Holiday Switch (2007)

Director Bert Kish and writer Gayl Decoursey don't exactly have an extensive selection of films to their names (well, not in these specific roles anyway). That's quite surprising, considering the fact that, in a reversal of the film I watched just yesterday, they try to do their best with this story of a woman who ends up in a different life from the one she has been living.

Nicole Eggert is Paula, a tired and long-suffering wife and mother. She seems to feel that a lot of her unhappiness stems from the fact that her husband (Gary, played by Bret Anthony) isn't making enough money to solve all of their problems. Or get their bills paid. Her unhappiness is exacerbated when she runs into a rich ex (Nick, played by Brett Le Bourveau). Not that she had previously given him much thought, unless you count the bizarre selection of clippings she keeps in an artwork folder. Nick and his wife are back in town for a big show at his art gallery. As resentment and frustration starts to bubble up, Paula gives herself a bump on the head and wakes up, yep, married to Nick in a life that she thinks she has always wanted.

So . . . It's A Wonderful Life given another reworking? Yeah, pretty much, but it's not the worst premise to be working with for a Christmas TV movie. And it's well done here, with just the right mix of drama, comedy derived from Paula acting more than just a little crazy, and some decent characters. While Paula makes her own mess due to selfishness and envy, it's hard not to root for things to turn out well for her as she tries to make amends in a number of different ways.

Eggert is a decent lead, portraying a character often ill-at-ease in most of the situations that we see her in, and Anthony is handed the easy part of lovely bloke who remains a lovely bloke while lots of other changes occur. Le Bourveau is fine, and does just enough in the opening scenes to make his character seem just about desirable enough, Patricia Mayen-Salazar is good as the hired help who manages to keep Paula right while she gets used to her new life, and Kristina Barr is equally good as Janine, the ex-girlfriend of Gary in one life and his wife in the other.

Although it never rises above the level of TV movie, in terms of both the plot devices and the limited scale of the whole thing, this achieves what it sets out to achieve. That's no reason to shower it with praise, but it's reason enough to push it above a number of other, lazier, titles you could be choosing to watch at this time of year.

5/10

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Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects (1989)

Charles Bronson is a tough guy, once again, in this piece of sleazy nastiness from director J. Lee Thompson. Of course, Bronson was always a tough guy in pretty much everything he did so, don't worry, I'll give you a bit more about his situation this time around.

Bronson is a cop who can't seem to pin anything on horrible uber-pimp Duke (Juan Fernandez). Duke specializes in little girls for his clients, which leads to Bronson specializing in making Duke's life as difficult as possible. It's not all by the book. In fact, it's about as far from the book as you can get. The clock starts to tick faster when a Japanese businessman (James Pax) turns to the police when his young daughter is kidnapped. The distraught father also has a few peccadilloes of his own, and Bronson may not be too happy about helping him if he finds out just what he's been up to since arriving in America.

Written by Harold Nebenzal, Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects is, in many ways, standard Bronson fare, yet it's also a bit different. His character is forced, albeit momentarily, to question how his mind works when he's not on the job, to consider the damage done and the huge difference between his own view of the world and the view that others can take. There are times when this creeps into territory covered by the likes of Tightrope and The Offence. And then there are times when Bronson forces someone to eat a watch.

Director J. Lee Thompson is well known for a filmography that's pretty loaded with testosterone, and he worked with Bronson on a number of movies before this one (this was their last film together), so viewers shouldn't have been TOO surprised by the end result this time around. It may have some extra unpleasantness, but it's still all about Bronson doing a good job where the system falls down.

Bronson is fine in the lead role, whether he's aggressively scaring pimps and crooks or going off on a bizarre racist rant aimed at numerous Japanese people he views as pesky interlopers, at one point. Fernandez is suitably loathsome as Duke, and Pax is, arguably, one of the more interesting characters to be placed in a movie like this. It's made clear that he's not the nicest guy ever, especially in the way that he treats his wife, but he's also not demonised for his actions, despite the one main sequence that sees him sliding from relatively harmless thoughts of his fantasties to grossly inappropriate real actions. Peggy Lipton and Amy Hathaway are just fine as the women in Bronson's life, Perry Lopez does well enough as Eddie Rios, Sy Richardson is a bad man who works with Duke, and fans of Nicole Eggert will be pleased to see her in a relatively early role.

It might leave you wanting to take a shower as the end credits roll, but this is another fine piece of Bronson-led machismo for those who like such fare. And I count myself among that demographic nowadays.

7/10

http://www.amazon.com/10-Midnight-Kinjite-Charles-Bronson/dp/B008FYZIZK/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1405919498&sr=1-1&keywords=kinjite

Decoys (2004)

Decoys is a fun movie that's well worth checking out if you've never heard of it before. It's like a cross between The Faculty and Species. In fact, it's REALLY like a cross between those two movies. The school setting, and the fact that one of the male leads looks so much like Elijah Wood that they mention it in the script, and the aliens trying to secretly take over people will remind you of the former while the fact that the aliens are really cute girls who don't seem to have an aversion to nudity will remind all red-blooded males of the greatness of the latter.

The plot is really simplicity itself. A young man (Luke, played by Corey Sevier) wonders just what he is seeing when he spies a couple of gorgeous young women (Stefanie von Pfetten and Kim Poirier) revealing themselves to be something more than your standard human being. They are, in fact, aliens who just love to keep themselves in tip top condition by enjoying cold temperatures and warm potential mates. Luke fails to convince anyone else of this (including his good friend Roger, played by Elias Toufexis AKA the guy that looks like Elijah Wood) and just seems to get himself in trouble while he keeps trying to alert everyone to the situation. Meanwhile, young men keep disappearing and the woman look like they have new men in their sights, including Roger. Just how long can any hetero male defend himself against such obvious charms?

Decoys suffers slightly because of the unoriginality factor but it compensates for this with a sense of fun and some nicely unexpected moments that try to balance out the jump scares and more obvious plot twists. Matthew Hastings directs, and co-wrote the movie with Tom Berry, and he gets a lot of things just right. Night Of The Creeps would certainly seem to be another influence, no bad thing, and this is at the forefront when we see the friendship between Luke and Roger and also when we see Luke being treated like a murder suspect by Detective Francis Kirk (Richard Burgi). There's a mix of humour throughout that doesn't always work but improves when the film gets into the second half and picks up a gear.

The cast aren't the greatest actors ever but Corey Sevier, Elias Toufexis, Richard Burgi, Meghan Ohry, Ennis Esmer and Nicole Eggert all do well enough while Stefanie von Pfetten and Kim Poirier easily portray alien females so sexy that they could find a number of men willing to be led away to isolated locations. Krista Morin, Carrie Colak, Marc Trottier and Sarah Smyth all provide decent support.

It's no modern classic, and it doesn't measure up to any of the other titles mentioned within this review, but Decoys is enjoyable enough and actually a lot better than 1001 other titles that have been given the DTD* treatment.

(*Is it Direct To Disc now that videos aren't the standard rental format?? Or maybe Straight To Disc could let us label them all as STDs)

6/10.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Decoys-DVD/dp/B00061RZNI/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1330899632&sr=8-2