Mr. Wydey's Film Guide Letter O

Oblivion (2013) The Scavengers came to Earth 50 years ago to take over after ruining their own planet. But they were taken out by a nuclear war, which wrecked Earth. They were still around and a fleet of drones, serviced in his area by Jack, was fighting them. Earth's population was going to a new planet but some, like Jack, still felt at home there.
   Jack got stuck down a sink hole when messing about and returned to base, and his bossy lady supervisor, with an old book. A homing beacon started transmitting from a wrecked building. Jack skived off to his private retreat for a while. Back on the job, he found 5 humans in stasis pods where a vehicle had crash-landed from orbit. He saved a woman from attacking drones.
   The woman wanted the flight recorder from her ship. Jack was grabbed by scavengers. He was told that the drones were the enemy. The crew of Jack's mission to Titan had been cloned but some, like Jack, still retained some residual memories despite brainwashing. The scavengers wanted him to program a drone to take a nuke to its orbiting command centre to end the war. The woman Jack rescued told him they went to Titan to investigate an alien object there and she was Julia Harper, his wife!
   The bossy lady set drones on the Harpers. Jack had a scrap with another version of himself and Julia was shot. Jack met another version of the bossy lady, who had been with him on the Titan mission. Jack took Julia to his retreat and went off to save the world from a legion of clones of himself and the bossy lady, and the drones.
   Drones attacked the scavengers' hideout. Cue a big battle. Jack put his wife back in the stasis pod to deliver her to the orbiting base. But it was the scavenger commander who got out in orbit and the base was nuked. Three years later, another Jack Harper and a gang of scavengers turned up at the retreat, where Julia was living with her daughter.

The Oblong Box (1969) This rather slow-paced film has the same title as a story by Edgar Poe. Something abominable happened to Sir Edward in Africa so his brother Julian (Vincent Price) keeps him chained up in their Munster-style mansion. Sir Edward has an escape plan, however, which involves taking a drug made by an African witch doctor and pretending to be dead. Unfortunately for Edward, he ends up buried while the pair who are supposed to rescue him are commissioned to find a decent-looking corpse to star in a ceremonial funeral.
Luckily for Sir Edward, he is dug up by Resurrectionists and delivered to a surgeon (Christopher Lee), who finds himself with a house guest intent on revenge instead of a cadaver for dissection. The ignorant natives in Africa, we learn, disfigured Sir Edward instead of his brother, who marries Elizabeth and opens up the gloomy house.
Sir Edward goes on the rampage and attracts the attention of the law (Rupert Davis, an early Inspector Maigret). His brother chases him into the woods and is bitten by the madman before killing him, and Julian ends up in chains in the room at the top of the house with his face festering horribly.

Ocean Rising (2016) A HUGE CME cause all sorts of earthquakes and zapped satellites and fried power systems on the ground. The Solar Dynamics mob wanted to cash for an early warning system. Earth's magnetic field was weakening and there was a guy trying to sell the end of all life as we know if it went down to zero then reversed. Josh wanted to zap the Earth's core with black holes.
The mad bozo's hysteria was destroying his wife's career. 3 years later, a tidal wave took out southern California; huge death toll. Josh and his wife were swept out to sea on his boat and they collected a real gang of human detritus, some of whom thought the disaster was starting to feel supernatural.
The poles were under water but CERN on the Swiss border was still there for Josh to do the black hole thing. None of the misfits spoke French and the guards were violent nutters. But the director recognized crazy Josh on CCTV. The magnetic field came back but the black holes kept growing. So Mrs. Josh took an axe to a power cable to save the world. Surprise! she didn't croak!

Octopussy (1983, Roger Moore) Bond is busted somewhere Spanish-speaking planting a bomb, but not for long. He has an escape plane in a horsebox and the bad guys are blown up. In East Berlin, a clown is beset by knife-throwing twins but escapes to the West. Miss Moneypenny has a new assistant. A Russian is flogging Faberge eggs anonymously. A crazy Russian general wants to conquer Europe in 5 days. General Orlov is told to sit down.
   Bond larks about at an auction and switches the egg bought for £500,000 for a fake. Off to India to harass Kamal Khan, the backgammon cheat, who bought the egg. After a battle with the circus mob, Bond has a session with Q. Off to shag Maud Adams, Khan's girlfriend, and let her steal the bugged egg.
   Bond has a horrible dinner with Mr. Khan, he stages a gaol break and he's hunted in the grounds of Khan's fortress. Cue a Barbara Woodhouse "Sit-t-t!" with a tiger and Bond doing a Tarzan act. Khan's GF is Octopussy, who has an international smuggling organization and an all-woman island. General Orlov has been swapping Russian national treasures for fakes to raise cash for his evil plans.
   General Gogol' finds out what Orlov has been doing and he is gunned down. But after a nuke has been sent with the circus, which is to perform at a US military base in West Germany. Bond causes a riot in a clown suit and deactivates the bomb with 1 second to spare.
   The Octopussies invade Khan's castle to sort him out. Bond goes pratting around on the outside of Khan's plane. And so does the Indian strong man; briefly. Khan is written off and Bond goes boating on Octo's Kleopatra barge. BTW, there's a very melodious and well-performed theme song.

Office Space (1999) Initech is a god-awful place to work. Peter Gibbons and his 2 pals, Mike & Samir, are feeling harassed by the boss and the equipment, and Milton keeps being moved further and further from the windows. The boss tells Peter he has to work at the weekend but his girlfriend takes him to a hypnotherapist on Friday evening and the guy croaks after putting Peter under.
   Peter stays in bed on Saturday and while the company is starting interviews to do some downsizing, he's making a lunch date with Joanna, a waitress. He feels great and he really enjoys doing nothing. The consultants are so impressed by Peter's new attitude that they decide he needs to be promoted. Peter does some remodelling of his environment with a power screwdriver.
   Mike & Samir face the sack, so Peter gets them to put a cash-extracting virus into the computer system. Mike screws up with a decimal point and tons of cash pour into Peter's account. Peter screws up his relationship with Joanna. Then he puts a confession and a refund of the cash under his boss's door.
   Peter has second thoughts but he gets to Initech to find Initech in flames. Milton had found out that he'd been fired while trying to find the boss and run off with the cash after torching the place. Mike & Samir get new IT jobs but Peter finds happiness shovelling up the wreckage of the Initech building.

Ogre (2008) Plague strikes Ellensford, a post-colonial American town in Pennsylvania. The people call on Bartlett, the sorcerer, to work some magic. Everyone agrees to accept the consequences, he has himself declared their magistrate and casts a spell which converts the plague into an ogre, which requires a human sacrifice every year on the winter solstice.
   In the present day, 2 couples go looking for the lost village. One bloke breaks his ankle, he finds the ogre's lair and he and his girlfriend are gobbled up. Jesse & Mike find the village, the population of which has been whittled down to a few dozen over the centuries.
   The next sacrifice is to be Young Steven, the boyfriend of Hope Bartlett. Franklin, Bartlett's critic, realizes that Bartlett can choose the victim and their miserable existence is due to Bartlett's desire to live for as long as there are people available to sacrifice to the ogre.
   Bartlett decides to give Mike to the ogre instead of Young Steven. Hope learns that her father caused the plague and unchains Mike. Steven leaves the bounds of the village and vanishes in a blaze of light. Hope tells her father he's a monster just before the ogre gets him.
   Jesse & Mike ask for help at a police station, the sheriff laughs at them, Mike steals his car, it bogs down but there's a shotgun in the boot. Hope thinks that she can undo her father's spell. Mike offers himself as bait in a trap, everyone blasts the ogre with various weapons, Hope works her magic and the ogre ends up outside the bounds of the village. So that's the end of the ogre. And the people of Ellensford. So what are Jesse & Mike going to tell the sheriff?

Olympus Has Fallen (2013) Pissant Oriental terrorists and traitors take over the White House to get the US to withdraw the 7th Fleet and let N. Korea attack S. Korea. Natch, there's a washed-up American agent, Mike, on the scene to take out BGs and stop the acting president from going wobbly and give the pissants what they want.
Codes are tortured out of the people with access to them. The acting president provides a chopper for the prisoners; and it blows up after taking off. Was the president aboard? Of course, he wasn't. Mike, you've got about 10 minutes before the closing credits roll to prevent all of America's nuclear missles from self-destructing in their bunkers. Mike gets to do in the head pissant, and the president takes a bullet to make him a hero.

Omega Doom got only one star in the Daily Mail Weekend magazine – a sure sign of cult film status. The Mail's preview, and all the others, condemned it as an ultra-low-budget sci-fi with no redeeming features [see also Medusa's Child above]. In the event, it is quite a reasonable way to spend an hour and a half in front of the telly, it moves along at a decent pace, it has humour, violence and retribution, and it held my interest. So a thumbs up to the film and two fingers to the miserable gits of previewers!

Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003) is a spaghetti Western 30 years on. A guitarist, El Mariachi, or just El to everyone, is grabbed by an armed posse working for a drug cartel, The boss wants to recruit him to kill General Marquez, who had been hired to bump off the president. El has to kill the general after he's killed the president so that the cartel can take over his coup. Lots on the history between El and the general.
   Lots of bullets flying, lots of gratuitous murder, lots of bangs and lots of Mexicans speaking Castillian Spanish. A 3-armed CIA agent is planning to stroll off with the 20 million pesos available to finance the coup. He fires up a retired FBI agent and points him at the head of the cartel, who was one of the FBI guy's 'ones who got away'. The CIA agent has his eyes drilled out, so he has to rely on his hearing to shoot people.
   The coup starts, los tres mariachis join in with exploding guitar cases & lots of guns. The general goes after the cash and meets El dressed in the president's coat. The CIA guy gets to shoot the cartel boss's daughter. The FBI guy does the same to her old man? No, it's El who has that pleasure, and he gives the 20 million pesos to the people of his village.
   This is a corny pastiche of the classic spaghetti Western, and rather silly.

The One (2001) Is a 'futuristic martial arts adventure' set across parallel universes and built on the premise that if Kim (Jet Li) kills a version of himself in another parallel universe, the energy of the Kim personality will be concentrated in the survivors, and if he kills all the others and becomes The One, all their energy will be concentrated in him. But the dimension police are trying to stop that happening, as they think that if Kim succeeds, he'll destroy the balance between the parallel universes.
   Kim can move faster than bullets and outrun police cars, but he is caught, convicted of 123 counts of murder and unlawful transits between universes and sentenced to life without possibility of parole at a penal colony in the Hades universe. But a female accomplice helps him to escape and he goes after Gabriel, the last surviving other version of himself, in a parallel dimension.
   Kim and Gabriel begin a lengthy battle, which migrates to a chemical plant, where there are lots of explosions. In the end, Gabriel, Kim and the surviving cop are sucked into a wormhole and they end up back on Kim's world; where the authorities shove Gabriel into a transmitter, bound for the Hades universe. Luckily, the cop spots that they have the wrong man, Kim is sent to Hell, where he has to fight all the other convicts, and Gabriel ends up in a universe where his girlfriend wasn't killed by Kim. Operation CIA (1965, Burt Reynolds) Sinister Orientals put a bomb in a box. Blimey! it's in black & white. One US spy blown up. He was on to something big. Agent Andrews is sent to Vietnam as an agricultural expert. Our hero gets done over by the thieving locals, who are planning to kill the US ambassador. They have no qualms about chucking grenades at kids. They also try to be lethal with a speedboat on the Mekong.
   The BGs chuck a snake at our hero during a scrap. The army shoots up some black-clad Commies. The BGs kill Andrews' assistant and he has to do some fleeing with a Vietnamese woman. Andrews drags a gas bomb out of the air-conditioning system and that's the assassination plot foiled. Hooray!

Operation Delta Force is one of those films that need a TV fully loaded with ammunition. The bad guys fire off millions of rounds and don't hit anything much. The good guys fire off about as many millions and zap the bad guys. But it is all in a good cause. The Africaaners don't get to spread the plague around and win themselves a homeland, and the good guys don't croak from the plague.

Orc Wars (2013) A wicked witch on an Orc world demands that her minions bring her a princess to sacrifice. On our world, an ex-special forces guy buys a furnished house and finds himself confronted with arrow-shooting monsters. When he blasts most of the monsters with a shotgun, they assume he's a wizard.
An Indian with a bandage over where his eyes used to be tells Joe Orton about Orcs and that he's the new guardian of a world gate. The princess then Orcs invade Orton's home. Just 2 Orcs get away. Good job the previous sentinel left a basement full of guns. The Orcs come back for more as the real estate lady drops in, so a major battle develops.
The Orcs have a fire-bomb chucker. Orton's team has a half-track with a machine gun and missiles. The Orcs bring on a dragon and the half-track and the house go up in flames. The Orcs stroll off with the princess. Orton slays the dragon, puts the Orcs to flight and slays the wicked witch with the princess' help.

The Order (2001) is all-action rubbish featuring jewel thief Rudi (Jean-Claude Van Damme) and, briefly, Charlton Heston! Rudi raids a Russian Mafia strong and has to fight his way out. His archaeologist dad in New York has a document of great value to The Order, a religious group founded by a disillusioned Crusader. Dad is kidnapped & taken to Israel. Rudi follows and runs into a police major, who decides he's there to smuggle out artefacts.
The head of the Order is killed by Sirus, a fanatic who wants to start World War III. To do this, he needs the map which Rudi's dad found, to plant a bomb right under the Temple Mount and blow up assorted Islamics. The police major is in with him, but the corrupt copper is after treasure, not Armageddon.
Lots & lots of chases and kung fu battles. Rudi acquires a lady police lieutenant as an ally. Rudi & his dad are both shot up a bit. Sirus gets a gutful of sword. The Muscles from Brussels drops Sirus's bomb down a deep hole and sends the police major after it. And Rudi's dad writes a best seller about The Order.

Out For A Kill (2003) had 1 star and featured Steven Seagal. Nuff said! Start with a slo-mo massacre in a Bulgarian night club. The Chinese mob was trying to take over the world's drug trade. Professor Robert Burns, an archaeologist, was framed for murder and drug running. Drug enforcement agents from the US & Hong Kong, who decided he was guilty as hell, wanted to use him for their own devious purposes, so they set the Prof. up as bait. [The director has a slo-mo fixation.]
   The DEA extracted the Prof. from China, which upset the Chinese Mob. Their assassins weren't much cop but they were good for some martial arts and slo-mo killings. The Prof. turned out to be a reformed international thief, who had gained his PhD in gaol! He wrecked a restaurant taking out 3 assassins. And he was lucky enough to be looking around outside when the bad guys blew up his house, in slo-mo, with his wife inside it. So no more Mr. Nice Guy.
   The Prof. went on a rampage and killing spree which took him to a trap in New York, which didn't work. On the way, he read the Chinese characters tattooed on the arms of the assassins. The Head Bad Guy was planning a massive shipment from Burma as a symbol of the new unity of the Chinese Mob, and he felt the Prof. was putting it in jeopardy.
   The Prof. had to rescue the DEA agents. A car chase and another kill in Bulgaria. Next stop, Paris in search of Sai Lo, who was lurking in a Chinese money laundry. The male DEA agent was shot. Prof. Burns finally confronted the HBG, who lost his head. Remembering all the Chinese tattoos let him open the HBG's safe and turn the documents in it over to the Chinese lady DEA agent.

Outland (1981) features Sean Canary as a marshall posted to a mining operation on a space rock which is dangerously inside Jupiter's radiation zone, from the view from the windows. The miners keet going crazy and killing themselves and each other.
Mr. Canary finds out that the management is giving them a drug which makes them work like horses and go crazy after 11 months. So the marshall finds himself on his todd, apart from the cynical old doctor, with a couple of hired killers on the way to write him off. And when the shootin' starts, half the station is taken out! Not a bad effort.

Outlander (2008) Norway, 709 AD: a damaged spacecraft breaks up in the atmosphere, 2 survivors, one doesn't last long. A computer pod implants Norse into the visitor; very painfully. He finds a trashed whaling village, and loses his fancy gun when he's captured by the locals. They want to know where he's from. He says he's hunting dragons.
   The locals beat him up and Freya, who won't marry Wolfrik, the bloke next in line to be king, patches him up. The locals are worried about being blamed for wiping out Gunnar's village. A monster attacks the walled encampment. The Outlander says his people have a name for them: Morwen. The beast kills everything, he brought it there and he wants to hunt it.
   The Outlander kills a cave bear on an expedition and the locals think they're safe and free Kainan. He warns Freya that the Morwen will come back. Then Gunnar, who betrayed Wolfrik's father and got him killed, attacks the village, thinking his village was destroyed in retaliation.
   The Morwen shows up. The Norsemen want to hunt it but Kainan says they have to trap it. Then he tells Freya how his people scorched the habitat of the Morwen to take it over, but one survived and wiped out everyone in his compound. He was returning home with his wife's and other bodies (and a Morwen stowaway) when he crashed on Earth.
   A priest confronts the monster and is eaten. The trap doesn't work, and there's a baby Morwen, too. The Norsemen leave the area but Kainan, Wolfrik and Freya stay to see off the monsters. Both monsters are taken out, but the big one does the same to Wolfrik, so Kainan wrecks his distress beacon, so no rescue, and becomes king of the group of Norsemen with Freya as his queen.

Out of Reach (2007, Steven Seagal) An ex-CIA agent is corresponding with a 14-year-old girl in a Polish orphanage. The CIA wants him terminated and Irena is turfed out of the orphanage. The woman in charge tries to tell our hero that she ran away. Then 2 killers go after him and the woman at the orphanage is killed.
In fact, the girl has been grabbed by a gang of people rustlers, who are making zillions out of the racket internationally. A Polish lady cop attaches herself to our hero and he also acquires a thieving little boy, who saw the bad guy who strolled off with Irena. A killer fails to get the cop. The CIA tries to do in our hero via the Colonel who has Irena.
Our hero crashes a ball at the Turkish embassy, where the girl is being held. He sets a trap and the cop gets him some fire-power. A knocking shop and assorted bad guys are blown to bitz. Our hero then strolls off to kill the Colonel and rescue the girl, and take her and the thieving kid to America.

Out Of Time (2003) Denzel Washington plays Chief Whitlock of Banyan Bay, Florida, has a safe full of Mob-money, which is evidence, and he's being divorced. His girlfriend, Anne, has a violent husband and terminal cancer. She finds that her husband has a million-dollar insurance policy on her. She thinks about selling it for $750K to get some desperation treatment but she makes the Chief her beneficiary instead.
   The Chief's wife sends him divorce papers so he gives Anne the drug money so she can leave Chris. Then Anne's home goes up in flames and there are 2 bodies in the wreckage; no smoke in the lungs. The Chief's soon-to-be-ex-wife, a detective, gets the case.
   The Chief tries to cover up the affair. Anne's doctor tells him she didn't have cancer. The Chief realizes that he was scammed. Then the DEA demands the drug money. The Chief is almost killed by Anne's fake doctor, but he gets the DEA cash back. Anne phones the Chief for help just after his wife finds out about the insurance policy.
   The Chief gets his pal Jake, the drunken M.E. to help. Chris fails to get the better of the Chief and Anne shoots him. She's the criminal mastermind! She shoots the Chief but his wife shoot Anne. Jake gets the Chief off the hook over the money but getting his wife back costs him the million-dollar insurance pay-out.