When an out-of-control general was on the verge of destroying the world, Col. Jack Slater (Vincent Spano) did what he had to do and he killed him. Now, Slater is in a military prison and separated from his family. However, he’s offered an opportunity to win his freedom. All he has to do is reassemble his old crew of military/scientist specialists and deactivate an underground computer. The problem is that a mad scientist named LaGrange (Zdenek Maryska) is threatening to use the computer to destroy the world and the underground chambers are patrolled by a killer cyborg that has melded with LaGrange’s mind. Meanwhile, above ground, General Devlin (Paul Koslo) is willing to sacrifice Jack and his team if it means covering up what’s happening underground. If the cyborg doesn’t kill them, the super computer will. If the super computer can’t get the job done, the government cover-up will do what has to be done. If the government can’t do it, the earthquake will have to suffice. Either way, it seems unlikely that Jack and his people are going to escape that underground chamber with their lives.
“Game over, man!”
No one shouted that in Downdraft but they could have because the scenes of the team searching the underground chamber will be familiar to anyone who remembers the space marines exploring the destroyed colony in Aliens.
“I’ll be back.”
No one says that in Downdraft but someone could have because the computer turning on the humans that created it will be familiar to anyone who remembers what John Connor told Sarah in The Terminator.
“Thank you and have a nice day.”
Again, no one says it in Downdraft but they could have because the killer cyborg might as well be named Robocop.
Downdraft takes elements from all of those films and then adds in the type of corrupt general who would send John Rambo to Vietnam and then abandon him there once it became obvious that Rambo had found evidence of American POWs. There’s not much about Downdraft that feels original but I will give Downdraft credit for including a little bit of everything. Not only is there a killer robot and a super computer and an untrustworthy general and a government coverup and a team of quirky nerds who know how to fight but there’s also a race against time to defuse a hydrogen bomb and several scenes of people having to climb rickety ladders and cross over chasms on unstable bridges. The action is impossible to follow but when there’s so much of it, it almost doesn’t matter. The main message of the movie is that humanity shouldn’t become reliant on supercomputers to run the world. It’s a good thing we all learned that lesson, right?
Vincent Spano was a good actor, even in this. Whatever happened to him? While he’s saving the world, he also finds time to fall in love with a Russian scientist played by Kate Vernon, who went from playing a key supporting role in Malcom X to starring in this. Everyone has bills to pay. That was as true in 1996 as it is today.
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in hosting a few weekly live tweets on twitter. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.
Tonight, for #MondayActionMovie, we are watching 1996’s Downdraft! Selected and hosted by @RevMagdalen, Downdraftstars Vincent Spano and Kate Vernon in a story about computers and the damage that they do! While the trailer below is in German, the film itself is Canadian. That’s how you know it’s going to be good!
Following #MondayActionMovie, I will be filling in for my friends Brad and Sierra (who are on vacation this week) and guest hosting the #MondayMuggers live tweet. We will be watching the original Rollerball, starring the great James Caan as a future athlete who is forced to choose between the comfort of selling out or the freedom of …. well, freedom. It’s a classic sci-fi film, one that is more relevant today than ever. We start at 10 pm et. Here’s the trailer:
It should be fun and I invite all of you to join in. If you want to join us, just hop onto twitter, start Downdraft at 8 pm et, and use the #MondayActionMovie hashtag! Then, at 10 pm et, start Rollerball and use the #MondayMuggers hashtag! I’ll be there tweeting and I imagine some other members of the TSL Crew will be there as well. It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy. And reviews of these films will probably end up on this site at some point this week.
Downdraft can be found on YouTube while Rollerball is available on both Prime and Tubi!
John (Keith Carradine) and his wife, Leanne (Daryl Hannah) are two white trash murderers who are on the run with the police. When the cops catch them in the act of burglarizing a house (and murdering the people who live there), John and Leanne manages to narrowly escape but they’re forced to leave behind their 6 year-old daughter, Janie (Julia Devlin).
Traumatized by her former life, Janie is adopted by an architect named Russell (Vincent Spano) and his wife, Dana (Moira Kelly). Dana, who lost her previous baby, and Russell are convinced that they can give Janie a loving home and help her overcome her past traumas. And it seems like they might be correct, even though Janie is still terrified of a mysterious monster that she calls “the tooth fairy.”
However, John and Leanne are determined to get their daughter back and they’ve just found out where Russell and Dana live.
The Tie That Binds is a stupid movie from 1995 that, like a lot of stupid movies from the 90s, was put into heavy rotation on HBO and Cinemax after a brief box office run. The main problem with the film is that everyone consistently makes the dumbest decisions possible but then we’e expected to sympathize with them when everything goes wrong. John and Leanne may be extremely evil but they’re also extremely stupid so it’s hard to really buy into the idea that they could somehow successfully evade being caught by the police long before the inevitable scene where they confront Russell and Dana in the unfinished house that Russell’s spent the entire movie working on.
The Tie That Binds does feature good performances, all from actors who deserved better. Keith Carradine and Daryl Hannah are frightening and Moira Kelly and Vincent Spano are convincing as a normal couple who just want to do the right thing. Both Kelly and Spano should have been bigger stars back in the day but instead, it seems like they usually just ended up in stuff like The Tie That Binds.
I realize that is a big claim to make. Birdemic, after all, is known for not only being one of the worst but also for being one of the most inept films ever made. It’s a film that regularly appears on lists of the worst films ever made and, unlike the always entertaining The Room, Birdemic actually deserves the honor.
So, when you compare a movie to Birdemic, it’s kind of a big deal.
However, having now sat through April Rain on multiple occasions, I can say that April Rain totally deserves the comparison.
Imagine if your local community theater decided to put on a low-budget, theatrical adaptation of 24, with the director’s son playing Jack Bauer and a retired accountant playing the main villain and you might have some idea of what it’s like to watch April Rain.
The film opens with endless overhead shots of Los Angeles while stirring “epic” music plays in the background. The movie uses these overhead shots in much the same way that Tommy Wiseau used the Golden Gate Bridge in The Room. Whenever the scene needs to change, we get an aimless overhead shot of Los Angeles that rarely seems to have much to do with either the scene we just viewed or the one that we’re about to watch. At first, it amused me to notice how many buildings had helicopter landing pads but then I realized that I was just looking at the same buildings over and over again.
After we spend a while looking down on Los Angeles, we are immediately thrown into the middle of the action as six men have a fierce gun battle outside of a warehouse. And by gun battle, I mean that each man stands about four feet away from the other, shoots a gun, and somehow manages to miss just as often as they hit. It’s during this scene that we learn two important things about April Rain:
1) Nobody in this film dies without flailing around for a few minutes before hand.
2) Anyone firing a gun will be shown in slow motion.
As for why everyone is shooting at each other, it all comes down to weapons. The group in the warehouse has a few crates full of weapons. The people attacking the warehouse want the weapons so that they can sell them to a terrorist cell.
The people attacking the warehouse, incidentally, a members of the Russian mob. I figured this out because they had names like Nikolai and Dimitri and not because any of them actually had a Russian accent or, in any other way, came across as being Russian.
Which is not to say that they don’t have accents. Their boss, Kotov (Adrian L. Tutor), definitely has an accent. Actually, he has several and they change from scene-to-scene. Sometimes, he sounds like he’s from Italy and then other times he sounds like he’s from Scotland…
Anyway, when we first meet Kotov, he’s running around in circles in his suburban front yard while his two youngest daughters chase after him. He’s wearing a dark blue apron that reads, in bright red letters, “World’s Greatest Dad.”
The face of the Russian Mafia
His oldest daughter, Katrina (Brittany Beery), would probably disagree with that. She’s got a crush on the newest member of the mob, Alex (Ryan Guzman). When Kotov drags Katrina to church, she gets out of it by saying, “I’m getting my period, dad!” and doing a massive eye roll. (Interestingly enough, I used to do the exact same thing to get out of going to Mass. Never underestimate the importance of the eye roll.) What makes this scene especially memorable are the extras sitting on the pew directly behind Kotov and his family. When Katrina explains why she has to leave church, they gasp and look like they’re about to faint from the shock. They do this despite the fact that Katrina and Kotov are whispering and that their voices would undoubtedly have been drowned out by the church organ that is played throughout the entire scene. Perhaps, at one point, the filmmakers were planning on including a subplot that hinged on super hearing…
ANYWAY — and watching April Rain is one of those films that will inspire you to say “anyway” quite a lot — it turns out that Alex has a secret of his own. He’s not really a Russian mobster! No, he’s a member of an elite division of the — well, to be honest, I’m not sure which agency he works for. However, I do know that it’s top secret because it’s housed in a huge warehouse and everyone spends a lot of time talking about how it’s all top secret.
Along with Alex, the team includes:
1) Sikes (Luke Goss), who is I guess is supposed to be in charge. He’s a taciturn but fair man who is first seen disciplining his teenage son. (“I can do what I want!” his son shouts, “In your face, old man!”) Sikes spends a lot of time shouting things like, “I WANT HIM ALIVE!” just before then shooting a bad guy in the head. (Incidentally, in April Rain, getting shot in the head means that a small splotch of red paint appears on your forehead.)
2) Rita (Miranda Frigon), who I liked because she’s a redheaded administrative assistant, just like me! At one point, Rita gets a phone call from someone outside of the agency. Sikes tells her that he needs her to be 100%. Rita agrees. The phone call is never mentioned again.
3) Kenny (Doug Savant), who doesn’t really have much of a personality.
4) Thomas (Vincent Spano), who is Kenny’s best friend and who, as a part of his job, is currently sleeping with Hellen (Anne Leighton) who works for Kotov. At one point, Thomas’s wife (Hillary Tuck) shows up and points a gun at him and screams at him for cheating on her. An exasperated Thomas yells back, “I work my ass off and you show up here and make me look like an ass in front of Kenny!” And the scene goes on and on from there…
And finally,
5) Hillary Miller (Ming-Na Wen!) is apparently Sikes’s superior. Thomas refers to her as being the Wicked Witch of West Los Angeles. “She flies around on her broomstick with a strap-on and a jar of vaseline,” he informs Alex. Ming-Na gets top billing but she’s actually only in a few minutes of the film and she spends most of that time yelling and glaring. It’s almost as if she’s daring you to ask her how she ended up in a movie like April Rain.
Ming-Na dares you to ask her what she’s doing in April Rain.
ANYWAY — Kotov has been supplying terrorist leader Tariq (Deniz Akdeniz) with guns and Vespa motor scooters and you better believe that we eventually do get a chase scene where the bad guy is fleeing on a Vespa. (And you also better believe that almost the entire chase scene is filmed in slow motion.)
Before launching his terrorist scheme, Tariq becomes an American citizen. The oath of citizenship is delivered by a judge who actually shows up on a Sunday to do so. “It’s the least I can do, after all the work you’ve done on my house,” the judge helpfully explains. Of course, as Tariq and the Judge enter the courthouse, the camera lingers on a security guard who views both of them with clear suspicion.
Upon returning to his apartment, Tariq and his family celebrate his new citizenship. Then, his two neighbors arrives to congratulate him. These two neighbors — well, they simply have to be seen and heard to be believed. “Share the wealth!” one of them proclaims, “then maybe everyone won’t want to kill us…” Another one drinks a toast to “education and the redistribution of wealth,” which I guess is the film’s way of letting us know that the only thing needed for the Tariqs of the world to succeed is for them to live next door to stereotypical California liberals.
What’s especially interesting about this film is that, for all the time devoted to the Judge, the security guard, and those two neighbors, none of them are all that important to the plot. In fact, after their initial scenes, neither the judge nor the security guard are ever seen again. As for the two neighbors, they’re kicked out of the apartment after Tariq is visited by Yusef, a jihadi who is also a pizza deliveryman…
(Just about every film has a few red herrings but few take it to the extreme of April Rain, a movie in which just about everyone in the cast is a red herring.)
Everyone’s either a red herring or a redhead or both.
Much like Birdemic, The Room, and Troll 2,April Rain is such a uniquely bad film that it becomes oddly fascinating. You watch and, with each moment, you can not help but wonder how much worse the film can get. And, with each passing moment, you discover that it can get a lot worse.
You want a cast that alternates between catatonic underplaying and histrionic overacting? April Rain hasgot you covered. (In defense of the cast, it’s not that any of them are bad actors as much as the script doesn’t leave them much choice. For instance, I thought Brittany Beery did the best that anyone possibly could with her role. The same can be said of Ryan Guzman and Luke Goss. As for Ming-Na — well, I imagine she probably just wanted to get her scenes over with.)
You want action scenes that essentially look like a bunch of kids making finger guns and going, “Bang! Bang!” at each other? April Rain is the film to see.
Do you want random scenes that come out of nowhere, make you go, “What the Hell?,” and are then promptly forgotten about in the movie’s grand narrative scheme? April Rain will not disappoint.
Do you want pages and pages of dialogue that add up to nothing more than empty verbosity? Might I suggest watching April Rain?
Do you want to see a movie that’s so bad that it’s good? Well, I’d suggest watching The Room and then Troll 2 and then Birdemic. But once you’ve got those three out of the way, definitely give April Rain a try!
From August of 1994 to July of 96, my family lived in Longmont, Colorado. Whenever I think back to living in Colorado or the times that I’ve visited it since, there’s always two things that I remember. First off, Colorado had the cleanest air that I’ve ever breathed and, for someone like me who grew up with severe asthma, that’s a big deal. Secondly, Longmont had some great dance teachers. I may have taken my first dance classes in Texas but I’ve always liked to think that Colorado is where I first truly fell in love with dancing.
Fortuantely, my family and I lived in Longmont and not New Granada, the setting of the Colorado-shot 1979 film Over the Edge. New Granada is a planned community, a collection of identical houses and sterile buildings that sit out in the middle of the desert. The majority of town’s adult population views New Granada as less a home and more of a business opportunity. When their children misbehave, they worry less about why and more about how that’s going to effect the effort to get a visiting businessman to invest in their town. The streets of New Granada are patrolled by a fearsome cop with the very appropriate name of Doberman (Harry Northup). Doberman may claim to be maintaining the peace but, as quickly becomes apparent, he’s just a bully with a uniform.
Is it any wonder then that the teenagers of New Granada are out-of-control? Between living in a town where there is literally nothing to do other than skip school, smoke weed, and hang out at a dilapidated rec center and having to deal with parents who don’t really seem to want them around, the youth of New Granada are angry and Over the Edge suggests that they have every right to be.
When Mark (Vincent Spano) uses his BB gun to shoot a hole in Doberman’s windshield, Doberman reacts by blaming and harassing Carl (Michael Kramer) and his friend Richie (a very young Matt Dillon). When Doberman demands that Richie tell him who shot the BB gun, Richie replies, “I only got one law. Any kid who tells on another kid is a dead kid.”
Things escalate. When a Texas businessman visits the town, the rec center is closed in an attempt to keep any of the kids from being seen. Doberman arrests Claude (Tom Fergus) for possessing a gram of hash, which leads to Richie realizing that one of the kids has turned into a snitch. Doberman’s obsession with finding out who shot the BB gun leads to the death of one of New Granada’s teens. Eventually, the adults of New Granada attend an emergency PTA meeting down at the high school, just to find themselves locked into the building by their children, the majority of whom proceed to riot and destroy the town outside.
Directed by Jonathan Kaplan and based on a true story, Over the Edge is one of the best youth-in-revolt films ever made. Not only is it well-acted (with Matt Dillion in particular showing a lot of rebellious charisma as Richie) but it’s also unique in that it is totally on the side of the young people. While Over the Edge does not necessarily endorse the violence that dominates the film’s finale, it also suggests that acting out was perhaps the only option left to the teenagers of New Granada. That Over the Edge was made in the 70s is obvious as soon as you hear the soundtrack and see the clothes and hairstyles. However, with its portrayal of both youthful alienation and out-of-control authority, it’s still very relevant today.
It’s a great film with an absolutely hear-breaking ending and it’s one that you should see if you haven’t yet.
When an out-of-control general was on the verge of destroying the world, Col. Jack Slater (Vincent Spano) did what he had to do and he killed him. Now, Slater is in a military prison and separated from his family. However, he’s offered an opportunity to win his freedom. All he has to do is reassemble his old crew of military/scientist specialists and deactivate an underground computer. The problem is that a mad scientist named LaGrange (Zdenek Maryska) is threatening to use the computer to destroy the world and the underground chambers are patrolled by a killer cyborg that has melded with LaGrange’s mind. Meanwhile, above ground, General Devlin (Paul Koslo) is willing to sacrifice Jack and his team if it means covering up what’s happening underground. If the cyborg doesn’t kill them, the super computer will. If the super computer can’t get the job done, the government cover-up will do what has to be done. If the government can’t do it, the earthquake will have to suffice. Either way, it seems unlikely that Jack and his people are going to escape that underground chamber with their lives.
Through the Shattered Lens 