One year shows-The adventures of Brisco County Jr.

One season 1993-94

Right after Army of darkness Bruce Campbell was brought in to star in a Western, sci-fi, action, comedy show on Fox. Adventurer Brisco County Jr. gets brought in on a mission after his father and legendary western police type is killed.  Now Jr. is quick with a gun, but never quite lived up to father’s reputation. He gets another chance, but he is determined to do things his way. With the help of his very bright horse Comet and some others he rides around dealing with various loonies, nasties and other while trying set the old west straight and bring it into the upcoming century.

I watched this show from day one. I thought it was hands down the best show on that season. I was in college at the time and always made time to watch it even if I had to do homework while I saw it. It had the flavor of a 60’s western combined with sci-fi elements and the comedy that only Bruce Campbell could bring to this role. When it canceled after one season I was devastated. It floored me that not everyone loved this show, but then again I was the only one amongst my group of friends that watched it so yeah maybe not many people were watching it. They were missing out.  Fast forward a decade and a half and it comes out on DVD. I watch the episodes and they are just as good as I remember them being. A real shame this gem couldn’t find it’s audience. In just one season it’s a fine show that deserved to go on longer.

 

 

 

 

It came from the bargain bin-Street Fighter

1994
Purchased at Big Lots recently.
Cost-$3
Why this could be good? I’m a big fan of the game and I liked a few JCVD films back in the day.
Why this could be bad? Everyone I knew who saw it said it was average or worse.

Guile is the main hero as a French accented, US flag tattoo wearing soldier (?!). Bison is the villain and some big old nasty plan hatched. Eventually all the other characters from the game appear and end up on different sides of this battle. There’s martial arts competition, military actions, gun battles, evil plots and all that kind of going on to some extent throughout the film. The main villains (Bison, Sagat, Vega) sneer, look evil and try to cause problems -ewwww take that good people. While the obvious heroes (Guile, Cammy, Chun Li) fight for what’s good, just and what the script tells them to fight for. Others like Ken and Ryu go from indifferent to maybe bad to good just in case you wondering or cared at all by this point. Somewhere along the line the director said “what have I done?”, no actually he said “we are running out of time and money so let’s set up a grand finale and blow stuff up”. So that’s what we get. There’s some fights with evil losing. The bad guy lair explodes. Zangief is forgiven his crimes because he holds a door open for the good guys while the other baddies remain bad. Ken and Ryu both become good for ummm good. At the end of the film the cast try their best to recreate poses of the game characters with not so impressive results. Game over.

The negatives-I think the first one that comes to mind is that for an action film based on a legendary fighting game this film lacks memorable fights. They take too long to get to real fights and when they do they are short and we see close ups of part of the action rather than a whole fight scene. Definitely real missed opportunities. With this many characters in one film it’s understandable that some get fleshed out more than others. However some of my biggest character complaints are…
1-That skinny soldier was T. Hawk? They didn’t even try on him.
2-Dhalsim loses his hair at the end and that’s like we all get on him being the Dhalsim we know. He was around before Cammy and Vega in the game yet they shoved him to the side in this film.
3-In this film Balrog is good and DeeJay is bad. Why? Did the writers of this movie ever see these characters in the game? I think not.
There are also the usual plot holes and perhaps worst of all I never really cared as much about the characters in this film as I did while playing the game.

The positives-The locations are nice, actually the storming the fortress scene at the end makes good use of the location. I liked that they tried to include all of the characters from the game even if they didn’t get most of them right. I liked when Sagat and Deejay thought they were getting something valuable only to find that they’d saved some Bison bucks.

Was it worth $3? The price is lower that the average bargain bin price of $5 so that means the film doesn’t have to be as good to be worth less money. I suppose that’s right. However for me in evaluating the value of a film for what I paid for it I go to two things-was it good and how many times would I watch it again? For the first one I have to say the film was below average. It had far more faults than I figured it would. The one thing I was hoping for was good fight scenes and it didn’t have enough of those. For the second question no I don’t have the desire to see this film again any time soon. So I’d say unfortunately it was not worth the $3.

I hope to this bargain bin segment twice a month starting in January. I already have some films lined up for the next few months. Some possibilities for 2015 include-
The Scorpion King action pack
Mortal Kombat double feature
Tales from the darkside the movie
Konga
Four sided triangle
Spaceways
Future Sport
Short Circuit double feature
Hancock
The wolfman (remake)
The Neverending story double feature
The monster maker
X the man with X ray eyes
Godzilla against Mechagodzilla
Casper meets Wendy
Werewolf the beast among us
Sherlock Holmes Double Feature (w/Basil Rathbone)
Idle Hands
Silver Bullet
Jason goes to hell
The land that time forgot/People that time forgot double feature
Alien Apocalypse
Crucible of Horror
Man of steel
Collateral Damage/Eraser double feature

Lois and Clark- Vatman

“You’re a Superdork”             “No, you are”

1994

What’s this about?

Superman is in France saving a plane from crashing. Meanwhile back in big old Metropolis Lois, Perry, Jimmy and Clark watch it on TV. Wait, a minute… Clark? How could that be? Some thing is loopy here. So Clark wants to find out what the heck is going on. Eventually he runs into the other Superman who acts like a really little kid only you know with super strength and stuff. Lois suspects this Superman is not real either because he looks at her like she’s a slug. Turns out Lex Luthor is behind this, no surprise there. Lex hired a corrupt scientist to make a close of Superpest with the reason being to train him to whoop the real Superstinker. However as with all evil plans there’s a flaw in the slaw-seems Superclone is fading and so he’ll die so Lex launches him after the real big guy. Eventually there’s a big showdown on an old western town movie set after phoney Supes takes Lois there to lure the real hero in. They battle but pretty soon imitation Supes gets winded and knows he’s not long for this world. He has a change of heart and gets back the lock of hair Lex used to make the clone. Superman (the real one) has to burn the fake Superdude and the lock of hair so there be no more clones. Roll the credits.

 

What’s up?

The negatives-This show always had a fair amount of humor and that may not be for everyone.

The positives-I make no secrets about being a big fan of this season and season one was my favorite because it had Lex, a developing relationship between Lois and Clark, the better Jimmy plus Clark and Supes are both still figuring out their roles in life. This was a good episode that focused on those roles. I like that Clark and Supes struggle to figure things out at times in this show. Lex is a great villain here as he always has an evil plot brewing and just shows the cocky, nasty attitude that make him a great villain.