No. 360 : Where Eskimos Live (2002)

 

Where Eskimos Live at the IMDb

I picked this DVD up in a charity shop having never heard of it before. Well, its name starts with a ‘W’ so it must be decent! It does hold a reasonable 6.7/10 on IMDb, but I felt that was high and I’d be around half marks, if I was feeling generous.

Bob Hoskins stars as Sharkey, a tough as nails child trafficker who sports the worst accent since Sean Connery’s Egyptian in ‘Highlander’. The DVD box says Sharkey is English, but he has an Eastern European twang for some reason. I wonder if he was dubbed in post, as he doesn’t sound like the Bob we know and love.

Anyway, Sharkey has a fake UNICEF badge and backpack and is floating around Bosnia in 1995 looking to pick up some children. His motives aren’t immediately clear, but we know he has false credentials and is clearly up to something nefarious. It turns out it’s adoptions he’s facilitating but I think the subtext is far more noncey. He is pretty rubbish at his job, getting his papers and stuff taken off him on a regular basis. There is an air of lawlessness due to the war and  Sharkey is frankly underprepared.

He encounters Vlado who is part of a gang of orphans straight out of ‘Oliver Twist’. We know he’s a good guy as he befriends a Downs kid that the others shun. They have almost nothing, but they do have a nice light up globe on which Vlado points out Norway to his friend. ‘That’s where eskimos live’- he says. He may be nice but don’t have him as your phone a friend on ‘Millionaire’!

Vlado’s gang blow up a truck that contains a local Colonel’s daughter. He is rightfully pissed at this and vows to hunt down Bob and Vlado who have now joined forces. This minor peril is quickly dealt with, and the pair bond as they travel across the war-ravaged land with Bob getting some action along the way in a frankly strange sex scene.

The two eventually make it to Germany where Vlado is to be handed over to the gang leaders for a potential organ harvest. Will Bob take the money and walk away? What do you think?!

This was a decent effort, but the multi-nation production showed through, with a lot of dodgy accents and performances. The central relationship was poor with the kid playing Vlado being far too ‘stage school’ for my liking. There were scenes where he was screaming in delight and mugging away as Bob took polaroids that were just awful.

Bob didn’t convince either as a latter-day child catcher and his Road to Damascus style conversion didn’t ring true. He did give it his all however, especially by wearing a comedy style neck brace at the end, after he was beaten up with a trash can.

The story was pretty sleight too and I thought that the film must have been based on a true story, but no, this really was the best the scriptwriters could come up with.

To its credit the film did address some serious issues and the brutality and horrors of war, such as a big pile of corpses, was well done. Overall, the film lacked any tension or peril for me, with the cute kid and grumpy Bob not convincing to any degree, apart as a couple of actors cutting a pay cheque.

Not one that will live long in the memory and one that you will be able to find in my local charity shop sometime soon!

Best Bit - Bob's Full Bed

'W' Rating 10/23

No.244 : Watchers (1988)

Watchers at the IMDb

 If you are in the market for an 80’s monster film with big hair and a super intelligent dog then ‘Watchers’ may just be what you are looking for. It’s based on a book by Dean Koontz (at least I think that’s how he spells his name) and I’m guessing it is pretty far removed from the source material as no one does much watching nor are any of the protagonists called ‘watchers’. Still I watched it (worse luck) so let’s see what we saw.

The film stars a mulleted Corey Haim who has a BMX and a hot girlfriend. They get all kissy face in a barn but before you know it she’s been kidnapped and a large monster is on the prowl. We learn from Secret Service Agent Michael Ironside (hair loss at critical levels) that an experiment has escaped from a local lab and it is on a killing spree. It doesn’t like eyes or mirrors so you have to wonder if it is having a bad hair day itself. In fact it is looking for its fellow escapee, a super smart dog. Ironside also warns that there were three experiments at the lab!

The super smart dog shows up at Corey’s house and he christens it ‘Fur face’. The dog understands English and is soon fetching hot dogs, playing Scrabble and writing computer messages with a pencil in it’s mouth. Obviously these things are impossible with paws so fortunately its handiwork happens off camera. While Corey is bonding with the dog, partly by sleeping in the nude with it under his covers, the monster is on the rampage. Various bit parts get chomped and have their eyes removed in scenes a bit too graphic for a film with a smart dog and BMX interest.

Ironside realises that Corey is his best chance to catch up with the monster and dog and soon gets as brutal as the monster - are his ties to the lab more than he is letting on or did he just find the wig shop closed? As everyone converges on a remote shack the scene is set for a titanic battle where the real monster will be unmasked and the fires will be terrifying - well there is a lot of hairspray about.

This was a right old pile of crap but it was funny and dated enough to keep me watching. Not in an ironic way where I laughed at the hairstyles and bad acting…Ok in  exactly that way.

The feeble plot doesn’t have enough to sustain a 90 minute film so subplots and disposable characters are thrown in such as Jason Priestley’s BMX gang who are dispatched in merciless fashion by the monster who clearly had enough of their terribleness - at least Piggy almost made it. The monster itself was a slow reveal with hairy arms and the odd toothy yell all we were treated to. They should maybe have kept it ambiguous as the 'terrifying creature' turned out to be the same costume as the one from‘Bigfoot and the Hendersons’.

The acting, admittedly with terrible material, was shocking with Michael Ironside doing his best to be a hard as nails baddie whilst trying to stop dazzling us all with his bald head and spouting his menace free dialogue. At one point his partner says “This is pretty ridiculous, don’t you think?” Sir, you are correct!

Best Bit : Michael’s big reveal
‘W’ Rating 11/23

No.183 : World Gone Wild (1987)

World Gone Wild at the IMDb

Well here’s a first for the 100+ W Movies Quest - no not a reader, although that’d be nice - an actual request. OK it was a request borne out of vanity as the person making the request only did so as he almost shares the name of one of the characters, but we’ll take what we can get.

This dystopian action thriller is absolutely dreadful and I doubt you’d be able to find it anywhere apart from my hard drive and numerous land fill sites - but let’s have a look anyway.

The film opens with some scene setting narration. The production evidently didn’t have the cash for a scrolling paragraph so instead poor old Bruce Dern is tasked with setting the scene. It’s the late 21st century and a 75 year war has left most people dead and it hasn’t rained in 50 years. Realising their shaky premise and the abundance of clouds in the film, they add in ‘cruelly there are clouds but no rain’ - you can’t fault science like that.

After a dreadfully tacky credits sequence with the cheapest TV movie graphics and over filtered colours we get to the nub of the action. The writer has seen ‘Mad Max 2’ and thought ‘Yeah no one will notice if I steal that’ so he sets us up in a remote compound filled with people in white clothes and hair bands. He cleverly substitutes the rare resource from gasoline to water to make it all original. Anyway the school only has four books, so at least it’s an improvement from today’s education cuts - little bit of politics there, and the kids have no pencils and a teacher lacking most of her clothes.

The lesson on etiquette is interrupted when Adam Ant appears, towed by cape wearing lackeys, resplendent in his flying goggles and in a hollowed out helicopter. I ‘d say ‘you couldn’t make it up’ but clearly someone has - drugs really screw you up. Ant is playing the ridiculously named ‘Derek Abernathy’ and after spouting a lot of shite for five minutes starts shooting up all the peaceful locals along with his dead eyed henchmen. Total carnage is averted when Bruce Dern turns up and kills a bad guy by booting a hubcap into his throat - clearly he’s not a man to be messed with.

Ant crawls off with some of the settlement’s young men (Operation Yew Tree?) to brainwash them into his cult, yes that's cult, while those who remain take stock and fix their hair. They know Ant will be back and Dern sets off to town for reinforcements. The town is a hell hole with women in basques running about while dying babies are denied water. Sounds like my kinda town! After some recruiting of colourful sidekicks Dern returns to fortify the settlement and wait Ant’s next attack. Can the mismatched gang of renegades and mercenaries take on Ant’s formation bike riding team of white clad brainwashed youths? Will the inevitable explosions kick start the environment? Hell yes!

This blog has been guilty of exaggerating the awfulness of many films but I defy anyone to see this and declare it even a partial success. Well OK, pished up students may be able to laugh ironically at the many plot holes, dreadful acting and atrocious dialogue, but we’re a bit higher brow at this blog.

For a start where, in a world with no rain for 50 years, do they find an endless supply of brilliant white clothes, never mind endless bullets and enough TNT to make 9/11 look like a box of Aldi fireworks? For a world scrabbling in the dirt to survive everyone looks well nourished and there is frankly an over abundance of motorcycles and capes.

OK, we can set these gripes aside, as long as the cast is strong and the plot is tight and coherent. Er, sorry. Ant fails to stand and deliver in the acting stakes and it is baffling how he managed to get through the audition. To be fair in a film where “Does Pinocchio have a wooden dick?” is the best line, the standards were never going to be high. Bruce Dern fails to deliver his usual mania and he seems largely disinterested in a film that doubtlessly looked more fun in the script than in reality.

The gang of misfits were uniformly dreadful from ‘Nitro’ the dynamite expert to some other guy who created a ‘snake pit’ trap with precisely 4 small snakes in it - at least they squashed them together for the close up
shot - Indiana Jones this was not.

The plot was virtually non-existent and they even had two goes at the finale both of which failed to elicit any excitement or tension. Ant had one of the lowest key demises of any movie baddie despite being seemingly bullet proof for the first 90 minutes. The big conclusion was ridiculous as it was predictable and frankly if the new rains had washed this effort out of existence no one would be complaining. Well apart from Mr Abernethy at any rate…

W Rating 6/23
Best Bit - Ant ain't no Goody Two Shoes