The Devil's Tomb
2009
I have a copy of this film, but I just can't force myself to watch it since
Beercaps already captured the nudity.
For the record:
The plot is summarized as follows: "An elite group of soldiers on a covert
mission to retrieve a scientist from an underground lab encounter an
ancient evil in the facility." Frankly, I am bored with ancient evil. We
moviegoers are badly in need a transfusion of some new avant-garde evil. In
that regard, we are much like the Republican Party.
The film was made with a good-sized budget ($10m), and the cast is a pretty
good collection by STV standards: Ray Winstone, Cuba Gooding, and Ron
Perlman.
It has yet to receive five votes at IMDb.
The nudity comes from Holly
Weber, showing off the best body money can buy as the "Dream Girl."
Crank: High Voltage
2009
The New York
Times reviewer wrote: "Crank: High Voltage, starring Jason Statham as a
man with a machine instead of a heart, is boorish, bigoted and borderline
pornographic."
Very true. It is also crude, low-rent, lowbrow, insensitive, soulless,
tasteless, offensive, lurid, sensationalistic, juvenile, racist, vulgar,
ridiculous, politically incorrect, and completely demented from start to
finish.
What I can't understand is why the reviewer thought those were bad things!
It may have something to do with the facts that (a) the reviewer is a chick
(2) she works for the humor-challenged New York Times.
The basic idea is that Chev (Jason Statham) has his heart removed by some
baddies, who keep him alive temporarily by jury-rigging a battery pack to
duplicate his heart functions. The only reason they keep him alive is that
they want him to be awake when they remove his other vital organs. Of
course, when he awakens from the surgery he's understandably a bit upset
that he has no heart, but he really gets ticked off when he overhears the
surgeons say that the next organ to be removed will be his dick. Upon
discovering that, he rises from his death-bed, kills a few random people,
and starts out in search of his missing heart, a search which basically
consists of maiming and torturing random people who refuse to help him.
What makes it a Crank movie is that his battery pack needs constant
recharging from power stations and car engines and whatever other sources
of energy he can find. After a re-charge, he temporarily acquires
superhuman energy, but as his charge wears off, his strength ebbs to the
sub-human level until he can find another place to get a jump.
(Boy, do some cops get a nasty surprise when they tase him instead of
subduing him manually. Each blast from the tasers makes him stronger, until
he has power rivaling The Incredible Hulk.)
I won't bore you with any more of the outlandish details of the plot.
Wikipedia has a
very complete summary, spoilers and all, if you are interested.
The point is that Crank is not actually a high-voltage action film, but a
parody of one. It is indeed a stupid and ridiculous film, as the New York
Times noted, and that is precisely the point! It is wildly imaginative,
surreal, and obviously intended to be funny. Although Jason Statham plays a
perfect straight man in the center of the madness, there is not one minute
of the film that is meant to be taken seriously, and that would be apparent
to anyone not employed by the New York Times. Yes, it is a non-stop orgy of
over-the-top violence and borderline porn. Yes, it totally lacks any human
emotion and resembles a superhero video game. That is exactly what is
intended. I have to say that the film succeeds in spades. Although it is
not the kind of film I would ordinarily watch for my own pleasure, I found
watching it to be a fascinating and exhausting experience. Excluding the
credits, the actual running time is only about 80 minutes, and that is
filled with so much frenetic action that it makes the first Crank movie
seem as slow and stately as a Tarkovsky film. Compared to this, the opening
sequence of Roger Rabbit moves slower than The English Patient. Chev makes
Lola seem like she was crawling.
It's just filled with bizarre cameos and sidetracks. One of the Spice Girls
plays Chev's mother in an off-kilter flashback sequence. A topless stripper
gets caught in the middle of a shoot-out, and the gunfire punctures her
implants. That pompous guy who played Q on Star Trek plays a wacked-out TV
commentator named Fish Halman, who seems to be channeling Glenn Beck. Corey
Haim makes a brief appearance. David Carradine plays an stereotypical old
Chinese man - and while that is totally offensive, he brings far more
dignity to Chinese people than any of the other characters in the movie. (Bai
Ling's character speaks English, but requires English subtitles!)
How large is the audience for such base tomfoolery? I don't know, but it's
probably quite small. Older people will find it sophomoric and brainless.
Conservative people will find it pornographic and trashy. Mainstream date
audiences will find it demented, and I don't know many women I'd recommend
it to. Family audiences should not even consider seeing it. You'd cause
your kids fewer nightmares by taking them to a double bill of Hellraiser
and a hard-core porn movie. The only ones to appreciate this film will be
the fanboys who love video game movies, and the movie buffs who reach
nirvana when a film really tests the outside of the envelope. Having said
that, I'll add that if you are in those latter groups, you will probably
find it as much fun as I did!
- 7.5 at IMDb
- 61% positive reviews at Rotten Tomatoes
- A failure at the box office, with a mere $6 million on its opening
weekend, despite distribution to more than 2200 theaters.
Nudity
Uh ... yeah!
Dude, the entire film is nothing but wall-to-wall violence and nudity!
You'll see exactly what the movie is like by watching these clips, which
show nearly 20 of the film's 80-some minutes. You'll definitely know
whether you want to see it or not.
Here's a film clip of
Amy Smart and
a bunch of other chicks naked for about 11 minutes. The visual quality
is outstanding - it's taken from a high-res Russian source - but the
audio is a cam-job which has been synched in over the Russian dubbing.
(You'll actually hear people laughing and commenting from time to time, but
the video quality more than makes up for it.) The download is (get ready
for a shock) more than 800 meg!
Here is the rest of the
(female) nudity. Since these people are nobodies, I dropped down the
video quality to make the download reasonable, but it still looks impressive.
