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.

Adventures of Tin-Tin: Secret Of The Unicorn (2011)

This is a CGI full-on 3-D animation of the Belgian comic-book series that started in the 1930s. The visuals are all faithfully rendered, with French-style architecture and vehicles. The voices are British, though - Boy reporter Tin-tin (Jamie Bell - King Kong ), bumbling police detectives Thompson and Thompson (Simon Pegg and Nick Frost - Paul ) and drunken Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis - LOTR, King Kong 2005 ) face off against villainous Sakarine (Daniel Craig - Casino Royale ). Together they embark on cartoonishly OTT adventures, where there is no actual threat of danger to our heroes.

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?

Big Game (2014)

A young boy in Finland is sent off alone into the forest on an overnight hunting trip, as his rite of passage on his thirteenth birthday. This is a touching story, straight out of a short film that one might catch at an art-house cinema.

Unfortunately, there are other hunters in the woods. Some trophy hunters with SAMs take out Air Force One, leaving the lame-duck President (Samuel L Jackson - Kingsman ) ejected in the pod from Escape From New York . His bodyguard (Ray Stevenson - Punisher: War Zone ) also makes it out ...

Naturally, the two stories collide. Two different genres meet - art-house coming-of-age story and Hollywood blockbuster shoot-em-up - and despite the schmaltz and clichés, the result is pleasantly watchable.

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.

Da Vinci Treasure, The (2006)

Professor C. Thomas Howell ( Peter Benchley's Amazon ) and his babelicious sidekick travel around the world following clues in the works of Leonardo Da Vinci. They must debunk the religious artefacts and uncover the location of an ancient treasure. Meanwhile, they must avoid villainous relic dealer Lance Hendricksen ( Aliens, Terminator ).

This rips off the Dan Brown story, but it is actually one of the most watchable Mockbusters so far. It is certainly better-paced than the Tom Hanks film!

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.

The Hunters (2013)

Michelle Forbes is a Relic Hunter as is her husband. They get double-crossed on a mission ...

The parents' mission is taken up by Robbie Amell ( Tomorrow People ) and his blonde-haired ex-GF ( Alexa Vega ) with whom he bickers constantly. In the Han and Leia school of this, this means they are destined to be together.

When the parents are declared MIA, the children must take over their mission. This was the plot of Spy Kids , except that in the earlier film the brother was Alexa Vega's and back then she was too young to have a love interest.

Victor Garber ( Alias ) rounds out the cast as the mentor figure. Also, there is a secret evil genius that is manipulating our heroes.

Lost City Raiders (2008)

The near future, and the Earth has been flooded thanks to Global Warming - like in Waterworld . A family of salvage divers (including Ian Somerhalder - Lost, Vampire Diaries ) are hired by the New Vatican to retrieve a magic artefact that can end the flood.

Millionaire Ben Cross ( First Knight ) tries to find the artefact first. Lots of sub- Relic Hunter antics ensue.

The Pyramid (2014)

Archaeologist Dick O’Hare ( American Horror Story ) and his daughter (also an archaeologist, despite her model-turned-actress looks) lead a dig on a newly-discovered pyramid. Unfortunately, it all goes terribly wrong. They send a robot into the structure to explore, but something destroys it. They decide to retrieve the robot, or bits of it, perhaps in the hope of repairing it and handing it back to NASA as if it were good as new. The smart option would be to let NASA claim the insurance, but if characters in horror movies were smart they would not be in horror movie scenarios.

The archaeologists are accompanied by a TV journalist and her cameraman (James Buckley - Zapped ). This is not the distraction so much as the fact that this is not a true Found Footage film. It keeps flipping between what the explorers are filming (they have the TV camera, the robot’s cameras and even a web-cam for a tablet computer) and what the storytellers want us to see. This is a cheat, and allows the use of additional music and sound effects - not to mention the threat of a disappointing Untruthful Narrator ending.

The monster is original, to an extent. The writers chose a creature that is part of ancient Egyptian folklore, but it has not been used as a movie monster before. The CGI is also well-rendered, so the visuals are not to blame.

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.

Treasure Guards (2011)

Anna Friel is an archaeologist who uncovers clues to the Ring of Solomon. She is desperate for funding, so she asks the Vatican for help. They send an Inquisitor to oversee her mission. While claiming they want the relic because it was Touched by God, their real agenda is to locate King Solomon's mines!

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.

Apocalypto (2006)

Devil's Disciple (1959)

This is based on a stage play by George Bernard Shaw . It seems reminiscent of The Scarlet Pimpernel , which influenced Zorro , which then influenced Batman . However, this movie takes the story in a different direction.

The Rev. Anthony Anderson (Burt Lancaster - ) is happily married to Judith Anderson ( Janette Scott ) in a small town in upstate New York. The gentlemanly Gen. Burgoyne (Laurence Olivier - Spartacus ) is trying to organise his army. He delegates law enforcement to Maj. Swindon (Harry Andrews - ), a bloody-minded fool. The redcoats execute the father of Richard Dudgeon (Kirk Douglas - Spartacus ), who plots revenge.

Lancaster and Douglas worked together in a series of movies, more than Redford and Newman (Butch & Sundance, The Sting) but a lot fewer than regular double-acts like Laurel and Hardy. The other recurring partnership in this movie is Douglas and Olivier, who also faced off against each other in Spartacus .

Hudson's Bay (1940)

Last of the Mohicans (1977)

This starts with a family of white settlers, besieged in their log cabin by some Native Americans. Luckily a white man and his Native companion save the day. This is not the Lone Ranger and Tonto, but Hawkeye (Steve Forrest - ) and his foster-father Chingachgook (Ned Romero - Star Trek: TNG ). They are the last of the Mohican tribe, a bloodline driven almost to extinction by war with the French and their Huron allies.

The father of the settler family recounts the main story as an extended flashback, making it nothing more than Hawkeye's backstory. Back in 1757, Hawkeye and Chingachgook and Uncas (Don Shanks - Paranormal Prison ) lived happily in the woods. Then they met Major Heyward (Andrew Prine - Amityville II: The Possession ), taking a relief column to Fort William Henry. Unfortunately his guide, Magua (Robert Tessier - Star Crash ), is leading the redcoats into a trap.

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 (Russell 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 French 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.

Patriot, The (2000)

Revolution (1985)

Tom Dobb (Al Pacino - Once Upon A Time In Hollywood ) and his son Ned (Dexter Fletcher - Kick-Ass ) take a cargo of animal skins down-river to New York City. Their boat is commandeered by Liberty Woman ( Annie Lennox ), and then the idiot son gets convinced to join the revolting rebels. Tom has to join up so he can look after his boy.

Rich heiress Daisy McConnahay ( Nastassja Kinski ) lives with her mother Mrs. McConnahay ( Joan Plowright ) and her sisters, who seek advantageous marriages with British officers. To be awkward, Daisy sides with the revolting rebels.

The heroic redcoats are represented by Sergeant Major Peasy (Donald Sutherland - ) and Lord Hampton (Richard O'Brien - Rocky Horror Picture Show ). They are merciful when they get the chance.

When the revolt is over, Tom has to get his back-pay from Sergeant Jones (Steven Berkoff - The Krays ).

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)

Nim’s Island (2008)

Tomboy Nim ( Abby Breslin ) and her dad (Gerald Butler - 300 ) live on a remote South Pacific island. When daddy goes off in the yacht, Nim is left alone. Her only companion (other than some English-trained wild animals) is her Internet pen-pal, the adventure writer Alex Rover.

Nim’s island paradise is invaded by Buccaneers, a cruise-ship crewed by the likes on Anthony Simcoe ( Farscape ). The only one she can call for help is Alex Rover. Unfortunately Alex the Adventurer is the alter-ego of Alex the Writer - an agoraphobic Jodie Foster !

This is a great kids’ story, with one major problem. The protagonist is never in any actual danger. We see the characters do things, but there is no actual emotional connection with them. It is a very well-made film, but ultimately there is nothing to it.

Return To Nim's Island (2013)

Soon

2000