Producer Irwin Allen kept his once-Towering cinematic credibility in flames with Fire, a virtual remake of his previous year’s telepic Flood — just with another basic concept from your high school chemistry class (or a then-rather popular 1970s R&B-funk band).
The real-life town of Silverton, Oregon, comes under siege from a massive blaze sparked by the cigarette butt carelessly discarded by a greasy convict (Neville Brand, Psychic Killer) doing chain-gang cleanup work in the forest. In the line of fire — literally! — are such soaped-up characters as a widowed lodge owner (Vera Miles, The Spirit Is Willing), the well-below-her-league old man who has tried to get into her pants for decades (Ernest Borgnine, The Poseidon Adventure), and a teacher (Donna Mills, who clenched a bigger role two years later in Hanging by a Thread, another Allen tele-epic) on a field trip with her young charges.
And speaking of Hanging by a Thread, Patty Duke again assumes the role of an unhappy wife, here married — for the moment, at least — to a fellow doctor (Alex Cord, Chosen Survivors). Perhaps their love will be, um, reignited? Dur.
An Allen touchstone, the well-stocked cast is fun to watch, including Erik Estrada (Airport 1975) as a prisoner who uses the smoke as convenient cover for an escape. Director Earl Bellamy (Walking Tall Part II) puts Estrada front-and-center as much as he can, assumedly realizing the soon-to-be-CHiPs star’s chiseled good looks are Fire’s most special of effects. It’s certainly not the lazy stock footage of terrified townspeople — some in horn-rimmed glasses, to show just how mismatched the material is. —Rod Lott
In Italy, the crime rates have skyrocketed to such great heights, it’s enough to make a police commissioner throw his hands toward the sky in resignation and cry, “Mama mia!” What’s an authority figure to do? Well, there is always the idea of assembling a team of super cops who are not only crack shots, but aces on motorcycles — a Stunt Squad, if you will.
Cool concept, no? It’s an awesome idea. Unfortunately, director Domenico Paolella (Hate for Hate) fails to pay it off. He didn’t quite make that movie.
What he did make is more in line with the guns-a-blazin’ hallmark of Eurocrime. The criminals at Stunt Squad’s core employ a devious plan of rigging public phones with explosives, and once the devices are wired for maximum wreckage, gang leader/handsome man Valli (Vittorio Mezzogiorno, Antonio Margheriti’s Car Crash) enters a nearby booth, inserts a coin and dials an explosion. To Valli, the more collateral damage, the better.
That brand of ruthlessness results in the formation of the Stunt Squad, but don’t go look going for characterization, which begins and ends with its members donning matching yellow helmets. All but a modicum of vehicular mayhem ensues, to audiences’ sheer disappointment of what could have been. Paolella includes a make-good sequence at a disco club where the ladies lose their shirts, so viewers won’t lose their minds. —Rod Lott
Apparently having run out of intimidating-sounding words for the blank previously filled by “identity,” “supremacy,” “ultimatum” and “legacy,” the Bourne franchise goes for reunion-nametag basics with just Jason Bourne — nothing less and certainly nothing more. The moniker is fitting, because it’s as dull and unexciting as the film itself.
When we last left Jason Bourne (Matt Damon, The Martian) in 2007’s The Bourne Ultimatum, he was … well, hell, I don’t recall, and given the amnesiac theme that kicked off the series, perhaps he doesn’t, either. But here, he’s boxing in bare-knuckle brawls that bring down Serbs in a single punch. Although these bouts are in Greece, the retired assassin’s participation seems rather out-and-about for someone so desperately wishing to stay off CIA radar. He is drawn back into his old employer’s shady world when former co-worker Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles, 2006’s The Omen) uncovers some intel about Bourne’s past — namely, his father (Gregg Henry, Body Double).
She snagged it as part of the complete information on CIA’s black operations by hacking into its mainframe; the agency even made it easy for her by dumping all the documents into one folder, handily labeled “Black Operations.” Nicky downloads it all to an encrypted USB drive, marked “ENCRYPTED” in block letters so as not to call attention to itself. And yet it does, so the jowly CIA director (Tommy Lee Jones, Mechanic: Resurrection) allows his expert on all things cyber (Alicia Vikander, Ex Machina) to bring Bourne in, while also secretly authorizing his elimination via a professional plugger (Vincent Cassel, Child 44).
By all accounts (being the previous four adventures — five, if you count the Richard Chamberlain one, which I’m not), this setup should place the film in forward drive. But it doesn’t, and no amount of director Paul Greengrass’ usual shaky-cam shenanigans can distract from the fact that some ingredient crucial to the tried-and-true formula is off, if not missing altogether. Part of it is Damon himself; speaking only 45 lines of dialogue, most of them spartan, he cruises through this one as if he were a robot. With the hero being a man of very few words (288, to be exact), it seems as if he’s tired of the material, and his lack of investment is infectious. Since his character’s arc already was granted definitive closure at the conclusion of Ultimatum (hence, the title), the web of plots and subplots feel as predictable as whether the end credits will roll to the groove of Moby’s “Extreme Ways.” (And to dispel any shred of doubt, yes, of course they do.)
By the time the story has loop-de-looped itself around to the Las Vegas Strip for the much-hyped car chase — well, technically, Cassel’s in a tank — the element on which Jason Bourne has double-downed is revealed to be excess. Perhaps Damon shouldn’t have been so quick to bad-mouth The Bourne Legacy, the 2012 franchise spin-off that fronted Jeremy Renner (Avengers: Age of Ultron) and Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton) in the respective absences of Damon and Greengrass. Unfairly dismissed by audiences because it wasn’t a fourth go-round for Damon, Legacy concludes with a motorcycle chase that is far more gripping than the rather lax sequence here, not to mention being the superior effort. Humdrum Ludlum at best, Jason is so lifeless, it’s stillborn, as opposed to “still Bourne.” —Rod Lott
If only Sugar Boxx were a faux trailer and nothing more, it might be something. Extended to a full-length feature, however, it loses a lot of spark … much like Robert Rodriguez’s own Grindhouse spin-off, Machete. Still, any purebred fan of the women-in-prison (WIP) film won’t hate himself for digging in, as this Boxx offers all of the much-reviled subgenre’s mainstays, sapphic ones included.
Cody Jarrett’s low-budgeter centers on Valerie March (The Hillside Strangler’s Geneviere Anderson, who’s prettier than the transvestite Christina Applegate the poster depicts her to be), a go-get-’em news reporter for WPNS (get it?). Wishing to expose the Sugar State Women’s Prison as the sex-and-slavery hovel it really is, Valerie longs to go undercover as a prisoner. Shortly after donning hooker getup, she gets her wish and lands herself behind its bars.
The hot-flashed hoosegow is the kind of place that houses the worst of the worst, where … well, let’s let the sexy Warden Beverly Buckner (Linda Dona, Future Kick) fill us in: “Life in this compound can be pretty damn hard unless you have friends. I’m talking about beatings, gang rape, dysentery.”
Check, check and check! Writer/director Cody Jarrett (Frog-g-g!) gleefully submits leading lady Anderson and her fellow actresses to much mayhem and misery before allowing them to achieve that much-desired revenge. As a result, Sugar Boxx is marginally violent, occasionally funny and aggressively stupid, while not fully being able to embrace its drive-in roots. Having little money certainly works to the movie’s advantage, as does Jarrett’s decision to fill supporting parts with Russ Meyer starlets Kitten Natividad and Tura Satana, not to mention veteran WIP director Jack Hill (The Big Doll House and The Big Bird Cage). That said, a little more creativity is required to pull off the pastiche/homage to the point where it looks as authentic as Jarrett no doubt would like.
I admired it more than enjoyed it, getting in step with its funky groove as it shimmied its way forth. In terms of silly-minded throwbacks of fightin’ foxy females, it’s not up to the titillating heights of, say, Bitch Slap, but for a mere 86 minutes, it will do. —Rod Lott
As demonstrated by Dr. Jack Finney (Lee Gideon, 1988’s D.O.A.) in the prologue, the gadget for which this film is named is a tiny computer chip that, when tucked into the folds of one’s brain, acts as a form of remote control: mind control, to be clear. In fact, Killing Device has the power to “turn people into kamikazes,” according to our hero, intrepid newspaper reporter Kyle (bland Antony Alda, half-brother of Alan), whom we don’t even meet until a third of the film has flickered past.
Before that point, one-time director Paul MacFarlane (cinematographer for shot-on-video slasher The Ripper) layers scene after scene of device-implanted humans — from a ’roided-out Stallone stand-in to an insolent granny — putting senators to the most extreme of term limits. One is shot dead; another is felled by a trick cigar that emits poison gas; yet another is shot while smoking an actual cigar! Kyle investigates, with the assistance of Sara (Gig Rauch, better-known as Gig Gangel, Playboy’s Miss January 1980, in her only acting role), a beautiful woman who happens to be at the wrong place at the wrong time and exists mostly to provide the inevitable, smooth jazz-fueled sex scene with shapely and immodest eye candy.
Packed with silly violence and scenes shot in a strip club just because, the low-budget actioner plays like a production of Andy Sidaris in his prime, only shot in Oklahoma instead of Hawaii or California, and infused with a political conspiracy à la Three Days of the Condor, but narrowed to the length (and depth) of a two-martini lunch. The dialogue is a hoot, particularly in the threats thrown Kyle’s way, from “Find what you’re looking for, fuzz nuts?” to “You better hope that gun’s made of chocolate, asshole, cuz you’re fixin’ to eat it!”
Featuring Return of the Living Dead’s Clu Gulager as Smitty and live music by Flash Terry and the Uptown Blues Band, if you’re into either of those sorts of things. —Rod Lott
Producer Irwin Allen kept his once-Towering cinematic credibility in flames with Fire, a virtual remake of his previous year’s telepic Flood — just with another basic concept from your high school chemistry class (or a then-rather popular 1970s R&B-funk band). 
And speaking of Hanging by a Thread, Patty Duke again assumes the role of an unhappy wife, here married — for the moment, at least — to a fellow doctor (Alex Cord, Chosen Survivors). Perhaps their love will be, um, reignited? Dur. 
