Being a soldier in any army no doubt requires some serious bravery. Surviving to become a middle aged/older soldier means that someone’s not only brave, but skilled and more than a little lucky. In The Woman King, Nanisca (Viola Davis) leads the Agojie, African kingdom Dahomey’s all female branch of their army. She’s survived to middle age in a way few warriors do, though not without some serious physical and mental scars.
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One of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s earliest films, Cyborg features splits, kicks, and staring contests. A little known skill of Van Damme’s, he sometimes challenges the enemy to a staring contest, and sometimes he stares off into the void as if he’s taking on something/someone no one else can see. Good work!
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Accident Man originated as a series of comic strips published in 1990. In an interview with Viking Samurai, Scott Adkins talks about reading it when he was about 14 years old, loving it, and dreaming that someday it would be made into a movie. Well, with 2018’s Accident Man his dream blossomed into reality, and years later he got to live the dream again with Accident Man: Hitman’s Holiday, a sequel which I dare say supersizes the first one in all the right ways.
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Oh my God, Becky, look at this movie. It is so mediocre. It looks like one of those good movies, but, you know, it’s not. Becky (2020) tells the story of the titular hero, Becky (Lulu Wilson), a thirteen year old girl at a cabin in the woods with her dad, Jeff (Joel McHale), her dad’s girlfriend, Kayla (Amanda Brugel), and the girlfriend’s young kid, Ty (Isaiah Rockcliffe), when four convicts escape from a prison and come knocking on the door in search of a special, magical key. Who knows when or how it got there? Who knows what the key does? Becky doesn’t concern itself about the answers, it just keeps on trucking without any concern for whether or not you’re following along.
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Podcast superstar Sean Malloy was kind enough to invite me to join an episode of his I Must Break This Podcast and discuss the Dolph Lundgren demon-fighting flick, Don’t Kill It! No matter the budget, Dolph’s got that je ne sais quoi that makes him so damn watchable! Come listen in to hear me and Sean discuss that tall Swedish drink o’ water’s 2016 film!
Episode 95: Don’t Kill ItContinue reading
One should hope they never find themselves at the business end of an assassin. Especially not any of the assassins from Accident Man (2018) seeing as how they all possess unique and brutal ways of killing people. There’s Jane the Ripper (Amy Johnston), who rips through people with her katana, Carnage Cliff (Ross O’Hennessy), who cleaves carnage with his mighty axe, and our hero, Mike (Scott Adkins), the Accident Man because he makes his kills look like accidents.
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Not to be confused with 1982’s The Slumber Party Massacre, remake/reboot Slumber Party Massacre (2021) pays homage to the first and second movies in this slasher trilogy. Just when you thought the slumbering and massacring was over, Danishka Esterhazy and Suzanne Keilly bring it all back with the tagline, “You know the drill.” If you know the previous movies, then you do know the drill- a group of teen girls has a slumber party interrupted by a killer maniac with a power drill. Slumber Party Massacre remake/reboot (henceforth known as SPMR) tries to bring some new equipment to the toolbelt. But is it worth taking for a spin?
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Dogs are wonderful animals, often treated as part of the family (or better than certain family members depending on how much people like the dog/you) Smart people know you don’t go messing around with people’s dogs. Smart people also know not to go messing around with John Wick (Keanu Reeves), the “Baba Yaga,” the (now retired) hitman. And you sure as hell don’t want to mess with this ex-hitman’s dog. In John Wick (2014), Iosef Tarasov (Alfie Allen), the son of the head of NYC’s Russian Mafia, Viggo Tarasov (Michael Nyqvist), shows what a not-smart man he is when he chooses to take the boys for a wild night out and ends up in the house of John Wick, trashing the joint and murdering the dog who was a gift from Wick’s recently-deceased wife. Bad call, Iosef. Really, really bad call.
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