Issue #01/56, January 14 - 27, 1999  

And so, a new year begins and a new batch of second-rate films arrives in Moscow hoping to recoup some of the losses they incurred in the land of their birth. So let's emerge from our post-holiday comas and see what's out there, shall we?

First up is I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, a title so begging to be cleverly manipulated that I'll just spare you all the bloodshed. What better joke, after all, than the long line of working titles the movie went through during the hurry-up production process? There's I Know What You Did Last Summer 2, I Know What You Did Last Summer: The Sequel, and I Know What You Did Last Summer... the Story Continues for the direct folks among you, the more to-the-point I Still Know if you're into the whole brevity thing, and I Still Know What You Did Two Summers Ago for clumsy pedants. Wacky creative types can go nuts with the so-called "fake working title" The Man with a Hook. What kind of fucked up shit is it when a movie like this not only gets sequelized, but has fake working titles? Pretty fucked up, I'd say.

As working title #5 implies, it's now one summer later and little has changed: that Gorton's fisherman nut-job is still running around killing everybody except the people he professes to be seeking revenge against, Hollywood script-writing hacks are still devoting way too much time to e-mail, and Jennifer Love Hewitt still has tits that are about three times too big for a girl of her slight build. Actually, these tits are the film's lone source of suspense, as sensitive viewers will find themselves wondering whether or not Ms. Love Hewitt will suffer from crippling lower back pain later in life. Even now, it's puzzling how she manages to move about more or less normally while carrying such an awkward load. Ah, the mysteries of youth!

There are some differences, however. For instance, Love Hewitt wears a small black bikini in one scene. Also, two of the four attractive young adults originally targeted for fishhook termination are already dead, of course. Their place is taken here by a pair of young black college students, one of which is even played by Babyface 'ho Brandy. Since black actors don't usually get to play slasher bait unless it's some kind of clever post-modern statement about how blacks never play slasher bait, this seems somehow noteworthy. I don't know if that's what you'd call progress, but it's definitely something. Some feeble allusions to The Shining have been appended to demonstrate a sense of film history. Most importantly, the homicidal angler's demise has once again been handled with sufficient vagueness to clear the way for another seafaring adventure, so I Still Know What You Did in 3-D should be going straight to video in the U.S. any day now.

Coincidence or no, this week's other three films are all allegorical tales about solitary black men embroiled in life-and-death struggles for justice in modern cities where the civilized veneer disguises an underworld of corruption and great complexity. In fact, two of the three--Enemy of the State and Most Wanted--are so interchangeable as to merit being referred to as the Deep Impact and Armageddon of Hunted Negro pictures.

But before we go there, let's spend a few moments with Blade, a film in which Wesley Snipes appears to have invested several million dollars just so he can be a totally ripped action hero with magical powers and who speaks with an incomprehensibly deep voice. It seems rather a high price to pay, particularly when you consider that his nemesis is Stephen Dorff doing some kind of post-grunge Kiefer Sutherland/Lost Boys impression. I think I'll just say that it's probably Dorff's best performance in quite a long time and leave it at that. And the same goes for a wrinkly, bearded Kris Kristofferson (!) as Snipes's spiritual mentor and futuristic weapons designer. Did someone say Convoy?

The comic-derived story is basically Vampire Batman, with lots of Give in to Your Dark Side hemming and hawing on Snipes's part. He's some kind of superhuman half-vampire freak, you see, and he has never really come to terms with his mother's succumbing to the world of the undead during childbirth. The obvious drug-abuse and AIDS parallels unearthed by this turn of events lurk just below the surface throughout but are never referenced explicitly, a surprising bit of subtlety for what's otherwise a pretty cartoonish outing. Don't worry though, there's still plenty of candy-apple-red blood splatters, PlayStation-style effects, and Germanic black leather fetishism (including Udo Kier!) to go around. There's also an amusing tacked-on ending featuring some stock footage of Red Square and a few moments of the kind of garbled Russian pronunciation you've come to expect from Hollywood. Given the raver subtext attached to vampirism in the movie, the brief Moscow epilogue could also be interpreted as an optimistic vote of confidence for the future of Moscow's ailing clubbing scene. As new Playgirl editor Mijay Cash'ncarry has said, "there is nightlife after the iceberg."

But getting back to our avidly hunted Negroes in Most Wanted Enemy of the State, this one's so close it seems to me a tail of the tape is very much in order.

Lets start with the principals: MW gives us Keenan Ivory Wayans as a top-flight Marine sniper; EoS has Fresh Prince as a lingerie-shopping lawyer. MW clearly has the ludicrousness edge, but EoS nearly gets it all back with floppy-eared goofiness. EoS is the obvious winner in terms of pre-Y2K technophobia, but loses some ground by having a well-known director (Tony Scott) on board. EoS earns an uncontested shutout in the Centrist Humor category as MW seems (at times, anyway) to be going for a kind of deadpan irony that is no longer particularly welcome now that the New Earnestness has taken root. On the other hand, MW plays the OJ card full on, while EoS plays it not at all. A very close match, I think you'll agree. Under normal circumstances, the Jon Voight as G-man Spook factor would be the deciding criterion, but unfortunately both films are off the charts in terms of this indicator (Career redundancy on Mr. Voight's part, you might say, but just remember that double duty means double payday--no small consideration when you're fast approaching mandatory retirement age.)

By now you're probably sensing that we've been led to a crossroads at which we are faced with tough choices. No one likes being put in such positions, of course, but difficult times like these that call for a few good men... with the mettle to be Marines. Which should tell you that I'm leaning toward Most Wanted on this one. But not because it's about an odds-beating Marine, for Christ's sake. The fact is that Enemy of the State is being shown around town in dubbed format (at least until next weekend), while Most Wanted is pure and unmolested, i.e., subtitled. It's a pretty lame tie-breaker, I'll admit, but if we don't start drawing a line in the sand somewhere these people will never learn. Hell, I haven't even seen Enemy of the State yet. All power to the Soviets!