Action

McBain (1991)

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Not based on the action-film character from The Simpsons, this McBain is based on the action-film character by James Glickenhaus, director of The Exterminator. And who plays this rousing actor hero? You must’ve said Robert Ginty, right?

But instead, we have an out-of-it, out-of-his-element Christopher Walken, well before he become a walking internet meme in regular, off-kilter movies.

In 1973, in the jungles of the Philippines Vietnam, the U.S. is withdrawing her troops. Michael Ironside, Steve James and Chick Vennera are on the plane ride home, but first, they find a P.O.W. camp they have to liberate. It looks like the set of Cannibal Holocaust. There, Walken is in a fight with a lookalike Bolo Young. Of course, the battle is won. But, should they we need each other, Walken and Vennera have a bond with a tattered $100 bill if things go bad.

Eighteen years later, things go bad.

Vennera is a freedom fighter for the Filipino Colombian government. Although he takes el Presidente hostage, he is killed by his own gun in a reversal of fortune. With Vennera’s sister (Maria Conchita Alonso), Walken (supposedly) walks all the way to New York City, has a beer and reunites with members of his old platoon, now leading very different lives, all of them dumb.

To get to the Philippines Colombia, they have bloody fights with drug dealers and mafia goombahs in order to get enough money to charter a plane. This takes up most of the movie’s 104-minute runtime. On arrival, Alonso and her freedom fighters take the presidential palace, and Walken shoots el Presidente in the head, with thumbs up all around in jingoistic support.

With songs that are overwrought hymns to America (“This my song for freedom!”) alongside the bloodiest gun battles in the early ’90s, this is a strange film that manages to be very boring. Although Glickenhaus caught lightning in a bottle with The Exterminator, apparently the bottle shattered on the ground with films like The Protector and Shakedown.

Plodding with its bad editing, weird time lapses and strange motivations, this movie is just pretty bad. No wonder it has been mostly forgotten, especially with cast members like Walken or Ironside, who are usually able to discern when bad trash is good trash. With McBain, it’s bad trash all the way around. —Louis Fowler

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Thriller

Til Death Do Us Part (2023)

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Wedding bells are ringing … until they don’t, when the bride decides she can’t go through with the nuptials and flees. To find her, the gobsmacked groom sends his seven groomsmen on a “containment mission” — odd word choice, if not for all of them being highly trained assassins, would-be spouses included.

Til Death Do Us Part. Get it?

From Timothy Woodward Jr., director of 2020’s The Call, the colorful thriller plays like a siege picture, as the bride (Natalie Burn, Mechanic: Resurrection) holes herself up in a house whose threshold the groomsmen attempt to penetrate. As they do, the bride goes mano y womano against them, whether using a chainsaw, a golf club or considerable martial arts skills that can’t be easy to execute while wearing a wedding gown.

These balletically choreographed fight sequences are the strongest minutes of Til Death Do Us Part; as a showcase for Burn’s pure physicality and athleticism, the film succeeds. Outside of that, it’s a mess. We’re made to feel the pain of every punch of a tussle, until the soundtrack suddenly does a tonal 180˚ by pulling a cover of “Rockin’ Robin” or a Frankie Valli soundalike single from its jukebox. In this way and others, the movie is often at odds with itself.

While many of the groomsmen look and behave like Tarantino cast-offs, best man Cam Gigandet (2017’s The Magnificent Seven) dances (sometimes literally) through his part as if he were competing against George Clooney for the lead in a comic caper set at a charm school. Meanwhile, an unrecognizable Jason Patric (Speed 2: Cruise Control) pops up in a super-sober subplot I don’t believe was designed to confuse its audience as long as it does.

One thing that is designed to pull the proverbial wool is the movie advertising itself as “from the creator of Final Destination.” While Jeffrey Reddick serves as a primary producer alongside Burn and Woodward, he’s not credited with the script. Til Death Do Us Part lives not only in a different genre, but has none of that franchise’s cleverness or entertainment ROI. Consider that a divorce. —Rod Lott

Action

Night of the Sharks (1988)

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You can’t miss Treat Williams in Night of the Sharks. He’s the one wearing minimally buttoned Hawaiian shirts and a baseball cap emblazoned with a big, red “S” — which, it goes without saying, stands for “Shit, what did my agent get me into?” (Oh, just an Italian B movie to keep your tummy full before your mid-1990s comeback, Treat.)

Williams’ fisherman character, David Ziegler, lives the hammock-and-shack life on the Caribbean shore, complete with a bolo-wearing sidekick (Foxy Brown’s brother, Antonio Fargas). The plot ostensibly concerns Ziegler fighting for his life when his dumb brother sends him a CD encoded with all the secrets of a criminal overlord (John Steiner, Caligula) that many a goon will kill to keep. But director Tonino Ricci is no dummy (despite Thor the Conqueror’s evidence to the contrary); ergo, his movie is titled Night of the Sharks, not Disc of Incriminating Data.

Sharks do appear, although mostly in sunlight. In fact, a particular shark pesters Ziegler daily, not unlike an unchained Doberman on a USPS mail carrier’s route. It swims in shallow water around Ziegler’s boat; Ziegler shouts it’s a “son of a bitch”; the shark shouts back. From shot to shot and scene to scene, however, its fin changes shape. In close-up, it’s toothless. Not that you’ll mind.

Perhaps sensing Dead Heat was going to tank, Williams gobbled up an easy paycheck in semi-paradise, whether you consider that to be the Dominican Republic or in bed with Janet Agren (City of the Living Dead) as his still-hot-to-trot ex-wife. (It’s certainly not listening to the cancer-ravaged voice of Christopher Connelly, playing a priest in his final role.)

Sharksploitation pics often don’t climax in an all-out jungle war, but that just makes this junk that much more fun. They also often don’t contain genuine star wattage like Williams, who, ever the professional, appears to have taken this as seriously as his 1970s’ lead roles. Yes, even when he’s arguing with a shark — which, it goes without saying, ain’t the stuff of Sidney Lumet. —Rod Lott

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Horror

Holistay (2023)

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Shot on the cheap in Las Vegas subbing for San Diego, Holistay is the third horror movie within less than a year about a double-booked rental home. Diminishing returns apply with this limp, unpolished go-round.

Vacationing from Ireland, a couple played by Erin Gavin (Dread) and Gavin O’Fearraigh arrive first to the cul-de-sac property backing up to a golf course. They barely have a chance to christen the bedroom when couple No. 2 enter, L.A.ers played by Gabriela Kulaif and Steven Martini (Major Payne). Within two minutes of meeting, the pairs agree to share the space.

Not consulted for that agreement? “Some weird guy with a hood” standing outside in the dark — aka a druid — and his banshee companion who dresses like Stevie Nicks. Each appearance is akin to encountering a Renaissance Faire attendee overdoing it. Strangely, Holistay sidelines this threat for most of the movie, as our weekenders safari, shop, nap, talk, drink wine, take pot edibles, talk, hot tub, do “epic” hot air ballooning, talk, read Martha Stewart Living, talk, talk more, discuss fish recipes, talk and all too easily forget about their supernatural visitors.

A glorious exception finds Martini’s East Coast goombah character armed and angrily yelling into the night, “Hello! What the fuck are you? Banshee? Bunch of fuckin’ geese? Huh, punk? Goose! I’m from New York! You want some-a-me?” His hysteria is unintentionally hysterical.

Joining the foursome in overall apathy is Holistay’s director, Electile Dysfunction documentarian Mary Patel-Gallagher in her first narrative feature. She turns her script’s subplots — involving an international fugitive and money stolen from an Alzheimer’s fundraiser — into the plot for a bulk of the time, seemingly forgetting about making a horror film until the end. To some degree, I can’t fault her for that, because otherwise, not much of anything is going on. Now that, I fault her for.

At the climax, she offers viewers a twist they won’t accept because it’s a cheat. While I believe Patel-Gallagher has a counterargument at the ready, I rewatched the pic twice and still contend it’s a cheat, because the person/people in question wouldn’t/don’t act that way in private. Which speaks to an even greater problem of characters’ unnaturalness permeating this thrill-free movie — one in which they don’t even unload grocery bags believably. —Rod Lott

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Horror

House of Frankenstein 1997 (1997)

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Hoping to launch a new series, NBC did the monster mash with House of Frankenstein 1997, a three-hour movie stretched across two nights. It was not a graveyard smash, nor a ratings one. Nice try, though, peacock — although maybe you should’ve scheduled it before Halloween instead of the week after?

In a marked detour from Universal’s 1944 House of Frankenstein, the titular spot is a hip Goth club, despite looking like the Hard Rock Cafe and Meow Wolf got together without protection and beget a pop-up experience for The Crow. Its proprietor (Greg Wise, Johnny English) has a team in the Arctic Circle looking for the frozen corpse of Frankenstein’s monster to display in his Los Angeles hotspot. Lo and behold, they find it!

However, the mute monster (Peter Crombie, 1988’s The Blob) is alive — alive, I tell ya! — and flees to the L.A. streets, where his facial scars and odd coloring won’t look out of place. He’s saved from homelessness by a kind pal (Richard Libertini, Fletch) who teaches him how to eat Froot Loops.

Meanwhile, Det. Vernon Coyle (Adrian Pasdar, Near Dark) investigates a serial killer dubbed “the Midnight Raptor” — actually a vampiric man-bat whose flight is rendered by director Peter Werner (I Married a Centerfold) in RGB Predator vision. As if that weren’t a full docket, Coyle’s also hunting a man who turns into a wolf, but at least that intros him to a near-victim (Meet the Parents’ Teri Polo) who’s totally DTF.

As scripted by J.B. White (NBC’s Peter Benchley’s The Beast), House of Frankenstein 1997 ends with closure, yet also a clear path toward further adventures the network chose not to take. That decision was wise because even juggling so many balls, the made-for-TV “event” is about twice as long than it needs to be.

The first half is the strongest, with Pasdar and Polo using their likability to overcome foolish dialogue, culminating in a sex scene that’s actually erotic, primetime limitations be damned. The hokey second bides time before pretty much lifting its club-set climactic showdown from the previous year’s From Dusk Till Dawn. As expected, the effects are telepic-chintzy with one notable exception: the makeup for the man-bat. The less said about the werewolf transformations, the better. —Rod Lott

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