Tag Archives: Alonna Shaw

King of New York (1990, directed by Abel Ferrara)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Drug kingpin Frank White (Christopher Walken) has been released from prison and is again on the streets of New York City.  Frank might say that he’s gone straight but, as soon as he’s free, he’s  partying with his old crew (including Laurene Fishburne, Steve Buscemi, Giancarlo Esposito, and others).   While Frank’s agent (Paul Calderon) goes to all of the other city’s gangsters and explains that they can either get out of Frank’s way or die, three detectives (Victor Argo, David Caruso, and Wesley Snipes) make plans to take Frank out by any means necessary.  Meanwhile, Frank is donating money to politicians, building hospitals, and presenting himself as New York’s savior.

King of New York is the epitome of a cult film.  Directed by Abel Ferrara, the dark and violent King of New York was originally dismissed by critics and struggled to find an audience during its initial theatrical run.  (It was lumped in with and overshadowed by other 1990 gangster films like Goodfellas and Godfather Part III.)  But it was later rediscovered on both cable and home video and now it’s rightly considered to be a stone cold crime classic.  Walken gives one of his best performances as Frank White and that’s not a surprise.  The film was clearly made to give Walken a chance to show off what he could do with a lead role and Walken captures Frank’s charisma and humor without forgetting that he’s essentially a sociopath.  Walken gives a performance that feels like James Cagney updated for the end of the 80s.  What’s even more impressive is that all of the supporting characters are just as memorable as Walken’s Frank White.  From Laurence Fishburne’s flamboyant killer to David Caruso’s hotheaded cop to Paul Calderon’s slippery agent to Janet Julian’s morally compromised attorney, everyone gives a strong performance.  (I’m usually not a Caruso fan but he’s legitimately great here.)  They come together to bring the film’s world to life.  Everyone has their own reason for obsessing on Frank White and his return to power.  I’ve always especially appreciated Victor Argo as the weary, veteran detective who finds himself trapped by Caruso and Wesley Snipes’s impulsive plan to take down Frank White.  Frank White and the cops go to war and it’s sometimes hard to know whose side to be on.

Director Abel Ferrara has had a long and storied career, directing films about morally ambiguous people who are often pushed to extremes.  Personally, I think King of New York is his best film, a portrait of not just a criminal but also of a city that combines the best and the worst of human nature.  The action is exciting, the cast is superb, and Frank’s justifications for his behavior sometimes make a surprising amount of sense.  Thought there’s occasionally been speculation that it could happen, there’s never been a sequel to King of New York and it doesn’t need one.  King of New York is a film that tell you all that you need to know about Frank White and the city that he calls home.

 

Retro Television Review: Miami Vice 4.10 “A Rock and a Hard Place”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Mondays, I will be reviewing Miami Vice, which ran on NBC from 1984 to 1989.  The entire show can be purchased on Prime!

Sonny goes to Hollywood.

Episode 4.10 “A Rock and a Hard Place”

(Dir by Colin Bucksey, originally aired on January 22nd, 1988)

I guess I am going to have to accept that Miami Vice is no longer a show about two vice cops fighting a losing war against drug traffickers.  Instead, it’s now a show about an undercover cop who is married to a world famous rock star, even though it makes absolutely no sense.

In this episode, a tabloid reporter goes to Miami to do some research on this Sonny “Burnett.”  He hears a lot of stories about how Sonny Burnett is one of the city’s biggest drug dealers and he writes a story about it.  Sonny is upset, though one would think this would actually help him maintain his cover story.  Myself, I have to wonder how competent this reporter was.  Sonny Crockett has been established as having been a semi-famous college football star (Tubbs recognized him as soon as he met him) but no one ever seems to notice that Sonny Cockett and Sonny Burnett look, sound, and act exactly alike.  Considering the number of times that Crockett’s cover has gotten blown and that everyone who has ever done business with Sonny Burnett has ended up either getting arrested and gunned down by the police, you would think there would at least be some speculation about this guy being a cop.

(On a plus note, Don Henley’s Dirty Laundry played in the background while the reporter doing his thing.  That’s a song you can’t help but chair dance to.)

The majority of this episode dealt with a corrupt record executive (Tony Hendra) who was looking to get out of paying Sonny’s wife, Caitlin, the money that she was owed for her new album.  His solution was to have her assassinated and to make it look like she got caught in the crossfire of one of her husband’s drug deals.  Needless to say, it didn’t work.  Sonny gunned down the two assassins and then arrested the record executive.  “You’re a cop!?” the bad guy said, stunned.

And again, I have to wonder how this is not going to blow Sonny’s cover.  Is the press really not going to ask why Caitlin’s criminal husband just arrested the guy releasing her latest album?

This episode had all sorts of plot holes and it asked the audience to suspend their disbelief just a bit too far.  But at least it didn’t features Crockett and Tubbs searching for a stolen shipment of bull semen.  That’ll be next week’s episode!

(Seriously, I’m not kidding….)

I miss the old Miami Vice.  Seriously, the city’s drug business is probably booming because Crockett and Tubbs are wasting their time with all of this season 4 nonsense.

Horror Film Review: Cyborg Cop (dir by Sam Firstenberg)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In this 1993 film, John Rhys-Davies plays Professor Kissel.  The professor is a mad scientist with a German accent who has taken over a small island in the Caribbean.  From his compound, he has developed a process by which he can turn anyone into a cyborg!  The cyborgs follow his orders and …. well, it’s never quite clear what exactly Professor Kissel plans to do with the cyborgs.  I guess he just wants to keep them around so that they can do random evil things.

DEA agent Philip Ryan is captured by Kissel and transformed into one of those cyborgs!  However, Philip has a brother named Jack (played by martial artist David Bradley).  Jack used to work for the government until he was disillusioned when one of his investigations went terribly wrong.  However, Jack is willing to come out of retirement to save his brother.  Teaming up with a journalist named Cathy (Alonna Shaw), Jack infiltrates Kissel’s compound and battles the cyborgs.  Along the way, Cathy falls in love with Jack.  I’m not sure why that happens as Jack tends to be a bit surly and self-absorbed.  Indeed, he and Cathy somehow manage to have not just zero but less than zero romantic chemistry.

Does this movie sound dumb?  Well, that’s because it was pretty dumb.  It was directed by Sam Firstenberg, who directed the first two American Ninja films.  And it stars David Bradley, who starred in the last three American Ninja films.  The American Ninjas were fun but Cyborg Cop just kind of drags.  A huge part of the problem is that David Bradley was a good martial artist but he was a less than impressive actor.  Seeing as how Jack is trying to save his brother from being turned into an emotionless robot, Cyborg Cop calls for a bit more acting than the American Ninja films did.  Unfortunately, it’s hard to make a film about human emotions when your lead actor isn’t capable of showing them.  It doesn’t help that Jack is written as being someone who is always in a rather foul mood.  Also, from the minute he lands in the islands, he wears a fanny pack around his waist and it just looks so utterly ridiculous.  It’s hard to take a fight seriously when one of the combatants is wearing a leather fanny pack.  The other big issue is that it takes forever to actually get to the cyborg action.  For some reason, the film tries to generate some suspense about what Kissel’s plan is, despite the fact that the word “cyborg” is right there in the title!

On the plus side, the film does feature John Rhys-Davies playing a mad scientist and he’s just the type of cheerfully theatrical actor who can do justice to the role of someone who spends most of his time ranting about how much smarter he is than everyone else in the world.  Rhys-Davies, who is best known for playing Indiana Jones’s friend Sallah and for playing both Gimili and the talking tree in The Lord of the Rings, appears to have had a lot of fun as Prof. Kissel and it’s fun to watch him in the role.  This is a case where most people watching the film will proudly cheer for the bad guy because the bad guy is so much more entertaining than the good guy.

Cyborg Cop somehow led to two sequels.  The work is never done.

Twice the Van Damme: Double Impact (1991, directed by Sheldon Lettich)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Twice the Van Damme means double the damme trouble in Double Impact!

In this low-budget action flick, Jean-Claude Van Damme plays twin brothers, Chad and Alex Wagner.  When they were just six months old, their parents were murdered in Hong Kong and the brothers were separated.  Chad grew up to become a goody-goody martial arts instructor in Los Angeles.  Alex grew up to become a part of the Hong Kong underworld.  Under the direction of the parent’s former bodyguard, Uncle Frank (Geoffrey Lewis), the twins are reunited and team up to take down the gangster who killed their parents.

When it comes to second-tier 90s action heroes, Jean-Claude Van Damme was never as good as Dolph Lundgren but he was still a thousand times better than Stephen Seagal.  The secret of Van Damme’s success was that, in real life, he was capable of doing all of the thing that he did in the movies.  Van Damme didn’t need a stunt double or trick editing to look athletic.  It’s easy to laugh at Van Damme’s propensity to do the splits in every film he made but everyone knows that if Stephen Seagal had ever tried to do the same thing, he probably never would have been able to stand back up.

Double Impact was made early in Van Damme’s career, after he had established himself with Bloodsport but before he went mainstream with Timecop.  Van Damme is credited with co-writing the script and it’s the first Van Damme film to feature him playing twins, an idea to which he would return a surprising number of times.  The movie is full of moments between the twins that were designed to make critics and audiences say, “He really can act!”  Unfortunately, at that time, Van Damme really couldn’t act.  Chad smiles like a goof.  Alex smokes a cigar and is an angry drunk.  When Chad fears that his mentor has been murdered, he shouts, “NO!” in a way that will remind you of Rainier Wolfcastle’s reaction to his partner getting gunned down in McBain.  That’s the extent of their characterizations.  It wouldn’t be a problem except that the movie is nearly two hours long and that’s a long time to spend listening to Jean-Claude Van Damme argue with himself.

There are a few action scenes, which is the main reason for watching any Van Damme film other than JCVD, but they’re mostly perfunctory.  The bad guy’s main henchman is played by Bolo Yeung and the fight scenes between him and Van Damme are exiting to watch.  Otherwise, Double Impact is damme forgettable.