Tag: Universal Soldier: Regneration

DTV ACTION ITEMS (PART 1): AN INTERVIEW WITH OUTLAW VERN

robertemmetsweeney2 Comments

May 1, 2012

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The summer movie season is obnoxiously approaching, with long-form toy commercial  The Avengers opening on Friday.  While estimable writer-director Joss Whedon is sure to provide a witty quip or two, this is still a 142 minute movie about a gang of men (and a token woman) who wear molded plastic underwear. This 3D “spectacular” will cost upwards of $20, so I submit that your movie dollar is better spent on the humble direct-to-video action movie. With no budget for CG, these cheap-o brawlers resort to showing actual humans moving in real spaces, often with jaw-dropping athleticism. And if not, they are over in 90 minutes or less.

For the next three weeks, I’ll be discussing DTV action movies, in the hopes of bringing more appreciative eyes to this last bastion of  the B-movie spirit. This week, I chat with Outlaw Vern about the general state of DTV movies today, from its studios to its stars. Vern has been a vocal (and very funny) supporter of the genre for years at Ain’t It Cool News and his own popular review site, sparking my own interest in them with his polemical call-to-arms in his write-up of The Marine 2: ““Some of us are starting to suspect that there’s been a switcheroo, that the DTV format – once designated as a 100% crap zone – has become the more reliable place to find good [English language] action movies.” The more I watch, the more I agree with him.

The interview was conducted over e-mail. Vern writes in very slangy prose, so words like “websight” are not typos, but are his own invention. You can order his book on Steven Seagal, SEAGALOGY, here.

For some background, what year did you start reviewing movies? Could you talk about what led you to start up your site?

I started in ’99. Back then there was this thing on the internet called “newsgroups” which was sort of like bulletin boards, and I would write crappy little movie reviews on the one called rec.arts.movies.current-films. Some of the people there thought what I was writing was funny and sort of sarcastically suggested starting a websight, so I did. After doing it for a long time I got better.

Did you cover DTV movies right from the start, or was there a particular film (or actor) that made you pay closer attention to them?

It started because I had a friend who was hooking me up with screeners from a video store, these were VHS tapes that the studios sent out to promote upcoming movies. Since they were movies that hadn’t come out yet I would write about them and send it in to Ain’t It Cool News. Back then a lot of them were sequels to Wild Things, Cruel Intentions, The Skulls, stuff like that. I also got some of the DTV Steven Seagal movies and I was really interested in him because of On Deadly Ground so I really took to those and that obsession led to me writing my book Seagalogy.

Unlike the majority of movie writers, you focus a lot on the way action scenes are shot. What do you think are the key ingredients to making a good action/fight sequence? Of those, what do you think DTV movies do particularly well?

There’s no one way to do an action scene but I’m very big on them having a clear sense of where the characters are standing and what they’re doing. That used to be a minimum standard of competence but now it’s kind of rare. A decade ago I was really bothered by fast edits starting with Armageddon, and then started worrying about bad framing after Gladiator, and of course since then you can usually assume that a theatrically released action movie is gonna have most of the scenes shot very close up with a handheld camera so you get confused and aren’t sure if anything cool happened or not. When the director actually makes an attempt to plan out the shots and clearly show people fighting it becomes a major promotional point, like in Hanna and Haywire.

For a long time actually the action was usually crappy in DTV movies. For example Seagal’s action scenes showed way less effort and craftsmanship than his earlier movies. Belly of the Beast and Urban Justice are two exceptions. But in recent years as most of the studio action movies have turned into shakycam bullshit with actors pretending to be fighters instead of the other way around, DTV became sort of the last refuge for American fight movies with the spirit of what we used to love in the ’80s.

Could you give a general DTV lay of the land for newcomers? Who are the major studios, directors and actors?

Millennium Films is mostly theatrical now (they did The Expendables and the Conan the Barbarian remake) but they were sort of the Cannon Films of the early 2000s, pumping out lots of the DTV movies starring Seagal, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Wesley Snipes. Those guys, Dolph Lundgren and Academy Award winner Cuba Gooding, Jr. are the primary marquee names doing DTV vehicles, but of course Wesley’s in jail now and Seagal has slowed down a little to do TV shows. For the time being I think Stone Cold Steve Austin is the most prolific star with a good track record. Most of his DTV movies, especially Damage, are way better than his one theatrical starring role, The Condemned.

WWE Studios (or “the prestigious WWE Studios” as I always call them) made The Condemned but I think they’ve become much more trustworthy in the DTV market. I really enjoyed The Marine 2starring the son of a wrestler I used to watch in the ’80s, and a quirky crime drama called Inside Out where the wrestler Triple-H is reunited with his Blade 3 co-star Parker Posey to play an ex-con who gets mixed up in his friend’s untaxed cigarette scam, but just wants to make pickles [this actually received a limited theatrical release last year -RES].

Years ago it seemed like no DTV directors left a mark on their movies unless it was a mark of suckiness. Now there are a bunch of directors I try to keep an eye on: Isaac Florentine (Undisputed 2 and 3, Ninja, Special Forces, US Seals II, many others) and John Hyams (Universal Soldier: Regeneration, Dragon Eyes) are the standouts, but I’m also interested in William Kaufman (The Hit List, Sinners and Saints), Roel Reiné (Pistol Whipped, The Marine 2, Death Race 2) and Jesse V. Johnson (The Butcher, Pit Fighter).

Where are most DTV productions shot? And do you know the general budget of most of these productions?

It seems like most of them shoot in Vancouver, but Avi Lerner, founder of Millennium, has a studio in Bulgaria, so a lot of them are shot there. There are a lot of New Orleans productions now too, because of tax incentives they have there. I don’t really know about budgets, but I just looked it up and IMDb estimates Universal Soldier: Regeneration at $14 million, less than a fourteenth what it cost to make Battleship.

What is your opinion of the “mockbusters” that the production company The Asylum  churns out? Most of them look like manufactured kitsch, but is there anything worthwhile or interesting there?

Not that I’ve seen. I mean, I get a laugh from the titles and covers like everybody else, but the parts I’ve seen have been terrible and not in a fun way, so I haven’t had the stomach to venture into that territory too much. People always ask me to review different ones but I’ve never had anyone claim to have found one that was watchable. Actually I thought about watching I Am Omega because it stars Mark Dacascos. That could still happen. My dream is that they’ll start doing rip-offs of Oscar winners. I’d like to see The King’s Peach and The Artiste. The ‘e’ in Artiste would be really small on the cover.

Scott Adkins is a favorite of yours (and now mine). How would you describe his work to someone who hasn’t seen him before? Do you think he’ll ever break through in Hollywood?

Adkins is an agile, high-kicking screen martial artist kind of like a modern Van Damme, but he’s English so he’s more eloquent in our language. But actually I like him best in the Undisputed movies playing a stoic Russian criminal. He has more of a background in straight acting than most action stars, having been on British TV shows like EastEndersand Mile High, but it’s his fighting that has earned him a following. He also kind of looks like Ryan Reynolds, so he was able to stunt double Reynolds in Wolverine.

I don’t know, part of me feels like he’s so talented and likable and has such an impressive body of work that he’s destined to blow up on the big screen, but part of me thinks there’s just not a theatrical market for martial artist stars like that anymore. Jason Statham is probably the closest thing we have to that in the western world.

Of the aging DTV action stars (Seagal, Lundgren, Van Damme and the like), who is making the most interesting stuff? Any recent recommendations?

I think Van Damme is in an interesting place right now, because he turned down The Expendables to do Universal Soldier: Regeneration, which totally paid off because US:R is a way better movie and now he gets a bigger role as the lead villain in Expendables 2. He’s really great in US:R, playing his zombie super soldier character as a burnt out, tragic character yearning for humanity but not able to reach it. Lundgren is also great in that (he’s only in a few scenes because he didn’t turn down Expendables). He’s doing some experimenting now too, he did an indie comedy, he’s got one coming out where he plays a villain, and he’s working with 3 of the directors I listed above, plus doing some directing of his own.

The best recent movie I’ve seen with any of those guys is Dragon Eyes, but Van Damme really just has a glorified cameo as the mentor to Cung Le.

I know you’re an admirer of Isaac Florentine. What makes him in particular such an effective DTV director?

He’s a martial artist himself and also grew up a movie nerd obsessed with Sergio Leone. But my theory is – and I’m not sure anybody else subscribes to this one – that it comes from directing Power Rangers. He did like 60 episodes as a choreographer and directed a lot of those so it just gave him years of practice quickly shooting down and dirty martial arts sequences with very little money. He loves movement and believes in visual storytelling, so he has a very energetic but clear visual style. And at this point he’s done more than a dozen movies but still puts his all into it so he’s gotten really great at taking guys like Van Damme, Lundgren or Michael Jai White and putting them in a story that really emphasizes their badass qualities. Florentine is also the guy that turned Adkins into a DTV icon, first stealing the show in Special Forces, then as the villain in Undisputed 2, who became the protagonist in Undisputed 3.

I think your favorite DTV production is Universal Soldier: Regeneration. Could you say a few words about why DTV doubters should see it?

That movie is the surprise masterpiece I’ve been hoping for ever since I started watching those screeners. It grabs you right from the beginning with this intense kidnapping, car chase and shootout. The cameras are right in the middle of the action but used very intentionally, not shaking all over the place. It takes these silly but fun sci-fi concepts from the original Roland Emmerich movie but treats them much more seriously. The music and sound design seem very influenced by Alien and The Terminator, it creates a really strong, grim atmosphere. The super soldiers are played mostly by MMA fighters so the fight scenes are really brutal. But there’s also something poetic about it, like the scene where Lundgren’s villain has been cloned after being chopped up in the original movie and he knows to fight Van Damme but can’t remember why. It’s this awesome sci-fi action movie but also says something about war taking away our humanity.

From the few I’ve seen, the DTV action movies seem to have a higher level of craft than Hollywood blockbusters because of their low budgets, forcing them to use more analog techniques (like using longer takes with real fighting instead of fx and rapid cutting). Do you think that is true, or am I exaggerating?

It seems that way because you’ve seen the very best ones. I gotta be honest, there’s a lot more crap than there is Undisputed. But I think that’s definitely true in best case scenarios like Hyams and Florentine. I compare them to the standout directors who were taking advantage of the drive-in market to do interesting stuff in the old days.

The standards keep going up for DTV and at the same time the standards for action scenes in theatrical releases are pretty much in the toilet. It’s like you’re not even expected to point the camera at the action anymore. Did you see Warrior? Really good sports drama, but the fighting tournament is literally shot to look like you’re in the audience with shitty seats where you can’t see anything. The fights are choreographed by J.J. Perry, but his work is showcased way better in DTV movies like Undisputed II, The Tournament and The Shepherd: Border Patrol.

What upcoming DTV movies are you most looking forward to?

I can’t say Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning because that’s hopefully gonna be in theaters. I have some hopes for this one called The Package because it’s Jesse V. Johnson directing Steve Austin and Dolph Lundgren, plus lesser known white guy martial artists Darren Shalavi and Jerry Trimble are in the cast. And I’m hoping Maximum Conviction will be fun because it teams Austin with Seagal. It’s all about team-ups right now.

If you had to select five DTV productions to convince someone to take DTV movies seriously, what would they be?

1. Universal Soldier: Regeneration (2009)

2. Blood and Bone (2009): Michael Jai White is a badass motherfucker who gets out of prison, rents a room and enters an underground fighting circuit on a mysterious mission of revenge. He’s every bit as badass as he was in Black Dynamite but in a non-parody context. This reminds me of the best Van Damme movies like Lionheart, mixed with a little blaxploitation swagger. It has an excellent villain, a surprising use of a Wang Chung song, and great little touches like the legendary Bob Wall cameoing as his character from Enter the Dragon.

3. Undisputed II (2006) and III (2010): – I didn’t really like the original Undisputed even though it’s directed by Walter Hill and has a great performance by one of my favorites, Wesley Snipes. But in the sequels Isaac Florentine replaced the boxing with MMA and came up with the brilliant idea of turning the villain George “Iceman” Chambers (originally Ving Rhames, now Michael Jai White) into the protagonist to fight the Russian prison champ Boyka (Scott Adkins). Then in part 3 Boyka has to rebuild himself after defeat and face the great Chilean fighter Marko Zaror (Mandrill). Boyka is a convicted murderer but you find yourself rooting for him to win and escape.

4. Darkman III: Die Darkman Die (1996): I want to honor the rare good-DTV-sequel. Most are half-assed rejected-TV-pilot-esque rehashings with different characters. Darkman III is one of the rare DTV sequels that seems to fit the medium: it’s certainly not worthy of a theatrical release – I mean, Liam Neeson is replaced with Arnold Vosloo from Hard Target and The Mummy – but gives us an idea of some of the fun we might’ve had if more people had paid to see Darkman like we did. It’s from the writers of Face/Off, and they come up with all kinds of clever and funny things to happen to the vigilante master of disguise. My favorite is when he disguises himself as the villain (Jeff Fahey) to break into his house and walks into his surprise birthday party. Later he impersonates the villain again for the good cause of attending his daughter’s school play.

runners up: From Dusk Till Dawn II: Texas Blood Money and Hostel Part III, both directed by Scott Spiegel.

5. Belly of the Beast (2003): I gotta include a Steven Seagal picture on here. Urban Justice is his most hardcore DTV action movie, Out of Reach is maybe his funniest (he plays an animal rescuer/swordsman who has to rescue his orphan pen pal from white slavers) but I think Belly of the Beast is most representative of the DTV yin and yang: quality action mixed with charmingly sloppy filmmaking lunacy that would never make it to theaters. Helmed by the great Ching Siu-Tung (director of A Chinese Ghost Story, choreographer of Hero and Shaolin Soccer), it brings Seagal to Thailand to save his kidnapped daughter from Islamic extremists, a corrupt general, a transvestite and a sorcerer. There’s a great shootout and a fight in a market where a guy slips on a tomato and lands on a meat cleaver.

ACTION ITEMS: DIRECT-TO-VIDEO, INTO MY HEART

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September 6, 2011

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Under the cover of disrespectability, direct-to-video (DTV) action movies are quietly throttling their theatrical brethren. Despite having budgets one-tenth of studio spectacles, these DTV scrappers excel where it matters most: the craft of shooting a fight scene. As the enigmatic film critic/ex-con Outlaw Vern stated in his review of The Marine 2, “Some of us are starting to suspect that there’s been a switcheroo, that the DTV format – once designated as a 100% crap zone – has become the more reliable place to find good [English language] action movies.”

Inspired, I watched Assassination Games (2011, on DVD/Blu today), Universal Soldier: Regeneration (2009) and Ninja (2009), where tussles are filmed to showcase the athleticism of the leads. The threadbare Bulgarian sets are coherently mapped out in master shots, so the close-ups of fist-to-face never throw off the geography of a scene. The camera generally keeps the combatants’ bodies completely in the frame, emphasizing a physicality generally lost in contemporary Hollywood (Jason Statham excepted), in which fights are reduced to a blur of cuts before a hired goon collapses. David Bordwell has identified this rapidly edited style as “intensified continuity”, an amplification of classical style that he places as starting “after 1960 or thereabouts.” These DTVers still fall in Bordwell’s post-1960s rubric, with shot lengths shorter than the classical era, but they offer a more authentic intensity, returning to feats of athleticism over editing.

The workhorses of DTV these days are Dolph Lundgren, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin and Christian Slater (who has 8 (!) movies listed as coming out this year), although Jean-Claude Van Damme is ramping up his schedule after his flirtation with respectability in JCVD (Lundgren and Van Damme will also cash a check for Expendables 2).  The only consistent indicator of quality, however, has been the presence of English actor Scott Adkins and Israeli director (and Power Rangers auteur) Isaac Florentine.  Both are trained martial artists, and their work together prizes lucidity of motion above all else (including the plot). In Undisputed II & III, which I enthused about last year, Florentine used high-speed cameras to isolate Adkins’ attacks and reversals in an MMA-inspired fight tournament. Ninja, which was made between the two, brings their analytic fighting aesthetic to an urban setting (Sofia, Bulgaria rather unconvincingly standing in for NYC). They ditch the super-slo-mo, but keep the clean lines and camera distance, keeping Adkins’ body whole in the frame, like Fred Astaire demanded of his directors.

Adkins plays Casey, a military brat orphan raised in a Dojo in Japan. His nemesis is Masazuka (Tsuyoshi Ihara), another prized student with daddy issues. Desperate to knock off Casey to impress their Sensei (Togo Igawa), Masazuka breaches the Dojo’s code of conduct and is expelled. Naturally, he dons a vulcanized ninja outfit and becomes a top assassin for an evil corporation (who also operate a cheesy death cult of some sort). These B-DTV trappings are mere action scene delivery systems, and it’s best not to let Adkins emote too much (the most he can muster is a frown of mild indigestion), but once the flesh starts flaying, Ninja satisfies. Take, for instance, the first battle between Casey and Masazuka, at the Dojo. It begins in long shot, with the full width of the house visible behind them.  Florentine maintains the distance as the fight with wooden training swords commences. He only cuts in closer when Masazuka lands a couple of blows, a punch and a slice that shatters Casey’s fake blade. After each of these accents Florentine returns to the long shot, re-orienting viewers to the space. It is a quick but effective sequence, representative of their work.

This can be seen more spectacularly in a brawl in a subway car (caught at the mythical “Noble St.” stop), into which Casey and lady friend Namiko are chased by the evil corporation’s thugs. Here a long shot is impossible, so Florentine opts for measured pans up and down, and a more-frequent use of slow-motion. Every element is isolated and accounted for – you see every gun kicked away and every blow landed. Low angles predominate, in which the ceiling offers another claustrophobic foe. In one sequence a mirthless baddie tosses a civilian towards Casey, and he leaps to avoid her. Cut to him continuing the leap up and through a guard rail, a bit of impromptu parkour. He lands and then ducks as the jerk throws a haymaker towards the camera. Cut to a reverse low angle, and after another block Casey is kicked halfway down the aisle, and the camera follows him all the way as it hovers close to the ground. This is a few seconds of screen time and yet it thrills with its logic and effortless flow.

Logic is not something one would associate with the Universal Soldier franchise, but this Regeneration, the third entry (or fifth, depending on whether you count a few TV movies), is as relentlessly rational a movie about half-robotic super soldiers can possibly be. It “stars” Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren, although combined they don’t have more than 30 minutes of screen time. MMA fighters Mike Pyle and Andrei “The Pitbull” Arlovski, as Captain Burke and the robo-monster NGU, respectively, would get the box cover in an honest marketing campaign. But this is DTV, where descending stars cash checks for cameo appearances and top billing.

This adorable hucksterism aside, Regeneration is a bracingly brutal piece of work, with director John Hyams weaving his tracking shots through the post-Soviet rubble of  Chernobyl (again, shot in resourceful Sofia, Bulgaria). Instead of the detail-oriented approach of Florentine, Hyams opts for a kind of dystopic realism, the creation of the dust-choked atmosphere more important than the grace of an individual fighter. There are very few close-ups and a profusion of long, gliding takes. Peter Hyams (2010, Timecop), John’s father, is the cinematographer, and his technical chops and experience no doubt helped in creating these elaborate shots on a budget.

Its sci-fi trappings aside, this a straight-up kidnapping drama. The Russian president’s two children have been nabbed by an insurgent group, who then take over the Chernobyl nuclear plant and threaten to blow it up, along with the kids, if their fellow rebels in prison are not released. As it happens, they also have retained the services of Dr. Colin (a wonderfully neurotic Kerry Shale), who has the tech to produce the eponymous Universal Soldiers. The U.S. military gets involved, because that’s what they do, and create their own UniSols to free the kids. Van Damme is Luc Devereaux, an ex UniSol dealing with post-traumatic stress syndrome, who now lives in a mental health facility. Devereaux is dragged back into action, and Van Damme plays this broken down hero’s confusion with admirable vulnerability. Of course, once injected with the UniSol drugs, he becomes an insatiable killing machine, which in turn drains the last of the human out of him. It’s a surprisingly sad and despairing film, as much a reflection on Van Damme’s beat-up body as JCVD was.

The action is shot elegantly, never more so than in a minute-long SteadiCam take that opens the final act. Van Damme is blasting his way through the war zone, and sprints right. The camera races along with him. Two masked gunmen blast away in the left foreground, as Van Damme evades their bullets in the background. Then he leaps through a window and disappears. The camera follows the shooters in their confusion, until Van Damme bursts through a door and kills them. It’s surprising that the star is hidden from view in this manner, leaving the audience stranded with two villains, building a mini-drama out of his whereabouts. Instead of cutting to Van Damme’s hiding place, the Hyams clan opt to maintain the tension of the unbroken shot, which then continues. Van Damme pushes forward into building and stalks the hallway. As he inspects an adjacent room to the left, the camera does a 180 and picks him up as he re-enters, swinging right and left to capture the gunfights on either side. Peter Hyams continues these balletic weaves until Van Damme has slaughtered a small village. It is not triumphal but ruthlessly efficient.

Assassination Games teams up Adkins and Van Damme, in a touching DTV passing of the torch. Now, the film received a limited theatrical run in four cities, so it is technically not direct-to-video. However, it was shot in Eastern Europe (Bucharest this time), by DTV hack Ernie Barbarash, so it is at least spiritually direct-to-video, which is all that matters. This is the kitschiest of the DTV films I watched recently, but it still had its pleasures. Adkins plays retired hitman Roland Flint, who gave up his gig after his wife was attacked in the line of duty (she is played, comatose throughout, by Van Damme’s daughter Bianca van Varenberg). When he learns that the perpetrator, Polo (Ivan Kaye), is being released from prison, he re-enters the competitive assassination biz. However! Vincent Brazil (Van Damme) has been hired to kill Polo as well, and sullen stare downs ensue.

Barbarash does not show the visual flair of Florentine and Hyams, with bland, centrally framed (although still intelligible) set-pieces, but he has a playful sense of genre codes that enlivens the proceedings. Brazil is the effete assassin, who hides a secret ultra-modern apartment behind a bookshelf in his grimy Romanian walk-up. He has violins encased in glass, a pet turtle, and is fond of sharpening his knives topless. This is grandly ridiculous, although Van Damme is not one to camp it up. It’s a role that, from the current crop of DTV icons, Val Kilmer could have joyously hammed. Flint is a non-entity in comparison, a guy who loves his wife and not, apparently, much else. And with firearms his weapon of choice, Adkins does not get to display much of his uncanny athleticism, just his impeccable five-o-clock shadow. It’s a bizarre, amiable failure, too reserved to embrace its camp aesthetic, and unable to unleash the kinetic talents of its actors.

Admittedly I’ve only taken a small sample of direct-to-video titles, but there is more visual clarity in this group than in any English-language action movie I’ve seen the last few years (and I like the Luc Besson-produced titles like Taken, Unknown, et al.). The low budgets force producers to return to basics: showcasing the physical gifts of your leads and coming under budget. DTV movies sell based on the actors, so if they want to succeed they need to film them as legibly and forcefully as possible. And with low budgets, directors don’t have the time to shoot all the coverage that Hollywood directors engage in, which gives editors multiple shots and angle to play with in their action scenes. Here they keep film costs low, and give their cutters few options, but grateful viewers like myself far more.