Mr. Wydey's Film Guide Letter D

Dante's Peak (1997) in Washington State towers over a town having a festival and looking forward to a multi-million dollar business investment. So the film has the Jaws plot – ignore the danger and hope everything will be okay for the sake of the town's economy and the volcano won't blow its top. Pierce Brosnan plays Harry, the vulcanologist whose boss is eager not to upset people unnecessarily despite lots of dead squirrels and a couple of dead tourists. Harry decides to stick around instead of going on holiday and he's on hand to save the mayor and her two kids from lava- and pyroclastic flows after the earthquakes start. Lots of spectacular volcano effects, mucho peril and Harry's boss gets his for being wrong. And so does the mayor's stubborn old ex-mother-in-law, who puts the family in peril.

Daredevil (2003) (Stan Lee, Marvel Comics) Some good opening titles; the lights on buildings in New York morphing into stars' names. Matthew grew up in Hell's Kitchen and his dad was a contender who'd gone bad. Matt was blinded by a childhood accident so dad got his act together again but he didn't take a dive when ordered to do so and he was killed.
   Meanwhile, Matt's other 4 senses had become supercharged, especially his hearing, which became a sort of radar, so he became a lawyer and a costumed superhero and seeker after justice. His avenger persona was able to leap from building to building, swing about like Batman and fight like Sammo Law or Jackie Chan. And he kept confessing all to his local priest.
   Being blind proved to be a good way of chatting up Elektra, a gal who could fight. Her billionaire dad was in with the Kingpin of Crime but he wanted out, so the Kingpin decided to have Nick killed then framed as the Kingpin. A black Irishman called Bullseye, who could throw anything without missing, got the job.
   Elektra was in the car when Bullseye took out her old man, Daredevil tried to intervene and Bullseye used his DD's cane as the murder weapon. An investigative journalist warned Matt that the Kingpin would take out the rest of Nick's family; i.e. Elektra. She went after Daredevil for revenge. He wouldn't fight but Bullseye turned up and killed Elektra.
   Daredevil & Bullseye did their best to wreck the organ in DD's church, and Bullseye wrecked a police car when he landed on it from a great height. While chucking Daredevil around his office, Kingpin mentioned that he'd killed his dad. So Kingpin ended up busted and heading for gaol instead of dead. And the reporter deleted his story on the Daredevil to let him carry on seeing off criminals.

Dark City (1998) is a Kafkaesque tale in which a Mr. Murdoch wakes up in a bath with no memory and a body nearby. He soons finds himself pursued by weirdo aliens, which can open doors in walls and stop time. The aliens can do things with their thoughts (they call it 'tuning') and Murdoch can do it, too. He eventually learns that he's in a laboratory in space where a city in constant night is regularly remoulded and the inhabitants have their memories swapped around constantly. The aliens are trying to find out what makes humans tick. They have a group mind, they're dying out and they want to learn how to become individuals. But Murdoch eventually zaps the lot of them, takes over the machine running the environment and turns it into a sunny, happy place.

Dark Storm (2006) Mad scientists in Montana try to extract Dark Matter, but it all goes horribly wrong in 200. They're at it again 6 years later, their funding is in danger and they're prepared to take any daft risk to impress the general who holds the purse-strings. Their weapon eliminates a redundant nuclear reactor but one of the team, Daniel is contaminated with DM and the director, Dr. McKray, is selling the project to the best bidder.
   A DM cloud in space takes out a military aircraft as the first of electrical storm events. The satellite which the team used is leaking DM and attracting more, and if the cloud gets big enough, that's it for the Earth. The general gives the project the bullet and the lab is shut down but Daniel tells his colleague Andy that they have to disperse the DM cloud in space before it's too late.
   Daniel has a DM episode; he now has super-powers; and ends up in the hospital where Elly, his wife, works. Infiltrators attack the lab and steal the core full of DM. Daniel & Andy need to get it back to disperse the DM cloud. McKray has Daniel's wife kidnapped. Daniel learns that McKray exposed him to DM as a test.
   Daniel frees himself and starts electrifying everything. The cavalry arrives. McKray contaminates himself with DM to gain super-powers like Daniel's. Firing the weapon disperses the DM cloud in space and sucks all the DM out of Daniel & McKray, and the Earth is saved!

Dark Waters (2003) kicks off with a pack of sharks chomping 2 divers and attacking an oil transfer station 3,800 feet down in the Gulf of Mexico. Our hero, Dr. Dave Quatrell, a con-man who's looking for Atlantis, is then shanghaied with his stroppy female partner by Mr. Somerville, a former associate of Dave's father. They head for the transfer station in Dave's submarine but the sharks return, the submarine bursts into flame inside when the sharks attack and Dave, his lady friend and one of the crew are left stranded in the transfer station.
   Dave learns that Somerville used to be with the CIA and he was working on a black program called 'Dark Waters'. The 3 survivors are rescued by a mystery submarine, which is the base for the sharks. A secret US project is trying to control them but not having much luck even after 20 years. And the sharks have killed over 280 people.
   The captain decides to have Dave & Co. killed but they have already escaped from the cell. Pursued by Marines, they take a swim in a shark tank and emerge at the lab where Dan, Dave's father, works. But Dave doesn't recognize his dad because he last saw him when he was 9. There's a shoot-out with the Marines and dad tells Dave who he is before he croaks.
   Dave uses his dad's keycard to start a self-destruct mechanism, which destroys the sub after Dave and his pals have escaped in a mini-sub, pursued by 2 sharks. Their answer is to open the hatch and wave a bloodstained top in the water. And when the shark pokes its head into the mini-sub, it gets a shotgun blast. Then a torpedo finishes the other one off.
   The survivors save themselves by inflating a life raft under the mini-sub. And when Dave opens his father's deposit box, he finds a map showing the position of Atlantis! So he reopens the Quatrell Marine Research Institute, which his father used to run.

The Day After Tomorrow (2004) is a disaster film which begins with the Antarctic ice shelf breaking up and ice cores from it showing that global warming 10,000 years ago triggered an ice age, which lasted 2 centuries. Melting of the ice caps causes the Gulf Stream to shut down. It starts snowing in New Delhi, where there's a conference on climate shift, and monster hail the size of grapfruit batters Tokyo.
   Our hero is the abrasive Jack, who has made an enemy of the US vice president. Extreme weather builds in the North Atlantic; weather buoys show huge temperature drops and the birds bug out of New York where Sam, Jack's son, has gone for a school quiz competition. Jack is told that the Gulf Stream is shutting down but he thinks everything is happening too fast.
   The giant hail, gales and then a whole bunch of tornadoes devastate LA. All air traffic in the US is grounded. Jack's model based on the ice cores suggests an ice age is 6-8 weeks away. Massive storms develop over the northern hemisphere and the ISS astronauts are stuck there, observing, as the space programme is also grounded.
   Helicopters fall out of the air over Scotland and people freeze solid in moments. New York starts flooding then a huge storm surge washes over the city. Sam and his pals are trapped in the library. Forget 6-8 weeks, the next theory is that the world-wide storms will bring the ice age in 7-10 days! America migrates to Mexico.
   Sam & Co. start burning books to keep warm and Jack heads north to rescue him. A couple of his mates are killed along the way. New York freezes solid and Sam and his pals have fun & games with wolves which have escaped from the zoo. Eventually, the storms end (after Jack had reached Sam) and helicopters arrive at New York to rescue the survivors.

Days of Thunder (1990) Tom Cruise O'Missile plays Cole, a punk kid, who crashes into Nascar racing. Cole impressed Harry, the old hand car builder (Robert Duval). The kid knows how to drive but he doesn't know about cars. Harry tells him a porky about the car to help Cole to his first win. Cole enjoys a winning streak while indulging in shunting matches with the current champ. Of course, both of them end up in the hospital.
Cole romances his doctor (Nicole Kidmann) and another punk starts hassling him when he returns to racing. The same sponsor is providing cars for both running punks so Cole gets himself fired for a revenge crash after the other punk puts him out of a race.
Cole convinces the champ to have surgery for a leaky blood vessel in his head. So Cole is handed the task of winning at Daytona in the champ's car so that the champ's sponsor will pay up for his season. No prizes for guessing who takes the chequered flag.

Deadly Water (2006) A kid's parents are dragged off a boat and eaten. In the present day, 2 women are searching for Greek artefacts under the sea. Something grabs their underwater camera and Old Jim is decapitated by a cable. There's a giant squid in the area and global warming gets the blame. Ray Ryder, the kid from above, inflicts himself on the expedition.
Nicola finds a ceremonial mask from the Trojan war. Maxwell, a Greek gangster, turns up. He's looking for a huge opal, which his family has told him to deliver or else. The kid in Nicola's crew sells her out to Maxwell. Nikki's boat goes up in flames; the mask wasn't aboard. Ray provides a replacement boat.
The squid starts eating bad guy divers. Ray goes off to kill the squid and finds the giant opal. Nikki is grabbed by bad guys and their boss gets the opal. The squid attacks the bad guys' boat, they're all eaten, including Maxwell, the opal goes overboard Raymond shoots the squid full of holes and Nikki ends up with the mask.

The Dead Pool (1988) is number 5 in the Dirty Harry series and the last one. An English film director and his associates have made lists of celebrities who are likely to croak – the dead pool – and the one with the most dead names on the list will be the winner. Harry Callaghan is number 8 on the list. But someone is giving destiny a helping hand.
   Callaghan is praised by the DA for putting a mobster away so Harry is ambushed by goons; all 3 of whom end up dead. He's grounded, almost moved to PR, then let out on the streets again with a Chinese-American partner; Al Quan. The first dead pool corpse is a druggie rock star, who's making a movie with the director. Then Harry joins in a restaurant robbery, where one of the dead is carrying a dead pool list.
   A midget TV reporter files a $2M law suit because Harry wrecks a camera when she was behaving like an asshole. He has to buy her off with a dinner. More goons shoot up Harry & the reporter in a glass lift. So Harry visits the gangster Genero in gaol and intimidates him. A film critic is offed next, and an attention-seeker pretends to be the dead-pool killer to get himself on TV.
   The next victim is offed by a bomb in a radio-controlled toy car. Genero gives Harry a couple of bodyguards. Harry gets a dead pool letter with RIP beside his name. The killer has a go at Harry & Quan with another toy car and Quan ends up in hospital.
   The killer grabs the midget reporter. Harry turns up, gives him his Magnum revolver, lets the guy shoot off all the bullets then nails him with a harpoon on the film set.

Deadlocked: Escape from Zone 14 (1995) features a couple of escapers from a prison camp on the site of an old fun-fair, who have to stick together -- not because they are handcuffed but because the prisoners are wearing collars, which explode when they get more than half a mile from the detector. The bloke resets the collars so that they are okay if they stayed within 500 yards or so of each other, which gives them real problems when the woman jumps onto a train before the bloke is ready and they get themselves shut into separate furniture vans! Lots of high-tech skulduggery, a couple of exploding heads and bad guys who really deserved everything they get.

Death Becomes Her (1992) is about two women who become obsessed with the same man and looking young. Meryl Streep steals wimpy Bruce Willis from Goldy Hawn, who balloons out but manages to look 30 at 50. So Streep takes the same magic potion and becomes young again. And after Willis shoves her down the stairs and kills her, she keeps walking and talking but she needs his skills as a mortician to stop her looking like a corpse. Then she kills Goldy Hawn and Willis dumps both of them, but they turn up at his funeral 37 years later for some final special effects gags. Daft but fun.

Death Race 2000 (1975) (David Carradine & Sylvester Stallone, a Roger Corman production written by Chuck Griffith) This film was banned from TV for about 30 years but along came violent video games and the censors lost the will to live. The 20th annual Trans-Continental Road Race is about to begin, offering 3 days of blood and death to the TV audience in a very strange United States, which is run by a Mr. President who's living in Japan.
   The star of the show is Mr. Frankenstein, who's supposed to have been rebuilt many times after crashes, and his main rival is Machine Gun Joe. The 5 cars can score extra points for killing people in their path, e.g. 70 points for toddlers and 100 points for anyone over 75. So a geriatric hospital parks some customers in Frankenstein's path but he goes for the staff instead!
   Meanwhile, there's an anti-race operation going on and Nero the Hero is blown up by the Resistance, which patches into the national TV to declare war on Mr. President & the race. Franky's navigator learns that he's really one of a succession of replacement guys, and he eventually learns that she's the grand daughter of the resistance leader. They want to kidnap him and swap Franky's life for permanent abolition of the race.
   The President blames the French for sabotaging things as the Resistance reduces the race to just Franky & Joe. The Resistance tries real hard to take out Franky but fails. Which is just as well as he plans to take out the President with his exploding hand. But he uses it to blow up Joe instead. So Franky has to improvise. And he becomes the President at the end.
   This film has a lot in common with Rollerball.

Deep Blue Sea (1999) is a cautionary tale about a female mad scientist, who creates smarter sharks at a mid-ocean marine facility while trying to cure human brain disease. Of course, it all goes horribly wrong, a rescue helicopter crashes onto the floating lab, which starts to sink while burning merrily, and smart sharks are chomping humans right, left and centre. A Jaws-like ending with a big bang to finish things off; and the mad scientist is one of the chomped.

Deep Evil (2004) is a daft sciffy monster movie. A man is arrested for setting off a nuke in Alaska and he ends up being interrogated by tazer. He says he is Dr. Langdon and he was on a black operation at a secret lab, which went into lockdown. A team of military & scientists was sent to investigate. All they found at first was a strange liquid and what looked like the remains of someone who had been dissolved!
   The US government had been trying to clone an alien lifeform brought to Siberia on an asteroid. The Russians had tried to do something with it and ended up nuking their lab. Anyone contaminated by the alien lifeform turns to water, after suitable horrible skin-erupting special effects. The US government was trying to clone the highly intelligent alien lifeform to find out how to kill it to stop it taking over the planet.
   Team members, including Dr. Langdon are killed and the survivors decide to set off a nuclear device. But the bozo on the team blows up the lift while they are under attack by alien 'spiders'. So General Harrison, the man in charge, gives them permission to halt the count-down. The surviving two military men fight caveman-size alien monsters with carbon dioxide fire extinguisters and the last of them triggers the bomb manually.
   Civilian Dr. Cole escapes to the surface, only to be shot by Harrison. So the interrogator asks 'Dr. Langdon' how he knows all this if there were no survivors from the mission. So he reveals himself to be an alien lifeform, which gives the interrogator a hell of a shock!

Deep Freeze (2003) is a daft tale about monsters at an Antarctic drilling base which is experiencing earthquakes. Trilobites (extinct everywhere else for 225 million years) the size of a dog are running around attacking everyone. And then one the size of the Loch Ness monster appeared. It is blown up but the final shot is of a waving tentacle belonging to a trilobite the size of the Kraken!

Deep Impact Interesting example of synchronicity here. During the slow bits of the film, your reviewer carried on reading Moonfall by Jack McDevitt. The film Deep Impact is about a comet which is on course to collide with the Earth. A schoolkid spots it, a professional astronomer confirms it then he's wiped out by a dozy truck driver while speeding down from his observatory.
   A year later, a TV reporter thinks she's getting dirt on the US Secretary of the Treasury, who has just resigned. Jenny Lerner thinks he's having an affair with someone called Ellie. But when she's kidnapped by the FBI and taken to see the president, he talks about E.L.E. – an Extinction Level Event. The comet impact is a year away, the Americans and the Russians have been building a spaceship called Messiah to blow it up and the resigned Secretary didn't think the plan would work
   A team of astronauts (& cosmonauts), led by an America Moon-landing veteran (Robert Duval) goes up to nuke the to comet. Their drilling operation takes too long, they lose a man in space and they succeed only into breaking the comet into a little chunk and a big chunk. So the US government sends a million selected people to hide in purpose-built caverns for a couple of years while the dust and debris of the impact settles.
   The Americans fire a shower of missiles at the comet, but they fail to deflect it. Panic on Earth and lots of human interest stuff and noble sacrifice. Heading home ahead of the comet, the astronauts realize they have 4 nukes left and while they can do nothing about the small comet fragment, they can take out the big one – which is big enough to cause the extinction of pretty well all life on Earth.
   The smaller fragment hits the Atlantic and sends an enormous tsunami hurtling across America. The larger fragment provides a spectacular display of meteors for the survivors, and America (and everywhere else) starts to rebuild.
   In the book Moonfall, the comet hits the Moon, which breaks up and drops big chunks of itself onto the Earth, wiping out large areas and drowning coastal cities with tidal waves.

Delta Force II : The Colombian Connection (1990) is a 2-star action film with Chuck Norris showing off his karate skills. An operation to extract a Colombian drug baron comes to nothing in the American courts when an idiot of a judge gives him bail of $10,000,000, which is just loose change to a coke baron. Then things get personal and the body count rises and rises, especially when Mr. Norris heads for South America to sort out the bad guy once and for all.

Depth Charge (2008) The nuclear sub USS Montana successfully tested some stealth gear off Iceland then the XO chucked the captain and most of the crew off the boat and threatened to nuke Washington and other major cities unless he got $1 billion for each of them. Cmdr. Krieg was sore because the US Navy had never given him his own command.
   Krieg fired a warning shot and Seaman James (young, black and looking nothing like Steven Seagal) and the doctor began to take out the bad guys. The President was told that Krieg's medication for a brain tumour had turned him psychotic and he had less than a year to live. Both of our heroes were shot but they continued to wreak havoc and kill bad guys.
   USS Florida, another sub, tried to intercept Montana but the bad guys got the stealth gear on line just in time. The doctor was captured but James freed him and they put the reactor out of action, in need of a reboot. Montana closed in as Cmdr. Krieg prepared to launch his missles. The President told the captain of Florida to shoot anyway.
   All of the bad guys were killed but Krieg shot off half a dozen missles as he croaked. The doc cancelled most of the launches and managed to make the last one self-destruct. And James steered the sub away from Florida's torpedoes.

Derailed (2002) features the 'Muscles from Brusselles' Jean-Claude Van Damme. His job was to extract an agent from Slovakia and he was being hassled by his wife because he kept disappearing. After a punch-up with Redcaps in Bratislava, a car chase and blowing up half the city, our hero and the agent made it to a train, which was promptly hijacked by the criminal gang, which the female agent had double-crossed.
   Worse, Mrs. Damme turned up with the family and got the hump when she found her husband sharing a compartment with a woman. Even worse, the woman was carrying SP43, a mutated strain of smallpox, one of the vials was shattered and the train was infected. So everyone who had not had a smallpox vaccination started coughing and getting v. spotty!
   The head bad guy was hoping to make a fortune out of an antidote to the virus. The Muscles larked about under the train as well as on top of it. The train went into a tunnel with the hijackers' helicopter attached to it! The Muscles went riding around on a motorbike, on and off the train. A drunken train driver nearly wrecked the hijacked train.
   The Luftwaffe took out most of the train and a bridge with it. Luckily, the Muscles had uncoupled the bit containing the hijackers and their prisoners, doing in the head bad guy in the process, but it ended up hanging off the wreck of the bridge! But in the end, everyone was cured of the pox and Mr. Muscles squared things with the missus.

The Detonator (2006) A wife walked out on her dead husband with all the cash in the safe. Wesley Snipes played Sonni Griffith of Homeland Security, a black man trying to be inconspicuous in Bucharest. A weapons buy with bad guy Dmitri, went bad and Griff had to kill just about everyone in sight. The CIA got him out of police custody and gave him the job of taking the widow to New York as a witness. Bad guys attacked their safe house, but Griff bugged out with Nadia when everyone else was dead.
Her old man stashed $30 million in a Swiss account and Joe Barzanescu, the head bad guy, who owns a football team, wanted it back. Nadia wanted to buy her life back from Joe. Mitchell, the local CIA data expert, said there were no leaks, so the safe house was sold out. Nadia ID'ed Joe as The Hawk, an arms dealer. Dmitri followed Griff from a meet with Sheppard, his CIA contact, to Griff's motel, which blew up when the bad guys attacked.
Mitchell told Sheppard that Joe was paying off Flint, their boss. A big shoot-out under the football stadium during a match and a stampede of spectators when it got to ground level. Griff got to take out Joe then he found out the hard way that Sheppard was the traitor. But he got to go to his own funeral to make him free to stroll off with Nadia and the $30 million.

Die Another Day (2002) James Bond blows up half of Korea before the opening titles of the film, which has a really cheesy title song. After 14 months in The Hole, Bond is spy-swapped and Mrs. M is grumpy with him. So he does a runner instead of going to a training centre in the Falklands, and wrecks a gene-therapy clinic in Cuba. After some fencing with mega-rich Graves, a Korean enemy with a new face via gene therapy, Bond takes his invisible car to Iceland, where Graves is passing off African conflict diamonds as local products.
The bad guy deploys his monster laser satellite. Bond and a NSA lady have fun in a lab with lots of lasers. Bond does some cliff-hanging, para-surfing and ice-driving before charging round a melting ice palace to free the trapped NSA lady. Then it is back to North Korea for fun and games on a Jumbo cargo transporter before the bad guys burn up the whole of the Demilitarized Zone with their orbiting laser.

Die Hard II: Die Harder Wimpy Bruce Willis, the guy who's too scared to get on a plane and fly across the Atlantic? And Norm of Hill Street Blues, alias Andy of NYPD Blue in charge of security? It could only be the sequel to Die Hard. Lots of mayhem, lots of shootin', lots of dead bodies, a plane crash, lots of suffering by Wimpy, and the bad guys trashed at the end.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988) Michael Caine, in league with crooked police lieutenant Anton Rodgers, works the Cote d'Azur, preying on rich women. Enter Steve Martin as a poacher, who tried to horn in on MC's next target. So the crooked cop puts the lady wise and SM is locked up. The poacher leaves town, but returns when one of MC's marks spills some beans.
MC agrees to take him on as a pupil, teaches him some manners and dismays him by letting SM know that the profits of their scams have to be spent on culture. So SM quits but doesn't leave town. MC decides there isn't room in town for the two of them. So they have a scamming contest; first to extract $50K from the Soap Queen.
SM does a 'wheelchair war vet and grandma needing an operation' routine. The mark isn't rich, so they change the bet. But the 'mark' scams both of them. And next thing you know, the lady is back with a gang of mugs and she recruits MC & SM to her outfit.

Disaster Zone: Volcano In New York (2006) New York is having an energy crisis and there's cold weather on the way. Under the city, there's a gang led by Matt engaged in building tunnels to give the city all the water it will need and a crew drilling a geothermal energy shaft. Cooling water pipes start exploding in the water tunnel and members of the gang are burnt with scalding, acidic water. Lava breaks into the tunnel, which collapses just before the gang bugs out!
   The US Geological Survey is called in to investigate the earth tremors. The bosses on the ground aren't too bothered about 3 deaths. The geothermal project is under financial and time pressures. No one wants to believe Matt saw lava and his ex-wife, Susan, is on the USGS team.
   Volcanic gases wipe out 100 bums in Central Park. The FBI thinks it's a terrorist attack on the city's water supply. Lava under the Hudson River cooks fish and blows up a cabin cruiser. Matt & Sue sneak into Tunnel 3, Sue gets her foot burnt with acid water and starts believing Matt.
   Sue's boss fires her when she tells the mayor it's not terrorism. Earthquakes, exploding manholes and house fires in the suburbs. No surprise that the drilling project at the centre of all the trouble. The guy funding it gets cold feet but the mad scientist won't stop. Matt & Sue track down his warehouse, they're captured and they have to escape when lava erupts from the bore-hole.
   The city has to be evacuated. Matt decides to vent the lava into the sea via the tunnels under New York. Of course, the mad scientist confronts them underground, but the lava gets him and the city is saved!

Doctor Who: The Movie (1996) While taking Master's remains to Gallifrey, the Doctor had to make an emergency landing on Earth on December 31st, 1999. He was shot by gang bangers and the Master escaped from the TARDIS as a sort of snake-thing. The Doctor ended up in hospital but the surgeon, Amazing Grace, got lost inside his 2 hearts and he croaked; only to regenerate in the morgue.
Meanwhile, the Master had taken over a body as a temporary host until he could take over the Doctor's body. The Doctor, with amnesia, inflicted himself on Grace. The Master opened the Eye of Harmony in the TARDIS using a junior gang banger and the Doctor regained his memory. He told Grace he had to close the Eye or the Earth would be sucked through it!
The Doctor & the Master had a race to an atomic clock for a spare part, the Doctor closed the Eye but the Master had taken Grace over by then. He started to take over the Doctor's body but Grace hot-wired the TARDIS and put it into a temporal orbit. After a big battle, the Master ended up in the Eye and the Doctor undid his damage.

Dog Soldiers (2002) Private Cooper evades capture by a Special Forces unit for 22 hours and 47 minutes, but Captain Ryan rejects him because he won't kill a dog for no reason. Four weeks later, Cooper is in Scotland as part of a military exercise in an area where people are disappearing. A cow goes over a cliff and lands on the unit's camp in the night. Then they come across some massacred Special Forces and get some live ammunition.
   The sole survivor is Captain Ryan, who is badly injured. Their radio doesn't work. Ryan was hunting something. "There was only supposed to be one of them," he complains. Bruce's gun doesn't work and he is killed. After a chase through the evening, a woman in a Land Rover, Megan, rescues the unit from wolf-like creatures.
   They take refuge at a deserted house. The Land Rover goes up in flames and the creatures attack the house. Megan says they are under attack by werewolves and she thought the troops were there to deal with them. Cooper sticks the sergeant back together with superglue. Megan says she's a zoologist, she heard the stories, she came looking and she found evidence of werewolves.
   Ryan's wounds heal miraculously and he is tied up. The creatures attack the house. A plan to escape in another Land Rover flops and Joe is written off. Ryan says he was sent by Special Weapons Division to capture a werewolf for study. Then he turns into a werewolf and escapes.
   The troops realize they're in the werewolves' home. The sergeant's wounds heal miraculously and he realizes he's turning into a werewolf, too. Megan gets the unit to blow up the barn with a propane cylinder. But she turns out to be a werewolf. Mucho mayhem. The sergeant turns the kitchen into a gas bomb and blows up the werewolves.
   Cooper runs into Ryan and slays him with the solid silver dirk, which his girlfriend gave him. The film closes with a tabloid front page. The headline is 'England 5, Germany 1' (one of the soldiers was going on about missing the match) and there's a side headline saying: 'Werewolves ate my platoon'.

The Domino Principle (1977) stars Gene Hackman as Tucker, a gaolbird Vietnam vet in the decade after the Kennedy assassination. Richard Widmark gets him out of gaol and reunites him with his wife but the price is a job. Tucker is manipulated into getting his cellmate, Oscar, released too and he ends up in Costa Rica. When he says he won't pull the trigger, the plotters kidnap his wife and make sure the job goes down. And then the person who ordered the hit gets antsy and everyone, but every one of the little people, goes down like a row of dominoes.

Double Team (1997) Another outing for The Muscles From Brussels. Agent Jack Quinn does a final job crashing stolen plutonium out of Croatia to frustrate arch-villain Stavros then he retires. 3 years later, his wife is pregnant, Stavros returns and the US government wants him caught. Quinn gets some weapons from a freaky black guy but makes a total bog of catching Stavros 20 minutes in to the film, so lots of mayhem and Stavros Jr. is killed.
More mayhem in a maternity ward and Quinn wakes up at The Colony, where failures are stashed. His wife has been told he's dead and he has to be part of a think-tank if he wants to stay alive. Stavros takes charge of the career of sculptor Mrs. Quinn and lets her old man know it. Quinn escapes from the escape-proof island and his 'guardian' is sent after him to kill him.
Quinn is ambushed by Stavros' guys at his home. Mayhem in Rome after Quinn's arms dealer joins the party. Mrs. Quinn gives birth. Quinn has to take on a tiger then Stavros in a minefield to save his kid. Stavros, the tiger and the Colosseum get blown up and the arms dealer bamboozles the guardian to let Quinn get away.

Downfall (2004) is the story of the last days of the Third Reich, and features a version of Adolf Hitler with a very peculiar accent. The familiar story is played out with no surprises.
   In November 1942, Traudl Humps was picked by the Führer as his new secretary. Jump to April 20th, 1945, Traudl was now Frau Junge and the Russians were shelling Berlin on Hitler's birthday, the rats were fleeing the doomed city and Hitler was staying put. He gave up when the Russians surrounded the city, but he continued to weave stories of relief armies.
   Hitler handed round lethal pills on April 23rd. Everything was dropping to bits and people were going through the motions because they had nothing else to do; planning an heroic defence by Dad's Army and kids, and killing deserters and anyone who looked dodgy to the murder squads.
   Speer opened Traudl's eyes a bit by telling her what would happen to the Goebbels kids. Goering & Himmler jumped ship. The Führer dictated his legacy around getting married. When he killed himself, everyone lit up. There was half an hour of the film left once the funeral pyre had been lit.
   Frau Goebbels killed her kids while her husband postured and got his legacy sorted out. Everyone got the hell out of the bunker or blew their brains out. Traudl got away, and when she dared to look at a Russian soldier, he offered his mug of vodka to her instead of raping her. And she ended up riding into the distance on a bike with a stray kid.

DNA This film got 1 star and a diamond in the Daily Mail's Weekend magazine, which means that it's a cult film (which is 10 times better than a 2-star film and 100 times better than a 3-star film). The main bad guy is J�rgen Prochnow, the captain in Das Boot, who is a mad scientist. After some guff about curing every disease imaginable, we get "2 years later" and the mad scientist has revived an extinct monster while on the CIA's payroll. But he's really double-crossing The Company and offering his ultimate killing machine/weapon of war to foreign governments.
So a CIA lady with a suitcaseful of munitions is sent into the jungles of North Borneo to take him out, helped by a local doctor, whom the mad scientist shot last time we saw him, and some colourful natives. Next thing you know, the monster turns out to be an alien and the plot starts to look like a rip-off of Predator, the film starring Big Arnie and Jesse "The Body" Ventura, the ex-wrestler and sometime governor of Minnesota. And thereafter it's lot of bangs, lots of people getting chomped by the monster, explosions, bodies everywhere and the CIA gets the job done.

Dracula 2000 (2000) brings the story up to date as far as the pre-millennial year. A bunch of criminals crack the Van Helsing vault but they fail to find anything much. But they do stroll off with Dracula's coffin. So Professor Van Helsing's grandson (Christopher Plummer), a pensioner who injects himself with stuff extracted from leeches, pursues them. The thieves have the coffin on a plane when one of them works out how to open it.
   Everyone on the plane becomes a Dracula victim and the plane crashes near New Orleans, which is where Mary, Van Helsing's psychic daughter, is having visions of the rejuvenated count. Her priest is no help. Simon, Van Helsing's young assistant, finds the boss in the New Orleans morgue, re-killing the undead. They fail to kill Selena, the employee of Van Helsing who let the thieves into the vault.
   Van Helsing announces that Dracula is beyond the reach of death and he's the original Van Helsing, not a grandson. He has vowed not to die until he finds a way to write off Dracula. Simon gets to decapitate one of the undead after Dracula has a romp with Lucy, Mary's workmate. Mary has a long nightmare and finds her father's body. Simon has a real talent for dropping his vampire gun.
   Mary has her neck chewed and gets to drink the blood of Dracula, who is really Judas Iscariot. Mary pretends to chew Simon's neck and they get into a punch up with Dracula and 3 undead ladies. Dracula is hanged from a tacky Jesus cross, and he goes up in flames when the sun hits him.

Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995) is a pretty faithful romp through the Dracula story with jokes by Mel Brooks, Leslie Nielsen as the vampire count and Mel Brooks as Professor van Helsing. The jokes swing from trying too hard to gross and really funny. Best bit of the film? The fountains of blood when 'Poor Lucy' Westenra is staked in her coffin. A very entertaining effort. More!

Dragon Fighter starred TV's Superman as a new security officer at a secret establishment staffed by post Cold War Americans and Russians. Their mission is to perfect cloning to replace species driven into extinction by the human race. But the mad boss-man cloned a mysterious species from 1,000 years ago and sets a fire-breathing dragon loose in the facility!
So everyone gets written off but our hero and a lady scientist, and our hero has to find a way of helping the US airforce shoot down a dragon using modern missiles to save his own ass. And, of course, when the clean-up team arrives at the wrecked research station, they run into another clone!

Dragonquest (2009) The entire world will be engulfed in flame if a mere kid fails to find the Stone of Virtue and defeats The Dragon. Arkady, the Keeper, is put in the care of a Knight of the Brotherhood, who has a girl versed in the martial arts as his assistant. In fact, they have to collect a set of stones, the first of which is guarded by what looks like the Loch Ness Monster!
The bad guy, who embraced The Darkness, goes after the Keeper & his companions. A giant, but very tame, spider guards another stone. The forces of Darkness see off the Knight, the bad guy bamboozles Katya and he chucks the stone collection off a cliff.
Luckily, the power of the stone is within the Keeper, so Arkady is able to battle the head bad guy while his blue dragon is seeing off the fiery one. And the world is saved. Hooray!

Dragon Storm (2004) is set in Carpathia in 1190, when meteorites land and release fire-breathing dragons! So lots of flaming peasants staggering around. A king is burned out of his castle and he goes to a neighbour, planning to overthrow him. A hunter, a boffin, the daughter of an inventor of a ballista, who was killed by dragons, and the 2nd king's daughter form a sort of 7 Samurai taskforce (with some helpers).
Lots of mayhem, dragons shot out of the sky and people going up in flames before everyone ends up back at the 2nd king's castle. The dragons attack just as a coup is succeeding and all bad guys and the last dragon are zapped.

The Drowning Pool (1975) Paul Newman plays Lew Harper, a private eye from L.A., who's rousted by a corrupt police lieutenant in Louisiana on a job. Iris Devereau wants to know who wrote a letter to her husband about her infidelities. She suspects Rebus, the fired family chauffeur, who was having a fling with her appalling daughter. Harper is taken for a ride by wise guys working for Mr. Kilbourne, an oil man, who wants to drill on Devereau land.
   Olivia, the matriarch of the family, is murdered. The local police chief suspects Rebus. Harper follows the trail to New Orleans and finds that the wise guys are looking for an accounts book, which Rebus has. It contains details of Kilbourne's pay-offs. Rebus says he didn't kill Olivia. Bad guys, including the crooked lieutenant, run Harper off the road when he tries to turn Rebus in and Rebus ends up dead.
   The police chief closes the case and Iris wants Harper to stop digging. Harper deduces that Iris's daughter wrote the letter. After some Russian roulette to make the lieutenant talk, Harper confronts Kilbourne, who says he was using Rebus as an industrial spy, not an assassin. Mrs. K. gave the accounts book to Rebus so he could use it to blackmail her old man.
   Harper & Mrs. K. have to escape from an improvised prison; and Mrs. K. blows her husband away. Iris is found dead next; sleepers & booze. So Harper makes her scumbag daughter confess to killing both Olivia & Iris with the police chief listening. Shock, horror! He's the daughter's real father.

D-Tox (2002) FBI agent Ed Molloy (Sylvester Stallone) is chasing a serial killer, who is targetting cops with no discernable pattern. After killing another cop, the killer phones Molloy to tell him he's the next target, and by the way, the killer's about to do his wife in. The perp is spotted, Molloy goes after him but he gets away.
   3 months later, Molloy's boss hauls him out of a bottle and packs him off to a rehab centre at the back of beyond in the middle of winter. The place is run by a cop for cops, and it's full of misfits from both sides of the Atlantic. A guy is shown dead in an icy lake and Molloy's boss makes of bog of ice-fishing in the neighbourhood.
   The communications at the clinic go down, someone steals all the medication bottles and the male doctor in charge goes missing. Attention focusses on Jack, the psycho, who was given a job at the clinic. 2 guys go off for help so, of course, they run off the road and end up dead. That's when I realized it's the plot of Alien with Jenny, the lady doctor, as Ripley.
   Malloy finds that all the personal files have been stolen and burnt so that the infiltrator can't be identified. Everyone starts waving guns around and going nuts, and they lock Molloy up; but he gets out. The killer is impersonating the guy in the icy lake, and he's the cop-killer from earlier on. So Molloy has to save Jenny to make up for not saving his wife and he gets to make sure of the killer this time.