Motorway (2012)

I love that the skill which the hotshot highway traffic cop (Shawn Yue) has to master is nailing a tight ass turn. Talk about a hero’s journey! This is what Motorway (2012), a Hong Kong crime thriller from Milkyway Productions, Johnnie To’s company, offers. That and Anthony Wong as the hotshot’s senior partner giving him the Obi Wan Kenobi driving instructor special. Look, if you don’t feel anything watching Anthony Wong in close up taking a drag on a cigarette while the sound of an engine is continuously revved, deciding upon whether to accept his upcoming retirement or help his protégé to learn the techniques of battling an old foe, well, then there are other cinematic pleasures out there for you! For me, I’ll take this straight-forward and satisfying car chase movie.

The story: two highway patrol cops (Yue and Wong) cross paths with a getaway driver (Xiaodong Guo) who is hired to bust out a prisoner from a cop shop jail. There is history between the driver and the senior detective, which is the only edge the local force have with the driver’s continual escapes, leaving crushed cars and dead cops in his wake. The story is reduced to bare bones simplicity, to the point when you hear Anthony Wong’s character is due for retirement, you don’t need a road map to know where that is heading.

One review of Motorway compared its car chase sequences as being pretty much all like the opening five minutes of Drive, which is highly accurate. There’s also a Michael Mann feel, with the throbbing synth and moody guitar noodling; that, and the majority of the pursuits are nocturnal. While there is plenty of speed and point-of-vehicle shots racing down highways, the film’s action is more about the tension of the getaway driver emerging from the darkness, cars becoming extensions of the human body, spinning around to block or attack, picking off police and pushing them off into the void.

Soi Cheang’s direction favours composition and pacing, providing style and atmosphere throughout. Even the villain remains an engaging presence, not through any details given about his past or who he is, but by his determined, cold-blooded professionalism. The stunt-work is mostly practical and impressive in what they’re pulling off in freeways and mountainous roads at the dead of night. And even if it presents a sobering, disciplined counter to the Fast and the Furious series in terms of car chase cinema, it will still offer some heightened ridiculousness, like the young hotshot flirting with a woman by driving donuts around her. And that closing credits score (by Alex Gopher and Xavier Jamaux) is a banger! Available to stream on SBS On Demand. Recommended.

The Ambulance (1990)

I distinctly remember reading Marvel comics when I was a kid, Spider-Man or Captain America, and they always included a little editorial from Stan Lee, and there were a few issues of him promoting The Ambulance (1990), a thriller starring Eric Roberts that was written and directed by Larry Cohen (Q – The Winged Serpent, The Stuff). Why was Stan Lee promoting The Ambulance? Well, because Stan Lee is in it! As himself, playing the boss of Eric Roberts’ character who works at Marvel Comics as an illustrator; there are a couple of scenes set at his workplace. This is only tangentially related to the story: when Roberts talks about his job to cop James Earl Jones, he is dismissed as a weirdo, prone to making stuff up, and then Roberts also uses his illustrator skills to mock up a drawing of a missing woman (who looks more like Duran Duran cover art than a police ID sketch).

Larry Cohen’s main high concept hook for The Ambulance is a twist on his Maniac Cop formula: “What if a cop was a psycho murderer?” Here, it’s “What if an ambulance was run by psycho murderers?” In the opening scene, Roberts tries to pick up a woman on the street (Janine Turner) who then falls ill and is taken away by an ambulance. Roberts tries to track her down and find out if she’s okay, but begins to stumble across a murderous conspiracy. All of which builds up to a recurring scene of him getting ill or knocked out and freaking out when a gurney arrives (“Don’t let them take me!!!”).

I had lots of fun with this 95 minute thriller. More Hitchcockian New York exploitation thrillers should have an unhinged protagonist as their hero like with Eric Roberts’ full-bodied performance, all sweaty and fast-talking, and charming me with his complete commitment, that and his lion mane of a mullet (circa Best Of The Best style). Cohen is from an older generation of movie-making, and makes sure the dialogue is snappy and cute, and provides great supporting roles for old pros like James Earl Jones and Red Buttons as a wisecracking journalist. Megan Gallagher also plays a cop who becomes involved in the mystery. And what a twist to see in the credits, “And introducing Nick Chinlund”, the first feature film for one of my favourite bad guy character actors! The Ambulance features plenty of New York street locations and neo-noir style to the cinematography; the idea to illuminate the interior of the sinister ambulance with green lighting is a brilliant visual. And there are lots of hectic stunts including car chases and a runaway gurney gag well before Hudson Hawk. More goofy and whacked out than scary or suspenseful, The Ambulance is still very entertaining, even when it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Just surrender to the momentum and the brio of Eric Roberts. Recommended.

Hologram Man (1995)

Slash Gallagher. That’s the name of the bad guy in Hologram Man (1995), a sci-fi action techno-thriller from PM Entertainment Group. No doubt direct-to-video upon its release, watching it on a YouTube rip now, the film looks like television, yet has enough budget for multiple explosions and equipment to launch stunt people into the air against a wall of flames in the background. Now Slash Gallagher (played by Evan Lurie who also cowrote the movie) is a dreadlocked megalomaniac (resembling a buff Jonathan Davis from Korn) who in the opening of the movie takes his army of goons to assassinate a US senator as part of his “revolution.” In Slash’s way are by-the-book cop named Decoda (Joe Lara) and his partner (John Amos). After one action sequence that smashes up and detonates multiple cars on an inner-city main road, there’s now a vendetta relationship between Decoda and Slash, particularly when Slash is captured and sent to hologram prison. Flash forward five years, and now LA is even more futuristic with space-ship cars and eco-domes. Decoda is no longer by-the-book but a long-haired, rule-breaking maverick and Slash has broken out of the matrix and turned into a powerful electron based force… a Hologram Man if you will.

Demolition Man is a clear influence here (and the film’s title is even name-dropped by a character) along with action sequences that recall moments from Robocop and Terminator 2 (the cocaine factory shoot-out and the truck freeway chase respectively). This is fun cyberpunk video trash that has it all: a VR training sequence that feels like a demo for a PC simulator, a corrupt corporation called CalCorp (short for “California Corporation”), character actors like William Sanderson and Tiny Lister as Slash’s henchmen, Michael Nouri from The Hidden as the power hungry governor, and Tron level effects that turn our muscular stars into video-effect body-suit wearing pixelated “holograms.” Lara resembles Nic Cage in Con Air but if he traded the white singlet for a yuppie suit, and Lurie has a haughty, over-the-top energy that is memorable. Directed by the king of PM cyber-action flicks, Richard Pepin (Cyber Tracker and T-Force) Recommended.

The Silencers (1996)

PM Entertainment had some spare fedoras and trenchcoats, and a HR Giger jumpsuit, and decided to make a sci-fi action movie called The Silencers (1996), which feels like a 90 minute X Files episode where every 20 minutes Mulder and Scully leap in slow motion from a massive explosion, the type that turns the background into a wall of flames. Beginning with a 1950s era Close Encounters scenario where a family in a farmhouse are visited by a cattle-stealing UFO, and then warned off by “The Silencers” aka the Men In Black, guys in hats and trenchcoats who also have dark eyes. Twist – the men warning people to forget about aliens are actually aliens!

Flash forward to the 1990s and rugged Secret Service agent Jack Scalia becomes aware of their existence when a US senator he is protecting becomes targeted for assassination by the Silencers. Even for a moderately budgeted movie destined for direct-to-video and looking like a TV episode, PM Entertainment productions always surprise with the amount of location shooting, and flipping of cars on the streets and wild stunt-work and multiple explosions; I’m sure it’s also a product of a by-gone era where moderate productions had scope for achieving impactful verisimilitude rather than immediately using CGI. There’s a very compelling, jaw-dropping and quite hectic action sequence in the middle of the movie where a tanker transporting top secret cargo is chased down the wrong way part of the freeway, with Scalia jumping from car to truck and back again, which already feels quite masterful before a helicopter (with a dude hanging from the landing gear firing a machine gun) is thrown into the mix. It’s also halfway through the movie before its true form reveals itself – with Scalia doing an odd-couple buddy-cop routine with a good guy alien (Dennis Christopher) called Comdor and wearing the HR Giger get-up. Comdor has been sent to protect Earth from the alien race working with the US government and acting as “the Silencers”. It’s Alien Nation, it’s The Hidden, it’s Dark Angel/I Come In Peace. It is the vibe!

They have to stop a Stargate portal from delivering an inter-dimensional invading army, and the only way to do that is with lots of gunplay that reflects the growing HK cinema influence on American action cinema. Scalia and Christopher are good fun in their roles, and it’s a wacky, entertaining flick. You’ve got Clarence Williams III as a General, a scene in a UFO Convention, and some Windows 95 computer graphics for the portal effects. Definitely the type of flick you used to get in a ten dollar 50 pack of unknown movies, but now you can watch free on a YouTube rip. Directed by Richard Pepin (who helmed the other PM Entertainment joints I’ve seen, Cyber Tracker and T-Force). Recommended.

Fear Is The Key (1972)

Barry Newman is best known for playing the enigmatic driver in the car chase movie Vanishing Point, and I also know him playing Peter Fonda’s security man several decades later in Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey. To see him play a tough guy role like in Fear Is The Key (1972), he is wiry and compact, but also feels like a character actor in a leading man part – similar to how Gene Hackman gives something grounded and no-nonsense when he’s the main star of an action movie. Based on an Alistair Maclean novel (The Guns Of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare), this adaptation follows through as a nail-biting page-turner, a pulp thriller that is best enjoyed without knowing too much, riding along with all of its twists and turns. I had a vague idea where Fear Is The Key was going, but it was still a satisfying experience due to the patience the movie has for unveiling the plot, even as it is serving up an extended, near-20-minute car chase sequence in the first act for all of the 1970s drive-in action movie fans. There’s a bit of everything from a neo-noir sensibility, a Louisiana coastal mystery vibe, as well as a military mission movie. We open with Newman on a transistor radio, talking to small transport plane he is guiding to land. When things go wrong, we fade out – returning to Newman driving into a small town and becoming aggressive at a service station diner. What happens next, I’ll leave that for you to discover… From there, we also have Suzy Kendall unwittingly involved in everything, John Vernon naturally playing a sinister, officious role, and even a young Ben Kingsley as an intense hitman. Snazzy score by Roy Budd and directed by Michael Tuchner. Watched the Imprint Films Blu-ray release. Even with all of the plot machinations, Newman gives it ballast, and a few grace notes as well. Recommended.