Tag Archives: Tia Carrere

Film Review: Lilo & Stitch (dir. by Dean Fleischer Camp)

Posted on by Leonard Wilson

The best way to sum up the Live Action version of Disney’s Lilo & Stitch is with a line used in both films – “It’s little, and it’s broken, but good. Yeah. Still good.” I didn’t care for it as much as I thought I would (due to some changes in the story), but didn’t despise it enough to fully warrant a full thumbs down.

The Memorial Day Weekend battle basically comes down between Angela Bassett and her husband, Courtney B. Vance, who both have movies coming out. Vance can see seen in Lilo & Stitch as Agent Cobra Bubbles (previously played by Ving Rhames in the original, who is in Bassett’s film this weekend, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning).Remakes are shaky things, even if you stay close to the source material. The Live Action version of Lilo & Stitch feels abbreviated, for want of a better word. I enjoyed what was presented, and so did the early evening audience that consisted of families and yet, it didn’t hit every note for me. I won’t say it’s horrible, but it felt rushed for a film that has about 25 more minutes than the original.

The story is mostly the same. Dr. Joomba Jookiba (Zach Galifinakis, The Hangover) has unleashed an abomination in Experiment 626, a.k.a. Stitch (voiced once again by Chris Sanders). Stitch is nearly indestructible, highly intelligent and extremely dangerous. Already captured and forced to stand trial, Stitch escapes, steals a spaceship and ends up in Hawaii. The water is dangerous for Stitch, as he’s too dense to really float.

Lilo (Newcomer Maia Kealoha) is girl that’s considered different by most. She loves her self made dolls, saving chickens that shouldn’t be caged and doesn’t have much in the way of friends. She often gets in trouble, and this is putting a strain on her relationship with her sister, Nani (Sydney Agudong, Infamously in Love). Nani is trying to hold a job and keep the local Social Worker (Tia Carrere, True Lies and the voice of Nani in the original Lilo and Stitch) at bay.

When the Grand Councilwoman (Hannah Waddingham, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning) sends Dr. Joomba and Pleakley (Billy Magnussen, No Time To Die) to Earth on a retrieval mission, Stitch hides himself with Lilo and Nani, posing as a dog. Both The CIA’s lead agent, Cobra Bubbles, is also closing in on Stitch after his crash landing. Can Stitch find a way to escape capture and learn the magic of Ohana? Will Lilo find the friendship she’s longing for?

Lilo & Stitch keeps most of best scenes from the original – Stitch’s opening lines are there, of course, and so is his speech about his family. The theme of Ohana is still there. It still means Family, and means no one is left behind or forgotten. However, we’re taught a new word, “Kuleana” – which means “responsiblity” or “accountability”. The live action version changes the script by escalating the broken home situation between Nani and Lilo. Nani has a life she wants to live, too, but the loss of their parents and taking care of Lilo have put her dreams on hold. In a cartoon, an alien can show up and make everything right. In reality, things are a bit more complicated. It kind of pulls the fun out of things, but grounds the film in some real world consequences.

The entire story is carried on the tiniest of shoulders, and Maia Kealoha makes for a near perfect Lilo. Every scene with just Lilo and Stitch alone are great, and they end up in quite a few adventures. The CGI for Stitch and the other aliens are also very good. Disney’s obviously learned something from Paramount and their “Ugly Sonic” scandal. The same can be said for Agudong’s Nani. There really isn’t a bad acting choice in the entire lot, but the film pulls a piece off the chessboard. The Grand Counselwoman’s chief enforcer, a large sharklike alien named Captain Gantuu, is not in the film. Instead, the story removes his storyline and focus on making Joomba more the villain and Stitch the hero. Joomba and Pleakley spend most of their time bumbling through Earth’s customs, but keep most of the humor throughout. I get why the directors chose to go this way, since the sequences give Lilo more to do in them. It’s not a perfect change, but it all evens out, and the kids in the audience at my showing ate it all up (as did some of the grown ups).

Lilo and Stitch is a good watch if you’ve never heard of the story before. For kids that are new to it, it’s a treat, but it may be better to wait for the Disney Plus edition.

On a side note, I also picked up a Collector’s Edition Lilo & Stitch popcorn bucket, which contains a opening in the back to hold popcorn or other items. Stitch’s skin feels like velvet (or something fuzzy, really).

Late Night Retro Television Review: Friday the 13th: The Series 3.11 “Year of the Monkey”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing Friday the 13th: The Series, a show which ran in syndication from 1987 to 1990. The entire series can be found on YouTube!

This week, Friday the 13th features an international adventure!

Episode 3.11 “Year of the Monkey”

(Dir by Rodney Charters, originally aired on January 15th, 1990)

Mushashi (John Fujioka) is a modern-day samurai who owns a cursed tea kettle.  When Jack, Micki, and Johnny come by his dojo in search of the kettle, Mushashi says that he will give it to them if they can prove that they are “honorable” by retrieving three cursed monkey statues that are currently in the possession an elderly businessman named Tanaka (Robert Ito).

Tanaka, however, has given the three wise monkey statues (“See No Evil,” “Hear No Evil,” and “Speak No Evil”) to his three children, Michiko (Tia Carrere), Koji (Leonard Chow), and Hitoshi (Von Flores).  Tanaka explains that each statue will challenge it’s owner.  Those who react in an honorable way will inherit Tanaka’s fortune.  Those who are dishonorable will get nothing.

Jack, Micki, and Johnny split up to retrieve the monkeys.  Johnny goes to New Yok to get Hear No Evil from Hitoshi.  Micki goes to Hong Kong to retrieve See No Evil from Koji.  Jack gets to stay in Canada (or Chicago or wherever this show is supposed to be taking place) so that he can retrieve Speak No Evil from Michiko.  What they don’t know is that Tanaka is several hundred years old.  Every time one of his children fails a monkey test, Tanaka gets a little bit younger.

It’s all about honor and dishonor and the code of the samurai in this week’s episode.  To be honest, it’s a bit of a mess.  First off, the title refers to the Chinese Zodiac but, other than our three regulars, all of the characters are meant to be Japanese.  Secondly, it’s never really clear how the cursed monkeys decide what is honorable and what is dishonorable.  Hitoshi uses his monkey to hear the thoughts of those around him and to take advantage of them.  That’s definitely dishonorable.  But then Koji is declared to be dishonorable even though his monkey did something on its own, without Koji telling it to.  Michiko refuses to use her monkey to her own advantage and is judged to be honorable.  She is told that it is now her duty to kill her father but instead, she commits suicide because killing her father would be dishonorable.  Then, Tanaka is eventually judged to be dishonorable because he stabs Musashi while Mushasi is not holding a weapon but that’s just because Mushashi dropped his sword at the very least minute.  It seems like Mushashi should be the dishonarable one for going out of his way to trick Tanaka.

My point is that this was a confusing episode.  The monkey were actually kind of cute but their powers made no sense.  I’m also not sure why experienced world traveler Jack decided to send Micki to Hong Kong instead of going himself.  In the end, this episode was pretty silly, despite the cool monkeys and the samurai-themed finale.

Top Of the World (1997, directed by Sidney J. Furie)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Ray Mercer (Peter Weller) has just gotten out of prison and already, he and his wife Rebecca (Tia Carrere) are heading to Nevada for a quicky divorce.  However, a stopover in Las Vegas leads to Ray having a run of luck in a casino owned by Charles Atlas (Dennis Hopper).  Ray and Rebecca start to reconsider their divorce but their reconciliation is temporarily put on hold when the casino is robbed by a bunch of thieves led by Martin Kove.  Because of Ray’s criminal history, the police (led by David Alan Grier) consider Ray to be the number one suspect.  Ray and Rebecca try to escape from the casino and clear Ray’s name, leading to a night on nonstop action and an explosive climax at the Hoover dam.

One thing that you can say about Top of the World is that it certainly isn’t boring.  The action starts earlier and lasts nonstop until the end of the movie.  No sooner has Ray escaped from one scrape than he finds himself in another.  Despite the low-budget, the action scenes are often spectacularly staged and exciting to watch.  Another thing that you can say about Top of the World is that, for a B-movie, it certainly has a packed cast.  Along with Weller, Carrere, Hopper, Grier, and Kove, the movie also finds room for Peter Coyote, Joe Pantoliano, Ed Lauter, Gavan O’Herlihy, Eddie Mekka, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, and even Larry Manetti of Magnum P.I. fame.  This movie paid off a lot of mortgages and probably funded more than a few vacations.

One thing you can’t say about Top of the World is that it makes any sense.  It doesn’t.  There are so many holes in the plot that you could fly a helicopter through them and that’s exactly what this film does.  But with the nonstop action and the entertaining cast, most people won’t mind.  I certainly didn’t!

Enemy (1990, directed by George Rowe)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

At the height of the Vietnam War, CIA agent Ken Andrews (Peter Fonda) disguises himself as a French journalist, slips into North Vietnam, assassinates a VC general, and then makes his escape into the jungle.  Unfortunately, the helicopter that was meant to take Ken to safety is blown up, leaving Ken stranded in the jungle with a beautiful Chinese spy named Mai Chang (Tia Carrere).

With the VC after both of them, Ken and Mai will have to set aside their initial enmity and work together to make it out of North Vietnam.  In between endless scenes of the two of them making their way through the jungle, there are battle scenes where the VC manage to shoot everything except for the two people that they’re after.

This cheap film was shot in 1988 but it sat on the shelf for two years.  The script, which attempts to be a rumination on the nature of war, feels as if it was written even earlier.  It will always be strange to me how Peter Fonda went from starring as bikers and aging hippies in films like Easy Rider and The Wild Angels to playing CIA agents and military officers in films like this one.  Peter Fonda was a stiff actor but, in this case, it works for his character, who, after all, is meant to be a man who has to keep his emotions under control.  Tia Carrere is beautiful and seems to be trying really hard to give a convincing performance despite being miscast as a grim spy.  Fonda and Carrere do have a surprising amount of chemistry together.  The romance that develops between them actually feels believable.

Enemy suffers from too much padding.  It’s a two-person show and those two people spend a lot of time walking through the jungle.  Some of the action scenes are exciting and the idea of an American spy falling in love with a Chinese spy is interesting but the ending, while action-packed, still feels like a cop out that’s designed to give Ken an easy out.  You can almost hear Ken thinking to himself, “I really dodged a bullet there.”

Natural Enemy (1996, directed by Douglas Jackson)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

This one’s pretty dumb.

William McNamara plays Jeremy, who was given up for adoption 24 years ago and has never gotten over it.  After killing his adoptive parents, his birth father, someone’s mistress, and a private investigator played by Tia Carrere, Jeremy wants to celebrate his 25th birthday by killing his birth mother, Sandy (Lesley Anne Warren).  However, Jeremy wants to draw out Sandy’s suffering so he comes up with a plot so complex that it’s hard to believe that anyone could actually pull it off.

After Jeremy finds out that Sandy’s new husband, Ted (Donald Sutherland, massively slumming), is the head of a small brokerage firm, Jeremy reads every book that he can find and somehow become an expert on the stock market.  Even though Jeremy could have a high-paying job with any firm, he wants to work for Ted’s little firm.  Ted hires Jeremy and Jeremy proceeds to worm his way into Ted and Sandy’s life.  Jeremy also frames Ted for securities fraud, which leads to Ted losing his job and being blacklisted by all of Ted’s highly ethical Wall Street colleagues.  (Yes, I managed to write that with a straight face.)  Despite the fact that Jeremy is obviously disturbed and that Ted and Sandy’s life starts to fall apart from the exact moment that Jeremy becomes a part of it, only Ted and Sandy’s son, Chris (Christian Tessier), suspects that there’s something strange about Jeremy.

This is one of those dumb revenge thrillers that is dependent upon everyone in the movie being as dumb as possible.  Even Jeremy turns out to be dumb.  After killing almost everyone that he meets, Jeremy suddenly decides to keep one person alive and, of course, that decision comes back to haunt Jeremy in the end.  Jeremy is smart enough that he can trick people into believing that he’s a brilliant stock broker but he’s dumb enough to make an obvious mistake.  Of course, everyone else is dumb enough to to not catch on to the fact that Jeremy is a sociopath so the mass dumbness evens out in the end.

Probably the most interesting thing about this movie is that, somehow, Donald Sutherland ended up starring in it.  Even great actors have to put food on the table and hopefully, Sutherland ate well as a result of starring in Natural Enemy.

Scarred City (1998, directed by Kim Sanzel)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

John Trace (Stephen Baldwin) is a patrolman who has managed to shoot four unarmed suspects in one month.  Most people would say that it might be time to put Trace on desk duty but Lt. Devon (Chazz Palminteri) thinks that Trace will be a perfect addition to the SCAR unit.  SCAR is an elite group of police officers who deal with the city’s worst thugs by gunning them down.  A typical SCAR operation involves setting up a fake adult bookstore just so they can ambush a group of men who come in to rob the place.

Even for someone as trigger happy as John Trace, being a member of SCAR proves to be too much.  When the SCAR team murders a group of gangsters who were having a party in a mansion, Trace is disgusted when two prostitutes are blown away as well.  When he discovers a third prostitute, Candy (Tia Carrere), hiding in an upstairs bedroom, Trace helps her escape.  With both the police and the mob now after them, Trace and Candy try to escape the city.

For some reason, Stephen Baldwin appeared in a lot of direct-to-video action films in the 90s.  I guess it was because he had appeared in The Usual Suspects and, at the time, he was also the cheapest Baldwin brother available.  (The Baldwins were hot commodity in the 90s.  Today, you could probably put William, Daniel, and Stephen all in the same film and still have enough money left over to hire a halfway decent cinematographer.)  Stephen has such a goofy screen presence that it was always strange to see him playing either tough cops or hardened criminals.  In Scarred City, he does that thing where he closes his eyes while delivering his lines and he looks even more awkward handling a gun than usual.

However, for a direct-to-video Stephen Baldwin action film, Scarred City isn’t that bad.  The script is surprisingly witty and even the bad guys get their share of good one-liners.  “Pretty fucking dead, sir,” one of the cops yells to their lieutenant when he asks how one of their partners is handling having been shot.  (Later, the same cop looks at her partner’s dead body and says, “Thanks to his dead ass, we’re going to have a parade.”)  Tia Carrere and Chazz Palmentiri both bring a lot of life to their otherwise underdeveloped roles and the action scenes are violent, exciting, and well-shot, which is good since the last half of the movie is a nonstop chase.  Scarred City may just be a B-movie but it’s a good one.

Rock and Roll Creation: Zombie Nightmare (1986, directed by Jack Bravman)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

When muscle-bound teen baseball player Tony (Jon-Mikl Thor) does a good deed by stopping a grocery store robbery, he’s rewarded by getting run down by a bunch of stupid teenage joyriders.  Luckily, there’s a voodoo priestess in the neighborhood and, while she can’t revive Tony permanently, she can bring him back as a zombie so he can kill those who killed him.  Soon, Zombie Tony is killing all of the teens (including Tia Carrere) and Detective Tom Churchman (Adam West) is on the case.  Detective Churchman, however, has a previous connection to both the voodoo priestess and the murder of Tony’s father.

Zombie Nightmare is best known for later being shown on Mystery Science Theater 3000.  It was one of the best episodes of MST 3K but Zombie Nightmare is just as great even without commentary from Mike and the Bots.  This film features Jon-Mikl Thor, Adam West, Tia Carrere, zombies, and a heavy metal soundtrack that features Girlschool, Virgin Steel, Thor, and Motorhead!  What more do you need?  Jon-Mikl Thor is actually really convincing as the zombie and it’s always interesting to see Adam West play a role straight.  West even gets to be the bad guy here, and he does it without winking at the camera once.

Jon-Mikl Thor followed up Zombie Nightmare with the even better Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare.  He was also the subject of a recent and revealing documentary, I Am Thor, which should be required viewing for anyone who thinks they want to be a star.