TITLE & REVIEW
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This is the sequel to the original film, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
. The budget has been pushed up, but everything else is pretty much the same.
It was originally titled Bill & Ted Go To Hell,
but apparently Christian fundamentalists in the USA found this offensive.
Joss Ackland (Lethal Weapon 2) is an evil scientist from the future who wants to destroy the society Bill & Ted (will) have (had) create (d)!? He builds evil robot duplicates of our heroes and sends them back in time to the week before the Battle of the Bands. The robots kill the real Bill and Ted ...
Our dead heroes wander the afterlife with the Grim Reaper (Bill Sadler - Roswell High ) as their guide. They have sundry adventures in their efforts to get back to Earth, save their girlfriends and win the Battle of the Bands.
We start in 1967, when a 9-months pregnant African-American woman
is taken into hospital with vampire bites to the throat.
She gives birth, but dies in the process.
We flash forward thirty odd years, and Traci Lords takes a guy to a nightclub somewhat reminiscent of the one in The Hunger . The resultant vamp-fest is interrupted by Blade (Wesley Snipes), a half-vampire with a samurai sword and automatic weapons loaded with silver bullets. When a vamp dies there's a slimier version of the dusting in Buffy The Vampire Slayer .
A vampire body taken to the morgue attracts the attenton of haemotologist N'Bushe Wright . She gets bitten, but Blade grabs her and drags her off to his lair. Along with Kris Kristopherson ( Planet of the Apes 2001 ) they fight vampires. There is the obligatory gunfire and SPFX, but most of the action is martial arts.
The purestrain clan of Vamps led by Udo Kier ( Barb Wire ) have made a treaty with the human politicians. However, Deacon Frost (Stephen Dorff - ) wants to conquer the humans. His plan is to fulfill an ancient prophecy and raise the Blood God ...
Like
Mortal Kombat
this is based on a computer game.
However, it does not try to take itself seriously and thus is a lot more fun.
An evil warlord, General Bison (Raul Julia - Addams Family ), and his sidekick Wes Studi ( Deep Rising ) have kidnapped hostages and are holding them to ransom. The Allied Nations sends in their best soldiers, Jean Claude Van Damme ( Universal Soldier ) and Kylie Minogue , to lead a rescue attempt. Their troops are clad in United Nations uniforms, the only difference being the AN insignia instead of UN ...
This was Raul Julia's last film, and though not one of his best it is enjoyable enough.
This was the supernatural feature film outing of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore,
stars of the BBC sketch show Not Only But Also ...
It is a reminder of the days when there was a British Film industry,
and perhaps of the reasons why there is no such industry today.
It is also a very dated look at London in the 1960s.
Moore's wimpish character is in love with his workmate Margaret Spencer ( Eleanor Bron ), but she does not even notice him. Cook's Satan offers him seven wishes in exchange for his soul, and Moore all too predictably accepts the Faustian deal.
Satan's henchmen are embodiments of the seven deadly sins. Raquel Welch has an eye-catching cameo as Lilian Lust, the babe with the bust. She is about the best thing in the film - the humour is too subtle, a nice counterpoint to the Carry On style of that era, but just not funny enough. The only real exception is the scene with the trampolining nuns.
This film is set in the future, on a mining world torn by a war between the Alliance and the EB.
Alliance Colonel Peter Weller (
Robocop
) crosses a post-apocalyptic no-man's land to organise some peace negotiations.
The other side may have the big bombs,
but the Alliance has seeded no-man's land with killer robots nicknamed Screamers.
However, this is based on a story by
Philip K Dick
so it is not so straightforward.
When Weller gets to the other side's bunker he meets his opposite number, Roy Dupois ( Haemoglobin , La Femme Nikita). It turns out that the Screamers have evolved into Terminator -style androids. Weller also gets an unconvincing love interest subplot with a female soldier ( Jennifer Rubin ).
The supporting cast include include Leni Parker ( Earth: Final Conflict ), while the movie's locations consist mainly of Canadian tundra and abandoned industrial facilities. Also, the SPFX are a bit ropey, but in all fairness they are low-budget greenscreen and stop-motion rather than low-budget CGI, which is even more distracting. The story, what there is of it, is grim rather than exciting. Weller's performance is what sells the piece.
Ripley (
Sigourney Weaver
) is back from the dead, cloned by mad scientist Brad Dourif (
Exorcist 3
) so he can clone the alien Queen that bonded with her DNA.
He thus breeds a race of Alien drones on behalf of
General Dan Hedaya (The Usual Suspects).
However, as you can no doubt guess, things go wrong.
The Aliens get loose, massacre everyone, blah blah blah.
Ripley teams up with a motley band of space-pirates including Michael Wincott ( The Crow ), Ron Perlman ( Beauty and the Beast ) and Winona Ryder . They have to fight their way through the Aliens to the only escape-ship left. Luckily they are not just a bunch of redshirts, they are an interesting bunch of individuals. The writer was a then-unknown Joss Whedon , and the pirate crew were the templates for the crew of the Serenity !
Ripley still has motherhood issues. Ryder becomes a surrogate daughter, quite unconvincingly. Perlman, on the other hand, is the only man aboard the ship willing to have sex with Ripley and yet she treats him like dirt.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet takes us away from the mood of Alien 3 , which was in essense a cliched remake of the first film. Instead he delivers a cliched and OTT remake of the second film. In the previous films we were concerned about Ripley: here she has super-human strength and reflexes. She's not in any danger, we just sit back and watch her kick ass.
The action seems pulled out of a comic book, as does the plot. The Dark Horse comic adaptions of the Aliens series was far superior to the disappointing film Alien 3 , so the writers here apparently stole the plot from Book Two and the albino monster from Deadliest of the Species.
Bedraggled bandit Lamont Cranston (Alec Baldwin) is captured by a Chinese sorceror.
The sorceror redeems him from evil and teaches him magicks.
Seven years later Cranston is back home in NYC, a trench-coated super-hero.
He has the power to cloud mens' minds,
so he can turn invisible and do Obi-Wan Kenobi mind tricks.
He even has a sidekick, a cabbie played by Brian Doyle (
Species 2
).
John Lone ( Ice Man ), last descendant of Genghis Khan, comes to town. He kills off a security guard (Ethan Philips - Star Trek: Voyager ), then tries to recruit Cranston to his cause. He has a small of band of heavily-armoured Mongol warriors.
Cranston's love interest is Margot Lane ( Penelope Ann Miller ) who is not only gorgeous but telepathic. Her father is Professor Reinhardt Lane (Ian McKellen - Lord of the Rings ), and in the best traditions of adventure serials he is constructing superweapons for the US Dept of War. His assistant Tim Curry ( Rocky Horror Picture Show ) is predictably corruptable. With his help, Khan threatens to nuke Manhattan. Hmm, topical.
Meanwhile, a madwoman in Arkham Asylum might hold the secret to the Cult.
The story starts with the young Timogene (John Wayne, of all people)
out for revenge against a rival horseclan, the Tartars,
for the death of his father.
The beautiful scenery should be familiar to anyone who has seen Wayne's westerns, and the Tartars make a good substitute for Apaches.
Eddie Furlong (
Terminator 2
) plays a teenage computer-game addict.
He tries out a new game called Brainscan,
supposedly the ultimate experience in terror.
However, the game's central character, the Trickster,
manages to appear in RL and starts to kill off Furlong's friends.
Police Detective Frank Langella ( Ninth Gate ) investigates the murders, and Furlong is his prime suspect.
Return to the October 2001 Special