John Wick 2 starts 4 days after the first movie. John comes calling at the Russian gangster's chop shop to pickup his stolen car. It gets wrecked while John's paying the storage fee. Santino comes calling on John to call in a marker John had given him. John refuses the job and Santino blows up his house. John's told, by top crime boss Ian McShane, that he needs to make up with Santino and do the job he wants or John's a dead man. Turns out that Santino wants his sister killed, she's the head of a big crime family in Rome. After the assassination Santino puts a contract on John and all sorts of assassins come out of the wood work. The rest of the movie is John killing all the assassins and paying back Santino. It ends with a cliff hanger that hopefully will get answered in the last movie of the trilogy.
It's a violent slaughterfest that happens in a criminal fantasy underworld with it's own currency and rules. The only cop we see is John's friend Jimmy. They don't seem to show up when the shot outs are going on and the only consequences are internal to the criminal world. We were thinking that the body count was higher than the first film and the internet says it does, 77 in the first 128 in the second. Lot of job openings in the underworld the day after the movie. I enjoyed the movie and look forward to the last film where John has to kill all the criminals in the underworld to get out his new predicament.
Bloody Knuckles is a 2014 Canadian horror comedy about a severed hand. It's written and directed by Matt O'Mahoney. It's his first film, he'd directed 7 shorts over the previous ten years and worked as a props guy on TV shows and movies.
That's Travis, he's an draftsman by day and an a cartoonist at night. He'd created a comic series that's got some local popularity. I found the art to be crap but that isn't going to stop people reading a comic. He does an issue about a local Chinese businessman, named Fong, who's really a gangster with his own gang of thugs. Fong is incensed and he has Travis brought round for punishment. He has one of his henchmen cut off Travis' hand and throw it in the sewer. Travis gets tossed onto the same street and he barfs down the sewer. His vomit lands on the hand. Travis's life life falls apart and days pass. The hand shows up at Travis' apartment, magically animated by the puke, seeking vengeance. It won't take no for an answer. The hand's a dick. A murderous dick.
There's a woman reporter who gets something on Mr Fong and his mob. The gangster kidnaps her and Travis, intending to put a stop to their annoyance. Lucky for them, the hand, joined by Homo Dynamous, comes to their rescue. They battle Fong to the death.
I got a laugh out of it, it's not great, it's a bit brutal, but it's entertaining. It's well enough made, there are interesting characters, and there are a good number of jokes of mixed quality. There's a good bit of gore as body parts get chopped off. The script is about average and the actors up to that or better. The only guy I didn't find to be that good was the guy who played Fong. It gets a 5.7 on the IMDb and I gave it a 6, it's not quite as good as a 7. I liked it enough to put the Blu-ray in my Amazon Wish List, it's under 8 bucks, so I'll stick it in my next order. I'll want to watch it again. You can watch, or download, a fairly decent copy from YouTube in the title link above.
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