Flight of the living dead [2006]

Snakes on a plane has a lot to answer for, it has seemingly opened the floodgates for some odd, unrelated spin-offs.

Snakes on a Train arguably had its own ideas at least, the only thing it shared was well.. the name and the snakes, then it went off on its own crazy ride. Unfortunately Flight of the Living Dead is exactly what it sounds like - Snakes on a plane, with zombies.

There are two flaws here that the writers should have noticed before even putting pen to paper. One: If you are shooting a zombie film with a very tight restriction on available population, then you know there is only so many zombies you can have therefore limiting what you can do with them. Two: If you restrict a film to one small location (ie - a plane) you need to come up with a lot of fresh, tense action to keep people from getting bored. It takes a very, very good writer and director to come out of this with a workable product. Obviously you do not have enough zombies to keep churning out good gore scenes to keep the splatter fans happy.

Regardless it has Dr Suresh’s dad from Heroes in it, which makes this slightly more appealing. Maybe.

Ah yes, I forgot about the plot, silly me. Its all about an evil science project for the military of course, whom yet again are fiddling around with a virus that brings the dead back to life (You would think by return of the living dead 3, they would have learned). Obviously during transportation the experiment escapes and feeds. The heroes in this are barely worth mentioning but include of course, a Cop (transporting a criminal - surprise!), an Air Marshal who would rather be out surfing, a Tiger Woods clone and his girlfriend.

The dialogue is awful, and when they set up some witty one liner or a joke ready for a punch-line, its not even bad… It simply doesn’t make sense.

Obviously the meat and potato’s of a film like this is the zombies and gore. I hate to let everyone down, but bar one scene that was actually pretty good, and another i didn’t see coming, it’s very disappointing. There is a complete lack of good gore and some really bad CGI.

So round it all up and you get something that sounds good on paper but fails in execution, I just don’t see how this film could have worked, and I admire (pity) the director for having the balls to try. One exclusively for the hardcore zombie fans, it is difficult to recommend it even to them!

** Notes about the trailer:
It was made under the working title “plane dead”
The trailer does the sneaky thing of not showing any of the characters from the movie, instead blurs and shakes some snippets of the action together. It is definitely not representative of the final product!

2/5

Ninja Terminator [1985]

Unfortunately it is difficult to confirm the history behind this film, however it appears to be two films edited together in a very haphazard way. The plot has obviously been thrown together in an effort to put the films into some kind of context, regardless here it is for your pleasure. Three Ninja dudes each steal a bit of a 3-piece statue which is imbued with ultimate ninja power. However if you possess all three pieces then you will become a Ninja Terminator!

The strange part here is that some of the film appears to be in America, the rest in Hong Kong, the two main characters Jaguar Wong and Ninja Master Harry communicate between the two films with the use of a Garfield phone. It’s amazing what you can do when you dub a film.

Basically most of the film is Ninja Master Harry running around trying to get the remaining pieces of the statue, he ends up fighting a variety of ninja’s and the combat is mostly sword play and silly (puff of smoke) magic. The action varies here between bad to average while maintaining a good level of entertainment.

Where the film really shines though is every scene with Jaguar Wong, who is without a shadow of a doubt one of the most ultimate bad-ass’s I have ever seen on film. Through the phone conversations its made clear that he’s trying to defeat Tiger whom is trying to get his evil hands on the statue (apparently sending ninja’s across to the other film). What Jaguar Wong actually does usually consists of this:

Random gangster: “Hey, you Jaguar Wong?”

Jaguar Wong: “Yeah, why you got a problem?”

[A fight ensues]

It follows this for most of the scenes he is in, and when he finally reaches Tiger we are treated to an excellent fight scene with some good, solid choreography. It’s not without its flaws but is right up there with some of my favourite kung-fu scenes. Unfortunately they did not use this scene as the climactic battle, instead using Ninja Master Harry for this purpose, which is a bit of an anti-climax after Wong’s.

On top of all that, there are some excellent ‘WTF?’ moments like, when Tiger removes his wig for the final fight, when Jaguar Wong gets angry over his jacket, the realisation that Ninjas use toy robots to send messages to each other and last but not least, an incident with crabs.

I have only scratched the surface here, but ultimately Ninja Terminator is more than the sum of its parts and so far is probably my favourite film to have reviewed for the Movie Rectum. It’s a classic and one I can recommend to all types of people.

And finally just to show off, here’s a trailer of Niiinjaaaa Termiiiiinatoooor!

does the Ident at the beginning remind anyone else of the Columbia Tristar ident with a Star Wars soundtrack?

5/5

Earth Defence Force 2017

Okay, okay so its not a film.
Don’t worry this won’t happen often, however EDF 2017 has many qualities that make it appealing to B-Movie fans everywhere.

The plot of EDF 2017 is at best a way to drive the action, similar to old 1950’s invasion films it is simply about an invasion by an alien race with superior technology, despite this lackluster plot the atomsphere is spot on. The designs of the Alien Technology - Giant walking machines with Death Ray’s, Flying mini gunships, and of course giant insects keep your interest, while the voice acting is spectacularly cheesy.

The game itself is in third person, you control one member of an EDF unit. You do see other EDF soldiers, but largely they are there for comedy value and just end up getting killed pretty much constantly. The controls themselves are sluggish, this is especially notable in vehicles where it doesn’t seem to care if you have inverted the y axis or not. The weapons (of which there are 100’s) are great fun, although some are pretty useless. Despite all the flaws in the games core gameplay it still fun, especially if you play co-op (not live enabled) with a friend. Destroying an entire city just to drive out an army of giant Ant’s is just a fun thing to do.

Another thing of note is that the graphics are functional at best, but this leaves way for a ridiculous amount of enemies on screen at once, which is really what makes this game fun. Also the game engine is dodgy as hell, you kill things like ants, they tend to just bounce about like a dead 3d object, everything else seems to explode or fall through you. Some might put the game down when they see this, but instead it just made me laugh my ass off.

Best of all it’s just a fun game overall, its easy to pick up and play for 30 minutes just for a laugh, don’t expect Crysis, but enjoy it for its complete lack of substance and silly physics.

3/5