Glickenhaus' other classic
The soldier...Found a region 2 disc yesterday, it includes interviews with Glickenhaus and the trailer. This movie is just as nasty as THE EXTERMINATOR, wich needs a similar release but with more extras ofcourse.
shareGlickenhaus isn't a bd director. I liked the film The Soldier, as I did The Exterminator. Good little revenge story.
Emos are morons
will agree with both comments here. The Exterminator and Codename:The Soldier were both fun, above average action films. They were never likely to win any BAFTAS but as genre movies they were great. I remember seeing both when I was about 13 (my mum banned me from seeing both before then) and still watch them occasionally 20 years later and I'm surprised how well they stand up in this CGI age. In fact, both are better than the computer-generated cobblers Hollywood makes nowadays.
Exterminator 2, however was *beep* It had no real relationship to the first film and had a totally different atmosphere. Typical cut-price Cannon rubbish that lacked the gritty realism of the first film.
I thought The Protector was not as bad as some people say. I really enjoyed it, but Blue Jean Cop was Glickenhaus's masterpiece.
Yeah The Protector was pretty good too! Just watched it a couple of weeks ago.
I don't remember much from Blue Jean Cop but I have a copy somewhere, need to check it out again.
MCBAIN could have been a lot better, but overall fits comfortably in with the rest of the late 80's action nonsense. At least there's lots of explosions and a cool scene where a guy gets his arm stuck in a tank barrel.
Glickenhaus's movies are all bad (except for SHAKEDOWN aka BLUE JEAN COP), but they DO have a lot of good points to them. EXTERMINATOR is an overall awful film with a few effective kill scenes, such as the beheading at the beginning and the shooting of the pedophile senator with the poison bullet.
SOLDIER is similar. Overall quite unbelievable and dull (though it has a lot of potential). It's similarly got a few excellent scenes, like the hilarious shootout in front of the capitol building near the start... the murder of the sheriff with the cuff-shotgun... and the exploding lightbulb scene... but expecially the ski chase.
Glickenhaus was good at one thing though - making his films seem really gritty and serious... owing a lot to their musical scores (usually brooding Jay Chattaway-ish stuff) and no-nonsense, no-frills approach to the editing and cinematography.
The scripts ALL could have used a lot of work though, the exception being SHAKEDOWN.
The Soldier is NOWHERE near as "nasty" as the awful The Exterminator. For one, it's a competently produced film with a fairly sizeable budget, unlike The Exterminator which looks like it was shot by a disturbed and morbidly violent college student.
In contrast, The Soldier is extremely light on violence and the overall picture is much brighter and is nothing more than a typical Cold War era tale of good guys vs bad guys. The violence never rises to anything more than a couple of bloody squibs. I found it to be a fairly entertaining movie, with a few excellent action sequences. However, I must say that the bad guys weren't really all that bad at all. I mean, their threat was to contaminate a Saudi Arabia oil field. Sounds good to me. The world would be a better place if we stopped purchasing oil from that hellhole with the worst human rights of any country on the planet.
I must say that I generally enjoy Glickenhaus' films. I also enjoyed Shakedown (aka Blue Jean Cop), McBain and The Protector. However, I despise The Exterminator. It's dull, slow, poorly made, extremely cheap and the gratuitous violence feels overblown, but still manages to look phony due to budget constraints.
shakedown is a brilliant movie. great action and dialogue and a wonderfully over the top ending. lots of great actors in it too. mcbain and the soldier had some aforementioned great scenes but had lots of unfulfilled potential.
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Eric C 4 Prez
Slaughter of the Innocents was also quite decent, although a bit different from other Glickenhaus-classics, as it wasn't quite as brutal. A great performance from Scott Glenn though.
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