Pandorum (2009) In the 22nd century, it will be standing room only on Earth, with a population of 24 billion. A mission was sent to a distant planet, which looked Earth-like. Corporal Bower was ejected from hibernation unplanned and with amnesia. Lt. Payton also awoke and there was almost no power on the Elysium. Bower went crawling off, hoping to reboot the reactor, and met other crew members in a cave-person condition, and monsters. Most of the other crew were out of their minds.
A relatively sane woman, a bio-technician, showed Bower that the ship was an ark. Bower led a party through a swamp and they battled the monsters, which the biotech reckoned were mutated passengers. Some people go crazy in space from a condition called pandorum. Another survivor told Lt. Payton that the duty crew got it after Earth was wiped out, either by a nuclear war or an asteroid.
There were lots of monsters in the reactor room. Bower & Co. did lot of faffing about in the dark. Then the lights came on when the reactor rebooted. Payton went crazy. No, he'd always been crazy and he'd killed the duty crew. Bower found that the ship had crashed on the planet and it was in the sea! Luckily, near the shore.
Bower flooded the ship and escaped in a life pod with his ladyfriend. The ship began an emergency evacuation and launched other pods, so that was a population of 1313 for the new planet.
Panic Room (2002) A divorced woman buys a vast brownstone house in Manhatten for herself and her appalling daughter. The house has a panic room; its castle keep; where the occupants can take refuge when bad guys break in. Only when it happens on their first night in the house, the bad guys include a guy from the security company, who builds panic rooms,and they expected to find the house empty. Their target is $3 million stashed in the panic room.
Mom & her kid hit the panic room one-quarter of the way into the film. The phone in there isn't connected. The security guy drills into the ventilation system and connects a propane cylinder to it. Mom sets fire to the gas and damages one of the BGs. The kid tries sending an SOS through a pipe leading to the wet, dark night, but a neighbour across the street just draws her curtains. Hey, this is New York!
Mom sneaks out to get her mobile, which won't work in the steel-lined panic room. She manages to tap into the landline and makes a brief call to her ex-husband before being cut off. The kid starts going diabetic, the BGs start falling out over money and dad, who's called the cops, just turns up without waiting for them and gets the crap beaten out of him.
Mom sneaks out again to get insulin. The BGs find the panic room open and 2 of them end up inside with the kid while mom is outside with the gun. The security guy gives the kid a shot of insulin then he gets to work on cracking the safe. The cops eventually turn up so mom has to send them away. The security guy finds $22M in bearer bonds in the safe!
Lots of sneaking about in semi-darkness as the BGs try to escape. Useless dad makes a bog of shooting a crippled BG but the security guy comes back to finish the gang leader off. Which means that he starts climbing a wall again as the cops arrive, so he's busted. The film ends with mom and the kid looking for somewhere else to live as mom and the BGs wrecked the panic room house.
Paradox (2010) Homicide cops are shot up on a planet where magic rules and the action has cartoon transitions in homage to the origin of the story. The bad guy escapes on a gargoyle and Sean, the surviving cop, can't work out why the bullet that hit his cigarette case bears no trace of magic. "Science has no place in police work," his boss tells him but Sean is willing to give it a go.
He meets the 120-year-old Sir Winston Churchill, who tells him about guns and a parallel world where science rules instead of magic. Everyone on their world has a counterpart on the other world; apart from paradoxes, like Sean. It's possible to travel between the worlds using a special mirror and the bad guy has to be stopped before the barrier between the dimensions collapses.
Sir Winston is shot by the intruder and magic can't remove the bullet. Sean consults Lenore, a lady scientist and they get a trip to the other dimension. The Senator who tried to get Sean to drop the case is a bad guy and a blackmailer. Sean keeps looking for the other mirror, which was built by a Professor Hillman, who has an evil twin.
Sean finds that his police captain is dirty, too. He and the other Hillman are planning to create a perfect world by collapsing the dimensional barrier. The evil Hillman is eaten by his own monster, the two worlds don't merge, but Sean keeps looking for a way back to the science world.
Parker (2013) A bunch of clowns and a priest (Parker) pull off a robbery at a big fair. The organizer wants to use the cash as seed money for a big score. Parker just wants his share. So he ends up battered and shot at the side of the road. But he's rescued by some farmers. He escapes from hospital and pulls off a robbery for some cash.
Parker goes after the bad guys for revenge and rampages in Palm Beach, Florida, where the big job will go off. The BGs have Chicago Mob connections and a killer goes after Parker's girlfriend. Her dad tries to buy Parker off but he is going after the BGs who swindled him on principle.
An estate agent lady who's desperate for cash offers to help Parker. He wins a bloody battle with the Mob's killer by chucking him off a building. The BGs are planning to do over a celebrity auction disguised as firemen.
Some BGs are terminated with prejudice. Parker shows up in Chicago 6 month later to write off the Mob boss. A year later, his lady associate in Palm Beach gets a ton of cash in the mail.
Passenger 57 (1992, Wesley Snipes) Charles Rane, the insane terrorist, was busted while he was about to get plastic surgery on his face. Meanwhile, security expert John Cutter, who got his wife killed in a supermarket heist, was doing hijack training for an airline, which recruited him. Cutter had to fly to L.A. and the Feds put Rane on the same plane. Surprise! His gang hijacked it.
Cutter was in a toilet when the fun started. He got a passenger killed before escaping to the cargo space and dumping the fuel. The plane had to land at Hicksville, Louisiana. Cutter was booted off the plane and the dumb ass local cops busted him.
The airline boss was worried about Rane blowing up the plane to cover an escape but Rane let some passengers off and strolled in the opposite direction to a nearby fair. Cutter fought off the local bozos to go after him. Rane was re-busted by the FBI and sent back to the plane.
The plan to bust the rest of the gang went pear-shaped, the plane took off and Cutter lost his gun getting aboard. He took out 2 terrorists then de-pressurized the plane while scrapping with Rane! Rane went overboard and the plane made it back to Hicksville. Job done.
Path of Destruction (2005) The US govt. cancelled a project but the company hoped that it would be revived and parked self-replicating nanobugs on an Arctic oil rig. 2 years later, the rig had a disaster and the bugs were released. They ate Seattle and headed east. The US military wanted to nuke them but the guy whose idea was stolen said they needed an EM pulse.
Luckily, there had been a plastic & paper stealth plane mothballed in a hanger for 20 years. "Icarus" would not be affected by the pulse, so it could be used to deliver a weapon. Unluckily, the plane could be eaten by nanobugs. But the general flying it delivered the weapon, and himself, and made the nuke unnecessary.
Meanwhile, Mr. Stark, the boss of the rogue company which made the bugs, was planning to sell them to the Chinese. So his plane was quietly crashed into the sea, and that was the end of him.
Patriot Games (1992) is based on the Tom Clancy novel featuring Prof. Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford). He's in London with his family when Irish terrorists try to kill the Queen's cousin, who's a government minister. Ryan crashes in and kills the brother of Miller, a scumbag killer (Sean Bean), who's arrested.
Of course, the scumbag is sprung from prison transport and he makes Ryan his target instead of the Royal, whom his fellow scumbags want to kidnap for ransom. The Minister has a traitor in his camp. The scumbag goes after the pregnant Dr. Ryan and her young daughter as Jack is surviving his own assassination attempt. Mrs. Ryan and the kid get a free trip to the ER and Ryan rejoins the CIA.
Ryan tracks Miller to a training camp in Libya. Shock, horror! The traitor is Capt. Hastings, Hercule Poirot's sidekick. The camp is Libya is taken out but the main bad guys are long gone. They attack Ryan's home in a storm when the Royal is there. Lots of shooting, the kidnap plan flops and Miller & his crew end up kilt. Hooray!
Payback (1999) is a curiously bleached film, which is mainly blue and white rather than colour, and features Mel Gibson as Porter, a crook who is shot by his wife after he and Reznik, a fellow crook, after stealing $140K from some Chinese gangsters. 5 months later, Porter goes after what he's owed. His junkie ex-wife dies of an overdose. Porter finds Rosie, a hooker for whom he used to drive, and she tells him where to find Reznik.
Reznik owed the local Mob 130 grand; Porter want 70 grand as his half-share from the robbery. Reznik, who likes being beaten up by a Chinese hooker, goes to the mob for help but doesn't get any. So he rats Porter to the Chinese gangsters who were robbed. 2 bent cops save Porter from the Chinese and Porter kills Reznik. Then he goes after Reznik's bosses, Carter & Fairfax, and their boss, Bronson. They put a bomb in his bed! So Porter kills the hitmen and goes after Carter.
After whacking Carter, Porter frames the bent cops for Reznik's murder and kidnaps Bronson's son. Fairfax's goons grab Porter after a shoot-out with the Chinese gangsters and he gets a couple of toes hammered before telling Bronson where his son is. But Porter has set a trap with the bed-bomb and all the bad guys are blown up. And at the end, Porter heads off to Canada with 130 grand because the bad guys didn't believe he wanted only 70 grand.
Paycheck (2003) Mike, a designer/engineer, does secret and illegal jobs, then has his recent memory wiped and collects a big paycheck. His old mate Jimmy offers an 8-figure deal for 3 years of Mike's life. But when the job's over, he finds that he's cancelled the $92 million payment and sent himself an envelope full of junk! Then the FBI kidnaps him.
Mike had been working on a classified project originated by Dr. Decker, who's now dead. The Feds try to extract memories but Mike escapes. Meanwhile, the machine he helped to build for Jimmy at AllCom keeps returning Error 41 because Mike put a blocker in the hardware.
Jimmy thinks Mike should have been killed while escaping. Mike links up with his best mate, Shorty, and concludes that the machine showed him his future and the stuff in the envelope is all about helping him to change that future and survive.
Jimmy's guys send a ringer to a meeting with Rachel, who got pally with Mike during his 3 lost years, but she also turns up to be chased by the Feds and bad guys on Mike's motorbike. Mike finds out that the machine predicted a catastrophic war so he goes back to AllCom to destroy the machine.
Mucho mayhem at AllCom. Jimmy gets his, and so does the machine, and there's not much left for the Feds. But Mike walks away with a winning lottery ticket worth $90 million.
The Peacekeeper (1997) stars Dolph Lundgren as Major Frank Cross and Roy Scheider as the President. An air force major does an unauthorized food drop to the Kurds and ends up carrying the President's black bag of nuclear codes to make himself unavailable for court martial. Bad guys steal the case while the President is enjoying a night with his bimbo. Cross goes after them. He has to jump a taxi from building roof to roof to roof and takes the place of one of the bad guys on their helicopter.
Cross ends up at a missile silo, where a gang of bad guys are hoping for $500 million and a plane. Cross teams up with the colonel in charge to cause havoc. The President is dragged away from his bimbo to be told that a nuke from the silo has taken out Mount Rushmore and Col. Murphy, with whom he has history, wants to talk to him.
When in the army, the President had Murphy's mission to kill Saddam Hussein after the First Gulf War wiped out by US forces. He's dismayed to hear that Murphy isn't dead. He's even more unhappy when Murphy tells him to shoot himself on TV or Washington gets a nuke.
The President pulls the trigger, but the gun's empty. Cross is almost fried when a missile is launched at Washington. Murphy double-crosses the President and dies laughing. But Cross and the colonel make the missile self-destruct using the black bag.
The Peacemaker (1997) features George Clooney as Colonel Thomas Devoe, a gung-ho Special Forces man, and Nicole Kidman as Dr. Julia Kelly, a nerdy boffin. Russian troops attack a train carrying 10 nuclear warheads heading for decommissioning, blow one up to cover their trail and stroll off with the remaining 9. Dr. Kelly views satellite images and tells her bosses that the train crash was staged.
Devoe and Kelly head for Vienna to find out how the missiles will be transported to their customer and they have a car chase with lots of mayhem in Vienna. Another satellite locates the ambulance carrying the warhead and Devoe gets to ride into hostile Russian territory in a helicopter. Fun and games at a bridge recover 8 warheads but the nuclear core of the 9th has already been removed by a back-packing terrorist.
The bomb's destination is Bosnia at the at the time when the Serbs, Croats and Moslems were busy with their respective ethnic cleansing campaigns. The Serb customer is planning to make a nuclear protest at the UN in New York because he blames the West for not letting his people keep on killing until they get sick of it and stop of their own accord.
Another chase through grid-locked New York before the Serb takes refuge in a church with the activated bomb. Dr. Kelly prevents a nuclear explosion by knocking hell out of the array of conventional explosives around the plutonium core with the butt of Devoe's gun!
Phenomenon (1996) George, the unhandyman and mechanic (John T. Ravolta), sees a Braht Laht in the sky on his birthday and it knocks him on his drunken ass. He beats Hank at chess for the first time ever and becomes quite smart. And he's a TK! But he can't get anywhere with Lace, the future Chief Brenda, The Closer (Kyra Sedgwick).
No one else saw the lights in the sky. George finds he doesn't have to sleep and finding enough things to do is a struggle. He feels compression waves and warns Lace about a small earthquake. A boffin invites him to Berkeley because of it.
George is diverted to a medical emergency and he learns Portuguese to speak to the patient on the way! The FBI busts George and his mate Nate for breaking an Air Force code. Everyone becomes scared of what George can do.
UFOnuts swarm him and he ends up in hospital; where he's found to have an inoperable brain tumour. One of the doctors wants to put him under a microscope and has him kidnapped with the law's connivance. But George escapes and goes home to die. A year later, the town celebrates his birthday with a party. The end.
The Philadelphia Experiment (2012) A boffin used a gadget to make a car vanish and reappear, and made the USS Eldrigde, a WW II destroyer, appear on the runaway of a nearby airfield. Bill Gardner, the only surviving member of the crew managed to get off the ship. The ship, with all sorts of electric waves crawling over it, took off again and landed on a skyscraper in Chicago!
Gardner went to his home and met his grand-daughter 70 years on from his original experiment in 1943. He needed to contact someone who knew about the project to put things right. Luckily, Molly was a hacker. The two had to fight off a government psycho. The field generator on the ship was still active and it was going to jump again.
The stupid woman in charge of sorting out the ship had nothing better in mind than bombing the crap out of it, which would only make things worse.The guy behind the original project had faked his own death and he was still around. He said that Bill was the only one who could shut the generator down and get the ship back to 1943.
Falkner, the car boffin, went off on his own and rescued Bill & Molly from the psycho killer. Bill got aboard the ship. Meanwhile, the stoopid woman had persuaded the President to nuke it. But Molly got to shoot the stoopid woman, Bill got the ship back to 1943, rewrote history, and he was still alive in 2013.
Phone Booth (2002) A PR guy is trapped in a New York phone booth at 53rd & 8th, which he uses regularly, after a guy tries, and fails, to deliver a pizza to him. Someone who knows a hell of a lot about him phones the booth and tells him not to leave, or else. The voice sounds like a mixture of Vincent Price and Hal 9000. Stuart is told that he'll be killed if he hangs up. Meanwhile, a bunch of hookers and a bouncer start harassing Stu for the use of the phone booth.
Stu tries to buy them off then the voice shoots the bouncer. The cops turn up and the hookers tell them that Stu has a gun. A black police captain tries to negotiate with Stu, who finds himself in more trouble when his wife and his friend Pam arrive separately and provide the voice with more potential targets.
The voice keeps telling Stu to get a gun which he has hidden in the phone booth. Stu uses his cell phone to call his wife and let the Captain know about the real killer. Then he steps out of the booth brandishing the gun.
Stu is shot and the killer cuts his own throat just before the police arrive? But really, the cops put Stu on his back with a type of baton round. And the killer is the guy who tried to deliver the pizza? All very convenient, and while he's lying flat on his back in a daze in an ambulance, the killer lets Stu know that he's still around and still watching him.
Piranha (1997) Two kids have a moonlit swim @ an abandoned research station. A lady P.I. goes looking for them, hooks up with local guy Paul, drains the pool but doesn't find any bodies. The lady working at the lab is assaulted by the PI. she tries to drive away but she crashes. She tells them that the PI released some engineered piranha into the river.
The fish kill Paul's mate Jack and more and more others. The fish were a Cold War experiment aimed at making foreign rivers too dangerous to use. Paul's kid is down river at the Lost River resort, run by Mr. Raymond, who employed the PI. The pushy PI threatens the lab lady when she dares to point out who put the piranhas in the river, and the lab lady ends up dead.
The fish get around the dam by a side channel. Raymond refuses to close his resort because there is East Coast Mob money in it, and fires the PI. Paul and the PI get a night in gaol but the PI mugs the deputy and they escape. The piranhas attack the kids but they are polluted to death; most of them. Raymond blows his brains out before the Mob can get him. And the killer PI gets off scot free.
Piranhaconda (2012, exec producer Roger Corman) An expedition finds interesting eggs in Hawaii before being chomped by a huge aquatic snake with piranha teeth, which takes out a helicopter. There's also a film unit in the area and one of its ladies is eaten. Prof. Musgrove, who is snooping around, runs into a gang of bandits. 3 young ladies are looking for ghost orchids. Then there were none.
Gosh! There are 2 snakes. And one less actress. The studio pulls the plug on the epic just before the bandits grab some of the film guys. Two get away and a snake eats a bandit. Another finds a film camera showing someone being chomped by a freakin' huge snake.
The bandit leader thinks the prof.'s egg could be worth a fortune. They want $3M ransom for the film gang. The 2 escapees help their colleagues to escape and the bandits take out one snake with an RPG. The other gets the rest of the bandits. Then it gets its egg back; plus a bonus helping of explosives from the special effects guy. Boom! One exploding snake head.
Pistol Whipped (2007, Steven Seagal) Matt, our hero, has spread a million bucks in gambling markers around town and a wiseguy has bought them all up. And he's divorced with a young daughter, so an area of vulnerability. He takes out the crime boss for being rude to a waitress. The cops who try to roust him are wrecked. Some Jap criminals get the wrecking treatment next.
He tells a priest the sad story of how he gambled away his life and his marriage, his cop partner was killed and he was blamed for stealing some dough, even though that's something he didn't do. The priest is done in and Matt is busted, natch.
Matt gets into a huge gun battle & chase as soon as he's freed. The bad cops set up an ambush for him at the graveyard and bring his daughter along. But Matt still has allies and he gets to kill the guy who killed his partner by cremating him in a hearse.
Pit and the Pendulum, The is a long way from the Vincent Price film of the 1960s. The comedy is there but combined with lots of blood and pain. At the beginning, the evil Inquisitor Torquemada has a body removed from its stone coffin, whipped until it falls apart and the bones ground up to make a giant egg-timer. His reason for doing all this is so that the deceased can be condemned as a heretic and all property confiscated from his heirs. Then a couple of little people, a baker and his wife, fall foul of the Inqusitor at the execution of the wife of the ground-up deceased.
The wife pays the executioner to strangle her before her body is burned at the stake, and a very painful, mouth-frothing business it is. Oliver Reed makes a brief appearance as a Papal messenger sent to tell Torquemada to pack in his torture and killings. Mr. Reed receives a mug of Amontillado before being walled up.
Torquemada assaults the baker's wife in his castle then he cuts her tongue out with a pair of scissors so that she can't talk about it. An old witch in her cell puts her into a trance and the lady wakes up in a stone coffin – prematurely buried. The same witch eats a load of gunpowder while she is waiting to be burned at the stake and goes up in a huge explosion with her flying bones stabbing the executioner to death.
Torquemada then shows the baker his new toy – the razor sharp pendulum, which swings above the lid on a pit filled with spikes. Once the abundant rats have gnawed through his ropes, the baker demolishes half of the castle's guards and the Inquisitor ends up falling into the pit and being well spiked.
Watching this film, knowing that there is real history behind the comedy, and recalling the events in the United States on September 11th 2001, I came to the conclusion that religion should be outlawed in any civilized society.
Pitch Black (2000) A spaceship chucks its crew out of stasis, the captain is dead and it's heading for a crash on a desert planet. But the pilot manages to make a landing of sorts after trying, and failing, to eject the passengers. There's a psychopathic prisoner among the survivors, which include Vala from Stargate SG-1, Series 9. The planet has 3 suns so there's no night. 'Trees' on the horizon turn out to be the skeleton of a vast creature.
A scouting party comes across an abandoned geological survey camp. Something rips one of the survivors to bits and Riddick, the psycho, is captured. He can see in the dark and he says there's something else to worry about other than him. The lady pilot finds that he's talking about things lurking underground, so Junkie John, the self-appointed sheriff, invites Riddick to help with the attempt to escape from the planet.
There's a shuttle at the camp but it need power packs. The Arab kid is eaten by flying monsters which live in the dark. The geologists at the camp were killed 22 years earlier, and an orrery found there shows that the 3 suns go into total eclipse behind a Jupiter-like planet every 22 years. And that's when the planet's evil creatures come out to chomp everything living, including one another.
John is planning to renege on his deal with Riddick. The eclipse starts, the things come out to play and Vala is written off. The rest are trapped in the wreck of their ship. They set off to the camp with power packs for the shuttle, protected by some lights to keep the creatures off them. So the wine merchant screws up the lights and gets eaten. John becomes monster-munch after a fight with Riddick.
Rain starts bucketing as the survivors are using lamps made from bottles of spirits. Riddick stashes the others and carries on to the shuttle with the power packs. The others find luminescent bugs and fill bottles with them as substitute lamps. And by the time the shuttle takes off, the party of survivors had been reduced, conveniently, to the number which the shuttle can carry.
Point Break (1991) Special Agent John Utah, fresh out of Quantico, is posted to the FBI office in L.A., where the boss is a dickhead wiseguy. He's teamed with veteran Angelo. There's a gang in ex-president masks robbing banks. Angelo thinks they're surfers so the kid learns to surf and gets Tyler to teach him after she saves him from drowning.
The boss isn't happy but the kid uses forensics to work out which beach the BGs use. The kid is worked over and saved a by top surfer, who lets him join the in-crowd. The Feds raid a gang of surfers but they get in the way of a DEA operation and cost an undercover agent this gang's supplier.
The kid and his partner stake out a bank, have a huge chase with the BGs, who get away. The kid recognizes the top surfer, despite his mask, and fails to shoot him. The boss BG tells his confederates, who've pulled 30 jobs with him, that it's all about the human spirit, not the money, and he'll deal with the cop. The presidents take the kid prisoner and drag him along on a bank robbery.
One of the guards starts shooting, one of the BGs is killed, the rest head for the airport. The kid screws up and ends up on the plane, and he lets the BGs parachute out over Mexico. He tracks the leader down to Australia 9 months later but screws up arresting him again and lets him commit suicide by surfing.
Polar Storm (2009) Comet Copernicus did a drive-by of the Earth and a bit came off and did a Tunguska in Alaska. The comet was also supposed to have a humungous magnetic field, which totally trashed Earth's! Dr. James Mayfield got some data in Alaska and returned home in time for an earthquake. Then he found that the US government had classified his data to stop anyone finding out what was going on.
The Sun was in the wrong place and sun dials no longer worked. It looked like the Earth's magnetic field was about to be switched off. James was kidnapped by his dad, a general, who thought he was a security risk and a danger to the cover-up.
The ground started cracking up and polar auroras began wiping out everything electronic and nearby human beings. James' 2nd wife disappeared into a crack but the stroppy teenage son fished her out. James came up with a nuclear solution but an EM pulse wiped out the USAF bomber.
Mrs. Mayfield was stuck in a place of danger controlled by dickhead soldiers, so she staged a gaol break and survived. James was told that an obsolete Russian sub could deliver his nuclear strike, but it would be a suicide mission. But James got the sub to hide in an underwater volcano to evade the blast wave and with one bound, the Earth was saved!
Posse (1993) is a rant about how African-Americans have been written out of history, especially in the West. Jesse Lee was in Cuba in 1898, during the Spanish-American war, and his corrupt colonel, whose regiment was getting its ass kicked, decided to send Jesse to steal some Spanish gold instead of retreating. The colonel ran away and there was a monumental shoot-out. Jesse and his posse were the last men standing.
They headed for New Orleans and another shoot-out; there were wanted posters out on the posse. Off to the Western frontier, where the gold coins were melted down into bars, and some golden bullets. Jesse killed the blacksmith; he was on a personal mission of vengeance. The colonel and his posse arrived at the town too late.
Jesse went after the sheriff of his old home town next, so the sheriff shot the mayor and blamed Jesse for the killing. Jesse worked out that the sheriff was trying to steal all the local land to sell to the railroad; the same thing had happened to the local Injuns. The sheriff and his gang are being shot up when the colonel arrives with Gatling guns.
Big battle! Surprise! One of the coloured folks is planning to sell out the town because he thinks it's inevitable and he might as well be the someone who makes a profit out of it. The sheriff gets a golden bullet, and the colonel is spiked and shot and blown up. And in the end, nobody's descendants live happily ever after because the black folks ended up with practically nothing.
Post Impact (2004) A comet changes course for no apparent reason, an attempt to zap it with a top secret microwave satellite doesn't work, it lands on Europe and there's a big freeze. 3 years later, the US president is told that the weapon has been taken over by bad guys in Berlin. An expedition is sent there under the command of Col. Walters, who hijacked Lt. Tom Parker and made him leave his wife and child behind in Berlin.
Parker has met Anna, the daughter of the creator of the weapon, and he gets himself included on the mission. It's -52 deg.C in Germany when the gang parachutes in aboard 2 trucks, one of which the stoopid colonel writes off almost at once. The other is taken out in Berlin. The gang takes refuge in some tunnels, where the weapon's creator is found alive but blind.
He wants to use his satellite to warm up Europe. Klaus, who was his chief engineer, wants to use it to take out Tangiers. But he's blown away by the expedition's crazy bitch, who also takes out the colonel. She's ex-SIS and she wants to use the weapon to make the Arabs drop the price of oil by taking out Mecca.
She's defenestrated but that doesn't slow her down much. But she's killed properly. Then the satellite is used to warm up Berlin and Parker finds the bodies of his wife and daughter.
Predator (1987) got 4 stars in Radio Times. Featuring Big Arnie, the plot concerns a bunch of total misfits, who are allegedly a crack special operations team, who get suckered into a bogus rescue mission by the CIA. Only they end up in an area where an alien is living. And this alien is an efficient killing machine with gadgets which provide chameleon-like camouflage. Not even ex-wrestler turned Governor of Minnesota, Jesse 'The Body' Ventura blasting away with a GE Minigun (of the sort normally fitted to helicopter gunships) can take the alien out. No, it is all down to Big Arnie and Vietnam War-style jungle booby traps in the end.
Predators (2010, a sequel) A mercenary barely survived being parachuted into the jungle. There are more of them, all very stroppy, all just plucked out of a variety of conflicts. The motley crew eventually discovers that the jungle isn't on Earth. They run into traps laid by a dead guy and use up a lot of ammo on local wildlife. The mercenary decides that the planet is a game reserve and they are the game.
The group is whittled down by invisible aliens. The female sniper remembers something similar turning up in Guatemala. A guy in an alien camouflage suit gives them shelter in his hole in the ground. He explains that there are 2 types of aliens, big & small, and they fight each other as well as the game. There's a big battle in the hole in the ground, and some aliens get killed as well as the host.
The mercenary does a deal with a small alien, who was a prisoner, for a ride home on a spaceship, which is blown up. One of the men turns out to be a decoy for the aliens. The mercenary wasn't aboard the spaceship and he terminates the decoy whilst seeing off the last alien. The next day, more customers are parachuted in to join the mercenary and the sniper.
Predestination (2014) We're going to kill the man who ruined someone's life. Some guy gets his face burnt off and wakes in a hospital. He's an agent after the Fizzle Bomber, who struck in March 1975 and killed 10,000 people in New York. The agent needs a face transplant. He goes to work behind a bar and meets Jane, who tells him her life story. She was dumped at an orphanage in 1945. She doesn't relate to other people and she has abnormal strength.
SpaceCorp recruited her, she was diverted to another agency and ditched when a mystery man got her pregnant and abandoned her. She turned out to be a hermaphrodite, whose female bits were removed after she gave birth to a girl. Baby Jane was kidnapped from the hospital by the mystery man and Jane became John, a writer of stories for women. The bar tender offered her a chance to get the mystery man.
He had a time machine in a violin case courtesy of the Temporal Bureau, which prevents crimes from taking place. They wanted Jane to kill a Fizzle Bomber suspect in 1963. Jane met her younger self. The bar-tender had a scrap with the guy who got his face burnt off. He was the baby snatcher, who dumped Jane's baby; also called Jane; at the orphanage in 1945. Jane was hauled off to 1985, abandoning her younger self.
The bartender tried to quit the Bureau and ended up in 1975 with END OF MISSION on his violin case display. Then FAIL ERROR FAIL. The mad bomber is the bartender's future self. He claims he saved lots of lives and the 10,000 killed by the Fizzle Bomber was worthwhile. The older self says the bartender becomes him by killing the older self. But the bartender does it anyway. The bartender is Jane as well. Which we'd kinda figured out.
Premonition (2004) Chechens in President Bush masks raid a medical facility and steal radio-cobalt sources, pretending to animal rights nutters. 2 cops interrupt the getaway, one of them doesn't survive a crash and Det. Jack Barnes has to be jump-started with an electric shock machine. He starts having visions and one of the Chechens tries to kill him in hospital even though he doesn't remember anything.
Barnes starts preparing for an earthquake, which happens! A couple of tossers from the FBI patronize him then he has a vision of a train crash. His wife thinks he's day-dreaming until she sees a report on the kitchen TV. A bloke called Vargas is following Barnes because he's been having visions about him.
Barnes has a vision of a big bang. The Chechens are planning to set off a cobalt-60 dirty bomb to kill people for a reason with which the audience is never troubled. Barnes rousts a thief, who is killed by the Chechens, which confirms suspicions of the FBI jerks that he's involved in something criminal.
Vargas joins Barnes and there's a gas explosion at a power station. Barnes cracks the cobalt connection but all the Feds want to do is bust him. The Chechens snatch his kid. Vargas was the guy in the helicopter. Barnes has a vision involving his son and the dirty bomb. He and Vargas get into a shoot-out with the Chechens, Barnes takes out the leader and the Feds get him, his kid and the cobalt off the roof of a building (by helicopter) before the building explodes.
Prince Valiant (1954) is a thoroughly daft Hollywood epic full of bad history and worse haircuts. The Black Knight tries to recruit a bunch of Vikings (in horned helmets so you know they're Vikings) to take out King Arthur. But he's foiled by Prince Valiant, another Viking, who's serving as a squire to Sir Gawain. The action includes a tournament, a storming of a castle, a duel between the Black Knight and Prince Violent, and the prince being knighted at the end.
Prometheus (2012, Ridley Scott) A humanoid drinks a potion and has its DNA rewritten. A couple in a cave find some drawings. On the Prometheus in December 2093 . . . Coming out of the freezers is an ordeal for some. It's Xmas. The revived crew gets a message from its dead sponsor. The destination is a system which ancient civilizations knew about, so aliens had to have visited them. There's a likely-looking planet orbiting a Sun-like star.
A team goes exploring in dark tunnels and ends up chasing some phantoms. Creepy David opens a door and they find a giant's head and some beautiful paintings. The gang has some fun in the teeth of a massive storm on the surface and one of the ladies nearly gets herself killed retrieving a helmet containing a humanoid head.
The head is alive! And it explodes in containment. Is there a life-form reading or a glitch? Is there nothing special about the creation of life? Is it inevitable? The team meets a lethal creature, which slays some of them. Discipline becomes a bad joke. One of the ladies is impossibly pregnant. The doctor won't give her a termination, so she has to perform a do-it-yourself extraction; of a horrible monster.
Another of the crew has been monsterized and has to be terminated. Unpregnant Elizabeth knows they need to leave the planet at once. The creepy David wants to go back to Earth for some destruction. So a skinhead alien rips his head off; surprise! He's an android.
Shambles upon shambles when the ship tries to return to Earth without Elizabeth. Splat! She's nearly taken out by the debris when it crashes. Elizabeth's baby/monster eats the alien skinhead. Creepy David's head says it needs her help to fly one of the other ships on the planet to Earth. Elizabeth posts a warning and decides to stay on the planet to look for answers. Meanwhile, the monsters are repoducing.
Pterodactyl (2005) An earthquake at a volcano in Turkey near the Armenian border shook loose some eggs, which hatched out pterodactyls! A professor, his assistant and 4 dorkish students headed for the volcano to look for fossils, not knowing they were heading for an area where US troops were hunting terrorists.
The expedition, terrorists, pterodactyls and troops collided and the troops ended up with the terrorist leader and the survivors from the expedition. The professor's girlfriend was dropped into a nest with baby pterodactyls, where she found a radio. More clashes with apparently bullet-proof pteros wiped out most of the party and the head terrorist became exploding lunch for the babies.
It all came down to the prof., his girlfriend and the alpha-male ptero before a smart missile finally found its target. And there were more monsters coming out of the volcano's lower reaches at the end!
Pulp (1972, Michael Caine, Mickey Rooney) "Mickie" King, a hack writer, got the job of ghosting a biography for a top secret client. Expecting to be contacted during the bus ride to the client's hang-out, he assumed that Mr. Miller was the contact, but Miller ended up stabbed in the bath of what should have been King's room.
The body disappeared without fuss. The "contact man" proved to be a girl, whose sugar daddy was Preston Gilbert; ex-Hollywood, Mafia connections and the archetypal movie mobster. He thought Miller had been contracted to rub him out and he was delighted to hear that Miller was dead.
But a week later, at Gilbert's end-of-book party, a "priest" started shooting and that was the end of Gilbert. King legged it, expecting to be the next target. The bodyguard told King that someone from Gilbert's past was worried about what he might say in the book.
King made the "girl dies in hunting party gang bang" connection. The killer opened fire again while King was getting more info from an old bloke, but he was a lousy shot and King ran him over. The shooter was Miller! King ended up in bed with his shot leg in a sling and he was warned off by the local wiseguys' American gopher.
Pursuit To Algiers (1945, Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce) Sherlock Holmes abandons a fishing holiday with Dr. Watson to see the young king of a small European country back home past ranks of assassins. They fly, Watson is told to take a ship to the Mediterranean for the fishing holiday. Watson learns that the plane has crashed; then Holmes and his "nephew", Nikolas Watson, turn up on the ship, which is packed with dodgy staff and customers.
Holmes stays ahead of the game right up to the end, then he's ambushed and the king is grabbed. Surprise! The king isn't the bloke passing himself off as Watson's nephew, he's the lowly steward. Assassins thwarted, job done.
Push (2009) Nick, as a child, sees his parents murdered. Governments are trying to track down psychic kids to turn them into weapons; something the Nazis tried and failed to do. Division in the US has a drug which is supposed to boost their powers, but only Keira survived it and she escaped. Division tracks down Nick, a not very good telekinetic with huge gambling debts. Then a 13-year-old girl, Cathy, finds him and tells Nick she's a watcher (who can see the future) and there to help him.
Cue a rumble with Chinese BGs (we're in Hong Kong). Division has Cathy's mom locked up because they can't control her. They killed Nick's dad for the same reason. Keira escapes from 2 Division agents after making one kill the other. Cathy and Nick find Keira, who has a case containing a dose of the wonder drug.
Cathy is told that Keira will kill them all. Nick goes after Carver, the Division pusher who killed his dad. Keira needs more of the psychic steroid or she'll die, Carver reckons. Nick has to devise a way to change the future to bamboozle the BGs, which include Keira after Carver has messed with her memories.
The Chinese mob is no match for Carver's telekinetic stooge, but Nick is. He injects himself with the stuff in the suitcase; but he survives because it's not the real case. Cathy has the real drug to swap for her mom. Carver retreats with Keira and Nick gets Keira to make Carver shoot himself on the plane.
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