Christopher Walken, Solider of Fortune: McBain (James Glickenhaus, 1991)

When his friend is killed attempting to overthrow the cartel-backed dictator of Colombia, Vietnam veteran Bobby McBain (Christopher Walken) gathers a team of old friends to avenge him.

A more cartoonish take on the men-on-a-mission template than 1980’s The Dogs of War, McBain marks Christopher Walken’s return to the world of mercenaries and coups.

Walken seems less invested here, but the movie around him as a ridiculous confection of action movie cliches - and I mean that as a compliment.

You know what kind of movie you are in when a rebel - dressed as a sex worker - sneaks under the president’s desk, unzips his fly and holds a knife against his nethers while other rebels take the more straightforward approach of just drawing guns on everybody.

It makes for a good double with the Chuck Norris vehicle, Delta Force 2, which came out a year earlier. Both films exploit the more fascistic, paranoid aspects of the action genre, with cartoonish stories of US soldiers going outside the law to bring down a South American dictatorship. As with that film, the Philippines acted as the stand-in for the third act.

Opening with a Vietnam flashback - in which McBain is rescued by retreating US soldiers - McBain bears no relationship with the fictional film series from the Simpsons, but it feels like an unofficial tribute:

Our hero is introduced in a primitive version of the thunderdome from Mad Max 3. 

Glickenhaus is not a great filmmaker - his storytelling is ridiculously simplistic - but he has an eye for real locations and in-camera effects.

He also had good relationships in New York City, and this results in some real production value: 

• a real truck crushing a car on the side of a street
• A stunt man plummeting from an apartment to the ground below
• McBain and co. suspending a Mafioso Don off a real building

When Maria Conchita Alonzo meets Christopher Walken on top of a bridge, the actors are on top of a real bridge with the city behind them.

After the film gets underway, it turns into a series of OTT setpieces. Even the connective tissue has the feel of an action sequence: The cartel leaders introduce themselves by throwing a victim out of a window of the presidential palace.

And while the film is aiming for a more mainstream audience, the film is filled with touches which feel straight out of an exploitation movie: After a teenage rebel sacrifices himself to blow up a tank, his charred body grotesquely dangles from the tank’s turret.

The movie’s underlying concerns are those of the Eighties: shame about Vietnam (the defeat, rather than the reasons for the war), and the myth of missing POWs.

Ultimately, this is a movie about old men regaining their mojo through violence.

There is no real villain - the dictator is a puppet and the drug lords run as soon as the revolution starts. In a moment that feels like a gag from a Rainer Wolfcastle movie,  McBain falls through the ceiling to kill the president as he prepares to shoot himself.

Its politics are hideous, and the script is less complex than an episode of GI Joe but I loved every minute of it.

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Christopher Walken, Solider of Fortune: Dogs of War (John Irvine, 1980)

Mercenary Jamie Shannon (Christopher Walken) is hired to orchestrate a coup in the African state of Zangaro.

After he is captured and tortured on his initial reconnaissance mission, Shannon’s professionalism is infused with a new motive: revenge. 

Based on a book by Frederick Forsythe, Dogs of War is concerned with the planning and execution of a coup.

As a teenager, I discovered a book about mercenaries in my local library, and it captured my imagination. It led me to track down a copy of Forsythe’s novel, but I recall only reading at least the first half.

Like Day of the Jackal, the novel is focused on process (probably the reason why I gave up on the book). In this case, it is the moving parts of staging a coup, and then plundering the country for its resources.

We open on Shannon’s last mission, escaping on a plane by effectively hijacking it. An effective bit of action that sums up the difference between Shannon’s crew and regular soldiers: you cannot get paid if you’re dead.

Walken is great - a svelte killer with no wasted motion. He conveys intelligence and experience purely on presence and action.

The novel spends its opening chapters focusing on the corporate machinations prior to the mercenary’s involvement - a massive deposit of platinum has been discovered and covered up so that the corporation can topple the Zangaro government and replace it with a more amenable regime.

Instead, these motives are kept offscreen. The motive for the operation is not revealed until midway through the runtime, by which time it has been revealed Shannon’s team are being shadowed by his employer. 

Instead the film focuses on Shannon, and his life at home - while he expresses no desire to get back into the action, he seems listless and lost without a mission.   

The first act of the film is taken up with Shannon’s disastrous reconnaissance mission, where he gains a personal stake in the eventual coup. 

Director John Irvine would go onto direct the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Raw Deal. This film shares that film’s attempt to focus on character. His approach does ground the material - in a neat reversal of expectations, Shannon initially rejects the offer to lead a mercenary force back to Zangaro.

Ultimately, unlike the novel, this adaptation is an action movie - Shannon is as motivated by revenge as much as by money. This is an emotional narrative that is building toward violent catharsis.

That catharsis gets underway about 30 mins from the end, and ends on a cynical but weirdly subversive button - Shannon assassinates the corporation’s intended puppet.

While it aims for the same process-led approach as Day of the Jackal, Dogs of War lacks the same sense of clockwork precision and mounting tension. A fun watch, but it feels like a rough draft for something more interesting.

We Bury The Dead (Zak Hilditch, 2024)

Following a catastrophic disaster in Tasmania, its victims appear to have reanimated. Squads of volunteers are enlisted alongside the army to bury the dead, and terminate any of the reanimated corpses.

An American woman, Ava (Daisy Ridley), signs on to volunteer so she can find her husband (Matt Whelan), who was in Tasmania when the cataclysm happened.

The zombie genre has become so ubiquitous in the 21st century (partially thanks to the success of the TV series The Walking Dead), it is starting to become more of a setting than a genre. While the genre has always been durable, hybrids like the romantic comedy Warm Bodies and heist film Army of the Dead show the genre’s true elasticity.

While it features some familiar elements, We Bury The Dead is not a horror film - it barely qualifies as a thriller.

It lacks the sense of momentum, or any real set-pieces. 

Instead, it is a quiet, disturbing meditation on grief.

The film is a slow burn for most of the early action.

We follow Ava as she arrives in Australia and joins the burial units. 

Most of the living dead Ava encounters are wandering wraiths, who seem to register other humans but make no moves to attack. The undead grind their teeth but do not appear to be flesh-eaters - they are just aggressive flaying out the living. 

These initial appearances give Ava hope that her husband - even if he is dead - may have a path back to her.

The film turns into a quest narrative, as Ava’s journey takes her into new environments with new characters who force her to confront her motivations for finding her husband.

The most significant of these figures is a soldier, Riley (Mark Coles Smith), goes from being an obstacle (he threatens to bring her in) to a threat.

His story is an extreme mirror of Ava’s - he has Ava cosplay as his dead wife.

Their dance is intercut with Ava’s dance with her husband. As Riley bends down to listen to Ava’s belly, there is a flashback to her husband mirroring the same action.

This sequence turns into a variation on the Bluebeard story, as Ava discovers Riley’s wife’s corpse in a made-up shrine in a bedroom.

Riley advises her that the dead who come back have “unfinished business” - he believes their unborn child can still be born.

That theme of unfinished business is central to Ava’s journey.

Unusually quiet and un-rushed, We Bury The Dead lets its story play out with a respect for the viewer’s intelligence - letting a look, or a glimpse of some interesting element (a tattoo) provide clues, rather than spelling everything out.

When Ava’s husband left on his trip, the couple were in a moment of upheaval - an unstated heartbreak that intertwines both our and the character’s need for understanding and resolution.

Daisy Ridley is fine in the lead, but this film exemplifies an issue I have with a lot of movies that try to aim for the US market - actors affecting American accents. 

She stands out when everyone else is speaking with their own accents.

Brenton Thwaites is a welcome injection of energy as the more mercenary worker Ava is paired with.

More interesting than fully involving, We Bury The Dead feels like a dry run for something truly spectacular.

The human story is more interesting than the undead trappings, and it almost feels like it would work better with a slightly less tidy close (having an end title song also feels like a strange choice).

Still, worth a look.

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BITE-SIZED: Cinema of Unease - A Personal Journey by Sam Neill (Sam Neill and Judy Rymer, 1995)

 Made as part of the British Film Institute's celebration of a century of cinema, Cinema of Unease is a key part of Sam Neill's legacy.

I first watched this film in high school, a private Presbyterian institution with a few similarities to the college Sam Neill attended.

Neil’s thesis was one of my earliest introductions to an idea of what New Zealand cinema meant.

Threading his own life story with a portrait of his homeland, Neill creates the image of a nation with a superficial sense of self. 

As a child who had grown up overseas, enamoured with the glamour of Hollywood, and later the genre movies of other countries, my own film culture had struck me as dull. Ignorance, and the influence of the cultural shrug, had put me off NZ film.

But Neil’s film cracked it open for me - the idea of (pakeha) society wrestling with an environment, both real and psychological, that they were not indigenous to - became a catalyst. His concept of the cinema of unease captured my imagination, and motivated me to engage with the films of my own country.

Of course, two decades later, our ideas of a national cinema have matured since its initial release - but the underlying themes, of the ongoing conflicts over what Aotearoa's national identity is, and who gets to tell stories about it, remain as relevant as they did when Neill and Rymer's film was released.

Cinema of Unease remains a significant moment of reflection from one of our first real cinematic icons.

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OUT NOW: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (Jane Schoenbrun, 2026)

Kris (Hannah Einbinder) is an upcoming filmmaker who has been hired to reboot the long-running Camp Miasma slasher franchise.

While she is suspicious that she has been hired because she is a queer filmmaker, Kris takes the gig. She has her own motive for taking the job: an opportunity to meet the franchise’s original final girl, Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson).

Visiting Billy at her home, which just so happens to be the site of the original film, Kris finds herself delving into her love of the franchise, and how it connects to her own sense of self.

Sometimes a film needs time to marinate to fully understand its meaning. And sometimes it takes time for you to realise the film’s meaning was never hidden, but exactly what you think it is.

When a movie goes fully into fantasy or blurs the lines, I tend to need a little grounding.

What I liked about this is that the emotional through line becomes that anchor - Chris’s obsession with this franchise boils down to deeper issues with sex and intimacy.

I loved the in-film history of Camp Miasma, with the early film posters inspired by Friday the 13th, followed by a DTV period, with high concept sequels (I want to know more about Miasma 3000!), and that level of detail helps to immerse the viewer in Chris’s state of mind.

The film connects our obsession with pop culture to our loss of connection with other people.

It also tackles the attraction to onscreen sex and death (the underlying impulses behind horror movies, James Bond and a host of other long-running series) but without any sense of condemnation. It takes the image of a woman running semi-nude while being chased by the killer and turns it into a moment of euphoria.

The film accomplishes this by making this dichotomy the vehicle for Chris’s own fear of intimacy and her own desires.

Despite her age, she is living an adult life completely disconnected from herself. This reboot project is almost a gateway back to her adolescence, and back to her own desires.

Chris has a partner (Scream star Jasmin Savoy Brown) and is part of a polygamous relationship, although that status appears to be something her partner is more into than she is (or something she herself endorses as a way to avoid intimacy).

Billy Presley, the star of the original slasher, becomes her guide through this process.

The film makes it clear she is not a famous person - she is barely a cult figure. The film makes it clear she is part of Chris’s singular fixation on the original film - in particular, a shot of Billy’s eye during the in-film movie’s sex scene.

The riddle of the actor’s feelings in this shot recurs throughout the film, as Chris is forced to delve into her own conflicted feelings about her body and pleasure

As the film begins to blur the line between what is real and reel, and Chris begins to act on her attraction to Billy, the film turns into a strangely poignant coming of age story. 

Sexy, deadpan and loving of its genre without descending into pedantry, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a gem.

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