Released: January 2017

Director: Albert Pyun

Not Rated

Run Time: 87 Minutes

Genre: Action/Thriller

Cast:
Michael Pare: Cody
Clare Kramer: Caitlin
Courtney Peldon: Ashley
Deborah Van Valkenburgh: Sister
Roxy Gunn: Ellen Dream
Joei Fulco: The Archangel Gabriel

Making movies is not a simple process, nor is it cheap.  You see a lot of big blockbuster movies these days that can cost upwards of 200 million dollars or more.  While these films definitely have a polished and fantastic look about them, there seems to be something missing.  It comes down to a lack of creativity and imagination, I feel.  Having such a massive budget can be freeing in a lot of ways in terms of production design and hiring the best cast and crew that money can buy.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but on the flip side, having that much money can actually do more harm to a movie than good.  Look at all these big budget sequels like The Matrix Reloaded and you can definitely see the money on the screen visually, but the story-telling and acting get left by the way-side.  The independent film genre is less a genre and more of a philosophy.  Some of the smaller and low-budget films that I’ve seen are some of the best movies ever made.  Take a movie like Bone Tomahawk, a western/horror hybrid that was made for a million bucks, but looks like a big-budget production with big-name talent attached.  You CAN have a good movie without spending millions upon millions of dollars.  I have a lot of them in my Blu-Ray collection.  Sometimes you come across a movie that’s very bizarre and yet strangely compelling.  For me, that movie was Road To Hell.

The plot of Road To Hell revolves around a man named Cody, who was a highly trained soldier, as he returns home to Edge City after nearly 30 years.  Apparently his time in the military has left him….damaged and seeking redemption.  He’s heading to Edge City to reconnect with a former flame that he left behind years ago.  The story seems pretty simple on the surface, but the film takes a turn for the surreal.  It’s implied that there’s a supernatural aspect to the film, but it’s never really gone into detail.  The film is narrated by The Archangel Gabriel, who takes the form of the lovely Joei Fulco.  It’s pretty clear that we’re not dealing with your typical road movie.  I’m not kidding when I say this film is bizarre.  Cody is a guy that apparently really enjoys killing and yet when he runs into these two strippers turned spree killers, he hesitates.  It’s very much implied that Cody is in some form of Purgatory, because Gabriel said so.  Yet, that aspect of the film is never fully explored.  It leaves the audience asking the question of whether this is Purgatory/Hell or not.  While certain aspects of the film are resolved by the end of the picture, that supernatural element is not even addressed.  It’s not a terrible story.  It’s surprisingly pretty thoughtful, but there are certain aspects of it that could have been fleshed out a little bit more, I think.

There’s a number of things that stood out for with Road To Hell.  The first is the visual aesthetic of the film.  The colors and brown/orange-ish overcast really gives the film its uniquely surreal quality.  I actually rather liked how visually interesting the film was.  There’s a lot of green screen used and it is fairly obvious.  Again, Road To Hell is a very low-budget indie film, so this was to be expected.  I actually rather like the way it’s done.  It kind of gives off this otherworldly vibe to the whole thing.  When I read other movie reviews on other sites, I notice that a lot of critics tend to not mention a film’s music, which is a shame, because that is absolutely one of the most important aspects of a film, no matter how minimal it is.  The music in Road To Hell is actually very good.  There’s a lot of songs in here that are sung by Roxy Gunn and her band.  These are surprisingly good.  It has a good selection of songs.  The actual score by Tony Riparetti is….okay, but nothing overly special.  His writing for some of the songs though is really good.

The acting in Road To Hell is mostly okay.  Michael Pare is probably one of the most underrated actors of his generation.  His performance comes across as particularly introspective and menacing at the same time.  Some of the best actors act with their eyes, and Michael Pare nails it.  Roxy Gunn, who plays Ellen Dream, does a decent enough job as a girl who has led a pretty tragic life.  One of the best aspects about Roxy Gunn’s performance is when she gets on the stage.  She’s not necessarily an actress, but she is quite a singer and musician, and that really comes across in her performance.  The songs that she sings have a very personal vibe to them that really helps her on the stage.  Unfortunately, the two girls that Cody runs into on the road bring this movie down a bit.  There’s something about their performance that bothers me.  I don’t know what it is, but their performance simply wasn’t that good.  It’s like they were playing their characters deliberately like they were in a low-budget film.  Aside from that, the acting was pretty solid across the board.

Albert Pyun has made some….interesting movies over the course of his career.  Some of them pretty decent, others not so much.  One of his most notorious films was Captain America from 1990.  How much of that film was his fault I’m not entirely sure, but it didn’t do him any favors.  Some of his more memorable movies have a tendency to deal with cyborg’s like….Cyborg with Jean-Claude Van Damme.  It’s one of my personal favorites.  That being said, I feel that Road To Hell is definitely one of his better efforts and is a surprisingly effective little movie.  It’s not perfect, but it is certainly better than most of the big-budget crap that we’ve been getting over the past few years.  In my opinion, at least.  Overall, I think it’s definitely worth a look.  If it gets released to the public.

My Final Recommendation:  It’s worth checking out, provided the film gets out of Purgatory.  8/10.

Released: April 2017

Director: F. Gary Grey

Rated PG-13

Run Time: 133 Minutes

Distributor: Universal Pictures

Genre: Action

Cast:
Vin Diesel: Dom
Jason Statham: Deckard
Dwayne Johnson: Hobbs
Michelle Rodriguez: Letty
Tyrese Gibson: Roman
Chris ‘Ludacris’ Bridges: Tej
Charlize Theron: Cipher
Kurt Russell: Mr. Nobody
Scott Eastwood: Little Nobody
Nathalie Emmanuel: Ramsey
Luke Evans: Owen

You know, for everything that I say about sequels and re-makes, I still go and see them holding out hope that they’ll be at least half-way decent.  I’ve seen the good, bad, and the horrendous when it comes to sequels.  I’ve said it before and I will continue to say it again and again:  A sequel has to do more than just deliver more of the same.  Not only do you have to give people what they HAVE seen, but you have to add more to it.  You have to spruce it up by exploring the world a little bit more.  The Transformers movies don’t add anything new to the formula.  The last several movies in that franchise have been indistinguishable from one another.  I gave The Last Knight a 7/10, but the fact is, I don’t think I need to see anymore movies in that series until they actually try and deliver a compelling film.  Sequels have a hard enough time trying to do more than the original film, but Michael Bay just doesn’t seem to understand that bigger and louder isn’t always better.  Transformers stopped being remotely decent with the first movie.  That’s not to say that these big and loud sequels are all bad.  They’re not.  Michael Bay just has a one-track mind.  The Fast and the Furious franchise is one of those franchises that I really like, because they know what they are and they run with it.

The Fate of the Furious picks up a short time after the events of Furious 7.  Dom and Letty are on their honeymoon in Cuba, when Dom is approached by a mysterious blond-haired woman.  Shortly after, Dom and his crew are called upon by Hobbs to help locate and retrieve an EMP weapon.  During the escape, Dom deliberately causes Hobbs to crash and steals the weapon.  After being sent to prison, Hobbs, along with Dom’s crew, is recruited by Mr. Nobody.  It seems that Dom is in league with Cipher, the blond-haired woman who happens to be a cyber-terrorist.  Not understanding why Dom would turn on them, Mr. Nobody also recruits Deckard Shaw, the villain from the previous film, to help.  The overall story has never really been the focus of the Fast and Furious movies.  They are just simply a way of getting from one action set-piece to another.  Sometimes a good movie doesn’t necessarily need a good story to tell, but for that to work, the characters and action have to step up their game.

Thankfully, the characters of the Furious movies are what really propel the story and action forward.  These characters are actually quite interesting and the actors portraying them are fantastic.  Everybody here steps up their game.  Scott Eastwood is a newcomer to the franchise, and he’s surprisingly not bad.  If the name sounds familiar, it’s because he’s the son of the legendary Clint Eastwood.  Tyrese Gibson is in fine form here as is Ludacris and Kurt Russell.  These guys are awesome.  Vin Diesel gets to flex his acting muscles a bit more in this film.  I’m not going to spoil the story part of why he turns against his team, but it is an important part of the film.  The guys that steal the show, however, are Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham as Hobbs and Deckard Shaw respectively.  Everyone here has some kind of chemistry with one another and Jason and Dwayne really hit it off.  They’re fun to watch.  Statham is clearly having fun with his role.  Helen Mirren makes a bit of a cameo appearance as the mother of Deckard and Owen Shaw.  Pretty cool.  The short end of the stick, though, is Charlize Theron as Cipher.  Theron is a fantastic actress, but her performance is way too much like Vickers from Prometheus.  She feels deliberately too much like a Bond villain.  She doesn’t quite have the same menace that Deckard and Owen had.  She brings the movie down a bit for me.

One of the things that has truly been very interesting over the past few Furious films, are the locations.  We’ve seen these films take us to locations like South America, Europe and the Middle-East.  One of the coolest aspects about Fate is that part of the film was really shot on location in Cuba.  We get to see an exciting car race take place in Havana.  We don’t see a lot of films shot in this little country and it’s a shame.  It’s beautiful.  The architecture, the cars, and the people really give the opening scenes a fantastic Latin flair.  From there, the film takes us to New York and Iceland.  This is quite literally a globe-trotting franchise.  They go everywhere, and the amount of action that these countries allow Vin Diesel and company is very surprising.  These are beautiful locations, and places that I would hope to visit one day.

If there’s one thing that most people can say about The Fast and the Furious movies, is that these films know how to escalate things.  At first, I didn’t think the movies could get any crazier than Fast 5 or 6.  Furious 7 took it up a notch or two beyond what I thought was bat-shit crazy.  Ladies and gentleman, I present to you, The Fate of the Furious, the most bat-shit crazy action movie I’ve seen this year.  It takes the action that we’ve seen in the previous films and dials it up to 20.  The action in New York city was absolutely bonkers when Cipher literally takes control of over a thousand cars and causes all sorts of havoc, especially when she causes cars to fall out of buildings several stories up.  That was INSANE!  Well, that was nothing compared to the stuff that happens in Iceland.  O. M. G.  They really went all out on the action here.  The craziest thing is, is that a lot of the action and stunts were done in camera.  So what you see, is generally what you get.  Yeah, there’s definitely CGI involved for sure, but a lot of what happens on the ground is done for real.  The submarine itself, though, not as much, but that’s understandable.  It’s absolutely crazy.

A lot of people have claimed that the Fast and Furious movies are no different than the Transformers movies.  Bullshit.  What separates the two franchises, giant robots notwithstanding, is that the film-makers of the Furious movies actually have made characters that we actually give a shit about.  What has Michael Bay given us?  A lot of action, but no character.  Honestly, I cared more about what happens to Vin Diesel’s character than Mark Wahlburg’s, because we’ve had seven movies to get invested.  Bay has no such pretense.  He doesn’t actually give two shits about character development.  While the Furious movies are really silly and come across as somewhat melodramatic at times, at least they attempt to make us care.  Michael Bay stopped caring about his characters YEARS ago.  That’s one of the reasons why I find myself not caring that much about Transformers these days.  Yeah, Fast and Furious aren’t the smartest movies, but they’re not trying to be.  They’ve embraced their insanity and the actors and director know it.  That is actually far more compelling than anything that Michael Bay has given us in well over a decade.  Sorry, folks, there is no comparison between Fast and Furious and Transformers.  I like both, but when it comes to big-budget blockbusters, my money is on Fast and Furious.

My Recommendation:  Definitely worth seeing.  9/10.

I’ve mentioned on several occasions about how much I love the first two Terminator movies.  I will go to my grave loving those films.  James Cameron burst on to the scene with the original movie that blew everyone away.  Arnold Schwarzenegger became a household name and Cameron would go on to direct Aliens, another amazing sequel.  If there’s a director who knows how to craft a proper sequel,  it’s James Cameron.  I recently reviewed Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and that is absolutely one of the finest sequels ever made.  I would put it up there with Empire Strikes Back and Aliens.  It’s that good.  The ending of the second film was both ambiguous enough for a potential third film and solid enough that you didn’t need one.  After Titanic hit theaters in 1997, James Cameron had the rights to Terminator sold from under him.  The rights eventually ended up at Warner Bros. who would start development on a sequel:  Rise of the Machines.  Starring Nick Stahl as John Connor, and Kristanna Lokken as the new T-X Terminator, Terminator 3 would also see the return of Arnold Schwarzenegger.  This would be the last film that Arnold would star in before he became governor of California.  The film was released to theaters in 2003 and the reception was mixed but somewhat positive.  It wasn’t a bad action movie.  Jonathon Mostow knows how to craft a solid action movie.  The problem with T3 was that it was a blatant re-hash of the previous film.  It introduced a couple of new ideas like the fact that Judgment Day was going to happen anyway and an ending that was ballsy as hell.  I have to give credit to Terminator 3 for that ending.  It was definitely one of the highlights of the film.  Unfortunately, the film began to rely more and more on CGI, and it was clear that it didn’t have the same feel as the previous films.  Enter Terminator: Salvation, the first film that doesn’t feature Arnold Schwarzenegger as a main character.  Starring Christian Bale as John Connor, Terminator: Salvation takes place in 2018, years after the bombs fell.  Credit must be given to McG for trying something different here, but T4 ended up being a generic post-Apocalyptic film that happened to have Terminators.  Visually, it was interesting and Sam Worthington’s character was fairly compelling, but the execution of the film left much to be desired.  I didn’t hate the film.  It was pretty decent for what it was.

Now, we come to Terminator: Genisys.  After Terminator: Salvation’s lackluster performance, AND the fact that the franchise would again change hands, it was decided by Paramount Pictures that rebooting the franchise would be a good idea.  It needed to happen.  Sadly, Terminator: Genisys suffered from multiple problems which would end up with the franchise’s future hanging in the balance.  The film’s marketing was awful.  The second trailer for Genisys gave away a major plot point in the film, which could have been an awesome game-changer.  That was also a problem that plagued the previous film.  You don’t want to show too much in a trailer.  You want to show enough to get people curious.  The other problem is that the film wasn’t properly written or executed.  The casting was….interesting.  I don’t have anything against Jai Courtney, whatsoever.  I actually happen to like him.  I just don’t think he was the right guy to play Kyle Reese.  See, the story would cause havoc with the timeline from the original film, so things would go haywire.  The idea of multiple timelines in a Terminator film isn’t really a bad idea.  Again, the execution was poor.  The visual effects were great and the action was wonderful, but the story was so bogged down by so many ideas and theories that it got lost.  The way the film ended was just….what?

The rights to Terminator will revert back to James Cameron in 2019.  That’s a year and a half away.  Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Cameron have both gone on the record that they would like to see a final Terminator film that would tie everything up.  Despite Genisys’s performance, it looks like we’ll be getting one more movie.  Apparently, they are getting Tim Miller to direct, while Arnold Schwarzenegger will return.  Emilia Clarke is not coming back and apparently, neither is Jai Courtney.  As for what needs to happen, I genuinely don’t know.  I feel that the Terminator movies NEVER should have gotten this far.  I’m one of those people that feel that Terminator should have ended with the second film.  I don’t hate the follow-up films, but they just pale in comparison.  With James Cameron producing, Terminator 6 needs to find a way to finish the story that was introduced in Genisys while providing a satisfying conclusion to the entire series.  This is my third “What’s Next?” post, but I’m having a hard time coming with ideas for what needs to happen with Terminator and things that I want see from the final movie.  I think what I would want to see is the character played by Matt Smith, who played Skynet as a T-5000 Terminator.  How did he end up in the original timeline.  Who sent the Terminator back in time to protect Sarah Connor?  These are questions that need to be answered, but I don’t know how they’re going to do that.  While I would love to see one more movie, I think we’ve all seen what the Terminator franchise has to offer at this point.  They’re just beating a dead horse.  Maybe it’s just time to let it go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q73gUUr8Zlw