Mr. Wydey's Film Guide Letter C

Chain Reaction (1996) "We need a pollution solution," says an advocate for hydrogen power, whose team has just built a successful power plant for Chicago University. But bad guys kill him and blow up the plant and everything in an 8-block radius. Dr. Chen disappears and Eddie the engineer and Dr. Lily Sinclair are framed as Chinese agents and saboteurs.
   Eddie & Lily tell Paul Shannon, a government guy involved in the project, that they're going to look for the truth; pursued by the FBI. Shannon puts on a good show for a Senate committee. The Feds put him under surveillance and follow him to C-Systems, a secret government research centre which doesn't let them in. So they conclude that the CIA runs the place.
   Eddie & Lily are chased in frozen Wisconsin. The guy in charge of C-Systems wants to know what Eddie knows about the hydrogen plant; then Eddie's dead. Lily is captured and meets a well battered Dr. Chen at C-Systems. Eddie goes there, too, and the Feds decide he was framed.
   Eddie makes the reactor work then he sends all the files from C-Systems to the FBI and sets the reactor to overload. Shannon kills the boss of C-Systems on the way out and lets the CIA know he's ready to set up shop elsewhere. And Eddie & Lily get out of the path of the explosion in dramatic style!

Changing Lanes (2002) Ben Afflec plays Gavin, a lawyer, who gets into a fender-bender with Doyle (Samuel L. Jackson), a member of Alcoholics Unanimous, who is trying to stop his wife taking their kids to Oregon. Gavin offers Doyle a blank cheque at the scene but Doyle, who's a real bean-counter, wants to do everything right. So Gavin drives off. Doyle was heading for a family court hearing, and he arrives just after it finishes.
   Gavin gets to court and he finds he's a document short; he wrote his name on it and gave it to Doyle. He has to get the file back by the end of the day or his firm in in big trouble. Gavin gets a hacker to make Doyle bankrupt to force him to return the file. Meanwhile, Dolye is involved in a fruitless scheme to buy a house for his wife; which falls through when the bank sees bankrupt on his credit rating.
   Meanwhile, the partners at Gavin's firm, including his father in law, want him to forge a replacement power of attorney. They won't let Gavin look at the trust fund documents, so he sets off the sprinkers and finds they have stolen $3 million. Then he makes Doyle solvent again, but the hacker can't do anything about the bankruptcy. Doyle takes the nuts off a wheel of Gavin's car and watches him crash. Gavin gets him arrested.
   Gavin's father in law tells him the guy who set up the charity trust was an exploiter, just like everyone else, and he's filed the forgery with the court. Doyle brings the original file back to Gavin and they say sorry to each other. So Gavin decides to blackmail the partners into returning the $3M. Then he persuades Doyle's wife to let him see the kids again.

Charlie's Angels (2000) This comedy starts with the Angels getting a guy with a bomb off an airliner. Their next case is the kidnapping of Eric Knox, a communications software expert. By now, the Angels have been painted as a bunch of flakes; except for the techy one who bakes 'Chinese Fighting Muffins'. Everyone goes to a Japanese evening held by Mr. Corwin, the suspected kidnapper.
Some Matrix-style messing about with the Thin Man. The Angels recover Knox but not his software, so off to the California Speedway for some racing, and the Thin Man is chased onto the highway for a game of chicken. One of the Angels makes herself invisible to bug the Red Star mainframe computer.
The Thin Man takes out Corwin and the Angels come under attack. Shock, horror! Knox arranged his own kidnapping. The Agency is blown up and Charlie is Knox's target because he believes Charlie killed his dad. The Angels go looking for Bosley in Carmell and have a humungous battle at Knox's tower. He splits in a chopper and shoots a missile at the tower. The Angels go after Knox and save Charlie's ass, but they never get to meet him.

Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (2003) Fun & games in Mongolia then bad guys put everyone in witness protection in danger. Surprise, Angel Dylan went into WP after helping to put Sean O'Grady of the Irish Mafia in gaol. He gets out of gaol so he can have a battle with the angels.
Angel Dylan ducks out but the case ain't over. Shock-horror! Ex-Angel Madison is the bad guy and she shoots the 3 current Angels instead of getting into a kung fu scrap with them. They didn't have Kevlar in Madison's day and the Angels survive for a huge final battle, in which Madison & Sean O'Ratbag get it.
This is a film underloaded with coherent plot and the action sequences aren't exactly crammed in. The escape in Mongolia and the motorbike race are both good, but this one is not a patch on the earlier film.

The Cheap Detective (1978, Neil Simon) Peter Falk stars in what looks like a pilot for Police Squad set in a sort of San Francisco in 1939. Private Eye Lou's partner is killed and he's in the frame for having an affair with the widow. There are clones of Rick's Bar, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, etc. in Casablanca meets the Maltese Falcon. There's a French guy called Paul, whose wife used to be Lou's girlfriend, and he's being pursued by the Cincinnati Gestapo.
The enormously fat bloke is after a necklace, but he ends up no closer to it. Paul gets the papers he needs to open a restaurant in Oakland and he's quite happy to ditch his wife and let Lou have her. The cops get the Gestapo and the widow admits killing everyone. And at the end, Lou drives off into the fog with all the other ladies in the film.

The Chronicles of Riddick (2004) features a character out of Pitch Black (q.v.) A cult with a conversion complex is murdering its way across the galaxy as bounty hunters go after Riddick the convict; but he strolls off with their spaceship. An Elemental (Judi Dench) wants to scare up a posse to take out the Necromongers. The planet she's on is attacked and subdued.
Riddick takes out one of the Necros when invited to join them so he's volunteered for mind regression. Only he escapes; only to fall into the hands of the bounty hunters again. One of the Necros is sent after Riddick, who ends up on the planet Crematorium, where sunrise means a 700 deg. surface temperature!!! He escapes with some prisoners and heads to the surface to try to outrun the sunrise to a spaceship.
A gang of Necros arrives and Riddick has to go through them. The survivors bug out with Riddick's girlfriend. He chases them to Helion Prime. Mutiny in the ranks of the Necros is multiplied by Riddick and his girlfriend. Both the head Necro and the successor wannabe end up dead and as you 'keep what you kill' in their culture, Riddick gets the head Necro's job!

City On Fire (2008) The temperature is going up and up around L.A. and Charles, the English meteorologist, gets Lab A at GRC, which is run by Oliver, who's desperate for cash to keep the place going. Lab B is occupied by Dr. Kate, whose weather control experiments eat up cash and haven't produced anything good. UniCorp, which employs Oliver, is drilling for methane around L.A. and planning to be a major player in the energy market.
There are uncontrollable wildfires all around L.A. and the guy in charge of the emergency services reckons something suspicious is going on. Dr. Kate finds that the methane levels are off the chart and she reckons the city will burn up before sundown! And when the temperature hits 140 deg.F, an unstoppable feed-back cycle of methane leaks and fires will begin.
Dr. Kate finds that UniCorp is to blame for the fires, having corrupted the governor of California. Mr. UniCorp takes over GRC at gunpoint to keep his drilling going. But he croaks from the heat and Dr. Kate sets up a silver iodide drop. Surprise! It starts raining and L.A. is saved. So Dr. Kate gets Lab A.

Clean Slate (1994) has an interesting plot idea. An ex-cop private eye is a witness in a murder case – but his memory is wiped clean every time he goes to sleep. So he can't tell the bad guy from his landlord and he gets involved in all sorts of whacky stuff as the bad guy tries to indimidate him. His only method of achieving continuity from day to day is to record a message, which he can play back at the start of each new day.
He eventually he ends up in court, waiting to have his pre-recorded testimony played to him via a radio in his specs. Only the prosecutor is as mad as hell about the affair which the private eye has been having with the prosecutor's wife; which the PI doesn't remember. Luckily, the PI bangs his head in the resulting punch-up and he gets his memory back. A silly film but fun.

Clear And Present Danger (1994) Harrison Ford plays FBI agent Jack Ryan in another of the sequence of books by Tom Clancy. The president is outraged because the US Coastguard finds that drug-dealing hijackers killed a friend of his, and his family, and stole their boat. He wants to show the American people that he can be tough on drug dealers, not knowing that his friend was laundering money for Columbians and stealing from them.
   Jack Ryan gets a job at the White House when his boss goes down with terminal cancer. He's not popular with the stooges on the hill, particularly Ritter, the deputy CIA director and Cutter, the air force security advisor.
   The president orders a secret campaign against the Colombians and Ritter sends in a covert execution force as Ryan is telling Congress that no troops will be sent there. The 'Reciprocity' force blows up a drug processing lab. Cortez, a Cuban working with the Colombians, has a girlfriend, Moira, working at the White House.
   The president announces uncovering $650 million of stashed drugs money. Moira is killed and Ryan is the sole survivor when a US diplomatic convoy containing Moira's boss is shot up in Bogata. The CIA drops a bomb on a meeting of cartel leaders but Escobedo, the main target, and Cortez are late, so they survive. The president gets squeamish about killing kids with dealers.
   Ryan & Cortez work out that the cartel leaders were zapped with a US missile, not a car bomb. Cortez offers Cutter a deal, which involves selling out the troops in Colombia. Ryan does some hacking into the CIA files, uncovers the whole plot. Ritter tells him he has a 'get out of gaol free' note signed by the president.
   Ryan heads to Colombia to rescue the 'Reciprocity' survivors. Escobedo then Cortez get what's coming to them and Ryan returns home a hero. He threatens to shop the president over Operation Reciprocity. The president says he won't do it – but he does.

Cliffhanger (1993) Sylvester Stallone plays Gabe, a fearless rock-climber in Colorado, who fails to rescue Hal's wife when her equipment fails had has to watch her fall thousands of feet to her death. 8 months later, Gabe is back at the death scene, there's bad weather closing in and bad guys are planning an aerial hijack of cash on a US Treasury delivery flight. But things don't go to plan and they lose 3 cases containing $100 million over Gabe's national park before crash-landing there.
The bad guys call mountain rescue and Gabe is obliged to join in to prove he hasn't lost his nerve. He and Hal are given the job of guiding the bad guys to the cases. The BGs cause an avalanche and case No. 1 is lost. The BGs think Gabe is dead. He meets Jesse, the lady chopper pilot, and they go after case No. 2. Another bad guy over a cliff.
Ancient Frank goes looking for everyone else in a chopper. Treasury men and Feds also come looking for the missing flight. Gabe is beaten up. Another dead BG. Frank falls into the BGs' trap and gets dead. Gabe and Jesse have to escape from a bridge, which is blown up. The BGs drop like flies. Gabe and Hal write off the rescue chopper with the head bag guy aboard. Then the Feds arrive.

Cobra (1986) Sylvester Stallone is Fred Cobretti, a cartoon-character member of the Zombie Squad, who strolls into siege situations and takes out crazed killers. There's a serial killer in town, going round mutilating people with no apparent pattern, and Monty, the guy in charge of the case, doesn't want Cobra crashing in. But he has no choice.
   A blonde lady (the then Mrs. Stallone) is scared by a gang and drives away from an attack on someone else; which tells the police they're after more than one killer. She can identify the leader but, luckily for him, he has a lady cop in his gang. And naturally, she's assigned to look after the witness with Cobra & his partner.
   The killers go after Cobra, who lights up a couple of them and heads to the hospital where the witness is stashed for more mayhem. The bad guys strike as Fred & Co. are taking the witness to a safe house, so lots of shooting and dangerous driving. Another day, another car trip; to a motel, this time.
   The spy tips off the bad guys, who get their motorbikes out. Luckily, Fred has brought grenades and an automatic weapon. Millions of psycho bikers are killed in an shoot-out and extended chase, which ends at a steel works, which is staffed by just one guy, who is taken out right away. The Head Bad Guy takes a trip to a furnace, and Cobretti gets his bike and the witness.

Code Red (2001) look like it's going to be a replay of Predator, the Arnold Schwarzenberger movie. A bad boy lieutenant is recalled to lead a mission into the African jungle to rescue his brother. A secret US research station is about to be blown up by a nuclear weapon because something has gone wrong there. But in the jungle, differences begin to appear. There is a whole bunch of alien creatures sucking the life out of their victims. There is also an alien in a suit, which can jump him across rivers.
The US military, it seems, contacted the aliens, they are messing about with the monsters at their research station, and they shot the latest alien visitor down. Cue the revelation that the general who sent out the rescue mission is up to no good, and the lieutenant forms an alliance with the alien.

Collateral (2004) Max, an LA taxi driver, picks up a prosecutor then a guy called Vincent Benson, who hires him to go to 5 meetings then take him to the airport for $600. But Benson is a hit man, and his first job falls out of a 4th floor window onto Max's cab! Benson makes him stash the body in the boot then head off to job number 2. Ray, a narco detective, goes looking for Ramon, who's in the boot, and finds a crime scene.
   Cops pull Max over for having a smashed windscreen but they are diverted. Max's dispatcher tries to screw him for the cost of the repairs on the radio but Benson bluffs him. Benson kills 2 punks, who steal his briefcase with the target info from the cab. Next stop is a jazz club, where Benson whacks the owner. After that, they go to the hospital to visit Max's mom to allay suspicion. They share a lift with detective Ray, visit mom and Max does a runner with the briefcase and hurls it onto the freeway.
   The Feds are interested in Ramon but Ray thinks he has a lead they don't know about and he's going to run with it. Meanwhile, Max pretends to be Vincent to get backups of the hit list. Ray spots his beat-up hack as the club is under Federal surveillance. 3 witnesses for their case have been killed, so the forces of law & order arrange an ambush. Ray thinks Max is genuine but the Feds think he's a hit man who looks like Max, so they're not worried about his safety.
   Lots of shooting at the next club. Ray rescues Max. Vincent gets the job done and gets Max back by shooting Ray. Max gets rebellious and crashes the cab. A cop finds the body in the boot as Max sees the hit list and realizes the last job is Annie, the prosecutor, who hired him before Benson. So he neutralizes the cop and goes to save Annie. Max shoots some holes in Benson and they end up on an MTA train, where Benson croaks.

Collateral Damage (2002) features Arnold Schwarzenberger as Captain Gordon Brewer, a fireman, whose family is wiped out by Colombian terrorists. They are blown up in a café by a bomb at the adjacent Colombian consolate and Arnie is hit by a cab. He smashes up the offices of a group of sympathizers of the terrorists before rampaging off to Colombia after El Lobo. He has to do some body-surfing through rapids and over a waterfall under fire to escape a government patrol and the head of the CIA wants him killed to show Washington what swines the terrorists are.
The bad guys want to catch Arnie and hold him to ransom. He ends up in gaol, but the terrorists blow the place open. Arnie makes a bog of killing Mr. Lobo to avoid killing Mrs. Lobo, who seems like a nice lady with a son (just like Arnie's dead family), and she sets him free just before the CIA zaps the terrorists' base. Arnie flies back to the States with Mrs. Lobo and the kid, courtesy of the CIA, because Mr. Lobo is planning an operation in Washington.
Mr. Lobo plants a briefcase bomb but it's just a diversion. Arnie realizes that Mrs. Lobo is really a bad guy, and she's planning to blow up the CIA HQ with a bomb in the kid's dinosaur, and as he's only adopted, she's cool with blowing the kid up, too. Of course, Arnie saves the day, and then he sets a fireman's fiery trap for the Lobos in the basement of the building as they are zooming around on a motorbike, trying to get away. And Arnie ends up with the kid as a replacement for the one blown up at the start of the film.

Columbo Goes To The Guillotine (1989) A bogus psychic [Anthony Andrews] convinces the US military that he is for real with the help of a magician, who specializes in exposing bogus psychics. But what no one knows is the magician left the 'psychic' to rot in a Ugandan gaol and he owed him big-time. The psychic chops the magician's head off with his guillotine illusion and leaves the police with a locked-room mystery. When blood starts dripping through the floor, enter Columbo to blunder about in his usual way and explain all the mysteries.

Coma (1978) Dr. Mark drove his surgeon girlfriend, Dr. Susan, away by boring her to death with hospital politics. Susan's best friend ended up in a coma after a routine operation, she started digging into that and similar cases, and she discovered that her friend had been tissue-typed. The lab said it was quality control. When Dr. Sue wanted to see the charts of 11 other formerly healthy coma patients, she upset the hospital's bosses.
The coma patients ended up at the government run Jefferson Institute. Dr. Sue overheard a pathologist saying administering carbon monoxide would be a good way to send a patient into a coma. A technician was murdered before he could talk to Sue and lo! She found pipes and proof that carbon monoxide was being piped to OR #8.
Sue was chased through the hospital by the killer. She took a trip to the Jefferson Institute, and was chased there, too. Her next stop was Dr. Harris, the chief of surgery, who drugged her and put her on the list for an operation in OR #8. Dr. Harris was involved in selling organs from patients deliberately put into a coma. But Dr. Mark sabotaged the CO delivery system. So that was Dr. Harris's career and nice little earner down the tubes.

Combustion (2004) A street of exploding drains and buildings – there's a company injecting high-pressure steam into old oil wells to revive them and this is pushing gas though cracks in the ground to the town of Millwood. The fire chief objects to the town engineer's efforts to determine the cause of a rash of fires. Mainly because the fire chief is in league with the oil guy.
The engineer wants to evacuate an area of the city but the mayor won't go for it as she's up for re-election. The fire chief tries to frame the engineer for arson. The engineer saves the mayor from the gas-filled basement car park at the town hall. Then he has to haul his stupid kid and his wife out of the gas-filled basement of their home.
The engineer comes up with the idea of using the oil pumps to suck the gas back to the oil field and then blowing the gas up there. The oil guy gets the fire chief to go to the town with some dynamite but all he blows up is himself. Which leaves the engineer free to blow up the oil field, get the bad guy busted and become a hero.

Commando One guy is written off by bogus dustmen, another by a car thief and a third is blown up on his boat – and all before we get to the guy with the bulging muscles and the opening titles. It can only be an Arnold Schwarzenberger film. Next thing you know, the bad guys are shooting up his home and kidnapping his kid. So Arnie heads down a mountain – straight down, not on the road, in a car with no brakes. The bad guys grab him and tell him to kill some South American president 'or we mail the kid back to you in pieces'.
   Arnie is put on a plane but he kills his escort and jumps off. He kidnaps a skinny airline worker to get the use of her car and heads for lots of aggro in a shopping mall with a little bad guy. After some dangerous driving, he drops the punk off a cliff. Another bad guy gets the Buffy, the Vampire Slayer treatment at a motel – and no one takes any notice of the shooting and crashing about, of course.
   During a break for the news, Mr. Wydey took the opportunity to fill the TV set up with bullets.
   Arnie needs some guns, so he drives a bulldozer into an armoury and starts to load up a shopping trolly, helped by the airline worker. When the cops arrive, only he is arrested and his new friend is able to blow the police van up with a rocket launcher, which the cops didn't notice in the back of her car. Next on the equipment list is an amphibious plane – his new friend can fly – so that Arnie can invade the bad guys' island.
   World War 3 starts on the island but luckily, the bad guys' guns are mainly loaded with blanks. The boss man is written off but a former pal of Arnie's, who has gone bad, is made of sterner stuff. Even being electrocuted doesn't slow him down. But a length of 4-inch pipe through his chest proves to be a bit too much.

Congo (1995) An expedition looking for perfect diamonds for lasers in the Congo is wiped out but Travis, the paranoid boss of the company, keeps it a secret for business reasons. Dr. Elliot, who has taught Amy the gorilla to talk with a gadget, gets funds from Homolka, a Romanian philanthropist, to take Amy back to the Congo to teach other gorillas to speak. Dr. Ross of Travis' outfit crashes the party in search of the expedition and her ex-fiancé
   The gang has to crash through a war zone, led by Mr. Kelly, a Great Black Hunter figure. He exposes Homolka as a chancer, who is looking for Solomon's city of Zinge, the source of his diamonds. The plane is shot down at Zaire and everyone has to land by parachute, including Amy. Her base tells Dr. Ross there's a new type of ape around just before Amy destroys her communications system.
   Jungle tribemen produce a member of the missing expedition, but he freaks out and croaks when he sees Amy. Homolka is convinced she has seen an open eye symbol at Zinge. The gang sees a parallel expedition shot out of the sky. There's nothing much left of the first expedition and grey apes attack when the gang reaches Zinge. Dr. Elliot decides they've been bred for violence.
   The gang finds a whole bunch of diamonds and Dr. Ross uses one in a laser to blast a way out of a trap. Then the volcano blows, so that's the end of the diamonds. Luckily, there's a balloon in the crashed plane so they can get out. Then Dr. Ross blows up her boss' communications satellite and tosses the big diamond from the laser. And Amy ends up with some good gorillas.

The Contractor (2007) Wesley Snipes plays James, a CIA agent who is reactivated to take out a terrorist, who's about to go on trial in London. Mr. Collins, his boss, doesn't want the USA embarrassed as the CIA trained the guy. Jimmy makes the kill but the getaway is a shambles and his contact is killed in a crash. Injured, Jimmy holes up in a safe house and Emily, a 12-year-old orphan neighbour who lives with her granny, adopts him.
   Collins turns up in London but the local police don't trust him; with good reason as he shoots the superintendent on the case after he traps Jimmy. The police invade the safe house area but miss Jimmy. They want him for 2 murders now. Collins is told he's up before a Congressional committee in 3 days; so that's how long he had to kill Jimmy.
   The passport guy sells Jimmy out but he evades a trap with Emily's help. Jimmy phones the super's daughter, who's a cop on the case, to tell her he didn't kill her dad and to arrange a meeting; which Collins crashes. After a chase, Collins & Jimmy shoot each other in a restaurant kitchen and after a chat, Jimmy just walks out.
   Emily has her back packed but there's no trip to America for her. Jimmy gets on a train with a bullet in his shoulder, watched by the lady copper. But later, Emily and her granny get a trip to Jimmy's ranch.

Control Factor (2002) begins with Lance Bishop surviving a massacre at his office. He keeps hearing voices, until he put on a copper-lined hat, and he finds that he is being targetted by a government mind-control experiment..He has to kill his 'wife', who turns out to be one of the people experimenting on him. The US military started the project hoping to end war and terrorism but it has gone too far. They are now using cellphone towers to control large sections of the population by feeding emotions to them. Bishop gets to capture and torture the project leader but at the end, the experiment is continuing elsewhere.

The Core (2003) It's Green World Day and 32 people croak in a small area, all due to pacemaker failure. The US military suspects an EM pulse weapon was fired but experts say no one has invented one powerful enough. Kamikaze pigeons restage The Birds in Trafalgar Square. Dr. Keyes decides there's something wrong with the Earth's magnetic field.
   The space shuttle Endeavour finds itself approaching L.A. instead of Edwards Air Force Base so the smart young lady aboard suggests an emergency landing in the L.A. river channel. Dr. Keyes is kidnapped and dragged to the Pentagon and told the Earth's magnetic field is falling apart because the core has stopped spinning. So there will be superstorms and microwave radiation from the Sun will cook the Earth within a year.
   The brilliant Dr. Zimsky reckons he can get to the core to restart its rotation because he knows a guy who can build a ship to go there. Rome is wiped out by a superstorm while the drilling ship Virgil is being built. Lots of fun and games when the ship is launched and the crew are wiped out one by one. Shock-horror! The density of the core is too low and the payload of nukes isn't big enough for the job. Dr. Zimsky tells the US military to use the Destiny weapon; which he created and which stopped the core's rotation in the first place.
   Dr. Keyes opts for Plan C, a sequence of nuclear explosions instead of just one. San Francisco is cooked by microwaves and Keyes has to get an ally on the surface to sabotage Destiny to buy him time. Just Keyes and the lady pilot are left when Virgil finally reaches the sea bed with no power and no communications. But some passing whales help out.

Cougan's Bluff (1968) An incredibly young Clint Eastwood stars as the eponymous deputy sheriff from Arizona. He goes hunting an Injun and outsmarts the sucker, then he parks the prisoner on the porch while he visits his girlfriend. The sheriff catches him in the bath and gives him a lousy job. Cougan has to go to New York to extradite a prisoner; who's in Belle Vue after taking LSD in gaol. (Well, it is the Sixties)
   The police lieutenant (Lee J. Cobb) tells him he'll have to go through channels when the prisoner is fit to travel. Cougan attaches himself to a lady shrink/parole officer and bluffs Ringerman out of the hospital. But he's ambushed and he ends up bashed over the head in hospital minus his prisoner and his gun.
   The lieutenant tells him to lay off. Cougan goes after Ringerman and his sheriff chucks him off the case and he's told to go home. Like that will make any difference! Coogan burgles the shrink's files to get the address of Ringerman's girlfriend but she leads him to a brawl at a pool parlour. So Cougan gets tough with her.
   When he catches up to Ringerman, they have a chase on motorbikes, the creep ends up back at Belle Vue and Cougan has to go through the system to get him. But he does end up sitting next to Ringerman on a shuttle helicopter to the airport – AND THEY BOTH LIGHT UP!!! (Well, it is the Sixties.)

Countdown: The Sky's On Fire (1998) starts as an ass-kicking contest between a government expert who's in the pay of ozone-killing industries and an environmentalist, whom he sacks. An ozone hole is heading for LA but the official expert says there is no cause for alarm.
Our hero goes public and cue grid-lock on the roads, the usual suspects looting and the National Guard called out. The expert comes round to our hero's point of view and he eventually launches a ORB (Ozone Replenishing Bomb) to mop up ozone-destroying halogens and close the hole.

Cradle 2 The Grave (2003) Bad guys break into a diamond exchange while Mr. Soo (Jet Li) infiltrates the guy directing the operation from the top of his tall building. Soo calls the cops and takes the stones stolen by one of the thieves while 2 more get away on the roof of a subway train with stones which include 'black diamonds'.
   Soo tells the head thief, Tony, that he can walk away if he hands over the black diamonds. Then the guy who imported the black stones phones Tony and demands their return. He sets his Chinese gangsters after Tony. Soo is a Taiwanese intelligence agent and the guy who imported the stones is a renegade, who used to work with him.
   The renegade has Tony's loud daughter kidnapped, so he & Soo go to see Mr. Chambers in his palatial apartment at the gaol to get the stones back. No chance! Tony & his crew resort to what they know; robbery. Soo takes out a gang of cage fighters while Tony does crazy driving on an OTV with the cops in pursuit. Mr. Chambers is killed.
   The renegade ends up with the stones, which are part of a weapon he's selling. Tony & Co. find out where it's happening, there's mucho mayhem when they crash the sale and Soo exterminates the renegade.

Crank (2006) Chev wakes up to a video of Ricky Verona injecting him with something and telling him he'll be dead within the hour. Chev's doctor tells him he has to keep himself cranked up and adrenaline flowing to block the poison. If he stops, he dies. Carlito, another Hispanic boss in the drug trade, tells Chev there's no antidote to the Chinese poison.
   The doctor tells Chev he needs epinephrine from an ER, so the hospital is shot up after Chev has killed Ricky's brother. He takes too much epi and gets himself on the TV news as a rampager. Chev collects Eve, his girlfriend, before Ricky's mob can get her and tells her he used to be a hit man for the Mob but he quit.
   Ken's shirt factory is shot up. The doc gives Chev a temporary fix. He arranges a confrontation with the Hispanics, who are shot up by agents of the Chinese guy, whom Chev decided not to kill. Ricky gives Chev another shot of the Chinese brew before they both plunge out of a helicopter while fighting.
   Chev tries to make a last phone call to Eve on the way to the ground, but all he gets is her answering machine.

Crimson Tide (1995) is set during the Bill Clinton era. Russia goes into political meltdown and rogue elements in the military seize missile bases and submarines. A US nuclear-armed submarine commanded by Gene Hackman with Denzel Washington as the Executive Officer is sent out to handle the threat. Washington falls out with Hackman when he goes ahead with a drill right after a fire. A message comes through that the Russians rebels are preparing to launch their missiles and the USS Alabama stands by for a pre-emptive strike to take them out.
   The sub is attacked by a Russian boat then it gets a launch command. Part of another order is received then the radio is damaged. Washington refuses to go ahead with the first order to launch missiles (on the grounds that the 2nd order might contain an order to cancel the launch) and he puts the captain under arrest. The sub wins a shooting match with the Russian boat and survives a trip down to crush depth.
   The captain stages a counter-coup against the mutinous XO and the missile launch is back on. The weapons officer offers some resistance but he is crushed. Then the XO stages a counter-counter-coup and the launch is off again. Of course, the radio is fixed just in time and the captain calls off the launch when the second message gets through to say that the Russians have regained control from the rebels.
   Then there is a throughly unconvincing Hollywood finish at an inquiry, where the captain retires and the XO doesn't get court martialled and hanged from the highest yard arm, along with his co-conspirators, for mutiny in the face of the enemy.

Crocodile Dundee (1986) is a rather insubstantial film. Sue, a reporter with a New York paper, heads for Walkabout Creek in the Australian outback in search of a bloke who survived being attacked by a crocodile. She goes off into the bush with him, wanders off on her own and has to be saved from a crocodile, which Dundee has to slay.
Mick Dundee takes a trip to New York, where they let him smoke in a lift! Sue's dad owns her paper and her boyfriend is a jerk. Mick falls foul of the local low-lifes then he goes walkabout after Sue gets engaged. But she does the decent thing and dumps the obnoxious boyfriend in favour of Mick.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) relates a Chinese legend and features kung fu-ists gliding around as in a dream, skimming rooftops and battling with a variety of weapons in a tale of betrayal and possible redemption. The best bit of the film is probably the destruction of a Chinese inn in the manner of a Western saloon being trashed.

Cruise Control (1997) is about Alex, a cop from the Suicide Squad, and his girlfriend Annie, who's the world's worst driver. They go for a trip on a cruise liner and a mad programmer takes over the ship's computer as part of a plot to steal some diamonds. Fun and games on a stuck lifeboat after the bad guy forces an evacuation. Then the ship has a fender-bender with an oil tanker before plouging up the shore into a small town. And the bad guy goes out in a blaze of glory.

Cube² : Hypercube (2002) is a sequel to Cube. A disparate group of people find themselves trapped in a hypercube. All of them contributed to its design/construction and they all worked for the sinister Izon Corporation. They face shifts in time, dimensions and parallel universes, people start getting written off (some more than once), including the blind teenage computer-geek girl who made the hypercube work. And it looks like they makers are setting up Cube³ at the end.

Curse of the Pink Panther, The (1983) is another attempt to cash in on a popular series of films after Peter Sellars died. Chief Dreyfuss fixes a computer, which is picking the world's greatest detective to find the missing Clouseau. Enter Detective Sergeant Clifton Sleigh of the NYPD, the world's greatest, and luckiest, screw-up. Dreyfuss ends up in hospital within seconds of meeting him, lots of action and blunders, and Roger Moore gets to do the Clouseau bogus French accent.

Curse of the Komodo, The (2003) Project Catalyst was intented by its creator to be a way of genetic modification to produce food. The US military have been using it to create weapons - giant komodo dragon lizards. The creator is told to go to the island of the komodos and wipe it clean. Meanwhile, thieves rob a casino as a major storm looms and their chopper lands on the island.
   One of the scientists drops dead, killed by poisonous komodo saliva. The komodos have been eating one another, there's just one huge one left and its only food source is humans. And it can run as fast as a jeep! The military doesn't want to evacuate the people on the island and the brigadier at Pearl Harbour decides to napalm the island, not knowing there's a chopper on it.
   Komodo saliva turns one of the thieves into a zombie! Two more casualties help with the chopper overloading situation. The zombie attacks the professor who created the project, so he turns himself into a suicide bomber and lets himself be eaten to blow the komodo to bits. So there are just 4 people left to flee the island. And the US airforce seems to have found a way to cram napalm into Sidewinder missiles!
   The psycho leader of the thieves goes back for the cash, so just the pilot and 2 ladies escape from the island. They talk to the press, so the brigadier blows his brains out. And the psycho is left on the island with all the cash and a whole bunch more komodos heading right for him! Chomp!!!

Cyclops (2008) is a daft creature-feature in the Ray Harryhausen tradition (but not as well done). A cyclops is threatening Rome so Tiberius Caesar sends Marcus to deal with it. Marcus doesn't think one cyclops is much of a threat but he captures it and brings it to Rome in chains. Tiberius makes him a Tribune, greedy bugger Marcus asks for a land grant and ends up demoted. Falco, the Emperor's nephew, suggests that the cyclops is used to kill criminals, like the ones building his villa, in the arena.
The cyclops and Falco's slaves escape. Marcus recaptures the cyclops then he has to recapture the slaves with Falco in charge. Marcus ends up under arrest and he has to become a gladiator and appear in Tiberius' 3-day Victory Games. Marcus feeds the cyclops and makes him an ally.
Falco wants Uncle Tiberius to name him as the imperial heir. Marcus & a tag team partner start fighting the Cyclops in the arena and a shambles ensues. Tiberius, the cyclops and Falco all end up dead and Marcus is the last man standing.

Cypher (2003) is a real tangled web!! Morgan Sullivan signs up as an industrial spy and becomes Jack Thursby, as far as Digicorps is concerned. He meets an Oriental woman in a wig, Rita Foster, who gives him some red pills to stop the nightmares he's been having. Then she tells him that Digicorps has been drugging everyone at the conferences to which he's being sent, and gives him a shot to protect him from the drug in the water.
   Sure enough, at the next conference, everyone else goes into a trance, everyone is fitted with their own helmet and programmed like Little Alex in A Clockwork Orange. 'Thursby' then finds he's been given a new home and a new wife. Sunways Systems wants him to bug Digicorps, and by the way, his original wife is divorcing him.
   He is warned to stay away from Foster, who works for Sebastian Rooks, a dangerous freelance consultant. And if he doesn't play ball, Digicorps will kill him. Sullivan tries to contact Rooks. Foster tells him that Sunways is using him to feed false data to Digicorps, then they'll kill him, and Rooks plans to use him to steal data from Sunways.
   Sullivan goes to the Sunways Data Vault, which is run by Dr. McKay of Stargate Atlantis, who reckons he's a better lie detector than the machines which replaced him. Sullivan has to zap him then climb 35 floors when he's trapped in the elevator. Foster extracts him. He shoots her in the shoulder when he finds himself trapped.
   Shock, horror!!! Sullivan/Thursby is really Rooks and being Sullivan was his plan to infiltrate Sunways to steal the data. Digicorps Security busts into Rooks' hideout loaded for bear, but he escapes to go sailing with Foster, mission accomplished.