TITLE & REVIEW

30,000 Leagues Under the Sea

The USN loses a top-secret missile-boat. Lorenzo Lamas ( Deep Evil ) and his hi-tech missile sub are sent to rescue the crew. A gorgeous English babe is the commander of the SEAL unit sent to recover the nukes. Naturally, Lorenzo and the babe have a personal history that involves a bad break-up. So this is like The Abyss , but low-budget and poorly-cast.

Lamas and his sub crew start running out of oxygen. They black out, and wake up aboard the Nautilus. Captain Nemo is the stereotypical madman with an urge to build an underwater civilisation.

65 (2023)

Kylo Renn (Adam Driver - Silence ) is a spaceship pilot. His craft hits a meteorite, and the escape pod ends up on a nearby M-class planet. Of course, the survivors get menaced by local monsters. Yes, this starts a lot like Pitch Black - of if we were to be less charitable, After Earth .

It turns out that the monsters are dinosaurs, and the planet is Earth ... 65 million years ago. Worse, the meteor that destroyed the ship was part of a larger meteor that is about to hit the planet and create an extinction-level event. The survivors have to get to their escape ship ...

The pilot is accompanied by a small girl who runs away and does not speak to him at first. Yes, they are basically Hicks and Newt from Aliens . Well, she is a stand-in daughter for him so is is a bit of a Ripley character instead. Anyway, this is not a very original movie but it does work if you consider it an alternative to Alien 3 . If Hicks and Newt had been seperated from Ripley, trapped together on a different continent, this is the adventure they might have had.

Around The World In 80 Days (2004)

In Victorian London, Lau Xing (Jackie Chan - Shanghai Noon ) uses his acrobatic kung-fu skills to escape the local police. However, the only way to hide is by becoming assistant to Phileas Fogg (Steve Coogan - The Parole Officer ) - an inventor who is regarded as insane by his contemporaries.

By incredible coincidence, Lau and Fogg have a mutual enemy. He is Lord Kelvin (Jim Broadbent - ), chairman of the Royal Society. Somehow this means he is also the Minister for Science, meaning that the British government is an unelected body. Kelvin bets Fogg that he cannot circumnavigate the world in eighty days. Of course, Lau has manipulated this to happen so that he can get himself home to China.

Lau has robbed the Bank of England, stealing a jade statue of the Buddha. This statue was stolen from Lau's village by a Chinese warlord, who gave it to Kelvin as downpayment in exchange for military assistance to conquer the village. Kelvin has Colonel Kitchener (Ian McNiece - ) send police Inspector Fix (Ewen Bremner - Exodus ) to catch Lau - and to stop Fogg from winning the bet.

The duo make it to Paris without much problem. They pick up a third member, Monique La Roche ( Cecile de France ), and catch the Orient Express train to Istanbul. There they run into Prince Hapi (Arnold Schwarzenegger - Terminator ), and this makes us wonder what Arnie was thinking. He is completely miscast, and the brown-face make-up only makes it worse. At the time he had a full-time job as Governor of California, so presumably he only accepted a tiny cameo role in order to maintain his membership of the Screen Actors Guild.

Once the trio get to India, they are ambushed by Maggie Q and some other Chinese agents working for the warlord. This scene set the basis for Maggie's career, so at least something good came of this film.

In the USA, Fogg is completely unrecognised. He has to take tips on begging from a hobo (Rob Schneider - Judge Dredd ). However, once Fogg gets out of San Francisco he is immediately recognised by Orville Wright (Luke Wilson - Charlie's Angels ) and his brother Wilbur (Owen Wilson - Zoolander ). Yes, New York City even throws an unofficial parade in his honour.

On the way across the Atlantic, the steamer captain (Mark Addy - Game of Thrones ) offers all the help he can. However, Fogg has to actually make an invention that works. Can he beat the Wright brothers by making a working powered aircraft?

The final confrontation with Kelvin involves an appearance by Queen Victoria ( Kathy Bates ) herself. Will this anti-Imperialist movie allow the British monarchy to redeem itself?

Caved In (2006)

This starts in the 1940s, in a salt mine in Switzerland. The good news is they find a rich seam of emeralds. The bad news is it also holds a hive of enormous CGI insects.

In the modern day, a rich man (Colm Meaney - Star Trek: DS9 ) hires a caver to guide an expedition into the disused mine. Unfortunately the expedition are all gangsters and they start to turn on each other, but that is to be expected with this kind of thing.

Meanwhile, one of the crooks stays with the caver's wife and teenagers. This allows for some good-old fem-jep.

Crawl Or Die AKA Crawl, Bitch, Crawl

This is set in a dark future, where a virus has turned human women infertile - like in Children of Men . Luckily, one fertile woman has been located and is sent to another planet - named Earth 2 . However, despite being guarded by the world's best Special Forces team she is still not safe.

All this is an excuse to get a bunch of people trapped in some underground tunnels. An alien beastie chases them, although at least it is prosthetic in most scenes. It bumps them off one at a time, so when it comes to Special Forces training things must have slackened by the time people landed on a planet in a different solar system.

The Final Girl, the best of the Special forces team, is Tank ( Nicole Alonso ) - a butch woman in skimpy sportswear and a blonde mohawk hairdo. We do not learn her name until the very end, so as you can imagine there is not much in the way of dialogue in this film. It is basically an extended chase scene, with the intention of creating a dark, suspenseful and claustrophobic atmosphere. However, this falls far short of the Polish black and white classic, Kanal.

Honey, I Shrunk The Kids (1989)

This is a special effects extravaganza from 1989. Decades later, it is still visually spectacular.

A scientist (Rick Moranis - Ghostbusters ) lives in suburban USA with his wife and two children. There is even a subplot of his feud with the neighbours - Matt Frewer ( Max Headroom ) and Kristine Sutherland .

The scientist invents a machine that can shrink objects. His children get accidentally reduced to the size of insects, and then thrown out into the back yard. They must make their way back across the law, dodging the occasional bee and scorpion, if they want to get returned to their former size.

Last of the Mohicans (1992)

This is a movie by director Michael Mann , best known for urban thrillers like Heat (1995) . However, he attacks this adaptation of the novel by James Fenimore Cooper with the usual attention to detail that he is famous for.

Hawkeye (Daniel Day Lewis - The Crucible (1996) ) is a white man, adopted by his foster-father Chingachgook (Russel Means) and brother Uncas (Eric Schweig - The Missing ). They are the last of the Mohican tribe, a bloodline driven almost to extinction by war with the Franch and their Huron allies.

Hawkeye and the others are hired to lead reinforcements to a fort on the border with the French land. When the forces arrive, they discover that Colonel Munro (Maurice Roeves - Dr Who: Caves of Androzani ) and his men are besieged by the French and their Huron allies, led by the bloodthirsty war-chief Magua (Wes Studi - Heat ).

Things go from bad to worse. Hawkeye and the Mohicans get out with Munro's daughters, Cora ( Madeline Stowe ) and Alice ( Jodhi May ). A British officer, Heyward (Steven Waddington - The Parole Officer ), tags along. However, Magua and his war-band are in hot pursuit.

The ending was slightly changed from the original story, because the decision was made to play up the romance angle rather than keep it as a straight-up boys-own adventure. This was a smart decision, because the director's emphasis on realism kept this somewhat slow-paced. The music by Enya is also very evocative.

Light at the Edge of the World (1971)

Will Denton (Kirk Douglas - Spartacus, Saturn 3 ) is a lighthouse keeper on an island off the Tierra Del Fuego, safeguarding sea traffic between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans a few decades before the Panama Canal was opened. This was the loneliest spot on Earth, but also an incredibly vital one.

A pirate ship arrives, and the crew quickly conquer the island. Captain Jonathan Kongre (Yul Brynner - Taras Bulba ), a former slave-ship operator, plans to lure cargo ships onto the rocks. In the meantime, he keeps his crew occupied by letting them hunt for the lighthouse-keeper.

The first ship they wreck is a passenger ship from California. It goes down in a shipwreck scene that lacks the graphic impact of the Disaster genre which took off a couple of years after this came out. There is only one lifeboat-load of passengers who survive, and they are wiped out by the pirates - in yet another scene that lacks graphic impact. Arabella Ponsonby ( Samantha Eggar ) is taken alive by the pirates, and used as bait to lure Will out of hiding. However, Will manages to rescue one of the crew and they start bumping off the pirates one at a time.

The 1970s was a time for grim movies with downbeat endings. This may have been made at the start of the decade, but it certainly embraces a lot of the tropes.

Sorceror (1977)

This is the third in a series of tense 1970s thrillers directed by William Friedkin . With French Connection he re-invented the police thriller, while The Exorcist re-booted the entire horror genre. However, this film sank without trace. In part because of the title - the original book was called The Wages Of Fear, while Sorceror is only the name of the hero's truck. There are no magic-users in the entire story, which means that many fans of The Exorcist were disappointed. The other reason it flopped is that it came out at the same time as Star Wars: A New Hope .

The film starts by introducing us to four main characters. They are all criminals who end up on the run. Each is played by an actor who is recogniasble in his own country, thus making this an internationally sellable ensemble cast. That said, the American is Roy Scheider ( Jaws ), so it is a good bet who the last man standing will be.

The characters all end up in a Third World hell-hole, a tiny town in an un-named Latin American country. The only employer in town is an American oil company, which does not give a damn about worker safety. When the oil well is sabotaged by left-wing terrorists, many workers are killed. Worse, a violent riot breaks out when the families attack the police.

The only way to put the oil-well fire out is with explosives. The bad news is that the only cache of dynamite is two hundred miles away. The worse news is that the dynamite is sweating, and the cases are basically full of highly unstable nitro-glycerine. Worst of all, the cases must be transported on bumpy roads in out-dated trucks. In other words, it is a suicide mission. Luckily, there happen to be four foreigners who have nothing to lose.

In a modern-day movie, the inciting incident is about twenty minutes into the story. This movie, however, has already drawn out the introductory act to about an hour into the story. However, once the trucks get moving the suspense is almost non-stop. Much like Apocalypse Now, which came out a couple of years later, the story is all about the journey.

The trucking goes well, to start with. Our heroes decide to make things look a bit more exciting by deliberately driving as close as possible to the edge when it is clearly visible that there is plenty of room on the other side. However, later on there is a spectacular sequence involving a rope-bridge. Apparently it was a nightmare to film, but it is spellbinding to watch. As always in this film, things are pushed to the level of extreme. There is a rainstorm, and the river is in full flood. A cheesy disaster movie would have used a river of lava, but the torrential water in this scene is terrifying enough.

Survivor (2014)

The protagonist is Kate, a young woman who looks like Katherine Heigl . She lives on a starship, where she is part of a recon team being given Special Forces type survival training by Captain Hunt (Kevin Sorbo - Hercules: The Legendary Journeys ). Their mission is to scout newly-discovered M-class worlds, in the hope of finding somewhere they can settle and live in peace.

The scout-ship is destroyed, and the crew parachute down to the planet. They are injured, scattered, and attacked by barbarians clad in gas masks. Kate manages to get away, and goes looking for the Captain.

Captain Hunt cannot come and rescue the youngsters. He landed sixty kilometres away, and broke his leg. Yes, the square-jawed action hero is disabled so the Final Girl has to save the day. This may seem like a revolutionary new empowerment strategy, but it is actually a decades-old trope. In every horror movie since The Shining (1981) , the cop gets taken out before he can rescue the damsel.

Kate goes to save Captain Hunt. She has an AI that interprets its internal map of the local terrain, along with the radio-beacons for the persons involved, and delivers verbal instructions as to the best direction to take. Yes, it is like a personal direction-finder ap - but it does not have a GPS network or wireless internet to connect with.

Hunt and the AI provide dialogue for exposition. The barbarians do not have any dialogue in the extended chase scene, which means that the fights are seemlessly filmed with professional stunt personnel. This also allows the director to show off the landscape with some impressive low-level helicopter footage. Evidently the camera drone has come of age.

As well as the stuntmen there are CGI beasties, which are not too annoying to look at because they are used sparingly. The real villains are some mutants, which have very well-done prosthetics.

This was written and directed by one man. As always with auteurs, the result is quite uneven. The story is minimal, and serves to create opportunities for impressive visuals. However, the visuals are indeed impressive and make it worthwhile.

Welcome to the Jungle (2003) AKA The Rundown

A restauranteur turned bounty-hunter (Dwayne Johnson - Fast Five ) is hired to recover a gangster's wayward son (Sean William Scott - Evolution (2001) ). The son lives in a small village in the South American jungle, where he is bankrolled by his bartender girlfriend ( Rosario Dawson ).

The bickering pair fall foul of local gangster (Christopher Walken - View To A Kill ), who runs an open-cast mine that is the area's major employer. Of course, with his monopolistic position he drives wages down.

Welcome to the Jungle (2013)

An office-bound nerd (Adam Brody - Mr and Mrs Smith ) has an unwilling Cyrano De Bergerac relationship with his manager. The nerd comes up with ideas, and the manager pitches the ideas to the clients. This sounds like good teamwork that keeps everyone in the company employed. Of course, the nerd is jealous.

The company's boss (Dennis Haysbert - ) sends the entire offie staff off to team-building exercise on a remote desert island. The man in charge is Jean-Claude Van Damme ( Universal Soldier ), doing a great parody of himself.

Naturally everything goes horribly wrong. The team get trapped on the island with a man-eating tiger, so a Lord of the Flies situation breaks out. The nerd has some survival skills, while the manager just wants to be King and have the others build a massive statue of him.

Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle (2017)

The story starts in 1996, after the events of the previous film. A teenage boy finds the Jumanji board game on the beach. He takes it home, but would rather play with his computer games. Next morning the board-game has magically transformed itself into a computer game, so he gives it a try and gets sucked into it.

Twenty years later, we meet the modern-day heroes. They are a mixed bunch of American High School kids who get detention together. This is a lot more like The Breakfast Club than their counterparts in the overly noirish Power Rangers (2015) . The kids discover the game, and when they start to play they get sucked in.

In their alternate selves, each is given an inappropriate pre-generated character. Gender is pre-assigned, so the hot girl ends up as Jack Black ( Tropic Thunder ) while the nerdy girl is uncomfortable as Karen Gillan clad in the skimpy costume of Lara Croft . Similarly, the nerd becomes Dwayne Johnson ( GI Joe: Retaliation ) and the jock becomes the relatively diminutive Kevin Hart ( National Security ).

The team meet Nigel (Rhys Darby - Mulder and Scully Meet The Were-Monster ), who gives them some background exposition. The villain is Van Pelt (Bobby Cannavale - Ant Man ), an explorer who has become a magically enhanced Kurtz from Heart of Darkness. To defeat him they must return a magical gem to its rightful location in the jungle.

There is a nod to the original story, when the team discover Alan's camp-site. Strangely the rules of the game seem to have changed. When Alan was trapped in the game for decades, he ended up looking like Robin Williams ( Popeye ). But when the 1990s boy spent twenty years in the game, he only looks like he aged a couple of years at most.

The result is a well-made light-hearted action-adventure movie. The CGI is so impressive that it is either minimally employed or so good that it is impossible to see the joins. Likewise the cast all acquit themselves well, parodying their usual character archetypes.

Jumanji: The Next Level (2019)

This is set a year after the events of the previous movie. The kids have split up for college, and the nerdy guy is under a lot of stress. He decides to go back into the game ...

The other kids realise what he has done, and go in to rescue him. The jock becomes Jack Black ( Tropic Thunder ) for a change, while the nerdy girl is still Karen Gillan clad in the skimpy costume of Lara Croft .

To mix things up a bit, and give new audience members constant exposition, a couple of new players are thrown into the game. Grandpa Eddie (Danny DeVito - Batman Returns (1991) ) becomes Dwayne Johnson ( GI Joe: Retaliation ) and his buddy Milo (Danny Glover - Age of Dragons ) becomes the relatively diminutive Kevin Hart ( National Security ).

The team meet Nigel (Rhys Darby - Mulder and Scully Meet The Were-Monster ), who gives them some background exposition. The villain is Jurgen the Brutal (Rory McCann - Game of Thrones ), a marauder who has stolen a magical gem.

This is a great sequel. It has all the best things about the original, but the new characters make it seem fresh. As well as the villain plot, the characters all have personal story arcs. All in all, well worth a watch!

Jungle Cruise (2021)

Jurassic World (2015)

Judy Greer sends her kids to stay with their Auntie, Bryce Dallas Howard , a senior executive at the dinosaur theme park. They arrive in a scene reminiscent of Westworld only with a catamaran instead of a hovercraft. The place is as busy as the theme park in the Scooby Doo Movie, but with real monsters instead of animatronic scares. Unfortunately, the more real the monsters are the harder it is for the people running the place to up their game every few years.

In the first movie, the heroes were menaced by one T-Rex and some raptors. The second movie had TWO T-Rexes, plus raptors. The third time round it was a T-Rex, a Spinosaur (super-predator), plus the obligatory raptors. This time, mad scientist Henry Wu (BD Wong - Gotham ) has cooked up something special. It has the size of a T-Rex, the claws of a raptor, the camouflage of a chameleon (or a cuttlefish), and other superpowers that nobody bothered to tell Security about. What could possibly go wrong?

Auntie is too busy with VIPs to look after the kids, so she lets her assistant ( Katie McGrath ) play nanny for them. They ditch her and go walkabout. What could possibly go wrong? Auntie has to team up with Starlord ( Guardians of the Galaxy ) to rescue the kids. The adults start bickering like Han and Leia in Star Wars (a cliché for romantic pairings in Hollywood flicks), get lost in the jungle (Romancing The Stone), but eventually Auntie turns into a James Cameron Action Woman.

This is a better disaster movie than San Andreas , and it technically passes the Bechdel test (auntie has phone chats with her sister and her assistant about her nephews). However, it is just trying too hard. Every character is a blatant archetype, every dinosaur species must be allowed to steal a scene, and so on.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)

This takes place three years after the events of the previous film. Not only has the park been closed, but the island is now the site of an errupting volcano. How the volcano's active status was not discovered when the original park was built a quarter of a century previously is put down to an act of god. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum - The Fly ) makes an appearance at the US Congress hearings, and airs his opinion that the dinosaurs should be left on the island so that the volcano can kill them all in a natural way. He certainly remembers the events of Jurassic Park II: The Lost World when a T-Rex ate half of San Diego. Ironically, of all the movies that is the one that this one most resembles.

Claire Deering ( Bryce Dallas Howard ) runs a group that wants to save the dinosaurs. She is recruited by Mr Lockwood (James Cromwell - Star Trek: First Contact ), a billionaire philanthropist and former friend of John Hammond, who offers to help her cause. He has created a new sanctuary where the dinosaurs will be safe. Why they do not just use Site Two, scene of the second and third movies, is not explained.

Claire recruits her ex-lover Owen Grady (Chris Pratt - Guardians Of The Galaxy ), a black nerd and a Latina veterinarian ( Daniella Pineda ). The security man is rent-a-villain Ted Levine ( Silence Of The Lambs ), so it is obvious that some villainy is afoot.

This movie really tries to push the female lead as an action hero. She is active, not merely a Final Girl who gets chased a lot, but we still empathise with her when she is in danger. The macho man is a lot less sympathetic, he is basically a comedy character because the audience never feels sorry for him despite the terrible dangers he is placed into. In fact, in one sequence the female character does all the work and then saves the male character.

The subplot also pushes for female supremacy. In the previous film, a couple of young boys went off exploring and had to be rescued by the adults. Now, instead of the fool-Hardy boys it is Nancy Drew - a young girl who plays detective and uncovers the villain's plot.

In the third act, the villain's plan is made clear. Henry Wu (BD Wong - Gotham ) has created yet another monster. This one is called the Indomidus Raptor, so it has more Raptor blood than the Indominus Rex cross-breed. The villains hire Toby Jones ( Wayward Pines ) to auction off their monstrosity.

One thing is for certain. The so-called good guys are bound to start feeding people to the dinosaurs. Yes, the old save-the-monsters morality always pops up. They have no idea of the consequences of their actions. When the villain monologues them, he points out their hypocrisy. Claire ran a park that enlaved dinosaurs and used them as entertainment, and she even signed off on the creation of the Indomidus Rex. Owen was a military contractor whose job was to weaponise velociraptors. Despite this, they still refuse to act responsibly.

The final sequence is narrated by Goldblum. Man choosing to play god has altered the nature of life on Earth. This seems set up for the final movie in the Jurassic World series. Yes, no matter how badly this one is there might still be yet another Jurassic World movie.

Jurassic World 3: Dominion (2021)

This starts with an informative documentary clip giving exposition about the events in and after the previous film. The dinosaurs were let loose, and now they have taken over the eco-system. However, nobody wants to do anything about it. This is clearly a metaphor for climate change.

Claire Deering ( Bryce Dallas Howard ) and Zia Rodriguez ( Daniella Pineda ) spend their time uncovering illegal dino-breeding farms. Meanwhile, Owen (Chris Pratt - Guardians of the Galaxy ) captures rogue dinosaurs and brings them in alive. If the monsters were of a supernatural origin - demons, vampires or werewolves - would the so-called heroes be treating them so gently?

For the last four years, Claire and Owen have been parenting the clone girl. They have isolated her in a log cabin, off the grid and away from other humans. That said, she has still got an English accent. Also, even though she is only fourteen years old they leave her Home Alone. She develops a tendency to ignore the rules and wander into the local town. Naturally, she gets abducted by dino-rustlers.

Claire and Owen go after the girl, who is sold by Soyona Santos ( Dichen Lachman ). This results in a girl-on-girl confrontation, which at least helps the film pass the Bechdel test. Claire and Owen hitch a ride on a plane flown by the movie's token black woman, Kayla Watts ( DeWanda Wise ). This pilot has a lot in common with Owen, and they bond on their shared military service. She would be a perfect love interest for him, if he did not already have one. However, she goes out of her way to make it clear she is a lesbian. Yes, she ticks three diversity boxes in one character.

Meanwhile, there is a subplot that actually matters more than the main plot. Ellie Sattler ( Laura Dern ) discovers that genetically engineered super-locusts have been released in America's farmland. She teams up with Alan Grant (Sam Neill - The Dish ) and Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum - The Fly ) to prove that the evil bio-tech mega-corporation is responsible.

The villain is, of course, an old rich white man. His name is Lewis Dodgson, obviously a reference to Lewis Carroll AKA Charles Dodgeson. He looks and acts like a caricature of Steve Jobs. However, his secret base is connected by a hyperloop system (which moves things short distances very slowly) so he might be an Elon Musk type. He was the one who bribed the tech support mole in the first film, and was thus ultimately responsible for the failure of the Park. Now he has Henry Wu (BD Wong - Gotham ) as his head scientist.

The result is a hotch-potch of cliches and predictable tropes. Colin Trevorrow takes most of the credit, although Stephen Spielberg is listed as a Producer so is not above blame.

Jurassic World 4: Rebirth (2025)

Soon

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