If You Meet Sartana...Pray for Your Death (1968)

I find myself somewhat surprised that the Italian spaghetti western isn't a genre I'm more familiar with. To be honest I'm not a huge fan of westerns by default, having a rather spotty track record with a lot of the entries considered classics. For every one that I like, such as the remake of "3:10 to Yuma," "Tombstone," "Django Unchained," or "The Good The Bad and The Ugly," there seems to be one that I should but don't, like "Unforgiven," "True Grit," "The Wild Bunch" or "Once Upon A Time in The West." I'm at something of a loss to explain the reasons. I guess I'm just odd.

I wasn't exactly sure what to expect with this one, but can you blame me for wanting to see it based on the title alone? "If You Meet Sartana...Pray for Your Death." That title is so amazing that it becomes stupid, and then goes right back to amazing again. And they made a whole series of these. There's "I am Sartana...Trade Your Guns for a Coffin," "Light the Fuse...Sartana is Coming" and my personal favorite, "Have a Good Funeral, My Friend...Sartana Will Pay" among many others. Those sound like the titles of episodes of "Dragonball Z." I get such a charge out of that.

So who is this Sartana dude, anyway? Well, based on the film that I saw, I can say for a certainty that I'm not exactly sure. However, a few things are painfully clear to me. The first is that he wears black, as any self respecting western hero is wont to do. The second is that he is a very good shot. And the third is that, generally speaking, if you double cross him or choose to be evil around him in any way, roughly everyone around you in a twelve mile radius is going to die. I could be off on the numbers slightly, but it's a pretty good ballpark figure.

There's honestly not a whole lot I can say about "If You Meet Sartana," and that's not because I'm at a loss for words. The reason is because I'm honestly not sure what was going on at any point. And that's not because it was complicated. In fact it's dirt simple to a degree that you honestly stop caring pretty early on. All I can do is give the basic setup: There's a stage couch transporting gold from a bank. It gets attacked by bandits. Then Sartana (John Garko) shows up and -

EVERYONE DIES.

I'm not joking when I say that. After the three minute mark of the film, there are so many back stabs, betrayals, sudden massacres and seemingly random characters showing up only to be snuffed out to make way for the next ones that it's nearly impossible to keep track of who anyone is or what they're talking about or doing. Yeah there's some crooked bankers and an evil mayor and his wife and a lot of bandits and some Mexicans and William Berger with his piercing blue eyes, but that's not what's important. What IS important is the fact that roughly every five minutes we get another scene where the ground ends up littered with both shell casings and blood. That's how this movie rolls.

It quickly becomes tedious and frustrating considering that there's never time or reason to get to know any of the interchangeable characters since they all die before you even know who they were or what they were doing. Add to the fact that it's such a fool-proof guarantee that no matter which character you're talking about (besides Sartana), it's a certainty that they will be betrayed by whichever other character is in the same room as them, who will then in turn then be betrayed themselves and so on, and we come to the point where even trying to understand the plot becomes a complete waste of time. It really is an amazing display of revolving door violence.

It's like a game of Telephone, only with shooting the person who just whispered the phrase.

Do you want to know the most incredible thing about this movie, though? I swear this is going to blow your minds:

I liked it. I'm dead serious. This was a fun movie despite me having no concept of what was happening. It's almost like a bizarre experiment trying to test how much violence can be physically crammed into an hour and a half block of time, plot be damned, while remaining stone-faced serious for its entirety. Most movies that try that are attempting to be ironic or comedic, a la "Shoot 'Em Up" or "Machete" or the like. But this movie is just too badass to contain anything less than a body-count that would make Reb Brown nod slowly in admiration.

Watching it is almost like drifting off into another plane of existence composed entirely of six-shooters, flying bullets and sweaty guys squinting. It's watching the tide roll over your sandcastle. It's the Mythbusters cutting a station wagon in half with a half ton of termite. You're in it for the destruction. What the hell else do you want? And in terms of doing what it set out to do, "If You Meet Sartana" is very good at all that.

You can't see it, but just two feet to the left is like a hundred dead bodies. That was from before lunch.

This is a dynamic movie, and the steely-eyed, chisel-jawed John Garko (real first name Gianni) is very charismatic and brings a great physicality to the performance, although much credit should probably be given to the dude dubbing him. Most all the actors are great here, actually. My favorites were the eccentric old undertaker Dusty (Franco Pesco), the slimeball murderer Lasky (William Berger), and Mendoza (Fernando Sancho), the horrendously sweaty Mexican General straight out of "¡Three Amigos!" Those guys were awesome and a lot of fun to watch. In addition, this is shockingly well-filmed. The camera work is superb, throwing a lot of very creative shots and dramatic reveals at us which are far beyond what I would have normally expected, including a haunting first person perspective sequence which must be one of the best I've ever seen.

One of my favorite things about watching movies is being pleasantly surprised. One of my other favorite things is discovering films and new genres that I previously had been unfamiliar with. "If You Meet Sartana...Pray for Your Death" fulfills both of those things, and while I'm not holding out hope that I'll find many other films in the genre as well made or entertaining as this one, I will have to be checking more Italian Spaghetti Westerns out, because I had a good time.

This trailer is absurd.

THE BOTTOM LINE - I liked "If You Meet Sartana...Pray for Your Death." Whether or not you will is kind of up in the air, honestly. Liking cheesy westerns or drive-in, grindhouse fare is a start, I suppose. But if the thought of seeing the kind of movie that inspired the look and feel and violence of "Django Unchained" sounds like a good time to you, this probably will be.

Carnosaur (1993)

Recently I made the somewhat foolhardy decision to eat some very spicy Thai food. Catastrophically spicy. "I wasn't sitting properly for days afterwards" spicy. Why did I do it? I don't know. Perhaps it was the same kind of surge of bravery bordering on insanity that inspires one to slap on a wingsuit and buzz a mountain or punch a bear just to see what happens. Some things defy explanation.

In any case, as I sat there on the couch, eating my Thai food whilst sweating artillery shells and trying to light a cigarette with my tongue, I noticed that something odd had happened. On my computer screen, suddenly there appeared images of chickens killing people as they grew into horrendously fake looking dinosaurs. Women were giving birth to the things. One of the women ripped open her own stomach to pull it out the dinosaur/chicken and look at it before she died like she was Ellen Ripley or something. Then a dude fought a T-Rex with a skid-loader.

  This is the soooong written for the fight scene. He's trying to eeeeat Raphael Sbaaaaarge...

I thought at first it was merely a nightmarish hallucination brought on by the abundance of those little devil droppings the Asians like to call "chilies." Hell, it had Clint Howard in it. What was I supposed to think? But the next morning after I had managed to not die during the night, in my computer's browsing history was a thing called "Carnosaur." I saw the evidence, and my world collapsed.

 There was a Clint Howard movie worse than "House of The Dead?!" HOW LONG HAVE WE KNOWN?!?!

"Carnosaur" is an ultra-cheesy, low-budget splatter-fest executive produced by Roger Corman, and if you don't know who that is, you should probably not bother with this one. For sake of brevity, just imagine if, instead of really bad CGI, the Asylum did really bad practical effects. Like, imagine if in "Megashark vs. Giant Octopus," the monsters had been sock puppets in a bathtub. Then we're talking. Then again, if you don't know who Roger Corman is, odds are very great you have no idea what "Megashark vs. Giant Octopus" is, either.

It's...well it's this.

So when one is watching a Roger Corman produced film, it's really best to buckle down and accept the camp, lest you want to claw your eyes out after five minutes. The tricky thing about that though, at least for me, is that there exists a point where camp is fun, and a point where camp is boring and annoying. I can't really say "Carnosaur" was fun. Despite having a plot oddly reminiscent of many a PS1 video game, this story of dinosaurs and SCIENCE and dinosaurs made WITH SCIENCE isn't really that thrilling even with its high body count, which is all it's really good for. And despite it having infamy as a gore flick, the violence is really far too corny to get much enjoyment out of.

What's going on in "Carnosaur" is that a geneticist (Diane Ladd) is trying to wipe out humanity with a virus and replace them with dinosaurs, since that seems like a thing to do on a Tuesday. So when the dinosaurs (which are hatched from chicken eggs, FYI) start running amok in a small desert town, it's up to an annoying environmentalist (Jennifer Runyon) and a very annoyed night watchman (Raphael Sbarge) to save the world. Oh joyous day.

Of course there's the usual roundup of characters who exist only to be eaten, a la "Tremors" (a FAR superior B-grade monster series, by the way). There's some hippies who chain themselves to construction equipment in protest, only to be completely boned when a dinosaur shows up, which is admittedly pretty funny, there's some Mexicans, a bunch of horny teenagers and their third wheel drunk friend, a bunch of random scientists and Clint Howard as a hick, all of whom get eaten since that's how this movie rolls. But my favorite was Harrison Page as the sheriff, since he was the most useful of all of them and managed to be something of a badass. It's just too bad he didn't yell at the dinosaurs about not doing things by the book. He probably could have whipped them into shape.

HAMMEEEEEEEEEEEER!!!! *

He's also the only one really acting in this. Diane Ladd looks like she's embarrassed to be reading her lines (as is understandable), and while Raphael Sbarge proved many years later that he is a good voice-over actor as Kaiden Alenko in the "Mass Effect" series (!), here he's kind of slumming it. Although I can't fault him too much. Out of all the dialogue he has the best two lines are a cheeky reference to "Jurassic Park" and "I hate wildlife" as the one-liner at the climax of the final showdown. That's pretty weak sauce. And Jennifer Runyon, the person he has to act with for the majority, is the girl from "Ghostbusters" that Venkman was hitting on during the ESP experiment. I don't blame him for not bringing his A-game.

So the cast isn't very strong overall, but let's talk about special effects for a second. You know, when the creatures in your film made in 1993 aren't achieving the same level of believability as the the Gorn from "Star Trek" did in 1966, then perhaps you should consider other methods of film making. Yes, it does tend to make it funny in a hypothetically intentional way (that's a fine line), but in the visual department the dinosaurs in "Carnosaur" look less like a scientist's horrible experiment and more like Shari Lewis finally snapped and went on a rampage with some new friends she found after they ate everybody at Lambchop's place. And that's just distracting.

Listen, I won't fault anyone for liking "Carnosaur." I really won't. There is a definite market for this kind of movie. I'm just not one of them in this case. While I can handle low budget, personally for me, I don't much care for when a movie's ambitions overstep it's means. It's okay if you have a small budget and have to do cheap effects. That's fine. That's perfectly acceptable. But don't try and make a "Jurassic Park" knock-off with a budget the size of what that movie probably spent on the film stock it was printed on. Just...don't, honey. It's not worth it. Make a slasher movie instead.

Damn it, a slasher movie WITHOUT THE DINOSAURS!

Ugh. I'm never eating super hot Thai food again. Next thing you know I'll have Uwe Boll in my DVD collection.

Wait a minute.

::checks::

Crap.

That's...actually a pretty good trailer. That surprises me.

THE BOTTOM LINE - "Carnosaur" is basically on the same level as any random Asylum flick, just with bad practical effects instead of bad CGI. On the other hand, it's not without its charm. It's a movie that lends itself better to being a drinking game party event rather than a cheesy genre flick to throw on to unwind. I'm not a fan of it.

* Nobody will get that reference.

Killing Season (2013)

Hey kids! Do you want to see 70 year old Robert De Niro as an action lead? Do you want to see John Travolta speaking in a ridiculously over the top accent while sporting a silly looking chin-strap beard? Do you want to see them run through the woods and fight each other with bows and arrows and then torture each other?

Yeah, me neither. I don't know about "Killing Season," you guys. On one hand, it's not that it's poorly made or anything. In fact I must admit to finding it reasonably interesting, and I never was bored with it. But on the other hand this action movie is hard to take seriously considering that the lead is a septuagenarian, and certainly looks like it. And it's not like he's Charles Grodin or anything, where the guy is like 97 but looks 52. De Niro actually looks a bit older than 70, struggling to move faster than a slow hobble and seeming like he's about to keel over and die at any second whenever the movie needs him to run. Which is a lot.

And while I personally really like Travolta as an actor, he really is hard to take seriously while he's doing his trademarked line delivery complete with Walken-esque voice cracks while doing an accent like he's Pavel Chekov. Wearing that absurd facial hair that makes him look like the top of his old-timey football helmet is missing doesn't help. And it's not that he's bad in this, in fact his performance is solidly chilling, but being John Travolta he takes it so far over the top that it borders on ridiculous. I still kind of liked him in this, though, I won't lie.

Nice. Now say "Nuclear Wessels."

The story is your pretty standard revenge setup, in which Emil (Travolta) and Ben (De Niro) are Bosnian War veterans. During the conflict, Ben shot Emil execution style and left him to die. Many years later, Emil has recovered and is seeking vengeance, finding out where Ben lives and traveling to his cabin in the woods somewhere in the Appalachians. At first Ben doesn't recognize Emil, taking him into his home and feeding him and drinking with him as Emil makes polite conversation that's clearly only skin-deep. That's actually the entire first act, which is almost completely made up of scenes featuring that awkward kind of tension when you know that one person is only playing at being nice. This is also the best bit of acting from Travolta in "Killing Season," as there are many little moments where you can see the facade crack a bit before he covers it back up again. It's awkward to watch but it's actually quite well acted.

Once they go out hunting for elk the charade is quickly dropped and Emil starts hunting Ben, which begins a pattern that dominates the last two acts of the film. This pattern is that one of them hurts the other to a degree that's a little too hard to buy them walking away from, which leads to the freshly injured person barely escaping death, which occasionally leads to them torturing their attacker, which leads to the attacker escaping the torture and hurting the torturer, and the cycle begins again. It's basically watching a game of Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots if it were "Deliverance." It's odd.

That's probably the biggest fault of the film. There's some really great dramatic tension going on at the beginning, but when it went all gory and "First Blood" on us, with De Niro running through the woods and patching his leg up with moss and making a bow out of a branch like he's Schwarzenegger in "Predator," it felt really out of place. It was like the movie started off like an intense, intimate, dialogue driven character drama, but all of a sudden it turned into a late 90's action movie staring Segal.

 Or, you know, something Travolta would have starred in during the late 90's.

I'm not saying that's bad, though. I love late 90's action movies. But the setup didn't really set the proper tone for the follow-through on this one. I could see it working as a short film perhaps, cutting out all the crap in the second act and most of the third, and having the entire thing take place in Ben's cabin instead of all through the woods. Then we'd be talking a nice, compact little story of revenge and forgiveness. Again, it's not that the story here is bad, it's just stretched out a bit too much, and the action is a bit too repetitive.

I will give the film this though, in terms of violence, it does what it does well. There are some really, really hard to watch moments in "Killing Season," and the amount of cringing one is likely to do is rather significant. I wouldn't call it a gore-flick, however, since it doesn't exist purely to be disgusting. The savagery on display is meant to be shocking in order to convey just a little bit of what the characters are feeling inside, and the savage places that we will go to in our anger. And there are moments when it certainly achieves that. Neither Ben or Emil is innocent, in fact they're both pretty terrible people, but through the violence they inflict on each other, they may find something like redemption. That's an interesting place to go in a movie like this, and for the most part, it does it well.

Jesus Christ, he looks so old he could have literally grown out of that tree.

I still get annoyed by De Niro's face, though. Seriously, has there ever been an occasion where he didn't look like he just smelled a really bad fart?

Check out the trailer for "Killing Season."

THE BOTTOM LINE - "Killing Season" has some interesting moments and decent acting in it, and the level of savagery is shocking to good effect, which I would say warrants a watch if you're a fan of either De Niro or Travolta. But it is a bit repetitive, and the amount of damage they're taking and still moving is pretty ridiculous, which makes it difficult to take seriously. Overall it's just okay. Would make a good double feature with "The Edge."

The Iceman (2013)

I'm not the biggest Michael Shannon fan, but I'm willing to bite the proverbial bullet on this one and admit that he can be pretty darn good, if slightly one-note. I guess when you're playing a remorseless hitman your range might be slightly limited by necessity, but at the very least Shannon was able to make the character of "The Iceman," Richard Kuklinski, come alive to a slightly terrifying degree.

Based on the true story of a mob hitman who was believed to have killed over 100 people, "The Iceman" is a story about a very, very bad man who does very, very bad things without really feeling much about it one way or another. Kuklinski's main deal is that he's a very angry person with little to no control over himself, and tends to solve problems by hurting/killing things. So, when in the late 70's the mob-run porn racket he's working for is shut down, the local mafioso running it (Ray Liotta) decides Kuklinski would make an excellent hitman. He's right about that, and Kuklinski becomes a legendary killer over some 20 years.

I said before that I'm not a huge Michael Shannon fan, and while this hasn't made me a convert or anything I will admit that he's really good in "The Iceman." He's got this great duality going on, where he'll be a stone faced killer one minute, with eyes that look like they're ready to fire lasers out of them, and the next minute he's with his family and that hardness melts away. But there's always those eyes of his that never soften. To paraphrase Robert Shaw, Kuklinski's got dead eyes that don't seem to be living until he shoots you. It's a great performance.

"Is that a gun in your hand or are you just...oh."

Most of the movie is watching Kuklinski brutally kill people with emotionless efficiency, and while it can border on repetitive, it's never so over-the-top as to feel gratuitous. Don't be mistaken, though, the film isn't a highlight reel of gore or anything. In between all of that death is the shocking balancing act that Kuklinski does with his wife and children, who somewhat unbelievably have no idea that he's a mob hitman.

Winona Ryder plays his wife, Barbara, and while it's easy to not like her character simply because she is so dense as to not have any idea what's going on, Ryder is charming and quite believable in the role. She provides a much needed juncture between the two different worlds, and I found her to be charming and I felt really bad for her and her two daughters because we all knew that eventually the jig is going to be up, and Kuklinski is going to be outed as the monster he is.

There's quite a number of celebrity cameos in this, of varying degrees of usefulness and celebrity. David Schwimmer has a decent if slightly hard to buy role as a lowlife mobster, and much like his part in "Band of Brothers" as a drill-sergeant, he actually does a very good job with the exception of being hard to take seriously because he's David freaking Schwimmer. Chris Evans plays a serial killer who gets around in an ice cream truck, which is weird, and James Franco even shows up for about 47 seconds for a single scene in which he has like a dozen lines and then gets shot. But he's James Franco so he got slapped on the DVD cover and has featured billing. Whatever.

Nearly his entire performance is spent cowering. Oh well. Still better than "127 Hours."

A guy who surprised me was Stephen Dorff, whom I didn't even recognize at first since he's rocking a sweet mustache. Like Franco he's got a single scene, but Dorff absolutely tears it up with the short screen time he's given. He's playing Kuklinski's brother who is behind bars for the rape and murder of a young girl, and he begs Richard to help him out and asks for money to hire a better lawyer to hopefully spring him. When Richard refuses, it gets ugly quick, and Dorff is scary intense. In fact it's probably the best acting I've ever seen out of him. I guess I'm just too used to seeing him in Uwe Boll productions to give him much credit.

I know that this isn't a very accurate biography of Richard Kuklinski in many ways. Most of the negativity coming down on it from general consensus concerns the fact that the film skips a lot of important things during his upbringing, and makes him out to be a much nicer guy than he was in real life where his family is concerned. And it's true that the film makes him out to be a caring father who doesn't care for anything else in the world other than his family, when in real life there was literally nothing nice about him at all.

It's like if Mitt Romney and Bruce Campbell merged and then became a cartoon character...

All that being said, "The Iceman" still succeeds as a chilling, rather bleak drama about a professional hitman, even if they're taking liberties with the truth. But hey, that's film, right? That's why it says "Based on a true story." I'm not looking for a documentary with this: I'm looking for a well made film.

Check out the trailer for "The Iceman."

THE BOTTOM LINE - "The Iceman" is an entertaining crime drama that manages to be both fascinating and repulsive at the same time. While you see horrible things happening throughout, it's nearly impossible to look away. This is mostly due to Michael Shannon's performance, which by itself is worth the price of admission. The dude's eyes can set you on fire from the other end of the room, I swear. This one is worth a look.

Octopussy (1983)

True story: After "For Your Eyes Only" they were looking for someone to replace Roger Moore as James Bond. He was getting tired of playing him, he was getting too old, and it was beginning to be noticeable. James Brolin and future Bond Timothy Dalton were considered for the part, but then Sean Connery happened.

When, after a lengthy legal battle "Never Say Never Again," a non-Eon remake of "Thunderball" was put into production starring the original Mack-Daddy himself as 007 once again and set to come out the same year as "Octopussy," it was widely thought that it was not the proper time to risk trying anything new. So Moore was brought back once again, and I'm forced to grit my teeth and suffer through more of his shenanigans as the series still refused to grow up a little bit.

That being said, I must admit to actually liking "Octopussy." Despite the ridiculous title which you feel silly even saying out loud, this is a fun movie that manages to be quite entertaining. The plot is a little obtuse at times and there is more than one occasion when it's easy to not understand a thing anybody is talking about, but the action in between all of it is abundant and exciting, more so then arguably any of Roger Moore's other outings, and the screwball antics are kept to a relative minimum. Mostly.

Dammit, I said "mostly."

The story this time revolves around Fabergé eggs, and before you say anything, no, the plot doesn't suck. It gets kind of dicey to follow, but essentially what's going on is that there's a lot of forgeries of priceless things going around and being sold for insane prices lately, all to fund a rogue Russian general, Orlov (Steven Berkoff), doing bad things like expanding their borders and conquering some of Europe. I know that sounds stupid, and maybe it is, but it works just enough to get the story from A to B. In any case 007 is naturally the only one who can do anything about it, and sets out to track down the forgers, heading out to India where a bunch of the action takes place, before heading to West Germany (a nice dated reference there) for the admittedly exciting climax.

The *ahem* titular character is a notorious smuggler played by Maud Adams, whom observant viewers might recognize from "The Man With The Golden Gun," where she played Christopher Lee's ill-fated concubine whose corpse was shockingly good at sitting bolt-upright in instant rigor mortis. Like in that previous film, Adams is a strong presence on screen, and makes for one of the better Bond girls of the series, since she's not totally useless or stupid. This is particularly true when you look at the lineup of girls from the rest of the Roger Moore era. In fact she's probably the most respectable of all of them, since she had become an incredibly powerful world-class smuggler all by herself, and Maud Adams does command a great deal of respect in her performance. She's not just some busty ditz they slapped a lab coat on and called "Doctor" like we believe that for one hot minute. (I'm looking at you, Denise Richards.)

Useless? She's got her own elite squad of hot ninja acrobat circus performers who dress like The Flash. That's awesome!

Roger Moore is his usual cream-puff self, but at least here he brought a bit more physicality to the role. Or at least, his stuntman did. I've said it before and I'll keep saying it until I'm finally done with him, but Roger Moore is not a threatening guy, and I've never bought him as an action lead. But despite all of that, the film does manage to make him come across as more than someone's goofy uncle despite his noticeably advancing age.

Like I said earlier, the wackiness is toned down a bit in "Octopussy," an aspect I was immensely relieved by. True, there are moments like Bond dressing like both a clown and a gorilla, a crowd watching a car chase with heads moving back and forth in unison like a tennis match, all while Bond's sidekick Vijay wails on the bad guys with a tennis racket, and Bond yelling like Tarzan while swinging on a vine (groan), but for all of that goofy crap there's still a lot of pretty hard-hitting action and some surprisingly dark stuff in here. When the film features a guy taking a rotary saw yo-yo to the face and a dude hunting humans like he's a cross between Van Pelt and the villain from "Bloodlust," it tends to make up for some of the more comedic moments.

I love ham and eggs!

Once again, however, the villain is slightly lackluster. Louis Jourdan is just...alright as Kamal Khan, an exiled Afghan prince working with Orlov. One one hand he's slimy enough and gives off the impression that he would gladly set fire to a car full of nuns just because, but it's likely that he'd probably get someone else to do it for him. And this is just me, but I like my Bond villains to be somewhat more threatening then that. Otherwise when we get to the final showdown there's going to be little tension because you know he doesn't stand a chance against 007. It's really more about getting past the big henchman they always have at that point, and I've always found that to be a bit anticlimactic when the films go that route. Orlov would have been the more logical choice for James to face off against at the end, but unfortunately that doesn't end up happening.

That's about all I have for "Octopussy." It's a surprisingly exciting entry in the Roger Moore series, and I'd call it one of his better, if not best ones. True, you're not going to know exactly what's going on the whole time, but the climax has Bond fighting a dude on top of a plane. That's got to count for something.

Yeah, the trailer sucks, but you get a taste for how much action is in this one.

THE BOTTOM LINE - I'd call "Octopussy" one of my favorite Roger Moore flicks. The biggest reason for that is the action, which flows fast, hard-hitting, and is surprisingly consistent throughout its overly long run-time. It's just enough to make you forgive the fact that it's still Roger Moore. It's what's great about the English. I must have seen this movie twice.

JAMES BOND

WILL RETURN IN

"A VIEW TO A KILL"

For Your Eyes Only (1981)

There were few places to go after "Moonraker" other than dramatically up, or, in the case of "For Your Eyes Only," back down to earth from the stratosphere of stupid that the previous film had left James Bond floating in. I think the filmmakers had realized one of two things: Either they knew they had pushed it too far into the outlandish, or they didn't think they could one-up it. One option gives them more respectability than the other. In any case, "For Your Eyes Only" was a distinct descent back down into reality (mostly), which went back to being more like the Connery films with fewer gadgets and a less bizarre storyline about Cold War espionage.

This is an entry in the franchise that is a little difficult to talk about. On one hand, it's honestly one of the more forgettable Bond films. The plot is somewhat hard to latch on to, the villain is horrendously bland, it's got what has to be in the running for the absolute worst Bond theme song ever, and there's a lack of iconic moments you can put on a poster to really stick out and make you remember the film. As bad as "Moonraker" was, there are scenes in it you won't forget once you see them. With this film you'll be struggling to remember many specific moments that you can think back on and say "That bit was cool."

On the other hand, I kind of liked it.

Hey, that's the name of the movie!

"For Your Eyes Only" finds Bond (Roger Moore) hunting down an encryption device that is capable of completely controlling all of the British fleet's missiles, which was lost when the ship it was on hit a mine and sank. And now they have to get it before the Russians do, since if they got it they could easily blow up the entire fleet or England or all of Russia's enemies or all of the above. That device seems like an entirely silly thing to create for reasons exactly like this, especially when apparently there's no way to reprogram the British missiles so that they can't be controlled by it. I wouldn't have personally made something like that, but then again I'm not a professional, so what do I know?

When a marine archeologist the British hired to find the ship is assassinated, the trail of the hitman leads Bond to Spain where the assassin is assassinated by Melina (Carole Bouguet), the daughter of the archeologist and Bond girl for this outing. Bond then follows the trail of another hitman to Italy. After that the plot gets a little convoluted as a lot of double crosses are revealed, making it so that it's just a little bit difficult to follow who is working for who. In fact, the main villain of the film isn't even revealed to be the main villain until about halfway through, due to the movie being deliberately misleading.

The guy holding Bond at gunpoint is one of the good guys. Who knew, right?

That's not to say that's necessarily a bad thing, however. Not every action movie needs their villain cackling behind steepled fingers, but it does tend to downplay the threat somewhat because we don't have as much time to build them up. When the villain, Kristatos (Julian Glover) is finally revealed it's a little difficult to be afraid of him because up to that point, all we've seen him do is have polite conversation over dinner and be generally normal. And little changes once the mask is lifted, as Glover doesn't exactly channel Vincent Price or anything in terms of wickedness. He just kind of looks overly annoyed when things don't go his way, makes threats he doesn't follow up on, and acts nonchalant if people die. Yeah, it may be a little more realistic, but it doesn't make for a fun or memorable villain. And I like Julian Glover as an actor a lot but here he's really not trying very hard to be a decent bad guy, particularly for a Bond movie. As silly as it may come across, you kind of want the mustache twirling at some point.

True, he didn't twirl his mustache in "The Last Crusade" either, but at least there he was evil in a Nazi sympathizer capacity.

Rescuing us from the unfortunate dullness of the Big Bad are two things the film does have going for it: An effectively intimidating secondary villain, Locque (Michael Gothard), and a handful of respectably fun action scenes which are pretty impressive in their stunts. A silent assassin, Locque doesn't say much if anything, but Gothard has this great intense stare combined with a detached coldness in his eyes that really sells the 'remorseless killer' angle, and I found myself wishing on more than one occasion that he was the main bad guy instead of Kristatos. After Bond takes him out in a surprisingly cold blooded manner by Sparta-Kicking his precariously dangling car off of a cliff, the film does tend to go downhill from that point on.

Personally I thought this was one of the better Roger Moore outings in the action department. In particular is a pretty good car chase through a jungle road, an effectively nerve-wrecking climb up a cliff, a few large scale shootouts, and what is probably the highlight of the film, a scene were Bond is chased down a mountain while on skis by a bunch guys on motorcycles. All of this is pleasantly well done, and I must give the Bond franchise tremendous credit for having not one, but two films which feature a fight on a bobsled track. I wouldn't have thought that possible.

Seriously. How did you manage to get into this situation twice?

While I'd noticed it from his debut, it was at this point that people started calling Roger Moore too old to be Bond. Some of it had to do with Carole Bouquet being some 30 years younger than him and looking like it, and another had to do with the character of Bibi, a young professional ice skater played by actual young professional ice skater Lynn-Holly Johnson. While Johnson was only a couple of years younger than Bouquet, she looked closer to sixteen, which made the scenes where she's trying to seduce Roger Moore, who looks like he subscribes to AARP magazine, exceedingly uncomfortable. It was played for laughs, and James flat out refuses her advances, but he's been such a pig throughout the series that by this point I'm not putting anything past him.

"Yes, well, put your clothes on and I'll get you some ice cream." = CREEPIEST. LINE. EVER.

I think this movie needs an adult.

I've praised the action and relative down-to-earth nature of "For Your Eyes Only," but that's not to say it got gritty and serious all of a sudden. As much as the tone may have been evened out, there's still scenes of Moore mugging to the camera, fighting hockey players like The Mighty Ducks went evil and at long last killing off a wheelchair-bound Blofeld by picking him up with a helicopter and dumping him down an industrial smokestack. Also, Marget Thatcher talks to a parrot while thinking it's James. This same parrot also helped save the day. I wish I were joking.

But the silly stuff is still to a far lesser degree than we'd seen in the past. Overall, this one gets a pass from me. As strange as it is to say I enjoyed a Roger Moore Bond outing, this is one of the better ones, despite it being rather forgettable. I guess in the end, not suffering throughout the proceedings at the expense of it being memorable is an acceptable tradeoff. At least when it comes to Roger Moore.

For anyone still complaining about movie trailers sucking today...I give you 1981. Ball's in your court.

THE BOTTOM LINE - It's one of the most forgettable Bond films, but it's actually not that bad. Despite his distracting advancing age and continued hamming it up, this is probably one of Roger Moore's better outings. At least it didn't hurt me while watching it.

JAMES BOND

WILL RETURN IN

OCTOPUSSY

Moonraker (1979)

During my foray into the world of James Bond, watching his adventures chronologically from the beginning and seeing the evolution of the series unfold before me while knowing what is to come by the time Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig come along, I have learned a bit about myself. Apparently I am a man who enjoys redheads, a martini without olives, and grit and realism in my 007 movies. I used to think that I liked the outlandish bits of the Bond series but as I've watched them I realize that it's when the films are down-to-earth and not goofy that I find the most enjoyment. It's when the movie winks at us, honking its clown nose while doing a silly jig saying "Look how not-seriously we're taking ourselves! This is such fun!" that I fluctuate between not caring and flipping my television the bird.

You see, there is a fine balancing act that must be done while being outlandish. Don't be mistaken, a film can be over-the-top and still maintain its dignity. Just look at "Goldfinger." That movie is insane. A gold merchant attacks Fort Knox and shoves a nuke in the vault? That's crazy and stupid at the same time. For crying out loud his bodyguard has a hat that can decapitate you. He's got a giant laser and a table with straps that could only exist for the sole purpose of cutting a person in half starting at the groin, clearly possessing it before Bond ever shows up. And he just has it because shut up he does. Is the silliness sinking in yet?

"Scheriously, Goldfinga! Why ish thisch here? Who built it for you? HOW MANY PEOPLE DO YOU EXSCHECUTE?!?!"

But at the same time, "Goldfinger" was arguably the best the series ever got, and it was taking itself as seriously as a heart attack. It was stone faced despite the absurdity. The only winks Sean Connery gave were to the obnoxiously hot 60's women he was about to sexually assault into loving him. There were zero winks directed at the audience. There were no cheeky segments where the spy caper turned into a Benny Hill skit with zany music. There weren't any goofy sound effects to act like a trombone going "wah-wah-waaaaaah" to remind us we're supposed to be enjoying ourselves and have a good time. Instead, "Goldfinger" let the fun be a byproduct of the action and over-the-topness instead of trying to artificially cram it in by having scenes like James Bond driving a gondola through the streets of Venice while pigeons do a double-take, like we needed constant reminding to enjoy ourselves because we're all stupid.

With that...ugh. Freaking "Moonraker."

I hate this movie so much. So much. No film in the franchise pushes so many of my buttons as this one. It's got Roger Moore, it's overly goofy and campy in that special way that treats us like cats with keys jangling in our faces, the action is stunningly bland, lazy and not edited well at all, the theme song is easily one of the worst of the series, and the main villain is nonthreatening and acts like he's asleep throughout the proceedings. And of course, they're in space.

But why are they in space? There's no reason for them to be in space!

It's pretty common knowledge that the reason that the teaser "James Bond will return in 'For Your Eyes Only'" at the end of the previous film was famously made incorrect by instead having "Moonraker" come next was because of a little movie that came out in 1977 called "Star Wars," the popularity of which convinced the filmmakers to send James Bond into space. And that little factoid is pretty telling of the mindset that seemed to be at work here.

They weren't out to make a good Bond movie with this. They were out to make a Frankenstein monster of everything that people seemed to like, like a movie made entirely by a computer that calculated low common denominator preferences, and damn whether or not it fit the tone of how the series started out. The Bond franchise had become a joke long before this, I am aware of that, but "Moonraker" finally put the last flower on the grave of what used to be its dignity.

Hey check it out. Pressed ham on glass.

This time we find Bond investigating a stolen space shuttle. Before you ask how in the world a space shuttle could go missing, just know that is by far one of the least ridiculous things at work here. His investigation leads him to our villain, Hugo Drax (Michael Lonsdale), a super-rich industrialist who would seem more evil if he weren't so sleepy-eyed and bored sounding. While uncovering Drax's plans, which boils down to "kill everyone on earth and repopulate with my master race," Bond goes around Europe and South America and then finally to Drax's space station, getting captured and escaping more times than I'm pretty sure is psychically possible.

Joining him is Bond girl of the day Holly Goodhead (Lois Chiles). Oh I'm sorry - It's DOCTOR Holly Goodhead. There's much to be said about that name, but I guess I can leave it at "Wow." Technically speaking "Pussy Galore" was worse, but that's still pretty egregious. She's alright I suppose, and since she does fly the space shuttle at one point I suppose she's not as useless as Bond girls normally are, but then again since Bond takes over flight duties at the end to save the day because apparently Bond knows how to fly a space shuttle now, I guess useless might indeed be a fitting descriptor for her.

Making history as the only Bond villain to make a return (Blofeld doesn't count since he was like five different actors), Richard Kiel shows up again as the towering henchman, Jaws. This is a good thing since aside from Oddjob he's probably the best side-villain in Bond history. So what do they do in "Moonraker?" Here, he's the comic relief. Yup. The guy who, just one film before, was ripping people's throats out with his teeth is now the subject of goofy gags which have him taking absurd amounts of damage while mugging at the camera like he's Wile E. Coyote. And then he gets a girlfriend and falls in love and becomes a good guy because the filmmakers thought that would be something the audience would like. Ugh.

You're right. Villains shouldn't be bad in action movies. That would be silly.

I think right there is "Moonraker" in a nutshell. They took what was good, or at least passable, and turned it into a mockery of itself. No longer were we allowed to have an explosive, violent, action-packed thrill ride for adults. By the time "Moonraker" came along, the Bond series had turned into a Happy Meal with easily marketable and kid-friendly goofball characters and a little bit of side boob. And this crap had started before Roger Moore had even taken the helm (just look at "Diamonds Are Forever") although he certainly was the first to completely disregard any kind of shame for the character of James Bond.

Speaking of Roger Moore, he's doing his usual hammy schtick here, and I'm so done with it. I don't buy him as Bond, and I never will. And by the time "Moonraker" came about it was clear that this dude is way too old for the role. It was noticeable earlier but by this point it was officially distracting. The rest of the cast is whatever. Michael Lonsdale is one of the least intimidating and most dull villains ever, Lois Chiles is there just to look pretty, and Richard Kiel, like I said, is turned into the missing fourth Stooge. The only person who is kind of compelling is Corinne Clery as the pseudo-Bond girl who gets killed in the first act, a trope which is a requirement of the franchise evidently. But she gets eaten by dogs so I guess that doesn't matter. At least she sold being afraid.

"I'm ever so enraged at Bond foiling my plans. Can't you see the rage on my face? It's palpable."

"Moonraker" has a following, which blows my mind, but I suppose I can understand why. Kind of. The special effects, particularly on the space station, are admittedly pretty good. This is especially so for a 1979 film which isn't even technically a sci-fi film. And while I personally thought the action was tepid and dull, there is an abundance of it, so I'll give it that. Strictly speaking, this is not a dull movie. And the final laser battle in space, as absurd as it is, particularly when one wonders how in the hell the U.S. immediately scrambled the marines into space, is reasonably well-executed and is far better than the strangely similar scene from the climax of "Thunderball."

Pictured above - *Pew* *Pew* *Pew*

However, that abundant action is constantly tainted by the bad comedy. The best bit of the movie, the opening sequence where Bond is thrown from a plane without a parachute (in a scene oddly foreshadowing of "Point Break") is ruined at the very end by Jaws falling into a circus tent while goofy music plays. You know, because clowns are the first thing my mind goes to when I think about James Bond.

Well, I suppose it is now. (Nice rear projection, BTW. Really convincing.)

I am so done with Roger Moore. At least this marks the half-way point for his run as James Bond. And there's nowhere to go but up from here. I don't care what Rotten Tomatoes says: There is no way "A View To A Kill" is worse than "Moonraker." Not possible. It's not in space, it's got a rocking 80's-tastic theme song and it has Christopher Walken. There's no way it won't be an improvement.

Check out the trailer for "Moonraker." If you dare.

THE BOTTOM LINE - In my humble opinion, it's possible that "Moonraker" is the worst Bond film. Ever. It's possible that it's not the worst from a technical level, or even an interest-holding level since I didn't find it as boring as "Thunderball," but terms of eye-rolling and pain it's the reigning champion. I'd rather watch "Austin Powers." And I despise those movies, but at least those had a couple of jokes that worked. This is just painful.

JAMES BOND

WILL RETURN IN

"FOR YOUR EYES ONLY"