Alien Lockdown (2004)

Tagline:

It's time to prey.

Movie Review:

First of all, you may have noticed I have dropped the "Back of DVD" part of the review. Unless it's funny for some reason, from now on I won't be putting it on my reviews; they tend to give too much of the plot away I find. I'd prefer to do that in my review if it's going to be done at all.

Alien Lockdown is a Nu Image production that was made for the Sci-Fi channel and stars John Savage (Soldier's Revenge) as a mad doctor, James Marshall as his wacky computer geek assistant and Michelle Goh (Out for a Kill with Steven Seagal) as the rough and ready Ripley.. I mean Talon.. who is doing "one last job" for the black ops army before retirement.

The movie starts with a history lesson; in 10,000 BC a meteor crashed to earth. Inside it was a chest that contained a green emerald thing. Apparently the power it yields can control armies, you know the story. The chest is rediscovered in an archaeological dig (think Stargate). Flash forward to the present and the Doctor is in his lab with a bunch of other scientists doing a demonstration of his new creation - an alien hybrid of all the most powerful animals on the planet, a genesis courtesy of the emerald and the decoding of its contained information by James Marshall's character. It has shell like skin that breaks scalpels on contact so you know it's tough. Assured by the good Doctor that it is pacified while in the lab (for some reason), of course the bloody thing gets loose and kills everyone, except the Doctor and James Marshall.

That's when Michelle Goh as Rip-.. Talon is brought in with a team of army guys to do a "clean up" of the lab. That means blow it up and kill everyone. This is when it really becomes obvious that the producers wanted a half Predator movie and half Aliens movie. We get the scene in the helicopter where we meet all the tough army guys and Michelle Goh, like Schwarzenegger in that scene, just sits back and watches, not getting in on the hilarity and bonding. Once they land it switches into Aliens mode - lot's of stealthy walking around dark corridors with machine guns, lot's of military commands ("Flank left", "Cover the rear", "Watch those corners" - well some of those I may have taken straight from Aliens but you know what I'm talking about). They even have bleeping tracking monitors to locate the creature.

The movie proceeds exactly how a low budget reinterpretation of two famous movies squished together would. The black ops team bust in, find the Doctor and his geeky assistant, and keep getting attacked by the creature on the loose, losing team members one by one until only Michelle Goh remains. Oh come on I'm not giving anything away here; as soon as I said "Aliens" you all thought "Only Ripley lived through that, with one other guy and a robot".. well there is no robot here but Goh does make it to the end with one other guy, and the Doctor is nuts and obsessed with the creature the same way the android from the first Alien is ("I admire it's purity.") The horror element is fairly mild as this was made for TV, but there are a few close ups of bloodied bodies and and the creature chewing on human remains.

Goh's character is done pretty well actually. Tough and emotionless from the outset, it's hinted at early on that she has feelings for one of the soldiers. He of course bites it and after his "leave me here" scene, she has a bit of a teary and explains to the one other survivor re: the other guy why this was her last job and why she is expendable. It's actually tactfully done and not cringeworthy like most emotional scenes in movies like this. Everyone else does a good job with their roles though there is nothing really to write home about, though John Savage's mad scientist is pretty effective, especially when he has a violent rant about how awesome it is that we are all going to die. Goh get's the best throw-away line, paraphrased from Predator: "If it can be penetrated, it can be killed." Oo-er.

The alien itself actually looks pretty good. Thankfully they went down the 'man in a suit' route like the aforementioned movies and not some CG abomination. The face is ripped off from the Predator and has the same mandibles but the skin and back and the way it moves are very Alien. Honestly it looks pretty good, though I'm sure the darkness helps masks any flaws. Later in the movie when the baby ones turn up they are done with average CG and look about as realistic as the swarms of scarab beetles in the Mummy movie (the awful one with Brendan Frasier). The CG helicopter at the beginning and end is a bit of a let down as well. The sound stage is pretty good too with lot's of realistic gun-firing, metal on metal sounds and the creature's roars.

I made it all the way through this, only checking the time to go once and an hour had passed at that point so that's pretty good. Surprisingly, if you are in the mood for something entirely derivative, Alien Lockdown comes recommended. Damn it, someone is cooking a steak outside my window and now I want one. That's nothing to do with this movie, I'm just on a roll here.

The Video:

Unfortunately the Australian release DVD was trimmed from 1.78:1 to 1.33:1 and the 5.1 DD soundtrack muxed down to a stereo. Disappointing but the overall presentation is still pretty good. The single-layer disc does mean the bit-rate is a bit low which is evident in the early Iraq scenes and some of the dark scenes in the complex. Overall though not bad and the soundtrack is quite punchy. Runtime 88 minutes.

I'm feeling lazy today and happen to have a download of the widescreen DVD as well as my own DVD so I used that for the screenshots. I'm pretty sure that's the edition you get in the US actually so is more representative for buyers anyway.

Sourced From:

A video store fire-sale for about a dollar.

Trailer:

More Screens:

Red Scorpion 2 (1994)



Tagline:

America Has A Brave New Weapon

Back of DVD:

He can control the destiny of the nation with the touch of a button, with legions of followers ready and committed to carry out his every evil command. Picking up where Hitler left off, Kendrick (John Savage - The Deer Hunter) is determined to gain supremacy at all costs through his reign of terrorism.

There's only one group that can stop him - The Red Scorpion - a top secret band of highly trained experts in the fields of combat and espionage. Their leader is Nick Stone (Matt McColm - Cyborg), a top agent of the National Security Council who has just been devastated by the death of a close friend on their last mission. Persuaded by his commanding officer (Michael Ironside - Top Gun) to complete this one last mission, he must now join up with a new team of commandos to overthrow Kendrick and thwart his treacherous plans.

Movie Review:

Red Scorpion 2 is apparently a sequel to the 1989 Dolph Lundgren movie of the same name, but Dolph is not in this, not even via flashback. Nor is this set in Russia or Africa, but instead the good ol' US of A (though filmed in Canada).

We start at a tacky nightclub filled with tacky people wearing tacky clothes dancing to a tacky band (with tacky hair). Thankfully the tackiness is stopped short when some militants enter and blow the band away, round up the non-whites in the room then blow them away as well. At the same time, a meeting of bigots is underway in a tent helmed by campy aryan neo-nazi Andrew Kendrick (John Savage) who doesn't condone violence (he lies). Elsewhere on a boat, an illegal weapons deal is being disrupted when undercover-whatever Nick Stone (Matt McColm), posing as a buyer, and his female accomplice reveals his intentions to arrest the sellers. This of course ends in a shootout whereby Stone's lady friend is killed and the boat explodes when Stone hurls a grenade at it. Then a gallery is broken in to and the guards dispensed with, and Kendrick has a minor orgasm as he retrieves the Spear of Destiny from a glass case. Following?

Stone is understandably bummed out by the death of whateverhernamewas and meets with his boss Michael Ironside to resign from his command. Ironside says he has "one last mission" before he can retire - take down that campy nazi Kendrick who plans to activate his sleeper cells and take over the country. Stone works alone normally (except I guess that time when whateverhernamewas was killed) but this time he has to work in a team. Cue roll call of squad members -Billy Ryan the sharp shooting redneck, Vince D'Angelo a computer specialist at the Hollywood OS and womaniser, Joe Nakamura a Taekwondo expert and classical music fan, Winston 'Mad Dog' Powell a disgraced detroit cop and Commander Sam Guinness, the token woman. About as cliched as you can get.

On their first mission to gather evidence and hopefully recover the stolen Spear of Destiny, the team infiltrate a warehouse owned by Kendrick. They have all been issued Aliens-style headset cameras and Sam and Ironside watch on monitors back at the truck. The occupants of the warehouse don't want to help with their enquiries so the first shootout of the movie occurs. Joe does some of his martial arts, Winston smashes through walls and chews cigars, Billy sharp-shoots and Stone round-house kicks a guy through a window. The guys don't work together as a team well, despite constant orders from their Commander, and the result is Joe being shot and the spear not being captured. Although a rubbish performance, Ironside's boss Colonel Gregori (George Touliatos, who played among other things a few bad guys in Stargate SG1) shows his face finally and declares that he will make a team out of them. I thought they already were a team, but anyway. He'll make them better. Ironside chews them out for their lack of teamship but with what little information they managed to gather, a second infiltration is planned.

Ironside has about two minutes of dialogue in Red Scorpion 2, he basically phones it in. And you might be wondering what the relevance is to Dolph Lundgren's Red Scorpion. Dick all, really. It is revealed later that Colonel Gregori trained Dolph's character from the first movie, Nikolai, that's about it. Now his team have Red Scorpion tattoos on their shoulders. That's the link.

Everyone else gives a fairly standard performance, except for John Savage, who hams it up good and proper as the white supremacist Hitler-loving Andrew Kendrick. He definitely wishes he has been in the Gestapo, wears black leather gloves and has a love of torture. He happily allows a reporter that stumbled into his lair to be branded with a swastika and also enjoys watching others play his own version of Russian Roulette. He has the creepiest lines as well: "I love the wind. Someday I'll be a part of it." What? There is a token training montage as well. The team need to learn to play better together so Gregori gets them to climb a cliff face. They fail over and over of course but when they finally get to the top there is much rejoicing.

Winston enters one of the bigot meetings and, being black, stands out like a choc-chip on vanilla ice cream. Billy has been planted in the audience as a redneck and the two get into a planned rumble. Kendrick approves of this and offers Billy a job for some reason, but after he sleeps with Kendricks female assistant, the game is up and Billy gets thrown in a dungeon. The rest of the team go in to rescue him and take down Kendrick once and for all. This all culminates in a big-arse finale with explosions, kickboxing, motorbike riding, spilled barrels of oil igniting nearby buildings and slow motion shootouts.

The two best deaths in the movie have to be mentioned. The first is of one of Kendrick's insignificant henchmen who, after running away on a rooftop, gets shot from a hundred feet away by a single pistol round which hits a barrel, sets him on fire and pushes him out of a window. The guy rolls off three separate roofs before crashing into a munitions dump, blowing the whole damn building up!

The last death, of Kendrick (you knew it would happen so I'm not spoiling anything), is hilarious. The guy doesn't get killed by the squad; after his plans of domination were destroyed and the building's exploding around him, he simply walks into an oncoming fireball yelling "THE WIND! THE WIND!".

An average-to-good little action flick that feels more like a midday movie than a late night rental.

The Video:

This movie doesn't seem to exist on DVD anywhere, but there were both VHS and LaserDisc releases when the movie first came out. I acquired a DVD-R of the LaserDisc version which was not a terrible print though the black level was almost non-existant. I ran it through a gamma filter and restored some degree of hard blacks and the movie was perfectly watchable with a much better resolution than a VHS copy would be.

Trailer:

More Screens: