Redbelt (2008)

I love Redbelt (2008) in spite of myself. Writer-director David Mamet has a way with words, but despite all his pretensions, he’s in love with macho bullshit as any other blockbuster action type. The movie is set in the world of Mixed Martial Arts competitions and has an eclectic cast that mixes Mamet regulars like […]

The Last Boy Scout (1991)

I used to watch the Bruce Willis-Damon Wayans action flick, The Last Boy Scout (1991) repeatedly as a 15 year old, positioning it as a ‘gritty’ R 18+ rated alternative to Die Hard even though I was often rewatching a TV edit that whittled away all the F-words and excessive blood-letting. Over the successive decades, […]

Heat (1986)

Not to be confused with the cops-and-robbers epic starring DeNiro and Pacino, Heat (1986) is based on a novel written by William Goldman, Oscar-winning screenwriter of Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid and The Princess Bride. I remember reading about it in his book, Adventures In The Screen Trade, and how the film adaptation went […]

Replicant (2001)

Journeying further into the world of direct-to-video Jean-Claude Van Damme releases from the late 1990s and early 2000s brings me to watching Replicant (2001) for the first time. Released in the waning years of Van Damme’s box office popularity, where his movies were coming out on DVD rather than cinema screens, I had heard some […]

8 Million Ways To Die (1986)

I really wanted to see 8 Million Ways To Die (1986) because of the posters: it basically looked like a very Eighties neo-noir action thriller which is a sub-genre that I love. It was a commercial flop at the time and has a creaky reputation due to being the last film of director Hal Ashby […]