Mr. Wydey's Film Guide Letter E

Earthstorm (2006) An asteroid hits the Moon, cracking it wide open and knocking it out of its orbit enough disrupt Earth's climate. As rocks bombard Earth, it looks likely that a big chunk will break off the Moon and wipe out all life on Earth. A way to fix things was proposed by Lana's late father, but Victor, who has the President's ear, rubbished his theory that the Moon has an iron core.
   John, a demolition expert and damaged goods, gets a trip to the Moon with a cargo of nukes. But first, the shuttle Perseus has to be launched through a hurricane. The shuttle has to negotiate swarms of asteroids on the way to the Moon and the nukes start rattling around in the cargo hold.
   A fragment of Moon recovered from a meteor strike in Baltimore proves that Lana's dad was right and the shuttle has the wrong explosive cargo for sealing the split. John has to build a magnetic weapon from the nukes and the shuttle's nuclear engines.
   Houston suffers a power failure and loses contact with the shuttle to build up dramatic tension. But the huge magnetic pulse sticks the Moon back together and Victor has to admit he was wrong about Lana's dad's theory.

Edison (2005) The corrupt undercover cops of F.R.A.T., who cleaned up the town of Edison, kill a guy involved in the drug trade and frame one of his colleagues for the murder. Pollock, a pushy kid reporter, decides something doesn't add up in court. Raif, the black cop, has a conscience about the killing by Frank the Psycho. The D.A. doesn't want to know about the kid's allegations of corruption but his investigator takes an interest.
   Raif goes to the rescue when Frank & Co. put Pollock and his girlfriend in hospital. The fall guy is murdered in prison. The DA's guy reckons FRAT has stolen $12 million in drug money over 5 years and the boss of the unit is overpaying on contracts to local companies by 300-400%. Frank has his car blown up when he goes after the kid, who has been stashed by his editor.
   The kid tries to talk Raif into doing the decent thing. The FBI grabs the contents of FRAT's evidence store. Frank attacks Raif and the Captain shoots him when Frank pulls a gun. Raif gives Pollard the rest of his story and a warning that the guys he's about to destroy are relentless.
   The whole of FRAT, led by the Captain, goes after Pollard. Raif come to his aid with a bootful of weapons, and he kills all of the FRATs. Pollard's editor sinks the bent D.A. and Raif is allowed to walk and marry his fiancée.

El Mariachi (1992) Three hit men turn up at a small Mexican gaol; and come off second best. Azul, their target, goes after Moco, their boss, a former associate. He collects a guitar case full of weapons. Meanwhile, a mariachi wannabe, broke & also dressed in black, hits a small town. Azul arrives and shoots the place up while looking for Moco.
Naturally, the kid is mistaken for Azul. 4 killers go after him but he takes them out. He bamboozles shelter out of Domino, a lady who owns a bar and a pit bull. She gives him a job when she finds he really does have a guitar in his case. Azul turns up at the bar, he's ambushed, and he legs it with the kid's guitar case. The kid has to shoot more killers.
The kid is captured next time he shows his nose out of doors. He's not the guy, Moco says. Azul gets his guitar case back from Domino, who shows him where to find Moco. Moco shoots Domino and Azul loses a hostage. Moco shoots Azul. The kid returns and gets shot in the hand, so he plugs Moco. Then the Mariachi heads off into the future with a guitar case of weapons, Domino's dog & motorbike, and a hole in his hand.

The Empire Strikes Back (1980) has the look and feel of part 5 of a 12-part series. The story has a fairly arbitrary beginning, there is lots of plot development during the course of the film and it just sort of ends with no big bang and an implied 'to be continued'. Both sides in the struggle have their minor victories and reverses, and there is a lots going on to hold the viewer's attention. About the only thing you wish is that the guys in the white plastic armour would take cover a bit more often instead of just being targets.

End Of Days (1999) Arnold Schwarzenberger stars in this bogus millennium change drama set at the end of 1999. In 1979, the Pope is appalled to learn that a child is about to be born who will give birth to a destroyer. Christine York is born in New York and annointed with snake blood as the Catholic Church tries to find her and take her into protective custody.
   20 years later, New York streets blow up and a creature takes a human host. Ex-cop Arnie is thinking about killing himself, but he has a disgusting breakfast instead and gets on with his job at Striker Security. He has to protecting a banker (the guy who was taken over) from Thomas Aquinas, a lunatic priest & Vatican visionary, who has cut his own tongue out! Arnie and his partner find that Thomas has a picture of a girl in his fridge.
   Christine is having visions and seeing a shrink. The Evil One carves enough information on Thomas's body to let Arnie track Christine down – just in time to stop the Vatican's agents killing her. Arnie's partner is written off and Arnie has to take out some cops to save Christine from the Evil One. He goes to a church, where he is told a load of old fanny about the Devil taking over if he manages to mate with Christine in the last hour of the year before the next millennium starts [which is 2000, not 1999].
   The Evil One visits Arnie at home for some temptation. Then Arnie has to deal with his 'dead' partner, Papal assassins and bunch of zombies. A priest patches him up, Arnie stocks up with weapons and crashes the Evil One's party. The place goes up in flames and Arnie evades the Evil One temporarily after a train wreck in the subway.
   The zombies attack as Arnie & Christine hide in a church, which proceeds to explode in all directions. Arnie does some praying, which does no good, and the Evil One takes him over. But he has an answer to that and suddenly, it's midnight and too late for the Evil One. And also too late for Arnie.

Enemy of the State (1998) features Will Smith as a lawyer who falls foul of the NSA. An NSA boss thinks that he has a video of him having a Senator killed. Smith has to go on the run and he hooks up with Gene Hackman (a long way into the film) who is a disillusioned, ex-NSA agent. Bugged, watched by spy satellites and helicopters, shot at, beaten up; Smith keeps running and running until he is able to set the irresistible force of the NSA against an immovable object in an ingenious ending. Good stuff and well done.

Enter The Dragon (1973), is about a martial arts expert (Bruce Lee), who is sent to a private island belonging to a drug-dealing Chinese warlord type. He is there ostensibly to take part in a tournament but mainly to clobber everyone in sight, including his host, to avenge his sister's death.

Equilibrium (2002) is a construct film, which borrows heavily from Orwell's 1984, Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, the Matrix series, (probably by coincidence) the Jet Li film Hero, which also came out in 2002, and every special effects martial arts film ever made.
   Survivors of a 3rd world war in the early 21st century knew that mankind wouldn't survive a 4th world war. So an oppressive religious order was established to root out 'the true source of man's inhumanity to man – his ability to feel'. The Clerics have an abundance of well armed & armoured goons at their disposal and they have big battles with the Underground; a lot of them cartoon-incredible to the point of being silly.
   A couple of Clerics to a torch job on the Mona Lisa and other paintings. In this Stalinist society, there is a very Nazi flag, the people are harangued by giant video screens, Big Brother style, and everyone has to self-medicate with a drug to suppress feelings. But Cleric Partridge is hoarding books. So his partner, Cleric Preston, murders him and gets a new, black, wise-guy partner.
   Predictably, Preston dreams about his wife, who was murdered by the state with his help, stops taking the drug, sneaks a book away from a burning and rescues a cute puppy from a slaughter session; which leads to his having to kill a goon squad in the usual cartoon way. At the next mass murder of Underground people, Preston tries to save a group of them but his partner takes them out.
   Preston contacts the Underground. He is told he has to kill Father (a.k.a. Big Brother) then the Underground will blow up all the factories for the drug. His boss gives Preston the job of rooting out a traitor Cleric. Preston's plan follows the plot of Hero in that he makes himself a star to get within killing range of Father. His partner busts him so Preston frames him as the traitor.
   When he gets to the audience chamber, Preston finds that he's been tricked. Father died years before and he's just a computer construct, and his partner has been pulling Preston's strings. So lots more fighting with swords and comic-opera shooting with infinite bullets. Preston kills his partner and the real Big Brother, and shoots up the state broadcasting system. So revolution and the goon squads are massacred by the Underground.

Evolution (2001) is a thoroughly silly but enjoyable film. It begins with a bloke rehearsing for his fireman's exam and having his car trashed by a meteorite, which crashes into a cavern system. Two whacky college professors discover that the rock is full of life, which starts to evolve amazingly quickly. The US army takes the site over and steals all their research materials from Harry (the black guy) & Ira.
   They infiltrate the vast military complex, which has sprung up in just 3 weeks. They find the cavern system full of exotic life and Harry gets a bug in his suit! The creatures are escaping from the cavern system. One of them eats a scumbag on a golf course and provides Harry & Ira with something to study. The creatures, some full of teeth, aren't able to breath oxygen yet, but given some evolution . . .
   A flying, oxygen-tolerant monster takes a shoplifter for a ride in a mall. The greater Grand Canyon area is at risk and the monsters will take over the entire USA in just 2 months! And humans will become extinct. The aliens evolve into killer primates, so the governor of Colorado gives the military carte blanche. The general plans to use napalm but the professors discover that fire makes the creatures grow at a hell of rate!
   The napalm attack generates a creature the size of a mountain; but our heroes discover that selenium in Head & Shoulders shampoo will kill it, especially if applied as an enema. So the world is saved. Daft but fun.

Eraser (1996) Big Arnie, James Coburn & James Caan are the familiar faces. Arnie plays John Kruger, a federal marshall working for witness protection. Everything kicks off with his staging of the 'deaths' of a gangster and his wife to keep them alive until it is time for the guy to testify in court. Kruger tells them, "Lie low, or else." And, "Smile. You've just been erased."
   The next job is Lee, a female executive at an arms manufacturer. The company, in cahoots with the Undersecretary for Defense, is building superweapons and planning to sell them to the Russian Mafia. Lee's sting operation for the FBI is blown by her boss, but after she has made copies of secret files. The Feds extract her and hand her over to Kruger, but she insists on going home.
   A traitor in the FBI swaps one CD for a harmless one but Lee made another. But when she tries to read the files, she sets of an alarm as she discovers the disk can be read only on the company's system. Kruger blows up Lee's house when the bad guys attack with super-guns. He stashes Lee in Chinatown in New York.
   Fellow marshall (and traitor) Deguern (James Caan) recruits Kruger to a plan to rescue a witness, which fails as Deguern shoots her. His real target is Lee. A suspicious Kruger tells Deguern she's in Atlanta. He is drugged on a plane but he manages to escape, skydiving after a parachute, and manages to avoid being taken out by the plane! Deguern finds out that Kruger is planning to meet Lee at the New York Zoo, so lots of shooting there and Kurger feeds the bad guys, and also almost himself, to the aligators.
   Kruger & Lee infiltrate her company disguised as paramedics with the help of the guy, whose life Kruger saved at the start. They find that a shipment of superguns is about to leave for Russia from the docks. So lots of shooting, exploding, mayhem and agonizing there.
   The Undersecretary & Deguern aren't locked up after being charged with treason and a van containing Lee & Kruger blows up. The Undersecretary & Deguern are telling each other that they didn't order the assassinations when Kruger parks their car in front of a train and phones Deguern to tell him he's just been erased.

Escape From New York (1981, John Carpenter) A 400% rise in the crime rate in 1988 prompted the US to turn Manhattan Island into a walled off maximum security prison with no guard, just inmates. Once you go in, you don't come out, and all escapers are zapped by the helicopter patrols.
   In the present day, Air Force One is hijacked so the president (Donald Pleasance) bales out in an escape pod and just happens to land in New York. Worse, the clock is ticking for him to make a speech at a summit with Russia & China. Even worse, the escape pod is empty when a rescue force lands.
   An ex-Special Forces bank robber called Snake Pliskin, who's about to be shipped to the prison, is given the chance to recover the president, or a cassette recording of his speech, in exchange for a pardon. But the local police chief (Lee van Cleef) has him injected with a mini-bomb as an insurance policy.
   A yappy cab driver (Ernst Borgnine) tells Pliskin that the president is in the hands of the Duke of New York. Pliskin gets to work with Brain, a.k.a. Harold, who ran out on him 4 years before. The briefcase is empty when Pliskin gets his hands on it. The Duke keeps outsmarting Pliskin & Harold, and Pliskin has to fight, and kill, the Duke's champion.
   Eventually, everyone ends up in the taxi on the mined 69th Street bridge. Only Pliskin & the president get to the wall, and the Duke catches up in his limo. The president gets to blow the Duke away and Snake has his bomb neutralized. But as a final 'up yours' to the man, he hands over the wrong cassette and the summit gets to listen to some music.

Executive Decision (1996) has an ingenious solution to getting troops aboard a hijacked Jumbo jet in mid-air. They used Remora, a vehicle intended for space shuttle rescues. Only the transfer goes horribly wrong and the commander of the troops and half the equipment are lost. Hercules Parrot (sans 'tache) is the leader of Moslem fanatics, who are planning to release nerve gas over the US as a pre-9/11 assault. The assault team recovers from its rocky start, however, and we get lots of tension and a dead dramatic ending!

Exit Wounds (2001) The vice-president's motorcade was shot to bits on a bridge in Detroit but luckily, a local cop called Boyd (Steven Segal) was there to save his ass and chuck him in the river, out of the way. Boyd's reward was a posting to the sink-hole 15th Precinct. The lady commander sent him to Rageoholics Unanymous then Boyd busted a drug buy, only to find he'd busted an undercover cop called Montini.
   The locker room assumed Boyd was working for the commander to root out corruption as she came from IAD. Boyd walked in on a robbery at the property store, and the bad guys got away with 50 kilos of heroin worth $5 million. Boyd then demolished a club run by the drug buyers and his partner, George, was well beaten up.
   Surprise, Montini turned out to be a dirty cop! He and 5 other cops raided the property store and their plan for moving the heroin involved impregnating T-shirts with it. The dirty cops grabbed Boyd but he took out most of them while handcuffed in their van as it charged through Detroit's streets.
   Surprise! The 'bad guy' turned out to be a black Internet mogul, who was collecting evidence on the corrupt cops who'd framed his brother and put him in gaol. Boyd went to the commander, but the bad guys shot up her car and she ended up head-butting the windscreen in a crash.
   Boyd did a spectacular jump over a car, which was charging at him along a cul-de-sac. Then he went to his old boss for help. Big mistake, the old boss was running the heroin racket. So the film ended with a massive shoot-out and punch-up, and gruesome endings for the bad guys.

Eye of the Beast (2007) recycles a well-worn plot. A couple canoodling in a boat on Fells Island lake in Canada are attacked by a giant beast. Dr. Leyland of NORA is sent to investigate and meets Catriona, the local fisheries officer. The fishermen blame the local Injuns for the drop in their catch and are uniformly stroppy. Next, a tourist is grabbed on the lake shore behind the backs of his family.
   Dr. Leyland and the fishermen find the remains of the boat and the boy just alive enough to gasp a warning about a monster before he croaks. The fishermen make the bits disappear because if there's a giant squid in the lake, that's it for the fishing. But Catriona stops it anyway after the dead girl's leg is found. The guys back at NORA don't want to know about a giant freshwater squid.
   Leyland finds out that Catriona saw the squid kill her father when she was 7. No one believed her. A fisherman is attacked but manages to hack off the squid's tentacle. Leyland takes an expedition onto the lake to kill the squid, knowing that NORA will shut down the fishery to study it. A lady at NORA sees the squid on a satellite photograph!
   Having got the Injuns and white fishermen to co-operate, Leyland gets the Injuns killed when the whites' boat breaks down. The squid attacks that boat and starts killing the crew. But Catriona gives the beast an eyeful of electrified harpoon.