BA_Harrison

Vampires are pure evil. Soulless undead creatures driven to feast on the blood of the living, they should be enthusiastically tearing out the throats of plump-breasted virgins, not falling in love or wallowing in self pity. I blame Francis Ford Coppola and Anne Rice.

Julian Sands plays vampire Alex, who encounters librarian Anne (Suzanna Hamilton), who reminds him of his long lost love Virginia. Kenneth Cranham is Edgar, who reveals Alex's true nature to Anne, conveniently leaving out the fact that he is also a vampire.

Tale of a Vampire is slow, pretentious, '90s arthouse crap with a terrible turn by Sands (I thought Alex was severely autistic to start with), soporific direction by Shimako Sato, and absolutely no scares. It's all about the shadowy rain-drenched alleyways, flickering candles, gloomy buildings and the general depressive mood - the kind of nonsense that goes down a storm with teenage goth girls, but which anyone else will see for the dreary, uneventful drivel that it is.

I'm a horror film fan... I'm used to characters making dumb decisions, but Mel Gibson's Flight Risk takes character stupidity to a whole new level, both the good guys and the villain repeatedly choosing to make life very difficult for themselves. There are multiple times in this film that either side could have put an end to the constant peril that they find themselves in, but hey, where's the fun in that? Flight Risk might well be the most idiotic action flick of the decade, but I still enjoyed myself, the usually unbearable Mark Wahlberg hamming it up a treat as a demented mob hitman, Topher Grace providing the humour as his whimpering quarry Winston, with Michelle Dockery getting between them as tough U. S. Marshall Madolyn.

The plot sees Madolyn accompanying accountant Winston on a charter flight from the wilderness of Alaska to Anchorage so that he can testify at a trial against a crime boss. What they don't realise is that the pilot isn't who he claims to be: he is in fact a sadistic killer hired to ensure that Winston never makes it to court. Madolyn eventually rumbles the hitman, and manages to over power him, but repeatedly allows the bad guy to get the upper hand - how else could Gibson spin this slight plot out to feature length?

Wahlberg's OTT performance is very entertaining, but for me, the majority of the fun is in just how unbelievable it all gets, and boy, does it ever! Madolyn leaving a knife kicking around the floor of the plane so that the hitman can find it is stupid, as is handcuffing him to a leather strap, but perhaps the dumbest moment comes when she informs the corrupt director of the US Marshal Service that she knows that he has been leaking information to the bad guys. It's like she wants to make trouble for herself. The hitman also makes some extremely bad decisions, but he's certifiably insane, so it's more excusable in his case.

The final act sees Madolyn attempting to land the plane in challenging weather conditions, while simultaneously fending off the killer, who has escaped yet again. It's very silly, action packed nonsense.

I rate Flight Risk 5.5/10, rounded up to 6 for IMDb. It's objectively not a great film, but there was rarely a dull moment; given the other releases I have seen this January (both snoozefests), I was happy just for that.

IMDb's current rating of 4.7 is unjust: the film isn't perfect, but it is way better than that score suggests.

Scott Glenn stars as burnt out L. A. homicide cop John Cain, who escapes the rigours of his professional and personal life by travelling to a Navajo reservation in Arizona in order to transport a Native American killer, Nakai Twobear, back to the city. However, Twobear possesses supernatural powers that enable him to escape, and so Cain joins a posse to track down the fugitive and bring him to justice.

I'm not the biggest fan of the 'Magical Native American' trope wherein Native Americans are depicted as mystical, possessing of magical abilities, with the stupid white man refusing to believe - it's a tired cliché - but Shadowhunter manages to makes it work better than most thanks to tense direction from J. S. Cardone and solid turns from all involved, the cast including Robert Beltran (Star Trek: Voyager) as Navajo cop Frank Totsoni, Angela Alvarado as sexy tracker Ray Whitesinger, and Benjamin Bratt as the despicable Twobear, who is genuinely terrifying. The desert scenery is also great, with a suitably creepy setting for the finalé: a ruined Native American settlement high in the rocky hills, crawling with rattlers and scorpions.

The romance between Cain and Ray is a little unlikely (Glenn being Alvarado's senior by 25 years), and Cain taking a severe beating in the film's climax, but still pulling through, seems a little far-fetched, but the film is well written, competently directed and exciting enough for me to be forgiving of such things.