Within the Woods (1978)

As a fan of both B-movies and the horror genre, it's pretty much a given that I'm also a fan of the Evil Dead trilogy. I'm not one the super-devoted mega-fans that starts frothing at the mouth at the mere mention of the franchise's name, but I really do love those three movies. That affection is why I'm nervous about the release of the Evil Dead remake. Sure, the franchise's creators are working behind the scenes of the remake as producers, but I'm still afraid that something could possibly go wrong.

But with the remake hitting movie theaters near you today, I thought I'd go back to the beginning of the Evil Dead franchise, back before the original trilogy. I'm specifically referring to the short film called Within the Woods. Made in 1978 on a budget of $1,600, this 30-minute short film actually served as a "proof-of-concept" prototype to show potential investors and generate funding for the first Evil Dead movie.

Never legally released in any home video format and existing today as a bootleg that looks like it was copied from a tenth-generation VHS tape, Within the Woods is an important piece of horror history for no other reason than because it laid the groundwork for one of the genre's most influential trilogies. And while it's essentially a glorified demo reel, Within the Woods isn't that bad either.

The premise is similar, but not quite. As the movie begins, a pair of vacationing couples ― Bruce (Bruce Campbell) and Ellen (Ellen Sandweiss), and Scotty (Scott Spiegel) and Shelly (Mary Valenti) ― are settling into a remote cabin in the woods. While Scotty and Shelly argue over a game of Monopoly, Bruce and Ellen venture out into the woods for a picnic. Bruce actually knows quite a bit about the area, revealing that the cabin is close to an old Native American burial ground. The burial ground is supposedly cursed, and those who disturb it are doomed to suffer the wrath of the angry spirits that watch over the area.

He assures a spooked Shelly that there's nothing to worry about, that it's just some old story. Besides, all they'll be doing is eating hot dogs, not bothering anyone's eternal slumber. But as Bruce digs a fire pit, he accidentally uncovers one of those old graves. And as he is quick to discover, the curse is true and the spirits that he has awakened are hungry for blood.

You have to keep in mind that Within the Woods wasn't made for mass consumption. It was produced for dirt cheap as a means of convincing Michigan businessmen to invest some cash in a feature-length movie whose creators weren't certain would even be completed, let alone successful. Within the Woods isn't Sam Raimi and company saying "here's what we can do," but something more along the lines of "here's what we could do." The movie's really rough around the edges, but as a piece of horror movie history, it's worth seeing just to experience where the Evil Dead movies got off the ground.

And really, you can most certainly see Raimi laying the groundwork for the Evil Dead movies. The cinematography, the editing, and many of the gags and scares would end up being recycled to better effect in The Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2. It's basically an Evil Dead movie made for the change Raimi found underneath his couch cushions. You can see that he had a ton of untapped potential at the time, and as a result, he gives us what would essentially be a "greatest hits" reel of the first two Evil Dead movies before they'd even been made.

As far as the acting goes, there honestly isn't much to say about it. Mary Valenti and Scott Spiegel don't really have much to do, but then again they don't really need to do anything either. Our two leads, though, are really good. Bruce Campbell is charming and charismatic as always, even if he wasn't quite ready for prime time yet. But I will say his performance as the possessed monster was awesome, so he had that going for him. And of all four actors, Ellen Sandweiss makes a great go of it. While she'd up her "beleaguered victim" game in The Evil Dead (before her character becomes a monster, anyway) her performance here is still really good. She's believable in the part and sells the distress well.

The worst part of the whole thing is that the version of the movie I saw came from an old VHS tape that looked so worn and degraded that it made everything murky and practically unwatchable. It wasn't hard to follow the basic gist of the movie, but a lot of details are lost. The really sad thing is that this is probably the best Within the Woods will ever look unless Raimi decides to give some DVD distributor the film negatives or a pristine copy of the movie so they can put together an official, legal release. I can't see that happening due to potential legal hang-ups (the music is all copyrighted and nobody ever paid to use it), so it probably goes without saying that Within the Woods isn't getting any prettier and it probably never will.

Judging Within the Woods on its own merits, then it's okay, I guess. It's not great, but it was never supposed to be. It's just a rough draft its authors would soon be working the kinks out of. But the movie's still really effective. If Raimi, Campbell, and Rob Tapert had shown me Within the Woods back then, I would have totally invested some money in their project. It's a damn fine short movie. I'm sure all the truly devoted Evil Dead fans have seen it by now, but if you have yet to check out Within the Woods, go to YouTube and hunt it down. Then go watch the Evil Dead movies, okay?

Final Rating: **½

Generation X (1996)

Over the years, thousands of characters have appeared in the books published by Marvel Comics. Few, however, have been able to match the success of the X-Men. It took a little while for them to take off following their creation in 1963, but since then they've developed into one of Marvel's biggest cash cows, with no less than six comics related to the X-Men currently being published.

And it's no secret that they've seen success in pop culture beyond comics too. The most obvious is the five movies produced by 20th Century Fox, but the X-Men have also been adapted into video games, toys, and cartoons. People forget, however, that there was almost a live-action television show based on the X-Men. The massive boost in popularity that the X-Men enjoyed during the '90s (which was probably due to that awesome Saturday morning cartoon that ran from 1992 to 1997) led Fox to try their hand at a live-action X-Men TV show.

Rather than the X-Men at large, the show would instead focus on the "Generation X" spinoff created by writer Scott Lobdell and artist Chris Bachalo during the "Phalanx Covenant" storyline that ran in the X-Men books during 1994. The comics' version of the team was popular enough that their book would run for 75 issues between 1994 and 2001, but the show would not do as well. It began simply enough, as a made-for-TV movie that aired on Fox on February 20, 1996. But the ratings for the movie were so bad that plans for the show were dropped. And after seeing how awful the movie was, maybe the show not taking off was for the best.

Generation X takes us to a world where, much like every other depiction of the X-Men, humanity is split into two classes. There are the normal human beings, and those born with a genetic anomaly that grants them a particular superpower. These "mutants" are feared by the general public, loathed and shunned by a society that doesn't understand them.

Some of these mutants eventually find their way to the Xavier Institute for the Gifted, a very selective private school where teenage mutants can learn to use and control their developing mutations. As the movie begins, the Institute's headmasters — powerful telepath Emma Frost (Finola Hughes) and Sean "Banshee" Cassidy (Jeremy Ratchford), who possesses an intense "sonic scream" — have recruited Jubilation "Jubilee" Lee (Heather McComb) and Angelo Espinoso (Austin Rodriguez) into the school's ranks.

As Jubilee and Angelo grow accustomed to their new surroundings and acquainted with their classmates, an enemy soon presents himself. Five years earlier, Emma worked with a mad scientist named Russel Tresh (Matt Frewer). She'd had him fired from a prestigious institute because of his unethical experiments on mutants, and he's spent the intervening time swearing revenge. In those five years, he's developed a machine that allows him to enter someone's dreams and leave subliminal commands. It starts innocuously enough, with Tresh using his machine to get kids to play more Virtua Fighter at an arcade. But being a mad scientist, his sanity quickly slips away and world conquest starts looking like a pretty good idea. When he discovers that Emma is teaching a class of mutants, Tresh decides to use that to his advantage and use her students to perfect his machine.

If anything can be said about Generation X, it's that it most certainly fits the "mid-'90s action/fantasy TV for teenagers" mold seen in shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It's just so aggressively mediocre that it's no surprise it didn't get picked up as a series. Much like what would have happened if that Justice League of America pilot got turned into a series, it probably would have ran for six or seven episodes before getting cancelled or shuffled off into syndication, airing on local UHF channels after Saturday afternoon reruns of Xena: Warrior Princess.

Helming this dumb little pilot is Jack Sholder, whose directorial output has mostly been within the realm of the horror genre. And all I can think to say is that his work here is really, tremendously bad. The camera's always moving or sitting at some cockeyed Dutch angle, which gets really old really fast. You just want Sholder to stop trying to be hip and stop all the wannabe music video crap. And it doesn't make the movie any less boring, either. Yeah, it's dull as dishwater. I can forgive mediocrity, but I can't forgive being boring. While some of this can be blamed on the lackluster script, Sholder should take some of the blame as well. For all his tilted camera angles and neon-colored lighting, he doesn't do anything to inject any energy into the movie.

But like I said, the writing is just as bad as well. Penned by Eric Blakeney, the script is just boring and uninteresting. The characters are just plain hollow, while the plot is stupid and goes nowhere. It takes forever for the story to actually start rolling. We get nearly halfway into the movie before anything even remotely resembling a plot kicks in. And because of that, I found myself struggling to care about anything in this movie. There was only so much I could tolerate before I wanted to just give up and find something better to watch, like paint drying or grass growing.

And then there's the cast, many of whom are underutilized and nearly all of whom are forgettable. Finola Hughes plays Emma Frost as a typical '90s TV bitch. There's nothing impressive or special about her performance, and it feels like she was trying to audition for Melrose Place more than anything else. And if Jeremy Ratchford's Irish accent sounded any faker it would border on silly. Ratchford's not bad here, but that accent is so bad, so unconvincing that you can't take him seriously.

Austin Rodriguez is trying very hard, which I respect, but he ultimately falls flat. It's like they hired Taylor Lautner or something. Randall Slavin, on the other hand, spends more time looking like a cross between Billy Idol and Matthew Lillard's character from Hackers than he does actually acting. In regards to Heather McComb's performance as Jubilee, I just rolled my eyes every time she spoke. They couldn't have hired a better actress? Hell, they couldn't have hired a better cast? They probably would have actually replaced some of the actors had it become a series, but still, you couldn't find anyone better?

But if you're going to watch Generation X, watch it for Matt Frewer. His overacting is absolutely astounding. Imagine Robin Williams cranked up to eleven and covered in a fresh sheen of mid-'90s neon. You can actually hear his overacting in scenes he's not even in. He's a ton of fun, making him the one bright spot of this whole awful movie.

Did you think X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine were the worst X-Men movies? Then you haven't seen Generation X. It's to the X-Men what The Star Wars Holiday Special was to Star Wars. The movie is 87 minutes of crap that simply isn't worth your time. That's probably why it has to get any sort of DVD release that I'm aware of. I had to download a bootleg from the Internet, and I still feel like I overpaid. So yeah, don't feel like you should be in any rush to check out Generation X. It isn't worth it.

Final Rating: *

The Last Exorcism Part II (2013)

Much like zombie movies in recent years, "found footage" movies have basically become a dime a dozen. For every good one, there are a zillion crappy direct-to-video found footage movies made by some joker that managed to get his hands on a camera and some editing software. But there are some good ones out there. Take The Last Exorcism for example. The movie absolutely scared the crap out of me when it was released in 2010, which is why I got really excited when I heard that there was going to be a sequel. Unfortunately, I got my hopes up for nothing, because The Last Exorcism Part II is a tremendous letdown on all fronts.

The movie picks up not long after its predecessor's fiery conclusion, and Nell Sweetzer (Ashley Bell) has somehow managed to survive and escape. Shell-shocked by what happened, she eventually finds her way to civilization and is rushed to a hospital. Nell is given a quick evaluation and sent to a halfway house for troubled young women in the heart of New Orleans. Her new surroundings spur Nell to try forging a new life for herself. She makes friends with the other girls in the halfway house, gets a job as a hotel maid, and even begins an innocent courtship with an equally shy coworker (Spencer Treat Clark). But Nell's crippling fear of the demonic entity that possessed her still lingers. Try as she may to put her old life behind her, that malevolent being refuses to be ignored and will stop at nothing to retake Nell.

I'm honestly unsure of where to begin. The truth of the matter is that The Last Exorcism Part II is such an all-around disappointment that not one thing is to blame for its failure to succeed. Instead, everything is to blame. Only one or two elements really manage to rise above the dreck that makes up the rest of the movie. It's dull and lifeless, with only the briefest amount of tension and the cheapest of scares. You really get the feeling that the filmmakers simply could not be bothered to care. The irony there is that there isn't much in the movie I cared about either.

Some of the blame should be saddled on the director, Canadian filmmaker Ed Gass-Donnelly. I've never heard of Gass-Donnelly before, and looking at his IMDB profile, I haven't heard of his previous work either. And if The Last Exorcism Part II is any indication, I'd probably be just as unimpressed with his other efforts. Gass-Donnelly is obviously trying as best he can, but outside of some great cinematography, he could have done a lot better. He occasionally builds some suspense but very rarely can sustain it, and the few actual scares to be had are all of the "cheap jump scare" variety. And even those are so few and far between and so cheap that it's like they were a complete afterthought. Nothing ever really pays off from one scene to the next, and up until the climax, the movie is just kinda monotonous. Say what you will about the first movie, but it at least tried to avoid being boring. Unfortunately, I can't say the same about this piece of crap. I actually spent most of the movie thinking up sarcastic jokes about the movie as if I were a cast member of Mystery Science Theater 3000. How sad is that?

Further dragging the movie down is its terrible script written by Gass-Donnelly and Damien Chazelle. Seriously, this script is friggin' awful. The story briefly mentions certain plot threads left over from the first movie before abandoning them as if it casn't be bothered to develop them any further. Like what happened to the Satanic cult from the end of the first movie? And what about Nell apparently giving birth to a demon baby? Things get oh so briefly brought up and then never referenced again. It leads me to think that maybe this was just some random direct-to-video exorcism movie that somehow ended up having the "Last Exorcism sequel" deal shoehorned into it. It's just a piss-poor excuse for a sequel in any regard.

But that's not the only thing wrong with the script. Every character with the exception of Nell is forgettable and uninteresting, and even if the whole movie focuses on one character, you'd think that Gass-Donnelly and Chazelle could have at least attempted to make them worth something too. The movie's climactic exorcism feels really forced too, like they crammed it in there to justify the whole "exorcism" part of the title without really building to it. The movie's just cruising along at its own pace and then some voodoo lady suddenly pops up and hijacks the third act of the movie. I wouldn't have been surprised if much of the buildup (assuming it was there at all) was left on the cutting room floor to keep the movie under two hours. If it had been crafted a little differently, it might have turned out a little better. Instead, things just happen and we're supposed to roll with it.

And I mentioned previously that all the characters outside of Nell felt vestigial, but it turns out I can say the exact same thing about the cast. None of the supporting cast makes any sort of meaningful contribution to the movie, but then the movie isn't really about them either. The whole thing revolves around leading lady Ashley Bell, who ― much like she did in the first movie ― completely knocks it out of the park. Bell is a million times better than this movie deserves, as she approaches Nell in a way that makes the character sympathetic and likable. You want to root for her, to give her a big hug and tell her everything is going to be just fine. In a better movie, Bell would quite possibly be an award contender of some sort. She's that good, and I hope that this will help lead to her becoming a breakout star in the horror genre (or down a path greater than that). Even as this entire movie crumbles around her, Bell's performance is a shining light in a realm of darkness.

The decision to abandon the first movie's "found footage" approach and make this sequel a traditional movie was a brave one. Unfortunately, it turned out less like [•REC] 3 and more like Blair Witch 2. I'll give The Last Exorcism Part II credit for at least attempting something, but it falls flat regardless. One talented actress, some well-done cinematography, and a couple of creepy moments simply aren't enough to elevate the movie to the same plateau as its progenitor. And how telling is it that the best parts of the movie were the stock footage from the first movie and the theater I saw the movie at showing the trailers for World War Z and the remakes of Carrie and The Evil Dead? In any event, I would totally see a third Last Exorcism movie if I thought it would improve upon this one. But as it stands, you're better off sticking with just the first movie. Crazy ending or not, the original Last Exorcism is light years ahead of this one.

Final Rating: **

Re-Animator (1985)

I'm not exactly sure when or how it happened, but it seems like zombies have become one of the hottest things in pop culture in recent years. Zombie-themed flash mobs pop up all the time, AMC's The Walking Dead is one of the biggest shows on television, and zombies are all over movies, video games, and comic books. But some people forget that zombies have been around seemingly forever. George Romero created zombies as we know them today in 1968 with his classic Night of the Living Dead, and ever since they've been around in some form or fashion.

And as good as current pop culture has been to zombies, the year 1985 was especially kind. I say that because three of the greatest zombie movies ever made were released that year. The first was Romero's Day of the Dead, followed not long thereafter by The Return of the Living Dead (which introduced the ideas of eating just brains into zombie folklore). The third is the movie we're here to discuss right now, Re-Animator. Focused more on a mad scientist playing God than a zombie apocalypse, Re-Animator has most certainly earned the devoted cult following it's amassed since its release.

Meet Daniel Cain (Bruce Abbott), a promising med student at the prestigious Miskatonic University. He lives a happy life, the only complication being that his girlfriend Meg (Barbara Crampton) is the daughter of Miskatonic's dean (Robert Sampson). But Daniel's world is about to get much, much weirder. Shortly after posting a notice about renting out a room in his apartment, he's approached by Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs), who recently transferred to Miskatonic University. Herbert seems just odd at first, but Daniel soon discovers his new roommate experimenting on a cat in their basement. In these experiments, Herbert uses a glowing green fluid to resurrect the dead.

Daniel finds himself assisting Herbert in perfecting this serum, sneaking into the medical school's morgue for human specimens. Things end up going haywire, however, when their human subjects all turn violent. It's even further compounded after greedy professor Dr. Carl Hill (David Gale) discovers evidence of Herbert's research and wants to claim it for his own.

Re-Animator is a movie I'd seen horror fans extol the virtues of for years. But like many a classic horror movie, it was a long time before I had the opportunity to see it. But like many a classic horror movie, it was a long time before I had the opportunity to see it. I finally broke down and blindly purchased the Blu-ray of the movie, and after watching it, I can legitimately say I didn't know what I was missing. Re-Animator is an amazingly entertaining movie, delicately balancing horror and comedy in such a way that both the scares and the laughs easily compliment one another without being jarring. It's a movie well worth seeing, that's for sure.

Helming Re-Animator is first-time filmmaker Stuart Gordon, who would later go on to make Honey, I Shrunk The Kids too. You wouldn't think that the same guy would make both of those movies, but weirder things have happened, I guess. For all the bizarre and surreal things that happen in this movie, Gordon approaches it with a certain level of seriousness that makes everything feel even weirder. The last of the movie features a decapitated zombie carrying his head around in a pan, barking orders to other zombies he's lobotomized, and it's treated seriously instead of the potentially wacky situation it sounds like it could be. And you know what? It works. It absolutely works.

The fact that Gordon films the movie this way when a lot of other filmmakers would have done it as a comedy actually helps put Re-Animator a step above other, similar movies. If somebody like Eli Roth had directed the movie, it would have just turned out silly. But Gordon allows the humor to be darker and, in my opinion, more fascinating than a movie like Roth's Cabin Fever.

And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the incredibly impressive gore effects. Re-Animator only had a budget of $900,000, and I'm sure that only a small portion of it went to the makeup effects. But the makeup crew, led by designers John Naulin and Anthony Doublin, do an amazing job. The gore is a big part of how Re-Animator built its reputation over the years, and it's absolutely dripping with red. It's really saying something when practical effects from a movie made in 1985 can absolutely blow away CGI effects from movies made in 2013, but Re-Animator does just that.

Another thing that draws horror fans to the movie is its connection to horror author H.P. Lovecraft. Re-Animator was initially conceived as a PBS miniseries based on Lovecraft's short story "Herbert West: Reanimator," but one thing led to another and it eventually evolved into the movie genre aficionados know and love today. I've never actually read Lovecraft's story (or any of his work, really), so Ihonestly cannot say how faithful to it the movie is. But I can and will say the script works well. This is one of those horror movies that is fueled more by the visuals and acting that the story, but that's not to say that the script ― credited to Gordon, William Norris, and Dennis Paoli ― is weak. Much like Gordon's direction, the script has a sardonic sense of humor that makes even the silliest things oddly serious.

Lovecraft himself once described his short story as a parody of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Gordon, Norris, and Paoli have followed suit in their own weird way. The Frankenstein influence is obvious, as after all, the movie is about a mad scientist resurrecting the dead. It's just that the whole thing is completely turned on its ear. There's a million different versions of the Frankenstein story, but Re-Animator is such a unique, original, and downright fun movie that it completely blows most Frankenstein movies completely out of the water even if it doesn't involve building a person out of spare parts.

And it helps that the movie boasts a strong cast as well. I felt Bruce Abbott's performance was believable and realistic. He plays the character as an "everyman" stuck in a series of increasingly bizarre situations, doing so with a great amount of charm. David Gale also does a great job in his particular role, coming off as creepy and off-putting with a weird "wannabe Christopher Lee" vibe that really gave the character a boost.

But no discussion of Re-Animator is complete without mentioning Jeffrey Combs's awesome performance as Herbert West. Combs is fascinating to watch, his charisma and acerbic wit making it impossible not to enjoy his performance. He plays West with a convincing obsession that alternates between both funny and crazy. Not many actors would be able to make a fistfight with a zombie cat both comedic and serious, but Combs pulls it off successfully. Even if you don't like the movie, I'm sure you'll come away from it thinking he's great.

I'm ashamed that it took me this long to finally get around to watching Re-Animator. This is a movie I should have seen years ago, back when I was watching shows like MonsterVision and developing my affection for strange cult classics like this. The fifteen-year-old me would have loved Re-Animator. And you know what? The thirty-year-old me loves it too. If you're like I was and have yet to see Re-Animator, drop everything and find a way to see it right now. Any self-respecting horror movie fan should make it essential viewing.

Final Rating: ****

Bullet to the Head (2013)

I made a big deal out of Arnold Schwarzenegger returning to the world of action movies in The Last Stand, but unfortunately, his comeback has been overshadowed by the resurrection of Sylvester Stallone's career. Much like Schwarzenegger, Stallone's theatrical success went downhill quick with flops like Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot and Judge Dredd outweighing successful movies like Demolition Man and Cliffhanger. But things started looking up again when the revivals of his beloved characters Rocky Balboa and John Rambo were met with open arms by both critics and moviegoers, and The Expendables and its sequel rode a wave of nostalgia to the top of the box office. This brings us to Stallone's latest movie, Bullet to the Head. Based on the French comic book Du Plomb Dans La Tête by writer Alexis "Matz" Nolent and artist Colin Wilson, Bullet to the Head is a fine action flick that's definitely worth the time and effort to check out.

Welcome to New Orleans, where professional hitmen Jimmy "Bobo" Bonomo (Sylvester Stallone) and Louis Blanchard (Jon Ceda) successfully kill a corrupt cop on behalf of greedy real estate developer Robert Morel (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje). But things end up going sour shortly thereafter when Louis is stabbed to death by Keegan (Jason Momoa), a ruthless mercenary sent by Morel to tie up loose ends. Bobo manages to escape, swearing to avenge his partner's death.

As this is going on, Washington DC detective Taylor Kwon (Sung Kang) arrives in town following up on a case. The corrupt cop was his former partner, and despite the unwillingness of the New Orleans police to cooperate, Kwon deduces what happened and tracks down Bobo. He offers an uneasy alliance with Bobo so that they can track down those behind the deaths of their partners. And while Bobo is hesitant to have anything to do with a cop, he's forced to accept Kwon's offer if he's to have his revenge.

Much like Schwarzenegger's The Last Stand a few weeks ago, Bullet to the Head was met with lukewarm reviews and disappointing box office numbers. And both movies are further similar in that they're both flawed yet ultimately entertaining movies that I did enjoy quite a bit. Bullet to the Head is not a perfect movie, nor will anybody ever accuse it of being one. But like I said earlier, I enjoyed it enough to feel that it was well worth my time.

The movie was directed by Walter Hill, the filmmaker behind flicks like 48 Hrs. and The Warriors. Hill's guilty of a few instances of that "shaky-cam" style of filmmaking that I hate so much, but I'm thankful he used it in such a way that you can still actually follow what's happening on the screen. Maybe it's me, but a lot of modern movies leave me stuck doing mental gymnastics trying to figure out what I'm looking at during more intense scenes, so I'm grateful that Hill shot the movie in a way that made the action actually watchable.

And the movie is fun enough, but I came away with the feeling that had it not been for the involvement of Warner Bros. and Sylvester Stallone, Bullet to the Head probably would have gone direct-to-video. I'm sure it's no fault of Hill's, but the movie looks and feels like one of those low-budget B-movies you'd find in those multi-movie DVD packs in the $5 bin at Walmart. I'd almost expected it to star Dolph Lundgren and Eric Roberts instead of Stallone. And I won't say that's a bad thing or that it detracts from the movie, but I'm just saying it didn't feel quite like a movie a major Hollywood studio would have given a theatrical release.

What does hinder the movie, though, is its screenplay. I've never read the comic book the movie was based on (nor had I even heard of it before last week), but I'm sure it's nowhere near as bad as the movie's script. Written by Alessandro Camon, the script is really lacking in a number of key areas. The dialogue is trite, a lot of the characters are flat and dull, the story is a threadbare excuse to set up its action sequences, and some plot threads get unnecessarily convoluted without a satisfactory payoff. And the best Camon could come up with for the villain is a guy who wanted to tear down some slums and build upscale condos? Lex Luthor tried pulling a real estate swindle in Superman too, but at least his plan involved shooting a missile at California. The villain from Bullet to the Head doesn't even have that.

But at least some of the cast is decent enough. Some of the actors ― particularly Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje and Sarah Shahi ― are forgettable or don't contribute a lot to the movie. However, I thought a couple of actors were noteworthy. Christian Slater was really good in his small role as Morel's lawyer, to the point that I wish he'd been the main villain instead. I also thought Jason Momoa was okay, even though there wasn't much acting required from him. He's just playing the clichéd '80s action movie bad guy that you'd see in a movie like Cobra or Commando. Momoa isn't bad, he's just not doing anything that hasn't been done before.

And then there's Sung Kang, who I thought was fun and likable. It's unfortunate, though, that there wasn't a whole lot to his character. It's more a fault of the writing that Kang's acting, but it's hard for him to do much when the only thing he's given is occasionally calling somebody to get information about who he's looking for. The character could have been completely eliminated from the movie and it wouldn't have changed it much. Kang is still good, though, so I'll give him that.

Last but not least is our star, Sylvester Stallone. His performance is really good, as he plays the role of "stone cold hitman" effectively and believably. Granted, he's done a ton of action movies where he's played similar characters, so I'm sure it's second nature to Stallone by now. The only negative of the whole thing is that as good as Stallone and Kang are individually, they really don't have much chemistry together. For a movie that's pretty much a weird play off the "buddy cop" movie, you'd think that the two leads would have been able to play off one another in a way that would make the movie more entertaining. But we're not dealing with Riggs and Murtaugh here, and outside of one or two scenes, Stallone and Kang don't really gel together.

And that really sums up the whole movie. As good as some parts of it are, it never really gels together into a cohesive whole. Bullet to the Head isn't a bad movie, but I guess I was just expecting more from it. If we're going to keep getting these throwbacks to '80s action movies, maybe we should just get more Expendables and Rambo movies. But as far as Bullet to the Head goes, give it a rental when it hits DVD in a few months. It's at least worth a watch, maybe as a double feature with The Last Stand. It's a fun flick that I'm sure action fans will enjoy, even if it does take a few missteps here and there.

Final Rating: **½