Mr. Wydey's Film Guide Letter A

13th Warrior, The (1999) is based on the book Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton. A poet from Baghdad falls in with some Vikings in the land of the Tartars and gets roped in to fight a terror which cannot be named – a savage tribe with a leader in a bear head-dress, which lives in a vast underground cave system, collects heads and destroys everything in sight above ground. But killing the boss female and the chief soon sorts them out.

2 Fast 2 Furious (2003) is the sequel to The Fast And The Furious. (q.v.) O'Connor, the ex-cop from the previous film is now a boy racer and he's busted in Miami and told he has to connect Carter, a coke importer, with the pile of cash which he plans to take out of the country. O'Connor & Pierce, a black dude with whom he has a lot of history, are told to get jobs as drivers. Lots of slick driving and crashes when they do the audition. Pierce has a lot of attitude and he's constantly mouthing off, and the Customs bloke in charge of the case doesn't like either of them.
There are bullets for two waiting for the drivers at the end of the line, Carter decides. But his girlfriend is an undercover cop and she warns O'Connor and Pierce. The Customs guy won't hear of calling the operation off and the drivers have two options: go to gaol or get killed. Pierce suggests running off with the cash. Fun & games on the road on the way to deliver the cash, and the cops find themselves swamped by racers when they try to bust O'Connor & Pierce.
The Feds end up staking out an airfield when Carter is planning to escape by boat. O'Connor & Pierce get the better of their minders but O'Connor decides they have to save the undercover lady cop. So they leap the car onto the boat and things go horribly wrong for Carter. The Feds get most of the cash but Pierce holds back enough to buy a garage for himself and his partner in crime.

The 6th Day (2000) Human cloning has been banned in the near future. A $300 million quarterback breaks his neck on the field, a company stooge finishes him off in an ambulance but he will be playing next week! Then it's Adam Gibson's (Arnold Schwarzenberger) birthday so Hank, a mate, takes over the job of flying Mr. Drucker, the boss of a firm which clones pets and body parts, to a snowboarding resort; where someone starts shooting.
   Adam, who refused to have the dying family dog cloned, arrives home with a present for his daughter, only to find that Natalie, his wife, has had the dog cloned and he's already there at the birthday party!
   Drucker's hit squad goes after him because he was cloned by mistake. So lots of shooting and crazy driving until Adam takes a dive into a river after his car. Human cloning might be illegal, and religious groups protesting against cloning pets & body part, but it's going on. The quarterback is a clone, and so are the hit-persons; when they're written off, they're replaced.
   Adam takes Hank to see his other self but he can't kill the clone. The wife of Dr. Weir, who does the cloning, is dying; mainly because his boss, Mr. Drucker, had defective genes put in her cloned body as a means of keeping the doctor under control. The quarterback has the same deal; don't be greedy in contract negotiations and you get a non-defective body.
   Hank is killed by a religious nutter, who killed Drucker, who now has a cloned body. As clones have no rights, Drucker will do anything to cover up what happened, including killing Adam.
    Dr. Weir's wife refuses to be cloned again. Adam infiltrates Drucker's building and gets proof that cloning is going on, so his family is grabbed. Adam teams up with his clone to fight back; and learns that he's really the clone.
   The original Adam & the clone have a long fight with security and blow up the cloning lab. Drucker is shot and reincarnated in an unfinished clone, which is written off eventually. When all the dust settles, the Adam clone is found not to have a defective gene, so he's okay to live an independent life.

633 Squadron (1964) was considered a bit of a classic when it is released, and it has a good theme tune, like The Dambusters. But looking past the spectacle of all those World War 2 Mosquitos flying around, and being criminally vandalized, the plot is rather sily. The Germans have a plant making 'rocket fuel' in Norway and it's the only one in the world.
Fine. Except that the V1 rocket plane ran on paraffin and the V2 rocket used ethanol and liquid oxygen – all of which are readily available from places other than Norway. And after zapping the factory, the two surviving Mossies fly back along the fjord, run the gauntlet of anti-aircraft guns again when they could have taken a safe route home, and are wiped out. Crazy. 10/10 for the planes, 0/10 for the plot.

Above The Law (1988) is the first of Steven Seagal's string of martial arts movies. It starts in Vietnam in 1973, where Nico quits a special operations team because he doesn't like Mr. Zagon of the CIA torturing prisoners. Cut to 1988. Nico is now a tough cop who beats people up and harasses relatives if they don't do what he says. He chases down a drug dealer but the bust turns into a shambles, the payload is military explosives, not drugs, and the FBI lets the bad guys walk because they're working with an unnamed government agency and untouchable.
   Nico's local church has refugees in the basement and someone is trying to get at them. A woman plants a bomb there and kills one of the priests – the wrong one. Nico goes after Sylvano, the drug dealer, because he saw him in the church with the woman. A senator is fixing to expose drug trafficking by the CIA. The bad guys go after Nico, so he sends his family to safety and goes after the bad guys.
   Zagon is planning to kill the Senator. When Nico busts in while he's questioning the right priest, Zagon puts Nico's female Hispanic partner in hospital and also plugs his grey-haired cop pal. Nelson, Nico's old buddy from Vietnam, turns up with a warning and Nico tells him the CIA ain't above his law. So he takes out all the bad guys, saves the senator and blows the whistle on what the CIA really does.
   Your TV needs to be well stocked up with bullets for this one!

Absolute Power (1997) Clint Eastwood is a burglar with an interest in fine art. He is disturbed on a job and hides in a vault with a see-through mirror on the door. He watches the lady of the house romp with her bloke, stab him in the arm with a paperknife when he gets rough and be shot to death by his bodyguards. They stage a buglary after doing a clean-up job and Clint is daft enough to let them see him making his escape. He takes the bloodstained knife, which the bodyguards were daft enough to drop.
   Clint tells his estranged daughter that he's leaving. Kate doesn't care. The police are highly suspicious when they find the crime scene hoovered, the position of the body all wrong and the other forensic not making sense. Shock horror!! The killer is the President of the United States!! Who was put into the job by the husband of the woman he killed!!!
   The police don't believe the burglar story. The husband, a senator, buys a hit-man. The cop in charge of the case homes in on Clint, who offers some pointers on how the crime was committed. After seeing the President weeping crocodile tears on TV, he decides not to go on the run. He takes a tour of the White House, suitably disguised, and leaves a blackmail note.
   The Secret Service are planning to kill the burglar. The head cop takes Kate, a state prosecutor, to see her old man's home, and she sees her history in photographs. She eventually agrees to be bait in a trap for him but the SS snipers make a bog of the kill. He sends Miss Russell, the president's chief of staff, a polaroid of the paperknife. The president decides he wants Kate whacked, too, because prosecutors ask questions.
   Kate's car is pushed over a cliff by the SS but she survives. So the SS send their psycho-killer to the hospital. But he gets the needle. Clint then returns the loot from the robbery and tells the senator who the real killer is. Miss Russell is busted and the senator goes to see the president, who commits suicide.

Alien Nation: Body and Soul (1996) is part of a series based on the premise that an alien slave spaceship crashed in the United States and the 'Newcomers' had to be integrated into society. A giant and a small child escape from a secret government facility and cops Sykes (human) and Fransico (Newcomer) are thrown into the aftermath of the pursuit of the escapees. Sykes has to go to classes to learn how to have sex with his newcomer girlfriend, a doctor, who eventually decides that the giant and the child are twins!
The Federal government gave the overseers on the slave ship bogus death certificates and new identities on condition they went to work for the good old USA. The 'twins' were a product of an experiment to split one being into a part that thinks and a part that does manual work. We go through the obvious historical parallels of a slave nation learning that its tormentors are still around. The research facility goes up in a big bang, Chorboke, the alien who experimented on the slaves, goes up with it. The giant and his tiny twin stroll off into the wilderness and 3 months later, Sykes and his girlfriend graduate from the sex course.

Alien Nation: Millennium (1996) The world is going crazy as 2000 approaches, even though the Newcomers know the 3rd Millennium won't start until 2001, and a portal has been stolen from the shrine in San Francisco by a cult led by Jennifer, who turns out to be the daughter of the lady in charge of the shrine. Jennifer offers a quick route to spiritual enlightenment but she's really about fleecing mugs.
The police start looking for people who disappeared after joining the cult and Detective Francisco's son, Buck, gets involved with the cult. The Captain tries to do a deal with Detective Sykes for access to the portal's technology. He reckons it can be used to create a super-amusement park and make him and his associates lots of lovely money.
Jennifer decides to stage her own suicide and disappear with the money. She wants to get back at the humans who were rotten to the Tectons when their slave ship crash landed on Earth. The plan is to collect one last donation from the mugs then kill them all. But Sykes manages to smash the box that generates the portal and only Jennifer is killed.

Alien Nation: The Udara Legacy (1997) is set 9 years after the Newcomers arrived on Earth. A Newcomer cop shoots a witness in protective custody and a gangster walks. A human is able to send pre-programmed Newcomers out on lethal missions. George Francisco's son, Buck, wants to become a cop to the distress of his mother. Another Newcomer takes a bunch of kids hostage at a school but Franciso & Sykes take him alive.
Francisco is the hero of the hour. Then he learns that Susan, his wife, was a member of Udara, a resistance/terrorist movement which fought back against the Overseers during their slave days, like the rogue Newcomers. A shadow force within Udara was treated with a gas to make they susceptible to hypnotic suggestion. They have a trigger tone and they can be ordered to self-destruct. Children were treated, including Emily, the Franciscos' daughter!
The guy with the Udara data is hijacked by Senator Silverthorpe and done in. Emily is triggered at her school and sent off to wound Silverthorpe to buy him the sympathy vote in his election contest with a Newcomer candidate. Susan identifies the former head of Udara and intimidates her into talking at gun-point. Emily shoots and wounds Buck at the TV studio where she is due to carry out her mission but she gets the de-programming phrase in time and George gets to bust Senator Silverthorpe for the cameras.

Alien Resurrection (1997) stars a Ripley clone [No. 8 of a series] made 200 years after her death. She is super-strong and fast, she has genetically preserved memories and her blood can burn holes in the deck. She also acts as the host for an alien queen. A sinister general wants to breed the Aliens and he has hired a crew of hijackers to take over a ship containing people in cryotubes as hosts for the monsters. One of the aliens kills its cellmate, lets the yellow gunk inside it burn through the deck and escapes. So the humans try to escape from the main spaceship, which begins an automatic return to Earth.
Ripley 8 wipes out her 7 predecessors – all horrible freaks – while trying to get to an escape shuttle with the hijackers, plus the general as their prisoners, while pursued by aliens. Everyone manages to hold their breath for about 10 minutes while they swim through the flooded mess hall – the few who weren't written off by the aliens. They also have one of the hijacked crew with them, and he has an Alien inside him. The general breaks away and the other female lead turns out to be a robot, who survives being shot by the general.
Ripley 8 is engulfed by the alien queen after helping the robot to programme the main ship to crash. The general shows up but he is zapped by the bloke with the Alien inside him as it is 'hatching'. And the poor bloke and the Alien are both shot to pieces. The slime-dripping queen gives birth to a kid, which kill mom and follows Ripley 8 to the escape shuttle. Ripley 8 used her blood to burn a hole in a window and the Alien is sucked through the small hole into space. And the main ship crashes on Earth with what looked like the force of a dinosaur-destroying asteroid, which kills the Aliens aboard; we hope.

Aliens (1986) begins with Ripley and the cat, Jones, being found after drifting in space for 57 years. The planet where the Alien-carrying ship crashed is being terraformed and contact has been lost with the base on it. Ripley says she ain't going back. So she does go back with a bunch of marines, most of whom are wiped out in short order. But with the help of a kid, who managed to hide from the monsters, and an artificial man, and no help from the company man who wants aliens for the biotech weapons division, Ripley is able to get off the planet before the fusion reactor at the base blows. And she gets to space an Alien who, hitches a ride up to the spaceship.

Alien Vs Predator (2004) A Weyland Industries satellite finds a pyramid under the ice on an Antarctic island, so the dying boss goes there with a team of archaeologists & survivalists led by Miss Woods. The pyramid is under an abandoned whaling station; everyone there vanished without trace in 1904. Something has drilled a tunnel through the ice to the pyramid, saving the expedition a lot of drilling.
   When they reach the pyramid, they remove devices from a sarcophagus and the fun starts. Invisible Predators start killing the humans, an Alien breeding system comes to life and the structure of the pyramid starts shifting, making it a 3D maze [a rip-off of the plot of Cube]. Humans are implanted with Aliens, which burst out in the approved fashion.
   Predators start fighting Aliens with just hand weapons. Just about all of the humans, including Mr. Weyland, are killed. Sebastian, an archaeologist, decides that Predators taught humans how to build pyramids in Egypt, South American & Cambodia, and they come to Earth every 100 years to test themselves in battle against Aliens. And if the Aliens win, the local civilization is wiped out to stop the Aliens spreading.
   Miss Woods manages to get a serious weapon to one of the Predators, and she gets to kill an Alien. The mother of all Aliens follows them to the surface for a final battle. She ends up on a one-way trip to the bottom of the sea after killing the Predator. A Predator spaceship uncloaks to retrieve the body but it doesn't offer Miss Woods a lift. Which is just as well, as an Alien hatches out of the Predator's body in space!

Along Came A Spider (2001) Criminal psychologist Dr. Alex Cross lost a partner in a sting that went horribly wrong and retreated into guilt. Then a teacher in a fake beard kidnapped Megan, a senator's daughter, and challenged Cross to go after him. Blonde Secret Service Agent Finnigan got the blame for the security failure and she became Cross's new partner.
   Cross deduced that Mr. Soneji had made a game out of the kidnapping, which he had been planning for years. Soneji's plan was to commit a 'Crime of the Century' like the Lindbergh kidnapping, and Cross was there 'to appreciate it properly'. Megan had a good try at escaping. Cross decided the real target was Dmitri, the Russian president's son, so he and Finnigan frustrated the knavish trick when Soneji went after the kid.
   Cross got the run-around delivering a $10M ranson. Then Soneji called on Cross and zapped Finnigan. He got stabbed in the leg, and Cross shot him because he had lost Megan. Agent Divine, another SS Agent at the school, had hijacked Soneji's plan. And Finnigan was working with him!
   Finnigan shot Divine then went to kill the kid, but Megan was suspicious of her. The kid had to run for her life but Dr. Cross had worked everything out and he shot Finnigan.

The Ambushers (1967) is a spoof spy film starring Dean Martin from the era before feminism and political correctness became rampant and fun was abolished. An American flying saucer is hijacked while Matt Helm of ICE is on a refresher course surrounded by ladies. Sheila Summers, the pilot, was retrieved from the South American jungle in a zombified state and it's Helm's job to 'get close to her'.
   The shock of an assassination attempt revives Sheila, only she thinks she's Helm's wife – a former cover story. The Helms are sent to Acapulco. Only women can fly the saucer as its power source kills men! Mrs. Helm gives herself away by shooting Caselius, the head bad guy, with blanks. A lady called Francesca helps the Helms to escape then she captures Matt for interrogation. She wants to find Caselius.
   Sheila rescues Helm then tells him her 'memory loss' was just a trick. Helm gets to swim in a tank of beer and learns that Caselius is up the jungle. The 3 partners; Helm, Sheila & Francesca; infiltrate Caselius' jungle hideout. Francesca tries to betray Helm to get the saucer but Caselius has already sold it for $100M.
   Helm ends up in front of a firing squad for a while. Caselius follows Sheila onto the saucer but he croaks. Helm saves Sheila when the saucer goes over a cliff on a runaway railway truck. And his reward is to get a new blonde for training.

Analyze This (1999) features Billy Crystal as a psychiatrist, into whose life gangster Robert de Niro crashes. The gangster keeps getting anxiety attacks and he keeps requiring the shrink to drop everything and attend to him – even during his wedding. Then the Feds shove their noses in to make things even tougher for the shrink. A 4-star comedy for people with minds twisted enough to appreciate it.

Antibody (2002) features the central character of the TV series Millennium [Lance Henricksen] as a softer, somewhat dafter guy, who gets himself sacked from the FBI for letting a terrorist bomb blow up the Russian consolate in Washington. He ends up running a security firm in Munich and he finds himself in a remake of Fantastic Voyage, which had a screen play by Isaac Asimov based on the plot of A World Unseen by Joseph Skidmore [Wonder Stories Vol. 7 Nos. 7 & 8] who got no acknowledgement. Anyway, we had a miniaturized submarine roaming around a terrorist's body looking for the trigger to a nuclear device, the sub and a couple of the crew being written off and our hero coming good at the last second.

Another 48 Hrs. (1990) Is an Eddie Murphy/Nick Nolte sequel. Out in the wilds, a biker is arranging a hit on Reggie and they blow away everyone at the diner when a cop walks in. Detective Jack interrupts another contract meeting at a race track but the bespectacled black bad guy escapes the shooting & explosions. IAD gets on Jack's case. He's after the Ice Man, the biggest dealer in the Bay area, but no one else believes he exists.
   Reggie spends his last day in gaol in the hole after bashing Jack, who tried to recruit him into another job. The black guy from the racetrack gives the 3 bikers a bomb. Jack shows Reggie his picture, which he found at the race track, and tells Reggie that the Ice Man has put out a hit on him. The bikers take out Jack then ambush a prison bus with Reggie aboard.
   Reggie survives the wreck and Jack was wearing a vest. Reggie's car is blown up next. IAD has Jack suspended, but that doesn't stop him trying to locate the black guy from the racetrack. A HUGE bar fight, Reggie & Jack go after Angel, one of the bikers. There's a big shoot-out but only by-standers are hit. But Angel is whacked.
   Jack decides the Ice Man is a cop, and Reggie has seen him; which is why he wants Reggie dead. Jack has been keeping Reggie's $475K in his locker at the police station! He hands over the dosh and tells Reggie to disappear. But there's another shoot-out, the other 2 bikers go down and Ben, Jack's buddy, is exposed as the Ice Man.
   Ben takes Reggie prisoner but Jack gets to blow him away; after putting a round in Reggie to get him out of the way! And they cop for the half a million bucks running away money which Ben had.

Another Stakeout (1993) is clearly a sequel. A big bang starts things off when a hitman blows up the 'safe' house containing a witness. She survives but runs away. 2 bungling cops [Richard Dreyfuss & Emilio Estevez] get themselves covered in the contents of a garbage truck and fish-bits respectively while chasing down a bad guy, whom a witness shoots with Dreyfuss' gun! They are put on a stakeout with a lady DA.
The trio play a dysfunctional family and they end up making the fundamental blunder of socializing with the people they're watching. Estevez is captured by the missing witness while on a bugging mission and he nearly gets killed. When the assassin turns up again, the stakeout cops get involved in a shoot-out with more cops. But the bad guys are whacked in the end.

Armageddon kicks off with poor old New York getting zapped by meteorites as a planet-killer comet the size of Texas approachs the Earth. With 18 days to save the planet, the best solution to the problem turns out to be to round up Wimpy Bruce Willis and a gang of disfunctional drillers, train them up a bit, get them to drill into the comet, insert a nuke and blow it into 2 pieces, which will pass on either side of the Earth. Two space shuttles are launched and manage to destroy an ageing Russian space station while refuelling. Then they race for the Moon, circle it and approach the comet from behind.
Of course, one shuttle gets wiped out by the debris around the comet but two drillers and the Russian cosmonaut survive. The other shuttle lands in the wrong place, and the guys back on Earth try to blow up the nuke. And then everything gets TOTALLY silly. Wimpy Willis fails to get the hole drilled but the survivors of the other shuttle save the day.
Then Wimpy has to stay behind to blow up the nuke and he spends AGES faffing around before he pushs the button. 2 hours and 50 minutes long, including station breaks, a film to get the audience screaming, "Bloody get on with it!" – when they aren't asking, "What the bloody hell's going on now?"

Armed And Dangerous (1985) Uniformed cop Frank Dooley (John Candy) comes across 2 detectives stealing TVs, Internal Affairs pounces and he ends up fired off the force. He and failed lawyer Norm Kane end up working for a private security firm at $4.60/hour. The boss is in league with the crooked union, and all the employees are idiots. Dooley & Kane but in to a robbery organized by the union and end up guarding a rubbish dump.
Maggie (Meg Ryan), the boss's daughter, who likes Kane, won't believe that her dad is a crook. Dooley & Kane crash a posh party to get the goods on the bad guys. The union boss is planning to steal the pension fund and use the cash for a drug deal. D&K are framed for the murder of an unco-operative union treasurer with the help of the crooked detectives.
They are chased and have to get some new outfits at a sex shop. The union is planning to hi-jack a security van containing the pension fund cash. Kane & Maggie take over the driving job and go for a wild ride. Dooley joins them in a tanker full of rocket fuel! The bad guys are defeated, Maggie's dad turns on the bad guys, Frank gets his job back and Norm is dragooned into the police force.

Army of Darkness (1993) features Evil Dead 2 hero Ash with a chainsaw attached to the stump of his right hand at times. He is blasted back into mediaeval times and ends up fighting a skeleton army, which is clearly inspired by Ray Harryhausen's efforts in Jason and the Argonauts. He has to get hold of a copy of the Necronomicon to return to his own time – and he has to use the command from Michael Rennie to Gort in The Day The Earth Stood Still. Only he keeps screwing up on the 'Nikto' bit. And in consequence, the 'present' to which he returns isn't quite his starting point. A very enjoyable comedy horror.

The Assassination File (1996) is a conspiracy theory film. A black presidential candidate is bumped off and the female FBI agent in charge of his protection team quits. 2 years later, she gets a file which tells her that people are being bumped off mysteriously. She contacts a smarmy former colleague at the Bureau and she is nearly killed by the 'cop' sent to bring her in, so she goes on the run. There's a black operations unit being run by someone at the Bureau and, predictable, the bloke in charge is the one she trusts, not the smarmy git. So lots of pursuit, shooting, things being blown up, and at the finish, the main conspirators just melt back into the shadows.

Assassins (1995) Sylvester Stallone plays Robert, a hit man, who takes another hit man into a swamp to whack him. A $200K contract arrives over the 1995 Internet. But Miguel, a rival, whacks the target, lets himself be busted and escapes from a police car after making it crash. Robert pursues him in a stolen taxi but Mig, who has studied Robert's career, gets away again.
   Robert's next job is in Seattle; a female bugger with a floppy disk and 4 buyers for the data. Mig takes out the buyers but Robert drives off with the target. She gets away but her cat doesn't. The assassins have a shoot-out in the bugger's flat, which Robert blows up. Robert offers to sell the disk for $2 million but gets a bomb as the pay-off. But the bugger switched the disks in case of a double-cross.
   Robert asks for $20M for the disk and Mental Mig gets the job of whacking him. Everyone swans off to Mexico and a bank where Robert whacked some character called Nikolai 15 years before. Robert spends all day in the bank getting the cash while Mig gets into a strop while waiting to shoot him and melting in the heat. The stupid woman screws up again but she manages to shoot Mig a bit.
   Enter Nikolai, who was wearing a bullet-proof vest 15 years before and who's been pulling the strings. Robert and Miguel both blow him away then decide not to kill each other. But Mad Mig reneges on the pact and gets shot to bits. Then Robert, the bugger and her cat head off toward the sunset with the cash.

Assault on Precinct 13 (2005) is a remake of the 1976 John Carpenter original that works. It's New Year's Eve, it's snowing and there's just a skeleton crew at the 13th Precinct house, which is due for demolition after it closes at midnight. The crew consists of Sgt. Jake, who had an undercover disaster 8 months before. He's on pain-killers and having to deal with the department shrink, who thinks he's afraid of responsibility because cops under his command died. There's also Jasper, who's on the verge of retirement.
   A guy is stabbed in a church and the stabber is busted. He's Bishop, a major criminal and he stabbed an undercover cop. The prison bus ends up at the 13th Precinct because of a storm. The lady shrink is also stuck there. Two cops are shot when the assault starts and the survivors find they had no phones and no radio due to jamming.
   Sgt. Jake finds that the besiegers are dirty cops in Bishop's pay, who will go to gaol forever if they let Bishop live. And they plan to kill everyone in the building. So the prisoners are armed. The shrink and one of the prisoners make a break for it while 2 other prisoners try a separate break. No one survives.
   Sgt. Jake abandons his pain-killers. Jasper finds a way out in the basement. Jake torches the building as the bad guys enter. The bad guys are waiting at the other end of the escape tunnel; Jasper sold them out because he didn't think Bishop was worth dying for. But he does the right thing and keeps the escape going.
   Marcus, the head bad guy, puts a bullet in Bishop. Marcus & Jake shoot each other. And Jake lets Bishop get away before help arrives.

The Assignment (1997) CIA agent Henry Field has a close encounter with Carlos the Jackal in Paris in 1974 but fails to recognize him. He's not allowed to kill Carlos a year later when he holds OPEC to $20M ransom in Vienna. "It's not our fight," Field's boss tells him. The Israelis grab Carlos in Jerusalem eventually but, surprise! They have Jack Shaw, a US Naval officer and a Carlos lookalike, whom Field recruits into the CIA with the president's help.
   Shaw has to undergo a very irritating training programme. The plan is to get the KGB to bump Carlos off as a traitor. Field plans to put $20M in Carlos's bank account, using Carlos's girlfriend to make the transfer, and let the KGB draw the obvious conclusion. Shaw does some 'training' with a former girlfriend then sets off to get personal with Carlos's current girlfriend.
   Shaw finds himself being chased by French agents, and killing them to get away, because the DST has turned the girlfriend. The KGB takes the bait, however, and the girlfriend is whacked. Shaw runs into a Japanese terrorist at Heathrow and the Mossad agent on his case is killed.
   Shaw is allowed to go home, where his wife realizes he's been sleeping with another woman. Shaw decks a violent dad at a Little League game and does the same to Shaw for threatening his family. Then he tells his wife what the CIA made him do. Then he goes back into harm's way.
   The real Carlos shoots his way out of a KBG trap. The Carloses have a punch-up, Field shoots the wrong one but he tells Shaw that someone will get the real Carlos sooner or later now he's lost the KBG's protection. Shaw is 'killed off' and relocated. And the French get the real Carlos eventually.

Asteroid (1997) is the bits of a mini-series bolted together. A comet due to pass 1 million miles from Earth barges through the asteroid belt and sends two chunks of rock heading for us. The smaller is mainly water ice and a fragment bashes through a dam near Kansas City, which has been evacuated. The other is 10 times bigger and mainly nickel-iron. The United States blows it up, not realizing that Texas will be hit with the shower of bits instead of one big lump. The obligatory stupid kid gets himself stuck on the side of what looked like a skyscraper which is sliding into a vast pit. (How is never explained.) And at the finish, we have this spectacular comet moving(!) across the sky in full daylight! Wow!

Atomic Twister (2002) Mom & her kid wait until the last minute before taking refuge from a tornado and mom is killed; natural deselection of the stupid. Corinne, grown up Jake's glammy neighbour (thanks to Affirmative Action), runs a power station in Tennessee which (surprise!) is assaulted by a tornado. The guy on the front gate doesn't see the HUGE twister until it's about 50 feet away and he's deselected.
The control room loses power and the satellite dish is taken out. Another twister hits the plant and the cavalry from the NRC is grounded. The cooling system starts failing and another Chernobyl looms. Neville, who shut down some of the pumps to save power, has to kill himself doing a manual shutdown of the reactor.
Jake has to save Corinne's horrible kid and the sheriff's daughter, who dumped him, with a tornado bearing down. The NRC comes up with a plan to stop the spent fuel going off, Jake has to stop a cowardly tanker driver to get fuel to the plant. So the plant is saved and everyone is a hero; apart from the idiot who put a nuclear reactor in Tornado Alley, of course.

Attack of the Crab Monster (1957, Roger Corman) Scientists on a small, earthquake-prone Pacific island disappear and are assumed lost in a storm. A new team arrives to investigate the effects of fall-out from a nearby atomic test. A huge pit appears mysteriously, Jim climbs into it after hearing the voice of a member of the previous team; and disappears. A gang of the others goes looking for him.
   Meanwhile, the crab monster attacks huts on the surface, looking for grub. It destroys the radio completely and reveals that it doesn't like electricity. The professor is chomped but the others continue to hear his voice. A monster crab is speared by a stalactite but another appears to tell the team they gave made a grave mistake.
   The crab creature is invulnerable to bombs and bullets, and it can eat a victim and assimilate his mind! It can also emit blasts of heat to make tunnels and create pits. A photograph shows that the crab is pregnant and about to give birth! The monster is trying to trap the scientists on a small part of the island so that it can eat them.
   One of the team is zapped by his own electrical booby trap and the crab monster chases the rest out into the open. Hank topples the radio antenna onto the crab, destroying it with electricity, and we get to The End very abruptly.

Austin Powers – International Man of Mystery (1997) is a first for us. We knew Mr. Powers existed but we'd never seen one of his films before. So we switched it on expecting it to be dreadful. But it wasn't. The obligatory bog and shagging jokes are there but the Bond parody rattles along at a fair pace and it keeps its sense of fun intact.
   Dr. Evil, an amalgam of Bond villains, freezes himself in 1967 and thaws himself out again in 1997. The same happens to Mr. Powers – only his hairy chest remains intact when Dr. Evil's long-haired cat ended up bald. So we have a villain and a hero of the 60s adrift in the politically correct 90s, and Dr. Evil planning to zap the planet if he doesn't get a million dollars from the UN – no, make that a hundred billion dollars as money ain't worth anything these days.
   The plan is to steal a former Soviet nuclear warhead, drill a hole down to the Earth's core, let off the bomb and destroy all the world's major cities with volcanoes. Powers is teamed with Ms Kensington (Liz Hurley), the uptight daughter of his 60s sidekick. Dr. Evil's henchpersons made him a son called Scott (played by Willow's werewolf boyfriend from Buffy the Vampire).
   Fun & games in the bogs of a casino, Miss Fagina's penthouse, the Q Dept. and Virticon, Dr. Evil's company. Powers and Kensington are captured and almost fed to the killer sea bass. Then there's a shoot-out and the world is saved. Dr. Evil has himself frozen again, it looks like we can expect more of the same on some future weekend.

Austin Powers – The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999) Dr. Evil returns to Earth as Austin Powers is on honeymoon – with Vanessa, an exploding fembot. Scott Evil gets into a riot when he does the Jerry Springer show with his dad, who has his HQ in Starbucks, Seattle. His staff have made him a 1/8th size clone. Dr. Evil goes back in time to 1969 (and an HQ in a hollowed-out volcano) to steal Powers' mojo. Fat Bastard delivers the mojo and wants to eat the clone as his payment!
Powers visits his frozen self. Scott joins his dad in 1969; mainly to sneer at him. Dr. Evil plans to zap Washington with a giant laser from the Moon unless he gets $100 billion; but there isn't that much money in the world in 1969. Powers & Agent Felicity Shagwell go back to 1969 and get themselves captured at the volcanic island. Dr. Evil heads for the Moon so the good guys hitch a ride on Apollo 11.
The mojo is destroyed during all the fun & games but Felicity tells Powers he doesn't need it. They return to 1999 and an encounter with Fat Bastard. Meanwhile, back in 1969, the foiled Dr. Evil rescues the clone, which was spaced, and vows to get Austin Powers.

Avalanche (1994) is a de facto comedy, whatever the original intentions. Duncan (David Hasselhoff) has to shoot his way out of a deal for some diamonds with swindling Russians. Meanwhile, Brian takes his son & daughter to his cabin on the slopes of Mt. McKinley, where he's writing a book. The Hoff shoots his pilot and bales out over the mountains. Surprise! The crashing plane starts an avalanche, which engulfs Brian's cabin. While digging themselves out, the family find the Hoff outside one of the windows.
   He persuades them to abandon the tunnel they've started and dig a new one, which will let him find his loot. The stupid kid gets himself trapped, Brian picks a fight with the Hoff to liven things up and the Hoff ends up tied up, squawking. The stupid girl gets too close to the bad guy and she ends up his prisoner.
   Brian breaks through to the surface, nicks the diamonds when he finds them, and collapses the tunnel on the Hoff. The kid is sent down the mountain for help as the Hoff regains control. Brian wimps out of finishing him off, and wraps him up like a mummy in parcel tape. Meanwhile, the kid nearly gets caught in a bear trap and eaten by an Injun's wolf.
   Brian and his daughter try to climb the chimney but the Hoff cuts himself loose. Brian scatters the diamonds, the Hoff scrambles about looking for them and Brian buries him again when he back his car up a bit, causing the cabin to collapse. Then the kid and the Injun arrive.

The Avengers (The Movie!) (1998) is described by reviewers in the papers as a proper turkey. The film is a corny pastiche with a good budget for special effects, and it is really silly at times but not without merit. 'Steed' is a little on the young and callow side, he looks more like a young Mr. Rigsby than John Steed and he gets rather too friendly with 'Mrs. Peel' to be true to the original. And surely they could have got someone better looking to play the lady herself.
Your humble scribe is reduced to stunned silence by the sight of Sean Canary and the members of B.R.O.L.L.Y. around a conference table, dressed up in teddy bear suits of various bright hues. The chase with the mechanical wasps is a hoot! And having the Invisible Man in charge of the archives is a novel touch. The weather special effects are well done and the giant Machine of Total Meteorological Destruction looked suitably impressive and like something out of James Bond or Star Wars. It is certainly too grand a set ever to appear in the original Avengers.
Adding blind, female 'Father' (who's in league with the bad guys) to the command structure as a counterbalance for male 'Mother' is a nice touch and a nod at the essential absurdity of the original. And our hero does manage to thward Mr. Canary's plans to screw up the nation's weather. So the verdict? Yes, some good laughs and worth a look on TV. I don't know about paying to see it in the cinema, though.