Mr. Wydey's Film Guide Letter T

Tales of the Crypt: Demon Knight (1995) There's this bloke, Mr. Smith, and another bloke in a cowboy hat is hunting him somewhere in America. And an explosive car crash doesn't slow down either of them. Smith has a relic in the form of a key, the cowboy tells the local police, and he wants it. Smith is carrying ID for a Frank Breaker, who has been dead for 5 years, according to the police computer.
   The local cops decide to bust both parties, so the cowboy sticks his fist right through a deputy's head! Breaker puts him to flight but he summons up a gang of demons, who trap a group of misfits in a church converted to a motel. Breaker seals the doors & windows magically using the key but there's a mine shaft under the motel.
   The demons get in and Ms Cch Pounder has her arm ripped off! Everyone heads into the mine but the demons drive them back to the upper floor of the motel. Breaker tells them that there are 7 keys, the demons have 6 of them and the cowboy wants to complete the set. One of the misfits gives up the key and gets chomped.
   Everyone retreats to the steeple. Breaker, who got the key during World War One, is chomped by a demon child and passes the key on to Joline. She spits blood from the key onto the cowboy and he festers, goes up in flames and blows up the motel. Then Joline heads out of town on a bus.

Team America: World Police (2004) is a Thunderbirds clone with foul-mouthed puppets. Islamic terrorists with weapons of mass destruction target Paris, so Team America takes them out; along with the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre. One of the team is killed and a top-gun actor is brought in to fill his boots. He's to be sent in undercover to inflitrate the terrorists, who are getting their WoMD from Kim Jong Il, the boss of North Korea.
Gary gets a makeover and acts his way into the terrorist leader's confidence. Team America takes out most of the antiquities in Egypt. Terrorists blow up the Panama canal. The Film Actors' Guild (FAG) blames Team America. Gary goes wobbly and quits TA. Then the TA HQ is blown up and the team is shot to bits.
The FAGs decide to change the world; in league with Kim, who's planning to make all countries equal by making them all 3rd World. Gary returns to take out Kim. TA has to shoot up the FAGs and take out Kim to save the world, and Gary ends up the hero of the day.

Tears of the Sun (2003) Bruce 'Wimpy' Willis stars as a tough Navy Seal, who is sent into a civil war in Nigeria, where Moslems are on a killing spree. His mission is to extract a female doctor, a priest and 2 nuns. The doctor insists on finishing an operation first and she won't leave without taking a gang of Africans with her. The priest and the nuns stay behind with the non-walking patients and, of course, they are slaughtered by the evil Moslems.
The doctor doesn't realize that there won't be enough helicopters for the Africans until Wimpy chucks her aboard a chopper and starts extracting her. But when he flies over the massacre, he goes back to the refugees. The ones who will slow everyone down are flown out, then Wimpy's CO tells him he's on his own with no air support. So the gang heads for Cameroun.
The Yanks engage the enemy when they find them wiping out a village. Wimpy has to root out infiltrators and he learns that his group includes the sole survivor of the dead president's family; effectively, the King of the Ibos; and the Moslems want him dead. Wimpy's CO tells him to ditch the 'king' as excess baggage but he refuses. World War 3 breaks out in the jungle and Wimpy loses men as he battles to the border, where they come up against a gate, which the border guards won't open. But luckily, a couple of fighters steam in from a US aircraft carrier and zap the bad guys with a load of napalm.

Tequila Sunrise (1988) stars an amazingly young Mel Gibson as a former drug dealer with a cop friend. The FBI is out to get Mel by any means possible as retribution for his past, although their efforts became a comedy of errors, and there is a Mexican drug dealer who is running rings around everyone but Mr. Gibson.

Termination Point (2007) A plane drops out of the sky the day before it took off! A farmer and his girlfriend are hauled into a strange vortex in the sky. Federal Agent Caleb is hauled off a plane to look for Dr. Winter, who has decamped with a teleporter because he's worried about the US government misusing it. Surprise! Dr. Winter is on the same plane as Caleb's wife and daughter, and he had to use the teleporter to avoid being shot down by the US Air Force.
   A lot of the passengers, and the crew, travel back in time to the crash site and the plane is stuck in Null Space, heading for the vortex. And the two agents sent to kidnap Winter stay aboard. Caleb goes hunting for a second controller for the teleporter and runs into fake cops; there's a leak in the agency.
   The bad guys on the plane produce their guns and take over; and break the teleporter controller. Caleb has to dodge the vortex in the atmosphere, which will eat the entire universe eventually (Termination Point), as well as fake cops and the rogue agent, in his search for the controller.
   When he finds it, he teleports onto the plane. His wife is shot as the plane reaches the vortex and goes back in time to before it took off. Caleb gets a phone message from himself and has Dr. Winter and the 2 bad guys arrested. The rogue agent is also busted. And the whole adventure never happened!

Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) Machines were wiping out humanity in 2029 and the computer controlling them sent a T-1000 Terminator back to 1994 to take out John Connor, the leader of the Resistance, having failed to take him out with the Arnoldator in the previous film. So Connor sent back a reprogrammed Arnoldator to protect his younger self.
   The Arnoldator got some gear and a motorbike from a Hell's Angel. The Terminator did the same with a cop. Meanwhile, Connor was stealing cash from ATMs and Sarah, his mom, was in a looney bin. The Arn & the Term clashed in an amusement arcade, the kid got away and there was a chase in the LA River channel. The real cops showed Sarah pictures of the Arnoldator and asked her about a cop-killer from the 1980s as her son was realizing that everything his mon had told him about Terminators was true.
   Sarah escaped from her cell as the Arn, her kid and the Term arrived at the looney bin. Sarah took John & the Arnoldator south to get weapons & supplies from some Mexican bandits of her acquaintance. She told the Arn that the enemy is a guy called Dyson, who will create the computer chip used in Terminators and also in the SkyNet weapons system, which will become self-aware and start World War 3 in 1997.
   Sarah tried to take out Dyson but made a bog of it. He objected to being shot for something he is going to do, but he got everyone into his company's research centre to trash his work. The cops arrived shooting and got their asses kicked. Dyson went up in a huge explosion. Lots of mayhem on the highway as the Terminator chased the Arnoldator and the Connors.
   Everyone crashed at a steel works, where the Term was frozen by liquid nitrogen but reformed. Cue a battle of the androids. Naturally, the wreck of the Arnoldator won. Then he got Sarah to lower him into the vat of liquid steel, which had consumed the Terminator, to destroy the chip in his head.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) Machines from the future keep trying to kill John Connor, who is destined to lead the remains of the human race to victory. But Judgement Day has been averted and he has disconnected himself from his past and he's running from 'the weight of the past'; and falling off his motorbike.
   A female Terminator; a Feminator; comes back in time with a kill list. The Arnoldator does the same shortly afterwards. Meanwhile, a new computer virus is shutting everything down and the military is going to have to turn over control of everything to the new SkyNet super defence computer.
   Connor runs into Kate Brewster, a vet who's the daughter of General Brewster, the guy in charge of SkyNet. They were at school together. The Feminator arrives to take them out but the Arnoldator has other ideas. Mucho destructo! Judgement Day has only been postponed, the Arnoldator tells Connor. It's inevitable.
   The Arnoldator retrieves a cache of weapons from Mrs.Connor's grave for another round of battles with the Feminator. SkyNet is self-aware and it plans to launch nuclear weapons to take out the human race. The Arnoldator mentions that it killed Connor in 2032! The US military loses control of its weapons when SkyNet goes on-line while the virus is tackled. The machine takes over.
   The Feminator reprograms the Arnoldator but Connor talks it out of killing him. He and Kate head for an underground 'control centre' but find themselves in a nuclear fall-out shelter. The Arnoldator sent them there as it is their destiny to survive Judgement Day, not avert it.

Terror Peak (2003) The scene: New Zealand. Linda Carter is a vulcanologist with an appalling daughter (Melanie), who lost her first husband to a volcanic eruption. They're staying at Patrick's failing holiday lodge which Kevin, the second husband, can rescue by throwing money & customers at it. Mount Extreme is dormant but waking up. Patrick has a Maori ex-partner, who's causing trouble.
   Lots of earthquakes to give the kids on an adventure holiday at the lodge a big thrill. The lady professor decides that mountain should be evacuated but the local 'experts' don't want to know. She sees another Mount St. Helens in the making and there's a village in the line of fire.
   The volcano starts erupting, Melanie & the tour guide (Jason) get stuck in a cave and asthmatic Kevin goes after them, losing his inhaler but not suffering much despite the poisonous volcanic gases flying around. The kids have to run through lava drips in their cave.
   Patrick & his Maori partner & the prof. fly to rescue them in a wreck of a helicopter; with a lot of difficulty. So Kevin chucks cash at them to save the business.

They Crawl (2001) is a daft sciffy creature-feature containing cockroaches. A bus driver goes crazy and crashes. A building is blown up with a young bloke called Brian in it. The police think it's an accident but Ted, his brother, tells the lady homicide cop, O'Bannon, that it's murder. Brian was a talented insect researcher who'd been behaving strangely for 6 months.
   An autopsy finds all the bus driver's internal organs missing; and Brian has similar surface wounds. An exterminator is eaten by cockroaches. There's a cult called Trillion around and evisceration is its trademark. Brian has emails with a military encryption and; shock, horror; Ted is facing a court martial, which does nothing for his credibility with the police captain.
   Brian's crime scene has residues of Semtex. He had an email pal called Lazarus, whose house blows up, killing 2 cops, when the police try to check him out. The emails are about the Azimov Program, which involves cockroaches. The guy who decrypts the emails suggests the military might be trying to control insects.
   Brian's professor, who gave Ted Lazarus's identity, clams up. Then Lazarus, not really dead, contacts Ted. He says the professor got them all the equipment and Brian cracked an impossible problem for the government; he found the frequency used by cockroaches for communication. So he was killed. Lazarus runs away. A member of Trillion confesses to all the killings. Then Lazarus is fed to the cockroaches!
   A cop is killed by a brain-eating cockroach in the precinct house. Ted finds Lazarus's remains at the professor's home. There's a search for the warehouse where the exterminator was killed, and a big shoot-out and punch-up there. The roaches amalgamate into a giant cockroach! But Ted crashes a truck into it and blows it to hell. But the inevitable single cockroach escapes the carnage.

The Thing (1982 remake, John Carpenter dir.) Antarctica, winter 1982. A Norwegian buzzes an American camp in a helicopter, shooting at a dog and he has to be shot. His camp is a wreck and there's the remains of an alien body there. The American camp is out of radio contact with the rest of the world. A creature emerges from the dog and attacks the other dogs. But a dose of flame thrower settles its hash.
   The guys find an ancient spaceship in the ice. The doctor finds that the alien cells can assimilate cells of other species, there's a 75% probability that one of the men is infected and if the infection gets into the general population, everyone will be taken over.
   One of the guys is taken over so the others try to burn everything alien. A guy called Blair wrecks everything to make sure that no one gets off the base. The doctor tries to create a test to find out who's still human. The monster knocks the humans off one by one. MacReady comes up with a test which works but Blair escapes before he can be tested.
   Blair has been building a ship out of helicopter parts. The survivors blow it up when they destroy the base. MacReady is the last man standing. No, the stroppy black guy shows up. They they sit down and wait for the fires to go out and anyone who is still human to croak.

The Thirteenth Floor (1999) Mr. Fuller leaves a message in a club, comes out of a virtual reality system and is stabbed to death. Jane, his daughter, turns up as Detective McBane is questioning Doug Hall, one of Fuller's assistants. Fuller's company has created a sepia-tinted 1937 in VR. Hall found a bloodstained shirt when he woke up. Fuller's message says he's discovered something incredible.
   Hall goes into the VR system to find the message. The barman (Vince the Nutter of Law & Order: Criminal Intent) doesn't hand over the note. In real reality, a barman called Tom Jones tries to blackmail Hall then he is slaughtered. Jane gives Hall an alibi. Hall goes into VR to meet the character, into whom Fuller was downloaded. Vince, knowing he's not real, shoots Hall's character. Hall is removed from VR while battling with Vince.
   Hall tells Jason, his co-worker, that he wants to shut down the programme. Det. McBane tells him Fuller didn't have a daughter. Hall tracks down the woman into whom Jane is being downloaded in 1999 then he finds that his world ends at a computer matrix. Jane tells him that there are thousands of simulated worlds but Hall's is the first to create a simulation in a simulation.
   Hall killed Fuller when Jane's husband was downloaded into Hall's body. Jason downloads into Vince's body and crashes his car. A cop turns up and finds a body in Vince's boot! Jason returns to RR when a truck runs Vince down; with Vince in his body. Hall takes Vince to the computer room on the building's 13th floor to show him he's in just another simulation and shoots him.
   Jane finds herself in bed with Hall with her evil husband in Hall's body, but McBane shoots him. The McBane tells her to 'leave us the hell alone down here when she gets back to where she came from'. At the end, Hall wakes up in a 2024 containing Jane and her father.

The Thomas Crown Affair (1999 remake) Pierce Brosnan, in the lead role, is a big wheel in New York, scamming mugs. Meanwhile, a Trojan horse robbery goes off in the Metropolitan Museum. TC blows the gaff to the staff, the museum goes into lockdown and he strolls off with a $100M Monet. The hotshot female from the insurance company decides the gang was recruited in Eastern Europe as a diversion, and she homes in on TC because he once bought a Monet.
The woman stands to make $5M if the painting is recovered. The cops try to invade TC's apartment but get the bum's rush. So the woman steals what she thinks is the Monet, only to find it's a copy. So she bonks TC into the middle of the following week. The cops aren't impressed. The woman goes on holiday with TC. The cops let her know TC has another girlfriend. (No, she turns out to be TC's forger.)
TC's shrink (Faye Dunawaywith) finds the idea of TC getting serious with an insurance investigator absolutely hilarious. The woman loses her cool, proving she's not in TC's class. He bamboozles the cops at the museum, returns the Monet but nicks another painting. The woman ends up with the painting but not TC, but he gives her a second chance.

Thunderbirds (2004, Dir. Jonathan Frakes) Schoolboy Alan Tracy is feeling left out of International Rescue but when The Hood strands the other Tracys in orbit and takes over the island, Alan, Fermat (Brains' son) and Tintin are left to thwart the Hood's plan to use the Thunderbirds to rob the world's major banks. Lady Penelope & Parker show up, but they aren't much help.
Alan makes a bog of being in charge and loses the other 2 kids. Everyone ends up in a freezer as Thunderbird 5 heads for re-entry. The Hood goes off in TB2 to rob the Bank of England. The gang stage a freezer-break and the kids go after the Hood in TB1. But they have to stage a rescue in London while the Hood is pulling off his robbery.
The senior members of IR return to Earth to sort out the Hood, and the kids all get IR badges. The special effects are well done and the cast look almost as convincing as the cast of the 1960s originals.

Thunderbirds Are Go! (1966) Zero-One takes off for Mars, so cue some miracles of engineering in action. But there's a saboteur aboard, so the next stop for the spacecraft is the bottom of the sea. 2 years later, a report confirms the sabotage and the Space Exploration Centre is ready to try for Mars again with the help of International Rescue providing security.
Another saboteur is unmasked and Lady Penelope's pink Roller takes to the water to pursue his speedboat and shoot down his escape helicopter as Zero-One the second takes off for Mars. Then Alan has a dream about a nighclub featuring Lady Penelope, the Shadows and Cliff Richard Jr. Z-1 reaches Mars after only 6 weeks! The astronauts are chased off the planet by 'life as we don't know it when they start shooting at odd rock formations.
Predictably, the fancy technology goes wrong when Z-1 tries to land and International Rescue are called in to revive the dead escape unit. The crash takes out an evacuated town, everyone survives and Alan is the hero of the day.

THX 1138 (1971) is George Lucas's debut as a director and it looks just it. The 'hero' is a human-robot tech in a nuclear plant living in a regulated future society where it is a criminal offence not to go around drugged to the eyeballs. The film is slow, thin on plot and lacking in action. The first half hour could be compressed into a 5 minute summary without much loss of content. After a whole bunch of messing about, 1138 runs away and we get a serious chase in the last 20 minutes. He evades the 7-foot robot cops by driving the cost of his recapture over the budget, causing the pursuit to be terminated. A film to be watched more out of curiosity – what did the Star Wars director do early in his career? – than for much in the way of entertainment or enlightenment.

Ticker (2001) features Steven Seagal as Officer Glass, as a bomb squad cop, and Dennis Hopper as a bad guy with a worse Irish accent. A senator is held hostage in his mansion. The FBI and ATF surround the place while the bomb squad go looking for a device in the basement. World War 3 breaks out as Glass decides the bomb is a decoy. The car park blows up and the head bad guy gets away.
   A year late, Officer Nettles, an ex-detective, is on the garbage detail, busting drug dealers. He and his partner walk in on the bombers, the partner is killed, the Irish bad guys get away but Nettles hangs on to the woman with them. The Head Bad Guy starts blowing up San Francisco to get her back and Nettles is allowed to hook up with the bomb squad.
   Alex Swan, the HBG, is a legendary bomb maker. He visits the police station and gets his stroppy associate shot by the police. Then he blows up the guy's car. He phones the precinct captain to tell him he has to release the girl in an hour or the city gets it.
   More bombs go off. Claire is released and she evades the police. Then she blows up Swan's car with him in it. Her next target it City Hall as she is after revenge for the death of her criminal husband. Nettles gets to flatten Claire in the City Hall basement and he has to disarm a device while Glass is tackling another on the roof. So no BOOM!

Timeline (2003) A man in a disconnected condition is found in a desert and croaks in a US hospital. A big US company is involved. Archaeologist The Big Yin is working at a 14th century site and he thinks the quality of the tip-offs about potential finds is too good, so he contacts his sponsor. A couple of days later, the team at the dig find a 600-year-old message from Professor Johnson asking for help!
   IPC is working on faxing objects and it has a wormhole locked to Castlegard, France, in 1357. People who make multiple trips through the device are subject to 'transcription errors'; which is what killed the guy found in the desert; and one of their people, Decker, is stuck there, having made 10 trips through the device.
   A rescue party goes back but the marines get themselves killed right away, and one returns with a live grenade, which blows up the IPC device! And if the rest don't get back in 6 hours, the wormhole will close. The rescuers arrive on the day when the French are due to recapture the castle, enraged by the execution of Lady Claire.
   The rescuers are captured, find the prof, get loose and are caught again. Both the French and English are eager to kill them as spies. Decker is part of the English force. The prof is required to make some Greek fire for the besieged English, and the battle starts at night with flaming ballista balls and fiery arrows flying.
   The English arsenal is blown up, the French win and Lady Claire isn't killed, the prof, his American son and the lady on the team all manage to get back and the IPC troublemaker, who tried to sabotage the repairs, is shunted to 1357 to be killed. And the prof. finds the tomb of Marek, who stayed behind and married Lady Claire, at the dig site.

T.J. Hooker (1982) features Captain James T. Kirk in a black wig before he got old and really fat like the rest of the original Star Trek gang. Hooker is a sergeant instructor for the LCPD. Throw in some cartoon bad guys, Hooker's traditionalist, death penalty supporting attitude, Hooker the divorced father and a dodgy DA, and then unfold a dodgy plot.

Today You Die (2005) Steven Seagal is Harlan, a burglar. He burgles a dope dealer, who catches him in the act and gets dead. Harlan drives past a childrens' hospital, which is closing, then gets a legit job driving a security truck but Bruno, his guard, shoots a load of guys at a casino and they do some crazy driving with $20 million aboard. Harlan dumps Bruno and when the cops find him, he tells them he has amnesia and he has no idea where the cash is.
   The organizer of the job realizes he's a dead man if he doesn't get to Harlan. Harlan goes to gaol. So does Bruno. He names Vincent & Taggart as also involved in the job; and Max, who's supposed to be dead, is still alive. Agent Knowles of the DEA tells Harlan that Max isn't on any database. Harlan saves the life of a black gang leader and gets in on his escape by helicopter.
   Harlan tells his girlfriend to take it on the lam. She's heavily into the Tarot and she gets weird dreams. Harlan sends Chinese gansters after Vincent. He concludes that Max is being protected by someone high-up in the DEA; like Saunders, Knowles' boss. Max is Saunders' informer. Knowles gives Harlan an address for Max, so Harlan wrecks his staff and does a deal.
   Knowles crashes the deal and Saunders sticks a gun to her head. BIG shoot-out. A HUGE explosion takes out the building and the armoured truck. And the childrens' hospital gets the cash to re-open.

Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) The British navy shoots a missile at a terrorist convention, only to find that Russian nuclear weapons are there. So James Bond has to start a riot and fly the plane carrying the missiles out of the danger zone, and evict a back-seat driver. In the South China Sea, Chinese fighters threaten a British warship. A stealth ship steals nuclear cruise missiles after sinking HMS Devonshire and shooting down one of the fighters to create confrontation.
   Elliot Carver of the Carver Media Group is behind it. MI6 gets 48 hours to investigate before the shooting starts. M tells Bond to pump Mrs. Carver, a former girlfriend, for information. Q gives him a talking car and some gadgets. Bond gets into a punch-up at Carver's global satellite news service's launch and puts him off the air. He goes burgling and runs into a female Chinese agent.
   Bond finds Mrs. Carver dead in his hotel room, where a sinister German is waiting to finish him off, too. Bond zaps him and wrecks the talking car while escaping. He takes a gadget stolen from Carver to the Yanks, who help him to parachute onto the shipwreck site. He finds the cruise missiles gone, the Chinese agent lurking and both are grabbed by Carver's men.
   Bond & his new friend take a motorbike ride and wreck a chopper, then they work out where the stealth boat is hiding. Carver is working with General Chang, the Chinese agent's target. She is captured when they reach the stealth boat, Bond makes the stealth ship visible, the British navy blasts it, Elliot is drilled a bit and the missile blows up with Elliot's enforcer.

Tornado Valley (2008) Ellie sees her mom hoovered up by a twister, it's her fault so she retreats indoors and into silence. 25 years later, Liz, her sister, has a daughter (Becky) with Matt, who works for the Storm Protection Centre in Oklahoma, they're estranged, Liz is hosting a conference of weather people and Matt is sent there by his boss.
There are 2 large storms heading for the US, one on either side of Florida, and they're due to collide over Iowa. Matt is about to complete a chain of storm-tracking radar stations; and the last is near the farm where his wife grew up.
The farm (surprise!) finds itself in the way of the superstorm. Matt & Liz have to dodge one twister and Elly leaves the farmhouse to look for Becky as another approaches them. She saves Becky, she finds her voice again, and Matt & Liz get back together again. Aaaah!

Total Eclipse (2008) There's a buncha meteors heading for L.A. and the lady President orders an evacuation. And the space station Hyperion will be taken out, too. And there's no way to get the 12 astronauts off. Satellites are also being knocked out and someone at the Department of Defense hacked NASA's computer to erase data showing that Hyperion was in danger.
   Dr. Brighton of NASA gets his assistant to hack the DoD to look for the hacker. Hyperion is knocked out of orbit, it has a nuclear reactor and if the fail-safes don't work, it will make south California uninhabitable for 1,000 years. But the Secretary of Defense reckons he can shoot it down. Dr. Brighton says don't do it. The President says go ahead.
   Dr. Brighton thinks that someone wanted Hyperion to crash and he discovers that his own research assistant is a mole. The SoD thinks the nation's missile system need a make-over, Congress won't pay for it so he staged a scenario in which a missile would be shot at Hyperion, fail to take it out and prove that all US missiles are rubbish.
   Dr. Brighton is invaded by DoD mobsters and interrogated with violence after he leaks the scam to his journalist friend Ken Stone, who has to dodge the FBI in L.A. with bits of space station raining down. The truth gets out, the President herself rescues Dr. Brighton and she tells the SoD that she'll bury him; which won't do the wreck of L.A. much good.

Total Recall (1990) features Big Arnie as a Martian secret agent, who has his brain wiped as part of a plan to trap the mutal leader of insurgents on Mars. The head bad guy is Senator Kinsey from Stargate SG1, so we know we have to boo him the moment he shows his face! Lots of shooting and blowing things up, ruthless bad guy persecuting Arnie, lots of mutants in the colony's version of 'Down Below' and some spectacular eye-popping before Mars gets an atmosphere.

Toxic Skies (2008) is a sciffy film with terrible sound quality at times. A bloke who knows too much is killed and a hospital in Spokane, Washington, starts to fill up with people with an unknown disease. Dr. Martin of the Global Health Organization is called in. She thinks it could be anything from avian flu to the plague. She can't get the town quarantined until a professor just back from a trip to Malaysia is identified as a common link and he's found dead.
   Someone leaves stuff about the Chemtrail Conspiracy in Dr. Martin's car and she's being shadowed by Jack, a journalist. Dr. Martin starts thinking immune-suppressing agents but no one in authority wants to hear that the Keller company is involved. A demented patient contaminates the black doctor. Jack tells Dr. Martin that someone is putting something in jet fuel to wipe out the old and the sick of America.
   Keller does a character assassination job on Jack and his source there is killed. The black doctor goes down with the plague and Jack hides in a plague victim's body bag. An army officer saves Dr. Martin from Keller's killers. He says the government got involved in a global warming swindle, which the crooks at Keller perverted.
   Dr. Martin & Jack go after a vaccine at the Keller facility, but it's not there. So Martin & Jack work a bluff. Keller's management are busted, the vaccine is released to the plague victims and the US military does another dirty deal with another bent businessman.

To Trap A Spy (1966) is the first of the UNCLE spin-off films, there's no Mr. Waverley and Illya appears in the first 10 minutes or so then takes the day off. An agent reports an assassination attempt just before he's betrayed & done in. Then there's an assault on UNCLE HQ in NY to kill the boss (who heard the agent's report), which flops.
Napoleon Solo uses an old girlfriend (Elaine) to get close to Vulcan, the bad guy, and he has to use a boxy radio in the absence of a pen radio. A Mata Hari from WASP tries to take out Solo but ends up bullet-ridden. Solo's car is booby-trapped but crashing into a river doesn't slow him down much.
With Illya taking time off, it's no wonder Solo & Elaine are captured in Vulcan's chemical plant. And Illya would have realized it wasn't the African president who was the target but his loyal followers. But Solo makes sure the bad guys end up caught in their own explosion.

Trackdown How do you make a Martial Law movie? Easy – you just stitch together 2 unrelated episodes of the TV series. In the first part, Sammo is trying to pass his US driving test, get himself a bank account and catch a crew which is robbing armoured trucks operated by security firms. In part 2, Sammo is a master chef, who is trying to save a family-run Chinese restaurant from being taken over by a mega-chain. Apparently, it is situated just where a new motorway interchange would unload customers. Lots of kung fu, lots of bad guys zapped, lots of vehicles destroyed, Sammo triumphant in both parts.

Trail of the Pink Panther (1982) is a compilation Pink Panther movie made from bits collected from the cutting room floor after Peter Sellars died. It's a sort of greatest hits of Clouseau's clumsiness with Jo Lumley going round interviewing people after the great detective's flight disappears on the way to the Middle East. David Niven makes an appearance but doesn't say anything – he gets a bad voice-over; probably for medical reasons.

The Transporter (2002) Bank robbers get into their getaway car, only to be told by the driver that the deal was for 3 guys and there are 4 of them. So one robber has to be shot and ditched before the Transporter delivered the truly amazing adventure of the getaway. His next job was transporting a bag containing someone making a lot of noise. Frank broke his own Rule No. 3 by looking in the bag and finding a Chinese woman.
   He delivered the bag and the bad guys paid him off with a bomb. Luckily, he wasn't in his car when it went off, and he returned to the bad guys' base to sort them out and steal another car; which had the Chinese woman in the back. He took her home and went to bed, leaving her to snoop into his belongings and his past. The local police chief called with Frank's charred number plate. Then the head bad guy arrived to demolish Frank's house.
   The girl told Frank that there were 400 people dying in a container and enlisted his help in rescuing them. Only her father turned out to be involved in the people-smuggling. The police chief rescued Frank and he woke up in a cell charged with extortion and kidnapping. But he got 12 hours to crack the people smuggling. So Frank went round a container park with a stethoscope, got involved in a brawl at a bus depot and hijacked a crop-duster to catch up with the people-smugglers' convoy.
   Lots of fun & games on the trailer truck before Frank wrote off the guy who destroyed his house. Then the Chinese girl got to shoot her father to save Frank's ass and the police chief got to let the smuggled people out of the container and pick up the pieces.

Tremors (1989) Earl & Val, handymen living in Perfection, Nevada, meet Rhonda checking out weird seismograph readings in their valley. The guys decide to quit Perfection but they find Edgar up a pylon and the doc says he was there for 3-4 days and died of dehydration. A farmer disappears and his sheep are ripped to bits. Earl & Val find his head in the ground under his hat!
   A road repair crew is taken out next and the citizens of Perfection find themselves trapped at the mercy of snake creatures with the road and the phone system both out. Earl & Val find they are up against 30-foot burrowing monsters with snakes in their mouths. They kill one by accident but Rhonda's seismic records show there are 3 more.
   Walter, the Chinese storekeeper, decides they should be called graboids just before he's eaten. Burt & Heather, a pair of survivalists, kill a graboid when it attacks their fortress home. The remaining two attack the buildings of the town when the inhabitants take refuge on the roofs. Everyone piles on to the bulldozer and its trailer but the graboids ambush them with a tunnel and they end up stuck on some rocks.
   Burt feeds a bomb to one of the graboids but the other spits a bomb into his remaining stock of bombs. Earl, Val and Rhonda are chased but Val suckers the graboid into erupting out of the edge of a steep cliff and splatting onto the rocks below.

Tremors II, Aftershock (1995) moves the action from Perfection, Nevada, to an oilfield in Mexico, where graboids are on the loose. Earl Russell and a new sidekick are hired to exterminate them at $50K a pop. After zapping a dozen of the monsters, Earl called in Burt Gummer. The graboids start reproducing, creating nippers which eat anything hot, humans and car engines alike, and the more they eat, the more they breed! But Burt shows that a big enough explosion solves all problems.

Trucks, based on a book by Stephen King, was renamed the Scoffed-at Sciffy shortly after someone read out the plot summary. We just knew it was going to be rubbish and wow! isn't that just what it turned out to be! Sci-fi with no science. Events with no plot to speak of, no explanations and no resolution. But hey! What else is there to watch on this second shite TV night? [Sounds like this review was written at an Xmas holiday. Ed. ]

Twister (1996) In June 1969, an F5 twister killed Jo's dad, sucking him out of the family storm shelter with the door. In the present day, storm chasers are out in force, including Jo & Bill, who's trying to get a divorce from Jo finalized so he can marry Melissa. Jo and her crew have a gadget for putting sensors into a twister to help with predicting when they'll form. Jonas, who has a rival version of Bill's gadget, crashes the party.
The guys run past sister-twisters and flying cows, and stop off for grub at Jo's Aunt Meg's. The F5 from her childhood has made Jo crazy. An F3, which she and Bill are trying to seed with sensors, fizzles out but an F4 twister wrecks the town they're in and takes out Aunt Meg's place and she got no warning. Melissa gives up on Bill. Then the strongest F5 for 30 years starts building.
Jo & Bill get an idea for deploying their sensors. The twister chucks a petrol tanker at them. Jonas drives his crew right into the tornado. Bill & Jo have to drive through a flying house. They send their truck and the sensors into the twister; then they have to run for their lives. But they survive and get back together again.

Two Days in the Valley (1996) begins with 2 hit men rolling into town, killing a woman's ex-husband and hitman 1 trying to kill hitman 2 and set him up for the blame. Only hitman 2 gets out of the car before it blows up and crashes into the lives of a bunch of disfunctional people. The widow is bent out of shape because she hadn't expected to wake up next to the body of her ex-husband and she can't pay hitman 1 because the cash is in her house, which is crawling with cops. Then she gets into a fight with hitman 1's girlfriend and shoots her. The two hitmen collide again at the crime scene and there is a thoroughly pragmatic ending.