So, here’s the second issue of KILL YOU LAST, the world’s only action movie fanzine.
This issue has the first part of an in-depth look of the film career of Hulk Hogan, an interview with the director of Rewind This!, a new documentary about the history of VHS, and a play-by-play examination of Bruce Willis’ disastrous appearance on The One Show. There’s also reviews of forgotten VHS-era classics Enemy Territory and Cyborg Cop, mediocre Brue Willis film Striking Distance and The Rock-starring family flick The Gameplan.
Plus Theres another gallery of awesome 80s VHS box art curated by the wonderful @VivaVHS.
(FYI, The first orders should be send out eek beginning 22
April. I'm shipping from the UK, so if you're in a different country, please
bare in mind it'll take longer to get to you. Cheers.)
So, for whatever reason,
I've made a fanzine about action movies. It's because I genuinely, unironically
love action films, and no one takes them seriously, so this is an attempt to do
something semi-intelligent and quarter-literate about them.
There's reviews of various
films, from recent stuff like Haywire and Expendables 2, to forgotten Bruce
Willis films from the 90s, to weird-ass straight to DVD crap starring 50
Cent. There’s also interviews with outlaw film critic Vern, author of the
excellent book Seagalogy, and the director of Chuck Norris Vs Communism, a new
documentary about VHS tapes being smuggled into communist Romania.
There’s also a gallery of
awesome 80s VHS box art curated by the wonderful @VivaVHS.
So, post-Expendables 2 I decided to go on an old school action film binge. I wanted to watch Red Scorpion, a forgotten Cannon era Dolph Lundgren classic, but the Arrow Blu-ray re-release was stupid expensive on Amazon. However, whilst going through my new flatmate's DVD collection I came across Mercury Rising, which I'd never seen before. I figured I couldn't really go wrong with some late 90s Bruce Willis, right?
Mercury Rising might be the blandest film ever made.
To be fair, it turned out to be more of a thriller than an action movie – there's not really any explosions, there's lots of serious-faced running through city streets and Bruce only kills about two people. Even if you haven't seen it you have seen it – Bruce plays a renegade FBI agent who has to look after a little kid who finds out something he shouldn't. See, just from that you tell you've seen that film about five times before haven't you? Probably about twenty times when you think of all the other movies where instead of a kid it's a sassy girl, wisecracking comedian or lovable dog who know to much that Bruce is protecting. There is literally no reason to see this film.
Ok, there were two things notable about it. Two entertainingly laughable things.
Ok, so the USP of the film is that the kid Bruce has to protect is autistic. The stupidly-convoluted plot centres around the savant-like kid breaking the US government's most-unbreakable-code-ever, because it was hidden in a puzzle magazine as a test (WTF?), and therefore dodgy CIA chief (pre-30 Rock Alec Baldwin) decides he needs to bump off the kid in the name of national security. This means we get a well intentioned but absolutely hilarious depiction of autism. When the boy first cracks the code, we get this ludicrously over the top scene with a pounding John Barry score, super-zoom-ins on his pupils, and worst of all, Matrix-style number crunching sound effects. BECAUSE AUTISTIC PPL ARE LIKE A ROBOT, INNIT. It reaches it's nadir at one point where Bruce is trying to get a helpful girl who he's roped into his whole endeavour to let him into his apartment. Understandably, she doesn't want to open the door, so to convince her he just lifts the autistic kid up to the spy hole by his arms like he was a puppy or something. She goes “d'awww” and lets Bruce in.
The other thing I liked was that it feature what I like to call People Using The Internet In The 90s LOLs. At one point Bruce is on the phone to an informant, the guy on the other end gets dragged away and tells Bruce “I'll email you. I'll set up an address (pause)... It'll be Einstein!”. Look, I'm pretty sure einstein@hotmail.com is taken. And einstein@gmail.com as well. Bruce then goes to a library to get internet access and with the help of a friendly librarian manages to track down the email address. Al Gore would be so proud.
No one will really admit it, but concert films aren't actually very interesting* - why not have all the fun of bouncing around to your favourite band live on stage by sitting still on your sofa watching them on TV, right?
So for their 2006 Madison Square Garden show, the Beasties gave 50 fans shitty VHS cameras to record the whole show, and edited it all together. It totally captured the "recording a live show on a camera phone and uploading it to YouTube" attitude of a generation, when YouTube was less than a year old, and gave some sort of sense of actually "being there", all with an awesome VHS aesthetic.
Plus Donald Glover is apparently in the audience somewhere.
3: Oscilloscope Laboratories
The sadly departed Adam Yauch started this chic indie film distribution company, which releases include Yauch's own basketball doc Gunnin' For That #1 Spot, art Ginsberg biopic Howl, Banksy's Exit Through The Gift Shop, Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights, Finnish evil Santa movie Rare Exports, Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff and Wendy and Lucy, and Dark Days, that incredible black and white documentary about homeless people living in New York subway tunnels.
(This has lead to a couple of lazy obituaries calling him the George Harrison of the group, 'cause they both produced films, and Yauch was a Buddhist, and Buddhism and Hinduism are basically the same thing, right?)
4: Nas was on their last album
5: Mike D recorded a country album, just for the hell of it
6: Bonus sixth entry, because the live video for The MC's And One DJ is just too awesome to leave off
*Katy Perry Part Of Me 3D is going to change all this, obviously.
African Cats is Disney's attempt to re-enter the world of fluffy nature docs. Back in the day the House of Mouse used to churn out shorts about the natural world (famously throwing a load of lemmings off a cliff), and post-March Of The Penguins, they probably reckon there's some dollar to be made in a cutsey, kid friendly documentary about big cats.
The film is a perfectly enjoyable piece of half term infotainment. The narration anthropomorphises the fuck out of the cats, giving them names and character motivation, so there's dubiously little educational value - it's basically an episode of Mist: Sheepdog Tales with lions. But whatever, it's fun for the kiddies.
What is interesting, however, is that originally the film was narrated by Samuel L Jackson, but it's curiously been revoiced by Patrick Stewart for the UK.
