ARMORED

ARMORED, a 2009 B crime thriller, would make a nice bottom half of a double bill with ARMORED CAR ROBBERY (1950). I reviewed the earlier film back here on the blog back in July and while ARMORED is certainly the lesser of the two films, it's not without merit.

Two teams of armored car drivers and guards (six men in all), plot to steal several million dollars in cash that they are transporting and make it look like they were hijacked. It's a simple enough plan until, everyone say it with me now, things go wrong. And the thing that goes wrong is one of the crew.

Ty Hackett (Columbus Short), an Iraqi war veteran, is a guard working for Eagle Shield transport company. The bank is about to foreclose on his home and child protective services are talking about removing his younger brother Jimmy, from the household. He desperately needs his part of the cash so he agrees to go along with the plan concocted by his best friend Mike Cochrane (Matt Dillon) on the condition that no one gets hurt.

But when a homeless man is brutally gunned down during the heist (the man was a witness to the goings on), things suddenly take a very grim and dark turn. Ty rebels against the slaughter and his co-workers and, locking himself into one of the two armored cars, begins a desperate race against time to stop his friends while simultaneously saving the life of a wounded LAPD patrol officer and rescuing Jimmy from the clutches of the robbers.

There's a well staged chase between two armored cars and the violence is swift, tough and brutal. Veteran actors Laurence Fishburne, Jean Reno and Fred Ward add much to the proceedings but this is clearly a one-on-one battle between Short and Dillon. Much of the action takes place in an enormous, abandoned industrial plant and cinematographer Andrzej Sekula shoots the location in imaginative and atmospheric ways.

Directed by Nimrod Antal from a screenplay by James V. Simpson, ARMORED makes no bones about what it is In fact, it wears it's B movie status as a proud badge of honor. It's a film that knows what it is and what it hopes to accomplish and does so admirably. Worth seeing.

ASSAULT ON A QUEEN

I waited 52 years to see ASSAULT ON A QUEEN (1966).

It wasn't worth the wait.

Oh, sure the one sheet looks great and the concept is can't miss: use a WWII era German U-Boat to hijack and rob the Queen Mary ocean liner. Sounds good, right?

The film has good genes. The screenplay is by none other than Rod (TWILIGHT ZONE) Serling from a novel by Jack (INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS) Finney. It stars Frank Sinatra, the smoking hot Virna Lisi, Richard Conte, Alf Kjellin (who?) and Tony Franciosa. But still, given all that appears to be going for it on the surface, ASSAULT sinks to the bottom fast.

Sinatra plays a deep sea diver for hire who is contracted by wealthy treasure hunters Lisi, Kjellin and Franciosa. While searching for sunken treasure the team stumbles upon an intact German U-Boat from World War II. They decide to salvage the vessel and then, once they have it on the surface, they get the wild idea to use the sub to play pirate and stick up the Queen Mary. That's the exact same idea I would have if I ever salvage a WWII submarine.

Sinatra joins the gang reluctantly, lured more by Lisi's abundant charms than the promise of material riches. They plot an elaborate heist scheme which, of course, goes wrong. The really bad guys (Kjellin, Franciosa and Conte) perish while Sinatra, Lisi and Sinatra's buddy, Errol John, survive.

Although produced by Paramount Pictures, the studio clearly didn't put a lot of money into this effort. I suspect the bulk of the budget went to pay Sinatra's salary and the studio must have figured that he had enough star power to sell enough tickets to turn a quick profit on what is basically a B movie. The special effects are on the level of an episode of VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA and much of the action is filmed on sound stages rather than the open sea.

ASSAULT ON A QUEEN is yet another one of those 1960s action/adventure films that I desperately wanted to see when I was a kid. But alas, the poster and high concept were all sizzle with the picture delivering very little steak.

Thumbs down.

BUCKSKIN RUN

I tore through BUCKSKIN RUN (1981) in a couple of days while on vacation this week. It's a collection of short stories by Louis L'Amour all of which were originally published in the western pulp magazines of the late '40s and early '50s. Interspersed with the stories are historical factoids about the Old West which L'Amour uncovered while doing research for his stories. The stories are a bit formulaic but they're all entertaining. My favorites are JACKSON OF HORNTOWN, DOWN THE POGONIP TRAIL and WHAT GOLD DOES TO A MAN.  It's worth noting that if you look up these pulp magazines online you'll see that L'Amour's name doesn't appear on any of the covers. At that point in his career, he was a young writer just trying to sell his stories for a penny a word and succeeding. As the years went on, L'Amour's pay rate increased considerably. Here's a rundown of the stories and where they originally appeared.

THE GHOSTS OF BUCKSKIN RUN (THRILLING RANCH STORIES, May 1948), NO TROUBLE FOR THE CACTUS KID (TEXAS RANGERS, December 1947), HORSE HEAVEN (RANGE RIDERS WESTERN 1950), SQUATTERS ON THE LONETREE (TEXAS RANGERS July 1952), JACKSON OF HORNTOWN (TEXAS RANGERS, March 1947), THERE'S ALWAYS A TRAIL (EXCITING WESTERN, July 1948), DOWN THE POGONIP TRAIL (EXCITING WESTERN, May 1949) and WHAT GOLD DOES TO A MAN (THRILLING WESTERN, January 1951).

Thumbs up.
 

36 HOURS

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE was one of my favorite television shows when I was a kid. The show, which ran from 1966 to 1973 on CBS, was an extremely popular spy program (spies were all the rage in the '60s), about a team of special agents who planned and executed an elaborate con against a bad guy in every episode. The scripts were remarkably ingenious and the emphasis on the show was on suspense, not action. The plans were always incredibly intricate and complex and were built to sustain any reversals in fortune that the team encountered. Which they inevitably did. Using high technology, make-up and penetrating insights into human character and foibles, the IMF team won the day each week but not before putting the team (and the viewers), through a twisting, tightening wringer of a plot. I loved it!

When the Tom Cruise MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE film franchise debuted in 1996, the emphasis was more on action and special effects than just the con as executed on the TV series. The films have proven to be hugely successful with six films produced to date, the latest having opened earlier this summer. I've only seen a couple of the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE movies (the first and GHOST PROTOCOL) and while I enjoyed them both, they weren't the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE adventures that I grew up with.

They're still fun films that more than deliver in the action department but I am here to make the case that the best MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE film ever made does not star Tom Cruise. In fact, this film was made before the television series debuted. And, the bad guys are operating the psychological con on one of the good guys.

36 HOURS (1965) is one helluva neat little spy thriller. The film stars James Garner as U.S. Army Major Jeff Pike, who knows the complete plans for the invasion of Normandy on D-Day, June 6th, 1944. The Nazis desperately want the information that is in Major Pike's head. Pike is drugged in Lisbon and wakes up in what appears to be an American Military Hospital in Germany in the year 1950. His doctor, Major Walter Gerber (Rod Taylor), explains to Pike that he's been suffering from amnesia. Nurse Anna Hedler (Eva Marie Saint), is there to tend to Pike and she eventually reveals that she is his wife. As Pike's memory starts to gel, Gerber tells him that the war is over and that the Allies won. The goal is to get Pike to open up about the invasion (which of course is now long past) and talk about the various beach heads and the date of the invasion. The Nazi high command have given Gerber 36 hours to get this information from Pike and everything is going smoothly, with Pike revealing what the Germans want to know until a freak happenstance causes Pike to tumble to what's really going on. From then it's a race against the clock to escape from the hospital and cross the border into Switzerland with Anna alongside him.

36 HOURS is short on action but long on devious plot. Written and directed by George Seaton (based on a story by Roald Dahl), the film is fiendishly clever and extraordinarily well executed. You root for good guy Garner to escape, Anna's story is gut wrenching and Taylor plays Gerber as a sympathetic man who only wants to prove that his theories about psychology are true and workable.

I've seen 36 HOURS twice over the last few years and have enjoyed it immensely both times. It's a film I was totally unfamiliar with when I first stumbled across it but it's now become one of my favorite semi-obscure WWII spy films.

Highest recommendation.

SHADOWS IN THE MIST

When I was a kid, one of my favorite comic book series was "The War That Time Forgot" which ran in the pages of DC Comics' STAR SPANGLED WAR STORIES. The premise was pure genius: G.I.'s vs. dinosaurs on a lost island in the Pacific during WWII. That's all you need to know. It's so gloriously insane, so pure in its essential this-is-so-coolness, that I couldn't help but be drawn to it and totally captivated by the stories I read. And to make it even better, I had boxes full of plastic dinosaurs and "army men" that I could use to recreate the adventures in the comics or make up brand new ones on my own. Total bliss.

I felt much the same way when I stumbled across a copy of SHADOWS IN THE MIST, Brian Moreland's debut horror novel from 2008. I was totally unfamiliar with both the title and the author but the library only wanted a buck for it and I decided to take my chances. After all, the paperback gave off a strong "War That Time Forgot" vibe with it's high concept premise of soldiers vs. Nazi zombies in WWII. Think BAND OF BROTHERS meets F. Paul Wilson's horror classic THE KEEP. This thing had it's fangs in my neck before I turned the first page.

Moreland's narrative delivers on the conceptual promise but there are plenty of twists and turns along the way. The story centers on Lt. Jack Chambers and his squad of infantry men, The Lucky Seven, who are teamed up with a squad of special forces commandos under the name X-2, to investigate the mysterious goings' on in the Hurtgen Forest, a fog and mist enshrouded area that appears to be infested with the living dead. Nazi living dead. 

The action is fast and furious with gun battles erupting every several pages. The story is a wild mixture of WWII combat thrills, arcane mysticism (the plot involves both the Jewish Kabalah and Nordic Runes), magic, monsters and plenty of blood soaked gore and guts. Moreland's writing relies on stock phrases and cliches a bit too much but his story is so bat-shit crazy and the narrative drive so propulsive that I had to keep furiously turning the pages until I was finished.

A great book? Nah. But one helluva fun ride if you're a horror fan, a WWII aficionado or both. This one delivers the dynamite in both hands.

Pure pulp.