2 Razors

Starchaser: The Legend of Orin

  • Title: Starchaser: The Legend of Orin
  • IMDb: link

Starchaser: The Legend of Orin is a movie that has alluded me most of my life. Just missing out on seeing it theaters, somehow I never caught up with it on home video, cable, or streaming. Until now. Sadly the ambitious, albeit derivative (stealing prominently from Star Wars and countless other sci-fi tales), animated 3D film wasn’t worth the wait.

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Why Minority Report Kinda Sucks

  • Title: Minority Report
  • IMDb: link

Released in 2002, Steven Spielberg‘s Minority Report offered a slick sci-fi thriller set in the not-too-distant future resulting in huge financial and critical acclaim. However, before it was a feature film adapted by Scott Frank and Jon Cohen (who admitted in an interview with Script Magazine that he didn’t understand the original story) The Minority Report was a short novella by Peter K. Dick. And for those who read the story before seeing the movie it’s almost impossible to reconcile the fundamental changes to not only the narrative but also the core ideas Dick was exploring to such an extent that the film’s title no longer makes sense. It would be another decade before a writer and director would so fundamentally misunderstand their source material resulting in Man of Steel.

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Naked Weapon

  • Title: Naked Weapon
  • IMDb: link

Nearly a decade before she was Nikita, Maggie Q was basically Nikita. Siu-Tung Ching‘s 2002 thriller stars Maggie Q, Anya Wu, and Jewel Lee as the three survivors from dozens of young girls abducted over the world, trained to be assassins, and pitted against each other by the elusive Madam M (Almen Wong). The movie offers flashbacks to the the girls’ training and graduation while in the present our protagonists are offered one last job to earn their freedom only to fall into a trap laid by a Yakuza boss (Andrew Lien) out for revenge against the women for one of their previous missions.

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Ryde

  • Title: Ryde (2017)
  • IMDb: link

There’s an interesting 20-minute short film buried in writer/director Brian Frank Visciglia‘s 2017 thriller Ryde. However, at 84 minutes, a serial killer (David Wachs) taking over a ride-share driver’s car to find victims gets stuck in attempts to elongate the story with our killer’s separate vignettes and lengthen the not-all-that-interesting dialogue between our other main character (Jessica Serfaty Michel) and her loser boyfriend (Ronnie Alvarez).

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