Change Your Image
Cadhorn
Reviews
Striking Range (2006)
so close to being something good
great actors (Lou Diamond Philips, Glenn Morshower) and good actors (Yancy Butler), mixed with good action, a stolid if mediocre and predictable plot, and an obviously low budget = something kind of sad. While there are no major disappointments in this flick, and there are several glimmers of something beyond the typical B movie actioner... it just doesn't quite manage to make it over the fence from B movie to A movie. Halfway through it you feel like you don't need to see the rest 'cuz you know exactly what's going to happen, though the cast does a great job with the thin material they've been given. Lou Diamond Philips seems to be one of those great actors that's terminally unable to distinguish good projects from bad, he just keeps cropping up in these roles (and movies) that are far below his talents.
Red Cockroaches (2003)
kept reminding me of Blade Runner
The obvious similarities: sound effects borrowed from blade runner. The advertisements for the off-world colonies playing in the background.
The subtle: the brother and sister falling in love before realizing they're related. Yet, somehow, i don't think they are related (father was a scientist for DNA21... perhaps doing some experiments with his own offspring), but they did grow up together... it's complicated. Definitely not as simple as: they're brother and sister, it's incest. Anyway, that reminds me of blade runner because, in the directors cut of BR you might get the idea that Harrison Ford's character (Deckard) is a replicant like Rachel, and probably of the same generation (nexus 6), thus sharing a lot of the same genetic material, practically brother and sister.
Anyway, forget all about Blade Runner the movie, think more along the lines of the style of author Philip K. Dick. This is a thought-provoking movie. Shocking, funny, silly, scary... sometimes predictable and/or badly acted, but never dull.
It'll be interesting to see what this director does in the future.