Movies
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday November 18, 1996
COBRA (1986)
On Nine at 10.45 pm
IF YOU'RE searching for the most venomous stinker of the week, look no further. This one takes the cakemix. It's a ludicrous comic strip starring that great lunk Sylvester Stallone (in a star-spangled T-shirt) as a tough detective in the Filthy Harry mould. His quarry? A serial killer. His reward? None other than the former Mrs Stallone, Brigitte Nielsen. Brigitte, a woman renowned for her silicon bosom and her rock-hard posing, co-stars as the unthinking man's Annie Lennox whilst all around massive cliches toll like brazen bells. Flash trash, heavy on the ultra V, big on the sauce, and pumice hard on ears sensitive to explicit feralspeak. Rated SVA, XXX, WD40, RS.
TANGO AND CASH (1989)
On Nine at 8.30 pm
ORCHESTRATED myths about brute force being the key to self-preservation roar into overdrive as Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell ham it up in excelsis. In order to take on Mr Bigshot Bastard of the narcotics scene - Jack Palance having the time of his life with mice and other rodents - they take on the guise of a couple of individualistic cops. Sounds refreshingly original, doesn't it? Rumoured to have cost about $55 million - much of it probably expended on Stallone's spectacles which survive the harshest treatment - the film isn't a complete disaster, but close to it. Even the chi chi throwaway lines are wretched. A couple of decent scenes reinforce director Andrei Konchalevsky's reputation for competence in prison escape sequences (if nothing else), but there's slender evidence of the existential finesse he displayed in Runaway Train.
THE EVIL MEN DO (1984)
On Seven at 10.45 pm
AN UNSCRUPULOUS doctor is teaching torture techniques to disgusting dictatorships. Odd! Usually these repressive regimes need no assistance in their pornographic abuse of people who dare to think as individuals. Someone must put a stop to this and so that not-quite clapped-out contract killer Charles Bronson is enticed out of his wheelchair at the Edward Woodward Retirement Village for Distressed Equalizers to lay some four square violence on the forces of darkness. Pathetic swill.
THE MIGHTY DUCKS (1992)
On Seven at 8.30 pm
NEW lamps for old, losers into winners - it's transmutation tripe, no disguising it and you've seen it dozens of times. Misfit/disgraced/washed-up sports star is assigned the job of dredging some form of pride and winning spirit from a team of drop-outs/nohopers/women. The team here is a disenchanted ice-hockey squad which comes to be known as the Mighty Ducks after a disgraced lawyer and one-time hockey whizz, Gordon Bombay, is ordered to lift their game via a community service order. And, in return, Bombay (Emilio Estevez) learns humility, team spirit and, god spare us, the value of my old primary school motto: play the game.
A PISTOL FOR RINGO (1965)
On SBS at 9.30 pm
GREAT pasta! A spaghetti oater which warrants champagne rather than rotgut. After robbing a bank in Quemado, Mexican bandit leader Sancho is wounded and unable to flee to safety across the border. He and his greasers hole up in a remote farm, owned by Major Clyde and his daughter, Ruby, who is engaged to the sheriff who plugged Sancho. The bandits torture and kill innocent people as the siege ensues - the law powerless in this classical Mexican stand-off. With Sylvester Stallone busy elsewhere, the Mayor turns to Ringo, a gunslinger, who demands 30 per cent of the stolen bank loot as his fee. Sliding into the siege zone, Ringo offers to help Sancho escape for half of the loot. Then the elimination begins and it's great pulp stuff with honour and treachery running neck and neck down to the wire. Innumerable sequels followed, mostly vile, but this is the goods.
© 1996 Sydney Morning Herald
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