankfully, it looks like Kuster exhausted even himself with this initial effort and he reins in the technique a little for the rest of the film.

Favourite quote

“Look I joined a monastery. I didn’t think I was joining a paramilitary organisation.”

Interesting fact

Proving that God’s work is never done, a spin-off TV series appeared two years later, which chronicled Lasko’s further adventures defending the church.

Review by: Jafo

Still want more? Then listen to the Exploding Helicopter podcast episode on Lasko Death Train. Listen via iTunes, Acast, Stitcher, Player FM or right here

Austin Powers in Goldmember

As Skyfall, the third Daniel Craig Bond film, provides a chopper fireball fix for cinemagoers, it seems an appropriate time to revisit the third of the 007 spoofing Austin Powers’ franchise.

Too tenuous a link? Perhaps. But the film does have the only ingredient necessary for a review on this hallowed website - the warming orange glow of a helicopter explosion.

We all remember Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997). The series debut was hilarious, lampooning the sexual innuendo, contrived plots and simplistic henchmen of the Bond franchise.

With the public hungry for more, a sequel seemed an obvious winner. However, with the best gags used up, The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999) quickly descended into puerile joke-making. They may have doubled the budget, but unfortunately they halved the humour.

It's against this unpromising backdrop that we arrive at the third installment, Goldmember (2002) which was presumably made for no other reason than a desire by creator/producer/writer/actor Mike Myers to have a final, pocket-lining, payday.

The story is simple. Blofeld parody Dr Evil (Mike Myers) hatches a plan to take over the world by using a "tractor beam" to crash a meteorite into the Earth, melting the icecaps and causing a global catastrophe of a scale normally only seen in Kevin Costner films (Waterworld, The Postman, et al).

To do this, he needs a key ingredient (that shares a name with popular Hemorrhoids treatment "Preparation H") from a Dutch scientist from the past, Johan van der Smut AKA "Goldmember" (Mike Myers again). However, Evil's plan is foiled early doors by British agent Austin Powers (take a guess, his initials are MM). Or so it would seem.

M equivalent, Basil Exposition, cock-blocks a potential threesome with Japanese twins to inform the newly-knighted Powers that his father, Nigel (played by the actually-knighted Michael Caine), has been mysteriously kidnapped. The only clue to go on is the Golden Members the kidnapper has painted on the overpowered guards. Can you guess who's behind this?

As the convolution reaches breaking point, Powers travels back in time (been there, done that in the preceding film), picks up Beyoncé as easily as she picks up the pay cheque for her role as Foxy Cleopatra, jumps back to the future, and after following a lead provided by Fat Bastard (played by, yes, you guessed it, Mike Myers) tracks down the recently-escaped Evil, Goldmember, and his Dad in order to save the day.

And if all that sounds exhausting you’d be right. Indeed, by the end, trying to follow the plot had become such a pain in the proverbial that I felt in dire need of Dr Smut’s Preparation H myself.

But you have to rewind to the opening scenes for the airborne explosive action. The film begins with what initially looks like an over-the-top action sequence. Actually it’s a fake trailer to "Austinpussy", a pretend Austin Powers biopic directed by Steven Spielberg.

It's a great moment of self-parody, with some brief but hilarious cameos from Tom Cruise as Powers, Gwyneth Paltrow as Powers-girl Dixie Normous, Kevin Spacey as Evil and Danny DeVito as Mini-Me.

As part of the sequence we see a chopper in pursuit of the motorbike-riding Dixie. Powers skydives out of a plane into his car, the Shaguar, in order to take care of the chopper and save Dixie.

Powers lines up the Shaguar to charge at the onrushing chopper, and then as it nears, launches into an acrobatic somersault - clearing the chopper and enabling him to fire at the bearded pilot, causing the helicopter to burst into flames.

Powers casually lands on the road by the rubble, before Cruise removes the glasses and utters the franchise catchphrase “Yeah Baby!”

Exploding helicopter innovation

Nothing special about the explosion, but the ridiculously implausible stunt does merit appreciation - the leap, somersault, gunfire combo, over an in-flight chopper. We know absolutely nothing about the reason why the helicopter pilot deserves to fall to a fiery end - we just know it's right, and bask in the resultant warm glow.

Positives

The opening trailer featuring the explosion is a genuinely enjoyable scene. I'm also sure I'm not the only one that has a soft spot for the shadow scenes from all three of these films. Simple. Childish. Hilarious.

Negatives

While a step up from The Spy Who Shagged Me, by the end you're left with the question of 'wouldn't it have just been better for everyone (other than Mike Myers) if this hadn't been made?' - the answer being a decisive 'Yeah Baby!'

Favourite quote

Nigel Powers: "There are only two things I can't stand in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures... and the Dutch."

Review by: Joseph Clift

Still want more? Then check out the Exploding Helicopter podcast episode on Austin Powers In Goldmember. Find it on iTunes, YourListen, Acast, Stitcher, or Podomatic.

Skyfall

The name’s Bond. Emo Bond.

Yup. Forget Brosnan’s lazy charm, Connery’s flinty coolness, crap Roger’s independently moving eyebrows. This time Sam Mendes – renowned for his emotionally wrought character studies – is in the directorial driving seat, so it’s all about 007’s angst and inner pain. We can only be grateful that Skyfall, unlike American Beauty, doesn’t open with our hero disconsolately cranking one out in the shower.

So, the story: Bond gets ‘killed’ in the opening scene (except of course he doesn’t) and cyber-terrorists steal a hard drive containing a list of secret agents’ names, which they then leak online. It’s Wikispooks, essentially.

We soon find Bond living in a beach hut, drinking heavily and even growing a beard to show us how much he’s really hurting inside. When the MI5 headquarters in London are blown up, he comes out the shadows so he can look pained and bicker with M (Judi Dench). During re-training, our struggling hero can’t shoot straight, fails the fitness tests and even throws a hissy fit during the psychological assessment. Are you getting the picture yet – he’s REALLY VULNERABLE, okay?

Given all this navel-gazing, Skyfall is unquestionably more talky-talky than most Bond movies, which in itself isn’t a bad thing. (Quantum of Solace, produced during the Hollywood writer’s strike, had about six lines of wonky dialogue). Most of the actors – Judi Dench, Ralph Fiennes, Rory Kinnear – are pretty solid. Young Ben Whishaw, as Q, is great in the single scene – a verbal joust with Bond – where he’s allowed to do more than rat-a-tat at a laptop, squeaking: ‘They’ve hacked into our system!’. (Note: this happens a lot.)

But we already knew Mendes could ‘do’ talking – the problem is he just isn’t really into the action stuff, and it shows. He’s the directorial equivalent of the brainy, speccy boy at school, and there’s a sense that the livelier scenes for him must feel like a double Games lesson in the rain.

Can't you see he's hurting, he hasn't shaved

A big set-piece in a Shangai casino is a massive damp squib. Filming the scene apparently chewed up entire weeks and millions of pounds, but somehow it’s arse-numbingly boring.

Bond simply breezes into the enemy’s lair, announces his real name, chats up the baddie’s girlfriend, beats up some henchmen, narrowly avoids the obligatory deadly animals in a pit and breezes out again. So, when did that ever NOT happen? It’s all been done before with much more aplomb, and Mendes brings nothing fresh to the mix. It’s Karaoke Bond, essentially.

The movie’s big success is Javier Bardem, playing the bonkers, campish villain. He’s a truly bizarre sight, his big, meaty Spanish features topped with a straw-coloured wig that makes him look like a Catalan cousin of the late, unlamented Jimmy Savile. This unsavoury impression is heightened when he starts stroking a tied-up Bond between the legs. You half expect him to suddenly spout: “Now, then. Now, then...”

However, even a creature so magnificent as Jimmy Bardem is soon neutered by the lumpen direction and formulaic plot. Almost as soon as he’s introduced, the flaxen fanatic gets caught – with suspicious ease – and is taken to MI5’s new secret HQ. Once there, he trades insults with M, chews a bit of scenery then promptly escapes again. As Q helpfully exposites, while rat-a-tatting on a keyboard: “He’s actually been PLANNING this for years…”

Now, that shuffling, grating noise you can occasionally hear throughout this 20-minute sequence is the sound of Heath Ledger spinning in his grave, because the whole thing is a bare-faced lift from his identical stunt as The Joker in The Dark Knight. Except this time, obviously, the entire conceit is transparent from the outset – and thus a bit pointless.

Now then, now then, Mr Bond

However, it’s in the film’s final act that things really unravel. There are lots of uncertainties in the world, but one thing you could always count on was an explosive final half hour in a Bond movie, involving a huge set (preferably inside a volcano), hundreds of disposable extras, a cat-stroking maniac and some proper excitement.

Instead, Bond drives M to his bleak ancestral home in the Highlands so they can sort out his ‘mommy’ issues. There’s a misjudged, semi-comic turn by Albert Finney as the family retainer and, just as the movie should be cranking up to grand finale mode, the audience spends a full ten minutes watching what looks like out-takes from Emmerdale.

Finally, as night falls, Jimmy Bardem and a gang of goons arrive in a huge helicopter. It lands. The baddies jump out. They shoot big guns at the house, and Bond, M and Albert fire rifles back. The helicopter takes off again, ostensibly so it can resume shooting at the house, but really so Bond can blast it with a couple of gas canisters that happened to be hanging around in the kitchen (just next to the teabags).

Inevitably, the chopper crashes and a CGI fireball fills the screen, much as a palpable sense of anti-climax fills the mind of the viewer.

Exploding helicopter innovation 

Not much to report, really. Once hit, the big, Chinooky-type chopper slowly sinks and crashes into the side of the house, lighting up the night sky with a massive explosion. Mendes’ deft and realistic touch with an action scene is once more in evidence, as Bond and Bardem remain entirely unscathed by a huge volley of burning petrol and molten metal, despite standing right next to – and, in Bond’s case, virtually underneath – the unfortunate conflagrating vehicle.

Positives 

There are a lot of individual good scenes, and it’s a genuine pleasure to see talented actors in a generic movie raising the bar with more than the usual action guy tough talk…

Negatives

…but Skyfall often meanders and forgets that it is, after all, supposed to be a Bond movie. Despite all the critical hoopla, it reminded me in parts of Timothy Dalton’s discouraging turn as ‘new man’ 007 in the Eighties. Existential angst does not a good Bond movie make.

Favourite quote 

“Now, then. Now, then.” [Javier Bardem]. Note: I may have just imagined that, due to the wig.

Interesting fact 

What with Bond's 50th anniversary, Dame Judi's final turn as M, the celebration of British-ness theme, the celebrated home-grown director, post Olympics and Jubilee euphoria – this movie was never going to get anything other than a soft and comfortable critical landing. What most reviewers seemed to miss is that, for long stretches, it's actually pretty boring.

Review by: Chopper

Still want more? Then listen to the Exploding Helicopter podcast episode on Skyfall. You can listen via iTunes, Player FM, Stitcher, Acast or right here...

Deadly Prey

There are good films, and there are bad films. There are even ‘so bad they’re good’ films. And then there is Deadly Prey (1987).

This movie exists in its own universe. Like a comet, it hurtles past the Good and Bad constellations, briefly orbits planet So-Bad-It’s-Good, before exiting our galaxy for as yet uncharted regions of critical understanding.

But, lest we become lost in deep space, let us pause to consider the plot, which is very much rooted in our own earthly world.

In the backwoods outside Miami, a team of mercenaries – led by ruthless Colonel Hogan (David Campbell) – is rigorously preparing for a covert mission. To hone his soldiers into finely tuned killing machines, Hogan has adopted an extreme and unconventional approach at his training camp.

You see, the Colonel is the type of man who laughs at mere assault courses, who snubs his nose at bayonet-holed straw dummies. Not for him the tired fakery of pretend military exercises, oh no: Hogan prefers to keep it much more real and lethal.

In fact, his approach revolves around having his soldiers hunt and kill ‘runners’ – ordinary people kidnapped off the street and forced to flee for their lives in a secluded wood before they’re caught and killed.

The film opens with the latest ‘runner’ being easily chased down and murdered. Unimpressed, Hogan orders his men to head into town and bring back some fresh meat. By a huge coincidence, the elite mercenaries make the mistake of snatching Mike Danton (Ted Prior).

Unbeknown to them, Danton is highly trained ex-soldier and Vietnam veteran, who doesn’t take kindly to being used as glorified human bait. Instead of trying to scarper out the woods, Danton turns the tables on his kidnappers and starts to hunt them down, picking them off one-by-one.

So, given these kill-or-be-killed stakes, only one question remains: can Colonel Hogan and his mercenaries kill Danton, before Danton kills them?

Now, this may not sound like a plot that you’d need a PHD in astrophysics to understand, but – much like the mysteries of our solar system – Deadly Prey asks questions baffling enough to leave even Stephen Hawkins’ electronic voice box speechless.

Why, for instance, does Danton spend the entire film running around naked, except for a pair of skin tight denim shorts cut so short they verge on the pornographic?

Why, despite fighting for his life against a team of elite soldiers, does Danton decline to pick up a gun? I made it fully 49 minutes before Danton, having fought off numerous assailants, finally thinks to picks up a weapon. (Having said that, Danton had in fact killed 20 people by this point with relative ease, so maybe that’s a moot point.)

And why does Danton’s girlfriend, having seen him kidnapped and bundled into the back of a van, call – not the police or any other recognisable form of law enforcement – but her freaking dad, for heaven’s sake?

I know I ask these questions, but your time would be better spent searching for the origins of the universe than trying to find answers in the plot. With Deadly Prey it’s not so much a case of suspending your disbelief, as completely erasing it.

This is nowhere more evident than in the credulity-shattering scene where Colonel Hogan, examining the crumpled corpses of two of his men, is suddenly struck by a chilling realisation.

“I know this, I know this style… It’s my style… Danton? Mike Danton, it’s gotta be.”

“Know him?”

“Know him? I trained him.”

Really, where does one start? With the fact that Hogan and Danton just happen to be old foes from the army? That, by complete chance, they find themselves pitted against each other courtesy of a random kidnapping?

I especially enjoyed the in-no-way-unbelievable revelation that the Colonel can recognise precisely who killed the two men by the nature of their butchery. What did our hero do, carve ‘Danton wuz here’ into their abdomens? Utter piffle.

Still, for all its brain-dead tomfoolery, Deadly Prey is a thoroughly enjoyable romp, particularly when Danton tears about the woods employing the kind of advanced cub scout skills seen in First Blood or Predator.

Yes, the acting is universally horrendous but, combined with the lamentable editing which leaves everything happening a beat too slow, the film gradually begins to take on an odd, mesmeric charm.

This works best in moments of inspired gonzoid genius – such as when Danton severs an opponent’s arm during a fight, then uses the dismembered limb to beat him to a bloody pulp. It’s like the famous Monty Python and the Holy Grail black knight scene, only played straight – and all the funnier because of it.

So there’s certainly plenty to enjoy, and that’s even before we get to the exploding helicopter.

Intent on finishing off Danton, Hogan deploys a chopper to track down and kill the pesky veteran. Caught in open ground, it doesn’t look good for Danton as he desperately tries to evade machine gunfire from the aerial vehicle.

Finally, after ineffectually firing his own machine gun at the helicopter, Danton remembers his weapon is also fitted with a rocket-propelled grenade. One shot later, and Colonel Hogan has no more air support for his manhunt.
Artistic merit

One moment the chopper is there: the next it’s a dirty great fireball. It’s almost like they didn’t actually blow up a real helicopter. That’s low budget filmmaking for you.

Exploding helicopter innovation

First, and only, known destruction of a helicopter by a man wearing stone-washed, skin-tight denim shorts.

Positives

While it makes precious little sense, Danton’s refusal to pick up a gun until halfway through the film does have some benefits.

Sans gun, Danton has to improvise weapons and traps out of sticks, branches and whatever else is lying around the woods, making for some highly entertaining methods of despatching bad guys.

Negatives

The music in the film is bizarre. A keyboard heavy ballad, it sounds like the score for a daytime soap opera rather than a testosterone-fuelled, macho action movie. Again, cost considerations probably played a part in all this.

Favourite quote

Exposition is an art. When it’s done well, it can effortlessly give the viewer vital information about the story without getting in the way of scene. Conversely, when it’s done badly an actor can be left slowly chewing big chunks of indigestible dialogue.

Deadly Prey’s scriptwriters imaginatively opt for a third way and seek to short-circuit the whole process. So when Danton unexpectedly runs into yet another old army buddy, we get to hear the immortal zinger: “Mike Danton? I haven’t seen you since you took a bullet trying to save my life.”

Were there any other important details you needed about their relationship?

Interesting fact

The cult around Deadly Prey’s has steadily grown over the years. So much so, that it appears a sequel Deadliest Prey with Ted Prior himself is on the cards for next year.

Review by: Jafo