Blood and Thunder or Thud and Blunder? Muscles and bullets and man-sweat. Big hair, big guns and big pecs. Americans rewriting history and Vietnamese so stereotyped it’s more racist than a Republican Tea Party rally. It’s RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II, the improbably named and impossibly bland sequel to the solid FIRST BLOOD. Sylvester Stallone returns as Johnny Rambo, the … Read More
FIRST BLOOD
The OTHER Rocky. Hey, all you skatepunks and facebookers and under-30 neo-hippies: you know that word “Rambo” that you toss around to describe tough guys? It’s an unquestioned part of modern worldwide vernacular: you use it as sarcasm, insult or deflective compliment; newscasters use it to sprinkle their reports with humor; sociologists use it to identify unnecessary brutality; the word is … Read More
LEVIATHAN
Levia-Thin. Three words describe LEVIATHAN: Alien, Abyss, Thing. LEVIATHAN is their deformed lust-child. That’s Ridley Scott’s ALIEN (1979), about a team of researchers in space encountering an alien presence; James Cameron’s THE ABYSS (1989), about a team of researchers on the ocean floor encountering an alien presence; John Carpenter’s THE THING (1982), about a team of researchers in the Arctic … Read More
RAMBO III
Bigger, Badder, Body Oilier. It’s all about the body oil. RAMBO III continues the RAMBO legacy by effectively blowing things up with wild abandon, while Sylvester Stallone keeps his shirt off. And why shouldn’t he? He’s arguably in the best shape of his life for this third outing as John Rambo, the unstoppable ex-Special Forces killing machine who has never … Read More