Belated write-up of our last movie night. I don’t know why I am more inclined to write up movies than books – maybe because with movies I’ve had more of a chance to discuss them and formulate an opinion in the first place?
Starcrash is an Italian film that apparently is meant to be a Star Wars rip-off, only no-one involved has seen Star Wars. And they didn’t have the budget. It’s awful. S really enjoyed it, but I sometimes fear he is turning into a parody of himself.
Acting-wise, there was the outrageously OTT villainy; there was the guy with fewer expressions than Castiel and no excuse; there was Christopher Plummer and his quiet dignity who was completely out of place, poor man. Also David Hasselhoff, who was the love interest, but the woman honestly had more chemistry with the robot.
‘The’ woman because there is only one. Also the line, “it’s time for some robot chauvinism”.
I felt like crying after that. They had threatened me with more Roger Corman films, see. To explain why that is so terrible, it includes films like Humanoids from the Deep, which has the tagline: ‘They’re not human. But they hunt human women. Not for killing. For mating.’
But thankfully S took pity on me and we watched Cliffhanger instead. He might have awful taste himself, but he is actually pretty good at picking what I will like. Cliffhanger is a Sylvester Stallone movie set in the mountains! So it is an action movie with lots of nice rocks to look out. I may have done some geeking. (And I’m pleased to see I was correct in picking there were actually two different mountain ranges involved.)
The movie starts with equipment failure on a rock-climbing expedition, which is a pretty good way to get my attention. It’s a nail-biting scene, that doesn’t end well for the hero. The movie proper starts a year later. Stallone has run away, abandoning his wife (but don’t worry, they’ll be reconciled!) and his job, and when he returns, the one thing he doesn’t intend to do is go mountaineering. Too bad there’s these people that need rescuing after their aeroplane crashed …
Too bad they’re actually all criminals!
Something I found amazing was just how often bullets hit their targets in this movie. Movies these days make gunfire just seem not that dangerous. It was refreshing. After all, isn’t it more satisfying when our hero can succeed despite their enemies being decent shots?
There are some excellent set pieces (impaled on a stalactite! hanging off a helicopter hanging off a cliff!) and it’s just a really well-constructed action movie. I do recommend it.
Spoilery observation: (skip) There’s a scene where there are only three baddies left, and one of them is about to renege on the plan. Head villain wants to get out of this alive, so he kills the [female] pilot so that he’s the only one left to fly them out. S pointed out that this was actually a clever way of getting rid of her without tainting Stallone’s character. Because apparently it’s not done to have the hero brutally kill a woman.
L went on to wonder how come it wasn’t okay to kill women in an action movie when they did it all the time in horror. I wish it had been a rhetorical question but I don’t think it was. L should really know better.
After that I quickly suggested we watch Gremlins, least they get any more unsavoury ideas. And fell asleep during all the gremlin-y hijinks (we had a late start, on account of spending like an hour looking through all S’s DVDs … that’s a lot of DVDs). It was duller than I expected, or possibly there was just too much set-up for two in the morning.
One terrible movie out of three is … not that bad, really.
