Action Junkie
Action Junkie – Trouble Man, and the trouble with men.
“His friends call him Mr. T. His enemies call for mercy!” In the summer of 1971, the seminal action film Shaft smoothed its way onto the silver screen and exploded at the box office. Made for a budget of one and a quarter million dollars,…
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Action Junkie: Street Law and an Intro to the World of Italian Action Cinema
If we are to look at the history of the action film, then the progression of the genre is one that began with the classic American Westerns directed by the likes of John Ford and Howard Hawkes. Films like The Searchers, Stagecoach, and Rio Bravo…
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Action Junkie: McBain – The Movie
McBain. In the world of The Simpsons he is James Bond as if played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. In fact, McBain is a character within a character as played by Rainer Wolfcastle, the Simpsons parody of the ex-Governator. For fans of the show’s earlier years, McBain:…
READ MOREAction Junkie: Hard Boiled
John Woo’s 1992 Hong Kong film Hard Boiled is to action films what Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West was to westerns. Leone’s epic was itself an ode to the western genre, from its plot to its locations to its camera placements.…
READ MOREAction Junkie: Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
George Miller’s third, and to date final, installment of the Mad Max series is a dueling oddity of a film, both as the closing chapter of a trilogy and as a movie standing on its own. From the film’s inception to its final frame, the…
READ MOREAction Junkie: Mad Max 2 – The Road Warrior
The original title for director George Miller’s follow up to his International hit movie debut, Mad Max, was simply Mad Max 2 when it opened to Australian and Japanese theaters in 1981. Overseas in the United States it was re-titled for American audiences as The…
READ MOREAction Junkie: Mad Max (1979)
When George Miller’s first feature film, Mad Max was released to audiences worldwide in 1979, the genre of the Action film did not exist as a genre like it does today. This is in part because films like Mad Max helped to define and establish…
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