Mr. Wydey's Film Guide Letter G

Gattaca (1997) Jerome Morrow, whom Gattaca is sending on a 1-year mission to Titan, is faking all sorts of tests because he's an imposter. He's really Vincent, who was conceived from passion rather than genetics, and he has all sorts of defects. He has a brother, Anton, who's a product of genetic selection.
   Genetic discrimination is illegal but widespread, so the only job he can get is as a cleaner; until he enlists the help of Adrian Monk, who introduces him to genetically perfect Jerome, who broke his back out of the country and who's stuck in a wheelchair. Vincent uses Jerome's blood, urine, hair, skin cells, etc. to beat tests at Gattaca.
   The Mission Director for Titan is killed and one of Vincent's eyelashes is found in a corridor near the crime scene. So the In-Valid former cleaner becomes the prime suspect. The 2 Jeromes have to get round the increasingly intrusive police investigation when one of the cops decides that the killer is an imposter who's still working at Gattaca.
   Irene, the bogus Jerome's less genetically perfect girlfriend, helps out and the killer is exposed eventually. The persistent cop is Anton, Vincent's brother, and Vince shames him into letting him carry on with the Titan mission as he was just a red herring in the murder hunt. And he gets a ride to Titan with some help from an unexpected quarter.

Ghost Busters (1984) A gang of psychic investigators come across a real ghost in a New York library just before their funding is cut off. They have no idea what to do but Ray, the techie, reckons they should capture it and hold it indefinitely. They set up their own business in a derelict fire station. Their first client is Dana, who has a ghost in her fridge; but Dr. Pete is more interested in getting her into the bedroom.
   The next job is at a hotel, where the ballroom is trashed but the ghost is captured. Business picks up and they recruite a new guy. An Environment Protection Agency jobsworth takes an interest in them. Something bad is about to happen to New York. Dana is grabbed by the thing in her kitchen and Lewis, her geeky neighbour (the future Austin Powers), is possessed by a demon.
   Judgement Day is about to happen, and the EPA jobsworth letting all the ghosts out of safe storage and having the Ghostbusters busted makes a bad situation worse. Ray finds that Dana's building is designed to draw in psychic turbulence. The mayor gets the Ghostbusters out of gaol to save the city. They suit up and head for Dana's building, which now has a temple on top.
   The building starts coming apart. A marshmallow man sets about New York; until he's toasted. And the Ghostbusters come up with a radical solution to zapping the problem, and the city is saved!

Ghosts of Mars (2001) A commission of inquiry on Mars in 2176 questions the sole survivor from a train. The lieutenant says she was part of a detail sent to retrieve a murderer, Williams, from a mining colony. Only almost everyone there was dead and a scientist told her that a dormant Martian organism had woken up and it was possessing people. After a huge battle with zombies, a gang of military, prisoners and survivors was trapped in a building. The scientist described finding an ancient tunnel at the mine and releasing, by accident, something trapped inside it.
The lieutenant became possessed but her sergeant remembered the lieutenant had a stash of mind-bending pills which, he hoped, 'would mess with anything in there'. The lieutenant recovered and told the others that the Martians wouldn't rest until all the invaders from Earth were dead. Another big battle and the survivors made the train. Then the lieutenant decided they had to go back and blow up the power plant to stop the zombies and show them Mars wasn't theirs any more.
Just Williams and the lieutenant were left after they set the power plant to blow. Williams got off the train after handcuffing the lieutenant, and that's what she tells the inquiry, which brings us up to date with events. Then there's an alarm and Williams turns up again to fight at the lieutenant's side as, we assume, more zombies are on the rampage.

Gladiator (2000) – You didn't see it in a cinema, and you didn't buy it on video or DVD because you knew it would be on telly eventually. So what's it all about?
Maximus, a Roman general, is made the emperor's heir in Germania. So Commodus, the mad, bad son, kills his dad and the general's family and has the man himself sold as a slave. Olly Reed turns Maximus into a gladiator and takes him to Rome so that he can get his revenge. Nice job of rebuilding the Colosseum, lots of blood spurting in slow motion in the arena. David Hemmings is a real hoot as a sort of ring announcer. And Commodus gets his in the arena (he was strangled in private by a wrestler in real life).

Glass Trap (2005) Staff disappeared at a nursery, Agent Elizabeth from the Dept. of Agriculture arrived to track illegally imported flora and some infested trees were delivered to a skyscraper. A set of flayed bones (Miguel) was found at the nursery. The building's occupants included Ms Highsmith of Hooray!, a supermarket mag, and her PA, a fashion photographer on the roof and an industrial spy, who clobbered the janitor. Giant ants started attacking people!
Ms Highsmith took out an ant with her putter. Agent Liz fainted over another body at the nursery. The burglar's daughter, parked in the garage, chased the ants away with heavy metal, then the batteries in her boom box gave out and the security guy was killed. Agent Liz announced that the ants had been exposed to plutonium from Iraq and they were giant, angry and radioactive.
Most of the people in the building made for the roof, most got away but the spy screwed up the escape system and was splatted on the ground. A Dept. of Ag 'expert' shot one of his own men when the guy was attacked by a giant ant and he was cool with killing any people in the building if his DDT took out the ants. So the few survivors had 2 threats to flee from!

The Glimmer Man (1996) Steven Segal plays Jack Cole, a bead-wearing cop from New York, who has to track down The Family Man, a serial killer in L.A. who kills families, with the aid of Jim, a tall, bald, black partner. Cole tackles a suicidal kid with a gun in a classroom and snubs his step-father. Big mistake as Mr. Devreau sets his Russians on Cole.
   Cole's ex-wife is done in by a killer who shoots his victims then arranges them in a crucifixion pose; but a pro pretending to be the Family Man. Jack finds the Family Man in a church and kills him after he says he didn't kill the first Mrs. Cole. The Captain turns Cole over to IAB and suspends him when his fingerprints are found planted at the crime scene.
   Cole looks for a connection between a dead Russian woman and Devreau, who turns out to be selling Russian chemical weapons to terrorists. He's also in league with Mr. Smith of the CIA (Brian Cox with a very strange American accent) who recruited Jack Cole in Vietnam to a black operations outfit.
   So lots of shooting and martial arts and gratuitous violence as the cops follow their trail to the copycat serial killer, lots of people going through windows singly and in pairs, a spot of abseiling when Jim goes through a window near the top of a tall building, a sense that Mr. Segal is going over the top deliberately in his action scenes, Smith is shot up a bit, the bad guys are vanquished Mrs. Cole's killer ends up in a crucifixion pose on some railings.

Go West Back in 1940, when we British were doing the Battle of Britain, what are the Yanks doing? Well, the Marx Brothers were making this film. The plot involves crooks trying to get control of a piece of land on which a railroad will be built and we get the usual mixture of gags, singing, piano and harp playing, and fun and games with a train in the final race to New York.

Godzilla (1998) "Dreary; dismal monster mish-mash; hokey man-in-the-lizard-suit monster movie; hugely hyped, hugely overblown". It is hard to find anyone with a good word for this remake but the scene where the worm-guy encounters the footprint – by realizing he is standing in it – is very well done. And the claw-marks on the beached ship are impressive. The jabroni on the landing stage is good and the monster's footsteps making the cars jump in New York is a hoot. And the Buster Keaton gag where the monster doesn't step on the cameraman. Zapping the famous buildings in New York when the monster ducks missiles is also fun.
   It turns out that the monster, created by French nuclear tests in the Pacific, is the first of its kind but pregnant and it is in New York looking for somewhere to build a nest. The US military doesn't buy the nest theory and the worm guy gets the sack team. He is promptly recruited by a bunch of French Secret Service agents, who want to zap the monster to clean up their country's mess.
   The US navy takes over when the monster leaps into the river. The first submarine shoots itself with its own torpedoes but the second hits the monster. Meanwhile, the worm-guy, his former college sweetheart, the mad cameramen and the French secret agents find the monster's nest in the wreck of Madison Square Garden. After counting the eggs, they realize they don't have enough explosives to blow all of them up – but that becomes academic when the eggs started hatching!
   The hatchlings chasing the humans is just like something out of Jurrasic Park, except that more humans get eaten. Then the air force takes out MSG and the hatchlings. Next thing you know, Godzilla is back – it is just stunned by the torpedoes – and determined to catch up with our heroes, who are fleeing in a yellow cab. The monster chews the cab briefly but it gets caught up in the rigging of the Brooklyn Bridge and a dozen missiles from the air force eventually finish it off. But guess what? The air force has missed one egg at MSG and it is hatching! Wow! What a twist!

Goldeneye (1995) A black-clad figure does a swan-dive down the face of a dam! 007 James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) teams up with 006 (Sean Bean) to save the world from the Russians. 006 doesn't make it, 007 jumps off a cliff to sky-dive to an aircraft and the weapons plant blows up. 9 years later, Bond has to sort out the St. Petersburg Mafia, who have stolen the last word in military helicopters. They use it to steal the Goldeneye gadget while using it to wipe out a Russian space control centre; from which just one female techician escapes alive.
The bean-counting woman posing as 'M' sends Bond to retrieve the weapon. He gets to romp with a psychopathic female helicopter pilot. Surprise! 006 isn't dead after all, he's working for the bad guys. Bond nicks a tank for a crash through St. Pete when a Cossack general strolls off with the space base technician. The general takes her to his private train, which heads off at high speed. But somehow, Bond gets his tank ahead of it for a crash.
006 and the pilot escape in the train's helicopter. Bond's next stop is Cuba and another tussle with the psychopath. 006 is planning to use Goldeneye to loot the Bank of England electronically then wipe out all electronic equipment in the city with an EM pulse. There's a big bang in the control room, Bond & Mr. Bean slug it out on a huge radio dish and the Yanks arrived when it's all over. Bond and the Russian tech end up at Guantanamo, which wasn't a dirty word in 1995.

The Great Dictator (1940) starring Charlie Chaplin is not to be missed. Chaplin plays both the Hitler figure and a Jewish barber in the ghetto, who served his country in the Great War and spent the period of the dictator's rise in hospital with loss of memory. It is a well crafted film, which drags a bit when Mr. Chaplin is doing his 'turns' but as he is the star, there's nothing to be done about that. The portrayal of the Mussolini figure is a hoot and the uplifting speech at the end has a hollow ring to anyone who knows what happened between 1940, when the film is released, and 1945.

The Great Los Angeles Earthquake (1990) Dr. Claire of the USGC finds that a new fault in California is about to let go right under L.A. because she had a new theory which will let her predict earthquakes. The build-up exactly matches the history of another earthquake in Mexico. But her husband is a sub-contractor for a multi-million-dollar development and he doesn't want his wife rocking the boat and losing him his contract.
   Claire gets tied up with a TV journalist, who runs a shock-horror show. On Day 7, there's a Richter 5.7 quake; but Claire's theory says there's a bigger one to come. The politicians don't want her to go public and the attitude at the top is that they should treat the earthquake like a meteor strike; do nothing beforehand and clear up afterwards. One of Claire's staff leaks the news that there's a Big One coming and the city goes into panic mode.
   There's gridlock on the highways and the airports are jammed. Cue the earthquake. L.A. and the surrounding area are wiped out by a Richer 8.0 quake and a R7.1 aftershock. Dr. Claire deserts the city command centre to go home; where her stupid daughter has got herself trapped in their flooding basement. The staff of the control center have to break their way out after more aftershocks.
   There will be no help from outside for up to a week? Which idiot wrote that? No road, no airports, no railways, but what about helicopters? But the epic peters out on a note of doom and gloom with a TV station in New York getting intermittent reports from the tearful shock-TV guy.

Ground Control (1998) Keifer Sutherland plays Jack, an air-traffic controller who quit after a useless pilot crashed on his watch in Chicago. 5 years later, on New Year's Eve, he gets dragged back to action at Phoenix, where the controllers are dropping to bits mentally, there's a guy called Murray trying to get them suspended for not being up to the job, the lady running the airport is cheapskating on the equipment budget and the equipment is going to hell.
   Oh, yes; and there's mucky weather coming in, the Pacific coast is closed and a whole bunch of aircraft need to land at Phoenix. Cruise (a very young Dr. Wilson from House MD) is one of the controllers and he has it in for Jack, who freezes when he has a Chicago flashback and has to be rescued.
   The power supply starts failing, screwing up radio, radar & ILS. A dozy Indian pilot doesn't manage to crash into anyone, but he has a near miss with an airliner, which loses its radio & hydraulics after a lightning strike. The captain is just resigning himself to crashing in the desert when Jack comes up with a brilliant idea.
   He decides that the plane can steer to the runway using its engines to make turns. Cruise is thrown off the job for being stroppy. The airliner gets its radio working and Jack freaks out a bit again. The plane goes off the radar & silent for dramatic effect. But it eventually gets down in one piece.

Ground Zero (2000) Southern California is being shaken by a swarm of earthquakes, which are getting stronger instead of diminishing. Divorced seismologist Kim is sent by her boss Burt to a shack out in the wilds to monitor the equipment there. This is 11 years after her dad was killed by an earthquake. She takes Justin, her 'orrible kid. There are bad guys in the area because G-Corp is testing small nuclear weapons for sale to bad guys.
Dramatic cracks open up, breaking the only access road and the bad guys are jamming Kim's satellite phone. She rescues Mike from a tree when his plane crashes. He says he's working for the NSA, but he turns out to be a mercenary working for a G-Corp rival to man-hater Kim's disgust.
G-Corp plans to test a 2-MT nuke then a 6-MT one 10 minutes later. Kim thinks this will crack the fault line wide open. Husband Robert and boss Burt go into the wilds to find Kim & the kid, everyone ends up being chased by G-Corp's soldiers, Robert has to knock one of them over a cliff and Mike sabotages the test. He's grabbed but Burt & Co. rescue him. G-Corp is busted and Kim & Robert get back together again.