The Story: A Hong Kong supercop accidentally gets mixed-up in international espionage that takes him to Siberia, Moscow, and Australia while chasing after a stolen dirty bomb.

How it Came to be Underrated: After a few failed attempts to cross over to an American audience by starring in bad American movies, Chan ironically finally achieved American success by staying in Hong Kong and working his way up to bigger and bigger budgets. Finally, his movies looked so nice that American distributers were willing to dub them and release them over here. The two biggest hits, Rumble in the Bronx (due to its American setting), and Supercop (aka Police Story 3, due to breakout co-star Michelle Yeoh), led to him finally getting the Hollywood movie offers he wanted. Caught in between was this, his biggest-budget Hong Kong movie, which for some reason got less notice here, even though I think it’s his best.

Why It’s Great:

1. After Bruce Lee died, hundreds of martial artists tried to mimic his superheroic stoicism onscreen. Chan’s genius was to do the opposite. His kung-fu was just as masterful (well, almost), but he winced in pain after every punch. His idol is clearly Buster Keaton, not just in his love of comedy (they both frequently fight guys two heads taller than they are) but in his insistence on doing his own stunts and his intensely likable persona that carries over from movie to movie. (Buster’s heroes were always named Buster, and Jackie’s, at least in the Americanized versions, are always named Jackie.)
   
2. And indeed the heart of Chan’s appeal at that time was the amazing stunts, whether or not they involved kung fu. In that sense, this was one of the last real Jackie Chan movies, because the higher budgets of his subsequent American movies came with a terrible price: the insurance companies wouldn’t let him do his own stunts anymore, which squandered half of his value. But he went out with a bang, since this movie has a half-dozen beautifully choreographed fights, culminating in a spectacular melee in a shark tank.
   
3. It feels silly to recommend a dubbed and edited-down movie, (a list of edits can be found here) but it’s not really that much of a problem—Since Chan was emulating silent movies, the soundtrack is sort of beside the point. The dubbing, for what it’s worth, is done rather well, with Chan doing his own voice and bringing a lot of personality.
   
4. Lots of people have tried to simulate the Bond formula (even many Bond movies are poor Bond-imitations) with limited success, but Chan and his longtime director Tong manage to find just the right combination of action set-pieces and twisty espionage. It helped that this was the first Police Story movie without Maggie Cheung’s too-nice girlfriend character, so Chan was able to spend more time on the mission.

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Given that this is nominally the fourth in a series, it’s only logical to watch the first three as well, which are all great, albeit very different. You can watch Jackie work his way up from a normal beat cop to become a, shall we say, supercop.

How Available Is It?: It has a bare-bones DVD with only the dubbed track. Supercop has gotten a much better DVD release, with both soundtracks and an excellent English-language commentary by a film historian that gives a lot of background on the whole series, so you should seek that out if you crave a special feature.

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: Your Hands and Feet Will Have Super Fantastic Power!

The Story: The happy-go-lucky time-travelling slackers return, but this time they explore heaven and hell, challenging death to a series of games, including Battleship, Clue and Twister. Only by making death their thrall can they get back in time to win the Battle the Bands that will make them the greatest prophets of human history.

How it Came to be Underrated: People love to complain about Hollywood’s franchise addiction today, but they forget about how much more ubiquitous sequels were 20 years ago, when every minor hit automatically got one. According to the old rules, we would now be seeing Wedding Crashers 6 and Mean Girls 3. The vast majority of those sequels were truly terrible…

Why It’s Cheesy Fun:

1. …but something strange happened in the summer of 1991, as the sequel era was dwindling. Some lame comedies from previous years got unnecessary sequels that turned out to be much better, weirder, and more subversive than the originals. Directors were learning to take advantage of the laissez-faire approach studios took to sequels and use that freedom to make truly bizarre personal visions. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is unwatchable today, but its sequel is shockingly fun and beautifully absurd..
   
2. Reeves and Winter are affably fun, but their characters are hindered by having indistinguishable personalities. What gives this movie its bite is Sadler’s absolutely daffy send-up of Bergman’s version of “Death” from The Seventh Seal, which he plays here as a hapless Swedish sad-sack deity. What on earth happened to Sadler’s career? He had a great run for a few years, then disappeared into minor TV roles shortly after his best-remembered role in Shawshank Redemption. At the very least he should be carrying his own CSI vehicle by now... and this role proves that he could have done anything.
   
3. This is a great example of how even the zaniest movies need to tap into real emotions, against all odds—the movie couldn’t be more archly tongue-in-cheek, but the visions of hell Bill and Ted are confronted with nevertheless tap into very real, unique-but-universal anxieties.
   
4. Re-watching this, I realized how dearly I miss the pre-CGI world. This movie has a super-low budget, but it still gamely swings for the rafters with wildly ambitious art direction that take us all the way through the full limits of human imagination, not constructed out of airless, hollow pixels, but out of actual sets, tangible props and practical effects that have weight and heft and shadows, allowing the actors to really interact with them in unexpected ways. It’s so much more fun to watch the movie knowing that, for one crazy month, all of this stuff actually existed!
   
5. For instance, they make it clear in the featurette that this effect was achieved by actually blue-ing up their skin, hair and clothes. Isn’t that fun?
   

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Two other better-than-the-original sequels that I liked in 1991 were Addams Family Values and Hot Shots Part Deux (Bi-Winning!)

How Available Is It?: It’s on a bare-bones DVD with a fun little contemporary featurette.

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: Death Picks the Beauty Queen!

The Story: A wanderer who is being chased by a mysterious hunter takes refuge in a desert motel where he recruits the locals to make a last stand against an army of demons.

How it Came to be Underrated: I rarely cover horror movies on this blog, not because I don’t like them, but because they don’t get to be underrated for very long. Take a movie like Evil Dead 2, which seems to be the biggest inspiration for this movie. Horror enthusiasts, always hungry to tell each other about anything good, transformed it from a minor cult classic into a household name very quickly. So why has this one remained underrated? Because of its tangential association with HBO’s lame “Tales of the Crypt” TV show, which squandered the name of the legendary EC comics by transforming their grim horror into campy comedy.

Why It’s Cheesy Fun:

1. Sure enough, this movie begins with a crappy intro by the puppet Crypt Keeper from the TV show, which is not directed by Dickerson. Lucky you, on DVD you can just skip the first 8 minutes of the movie and totally ignore that whole element. Then you just have a lean and mean little 80-minute horror movie left, which doesn’t need to be a second longer.
   
2. Ernest Dickerson was the first major black cinematographer and when he switched to directing, he was happy to bring a subversive racial sensibility to the B-movies he took on. Usually black people die first in horror movies, but even in ones where they become the survivors (Night of the Living Dead, Anaconda) there’s always an implication that they survive because they’re somehow inherently more moral, which still defines everybody according to race. This movie avoids both problems: the last survivor just happens to be most kick-ass character.
3. What sinks most horror movies are the performances. I suppose Dickerson was able to use his rep to get a great cast here, headlined by always great tough-guy William Sadler and Billy Zane at his strutting, cocky, charismatic best. Pounder, Pinkett, Church and Farmer all do dependably fine work too.
   
4. I always wince when fantasy or horror stories define good as the Light and evil as the Darkness, but this one makes it work by first defining the villains’ earthly manifestations as clearly understood physical challenges for our heroes with fixed rules and limits that allow us to predict what might happen next. The “blood seals” they put on the doors let us always see where the safe spaces are, and we get to see how and why that space keeps shrinking throughout the movie, which is always essential. No questions here of “why don’t they just…”
   
5. I also firmly believe that all horror movies need an element of psychological temptation, not just physical threats, and this movie juggles the two well. Horror writers do well to remember that the thing we’re most afraid of is ourselves. (But don’t worry, there’s still enough gore for the gorehounds too)
   
   

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Zane was also underrated in the uber-cheesy adaptation of The Phantom. Sadler was also underrated in… tomorrow’s movie! That’s right, it’s a two-day Sadler-fest!

How Available Is It?: It’s got a nice-enough bare-bones DVD

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: Danger!

The Story: Two armored car guards try to clear the money out of the banks along a river before it floods, but a well-armed heist gang shows up to take advantage of the situation. One guard gets away with the money and the gang chases him through a rapidly-flooding town.

How it Came to be Underrated: Graham Yost sold three high-profile big action spec scripts for big money in rapid succession: First Speed, then Broken Arrow, then this. The other two earned back their big pricetags, but this one turned out to be one high-concept heist too many for audiences. Slater is underwhelming as always, but this is nevertheless an endlessly entertaining cheeseball heist/disaster flick that is criminally underseen.

1. I talked before about how important character consistency is in a movie like Sideways, but it’s even more important in a movie like this. We’ve got 15 characters, (two in the armored car, four in the heist crew, four in the sheriff’s office, two old coots, the guy who runs the dam, and Minnie Driver in the church) each of whom has a totally different motivation for being where they are, even within each group. The audience has to understand all 15 different personalities very quickly in the first ten minutes, because each will have an unexpected reaction once the heist happens. We get to compare their reactions to what we thought we knew about them. The reactions surprise us, but they still make sense with what we’d already learned. It’s remarkably good writing, all the more so because it plays like artless escapism.
   
2. One problem with writing pulpy thrillers is that you not only have to come up with a believable reason why one person would try to kill another person, you have to keep coming up with more and more reasons—Every time the advantage shifts (which has to happen about every ten minutes), the original motivations tend to disappear and you have to come up with a new reason for violence to erupt.
3. That’s why it’s so clever for this movie to combine the heist and disaster genre. First of all, the heist gives everybody a reason to put themselves in harm’s way, which most disaster movies lack. Second, the movie gets to jump back and forth between the flood and the villains as a source of conflict, so neither one has to go too far over the top.
   
4. But all that pales in comparison with this movie’s true claim to fame: This was the very first movie in Betty White’s ongoing salty-talking-little-old-lady guest-cameo period, which has just now reached it apotheosis. Here you can see where it all began!
   

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Yost has had a very smart career: after making his name by selling a bunch of cheesy action spec scripts, he used that clout to change course and start creating critically-acclaimed TV shows like “Band of Brothers” and “Justified”. Good for him! That’s the dream of every cheesy-thriller writer.

How Available Is It?: The DVD is bare-bones, but I don’t think that the Criterion Collection is going to get around to this one anytime soon.

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: Uncanny Tales!