(1986)
Dir - Jean-Claude Lord
Overall: MEH
Opening with a scene where reckless dipshit scientists terrorize a monkey because "science", The Vindicator, (Frankenstein '88, Roboman), proceeds into a cornball 50s B-movie throwback, just with more gore, more animal abuse, Stan Winston providing the special effects for some reason, and eventually Pam Grier because a girls gotta eat. Shot in Montreal, Quebec and directed by Canadian genre peddler Jean-Claude Lord, the "dangerous escaped lab experiment on the loose" script by Edith Rey and David Preston is formulaic and predictable, allowing for mostly unlikable characters to behave like idiots while uttering persistently hackneyed dialog at each other. Grier can hold her own in any schlocky nonsense thrown her way, and she does commendable work here in a thankless role as an assassin literally named Hunter who gets to say things like "Inside that suit is a man...and I've never, EVER lost to a man" and "Well well well, hello spaceman" while pointing weapons at people and kicking everyone's ass. Elsewhere, the performances are embarrassing at best, but again, the material that everyone has to work with takes itself way too seriously to come off as anything but groan-worthy. At least a couple of unintentionally funny moments and Grier's involvement keep it from being a total waste.
(1988)
Dir - Chris Roache
Overall: MEH
Dir - Chris Roache
Overall: MEH
The only directorial effort from Chris Roache, (who also penned the screenplay here), The 13th Floor is a rightfully forgotten one out of Australia, technically belonging in the horror genre since it features the ghost of an electrocuted child that is sometimes haunting a high-rise office building. In actuality though, it is a low-level crime film, where a mafia boss tries to track down his estranged daughter Lisa Hensley who is slumming it up in said office building with two of her friends. Hensley witnessed her father murdering the now ghost kid when she herself was a youngster, but it has taken until she reaches adulthood for their paths to cross again. Horny guys try to get in Hensley's pants, one of them succeeds, her friend Miranda Otto is jealous of this and overdoses on smack which the ghost child watches her, and a guy gets the bloody shit beaten out of him by hired goons who want to get their hands on some incriminating documents. The film is competently done and atmospherically photographed by Stephen Prime, but there lies the problem; it has neither a deliberate style nor any accidental camp appeal, just a haphazard supernatural element thrown into some unengaging gangster dealings.
(1988)
Dir - Dennis Berry
Overall: MEH
French/American filmmaker Dennis Berry worked on both sides of the Atlantic, his 1988 film La mort mystérieuse de Nina Chéreau, (The Mysterious Death of Nina Chereau), serving as his only full-length foray into horror, though such elements are largely underplayed. Clumsily executed and plotted, the script by Claude Harz and Steven Bawol starts off with a rocky premise where a smug and persistently unlikable therapist, (unfortunately the film's main protagonist), recklessly ignores professional protocol in his attempt to get the to the bottom of what happened to one of his escaped patients. Said patient is portrayed with awkward aloofness by Maude Adams, while Scott Renderer is her therapist that is clearly smitten with her, bumbling through Paris as he smirks at Adams' aggressively distant mother, smirks at the detectives that knows he is aiding and abetting a wanted criminal, and botches various attempts to uncover the mystery. He eventually does, and it proves to revolve around cinema's favorite blood-bathing Countess Elizabeth Báthory, (hence the horror angle), but despite some agreeable location shooting, the film is poorly written, poorly performed, poorly paced, and fails to deliver on a mystery that should be more suspenseful than it is.
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