Our first feature is xXx: Return Of Xander Cage, it's third in the series. Vin Diesel played Xander Cage in the first movie back in 2002, he was dead in the 2005 sequel, so Ice-Cube took the lead. Now Vin is back from the grave to help out members of Samuel L Jackson's xXx Program at the NSA. It's got a script by F. Scott Frazier and it's directed by D J Caruso.
Someone has invented a magical box that can do amazing things like take control of a satellite and crash it anywhere they want on the Earth. It's stolen from CIA HQ by Donny Yen, Tony Jaa and their gang. CIA agent Toni Nicolette finds Xander and asks him to get the box back. He gets his gang of cartoon characters together and they go find Donny and Tony. There's plenty of exotic scenery as the team moves around the globe before ending in Detroit. The cast is filled with plenty of exotic and pretty women that can kick my ass three ways to Sunday. Between all the action stars and such there are oodles of punch ups. There's plenty of loud noises, plenty of things seem to blow up all the time, and flying about in cargo planes. There's a fairly good sense of humor but no real sense of physics. The script is fair to good. Some times the dialog made me roll my eyes. The film is fun enough but not as entertaining as the first film in the series. It's almost like it's a bit of parody.
Witchtrap is a 1989 horror film that's also known as The Presence. For some reason the new Blu-ray uses a print that has The Presence title on it. The movie is written and directed by Kevin S Tenney. He's directed a few minor horror and SF films, Night of The Demons, both Witchboard films and Arrival II are the ones I know about.
It's a story about some people hired to investigate a haunting at a Bed and Breakfast place that used to belong to a stage magician. It's said he was a wizard and he died preforming a ritual that would give him immortality. It didn't work. He's a ghost now. Everyone's favorite scream queen Linnea Quigley plays the camera person in the team hired to find and exorcise the ghost. The rest of the actors weren't familiar to me at all. There's a couple of psychics and some security people. None of them are prepared for the ferocity of the ghost and they're easily tricked and killed. Poor Linnea gets it in the shower pretty early on.
The story is pretty straight forward but the dialog is often kind of weak. The effects are better than the cast but not always. It's a mixed bag, kind of typical really for a low budget film. Sadly we won't know how much better the cast might have been, in the Linnea interview on the Blu-ray she says that all the sound was ruined and the whole movie had be be dubbed in later. We had commented on the sound as were watching the movie. It's not so awful that you can't watch the film. In all I thought it was about average, a bit of gore, a few scares, a few laughs, and a few fans who gave it a 4.7 on the IMDb. That's not too far off for me, I'd give it a 5 because it's not really a 6, or a 4. You might like it, you can find out on YouTube.
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