Peninsula / Busanhaeng 2: Bando (South Korea, 2020)

Korean director and scriptwriter Yeon Sang-ho already had a tidy little career as the maker of adult-oriented animation films when, in 2016, he released a double whammy: first, in April, he released the mildly successful animated fast-zombie film Seoul Station (2016 / trailer), and then, a month later, his first live-action flick, Train to Busan (2016 / trailer), also a fast-zombie movie, premiered at Cannes and went on to be a major hit both in his home country and across the world. The latter is currently in remake development hell, due to eventually reappear with an American cast as The Last Train to New York. 

Trailer to

Peninsula:

As is to be expected, the success of Sang-ho's zombie films, above all the mega-success of Train to Busan, has lead to a sequel, possibly the first of many — emphasis on "possibly", because the first sequel, Peninsula, a standalone story that takes place four years after the outbreak introduced in the first films, did well enough but only managed to take in a bit more than a fourth of what Busan took in, despite costing almost twice as much to make. It is easy to see why it brought in less dinero, for while Peninsula has its plus points and makes for passable viewing, it is a pale and overly familiar film in comparison to Busan.

When considering who survived in the first film, it is hardly surprising that none of the characters of Train to Busan appear again in Peninsula, which, like the various narratives of George Romero's shambling-zombie movies, instead tells a new tale that transpires within the same universe as Sang-ho's other two movies. Along the same lines, Peninsula even does a riff on the ending of Romero's Dawn of the Dead [1978 / trailer] — the last-minute decision of a character to not give up and die — as well as an idea used in Romero's Land of the Dead (2005 / trailer) and elsewhere: humans versus zombies in a gated arena for the entertainment of the masses. Those are not the only things in Peninsula that might remind you of another movie..

Peninsula opens within the same timeframe as Train to Busan, introducing us to the soldier Jung Seok (Gang Dong-wan of Jeon Woochi [2009 / trailer] and Dr Cheon and the Lost Talisman [2023 / trailer]) as he brings his sister, nephew, and brother-in-law Chul-min (Kim Min-jae of The Wailing [2016 / trailer] and Urban Myths [2022 / trailer]) to safety. Safety proves short lived, however, and four years later Jung Seok and Chul-min are living broken lives in Hong Kong, where Korean people, as "bringers" of the zombie virus, are social outcasts.

There, with nothing left to lose, they and two other Korean survivors accept the offer of some Chinese mobsters to illegally re-enter the Korean peninsula and retrieve a truck full of cold, hard (American) cash. But once in the former South of the Two Ks, they have more than zombies to deal with: a rogue militia appears from nowhere and takes the truck, while Jung Seok is unexpectedly saved by two young girls, Joon (Lee Re) and Yu-jin (Lee Ye-won) — seriously: Yu-jin is even a child — driving an SUV...

The MacGuffin of the flick is more than reminiscent of Zack Snyder's Army of the Dead (2021 / trailer), but with a smaller crew and lacking both the safe that needs cracking and the nuclear deadline of that Netfux film. Snyder's project is probably the better movie, but Peninsula does offer its own thrills and fun. As normally often happens in movies — see, for example: 28 Weeks Later [2007 / trailer] — and never in real life, the mother of the two girls, the take-no-nonsense Min-Jung (techno queen Lee Jung-hyun of Alice in Earnestland [2015 / trailer]), and Jung Seok, two people from a country that had (in 2023) a population of 51.74 million people, have a connection, so they of course work through things to team up to get the money and leave the island.

Peninsula is an uneven film with pacing problems, to say the least, and suffers from multiple overly long tear-jerking emotional scenes that seriously destroy the rhythm of the film. The two zombie-adept kids are beyond belief, but they are integrally involved in some the movie's best scenes and ideas, like the first chase scene and the use of toy cars to distract the dead. That first chase scene almost calls to mind a computer game in which points are gathered by running over the dead — a nod to Death Race 2000 [1975 / kill count], perhaps? — while the much larger and more explosive one that comes towards the end of the movie definitely owes a lot to the mass destruction of automobiles as found in the ultimate car-chase movie, Mad Max: Fury Road [2015 / trailer]).

That said, unlike the previously mentioned two dystopian films, Peninsula leans heavily into the realm of lousy CGI; luckily, as obvious as the CGI is, one cannot help but laugh and thrill as the events unfold onscreen.

Is Peninsula any good? Sure, in a very generic and brainless way. Despite its bigger budget, however, it does come across as a cheaper film than its predecessor and, on the whole, it is also less satisfying. But it goes well enough with a six-pack and smoke and a group of like-minded friends.

Like most modern zombie films, Peninsula is never in any way scary; likewise, it is surprisingly light on gore. But while one might have a fun enough time while watching it, particularly if you are a less-demanding fan of the genre, it is ultimately an entirely forgettable movie.

As an extra —

no-nonsense mom (Lee Jung-hyun)

sings Ari Ari (2002):

R.I.P.: Roger Corman

Roger Corman

5 April 1926 — 9 May 2024

One of the greats has left us: Roger Corman, filmmaker extraordinaire — "The Pope of Pop Cinema", "The Spiritual Godfather of the New Hollywood", and "The King of Cult". As a director, producer, studio head, distributor, actor and mentor, he influenced Hollywood and movie-making far more than he will probably ever be given credit. Corman entered the biz as a messenger in the mail room at 20th Century Fox and worked his way up to story reader before, feeling somewhat shafted by his experience on Henry King's The Gunfighter (1950 / trailer), he took off for Europe for a few years. Returning to return to Hollywood to sell his first script, which eventually became Nathan Juran's Highway Dragnet (1954 / full movie), Corman soon produced his first movie, Wyott Ordung's Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954 / trailer), and a year later he directed his first feature film, Five Guns West (1955 / full movie). And thus an unstoppable creative force came into being...

Screw "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon", when it comes to Hollywood and movies, one can probably play "Two Degrees to Roger Corman". (BTW: According to The Oracle of Bacon, Roger Corman was in Apollo 13 [1995 / trailer] with Kevin Bacon — a degree of one. In turn, as we already knew, the director of Apollo 13, Ron Howard, made his directorial debut with Grand Theft Auto [1977 / trailer], on which Roger Corman was the executive producer, after starring in the Roger Corman production Eat My Dust [1976 / trailer]).
To do a Career Review of all the movie projects that Roger Corman was involved in exceeds our current abilities. Thus, we list below only the movies that he was involved in that we have reviewed here at a wasted life... We are sure we have missed a few.

 

Camal Spiders (2011)

dir. Jim Wynorski

 

 

Dinocroc vs. Supergator (2010)

dir. Jim Wynorski

 

 

Vampirella (1996)

dir. Jim Wynorski

 

 

Carnosaur (1993)

dirs. Adam Simon & Darren Patrick Moloney

 

 

The Terror Within II (1990)

dir. Andrew Stevens

 

 

Sorority House Massacre (1986)

dir. Carol Frank

 

 

Space Raiders (1983)

dir. Howard R. Cohen

 

 

Forbidden World (1982)

dir. Allan Holzman

 

 

Piranha (1978)

dir. Joe Dante

 

 

Lady Frankenstein (1971)

dir. Mel Welles & Aureliano Luppi

 

 

Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965)

dirs. Curtis Harrington & Pavel Klushantsev

 

 

The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

dir. Roger Corman

 

 

Dementia 13 (1963)

dir. Francis Ford Coppola

 

 

The Terror (1963)

dirs. Roger Corman, Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Hale, Monte Hellman, Jack Hill, Dennis Jakob & Jack Nicholson

 

 

The Intruder (1962)

dir. Roger Corman

 

 

Attack of the Giant Leeches (1962)

dir. Bernard L. Kowalski

 

 

A Bucket of Blood (1959)

dir. Roger Corman

 

 

 
The Wasp Woman (1959)

dir. Roger Corman

Judgment Day (USA, 1998)

It only took Hollywood a little under 20 years to forget the fiasco that was the major box office flop Meteor (1979 / trailer), the film that basically killed the trash-film institution that was the original American International Pictures. Thus, 1998 suddenly saw the release of two big budget meteor-heading-for-Earth films, Paramount's Deep Impact (1998 / trailer) and Michael Bay's inordinately cheesy Armageddon (1998 / trailer) — not to mention this low budget, direct-to-video flick here, Judgment Day, from Cinetel Films, that mover-and-shaker firm [Not!] that brought us masterpieces like Vampirella (1996), Camel Spiders (2012), and more. In best mockbuster fashion, Cinetel saddled the movie with a name that could only make one think of that far better Arnie film (trailer) from 1991, but at least the title Judgment Day does indeed have a link to the actual content of their film (unlike, say, such films as Asylum's mockbuster dud, Transmorphers [2007]).

Trailer to

Judgment Day:

The plot of Judgment Day, in short: a big meteor is heading for Earth and the anti-meteor project Linebacker, run by the President's old college roommate Dick (milquetoasty character actor David Wells of Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: Initiation (1990 / trailer), Progeny (1998), the unjustly obscure Ladies Club (1986 / trailer) and so much more), doesn't cut the mustard when it comes to being able to destroy it. So, time to get Dr David Corbett (Linden Ashby of Night Angel (1990 / trailer], Wild Things 2 (2004 / trailer], and Wild Things: Diamonds in the Rough (2005 / trailer]) and quickly revive his Thor project. Darn! The charismatic religious leader Thomas Payne (Mario Van Peebles, still looking very much one of People magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People in the World" [1991]) is convinced that the meteor is God's plan, so he and his followers kidnap Dr Corbett, which leads the military brass in charge to pull in FBI agent Jeanine Tyrell (Suzy Amis) to find Corbett any way she can. She, in turn, pulls in jailbird Matthew Reese (Ice-T of Tank Girl [1995], 3000 Miles to Graceland [2001], Tara [1991] and Leprechaun 5: In the Hood [2000 / trailer]) to help. Can they find Corbett and avert Armageddon Judgment Day?

In itself, the basic narrative behind Judgment Day's deadly-meteor-dooming-Earth plot is neither far-fetched nor that bad. Anyone who doesn't believe that dinos and Adam & Eve inhabited the planet at the same time knows that happenstancial global genocide from space is a possibility, even if you don't look up. Likewise, anyone following the slow but deadly rise of the Christian Theocracy in the USA (and the current state of the Republican party, not to mention the anti-democratic MAGA believers) should have little problem in accepting the idea that Christian fanatics are secretly (or not too secretly) embedded within our government — or, for that matter, that there might be a powerful Christian leader (or Republican congressperson or Supreme Court judge) who would see a deadly meteor as part of God's work and the intended harbinger of the Armageddon and Judgment Day. As such, the two basic plot concepts lend themselves well to being combined into a possible thriller or action flick, which is what screenwriter "William Carson" tries to do in this flick.

Unluckily, scriptwriter "William Carson", better known as the highly prolific B-, C-, D- and Z-film director, scriptwriter, and producer Fred Olen Ray (the man behind, among innumerable films, Biohazard [1985] and Venomous [2001]), flubs things up again (as so often) by taking a workable idea and promptly adding such a huge plot hole that were the script cheese, it would be Swiss No-Cheese-Left. Namely: if Payne the Religious Fanatic truly wanted to stop Corbett the Scientist from stopping "God's plan", he would simply shoot the scientist dead — like Payne does everyone else — instead of kidnapping Corbett and keeping him alive in a locked cell.

Of course, there wouldn't be much action and quasi-buddy-movie stuff if narrative logic were taken seriously in Judgment Day, but the previously mentioned narrative flaw is really too big to overlook — but one does, because one does not watch movies like Judgment Day expecting intelligence or care; one watches them for the fun of it, for the laughs, for the explosions, and the gunplay. And the film has all three, as in that typically less-than-logical scene in which Payne shows up at a trailer where Tyrell and Reese are questioning a lead and first shoots the trailer to pieces with machine guns (hitting everything but Tyrell and Reese) before obliterating it with a grenade launcher. (Logic says: grenade launcher first ensures no one escapes.)

The flick is the sophomore directorial project of former actor John Terlesky — his short list of acting projects include some noteworthy films, including Chopping Mall (1986 / trailer, with Dick Miller), The Naked Cage (1987 / trailer), Deathstalker II (1988 / trailer), and the contemporary "nudie-cutie western" Hard Bounty (1995 / trailer) — who segued from acting in "bad" movies to directing low-budget trash action like this D2V flick to a highly successful and busy career as a TV director. Put the blame on Judgment Day's budget, maybe, but this science-fiction "action" flick reveals a slight predisposition to a career outside of feature films: we might be prejudiced, but we do feel that anyone who cannot shoot cops flying through the sky, due to an action-scene explosion, without them looking like keystone cops who just jumped on a hidden trampoline, is just not really ready for the big screen.

Additional pet peeve: twice in the film's story development, the narrative advancement relies on turncoats, both within the contingent of fanatics and within the government, and one can see miles in advance that those characters will do what they eventually do (and, of course, pay for it with their lives). True believers don't turn at the drop of a hat, so the "turncoating" lacks the verisimilitude required to stop it from coming across like cheap and easy plot expediency. That flaw, like the script in general, is possibly hard to truly get mad about seeing who wrote the movie — Fred Olan Ray was/is possibly never ready for the big screen, which is why he never has and never will reach it.

In the end, Judgment Day is a pretty run-of-the-mill action film but makes for a painless waste of time. The cheesily fun opening in "Peru" in Judgment Day is sort of fun, as are a variety of South Central-set confrontations — Coolio (1 Aug 1963 – 28 Sept 2022) even shows up long enough to look mean and not really advance the plot before an inglorious end. None of the actors really shine in their roles, but none of them are truly terrible either, though Suzy Amis is somewhat uneven and at times even seems somewhat embarrassed for being there. (It is not all that hard to believe that her realizing that her future as an "actor" would probably be doomed to D2V films like this one actually led to her direct and subsequent retirement.) Van Peebles, on the other hand, is so casual and natural and self-assured and BBC-manly that he actually manages to exude a sense of threatening fanaticism doing nothing. He was and is an actor that truly should have had bigger and more mainstream success than he did or now has.

The religious angle is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Judgement Day, arguably even percipient now that the US faces the real anti-democratic threat of organized Evangelist and Christian right-wingers who believe in "freedom" and "democracy" about as much as ISIS militants do. But Judgment Day is hardly a film with a hidden message, it is a turn-off-your-brain-at-the-door, generic, low-budget trash project with a few good explosions and shootouts, a few laughs both intentional and unintentional, a dearth of breastage or nudity, and an almost anticlimactic end due to the slightly unexciting staging of the final showdown. Painless, in other words, but hardly a must-see.

Dorian Gray (Great Britain, 2009)

 

"The only way to get rid of a temptation, is to yield to it."
Lord Henry Wotton (Colin Firth)

Trailer to

Dorian Gray:

Obviously enough based Oscar Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, this 2009 feature-film version of the tale is but one in a long line of cinema undertakings that go back as early as 1910, with the Dane Axel Strøm's lost short Dorian Grays Portræt, and that include versions such as the lost Hungarian feature film Az élet királya (1918), with Bela Lugosi as Lord Harry Watton [sic]; Albert Lewin's "classic" B&W version from 1945 (trailer), with the famous painting by the American painter Ivan (Le Lorraine) Albright (above) now hanging at the Art Institute of Chicago; Massimo Dallamano's intriguing Eurotrash version, Il dio chiamato Doria (1970 / trailer — see Maria Rohm), which sets the events in the then contemporary 1970s; the forgotten porn version by the graphic artist Armand Weston (26 Dec 1931 – 26 May 1988), Take Off (1978 / scenes / full NSFW film), German poster directly below, starring one of a wasted life's favorite male pornsters, Wade Nichols,* as the titular hedonist, now named Darrin Blue (the Golden Age production swept the 1979 awards at AFAA); and Wash Westmoreland's totally obscure D2V big-tooled and muscular The Seven Deadly Sins: Gluttony [2001], featuring the pleasant whopper of Eric Hanson at his prime as that of Dorian.

* Normally when we refer to Wade Nichols (28 Oct 1946 – 28 Jan 1985), a.k.a. Dennis Parker, in a post, we embed his disco song Like an Eagle (see: Uschi Pt X: 1977, Gigi Darlene Pt III & Harry H. Novak Pt VIII), but for a change we'll embed his second disco single, which reached #11 on the charts in South Africa in 1980:

Wade Nichols/Dennis Parker singing

New York by Night:

But this version of The Picture of Dorian Gray here is hardly obscure and is definitely not porn. No, this one is a rather upscale British production, a period piece shot at Ealing Studios and on location in London; it's also the third Oscar Wilde adaptation directed by former actor (e.g., Nightbreed [1990 / trailer]) turned director Oliver Parker, his earlier two Wilde movie adaptations being the comedies An Ideal Husband (1999 / trailer) and The Importance of Being Earnest (2002 / trailer), both of which are more interesting and entertaining than this polished but oddly uninvolving horror movie.

 

"You shouldn't believe every word Harry says. He doesn't."
Basil Hallward (Ben Chaplin)

 

Not that Parker's Dorian Gray is really a terrible film, it is just that for all its upscale production values and nifty period setting, it suffers from an amazingly weak lead, some questionable CGI townscapes and a tacky CGI painting of Dorian Gray, one too many dream sequences, and a general tameness that sorely undermines the interest of the viewer — and that despite the addition a few truly modern-feeling sequences of violence and blood.

The narrative is probably known well enough: upon seeing the portrait painting by his artist friend Basil Hallward (Ben Chaplin of Lost Souls [2000] and Twixt [2011 / trailer]), the attractive Dorian Gray (Ben Barnes), an innocent of captivating attractiveness, glibly states that he would trade his soul to stay young forever. And thus it transpires: he remains ageless and unchanged while his portrait, which he soon hides from the public, shows the true ravages upon his soul and appearance as he, taking the libertine and egocentrically amoral admonishments of Lord Henry Wotton (Colin Firth of Apartment Zero [1988 / trailer] and Kingsman: The Secret Service [2014 / trailer]) as words of wisdom by which to live, spirals into a licentious life of wanton and intentional decadence and evil...

Scriptwriter Toby Finlay does tweak the narrative of the book here there, but for the addition of the dream sequences and Dorian's past as an abused child one would be hard placed to say that some of the changes don't work. Having Dorian get rid of the Hallward's body, and the method he chooses, does work better than how it occurs in the book, for example, and the demise of James Vane (Johnny Harris of Black Death [2010 / trailer] and RocknRolla [2008 / trailer]) is definitely better — as well as more in line with the cinematic tastes of today — than his rather ignoble accidental death in Wilde's novel.

Perhaps the most inspired change, however, is the replacement of the book's rather stock character of Hetty Merton — Wilde, whose opinion of women was rather low, was not exactly gifted with an ability to make them well-rounded characters — with Emily (Rebecca Hall of The Night House [2020 / trailer], The Gift [2015 / trailer] and The Awakening [2011 / trailer]), the suffragette daughter of the now aged Lord Wotton. The change adds an appealing level of irony in that a man who basically molded the subsequent decadent character of the young and impressionable Gray through the witty espousal of self-indulgence and hedonism should experience his unwitting creation coming back to rob him of his greatest treasure, his daughter.

Unluckily, though Rebecca Hall is pleasant enough and not a bad actor, the budding love between her character, Emily, and Dorian, fails to achieve any level of verisimilitude or true believability. The same can be said of Hallward's pre-decay portrait of Dorian, which, though continually referred to as a masterpiece and his best work, is a rather generic and unimpressive portrait that in no way exudes "masterpiece"*. Likewise, the later CGI version of the portrait reflecting Dorian's morally bankrupt soul is, for all the dropping maggots, less terrifying than unconvincing and ridiculous.

* For an example of a portrait that truly exudes masterpiece that was painted around the time in which the narrative of Dorian Gray transpires, take a gander at John Singer Sargent's Portrait of Madame X (1884)... Hell's Bells, even the average Norman Rockwell or Margaret Keane painting has more presence than Hallward's portrait of Dorian does.

Furthermore, the movie in general remains rather uninteresting and uninvolving, and more than one character is miscast. Rachel Hurd-Wood (of Perfume [2006 / trailer] and Soloman Kane [2009 / trailer]), for example, who plays Dorian's first love interest Sibyl Vane, whom he soon drives to suicide, remains as oddly vapid as she is attractive. And as the titular lead Dorian, Ben Barnes (of Killing Bono [2011 / trailer] and By the Gun [2014 / trailer]) is dreadful. When he first arrives in London, he comes across less innocent and babe-in-the-woods than he does slightly intellectually challenged, and throughout the movie he never once manages to successfully convey the allure that supposedly makes him so irresistible to everyone around him. For that matter, he never really comes across as evil, even when he's trying to convey evil — all of which is surprising, when one takes into account how he so successfully conveys allure, "goodness" and unadulterated evil in the watchable Netfux series Shadow and Bone (2021-23 / trailer).

A twinky Ben Barnes in

the British boy group Hyrise singing

Leading Me On:

All in all, Dorian Gray is watchable but unmemorable. The impressionable might find it mildly scary in places, and perhaps even a bit "decadent", but there are really so many better horror movies out there that it seems a shame to bother with one as lackluster as this. The witticisms are the best thing about the movie, but though witty dialogue is indeed a specialty and integral part of Oscar Wilde's work, nice dialogue without convincing fear or terror does not translate into a good scary movie.