Mr. Wydey's Film Guide Letter H

Half Past Dead (2003) features Steve Seagal as an undercover FBI agent, who ends up in New Alcatraz, where a bloke who stole $200M in government gold is about to be executed (Detective Mick Belker from Hill Street Blues). Enter the bad guys to shoot the place up and capture him. Only Mr. Seagal rains on their parade. Our TV ran out of bullets twice but we are able to fill it up during the adverts.

Hands of a Murderer (1990) is a TV film which features the Equalizer (Edward Woodward) as Sherlock Holmes, Magnum's butler as Dr. Watson, Superintendent Dalziel as Colonel Booth, the sinister pre-MI5 bloke and Anthony Andrews as a pleasingly lizard-like Professor Moriarty.
   On 1900/04/12, the Professor escapes from the gallows at Newgate prison and Sherlock Holmes takes a pop at the inept Inspector Lestrade. Mycroft Holmes tries to get his brother to work with Col. Booth, the head of security, to avert a war. Holmes turns down the chance to plug a leak from Mycroft's office.
   The leak is being hypnotized by Moriarty's girlfriend. Mr. Stubb strolls off with a coded document and Moriarty, in the pay of a Prussian master spy, kidnaps a surprisingly skinny Mycroft to get the key for the cypher. Mycroft bamboozles the girlfriend and lays a trap for Stubbs, the safe-cracker. So Moriarty calls on Holmes to exchange threats.
   The girlfriend gets the secret from Mycroft eventually and Watson sets Holmes on the right track. Col. Booth gives himself away as a bad guy. The police invade Moriarty's very elegant den but he gets away and Holmes is blown up.
   No, it's all a trick to get Moriarty to the funeral for a chase in carriages. Moriarty goes into the river with his girlfriend but the bodies are never found. And Holmes discovers that his biggest fan is none other than Queen Victoria.

Hard Rain (1998) is an extremely wet film set in a town near a dam, which is in danger of collapsing. The place has been evacuated, and that includes the cash in the bank. The armoured truck crewed by Tom and his Uncle Charlie gets stuck, thieves turn up to rob it, Uncle Charlie is killed and Tom hides $3 million in the graveyard. The thieves steal boats and jet-skis to chase Tom in the flooded town.
Tom ends up locked in a cell at the sheriff's office. Luckily the lady doing stained glass windows for the church, Karen, rescues him just after the water reaches the roof of his cell! They end up in the home of a pair of crazy old coots with guns. The thieves catch up with Tom again and he finds that Uncle Charlie was in league with them.
Tom has to take the thieves to the money; but he finds it gone. The sheriff is out of a job after losing an election, he sees the cash as a leaving bonus and he and his allies wipe out most of the bad guys. They also try to exterminate Tom, Karen and the head thief. The old dam collapses and there's lots of shooting, in which the sheriff gets his. And the head thief is allowed to escape with one bag of cash.

Hard Target (1993) Down South, there's an outfit scaring up ex-military derelicts for rich people to hunt. The daughter of one of them (her out of Witchblade with the eyebrows) goes looking for her dad, whom she's not seen for 20 years after her parent divorced, in New Orleans. Jean-Claude van Damme saves her from being robbed, and worse, and offers to find her father for a fee. The police come up with a body and van Damme proves it was murder.
   The gang becomes interested in the Muscles from Brussels as a target. They wipe out their bent pathologist, who is being harassed by a lady detective, and another derelict gets to be the subject of the last hunt in New Orleans. The client ends up dead and the prey is shot down in a street full of people.
   The gang writes off their recruiting agent and the cop next. The Muscles takes out some of the stooges, then takes a ride on a freight train with his employer. The head bad guy (Lance Hendriks) takes a gang of hunters (at $750K a head) into the bayou after them. The Muscles' bootlegger uncle joins in, and blows up his home and distilling operation to take out some stooges.
   The Muscles is chased by helicopters and motorbikes, and ends up in an old works full of carnival stuff and flammable liquids. Lots of shooting and explosions. The uncle and the young lady join in and the HBG gets a grenade down his pants!

Hard To Kill (1990, Steven Segal) 1983 in L.A. Someone is hiring gangsters to kill a senator, undercover cop Mason Storm gets some film and audio then he's chased away. Dirty cops shoot up his home, taking out his wife but not his kid, and plant cash & drugs. Storm dies for a while in the hospital and O'Malley, a lieutenant from IAD, decides he should stay dead officially.
   Storm comes out of a coma in 1990 with a big beard. A scumbag killer shows up but he's able to escape with help from a nurse, who stashes him in her house-sitting job. Storm trains himself into a one-man wrecking crew. O'Malley tells Storm his kid is still alive. Wise guys follow the nurse. O'Malley tells Storm he quit the job when bad guys ran his mother off the road.
   Storm realizes that a Senator Trent his his mystery voice. Bent cops shoot the house-sit to bits. Storm invades his old home to recover his camera. The bent cops are bugging everything and they find out that Storm's kid is with O'Malley.
   Storm runs from the bent cops. They take out O'Malley but Storm gets the kid. Storm calls on the senator at his mansion and takes out his goons. Then he has the senator busted instead of killing him as that would be a worse fate.

Hell's Rain (2007) Loadsa meteorites are heading for North America. One hits the small town where the lady mayor is haunted by visions of her dead son so she's planning to move to Chicago. When more meteorites hit, the mayor forces her gloomy doctor husband back to work in the ER. There are zillions more meteorites on the way, and the town's power plant is taken out.
Highway 40 is cut so everyone is stuck in the town in the Colorado mountains. The mayor talks strikers back to work to save her daughter from a gas leak at her place of work; but she's skiving off with her boyfriend, who ends up pinned down by a tree. The rocks are bits of a single meteorite, which will go off like an atom bomb if it hits!
The mayor goes on the radio to tell everyone they have 35 minutes left. A promised rescue helicopter for 10 people is cancelled because the town isn't important enough. But the big bang turns out to be a phut. So everyone survives, the strikers get their contract and the mayor is re-elected and doesn't go to Chicago.

Hercules and the Lost Kingdom (1994) Kevin Sorbo plays the son of Zeus and a mortal mother. He gets a summons to Troy and collects a girl who's about to be sacrificed, and a slave who won't take "Get lost!" for an answer, along the way.
   The girl turns out to be the daughter of the king of Troy and she should have been sacrificed on Hera's orders. Sinister figures are trying to kill the princess, and she & Herc have to survive being swallowed by the Loch Ness monster on the way to Troy.
   The people of Troy have lost their city and they're living in the woods. The king croaks after being reunited with his daughter. Herc leads an assault force through a secret tunnel, and they have to fight the masked warriors, which deflate when killed.
   Meanwhile, the bad guys try to sacrifice the princess, Hercules does battle with their leader, the princess is saved and the Trojans get their city back. Hooray!

Hercules In New York (1969) is Arnold Strong's first film [he's b.k.a. Arnold Schwarzenberger] Hercules is blasted off Mount Olympus by Zeus for being cheeky. He lands in the sea and he's hauled aboard by a ship heading for New York. There, he hooks up with a lowlife pretzel seller and a university professor and his daughter. Herc goes into the grappling game and defies Zeus when the head God orders him home again.
Zeus sends Nemesis after Herc and Juno tells her to slip Herc a potion which will take away his divine strength. Meanwhile, mobsters have taken over Herc's contract and Pluto is betting that he will lose his next match, which turns out to be a weight-lifting contest with Monstro the Magnificent.
Herc finds a chariot to pursue the mobsters, who are chasing the professor and his daughter. The wheels come off the chariot. Atlas and Samson sneak down to New York to help out. Herc goes home from the top of the Empire State Building and Zeus heads down to grown level for a while.

Hero (2002, English sub-titles) Jet Li plays a Chinese 'Man With No Name' in the 7th Century, at a time when the Qin kingdom had not yet swallowed up its neighbours to create a Chinese empire. Mr. Nameless got to meet the Qin king on the strength of having seen off 3 assassins. But his story unravelled and the king decided that Mr. Nameless was there as an assassin.
The tale of quests for revenge reconsidered in the light of the good of the country is full of leaping about and martial-arts battles, and colour co-ordinated tableau as stories unfold and layers of truth emerge. There's a cast of thousands at times and the special effects are very well done. 4 stars and well worth it!

Hero and The Terror (1988) 2 dozy cops strolled into the lair of a crazy killer without calling for back-up and Danny O'Brien (Chuck Norris) barely survived an encounter with The Terror. The newspapers called him The Hero and Simon Moon ended up in a looney bin. 3 years later, Danny had got his shrink pregnant after 6 months' therapy and she was moving in with him (but marriage off the list).
   Surprise! The Terror escaped from the bin and drove his getaway vehicle through a fence and over a 400 foot cliff into the Snake River. He was written off as dead but no body was found. Then the mayor of L.A. poured $14 million into reviving a derelict area, and a gala do was held at the theatre, in which Moon had taken refuge. A starlet had her neck snapped but Danny said it wasn't The Terror to please the mayor and prevent copycat killings.
   Kate started having her baby. The cop staking out the theatre at Danny's request shed his radio & gun before doing some running; and ran into The Terror. Danny got part way into Moon's secret, then he spotted his hideout when looking at the theatre's plans. So he steamed in.
   Det. Mike to him to wait for back-up. Danny & Moon had a battle in almost complete darkness, so not much to be seen most of the time. The Terror took a dive through a skylight, and The Hero ended up marrying his shrink.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005) is a remake of the highly successful radio show and the British TV version.
   A dolphin display and a crap theme tune to start. They've made Ford Prefect black (and looking a bit like Huggy Bear) for no apparent reason. The incidental music is a heavy diluted version of the original scores for the radio & TV versions. Stephen Fry ain't no Peter Jones as The Book, the graphics of which are surprisingly crude.
   The Vogon's aren't bad. Zaphod Beeblebrox doesn't have 2 heads? Yes, there's another lurking, and so is his third arm. Marvin is a midget which is mostly head and looks like one of Darth Vader's white plastic armoured soldiers, which has shrunk in the wash.
   The script has been messed about a lot and some new stuff has been stuck in, presumably to stretch it to 100 minutes. So the guys end up on Vogsphere, rescueing Trisha, instead of going directly to Megrathea. They do a walk-by of the original Marvin on Vogsphere. The back to the script, the Earth rebuilt, but they've mucked up the ending.

The Hive (2007) A meteor hits a South-East Asian island, turning the local ants into a killer mob. Thorax is called in to stick it to the ants over the objections of Dr. Clare, who believes the ants have become self-aware and shouldn't be killed. The ants fight back and one of them invades Bill's head. But they are stopped eventually.
   A new swarm of 200 million ants, 3x bigger than the last one, can form ant tentacles! And it includes lots of species instead of just one. Bill & Cortez are lured into a trap and Cortez is eaten. The ants then invade the Thorax base camp. Then they let the bug guy & Dr. Clare know they want to talk; they demand the island.
   The human government says 'No way!' even though the ants have a young girl prisoner. They can have part of the island or be nuked! Crazy Bill goes into the ants' lair with his boss & Dr. Clare. He's got a bomb, so that's it for the ants and the alien controlling them heads back into space.
   The local bosses decide, "Nothing happened here. No alien, no spaceship. We will protect the people by telling them nuffink."

Hollywood Homicide (2003) is a comedy starring Harrison Ford, who looks much too old to be Joe, a working cop, who does real estate on the side. Joe & his young partner, K.C., who wants to be an actor instead of a cop, investigate the slaying of a bunch of rappers. (What's the crime? Ed.) Joe is trying to shift a millstone of a house, in which all his assets are tied up.
   The assassins are capped by a cop working for the club's security firm. Benny Mako of Internal Affairs is causing trouble for Joe & K.C. because Joe embarrassed him 2 years before and Joe is having an affair with Benny's ex (Lena Olin). Joe & the kid bust a gut busting a suspect, who's almost wiped out in a drive-by shooting.
   K.C.'s mom says the rappers were being ripped off by Mr. Surtain, their producer, and killed as a warning to other potential deserters. The kid's dad was killed on an undercover operation involving the dirty cops Wasley & Benny. Joe & K.C. are busted but make fools of their interrogators. Joe keeps getting calls about a major real estate deal while chasing Surtain all over the place.
   K.C. gets to do some acting before blowing some (non-lethal) holes in Wasley. Meanwhile, Joe traps Surtain on a roof and chucks him off into a dumpster. Benny is busted while trying to bust Joe & K.C., and the kid gets to do some ham acting at the end.

Hooper (1978, Burt Reynolds) A middle-aged stuntman, who gets along on pain-killers, feels unappreciated then the 'Young Sonny Hooper' hits town. The kid (Jan-Michael Vincent) parachutes in to a benefit do to get himself noticed. There's a huge battle in a club afterwards. Roger, the director of Hooper's film, gives Ski, the kid, a stunt.
Hooper's doctor tells him his spine is shot and he could end up paralysed or even dead. Roger puts more stunts into the script. Hooper & the kid come up with the World's Biggest Gag. Jacko (Brian Keith), the guy Hooper replaced and the father of Hooper's girlfriend (Sally Field) ends up in hospital after a stroke as an awful warning.
Hooper decides to quit after the big stunt. Then he calls it off, but not for long, so his girlfriend says goodbye, but she's back on set for the finale of the film. Sonny & Ski drive through mayhem and make the 300-foot jump in their rocket car. Then Hooper decks Roger.

Hot Shots! (1991) Airplane meets Top Gun meets Police Squad meets Police Academy. The US navy wants Topper Harley (Charlie Sheen) back for a top-secret mission after chucking him out. Lloyd Bridges play an admiral without 2 brain cells to rub together. Topper falls for the French shrink, who thinks he should be grounded, and she's the girlfriend of another pilot, who blames Topper's dad for his father's death. Washout and Dead Meat are also on the roster.
There's an aircraft manufacturer up to no good. Lots of stunts and general silly antics, then Topper leads the big mission. He drops a bomb into Saddam's lap and takes out a nucular plant with enemy missles, which were following him. Then it's back to the Indian reservation, where Topper hangs out, and a happy ending with the shrink.

House of Flying Daggers (2004) The Tang dynasty is crumbling and the Robin Hood-style Flying Dagger bandits are stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. Police chief Leo sends Captain Jin undercover at a house of ill repute, where he meets Mia, a blind dancer. She's a Flying Dagger and she won't say who the new leader is (the old leader having been killed). Jin rescues Mia from police custody and she says she's the old leader's daughter.
   Jin & Mia run into solders who don't know Jin is a copper and a big battle ensues. Someone who isn't a Flying Dagger lends a hand; Leo. He tells Jin that the General sent the extra troops and there are more ahead, so Jin quits his job. Then Mia dumps him. She ends up fighting the Bamboo Squad, Jin joins in and they both end up captured. But loads of flying daggers take out the soldiers.
   The lady brothel-keeper turns out to be the new leader of the Flying Daggers. Leo & Jin end up prisoners. But Leo is a flying-dagger mole! And he's in love with Mia but she has fallen for Jin. She lets Jin go when told to kill him, so Leo gives her a flying dagger. Then he tries to put the blame for killing Mia on Jin, like a typical Labour politician.
   It starts snowing as the General's men approach, Leo & Jin have a huge battle, Mia, who isn't quite dead, kills herself in an attempt to persuade Leo not to kill Jin, but everyone looks doomed from blood-loss and hypothermia.

The Hunted (2003) starts in Kosovo in 1999. Serbs are murdering Albanians and a US special forces team goes in to kill a Serb commander. Switch to British Columbia where L.T. (Tommy Lee Jones) frees a white wolf from a snare and clobbers the guy who set it. Switch to Silver Falls, Ontario in 2003. Two deer hunters run into a guy with a knife, who takes them out. It's Aaron Hallam, the kid who took out the Serb.
The FBI brings in L.T. to hunt down Hallam. They get into a punch up and the kid is shot by a female FBI agent with a dart gun and taken to Portland. The army turns up to claim the kid, who 'doesn't exist'. Of course, the kid escapes and, of course, L.T. goes after him. But first, a flashback to L.T.'s training programme for killers.
A big chase through Portland by car and electric train takes a break while the protagonists make some weapons out of readily available materials. L.T. does some body-surfing through white-water rapids before their final encounter. Of course, the kid ends up dead. But the white wolf is still lurking around L.T.'s cabin.

Hydra (2009) A bunch of treasure hunters on a volcanic island are eaten by a 3-headed monster! Then a ship arrives with 4 of the world's richest men. They've all had someone killed by a criminal, so there are 4 criminals aboard for them to hunt. The original island picked for the hunt has disappeared but the captain of the ship finds Hydra island.
   2 crewmen sent to check out the island are eaten. The criminals get a 24-hour head start, but they've all been implanted with GPS trackers. One of them, Nolan, is ex-special forces; he left the ship's captain for dead for being an evil bastard. The captain doesn't tell his boss when 2 more crewmen disappear.
   A hunter kills one of the criminals then one of the treasure hunters dashes through the group with the Hydra on her tail. It eats the hunter. The boss tries to call off the hunt when he discovers that Nolan is a special forces psycho. The treasure hunter lady offers to help the others if they'll help her to kill the Hydra.
   The volcano becomes violent. Nolan plucks a Vorpal sword from a lava tube and hacks the heads off the monster (which grew more when Hercules did it; the trick is to cut the heads off then burn the stump). Nolan takes over the ship, which the Hydra invades. But Nolan slays it completely with just the Vorpal sword after it has eaten all the bad guys.