A week of 'The Expendables', August 16-20

In celebration of the successful premiere of Sylvester Stallone's "The Expendables", I am devoting the week of August 16-20 at Watching the Detectives to reviews of films featuring its stars.

If any blogger out there would like to join in, I'll link to your post. I am also willing to post links to older reviews or articles you've written about Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, or any other featured player in "The Expendables." Please drop me a line at stevemillermail@gmail.com.

Tin foil hats DO work against mind control!

They Came From Beyond Space (1981)
Starring: Robert Hutton, Jennifer Jayne, and Michael Gough
Director: Freddie Francis
Rating: Four of Ten Stars

A group of scientists researching a strange group of meteors fall prey to alien mind-control. They swiftly start spreading their domination to others, as well as start spreading a deadly plague. When they try to dominate astrophysicist Dr. Curtis Temple (Hutton), the metal plate in his head protects him. He launches a one-man battle to figure out what the aliens are up to, and how they can be stopped.


"They Came From Beyond Space" is a sci-fi movie in the "invisible invasion" mode that's got an okay cast and all the components of a great sci-fi thriller, but the stew never quite reaches a boil. The best moments of the film are the unintentional comedic moments, such as when Dr. Temple and a colleague literally create tin-foil hats for protection from the alien mind control.

And aside from unintentional comedy, there's nothing else here worth commenting on. It's about as bland as a movie can be while still offering a little entertainment.

How can you tell it's 'the wrong hair'?

Under most circumstances, I couldn't care less about Paris Hilton and her hair, but this article caught my eye.

Paris Hilton sued for wearing the wrong hair

If you don't want to waste your time reading about Hilton, she's being sued for allegedly failing to wear a particular brand of hair extensions after being paid US$3.5 million to do so.

And I am left wondering: How can the company that believes they were wronged tell Hilton was not wearing THEIR hair extensions? Do you women folk swap hair extension tips while you luxuriate in public rest rooms? Was Hilton's failure to honor her contract discovered because there is a way to tell virgin hair from non-virgin hair? (Apparently, the product Hilton agreed to lend her name and face to is made from the hair of European virgins--or so the online listing for Hairtech International products imply, as the first paragraph on this random page shows. Maybe she was busted because virgin hair would look decidedly unnatural on someone as well-used as Paris Hilton?)

Please help educate a curious bachelor whose female friends would just turn away and laugh. How can you tell if Paris Hilton is wearing the hair of a virgin in this photo from a 2008 media event held specifically to promote the Band-It hair extension product from HairTech International?



(While contemplating the mysteries of telling one brand of hair extensions from another, perhaps you would be interested in reading reviews of movies featuring Paris Hilton at Terror Titans.)

Join Jack Nicholson for a 'Ride in the Whirlwind'

Ride in the Whirlwind (1965)
Starring: Cameron Mitchell and Jack Nicholson
Director: Monte Hellman
Rating: Seven of Ten Stars

When three drifters cross paths with a band of desperadoes, vigilantes mistake them for members of the gang. The innocent riders are forced to become the criminals they are mistaken for in order to survive.


"Ride in the Whirlwind" is a surprisingly engaging western. I say "surprisingly", because when it comes right down to it, an awful lot of the movie is spent with characters having fairly mundane and repetitious conversations, and is populated with characters who are as unknown to the viewers when the movie ends as they were when it started. Usually, such elements are signs of a cheap movie that is choking on the padding added to stretch it to a decent run-time. In this film, however, the elements merge with the random way three possibly shady--but certainly not the bad guys they are mistaken for--men are forced down a path of violence and brutality. I suppose this movie is an illustration of how a talented director and cast can create a find movie where hacks would merely produce a pile of crap out of the same material.

I recommend this movie if you are a fan of westerns. "Ride in the Whirlwind" occupies a sort of middle ground between the "traditional" American western and the European western (best recognized through Sergio Leone's movies starring Clint Eastwood) that was transforming the genre when this film was released.

(Trivia: "Ride in the Whirlwind" was shot back-to-back with "The Shooting", another low-budget western directed by Hellman that featured much of the same cast and used the same crew and locations.)

Tectonic Tuesdays: Anna May Wong

Immodest women are nothing new, and neither is the devastation they bring... they've been causing chaos since it was just Adam and Eve. It took the wisdom of the Great Imam Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi to realize the connection between their wicked ways and earthquakes--a connection described here--and it is this series of posts that prove he is right.

Fourteenth Case Study: Anna May Wong
Anna May Wong was not only one of early cinema's legendary great beauties, but she was also the first Asian-American movie star. Wong overcame the naked racism of early Hollywood to gain worldwide popularity with movie audiences, but she also put her body on display in sexy outfits in many of the 35 silent movies she appeared in between the years of 1919 and 1929. As a result, a 1929 earthquake off the eastern coast of Canada triggered a tsunami that left tens of thousands of residents of coastal towns homeless.


After spending a few years making movies in Europe, and making a successful transition from silent movies to talkies, Wong returned to the United States to not only use her immodest ways to inadvertently threaten the world with earthquakes, but to more directly assist the Allied effort to defeat the Japanese Imperial Army and liberate her ancestral homeland of China. In 1942, starred in two movies highlighting the brutal nature of the Japanese occupation of China. However, that same year, her cinematic displays triggered earthquakes in Guatemala and Turkey, with over 1,000 people dying in both locations.

And all because of the immodesty of Anna May Wong.

'Dream of a Warrior' is a confused mess

Dream of a Warrior (2002)
Starring: Leon Lai, Park Eun-Hye, and Lee Na-Young
Director: Park Hee-Joon
Rating: Four of Ten Stars

Dean, a Soul police detective (Lai) starts having strange dreams of a beautiful girl being menaced by monsters (Eun-Hye). He is soon assigned by his superiors to help Dr. Jang, a researcher working on time travel experiments. Dean learns that the girl of his dreams is the doctor's daughter, who he, in true mad scientist fashion, used as the test subject in one of his experiments and ended up stranding her in a distant time and place. Dean is the only one who can save her, and soon he too is sent long ago and far, far away, to the world of Dillmoon where the last outpost of civilization is being menaced by evil madmen who wield second-rate computer graphics as their primary weapons!


"Dream of a Warrior" is a fantasy movie that wants to be a sci-fi film. Or maybe it's a sci-fi movie that wants to be a fantasy film. Whatever it is, it's a hodge-podge of ideas that don't mesh very well. Most of the film consists of the story of the final days of Dillmoon and the last incarnations of Lai and Eun-Park as the doomed lovers, Dean and Princess Rose.

In fact, the whole time travel concept is such a small part of what goes on that it's almost extraneous. However, add to the mix a group of cultists that appear early in the film who warn about dire consequences when Jang's experiment links our world to Dillmoon (who then never reappear, and whose predicted dire consequences never pay off), as well as the fact that Dean isn't the only character in the movie that has a counterpart on Dillmoon, and the time travel aspect goes from a ill-fitting add-on to a sword-and-sorcery fantasy film to a convoluted and ill-conceived twist.

There's an average time-travel/eternal-warrior love story that's been smashed together with an average sword-and-sorcery story in "Dream of a Warrior", but the combined total is something that's less than worthwhile. Maybe the 100-minute version that was released in Hong Kong and Korea makes more sense, but the 87-minute international version (the one I viewed) was entertaining but severely lacking in any decent pay-offs from its disparate elements.

Hitting the wrong target....

So, I got tired of the Chinese spammers filling the comment sections with crap. I set comments to be moderated. Great idea, until you reject a comment you meant to accept.

To the person whose comment I rejected who ISN'T a Chinese spammer... my apologies. I clicked on the wrong button. If you feel so inclined, please post again!